Three Gen Xers sat down to connect stories that usually get told one at a time. Max Borders writes Underthrow on Substack. Mark “Moose” McGrath and I asked him how debt, inflation, healthcare, China and mass psychology fit into one picture of decline.
Mark opens with his case that Generation X sees the world from an unusual place. We grew up analog and came of age as the world went digital. Max builds on that with cultural archetypes and the fight he sees between them for control of American life.
Money and markets
Max walks through how printed money and record debt act as a quiet tax on every household. He argues that healthcare shows a textbook spiral driven by third-party payment, community rating and Medicare price floors. He draws on Friedrich Hayek and complexity theory throughout.
China and narrative
We cover China’s memory of its century of humiliation, the Belt and Road Initiative, tariffs used as narrative weapons and the fentanyl crisis. Max and Mark look at why some planners think in spans of fifty years while American politics runs on the news of the day.
Orientation at the center
We bring it back to John Boyd’s real OODA loop. Orientation sits at its center, and mass psychology and narrative warfare go after orientation first. Agency starts when you see how your own orientation was shaped.
Which of these stories have you been treating as separate?
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https://youtube.com/@nowayoutpodcast
Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.