The American bootstrap, DIY culture, and fathers' skills

• Did your dad teach you traditional manly skills?

The crying discussion widens into the American pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps temperament, which a host traces to the political system rather than the faith, with jokes about falling apart over an avocado sale and a quarter stuck in the cart machine. COVID's "year of the do-it-yourselfer" gets mixed reviews: people fixing their own fences and grass was the American spirit returning, though celebrating it is overblown. The hosts confess their own fathers passed on no discernible skills and learned manliness from stepdads and fathers-in-law instead, including a story of a tire mounted backwards while a father-in-law watched for forty-five minutes. Asked directly whether his own father passed on traditional manly skills, one host answers that his farmer relatives lived too far away to teach him.