Chaos Lever After Dark — Season 2 Kickoff

Chris Hayner (00:03)
A spotlight,

Ned Bellavance (00:03)
Mm.

Chris Hayner (00:04)
I should have said. I'm gonna have to fix that in editing.

Ned Bellavance (00:06)
Do

you?

So is this one of the situations

Chris Hayner (00:07)
I mean

Ned Bellavance (00:08)
where you're gonna edit out all of your flubs and leave all of mine in?

Chris Hayner (00:12)
I'm actually gonna double yours, yeah.

I'm gonna find ones from previous episodes and and work them in.

Ned Bellavance (00:18)
That's not creative. You could just load my voice I mean there's hours and hours of it recorded,

load it into some voice AI synthesizer and just make me say anything you want.

Chris Hayner (00:27)
Yeah, but let's be honest, even AI doesn't want to hear that.

We have to be kind to our robot overlords.

Ned Bellavance (00:32)
Future robot overlords. And so far, I am unimpressed.

found an old

Chris Hayner (00:38)
Does a does a visible

shrug show up in the podcast? I don't remember. Like if I do a lot of gesticulation, does that come across on the audio feed?

Ned Bellavance (00:47)
Absolutely.

I saw this really weird thing yesterday. I was listening to a podcast, and for whatever reason, my podcast player it was showing me a transcript instead of the podcast title as it was playing. I don't know how they did that, or if it was on purpose.

Like some podcast players will now show you what chapter you're on within the podcast if you add that to your metadata, but I've never seen the transcript show up. I don't know.

Chris Hayner (01:16)
Yeah, that's

that's something that one of us should research.

Not it damn it.

Ned Bellavance (01:22)
Yes I win. Hello, fellow simulacrum in the Matrix. Have a seat or yourself a drink. Get ready to dig into some cyber stake like cipher because it's Chaos Lever After Dark.

Chris Hayner (01:37)
Did we agree on after dark? I thought it was after hours. No, after dark is better, isn't it?

Ned Bellavance (01:41)
After Dark is better. Besides after hours

Chris Hayner (01:44)
Yeah.

Ned Bellavance (01:44)
was a thing from Krakt, and I don't wanna like steal from Krakt.

Chris Hayner (01:48)
Well, everybody else does.

Ned Bellavance (01:48)
They might come after.

You're not wrong.

It's amazing. This is, you know, totally on point for us. We're we're immediately going to diverge into something completely unrelated to technology. But I I was

Chris Hayner (02:00)
Ha ha.

Ned Bellavance (02:00)
a fan of the crack.com website in its heyday. I assume you were as well.

Chris Hayner (02:07)
Yeah, of course.

Ned Bellavance (02:08)
And the diaspora of writers from cracked have really filled out some of my best podcast listening, and they've gone on to earn like Emmys.

Chris Hayner (02:20)
Turns out they were actually good at

Ned Bellavance (02:20)
Or at one of them. I turned in that me.

Chris Hayner (02:21)
stuff. Also, isn't it diaspora?

Ned Bellavance (02:25)
potato potato.

I mean, we're we're right back in our our regular cadence where I can't pronounce things and neither can you.

Chris Hayner (02:34)
What's important is neither one of us really tries that hard.

Ned Bellavance (02:37)
Maximum effort. Here we are.

So we're back.

Chris Hayner (02:40)
The epitome of

Ned Bellavance (02:41)
this is the intro to season two and it's going great.

Chris Hayner (02:45)
Ha

ha.

Yeah, season one was th three years and a hundred and ninety six episodes, which is I think totally normal for seasonal

Ned Bellavance (02:53)
something along those lines, yeah. In entirely too long and entirely.

Chris Hayner (02:57)
seasonal content, right?

Ned Bellavance (03:01)
We're hoping to do at least two hundred episodes in the next three months. Like the way it was meant to be.

Chris Hayner (03:07)
Yeah, I mean sleep is for other people.

Ned Bellavance (03:10)
That's what I hear. No, that I that that's an unsustainable format, and I think actually doing seasons might be good for us, you know. Every once in a while wander away from our microphones and touch grass or assemble something with Lego, you know.

