Soft + Savage Podcast

What happens when money can move as fast as a photo, and can be told what to do years from now? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Chris Giancarlo, the 13th Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project, known across finance as "CryptoDad." Giancarlo helped run the trading platform that handled most of th...

What happens to a species that stops paying attention to the system keeping it alive? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Marti Spiegelman, a California-based teacher who brings indigenous wisdom to leaders across Western business, education, and science. Trained first in biochemistry and then in Yale- and Bauhaus-rooted graphic design, Marti ran a design business in San...

If the most disruptive technology of our generation is being built almost entirely outside the government it's meant to protect, who's actually in control? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Arun Gupta, CEO of NobleReach Foundation, a 22-year venture capitalist and author of The Mission Generation. Gupta spent nearly two decades building Columbia Capital's...

What if the missing infrastructure in American cities isn't broadband or transit, but a fire to sit around? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Adam Bamba Tanaka, Chief Operating Officer of Therme Group US and a Harvard PhD in Urban Planning leading the American expansion of bathing culture. Adam coordinates Therme Group's U.S. market entry, including Culture of...

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Raphael Miles shares what it takes to build impossible infrastructure — and reimagine public space through water, precision, and persistence.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Daniel Lanzilotta turns plastic waste into witness — revealing what our systems leave behind and what art can force us to see.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Dr. Lauren Arnold explores the intersection of medicine, research, AI, and the human questions shaping the future of health.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Bizzie Gold unpacks resilience, reinvention, and the method behind lasting personal change.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Adam Tanaka reframes wellness as civic infrastructure — and asks what our cities should be designed to restore.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Jesse Levin takes us inside crisis, readiness, and the human architecture behind real-world response.

What if the entire 2008 financial crisis ran on a number that was wrong by fifty times? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Chris Giancarlo, the 13th Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project, known across the finance and policy world as "CryptoDad." Giancarlo helped build and take public one of the tr...

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Leonid Khanin breaks down wellness as architecture — not escape, but a system for restoring the body and mind.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Marcina Hale and Stephen Apkon examine division, dialogue, and what it takes to choose another way in a world built for conflict.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Jessica Francis explores ayahuasca beyond myth and spectacle — into the body, the story, and the work of real healing.

In this episode of Soft + Savage, Sean Dino Johnson reflects on rehabilitation, performance, and what it means to restore dignity after the system has already written someone off.

What does the body remember before the mind can explain it? In this episode of Soft + Savage, Louise Levin sits down with Angelo Musco , an Italian-born, New York-based contemporary artist whose work transforms the human body into large-scale living architectures. Angelo’s work uses bodies not simply as subjects, but as material — assembling thousands of human forms into nests, eggs, amniotic land...

In this episode, Louise Levin sits down with John Kirbow—a former U.S. Army Psyops specialist—to unmask the tactics used to fracture societies from the inside out. From the warzones abroad to the algorithm-driven battlefields of social media, Kirbow breaks down how psychological operations, false binaries, and engineered outrage erode our ability to think, connect, and choose freely. With the calm...

In this episode of Soft and Savage, Louise Levin speaks with Dr. Michelle Holko about the urgent crossroads at the intersection of biotechnology, AI, and national security. Holko explains how biology is shifting from discovery to design, unlocking new possibilities in medicine, food, energy, and defense. But she warns that while the U.S. pioneered breakthroughs like genome sequencing, China’s coor...

In this episode of Soft and Savage , John Hargrave—CEO of Media Shower and author of The Intelligent Crypto Investor —cuts through the confusion of crypto by reframing it in familiar terms: blockchains as shared spreadsheets, cryptos as companies, and tokens as stocks. Drawing on his own journey from early Bitcoin gains to devastating losses and recovery, Hargrave emphasizes disciplined, long-term...

Episode Summary: Dr. Samuel Vaknin unveils narcissism's dual nature: wounded children wearing masks of grandiosity. From love-bombing to discarding, they create psychological mazes for victims while their emptiness drives constant validation-seeking. Different types—overt, covert, somatic, cerebral—share childhood trauma origins, but their destructive patterns can captivate individuals and so...