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- #160 – Tobacco & Digital Literacy
#160 – Tobacco & Digital Literacy
Quote, Podcast, Article, Observation, X.
Dimitri Gremos
June 17, 2026
Good morning everyone,
Hope you’re having a great week!
Can honestly say that I am very happy to be on the other side of what has been quite an arduous university semester.
The History of Legal Thought, Conflict of Laws, Anti-Corruption Law, and Death & Inheritance Law subjects now in the bag. Only one sem to go!
Currently spending a few days on Hamilton Island, and then it’s back on the tools next week.
Without further ado, here are 5 things I found interesting over the past few days.
Let’s jump in.
read online on my website
read time 3 minutes
#160 – The Rundown:
Quote: Life is like hiking.
Podcast: High Performance with Nico Rosberg.
Article: The sector most investors ignore.
Observation: Where young Aussies are surprisingly falling behind.
X: What will SpaceX employees do after the IPO?
Quote:
Life is Like Hiking
“Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking.
You don’t need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.”
James Clear
{h/t James Clear}
Podcast:
High Performance with Nico Rosberg: The F1 Champion Who Disappeared
Nico Rosberg spent 31 years building his entire identity around one goal: F1 World Champion.
He got there in 2016, and then walked away from the sport five days later.
He strips back the curtain on his legendary, fierce rivalry with childhood friend Lewis Hamilton, describing the psychological warfare of their title fights and the conscious rewiring required to stop yielding in wheel-to-wheel battles.
Nico also opens up about his venture capital play with Rosberg Ventures, and how anything in business feels like a breeze after the pressure he experienced in F1.
Jake and Damian often do an excellent job hosting these interviews, and this was no exception.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
[Duration: 1 hour 41 minutes]
P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. Hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.
The Sector Most Investors Ignore
An interesting article by Lyall Taylor on an asset class most people completely disregard: tobacco.
“Most developed markets have tobacco advertising bans. This means that it is almost impossible to launch a new, competing tobacco brand. In many countries, you are not even allowed to engage in display advertising at the point of sale (cigarettes sometimes even need to be hidden from view behind the counter). Customers therefore wouldn’t even know your new brand existed. Furthermore, because regulators want to reduce tobacco consumption, they are actually more than happy for tobacco companies to acquire each other and keep raising prices. Unlike most industries, antitrust concerns are therefore non-existent - quite the reverse. Meanwhile, the highly addictive nature of nicotine makes consumers not particularly price sensitive.
However, while all of the above is fairly obvious, it would be rendered irrelevant if smokers all just decided to stop smoking, or if regulators were to ban tobacco entirely, and it is the systematic over-estimation of these risks by investors that has driven the undervaluation of tobacco stocks over most of the past 30 years. This has allowed the companies to buy back tonnes of stock at cheap prices, or pay high dividend yields which investors have been able to reinvest at high returns (whereas most industries with great economics have traded at high valuations, preventing this opportunity).”
Lyall Taylor
Check out the full article here.
{h/t Trader Ferg}
Observation:
Where Young Aussies Are Surprisingly Falling Behind
This was a statistic that stopped me in my tracks the other day:
Two-thirds of Australian Year 10 students are failing to meet basic ICT skill benchmarks, sinking to a 20-year low.
Sorry?
So, the generation that spends an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes on screens per day is digitally illiterate?
The testing is run by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (aka the body that sits above NAPLAN), and assesses students’ ability to actually use technology, not how much they use it: finding information online, judging whether it's any good, organising and reshaping data, building digital products like presentations and basic coded solutions, and handling all of it safely and ethically.
A few thoughts on this:
1) Being constantly online and being genuinely capable online are two different things.
2) This statistic makes the whole “digital native” label often assigned to younger generations seem like a bit of a misnomer.
3) If this is the stage we’re at before AI has become completely mainstream, what does digital IQ look like in 5-10 years?
{h/t The Aussie Corporate}
X:
What Will SpaceX Employees Do After The IPO?
Shaun Maguire (Partner @ VC giant Sequoia) on what SpaceX employees are going to do with their new wealth from the SpaceX IPO:
“There’s this meme that wives of tech billionaires go on to do NGOs and fund bad causes—SpaceX will be the literal opposite.”
“These people are going to do the most amazing things with their money.”
“The people that will make the most money will be the people that were there the longest. The people that have been there for 15+ years—they've had to battle environmental groups and physics.”
“These people are naturally frugal. They're also naturally driven by what I consider to be very positive.”
“Most people that joined SpaceX over 15 years ago—they did it for the mission. Because they love space, and want to build rockets. They want to work with their hands and want to keep America competitive in the space industry.”
“It's self-selected. The people that were there early didn't think it would ever become this big of a company. They didn't do it to get rich. And they got rich very slowly, with very real skills and real experience of how much of the world is designed to take money and do bad things with it.”
“This group of people—we're going to see more beautiful travertine sculptures in cities, just for public art.”
“I think we're going to see a lot of physical whimsy out of the SpaceX crew.”
Shaun Maguire
Interesting perspective and very curious to see if it plays out.
{h/t Mr Family Office}
Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.
In case you missed it, last week’s newsletter covered the (surprisingly) unregulated world of private jets, where family offices are putting their money & more.
If you enjoyed this edition, it would mean the world if you could forward it to a friend or send them my website.
This goes a long way to helping me reach more people :)
See you in the next one,
Dimi