What’s that coming over the mountain? Be More Yeti!
One of the best, if not the best, journalism scoops of the 20th Century was by The Times correspondent James Morris when he broke the story of the first climbing of Mount Everest (Tibetan name Chomolungma) in time for the Queen’s 1953 coronation.
Morris spent three months in the Himalayas staying close to the team that made the ascent, going up and down between various base camps to ensure that rival publications did not usurp him by having any access to a radio transmitter that would stymie his plan of using Sherpa ‘runners’ to run down the mountains to his prepared radio down below.
Using tactics that we know of late, Morris befuddled his competitors by spreading the odd false story of a failed ascent as well as creating codes to further protect his story.
Finally, the peak was reached, the triumphant team returned to Morris’s base camp, so Morris gave the relevant code (“Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned May 29 stop awaiting improvement all well”) to a Himalayan runner
Our runner managed to reach base, the news was relayed to The Times and the news was delivered just before the day of the Queens’ coronation. Those were the days when things like that really mattered to post-war Britain.
The remarkable story is told in Morris’s book Coronation Everest, but what is even more remarkable is that this story of British derring-do and Boys’ Own heroism was actually told by a woman.
In those days Morris was called James, but spent most of his life as Jan Morris after transitioning to a woman 20 years later in 1974. A decision at least as courageous as spending three months in the Himalayas, Morris spent the rest of her life in Wales, seemingly as a very happy historian until passing away late last year.
Commenting on gender assignment or dysphoria is a dangerous climb for any writer, but Morris’s journeys probably tell us a lot about ourselves.
Sometimes we are brave, sometimes we are weak. Sometimes we are male, sometimes we are female, sometimes we are Elizabethans from the past, sometimes we are Martians from the future. Just vessels of time that react to forces that are unknown to us.
That’s you, that is
Just read Orlando by Virginia Woolf. That’s you, that is.
So it is with the world of crypto and what is around the mountain or what comes before it. A month ago there were bulls running around their echo chambers listening to all the other bulls.
Crypto was trendy again, everybody had been making big dough for nine months and the baby bulls (moon-calves?) were joining from the side lines. Elon Musk went mischief, playing with the market. Others followed. Everybody was a bull.
Then, one morning, everybody started to behave like a bear. Rather as if Morris herself had rounded Thyangboche in the Himalaya and seen a yeti in front of what-was-him in 1953, lots of people got the fear overnight.
Yes, of course, we’ve seen it all before and no doubt the bulls will return, but it’s extraordinary how easy it is to change emotional-species, a lot easier than changing gender.
At time of writing Bitcoin is falling again like snow in the Himalayas, down to a lower ‘base camp’ of about $46,000, rendering weak investors as snow-blind as a herd of yaks as they act like lemmings and panicking they won’t reach the peaks they reached before.
What fresh hell is this? Not what’s actually going on, but the shocking inevitability of these tatterdemalions who only wear the shoddy clothes of the ridiculous Emperors they emulate and covet. It’s so boring.
Story doesn’t change
This crypto battle is Manichean, other sides think they are good and they both think each other evil. The utter ennui of it all is that everything that goes up comes with an agenda and everything comes down with a manifesto. The story doesn’t change.
Or maybe it does and it is all about speed of communication. Elon Musk can drop a tweet about crypto and a lockdown-world has nothing more exciting to do than react.
No wonder that the Bitcoin Cassandras who hate crypto laugh every time that happens. It’s a Marvel universe and Tony Stark is Out-Of-Space-Man, not Iron-Man. To them, it’s not real.
But speed isn’t everything, sometimes the way things happen through time does.
James Morris’s story of the climbing of Everest, or Jan Morris’s story of the climbing of Chomolungma, is much more romantic because of the codes and the runners lolloping over the Himalayas rather than a simple radio transmission, or even Morse Code.
So it will be with bulls and bears. As somebody who once spent an extraordinary day in Pushkar, Rajasthan in the 1980s off his face with some bhang and meeting a sadhu who only emerged once a year from his hut… before watching hill-runners sprint past him under a swingboat moon on the descent, such things are wondrous and magical.
What is not wondrous and magical are the same old tropes about crypto and the speed they are relayed. But go back to time, not back in time… back to time. Nothing really matters on a daily, monthly or yearly level. Nobody lives in the moment, that’s just for the irresponsible.
What matters is the end of the time that people put on holding crypto and when they cash in or out. Minor-time fluctuations, nothing to see here, are irrelevant. Let the bull and bears do their dances with wolves or whatever. As the sadhu told me near Puskar in 1988 as we looked to the valley below, it’s only those in the mountains who really know what life is.
Those in the shallows know nothing… so ignore them. Go higher, be better, head for the hills, be more Yeti, less bull or bear. Yes, be more Crypto Yeti. That way you’ll keep everybody guessing whether you or this or time is real. Much more fun.
Be more Yeti!
Monty Munford is a renowned Tech journalist and has his own podcast https://blockspeak.io
He WAS a keynote speaker/emcee/moderator/interviewer at prestigious events around the world until Covid destroyed his conference speaking career… until 2023. He has spoken at more than 200 global events.
He was previously a weekly tech columnist for Forbes in New York, the Telegraph in the UK and continues to write regularly for the BBC, The Economist, The FT and… City PM.