September 22, 2024 • 8 mins
The legendary Tim Minchin joins Jonesy & Amanda for an incredible chat!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
And Amanda gam Nation.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Look, there's almost too much to say about our next guess.
Tim Minchin is the king of creativity, whether he's dazzling
us on stage composing behind the scenes for Matilda the Musical.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
He has one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Most creative brains in Australia, maybe in the world. And
he's just put out a new book called You Don't
Have to Have a Dream.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Tim Minchin.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
High. Hi, Amanda Jones, How like Tim, You're in the
midst of moving house, which is the worst job in
the pastry of the world.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's moving day. The packers are in and I thought,
you know, I'm going to go and do some radio
because this sucks.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
That's how big you are. James Packers back in town
and he's come around.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Yeah, the Packers are there having an argument that cradles
there everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Totally. No, it's it's exciting.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
We've just been renovating, so I've been living in a
rental for a couple of years and we're going back.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You're going to feel like a grown up living in
a nice house to trash it.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm deeply uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Actually, I've never sort of made a house nice, and
we've renovated this old nineteen thirties house, and I feel, Yeah,
it's exactly that feeling of oh my god, I'm a
grown up, which at forty eight point nine I should
already feel, but yeah, it's a bit scary.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I first felt like a grown up when I got
a salad spinner. Oh really, Yeah, And I thought, you
know what I was in my fifties. I thought I
am actually a grown up. That was the sign for
me that i'd become.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
And then you started spinning and you felt like a
child again.
Speaker 6 (01:18):
I always feel like when I get a piece of timber, yeah,
and I go, that's a good bit of timber.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'll keep that. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
So I've got a pile of it, and it's not
for burning, it's just in case I need a piece
of timber.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah. I think that's pretty grown up.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I feel like a grown up every morning when I
wake up in severe pain just from living like I
did quite a lot of carrying stuff up into an
attic yesterday, and I woke up this morning feeling like
i'd run a marathon.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well, look, let's talk about your book. You don't have
to have a dream. I've seen.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Some videos of incredible speeches you make where you'd say
to university graduates or the.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Like, here are my tenants for how to have a
good life. Is that what this is about?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:57):
So this is a book which started as a publisher
saying I had I did this university speech about ten
years ago that went ape viral, went all around the world,
and a publisher said, why don't we make that speech
into a little book, you know, something you keep by
the lou or give to you give to your kids
when they leave school. But actually, I've done three graduation speeches,
(02:18):
and they all sort of deal with different things. Ones
really about life, ones about acting and artistry and writing,
and ones more about music. And so we collected them
all and then I wrote some essays kind of drawing
them together and reflecting on how these ideas influenced my
work and how I live my life. It's pretty pretentious,
but as we say, I'm a grown up now, so
I'm allowed to pontive you to that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
And then we found this beautiful illustrator and ended up
being a really gorgeous book. And it's Yeah, it's gone
pretty well. It's in the Sunday Times bestseller list in
the UK now, and so I think it's number one
nonfiction in Australia this week.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So people obviously want advice from an idiot. That's what
That's what I've concluded.
Speaker 6 (02:56):
I was reading here that you said you feel you've
woken up to counsel cancel culture.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh well, who said that.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
That's what it's said, That's what it's said in my
questions here, all.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I mean there's there's lots of stuff
in the book.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
A lot of it's about you know, positivity and and
you don't have to have a dream thing is a
lot of it is about me trying to just you know,
plicate these dominant narratives that everyone has to really know
what they want to do and they're going to be
president or an astronaut.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
It's it's not how I got to where I got.
I've just always been really passionate about what's in front
of me and let come what may. And I know
that doesn't work for everyone, and if you want to
be a you know, constitutional lawyer, you need to have
a long term goal.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
But for a lot of us, I don't think we
have that vocational urge.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
And so I've just always been like, just be really
into what you're doing, even if it's working in a
cafe or writing a score for a youth theater company,
which is how I sort of started out. But there's
also other stuff in the book that addresses some of
the contemporary issues. The one that makes me very anxious
is how social media makes everyone feel like they're on
separate sides from one another. We find it very easy
(04:04):
to dehumanize people we disagree with. So there's I don't
get too caught up in that, but yeah, I think
that's a pretty given that. I talk a lot about
critical thinking and about checking your own ideas and making
sure you don't make assumptions that everything you think is right,
I had to address the social media factor.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah. Yeah, because we've.