So season two, what are we gonna do? What's the format? We're we're we're switching things up a little bit. For for those who don't remember, our previous format was to do tech news of the week and a major episode every week. And that was slowly killing both of us, I think. Mostly me.

Chris Hayner (03:47)
Right. And now I mean

sort of I was sort of fine with it, but apparently apparently that's not the right attitude to have. So yeah, we're trying to do something a little

Ned Bellavance (03:56)
Yeah. So

Chris Hayner (03:56)
bit different. And the other thing was the longer episode was like I mean, we kind of had a self imposed limit of like forty, forty five minutes tops.

Ned Bellavance (04:06)
Yes.

And listeners may have noticed towards the end of a lot of those episodes we'd start talking really fast. And that's

Chris Hayner (04:14)
Ha ha.

Ned Bellavance (04:14)
because we actually wrote like fifteen thousand words on the topic and we'd only gotten to ten thousand of them so far.

Chris Hayner (04:20)
I thought that was just when the Adderall kicked in.

Ned Bellavance (04:23)
I mean a little from column A, little from column B. So I think we're gonna remove that self imposed imposed time limit and whatever topic we wanna cover takes up as much space as we want it to take.

Chris Hayner (04:37)
Right. Now we'll see how that goes. There is always the possibility that we'll, for example, just record ninety minutes and cut it into two episodes.

Or we'll just

Ned Bellavance (04:47)
Yeah.

Chris Hayner (04:48)
not do that.

Ned Bellavance (04:49)
I think I'd like some feedback from the audience on that. If you have a preference, do you prefer like a big chunk of an episode that's like ninety minutes or a hundred and twenty minutes, or would you prefer it be broken into bite-sized chunks that you can consume in a way that makes sense for you?

Chris Hayner (05:08)
Right.

Ned Bellavance (05:09)
So I think what we're gonna be doing is we're still gonna have a weekly release of tech news that has piqued our interest. Tech news of the week. People seem to like that. We seem to like writing it. Kept me from going insane because I had somewhere to yell my thoughts into the void.

Chris Hayner (05:28)
And that probably won't change as mu that

Ned Bellavance (05:28)
And what do you want?

Chris Hayner (05:30)
much from what it used to be, right? I mean it's that format seemed like it was pretty locked down.

Ned Bellavance (05:34)
Yeah. So we'll keep doing that.

Chris Hayner (05:35)
Maybe we'll loosen

the reins on that, but I think we'll still try to keep them short.

Ned Bellavance (05:39)
I think we were doing four we were doing four stories. We could probably expand it out to six if we don't have the pressure of also writing a longer form episode every week. So

Chris Hayner (05:51)
Do six news things happen each week, I wonder?

Ned Bellavance (05:54)
that that seems like too many,

Chris Hayner (05:55)
I've heard this urban legend and I don't know if it's true and I want it to be true so much I've never researched it. But I remember being told that back in like the 40s or 50s when regular news was just starting to be a thing on television, there

Ned Bellavance (06:10)
Yeah.

Chris Hayner (06:11)
was a few times where the news person would come on and say, nothing fucking happened. And that was the

Ned Bellavance (06:17)
Yeah.

Chris Hayner (06:18)
end of the show, and it was just static from there on out.

Ned Bellavance (06:21)
I find that impossible to believe. If for no other reason,

Chris Hayner (06:23)
But I want to believe.

Ned Bellavance (06:26)
like they had a time spot for the news and you had to take up that time spot to run the ads. I'm assuming back then,

Chris Hayner (06:34)
Yeah.

Ned Bellavance (06:34)
even you know, in the forties and fifties, everything was ad supported anyway, right?

Chris Hayner (06:39)
But if you think about it, if the show goes to static and then there's a random ad interrupting the static, doesn't that really presage the dystopia that we live in

Ned Bellavance (06:48)
static would be too too good for us. Let's be honest.

So yeah, we're we'll do the weekly tech news of the week. It's implied by the name.

Chris Hayner (07:02)
The tech news of whatever doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Ned Bellavance (07:08)
and then the longer form stuff will be our Chaos Lever deep dives. And we'll figure out whether we want to chunk that into parts and release it, you know, part one one week and part two the next week. Or if everybody says we just want the whole enchilada, okay, we're gonna drop it, but then you might not get another deep dive for several weeks while we while we build and write and record another one.

yeah, upcoming topics that I have in mind. doorknobs.

