I'm bad for the same reason because if someone asked me a question, I just answer it to the best of my ability one hundred. But if it's really a silly question, I'll go I'm not much good with those sorts of questions. What I need to be better is someone asked a good question and I think, oh, that's a good question. I'm going to unpack it, and now
I don't. That's what gets me in trouble, because although you could look at it like this, and you could look at it like that, and then the press will go, he said that thing, and I'm like, no, I was. I was doing the thing I'm trying to do, which is to be self aware about my biases. A bit doesn't work out.
Hello, I'm mini driver. I've always loved Proust's questionnaire.
It was originally in nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appear to be universal.
And it made me.
Wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these questions as conversation starters. So I adapted Pru's questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love
for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to
all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the musician, composer, writer, and comedian Tim Minchin.
Tim's live shows.
Are unlike anyone else's, and I urge you to go and see him if he's playing anywhere near you at any time. He has this magical spectrum that he plays within where one minute the mundane is being examined and poeticized in a hilarious way, and in the next moment, an existential philosophical viewpoint enters the scene or song, and now all things are transformed, including you, the audience. Tim wrote the music and lyrics to the multi award winning
musical Matilda. He has released five DVDs and seven live albums, and this summer in June, his show Songs The World Will Never Hear is touring in the UK.
Like I said, go and see.
Him perform if he possibly can, because he is a proper magic Can you tell me wherein when you were happiest?
You have to tell me yours, I will tell you mine. Do you have one?
Yeah?
I think it can either be like it's either a moment, because obviously there are I would hope lots and lots and lots of different happy moments. I think it's really
about isolating one that reflects something about you. So for me it is there is this clear day when my mum was still alive and she was on the beach with my son and they were like having a picnic, and I think my sister was there with a couple of her kids, and the waves suddenly picked up, and I was like, I'm just going to go for a quick surf, and I paddled out and I was just out, and I could see that there was a set coming in, and I just turned around, knowing the set was coming,
and I just saw them on the beach and the feeling seeing them all there and then turning back and there was this perfect set of waves and there was probably only a couple of other people in the water paddling for that wave, catching it and then riding it and watching my son holding my mum's hand, like jumping up and down on the beach. It was such undiluted joy of connection.
And that's a convergence of so many things that you love. So you managed to get your mom now be artified by demise and your son, who you love because he's your son, and your hot favorite thing, which is being in the ocean, and then the ocean serving up adrenaline and dolphins in the form of a good step, and then you catching them set, so you communing with the ocean and being witnessed, and there's so much there that you're right, that's a moment that speaks.
To who you are exactly.
I fear that I don't know if I can make them converge, because I am very when I'm down on my block where we have some trees, and I've just done like eight hours hacking away at some drop that some people would find absolutely horrible, like trying to clear an area of weeds of invasive species, and I'm just hot and sweat. But there was a task which eight hours ago looked actually futile. But just by putting my
head down and not stopping, I made something difficult. I put it behind me, and then I'm hot and I'm tired, and I walk into that little shitty house we have down there and get a beer and feel like I've earnt that beer, rather than I'm having that beer because I find the ends of days anxiety making. But rather this is a beer I've learnt by doing labor. And you know that is a version of it, as is the me that runs my ten k in a time I'm proud of, as is me watching my son play guitar.
And then there's the version of happiness that you get when you've got ten thousand people standing up at the end of a concert that is unmatched, or just me on stage buying piano. That's a type of happiness, you know what I mean. There's a sort of selfishness womania call happiness, and then it's opposite. There's eight hours of weeding where I've managed to convince my kids to help me, and then there's being on stage in front of a lot of people, and they're very, very different.
I think what I like about that question because a lot of people have rolled their eyes at it, But what I think it does is ask us to distill what it is in ourselves that we connect with around contentment. So it doesn't surprise me at all that running a ten k in a time that you deem appropriate, clearing weeds, or standing on a stage, that all of those things are a distillation of a part of you, and that they become part of your self knowledge.
And I like how revealing that is.
Because we don't ask ourselves, I think enough, or share with ease each other what helps us distill those things? Like happiness is such a kind of ephemeral idea for most people, and they're like, oh, I'm so busy thinking about not being able to pay my mortgage or my shit job or my boring relationship or whatever it is that we don't go. These small things or these big things are the things that make me feel better.
