Clueless

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

• George Carlin.

Get your Free
financial review

The Castle Church at Wittenberg, situated on the river Elbe in Germany, once hosted an extraordinary collection of holy relics. It had begun with a genuine thorn from the crown of Jesus, certified to have pierced Christ’s brow.

Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony, diligently built up the collection to such an extent that by 1509, it numbered 5,005 individual pieces. Under the Catholic system known as ‘indulgences’, whereby charitable donations could earn sinners respite from the fires of hell, the overall Wittenberg collection was calculated to reduce purgatory by 1,443 years.

It included one tooth of St. Jerome, four pieces from St. Augustine, four hairs from Our Lady; three pieces of her cloak, four from her girdle, and seven from the veil sprinkled with the blood of Christ.

The relics of Christ included one piece from his swaddling clothes; thirteen from his crib; one wisp of straw; one piece of the gold brought by the Wise Men and three of the myrrh; one strand from Jesus’ beard; one of the nails driven into his hands; one piece of bread eaten at the Last Supper; one piece of the stone on which Jesus stood before he ascended into heaven; and one twig from Moses’ burning bush.

By 1520, the collection had swelled to 19,013 holy remnants. Those who viewed these relics on All Saints Day, the first of November, and made the stipulated contributions might receive from the pope indulgences for the reduction of purgatory, either for themselves or for friends or family, to the extent of 1,902,202 years and 270 days.

In 1516, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, arrived in Germany, having been sent by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences and raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Tetzel was thought to have popularized the following jingle:

“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

A recently appointed priest, Martin Luther, took great exception to this mercenary trade in indulgences, and three times during sermons in 1516 he spoke critically of the practice. He saw the purchase of indulgences as extremely dangerous and likely to make worshippers complacent, and neglectful of their earthly duties.

In October 1517 Luther wrote to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, enclosing within his letter a copy of his “Disputation of Martin Luther on the power and efficacy of indulgences”, otherwise known as “The Ninety-Five Theses”. Some accounts have Luther nailing a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church.

Luther’s attack on Catholic doctrine was always going to be contentious, at least at a local level – the sale of indulgences also supported the Castle Church and his university. But Luther probably had little idea at the time that his protest would go on to ignite the broader Protestant Reformation and cause a schism within the Catholic church itself. He probably had no idea he would change his society and the progress of religious thought completely.

Roughly 500 years later, a new iteration of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses sprang up. As befits the content of this latest polemic, it was first published online,

From The Cluetrain Manifesto, first published in April 1999:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter.. and getting smarter faster than most companies.

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humourless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

“While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy-talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

“However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intra-networked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

“Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

This correspondent first came across The Cluetrain Manifesto, ironically enough, in a research note written by Henry Blodget. If you don’t remember the name, he was the internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who became a violent booster of internet company initial public offerings (IPOs) until he was caught red-handed issuing essentially fraudulent recommendations, after which he was barred from the securities business for life. But we digress.

Cluetrain was a child of the late 1990s. It betrays its age with that reference to intranets (remember them?). But the original authors of Cluetrain – Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger – were on to something.

Being a child of the 1990s, Cluetrain would have been only barely conscious of Google (founded September 1998) and not aware at all of the likes of Facebook (founded February 2004) or Twitter (founded March 2006). But its authors were clearly all well aware of the potential of the networked world.

Not being an early adopter, we didn’t join Twitter until the end of 2009. One man, on the other hand, got on board in early 2007, and his name is Naval Ravikant.

Who is he ?

We suspect Naval himself wouldn’t self-identify with any particular role, as he seems to us to be something of a “Renaissance Man” and polymath, but a potted biography would include the following. He is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, a platform designed to connect startups with angel investors and employees. He is also an angel investor with interests in 200 or so separate companies, including Twitter and Uber. He is also extremely generous in sharing his experience and wisdom with the world in an utterly charming and gracious way.

Naval has also penned a thread on Twitter which is mind-alteringly good. It’s currently pinned to his Twitter timeline, which you can access using his handle @naval. All credit goes to him; we’re merely republishing it here for ease of use. Its title: “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”.

• Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
• Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
• Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
• You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity – a piece of a business – to gain your financial freedom.
• You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
• Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
• The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
• Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
• Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
• Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
• Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
• Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
• Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
• Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
• When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
• Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
• Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
• The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
• “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” – Archimedes.
• Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
• Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
• Labour means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labour leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
• Capital and labour are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
• Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
• An army of robots is freely available – it’s just packed in data centres for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
• If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
• Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
• Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
• There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

How cool is that lot?

What we love about Naval’s advice is that he doesn’t hide behind jargon. His prose couldn’t be more lucid. And his recommendations span multiple disciplines: early-stage investment, investment at a more holistic level, work, lifestyle.. Everything features.

Thomas Jefferson once remarked that

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Naval Ravikant is a wonderful living expression of the power of sharing ideas in a digitally networked world. While it’s true that much of the internet is a distraction engine (or what Nicholas Carr disdainfully calls The Shallows), if you can manage to extract enough signal from the noise, the rewards are all there for you to enjoy – and in most cases, at absolutely zero cost. It’s like having the library of Alexandria in the palm of your hand.

So switch off the news media. Make time instead for thinkers like Naval Ravikant, and search them out on the likes of Twitter and YouTube and Substack. Both your mind and body will thank you for it (Naval is also very good on matters relating to lifestyle).

The author of Avoid news: towards a healthy news diet, Rolf Dobelli, writes as follows:

“Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant. Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile? Probably not.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto, meanwhile, ends with some rather ominous advice to businesses that fail to embrace the potential of the networked world:

• Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.
• Our allegiance is to ourselves — our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.
• Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can’t they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.
• We’re both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they’re really just an annoyance. We know they’re coming down. We’re going to work from both sides to take them down.
• To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
• We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

The authors of Cluetrain were ahead of the crowd in their appreciation of how and why the Internet would change everything. As has now become accepted wisdom, the impact of revolutionary technologies tends to be overstated in the short run but understated over the longer term. Allied with the rise of AI, the authors’ thesis has if anything been reinforced by the passage of time. On 27^th May 2026, The Financial Times published an essay by Ellesheva Kissin, ‘How AI Threatens the Consulting Giants’, in which the author highlights the threat posed to incumbent consulting companies by AI-empowered rivals capable of fulfilling their core services at a fraction of the price. PwC’s global headcount last year, for example, fell by 5,600. This suggests that while some AI infrastructure providers may be worth their current stock market valuations, the scale of the Schumpeterian creative destruction ahead makes overall listed market capitalisations now look delusional. Everything may indeed change – and  some mega-cap companies may come to regret that fact.

………….

As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:

Get your Free
financial review

…………

Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.

Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds.