Is Convenience Making Us Weak? | Full Auto Friday | 10.9.26

Andy Stumpf opens a Full Auto Friday episode from the back of a Montana mountain goat hunt with his wife, Leah. She drew a tag that some hunters wait 15 to 25 years to get, and they spent five days off the grid in a tent with a titanium stove. No internet, no social media—just sun-up to sun-down movement across near-vertical terrain. It was a 14-hour day on the successful hunt. Then he came home to cell service, a phone explosion, and two new puppies named Beans and Javi. That contrast—between deep backcountry self-sufficiency and the instant convenience of modern life—sets the table for everything that follows.

The Two Biggest Shifts in American Culture

A high school senior interviewing Stumpf for an assignment asked him what change in American culture surprised him most. He gave two answers. The first was the internet and the smartphone. He remembers his first flip phone with a three-inch antenna you had to pull out with your teeth, and a plan that charged by the minute. Now everybody walks around with a portal to all human knowledge in their pocket—and the posture that goes with it. He describes the “classic post-internet smartphone posture”: phone in one hand, neck bent down, looking at a screen while the world passes by. He suggests pausing in any public space and counting the people who are not in that posture. The second shift is political polarization. Stumpf sa