An amazing one yesterday morning, because it was a Sunday morning and we've just moved back into our house that has been being renovated for two years, and my daughter, who has not found a high school easy, just in her final year. Twelve weeks o and we're back in the house and my boy was going to do an
audition for a musical. And he's not an extrovert, he's not a show kid, but he really wants to do it, and so I spent now with him warming up his voice because he had cold, and I was teaching him how to warm up, and for the first time ever, he understood the benefit of warming up. And I sent him off to his audition, and my daughter woke up having had a bit of a night out, which you know, it's quite new and exciting to have it. I'm in this house that we spent all out of time and
money on and making coffee and my coffee machine. I mean, there are those moments where but they're rare ones because they're ones where you've gone. If I renovate my house, and if I get my daughter through high school, and if my son likes music like I do, those are the sort of things that will make me happy, and if I have a good coffee machine, And often they
are false. And then every now and then you get day where you're like, ah that I thought this shit would make me happy, and usually usually so I thought it would make me happy and then didn't. And the happiness comes at you from the side in a moment you weren't expecting. And that's a hard lesson to learn. I mean, I say it in my little book I've just put out, don't see happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much, it goes away.
I think happiness is the side effect, and you should be very careful about pursuing it. And you'll notice that all those things when you send them back to me. I was a bit mortified to realize they're all goal or into which there's something about my brain. I need a task now.
But that's interesting, Like what's that mortification? Because it's you, but it's but that's also that's who you are, and in a way, it's like it's how you achieve the extraordinary, very very very idiosyncratic things that you tim achieve, and you being goal oriented, I wish that you would rethink your mortification.
Well it's not a horrific mortification, but it's like, oh, yeah, that clocks that's me. Yeah, I like to have a goal and do it and then have a beer at the end with my family. That I'm a pretty simple orrobot. Really I need a thing to feel like I've achieved, and then that's just a relaxation of me.
So what quality do you like least about yourself?
Probably related to that need to achieve, which I don't know if I like it. The thing I think is a bit of a trial. Is it slightly re inless sense that I need to do something more to prove myself to myself or something. It's a bit tiring when it works, tiresome to be needing to prove myself to myself.
Who is the you that is proving and who is the you that needs to be proved too.
I've talked about this idea that I think maybe just second child stuff or whatever, or going to a boys' school where you kind of made you feel like if you're not whatever footy player. There's a bit of that stuff. But also because I've got a lot of closed doors in my career as a musician and an actor and artist. There are a lot of closed doors for about ten years, which in hindsight, of course, were the best thing that could have possibly happened, because it made me work out
and got me where I got. But I think those closed doors gave me a little mechanism in my brain that has a bit of a I'll show them, and the me I'm proving myself too could also be described as this esoteric them. But there is no there. There is an I'll show them training in my brain, and I think artists get that all the time, a bit yeah, well you oh idea all the time.
And I've only recently started asking myself who who the fuck is the them? Who is the them? And why do I think they care?
They don't care. In fact, the people who said no to me, I'm very happy for me. I know people who said no to me, You're like, oh, you did so well, so great, Like there's no one to prove itself to. And that's connected to the other thing that I think is unattractive in me, which is I can get a bit sort of how dare they know? A bit righteous when I'm unfairly criticized or i feel like I've been mistreated, or specifically, if i feel like I've been treated in a manner that I would not treat others.
I'm not claiming any sort of ethical even goodness, let alone perfection, but I have a very this is the right way to treat people, and this is how one should behave And when I'm treated in a way that I don't think I'll trick someone else. I have a tendency to be a bit right and it's not really attractive. You need to be able to take listenings and arrows with humility, and I worked on that as well. But yeah, I can get a bit defensive and a bit like not being treated well and I'm going to write a
strongly worded letter. And I was like, oh, shut, you're all right.
By the way, my boyfriend is constantly telling me that I need to write a book for the lou called a strongly worded letter because hot but him, I'm not joking. I think that we should because it is it is the funniest thing. Like he's walked into the kitchen on more than one occasion, and he's like, what are you doing.
I was like, I'm writing to the New York Times about the first so I would not include the word dyke d y k e in Word today or some show that they've changed the design A write righteousness is Oh my god, it's hilarious.
I've got a fire called unsent Angry Letters.
I think we should make a compilation and we should just solicit letters from people that we.
Know, Yeah, and take all the identifying factors out of it.
Yeah, exactly.
I read one the other day I wrote years ago where I pulled out of a corporate geek and I pulled out hugely apologetically, with plenty of time. I got a really good role in something. It was like a major thing, and I pulled out and they tried to sue me for the money and all that letter was hilarious. It was like so shaming and so self rutchous. I write them for myself.
I do send my word spelling Being connections letters to the New York Times and they never write back.
I was doing spelling be today and they wouldn't let me have na fair enough Pali pali as in pay like he's a bit pally with me.
