The Tariff Talk
Hi Friends!
Okay, so you guys beat the absolute brakes off of me in the comments last week for not addressing the tariff situation. There are really three reasons why I didn’t initially cover it:
First, I don’t particularly want to cover partisan politics here. Obviously, this is a wide sweeping situation that likely transcends that and of course, I did cover the Fed a little bit last year, but from where I sit, engaging in and/or promoting back and forth bickering rituals isn’t all that constructive and isn’t really collector car news, so I would rather just stay out of it.
Second, I really, honestly didn’t think they were actually going to happen. It turns out (at least from our perspective) that by all intents and purposes I was correct here. Of course, not every segment was spared, we’re all likely to feel this in other places and the new car market is certainly going to take a hit, but as far as this hobby is concerned, we weren’t able to import cars younger than 25 years anyway, so there’s not much change with classic cars overall. Recently, I’ve really adopted the idea that the best policy on virtually everything is to just not worry about something until it becomes real. For me, this was never real and at least for now, it appears it’s going to stay that way. That’s probably the biggest overall reason why I didn’t cover this last week.
Third, I’ve been tuning all of this stuff out on purpose. At the beginning of 2025, I got into my phone and on all my computers and just began blocking things like crazy. Anything regarding politics (from both the left and the right and on both the state and federal levels), I blocked. Obnoxious pop culture figures, natural disasters, media personalities, dating, marriage and social issues, I blocked. Anything having to do with any sports that I don’t care about, I blocked. In fact, pretty much the only thing that I didn’t block was news and/or mentions of anything regarding collector cars and motorcycles, a VERY small group of boxing podcasts, vintage Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster demo videos (shout out to all the car dudes at Emerald City Guitars), my YouTube animal shows and news that’s highly localized and pretty much only relevant to the small corner of the East Valley in the Phoenix area that I live in and that’s literally it.
I simply turned off all the noise and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in a really long time. If this is something that you’ve considered doing, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s been incredibly good for my mental health and I’m sure you’ll see benefits too.
So, what was my motivation here? Initially, I was trying to ease some of the media fatigue that I experienced during the election, but since then, it’s become really clear that the real benefit has been enhancing my focus and avoiding needless panic. The fact is, we know exactly what’s going to happen here. Had the other side won, we would have known exactly what was going to happen there too. We have lived through both scenarios before and if you’re actively reading this, it means that you lived and you survived and you’re continuing forward regardless as well.
One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about this industry is its independence and its ability to avoid a lot of the speed bumps that other spaces tend to consistently encounter. In a lot of ways, this is one of the last stands of the wild, wild west type of business mentality that this country used to run on. That’s not all of it though. In almost every situation, you don’t really get to swim in this pond unless you’ve done something cool in a much bigger lake someplace else first. This means that people that operate here have a fierceness and an entrepreneurial nature that by definition exists solely because of our ability to adapt and overcome. Are there going to be potholes along the way? Of course. There is in everything and they happen here too (2024 had a whole bunch of really big ones). However, we’re still here and in one capacity or another, we’re still going to be here.
Had these tariffs actually gone into effect, I have no doubt that we would have figured out a way to make it work regardless, because that’s just how we’re built.
Folks in this hobby and industry can handle bumpy rides. Most of us take them all the time, we live and breathe building the machines that take us on them and we run them hard just because it’s fun.
There’s nothing new or different here. Regardless of what happens, we still got this.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