Speaker 6 (04:23):
Come safer now, I felt, well, you don't want to
say anything controversial, and I find anything we say on
the radio is fine, but if we isolate it and
put it into a little sandbite, it's a whole different
kettle of.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Feature football taking something to the bunker. If you look
at something in slow motion at all, it's terrible. Yeah,
that's you can't live your life like that. Yeah, And
because I'm a long form speaker. I speak in long sentences,
and I'm always interested in unpacking all angles that I
can possibly think of. It's a very interesting time to
be in the public domain because I can say something
(04:55):
long and loving and conciliatory and a bit like, well,
some people think this and that and then have that
taken out of context and put on the Internet. And yeah,
I've actually got off social media now, having kind of
copped one too many pylons.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And they feel the trouble is it makes you paranoid.
It feels like the whole world's parting on you. It's
just a couple of hundred kids, you know, or young
usually young people.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
We had Rob Schneider. He came in and we're going
to roast him. He's anti vaxer, and anyway, he was lovely, wasn't.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
He was really annoyingly personable, a very great.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Interviews and nice. Anti vaxers doesn't mean they're right.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
No, exactly, You've got it. You can have your own
opinion on things.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
But I did say to him, I said, be in America,
what's it like, because it looks like America's going nuts?
Speaker 5 (05:37):
And he said, well, online it looks like but you
go to America, it's it's fine.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Now I'm off social media, It's definitely made me feel
a bit better. The trouble is in the world in America,
people are still treating each other as humans. Unfortunately, online
does translate to a media coverage. So the New York
Times checks X check Twitter, which is crazy. The New
York Times shouldn't be reporting on those conversations because those
(06:05):
conversations are algorithmically distorted, and also it translates to votes.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So I'd love to go, oh, that's just.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Online stuff, but unfortunately online is where Trump's supporters see
him in this distorted, you know, amazing way, and.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So yeah, you can't ignore it. Unfortunately, we could talk
about it all day.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But too because that way you don't have to move hound.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Well, there's a lesson in my big speech, the speech
that went viral, and it is it's define yourself by
what you love. And that's something I'm really working on
because it's so easy to go I don't like this,
and I hate it when people this, and I don't
like Coldplay, and I don't like Taylor Switch or whatever,
and we just get really good at defining ourselves in
opposition to stuff. So in my speech I say, be
(06:52):
pro stuff, not anti stuff, which is why I'm always
careful about getting too caught up in the kids these
days and their social medias. So what is the positive
thing we can talk about that is the offset to that?
So rather than whining about it, what can we say
about society that makes us feel better?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, I like to do quote you about these things.
I also like to quote Steve Guttenberg from the Oh yeah,
of course he actually said recently he said, and I've
tried to change my thinking around this is it. Rather
than saying, oh I have to go and do something,
say I.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Get to do this today.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, that's the key to happiness.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
And there's another reason social media's poison is because comparison
to others is absolute poison. And we've always known that,
since the ancient Greek, since before then, we've known that
comparing yourself to others is the key to keta unhappiness. Yeah,
I mean we're never going to be Steve Gutenberg. No,
I don't know how many of your listeners know. I
know exactly who is. But yeah, So choosing what you
(07:48):
have rather than striving for what you haven't got is
of course the key to happiness. But easy for me
to say because I'm moving into my nice kitchen and.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
You'll always know that. Amanda defaults to police Academy.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I stopped after number six.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Well, Tim, it's great to have you in Good luck
with the movie using the ute from upright. Yeah, that'd
be good.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Unfortunately we're paying people to do it so bad board boxes.
Speaker 6 (08:11):
It would it would be sad if I saw you
with boxes, if you rang us and said, can you
guys give me a hand moving free?
Speaker 5 (08:17):
Because he's got no, he's got a piano as well.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I'm doing a lot of little trips with little bits
of musical equipment that I don't want anyone else to touch.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
Your book You Don't have to Dream is available now.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
You don't have to have a dream.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
You don't have to have a dream. You don't even
have to dream. You don't have to have a dream.
It's available now. And for tickets to the tour, go
to famee dot com dot are you slash Tim Minchin.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
There you go. Listen to me pontificate more on stage.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
I can't dream of anything I'd like more.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, I'll see you there.
