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

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

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