SVIATOSLAV GUSEV

Why do people drink energy drinks? Seriously, I don't get it. They cost more than water, and the taste is usually disgusting. I've literally tried maybe 3 in my life — some acrid, sugary water with an unpleasantly pronounced aftertaste that you want to wash down with mineral water just to kill it. And when girls invite me over and I see those same energy drinks in the fridge, for me it's always a clear red flag. After breaking up with me, in a stressed state, every one of them started smoking and doing similar stuff. And for me that was always an immediate marker that I made the right choice by leaving. I can't stand the smell or sight of cigarettes, it's such vileness. Provokes nothing but disgust. Alcohol — same story. I've never in my life tried vodka, I have no idea what it tastes like. But for me, people who love drinks like that immediately associate with the homeless guys I saw lying in the streets of Paris. What I can understand is grabbing a bottle of wine that costs someone's monthly salary at a restaurant with blood relatives you haven't seen in years. I won't even sleep with a girl who's in any kind of intoxicated state, except (we had a glass of wine or champagne). And the main reason I broadcast this stance is that my daughter is 13. I just remember myself as a kid. The fact that I don't swear, don't drink, and am well-educated — the reason for that is my endlessly beloved mother, who never drank, never smoked, and in 50 years I've never heard a single curse word from her, and my respected ethics teacher. Right now I'm not even sure schools still have an ethics teacher who teaches aristocratic manners of high society. What's the takeaway? Education — we're back to it again. In gymnasium №1, in the lyceum, even in primary school we studied several foreign languages at once. And so when I, as someone with German roots but who never lived in Germany, flew back to my homeland in 2021 to visit my grandfather in Berlin, or before that, celebrating my birthday in Paris, or this year in Monaco — I felt insanely comfortable. Because it's really pleasant when you can instantly switch from your English with a British accent, which half the people don't understand because I speak too slowly, to French or German that the locals actually understand. And what do we have in the country now? Literally everyone is practically forced to speak, write, and do business in their native language, and in government institutions there's maybe one foreign language, tops. When you study foreign languages, first, you develop your brain — there's plenty of scientific research on this — and second, you also study the culture. That is, you broaden your horizons, it's like traveling. I've already traveled half the world, which has given me an insane exposure to business decisions, to how certain social groups behave, to style and fashion in different countries, to how the economy is structured and how political movements work within different social groups and regions. Thanks to that, wherever I go to live, do business, or simply build relationships, I'll take the very best of what I've seen and know. And this is truly the scourge of our times. In my understanding, traditional values are not about banning everything and anything. It's the deliberate promotion of what's useful and good, and demonstrating why it's better. Remember how I started the post? With alcohol and cigarettes. And now we do a somersault to bring it together. Why do zoomers drink less and barely smoke, unlike boomers? They choose the wellness-fitness path, and not because "the state restricted alcohol sales," or because they started slapping scary cancer-consequence pictures on cigarettes. Studies show that the main reason was the visible demonstration of what a person on a healthy diet, leading a healthy lifestyle, looks like — contrasted with a smoking, alcoholic skuf.

A lot of people live in wait-and-see mode. Waiting for Bitcoin to give a decent entry point. Waiting for the crisis to end. Waiting for the market to make sense again. Waiting for more money to appear. Waiting for the right moment. The problem is that the perfect moment almost always becomes obvious only in hindsight. During the last bear market, people were waiting for Bitcoin at $10–12k and ended up watching the bottom sit at $15k. Now the same story is repeating with different numbers, different arguments, and different reasons to wait a little longer. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the main mistake isn't that you sometimes buy high or make a less-than-perfect decision. The main mistake is endlessly waiting for the perfect moment. This applies to more than just crypto. Business, moving, relationships, health, any big decisions. Nobody promised that first the storm ends and then life begins. It's rather the opposite: you have to learn to live, work, and make decisions normally right inside that storm. The future matters. I myself constantly make plans years ahead. But there's a big difference between planning for the future and living in wait of the future. The market will crash many more times. Then rally. Then crash again. Crises will keep replacing one another. But no one will give the past years back. That's why the ability to act with the inputs you have today matters so much.

💙 Stumbled upon a really solid service on the internet today. Works flawlessly. Pretty impressive feature set, plus a huge list of services at wholesale prices. Besides your usual SMM stuff, they sell TG Stars, Premium subscriptions, and even Steam top-ups. It's a service for partners and sellers. You can top up your balance with zero commission if you pay via SBP or USDT.

Big money and freedom begin where your routine ends. Many people confuse daily grind with efficiency. They take pride in controlling every step: posting content themselves, dealing with clients or partners themselves, manually crunching spreadsheets themselves. That's not "control," that's literally being enslaved by your own micromanagement. The Matrix is when you yourself become a cog in the algorithm that was supposed to work for you. The whole difference between a craftsman and a founder is that the first sells his time, while the second builds a conveyor belt. If a process can be programmed, it must be automated. After that, it's a question of scale. As Tinkov said: "Real business is when you can leave for the other end of the world for six months, turn off your phone, and when you come back — not only is everything still running, it has grown without you. If everything falls apart — it's not a business, you just created a job for yourself."

Overthinking. The most effective yet underrated tool against stress and anxiety was articulated two thousand years ago by Jesus Christ: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Thousands of years later, Bezos translated the same idea into an entrepreneur's language: Stress doesn't come from hard work. It primarily comes from not taking action on something you can control. Stress comes from ignoring things you shouldn't be ignoring. We get anxious when we channel today's energy into fear of a tomorrow that hasn't come and isn't guaranteed to anyone. We run through dozens of scenarios, worry about consequences, but never make that one call, never send the email, never make the decision. Not worrying about tomorrow doesn't mean giving up on plans, responsibility, and the future. Quite the opposite. It means thinking about the future through the lens of today's actions. Make the call. Send the email. Make the decision. Start solving the problem, even if you can't close it out fully today. As long as you stay stuck in your head, you're helpless against your own anxiety. The moment you start acting, you take back control. The problem may not be solved yet, but the feeling of helplessness is already giving way to a sense of motion and progress. Focus not on what was or what might happen, but on what you're capable of doing today.

🤚 Some friends reached out and asked me to give a shoutout to their service I've already written about this project before. The platform will be super useful for entrepreneurs, as well as for those who run a tg channel or want to attract users via their referral link to a bot or miniapp.

📉 The Russian stock market is tumbling amid UAV strikes on Ozon and Wildberries warehouses.

Don’t chase pussy.

Stripe is buying OpenRouter for roughly $8B. Back in spring the startup was valued at $1.3B, and now its price has grown 5–6x in literally a few months. OpenRouter launched in 2023, but has already become a single entry point to 400+ AI models for 8M developers and companies. Around 25 trillion tokens flow through the platform every week. But here's what really matters: Stripe isn't buying just another neural net. They're buying the infrastructure layer between business and all the models at once (an aggregator business model, a SuperApp if you will): routing, picking the optimal model by price and quality, fallback providers, and cost control. In AI, huge money will be made not only by model creators. For example, Perplexity with Syntx AI, and Higgsfield along with Cursor, are examples of such businesses that turned from startups into unicorns in literally a couple of years. Funny thing — OpenRouter used to be called "the Stripe for AI." In the end, Stripe itself bought it. Ironic, isn't it 👀

What’s the point of having all this if you spend all your time at work just to afford it?