Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, nexo.io, an elliptic, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, October 3rd, and that means it's time for the

breakdown weekly recap. However, because it is the first Saturday of the month, instead of the

weekly recap, we're going to do the monthly recap.

September was an interesting transitional moment. You had a real sense of almost in-betweenness or

liminality creep into the major discourse, and moreover creep into the sentiment. And what I mean by that is that you had

seen a summer where we were charging back after the spring's COVID-19 related shutdowns,

but the fall was starting to hit a different note. On the one hand, that had to do with the fear

of a rise or a return or a second wave of COVID-19. On the other, it just had to do with

the end of the easy phase of a recovery where the jobs that were coming back were much harder

won, not just the things that had been lost immediately in the short term. Layer on top of that,

the fear or nervousness or just general lack of clarity that comes with

a presidential election. And you had the right sort of mixture for a big question mark, let's say.

My guests in September, I think articulated from a macro perspective a lot of that that in-betweenness with a special emphasis on

the immobility, really, of the Federal Reserve, this central actor in the economic system we've

constructed, to actually move and change things, both in the short term and in the long term.

Let's kick our conversation off where we kicked off September as a

month with Luke Groman. In this clip, he gives us a clear-eyed look at the options from here,

with the here being a debt burden that we can't possibly pay back. To me, the punchline is that if you

look back over the last 100, 120 years, any time you

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