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. 2d ago

    Programmable money: How your dollars will work like your photos, with Chris Giancarlo

    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 the world's credit default swaps going into 2008, later led the CFTC, and now works on how the dollar moves onto digital networks through stablecoins. This conversation explores the forces that shaped Giancarlo's view of money: a shared ledger that could have shown regulators the real risk in 2008, payments small enough to cover a single article or five minutes of a film, the cost families pay to send money home across borders, and the idea of programming an inheritance to release on a condition. Together they sketch a financial system that works the way the internet already does. Soft + Savage is not interested in crypto as a trend or a trade. This is a conversation about the architecture underneath money: how digital ledgers change what we're able to see, how privacy gets decided by the rules being written now, and how Giancarlo wants the next version of money to give people more agency, not less. 🎬 Director's Cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCKd0W6sfhA&t=1s 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. If your money could move as easily as a photo, what's the first thing you'd change about how you use it? #SoftAndSavage #LouiseLevin #ChrisGiancarlo #CryptoDad #DigitalDollar #Stablecoins #FutureOfMoney #ProgrammableMoney #Blockchain #FinancialArchitecture

  2. Oct 2

    We're trying to fix a system we no longer belong to, with Marti Spiegelman

    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 Francisco for 20 years before turning to energy healing and initiation with elders in South America, West Africa, and the Himalayas. She now works at the interface between those original wisdom traditions and the modern world, weaving them back together through science, design, and what she calls visionary skills. This conversation explores the forces that shaped Marti's thinking: a culture that turned its awareness inward, a planet that rebalances on its own terms, the intelligence of the human senses, and the gap between knowing about a living system and living as part of one. Soft + Savage is not interested in climate change as spectacle. This is a conversation about attention as infrastructure: how a culture's habits of awareness decide what it can see, how separation from nature produced a species that takes without registering the consequences, and how Marti teaches leaders to let the larger system inform them again. CONNECT WITH MARTI SPIEGELMAN Website: https://martispiegelman.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martispiegelmanmfa/ 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. When was the last time you spent time outdoors without naming, photographing, or analyzing any of it? #SoftAndSavage #IndigenousWisdom #ClimateChange #Consciousness #SystemsThinking #LivingSystems #HeartsInTheIce #Arctic

  3. Oct 2

    Why the Career You're Building Won't Survive the Next Decade — with Arun Gupta

    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 cybersecurity and government-technology investment practice before founding NobleReach, where he places students and mid-career professionals directly inside federal agencies. His scholars are now the lead AI engineers at the Navy, the FDA, Treasury, and the IRS, working inside a system built for multi-year procurement cycles while the technology it's meant to regulate changes every few months. This conversation traces the forces behind Gupta's mission: the collapse of the single-employer career his father's generation took for granted, the shift from chasing institutional prestige to building a career around a problem you actually care about, the private sector now funding and leading national security innovation that used to start inside government, and the four-layer resistance (personal, relational, societal, institutional) that keeps capable people from ever making that shift. Together they point to the same idea: purpose, not a title, is what holds up when everything else is changing. Soft + Savage isn't interested in career advice as a motivational exercise. This is a conversation about what happens when the systems that used to hand people their identity (a stable job, one employer, a government that built its own technology) stop holding weight. It's about the psychological grip of prestige that keeps capable people frozen, the actual mechanics of how procurement law and defense budgets decide whether a country keeps pace with its adversaries, and what Gupta is building to close the gap between the two. CONNECT WITH ARUN GUPTA LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arungupta23/ NobleReach Foundation: https://noblereach.org The Mission Generation: https://www.themissiongeneration.com/ 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. Would you trade job security for a career built entirely around a problem you actually care about? #SoftAndSavage #NobleReach #NationalSecurity #ArtificialIntelligence #VentureCapital #PublicService #CareerPathways

  4. Aug 17

    Meet the Saunapreneurs Behind NYC’s First Ever Sauna Village…

    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 Bathe-ing, the sauna festival that turned Domino Park into a working laboratory for public thermal space. The conversation moves through sauna masters, founders, and bathers who built this world from nothing. This conversation explores the forces shaping American bathing culture right now: a society mediated by screens and starved for a genuine third place, the regulatory fights over what even counts as a legal structure on water, the ecological stewardship woven into ritual, and the friendships that form between strangers who show up to sweat together. Together they trace how a fire in a small room becomes civic infrastructure. Soft + Savage is not interested in wellness as a trend. This is a conversation about what happens to a city when its public spaces disappear. How permits decide what gets built, how fragmentation gets reversed one room at a time, and how Adam and the people building this movement are treating heat itself as a form of urban planning. CONNECT WITH THERME GROUP US Featuring Adam Bamba Tanaka, Chief Operating Officer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-bamba-tanaka-phd-12496123/ Website: https://www.thermegroup.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thermegroup/ CONNECT WITH SUPERIOR SAUNA & STEAM Featuring Shaelyn Crutchley (CMO) & Justus Benson (President) Website: https://superiorsaunas.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/superiorsaunas/ CONNECT WITH ALTÆR SAUNA Featuring Kayla Sibilia, Founder Website: https://altaer.space/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/altaersauna/ CONNECT WITH KOS SAUNA Featuring Kate Butchart, Creator Website: https://www.kossauna.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kos.sauna/ CONNECT WITH CULTURE OF BATHING Substack: https://cultureofbathing.substack.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultureofbatheing/ 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: When's the last time you had an unplanned conversation with a stranger, no phone in hand? #SoftAndSavage #LouiseLevin #AdamBambaTanaka #ThermeGroup #BathingCulture #ThirdPlace #SaunaCulture #UrbanPlanning #CultureOfBathing #CommunityInfrastructure #EcologicalRestoration)

  5. Jul 31

    The Grassroots Urbanist: How four architects posted a drawing online and 10 years later, built it.

    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.

  6. Jul 29

    Modern life is filled with materials the human body was never designed to absorb.

    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.

  7. Jul 24

    The Penn-Trained Health Strategist: The quiet transfer of medical innovation to the East.

    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.

  8. Jul 22

    Most personalities are survival strategies pretending to be identities. — Bizzy Gold

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

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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.

Information

  • Creator
    Louise Levin
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Soft + Savage Podcast
  • Show Website
    Soft + Savage Podcast