Soft + Savage Podcast

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 trading platforms that handled the majority of the world's credit default swaps in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, then spent two and a half years...

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 landscapes, cellular structures, and worlds that feel both ancient and futuristic. His art sits at the intersection of trauma, birth, confinement, nature, restoration, and collective human design.

This conv...

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 of a therapist and the precision of a strategist, Louise and John explore how we reclaim agency in an age of manipulation. The conversation moves from critical thinking to compassion, from division to dialogue—urging...

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 coordinated “whole-of-country” push in biotech now threatens American leadership. Together they explore chilling risks—biological weapons, super-soldier research, and food weaponization—alongside hopeful moonshot opportunities. The conversation is both soft in its humanity and savage in its recognition of high-st...

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 investing over hype, advocating for diversification, dollar-cost averaging, and a maximum 10% allocation to crypto. He challenges conventional thinking by arguing that crypto is not just an asset class but a fo...