
Nicholas Gruen Eureka Podcast: Nicholas Gruen talks with Misha Saul
From Misha's website
Nicholas is a prominent Australian economist and has chaired various Australian government groups and initiatives as well as Kaggle, where he was an early investor. Lindsay Tanner has described him as "Australia's foremost public intellectual".
We cover:
- Toyota, Tech and Isegoria
- Problems with technological scale vs human-centred design
- Our inability to solve child abuse and indigenous disadvantage
- Corporate value phoniness
- The surreal waste of government programs
- Mentorship
- Interesting people
- Investment philosophy
- The Australian Dream and Australian identity
- The meaning of life and what Nicholas would do with a billion dollars
- New banking initiatives
- Plain packaging cigarettes
- Regrets and the long shadow of the Holocaust
- A Poem
- Advice he’d give his younger self
- “We need the eggs”, a joke that gets better with age https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-M3Q2zhGd4
The poem Nicholas recites is from The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory by Mark Raphael Baker, and I extract it and its lead in sentence below:
"My parents sing a Yiddish lullaby to their numerous grandchildren about what might have been:
”Sleep now child, my pretty one
Close your dark eyes.
A little boy who has all his teeth
Still needs his mother to sing him to sleep?
A little bly who has all his teeth
And will soon attend cheder.
There he will study Torah and Talmud
But still he cries when mother rocks him to sleep.
A little boy who will become a great scholar
And a successful business man as well.
A little boy who’ll grow to be a bridegroom
Has soaked his bed as if he’s in a pool.
So hush-a-bye my clever little bridegroom
Meanwhile you lie wet in your cradle.
Your mother will shed many a tear
Before you grow to be a man.
Shloft zhe mir maybe eltern, maybe sheyne
Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.
Tomorrow your children will shed your tears,
Tuck your memories in bed and say goodnight.”
