I had Robin Mills on the podcast this week. He’s the founder and CEO of Qamar Energy, a Dubai-based energy consultancy, a fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and a former Shell executive. He also wrote a book back in 2009 called The Myth of the Oil Crisis, and that title turned out to be the whole conversation.

Here’s why I wanted to talk to him right now. We’re in the middle of a real oil crisis. Iran has spent months trying to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping lane that normally carries about 20% of the world’s oil and another 20% of its liquefied natural gas. At times this year that flow has dropped to almost nothing. Even with Saudi Arabia and the UAE routing oil through pipelines that skip the Strait entirely, Robin estimates the world is still short something like 10 million barrels a day compared to before the war. That is a bigger supply gap than the 1973 embargo, bigger than the 1990 Gulf War. By any historical measure, this should be the worst oil shock of our lifetimes.

And yet crude is sitting around $85 a barrel. Gas at the pump is elevated, but nowhere close to a record. If you told an oil trader from 1990 that 10 million barrels a day had vanished from the market and prices barely moved, they would not have believed you.

That gap between what should be happening and what’s actually happening is the whole lesson.

We’ve been here before, just with a different villain

Robin wrote his book after the 2008 oil spike, when the fear wasn’t war, it was geology. The story back then was that the world was running out of oil, period. No new fields, demand climbing forever, $147-a-barrel crude as a permanent new normal. Robin’s argument was that this was wrong. There was plenty of oil left, the industry just needed time and the right economics to go get it.

He was right. Within a few years, US shale production exploded, driven by guys like George Mitchell in Texas who spent a decade failing to make fracking work before he finally cracked it. The majors like Shell, where Robin worked at the time, mostly sat it out. It was smaller, scrappier companies that made the breakthrough. Oil prices crashed in 2014 and stayed low for years.

So the “permanent crisis” of 2008 wasn’t permanent. It was a normal industry cycle that got mistaken for a structural break, and a lot of money was made and lost on that mistake.

This time the crisis is real, and the market still isn’t panicking

What’s different in 2026 is that this isn’t a geology story, it’s a war. Iran can’t out-drill the world into a supply glut. What it can do is make the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to sail through, and it has. A few missile strikes on tankers is enough to make most shipping companies simply refuse the risk.

So why hasn’t the price done what you’d expect?

A few reasons, and they matter more than the headlines do. Saudi Arabia and the UAE both built pipelines years ago specifically to route around a Hormuz shutdown, and those are running near capacity now. China spent all of 2025 quietly stockpiling over a billion barrels of oil into strategic reserves, for reasons nobody fully understands even now, and that stockpile let China cut its oil imports by roughly 5 million barrels a day without missing a beat. And OPEC’s spare capacity, mostly sitting in Saudi Arabia, is real leverage even when it can’t physically get through the Strait right now.

None of that shows up in a headline the way a burning tanker does, but it’s the actual mechanism holding the market together, and it’s the kind of thing you only see if you look past the crisis narrative to the plumbing underneath it.

The pattern that should change how you read every “crisis”

I think about this the same way whether we’re talking about oil, interest rates, or whatever the next real estate scare turns out to be. The headline version of a crisis and the actual mechanics of a crisis are usually two different stories, and the gap between them is where most bad financial decisions get made.

In 2008 it was “we’re running out of oil forever.” It wasn’t true, and the people who made permanent decisions based on that temporary panic came out worse than the people who understood the underlying supply picture. Right now it’s “a war has taken out a fifth of the world’s oil supply, buckle up.” That part is true. But the conclusion most people would jump to, that this means chaos and runaway prices, isn’t holding up, because the market has more flexibility and more redundancy than the scary version of the story accounts for.

I see the same dynamic constantly with the investors I talk to. Something happens in the news, and the instinct is to react to the headline instead of asking what’s actually happening underneath it. Rates spike and people panic-sell assets that are still cash-flowing fine. A market wobbles and people freeze on deals that still pencil. The volatility in the news cycle is almost always bigger than the volatility in the actual fundamentals, if you take the time to check.

Robin said something at the end of our conversation that stuck with me. He said for a retail investor, trying to trade oil directly based on headlines is close to impossible, because the market moves on things like a single tweet about peace talks, reversed by the weekend. What he said actually works is owning high-quality assets in the space and holding them through the noise, rather than trying to trade the news cycle in real time.

That’s the same conclusion I’ve landed on with real estate and private markets, just applied to a different asset. You are not going to out-trade the headlines. Nobody can consistently time when the next “crisis” is fake and when it’s real just by watching the news faster than everyone else. What you can do is build a portfolio around real, cash-flowing assets with enough redundancy, diversification across markets, and a long enough hold period, that you don’t need to correctly predict the next scary headline to come out fine.

The Strait of Hormuz will eventually reopen, or it won’t and the world will keep rerouting around it the way it already has been for months. Either way, the investors who did well through this won’t be the ones who guessed right about Iran. They’ll be the ones who weren’t exposed to a single point of failure in the first place.

That’s the whole myth, in oil and everywhere else. The crisis in the headline is rarely the crisis in your portfolio, unless you’ve built your portfolio to have no room for error. Don’t build it that way.

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