Soft + Savage Podcast

Louise Levin

The Soft and Savage podcast illuminates the great minds, great movements and great works across demographics that are actively shaping our futures. Hosted by Louise Levin, the Queen, a “woman of a certain age and raging dilettante,” this podcast is for those interested in the gray matter of global conversation, the space where challenges are defined and solutions devised. Soft and Savage seeks to both decode the modern moment and inspire listeners to action through dynamic conversations with leading visionaries, whose solution-oriented approach to the modern challenges we all face walks the razor’s edge–between Soft and Savage.

  1. Jul 13

    What the Fed didn't know on the eve of the 2008 crash — with Chris Giancarlo

    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 as a CFTC commissioner and two more as its chairman — unanimously confirmed by the Senate under both Obama and Trump. He now leads the Digital Dollar Project, the nonprofit shaping the architecture of how the United States approaches a digital dollar. This conversation explores the forces that shaped Giancarlo's relationship to money: a 2008 phone call from the New York Fed that revealed how little regulators actually understood about the risk in front of them, the quiet cost of currency debasement on families with no access to a stable currency, the question of whether digitizing money hands people more agency or takes it away, and the unglamorous regulatory mechanics that decide what gets to exist before the public ever sees it — and what it means to build the rules for money before money itself changes shape. Soft + Savage is not interested in cryptocurrency as a trend or a get-rich-quick story. This is a conversation about the architecture underneath money itself — how a financial crisis can be misjudged by hundreds of billions of dollars, how privacy and surveillance quietly trade places depending on which technology wins, and how Giancarlo has spent four decades trying to make sure the next version of money still serves the people using it, not just the institutions issuing it. CONNECT WITH CHRIS GIANCARLO X (Twitter): https://x.com/giancarlomkts Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisgiancar/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-christopher-giancarlo-77257111 Digital Dollar Project: https://digitaldollarproject.org/ CONNECT WITH SOFT + SAVAGE YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SoftandSavagePodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/softandsavagepodcast/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0x9Af3IHHQNcBItNJ5jui0 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/c75e1401-d916-4aa0-ad12-ce4078abfc10/soft-savage-podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soft-savage-podcast/id1883783191 Website: https://www.softandsavage.com HOSTED BY Louise Levin https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-levin-68b9949/  Subscribe for more conversations with the artists, thinkers, builders, and cultural forces shaping what comes next. Question for the comments: If you could program your own money to release on a condition — the way Giancarlo describes for inheritance — what condition would you build in? #SoftAndSavage #LouiseLevin #CryptoDad #ChrisGiancarlo #DigitalDollar #Stablecoins #CFTC #FutureOfMoney #FinancialArchitecture #PredictionMarkets

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

The Soft and Savage podcast illuminates the great minds, great movements and great works across demographics that are actively shaping our futures. Hosted by Louise Levin, the Queen, a “woman of a certain age and raging dilettante,” this podcast is for those interested in the gray matter of global conversation, the space where challenges are defined and solutions devised. Soft and Savage seeks to both decode the modern moment and inspire listeners to action through dynamic conversations with leading visionaries, whose solution-oriented approach to the modern challenges we all face walks the razor’s edge–between Soft and Savage.