I think there's all sorts of words that at Anglo Australian was that they just won't have any chance. That's what person, place, or experience most altered your life.
Well, see, I'm I'm a determinist fetishist, as in I I am.
I'm writing that down.
Hold on, I love that determinist fe.
As in I am. I was on stage, they're not doing an interview, and I sort of made the point that the fact that you came to the show to know if you're in a relationship with someone and you intend to have children, the fact that you came to see me speech to night and that I am saying a sentence will change the child you have, because everything does, because the chance of you having any one child is
a swimm into one. And so just the fact that I'm talking a bit long now means you're with this theater two seconds later than you would and everything from that moment forward will be slightly different than it would have been. Everything everything that you touch from that moment forward will be slightly different, and therefore your child will be a different child. Because I said the sentence track and so I fare to show that butterfly wing, flat stuff.
So it's hard. I like to think about the tiny, tiny things that changed everything. I can't name, and I don't.
That you could change.
It's all of them, right, it's every every choice changes.
Right then, can you tell me when that in your life? Do you remember when feeling that you were a determinist fetishist began?
Like?
Were you very young?
Was that something that you were conscious of suddenly going, Oh my god, I believe in every single thing affects every thing.
I was trying to figure that out. I've been playing a song in my latest tour called Understand that has a middle eight in the song just as this loop that goes you believe in fate? I guess I believe in consequence and flapping butterflies and photographs and it's all just about this. And I'm like, oh that I wrote that in two thousand and two. I was in my twenties. Oh right, this stuff is earlier than I thought I
would have pegged it as in my thirties. I think I was really issued into journalism before I really got my head around free will and the problem with free will anyway, What was the question, what personal? It was?
What personal place or experience most altered your life. But that's such an interesting answer because the answer.
Is all moments always, all.
Moments affected, all moments affected, all moments affected moments.
I think that's right. The particular jiz that my dad did on a train to Edinburgh in nineteen seventy five is the main event that after everything.
That way is that where you work and see.
I believe I was considered back with my mom's just diver well a year ago now and so I'm sorry I used to not say particular things. Now I've been saying whatever I want. No, the story goes my dad and mum were on a sleeper trained to Edinburgh.
Oh that's very romantic.
That's why.
Maybe that is why you rock and roll.
But I also I like how you what did you just call it awayward jizz?
Yeah, there's lots of little moments that changed my career. And I suppose because I've had this one relationship in my life, Sarah, who I met when I was seventeen. That's sort of turning up on the first day of UNI and seeing this girl I've met before and finding out we had all the same lectures. I mean that it's it's hard to put any quantity on her influence on my work. I guess I would have been a musician. I would have been an artist whatever I think it's
built to do. But my first girlfriend happened to be someone who suited me. But it is very unusual in this day and age and in our industry to have one relationship and to have to fall in love with someone who's so different in it, so compatible, and who has been so unbelievably supportive of every eight hours of
weeding I've ever wanted to do. She's like, all right, if you want to do weeding, or you want to write an orchestra tour, or you know, you want to have kids and move to England when I'm six months pregnant with that first child, Okay, we're moving to England. She's not a pushover, she's just up for it. And that's obviously massively influential in allowing me to do what I've ended up doing. Yeah, it's a.
Little true lovely Sarah. Give her a big hug from me, please.
I'll do that. She's Quoked's hell at the moment, is she? Yeah, look after yourself. I'm doing a podcast.
In your life, and I know that this going to dovetail into something else that I just said, But I'm asking you in your life, can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster.
Oh? Yeah. That's one of the great bits of learning that you can only get from time, is that everything that seems bad at the time because everything that happens after any given event is dependent on that event to happen. Because there is no faith and no God with my worldview, with all due respect to people who believe in fate and God, because it's just a deterministic thing. Every disaster is the shit in which all your future flowers grow.
And getting your head around that is really great bit of wisdom, and it's very hard to apply in the moment. When the next bad thing happens, you think, well, hold on, I've learned that when bad things happen, they are the shit in which future flowers grow. It that's just how causality works. But in the moment you still ray on against it. Of course you do. It's a negative thing. It's a tortered expectation. It's a thing about which you're
going to write and anyway later. But I think it would be true wisdom to be able to, in the moment of disaster, access your knowledge that out of this desans will grow something beautiful.
I've banged on about that since I was in my late teens early twenties, of how it is possible that this duality exists, that one can categorically know what you're saying is true, which is, I know that something good, invariably something else, not just good, something else is going to grow out of this.
Unless nothing good is ever going to happen again, everything future good will rely on this moment.