And Amanda gam Nation.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Look, there's almost too much to say about our next guess.
Tim Minchin is the king of creativity, whether he's dazzling
us on stage composing behind the scenes for Matilda the Musical.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
He has one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Most creative brains in Australia, maybe in the world. And
he's just put out a new book called You Don't
Have to Have a Dream.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Tim Minchin.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
High. Hi, Amanda Jones, How like Tim, You're in the
midst of moving house, which is the worst job in
the pastry of the world.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's moving day. The packers are in and I thought,
you know, I'm going to go and do some radio
because this sucks.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
That's how big you are. James Packers back in town
and he's come around.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Yeah, the Packers are there having an argument that cradles
there everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Totally. No, it's it's exciting.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
We've just been renovating, so I've been living in a
rental for a couple of years and we're going back.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You're going to feel like a grown up living in
a nice house to trash it.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm deeply uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Actually, I've never sort of made a house nice, and
we've renovated this old nineteen thirties house, and I feel, Yeah,
it's exactly that feeling of oh my god, I'm a
grown up, which at forty eight point nine I should
already feel, but yeah, it's a bit scary.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I first felt like a grown up when I got
a salad spinner. Oh really, Yeah, And I thought, you
know what I was in my fifties. I thought I
am actually a grown up. That was the sign for
me that i'd become.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
And then you started spinning and you felt like a
child again.
Speaker 6 (01:18):
I always feel like when I get a piece of timber, yeah,
and I go, that's a good bit of timber.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'll keep that. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
So I've got a pile of it, and it's not
for burning, it's just in case I need a piece
of timber.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah. I think that's pretty grown up.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I feel like a grown up every morning when I
wake up in severe pain just from living like I
did quite a lot of carrying stuff up into an
attic yesterday, and I woke up this morning feeling like
i'd run a marathon.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Well, look, let's talk about your book. You don't have
to have a dream. I've seen.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Some videos of incredible speeches you make where you'd say
to university graduates or the.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Like, here are my tenants for how to have a
good life. Is that what this is about?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:57):
So this is a book which started as a publisher
saying I had I did this university speech about ten
years ago that went ape viral, went all around the world,
and a publisher said, why don't we make that speech
into a little book, you know, something you keep by
the lou or give to you give to your kids
when they leave school. But actually, I've done three graduation speeches,
(02:18):
and they all sort of deal with different things. Ones
really about life, ones about acting and artistry and writing,
and ones more about music. And so we collected them
all and then I wrote some essays kind of drawing
them together and reflecting on how these ideas influenced my
work and how I live my life. It's pretty pretentious,
but as we say, I'm a grown up now, so
I'm allowed to pontive you to that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
And then we found this beautiful illustrator and ended up
being a really gorgeous book. And it's Yeah, it's gone
pretty well. It's in the Sunday Times bestseller list in
the UK now, and so I think it's number one
nonfiction in Australia this week.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So people obviously want advice from an idiot. That's what
That's what I've concluded.
Speaker 6 (02:56):
I was reading here that you said you feel you've
woken up to counsel cancel culture.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh well, who said that.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
That's what it's said, That's what it's said in my
questions here, all.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I mean there's there's lots of stuff
in the book.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
A lot of it's about you know, positivity and and
you don't have to have a dream thing is a
lot of it is about me trying to just you know,
plicate these dominant narratives that everyone has to really know
what they want to do and they're going to be
president or an astronaut.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
It's it's not how I got to where I got.
I've just always been really passionate about what's in front
of me and let come what may. And I know
that doesn't work for everyone, and if you want to
be a you know, constitutional lawyer, you need to have
a long term goal.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
But for a lot of us, I don't think we
have that vocational urge.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
And so I've just always been like, just be really
into what you're doing, even if it's working in a
cafe or writing a score for a youth theater company,
which is how I sort of started out. But there's
also other stuff in the book that addresses some of
the contemporary issues. The one that makes me very anxious
is how social media makes everyone feel like they're on
separate sides from one another. We find it very easy
(04:04):
to dehumanize people we disagree with. So there's I don't
get too caught up in that, but yeah, I think
that's a pretty given that. I talk a lot about
critical thinking and about checking your own ideas and making
sure you don't make assumptions that everything you think is right,
I had to address the social media factor.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah. Yeah, because we've.
