Psychedelic Facilitator: Ayahuasca activates your personal agency. It was never just the medicine

Psychedelic Facilitator: Ayahuasca activates your personal agency. It was never just the medicine

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.

The most dangerous environments in America are built from people who were never given a language.

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.

An artist hunted down everyone who wounded him and photographed them naked — Angelo Musco

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 conversation explores the forces that shaped Angelo’s artistic language: the body as memory, pain as structure, collaboration as precision, and the strange dignity of turning personal history into something vast enough to hold others. Soft + Savage is not interested in art as decoration. This is a conversation about the architecture of human experience — how the body carries what culture forgets, how beauty can emerge from rupture, and how one artist builds meaning from the raw material of being human. CONNECT WITH ANGELO MUSCO Website: https://angelomusco.com/ [https://angelomusco.com/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angelomuscostudio/ [https://www.instagram.com/angelomuscostudio/] CONNECT WITH SOFT + SAVAGE YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SoftandSavagePodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@SoftandSavagePodcast] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/softandsavagepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/softandsavagepodcast/] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0x9Af3IHHQNcBItNJ5jui0 [https://open.spotify.com/show/0x9Af3IHHQNcBItNJ5jui0] Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/c75e1401-d916-4aa0-ad12-ce4078abfc10/soft-savage-podcast [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 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soft-savage-podcast/id1883783191] Website: https://www.softandsavage.com [https://www.softandsavage.com/] HOSTED BY Louise Levin https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-levin-68b9949/ [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: What do you think the body remembers that the mind tries to forget? #SoftAndSavage #AngeloMusco #ContemporaryArt #ArtAndTheBody #LouiseLevin #ArtistInterview #CultureAndSociety #HumanExperience #CreativeProcess #BodyMemory #ArtPodcast #ArchitectureOfExperience

Beyond Manipulation: The Annihilation of Personal Agency with John Kirbow

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 listeners to look beyond the noise and interrogate the systems shaping their beliefs. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about waking up. His Book: Combating Domestic Extremism: A Post-9/11 War Veteran’s Perspective – How lessons from the warzone can help us confront radicalization, conspiracy, and civic decay.

Dr. Michelle Holko: The Intersection of Biology and AI. The Race to Control Life.

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-stakes global competition. Instagram: @mholko The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology: https://www.biotech.senate.gov/ [https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbDJ1eVVjS0FaQXkyd1dwUEZ0c3ZjRmh5aHRqQXxBQ3Jtc0ttYWdRS3pFX2NiTnZCRUY0aGdPQ25raW13Yk9XclU5d2x0WkFEUjR6NXZ3RDBkcVB1MEUzaml1NmVOQmVKdVdYWTg3Wlk3bEU2Wm51TC14OUxZblVucjNNR3g0SWZfY05yQzRfSGRMdU5wel9QNmJuRQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.biotech.senate.gov%2F&v=YRC6haGCExg]