The Tariff Whiplash Economy Is a Farmer’s Nightmare — and a Hunter’s Moment
The “chaos,” as everyone is calling it, is simply the conditions under which the Hunter was built to operate.
A year ago this week, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and declared April 2nd “Liberation Day,” announcing sweeping tariffs on virtually everything the United States imports. Within days, the stock market had shed trillions of dollars in value. Within months, the policy had been struck down by the Supreme Court, reimposed in new forms, partially refunded, re-litigated, and announced yet again.
One Colorado retailer absorbed $25,000 in tariff costs in a single fall season. Economists have taken to calling the era the “Trump freeze,” as businesses found they simply couldn’t plan for a future that changed by the hour.
“Businesses need predictability to grow,” said Colorado’s state treasurer last month. “But what they’re getting instead is tariff whiplash. Policies are announced and they’re changed.”
He’s right, of course. But here’s what he almost certainly doesn’t know: he just perfectly described why Farmers fail and Hunters thrive during times of crisis like we’re experiencing today between the tariffs, the war with Iran, and Trump’s draconian cuts to social programs and threat to end Medicare.
The entire premise of the agricultural revolution — the moment, roughly twelve thousand years ago, when human societies began to shift from hunting and gathering to planting and harvesting — is that farming requires predictability.
You plant in spring because you know, with confidence, that summer will follow. You store grain because you trust the cycle will repeat. Farming is, at its most fundamental level, a bet on the future behaving like the past.
The Farmer’s brain, shaped over ten thousand years of agricultural civilization, is exquisitely tuned to stability. Rules, routines, and long planning horizons are not just preferences for the Farmer type — they are the operating system.
The Hunter’s brain works on entirely different firmware.
When our ancestors were tracking game across an African savanna or a European forest ten thousand years before the first wheat was ever planted, the environment changed moment to moment.
A storm front moved in. The herd shifted direction. A predator appeared at the tree line. The Hunter who stopped to make a careful, methodical, long-range plan was the Hunter who went hungry, or worse.
What kept the Hunter alive was rapid environmental scanning, instant decision-making, and the ability to abandon a strategy the moment conditions changed. Adaptability wasn’t a nice quality. It was the whole game.
Now look at what the tariff and war chaos have actually produced in the American economy. One executive after another has used the word “impossible” when asked to describe planning for the year ahead. “It’s impossible to plan,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told Reuters. “You hear that tariffs are off, and you are considering how to get refunds. Then a few hours later, it’s 10 percent. Then it’s 15 percent the next day.”
For Farmer-brained executives running Farmer-brained corporations, that kind of environment is genuinely paralyzing.
The spreadsheets don’t work. The five-year plans are worthless. The supply chains they spent decades optimizing have to be thrown out and rebuilt, sometimes repeatedly, against a backdrop of policy that may change again before the new approach is fully implemented.
Volkswagen’s CEO recently told investors that “a structural reset is required” and that “there are unfortunately no quick fixes.” That’s the sound of a Farmer staring at a field that used to grow wheat and now grows something nobody has a name for yet.
But I keep thinking about the other side of that equation. I keep thinking about all the Hunters I’ve known over the decades, the ones who were told their whole lives that they couldn’t focus, couldn’t plan, couldn’t stick with anything long enough to make it work.
The ones who drove their teachers and managers half-crazy with their inability to follow established procedure. The ones who are, right now, looking at this economic landscape and feeling something that the Farmer-brained executives around them definitely are not feeling.
They’re feeling alive.
The Hunter doesn’t need the ground to stay still. The Hunter needs the ground to move, because that’s when the scanning skill kicks in, when the rapid pivoting becomes an advantage instead of a liability, when the ability to abandon last week’s plan without grief or guilt turns out to be exactly what the moment demands.
The “chaos,” as everyone is calling it, is simply the conditions under which the Hunter was built to operate.
I’m not suggesting the tariff policy or war with Iran are good economic policy, because by most measures they aren’t. Manufacturing employment is down. Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Small businesses have been hammered. These are real costs and real people bearing them.
But I am suggesting that inside every economic disruption there are always people who thrive precisely because of the disruption, and that those people almost always turn out to have what the medical establishment has spent the last fifty years calling a disorder.
Thomas Edison, who I’ve written about for three decades as perhaps the most famous Edison-gene Hunter in American history, built his greatest achievements during periods of extraordinary technological and economic chaos. He wasn’t successful despite the uncertainty of the Gilded Age. He was successful because his brain was perfectly adapted to it.
The question worth asking yourself, if you’re a Hunter reading this in the middle of what economists are calling unprecedented volatility, is not “how do I survive this chaos?”
The question is: “What can I build inside it that the Farmers around me can’t even see yet?”
Get out there and join the hunt, and good luck!