I’ve been following Silicon Valley since its first season and have fallen in love with Ehrlich Bachman as he parades around with in his kimono, taking bong hits and pretending as if he is cut from the same technological and entrepreneurial cloth as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, simultaneously unable to collect rent from the characters on the show that live in his pizza box ridden home.

It can be easy to forget that some of our favourite characters on our most beloved shows are real people, with real lives, with the same shitty hands the rest of us are sometimes dealt. TJ Miller is one such person that flirted with death at a young age when he found he had been living with a brain malformation for his entire life. Most people with this condition simply die unexpectedly in their mid 30’s, having never known of the fatal malformation that was always there. Luckily for TJ, the copious alcohol consumption and lack of sleep while filming Yogi Bear 3D lead to a hospital visit that revealed his brain malformation and made him confront the decision of going under the knife and risking death on the surgeon’s table to fix his brain.

It’s the things that come up for us when death is strolling around in our neighbourhood, nearby, but not quite knocking on our door. What does it mean to communicate with your sick partner? How do you go about solving the mental puzzle of a manic state? How can a community of people who have such a profound experience in common like being chronically ill elevate each other by telling their story? These are a few of the topics we tackled with in our conversation with TJ Miller, and we couldn’t be more excited to share it with you.

TJ Miller is an original cast member and star of HBO’s Silicon Valley as well as appearing in blockbusters such as Transformers, Deadpool & the upcoming Deadpool 2, and of course, Yogi Bear 3D. Although big screen success has been good to him, he is first and foremost an extremely talented and international standup comic.