The U.S. Can't Back Down: The Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Messier Than You Think with Michael Every

**Michael Every** (0:00)
What we continually see is deeply conflicting information. You can't just follow the headline and say, well, this is what's happening. You have to start understanding some of the dynamics that lie behind all of it. That is really the core to doing the best you can do towards predicting where this ends up. I'm going to make that call that Hormuz is not going to be re-opening for months. When I share it with people, they generally think, I'm just telling them it's the end of the world.
Well, it's the end of the world as they knew it. But I don't think it means like a crippling belt-tightening where suddenly we don't live well. I think it means we live differently, but perhaps better.

**Nate Hagens** (0:39)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
Today, I'm pleased to welcome back global financial analyst, Michael Every, to discuss with me the current state of the global game of power involving the Strait of Hormuz, and a wide boundary analysis on which path forward and which ultimate winners, if any, are most likely given the extremely high stakes of this situation. Michael Every is global strategist at Rabobank with over two decades of experience. He analyzes major financial developments and contributes to the bank's various economic research publications. Before Rabobank, he was a director at Silk Road Associates in Bangkok, senior economist and fixed income strategist at the Royal Bank of Canada in both London and Sydney as well as economist for Dun & Bradstreet in London. This was another phenomenal conversation with Michael.
I'm a systems analyst and a citizen of the planet, but I cut my teeth on Wall Street. So I deeply appreciate the wisdom and acumen that Michael brings to this conversation on the pathways ahead. Just a note, as viewers here are aware, I care most about the biosphere and the living world. And I think his discussion in this conversation on hard versus soft power gives pretty strong evidence of how low of priority the ecological issues are going to take, given what else is going on and at stake. The conclusion for me is ecologically minded humans need to understand and incorporate this into their work. And to me, there's two pathways in parallel to the great game of power that Michael describes so well, build and expand as many regenerative technologies and practices as possible and infuse an awareness of the importance of the living world, a life ethic, if you will. That wasn't part of this awesome conversation because it's not Michael's job to also integrate that. But conversations like this one are what I hope pushes the thinking and action forward of our global community of viewers towards better futures than the default. With that, please welcome Michael Every.
Michael Every, welcome back.

**Michael Every** (3:26)
Great to be here.

**Nate Hagens** (3:27)
Thank you for coming on, especially with all the events going on in the world and it being late night in Thailand. So let's get right to it. You and your colleagues at Rabobank have recently written a piece framing the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz around Homer's Odyssey. And I saw a lot of inside references there that were kind of impressive, describing many twisted outcomes to this situation. For listeners, in addition to myself, who are getting whiplash from the hourly or daily headlines, give us the grounded picture right now. What is physically happening in the Strait? And for timestamp, today is Tuesday, June 9th, 8 a.m. Central Time.
What's going on?

**Michael Every** (4:16)
I have to say that that piece that we put out began, as is often the case with my work, with a pun that came to me when I was thinking of the opening line of the Odyssey, which is tell me, muse. And I thought, tell me, Hormuz, because it just suddenly came to my mind and I thought, actually, you know what? It really does work because the line continues, tell me of a complicated man. That's one of the modern translations. And this is a very complicated Strait. In fact, you could say it's a Strait of twists and turns, which is how Odysseus is also described. And if you look at the original Greek, he's called Polytropos, which is twisting and turning.
He's also called Polymetis, which means very cunning or having many different characters. And all of this completely applies, as does the fact that Odysseus is within the book regarded as an unreliable narrator. We're not quite sure if anything that he tells us is actually happening or not. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought this, besides the fact that the Odyssey obviously is an arduous journey that we're all on, was the perfect kind of literary analogy for where we are, and where we still are now as we speak, and as I'm sure where we will be when this actually goes to air, which is flip-flopping from one side to the other, up is down, black is white, yes is no, no is yes. Some things we can say and many things we cannot with any kind of certainty.