How can we become experientially so shit? How can one hold both those things to be true? Is that just fundamentally being a human being that you're experiencing a terrible time? How can one fully piggyback onto the notion that this is going to create something else, interesting, good, whatever adjectivity you want to use, something else will grow out of this.
Shit Because you'd be a psycho, you'd be a psycho robot to be able to just skip a step, because the whole reason the good stuff comes is because you don't skip a step because you rail against what you've lost, or you rail against your thoughts of expectation, or you grieve for your mum, or you grieve for your relationship, or you grieve for the four years you spent working on an animated film in LA and then get shut down or whatever like. But I got to meet me drag.
So there's personal stuff everyone goes through. But in terms of a sort of more illustrative thing is my experience of my movie in La America, Harry, in my movie the Dream Wreaks film, we spent years building this thing and it was going to be amazing, and then the studio got sold and I got shut.
Down, and it really was four years work, right, Yeah, I mean, and that's when we met.
It was in that period because we lived in a neighborhoods So.
In hindsight, we had a great time in LA, but I didn't both been Broadway in LA. I've had fantastic times and met fantastic people, the artists and practitioners, I've met some of my favorite people in the world. But the businesses were ruthleous and yell and shitting and unethical.
And all against the backdrop of the sunniest most blue sky, easy going.
It's such a fucking line.
It's so weird, and everyone's complicit and I didn't want to be complicit. But anyway, I came back to Australia, not with my tailor between my legs. We were always going to move back to Australia after the film, and I was very grumpy. I was really that was a huge thought of expectation. I really didn't like that someone had stolen my time and my heart. Yeah, I felt really the opportunity cost of what I could have been doing.
I felt really cross. And then this project came about that became a TV show called Upright, which I was the sort of head writer on and active in. And not only what I have not been able to help create Upright if I haven't gone through that, but I put this actual lesson that we're talking about into Upright, because Upright it's about a guy who's got this shit in his past that he can't get past, and he has to get to this place that you were just
asking your rhetorical ish question about. He has to get to the point of realization that we are not ourselves despite our scars. We are ourselves because of our scars. We are beautiful because of our messiness and our errors. And you know, in the final episode, of season one of Upright. He actually he's giving a piano to a child, and he's describing the piano, but really he's describing himself. Well,
he's tropping. He probably doesn't know that's what he's doing, but he's saying, it's all scratch, it's a bit out of tune, but that's what makes it what it is. And you know, you should just play it and don't worry about making mistakes because sometimes when you make mistakes, you make something accidentally beautiful. This is this monogue in the final and I didn't realize that what I was doing was making sense. I was using my art to make sense of my lost art. And I know it's
not a big deal. Many worse things can happen then losing a few years work, but just an illustrative idea. I guess how I love that lesson in a really profound way. As you say, though, applying it in the moment when shit's going wrong is perhaps understandably impossible, because.
You still have to and maybe that's the point, like you said, you have to go through the steps of the experience because we're here in this experiential reality, and that it's later with further reflection that you can perhaps again distill. I hesitate to use the word meaning because I'm actually a bit anti meaning. I don't really like meaning. I don't like the assigning of meaning because it feels full of dogma and that.
My meaning is more meaningful than your meaning. I think it's bollock.
Just be obnoxious and quote. You know I was saying earlier about that middle eight that has everyone will also the lyric before that, yes, yes, the lyric before that is it's not karmic destiny. It's just consequenced avoid of meaning makes us miss the issue anyway. So it's just I just felt like i'd missed out that lyrics. Yeah, I think, yeah, looking for me.
I think it's a bumsteer. I think it's.
Yeah, that doesn't exist in America. That would not be a phrase on anything ever.
In America.
A bomsteer doesn't exist. What question would you most like answered? Hmm?
I want to give a flip and answer, but I can't even think of one of them. Eight sevens seven eight fifty six. Yeah, that's my favorite. I got to say, I love the unpacking more than anything else in my life, you know, like I am really disinclined to be attracted to answers that are simple.
So you like questions, I like questions.
Answers, I don't want anything answered. I want to constantly be chipping away. And I really like And maybe it makes me a buffoon, a wanker, or certainly a sophist, but I really like a Priori contemplation. It was the same when I was at Uni, like doing my aunt's degree, I would always get my best grades when I didn't go to the library at all and I didn't read anything, and I just went at it. And I think I'm for good or ill. I really don't want to know
what other people have made it at all. It's the same with musical theater. Right before I wrote Matilda, I have I studied a musical theater score. I'm not particularly like I love musicals, but I'm not trained. I can't read the music. I didn't go looking for what Sondeine does or what Moieber and Jim Rice do. I just went what would majit are? Seeing? Like I really liked sitting down with Dennis Kelly, who had also never written a musical, and just going how do we make this
story make people feel things? And I feel that about life and about comedy. I've never analyzed comedy. I've not ever watched much of it. I just don't want to know what other people's answers are. I want to find out my version of the answer. It's probably really arrogant or something, but it's just served me being like, what do I think about this? I'm a secret of answers in like bashing through the bush kind of way, not in that kind of looking for what someone else figured
out kind of way. Obviously with a million fucking exceptions, including seven which I couldn't possibly do myself.