Speaker 6 (04:23):
Come safer now, I felt, well, you don't want to
say anything controversial, and I find anything we say on
the radio is fine, but if we isolate it and
put it into a little sandbite, it's a whole different
kettle of.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Feature football taking something to the bunker. If you look
at something in slow motion at all, it's terrible. Yeah,
that's you can't live your life like that. Yeah, And
because I'm a long form speaker. I speak in long sentences,
and I'm always interested in unpacking all angles that I
can possibly think of. It's a very interesting time to
be in the public domain because I can say something
(04:55):
long and loving and conciliatory and a bit like, well,
some people think this and that and then have that
taken out of context and put on the Internet. And yeah,
I've actually got off social media now, having kind of
copped one too many pylons.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And they feel the trouble is it makes you paranoid.
It feels like the whole world's parting on you. It's
just a couple of hundred kids, you know, or young
usually young people.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
We had Rob Schneider. He came in and we're going
to roast him. He's anti vaxer, and anyway, he was lovely, wasn't.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
He was really annoyingly personable, a very great.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Interviews and nice. Anti vaxers doesn't mean they're right.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
No, exactly, You've got it. You can have your own
opinion on things.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
But I did say to him, I said, be in America,
what's it like, because it looks like America's going nuts?
Speaker 5 (05:37):
And he said, well, online it looks like but you
go to America, it's it's fine.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Now I'm off social media, It's definitely made me feel
a bit better. The trouble is in the world in America,
people are still treating each other as humans. Unfortunately, online
does translate to a media coverage. So the New York
Times checks X check Twitter, which is crazy. The New
York Times shouldn't be reporting on those conversations because those
(06:05):
conversations are algorithmically distorted, and also it translates to votes.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So I'd love to go, oh, that's just.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Online stuff, but unfortunately online is where Trump's supporters see
him in this distorted, you know, amazing way, and.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So yeah, you can't ignore it. Unfortunately, we could talk
about it all day.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But too because that way you don't have to move hound.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Well, there's a lesson in my big speech, the speech
that went viral, and it is it's define yourself by
what you love. And that's something I'm really working on
because it's so easy to go I don't like this,
and I hate it when people this, and I don't
like Coldplay, and I don't like Taylor Switch or whatever,
and we just get really good at defining ourselves in
opposition to stuff. So in my speech I say, be
(06:52):
pro stuff, not anti stuff, which is why I'm always
careful about getting too caught up in the kids these
days and their social medias. So what is the positive
thing we can talk about that is the offset to that?
So rather than whining about it, what can we say
about society that makes us feel better?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, I like to do quote you about these things.
I also like to quote Steve Guttenberg from the Oh yeah,
of course he actually said recently he said, and I've
tried to change my thinking around this is it. Rather
than saying, oh I have to go and do something,
say I.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Get to do this today.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, that's the key to happiness.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
And there's another reason social media's poison is because comparison
to others is absolute poison. And we've always known that,
since the ancient Greek, since before then, we've known that
comparing yourself to others is the key to keta unhappiness. Yeah,
I mean we're never going to be Steve Gutenberg. No,
I don't know how many of your listeners know. I
know exactly who is. But yeah, So choosing what you
(07:48):
have rather than striving for what you haven't got is
of course the key to happiness. But easy for me
to say because I'm moving into my nice kitchen and.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
You'll always know that. Amanda defaults to police Academy.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I stopped after number six.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
Well, Tim, it's great to have you in Good luck
with the movie using the ute from upright. Yeah, that'd
be good.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Unfortunately we're paying people to do it so bad board boxes.
Speaker 6 (08:11):
It would it would be sad if I saw you
with boxes, if you rang us and said, can you
guys give me a hand moving free?
Speaker 5 (08:17):
Because he's got no, he's got a piano as well.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I'm doing a lot of little trips with little bits
of musical equipment that I don't want anyone else to touch.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
Your book You Don't have to Dream is available now.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
You don't have to have a dream.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
You don't have to have a dream. You don't even
have to dream. You don't have to have a dream.
It's available now. And for tickets to the tour, go
to famee dot com dot are you slash Tim Minchin.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
There you go. Listen to me pontificate more on stage.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
I can't dream of anything I'd like more.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, I'll see you there.
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