Tom Woods — bestselling author, host of the Tom Woods Show, and the libertarian who once spent half an hour explaining anarcho-capitalism on PBS because the producers assumed he’d be the one to moderate Doug — joined us for a conversation that ran across Trump, the Israel lobby, the rot in the culture, the war between the generations, and somehow landed on a note of genuine cheer.
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The Trump hangover
Woods voted the way a lot of people voted in 2024: not for an ideology, but against Kamala, against the open border, against the trans material aimed at kids. He gave Trump room. Then he watched the room fill up with the usual disappointments.
During the campaign, Trump said high home prices were a government creation and that he could knock them down 40%. Woods thought: finally, someone gets it. Then Trump took office, decided nobody actually wants cheaper houses — least of all the boomers whose net worth lives inside them — and rolled out a 50-year mortgage instead.
That, Woods notes, is the American way. “We’re going to make it affordable” has never once meant “we’re going to lower the price.” It means more loans, more debt, a bigger number you’re now able to finance. The same trick that gave you six-figure tuition will now hand you a mortgage your grandchildren can inherit.
Doug’s read on the man is harsher. Trump, he says, is “such a skilled and enthusiastic liar that you almost have to believe him” — too bald-faced to be credible, and totally without a moral center. What makes it maddening, Woods adds, is that the man is also genuinely funny and tends to go after people who deserve it — which is exactly what makes him so easy to want to like, right up until you notice that nobody draws his wrath like the most principled people on his own side: Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens.
“You always get John McCain”
The line Woods is most famous for — the one Jeremy Corbyn has quoted, the one that’s gone everywhere while almost nobody knows he wrote it — is this: No matter whom you vote for, you always get John McCain.
People thought Trump was the exception. They thought they were voting for option A and would, for once, not get option B. Woods’s point is that the machinery doesn’t much care what you select on the ballot. Ron Paul, he says, would have actually stopped the wars — the president is commander-in-chief; he can simply decline to prosecute them — but you can’t get a Ron Paul through the door, and some of that is the machine and some of it is the electorate.
The episode spends real time on the taboo you’re not allowed to name out loud. JD Vance said the obvious thing — that American and Israeli interests will sometimes diverge, because they’re two different countries — and got branded an antisemite for it. Congressman Randy Fine openly bragged about helping vote Thomas Massie out over Israel. As Woods puts it: they’ll say it themselves, celebrate it even, but the moment you repeat their words back to them, you’re the bigot. Mearsheimer and Walt were right that the lobby exists. The strange part is being made to pretend it doesn’t.
Nobody believes what everybody believes
Woods borrows a line from his friend Kevin Dolan: nobody believes what everybody believes. We’re all expected to affirm a dozen propositions almost no one actually holds. Egalitarianism is the example — everyone salutes it, nobody lives by it.
The proof is in what happens when you swap the picture. A Pride Month image made the rounds: a tattooed lesbian couple, one of them in full head-to-toe Islamic dress, two kids, the slogan “be who you are, no matter whom you love.” The internet replaced the couple in the doorway with a somber portrait of Robert E. Lee. Is he allowed to be who he is? The joke lands because the “be who you are” crowd very obviously keeps a list of exceptions — people you’re specifically not permitted to be, because they say so. Even a writer like Roald Dahl gets his books rewritten decades into the grave for using the word “fat.”
The generations at war
The starkest data point in the whole conversation is the Massie polling. Split by age, it wasn’t close. Younger voters — and Woods means everyone up into their mid-fifties — were overwhelmingly for Massie. The 65-and-up crowd were overwhelmingly for a man they’d never heard of, the one Fox News told them to back after taking Massie off the air for a year and a half.
Woods won’t let either side off easy. The boomers took a lot out of the system — pension, Social Security, the inflated house — and now wonder what the kids are complaining about. But he refuses the counter-myth that the young are helpless victims of high prices and no jobs. With the tools sitting in your pocket, he argues, you can become a master of the universe — not easily, but more easily than at any point in history. You just have to stop scrolling long enough to find the right guides and do something real. The man who waits by the phone for someone to call and tell him he’s useful was doing fine in 1957. In 2026, that’s a losing strategy.
The white pill
Then, after the better part of an hour spent cataloguing the decline, the conversation turns.
Strip out the politics, Woods says, and look at how a human being can actually live now. He went to see Beethoven’s Ninth a few weeks ago and it lifted him to the heavens. He has the leisure to play chess anywhere in the world, to study the greatest games ever recorded, to hand off the laundry and spend those hours on what he loves. None of it was available to an ordinary person two centuries ago. It exists because of an inherited capital structure most people never stop to thank — which Woods calls one of the most profound acts of ingratitude in history.
Doug’s framing is the one to end on. The three of them, he admits, are a rounding error; the writing and the podcasting probably won’t turn the tide. You do it anyway — for the good karma, and because, as Woods says, you want to look your kids in the eye and tell them their dad fought. We didn’t win, but your dad fought.
Teddy Roosevelt put it the way Doug likes to quote: do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
The primary trend is up. The near term is the worry. But the long ascent of man has survived worse than this, and the collapse of one overextended empire may yet prove a blip on a very long chart.