I love that answer.
It's very there's a real cook quote that's been in a thousand sort of marriage for our ceremonies paraphrasing with you sort of remain interested in the question. You eventually live the answers, So just ask those questions that you feel rather than seek the answer. Yeah, I think that is, and.
Not to get mine in the kind of question of our time too much. But I've got off social media and I finally got got a place in my life where my phone is not governing my input. And one of the reasons I got offer is it seems to engender in curiosity, even whilst making people feel like they're being really curious, because I feel like they're getting information and they're learning stuff. But there's something about being fair information all the time that buggers up our unnatural curiosity.
And I don't want anyone to think I think everyone should make up their own theories about what medicine works or whatever. I'm a massive data and evidence a science nerd, right, so I'm a fact guy. I'm not saying we should
all make up our own facts. I just think we should embrace creating an environment for oneself where your natural curiosity and your own capacity to unpacked meaning to generate your own meaning, to figure out what you feel about the big questions about life and death and ethics and parenting, and like just giving yourself space.
I feel exactly the same way, and I feel exactly the same way.
That's why we're going to be friends until we.
Exactly until we die.
What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you?
I don't know. I think i'd be making it up. Just say though, is why?
Man?
Well, what define give me the tenets of what defines love for you?
Because I haven't had many romantic relationships. Sarah and my relationship grew out of a friendship and I felt in love her, But I don't have be romantic. I'll tell you what defines much for me.
Yeah, because it doesn't have to be romantic, and.
It's quite pedestrian, and it will make me seem nauseatingly auxorious. Although I think auxorious has been.
I think using the word auxorious means is quite nauseating.
Yeah, so for the people who aren't wainkers enough to know the word uxorias means inordinately fond of one's wife, too fond of one's wife, and auxoria's implies that it's a little bit nauseating. Anyway, this is what I understand about Sarah and me. We are so different, like you've met us both. I mean, we couldn't be more.
You couldn't be more different, And the fact that you've jumped on the same train of your lives together is fantastic and amazing.
What the great stroke of luck is. Notwithstanding to early where she's disgusting and snotchy and gross, I'm not so good with sick people. I'm like, apparently, no, I'll bring you to a cup of tea but get out of my face. I basically have been with Sarah for the vast majority of the last thirty one years, and when she goes upstairs to do something and comes back down and comes into the room, I'm in the kitchen. I mean, I basically am happy to see her when she walks
into the kitchen. And that is not something I did. That's not a choice I made. It doesn't mean I'm like, oh my god, so hot, and I just, of course we are normal people in a relationship that's been around. We've had kids and we've watched them grow up, and we're not like fizzying with But the fact is, I'm very rarely over thirty one years, have not wanted her to walk into any room I'm in, And that is
That's what defines love for me. It's just we just happen to be a functional paer and we like seeing each other walk into that and I think we'll probably go the whole way. I mean, you've come with my God.
I love that answer. I love that answer. I love all your answers. I knew the excellent talking to you.
This is why I don't read questions, because I would be worse if I've read them.
It's right for you. It's absolutely right for you. It's funny the humanness of people invariably seeps out even when there's a prepared answer. I've noticed even when.
People have what to say, probably big question.
What's interesting is how people like you and everyone that I interview bellies up to answering a question that is asking something of them, is asking for some excavation, and even the most prosaic answers invariably lead their way into stuff that is much more raw, rawer.
Your Americans.
Mirror for my favorite episode potentially of thirty Rock, the.
Rural Durer, the Rural Duror.
You're an angel for taking time out of your wine drinking, your sick wife and your tour to come and talk to me. And I just couldn't appreciate it more. I fucking wish that we live next door to each other. I'm so annoyed. Thank you so much, Tim, Loads of love Tea. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me, Mini Driver, executive produced by me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support from Jennifer Bassett, Zoe Denkler, and Ali Perry. The theme music is also by Me and additional music
by Aaron Kaufman. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa castella, A, Nick oppenheim, A, Nick Muller and Annette wolf A, w kPr, Will Pearson, Nicki Etoor, Morgan Levoy and Mangesh had tick at