Chris Hayner (07:38)
Not doing doorknobs, that's not what I said.

Ned Bellavance (07:40)
OER. we are. Cause you know you know why? I was like, how interesting could door knobs really be? And two hours later, I was like, shit. This is gonna be like a four hour episode.

And there was actually an inventor of the doorknob mechanism. So that's gonna be interesting too. So we're gonna cover that. I also want to talk about USB as as a port and also just as a kind of timeline of how ports changed on the back of PCs over over the decades. It was a real mess back there for a while. And checking my current it's still a mess back there, but

Less?

Chris Hayner (08:22)
Yeah.

Ned Bellavance (08:24)
And then I think we're gonna start I'm the first topic I wanna cover is local AI. So that's gonna be my first topic. I don't know, Chris. Do you have any topics already in mind that you wanna cover?

Chris Hayner (08:35)
I was going to try to look into physical security.

Ned Bellavance (08:39)
okay.

Chris Hayner (08:40)
So there's a lot of technology that we kind of like make assumptions that like a building is safe, a window is safe, people can't get in the front door. And there's actually security and technology that goes into that stuff. Some of which is crazy, crazy tech like, you know, the original miss mission impossible. And some of

Ned Bellavance (08:57)
Right.

Chris Hayner (08:57)
it is basically just like a door that has hinges that you can't knock the pin out of.

Ned Bellavance (09:02)
It seems simple, right?

excellent. So physical security, another interesting test. So four topics already, and if you have suggestions.

Let us know, you know, along with how you want those those topics addressed.

Chris Hayner (09:17)
Do we have an email address

for this that we can have people spam us nonsense about? I can't remember.

Ned Bellavance (09:23)
There's a forum on the Chaos Lever website. So go to chaoslever.com and there's a feedback form.

Chris Hayner (09:28)
People are not gonna fill

out a form. All right, here's gonna be the test. If

Ned Bellavance (09:32)
you actually want like a

Chris Hayner (09:32)
you're the kind of person that'll fill out a form, please fill out the form.

Ned Bellavance (09:36)
You're our kind of person. That's what you

Chris Hayner (09:38)
Yeah.

Ned Bellavance (09:39)
are. I there is a chaos lever email, and I'm I would have to look it up. I think it's just info at chaoslever.com. So if you really really

Chris Hayner (09:50)
We'll work on it.

Ned Bellavance (09:51)
want to send an email, try that. If you get if you get a bounce back.

Chris Hayner (09:55)
Maybe

this could be a good way to to get our OSINT audience involved. You have to find the email address and then you can send something.

Ned Bellavance (10:05)
There you go.

this kind of episode that we're doing right now we're calling after dark. And there is no set schedule for these. It is really just when

we wanna get on and chat and we're gonna put you through it as well. That's that's the idea behind After Dark. We may at some point start live streaming those, but that's gonna take some work to figure out exactly how we wanna do that. So in the meantime, we're not going to do that. So After Dark will be sporadic, just like me.

Where will you be able to find this stuff? Well, you can find the podcasts anywhere podcasts are sold. You know, zero dollars is a price, and we are priceless.

The video accompanying the podcast is going to be published on the Chaos Lever YouTube page. It was being published on my personal page before, and we're not doing that anymore.

The problem was we were publishing so much chaos lever stuff, it was overwhelming my like regular videos that I put on that

channel. And

Chris Hayner (11:05)
Right.

Ned Bellavance (11:06)
people were like unsubscribing because they're like, Well, I wanted to learn about Terraform. I don't want to listen to two people ramble about tech news. It's like A, harsh, but B, okay. So it's gonna have its own dedicated channel that you can subscribe to if you don't want to hear me talk about Terraform, because you probably don't.

Chris Hayner (11:24)
I know I don't.

Ned Bellavance (11:25)
God. I don't even want to listen to me talk about Terraform anymore. That's that's an afterdark topic for another time.

Chris Hayner (11:31)
No

Ned Bellavance (11:32)
I'm just gonna bitch about how Terraform took over my life for a year.

the other thing I wanted to mention, we didn't talk about this when we were planning the episode, but merch store, if people are interested in chaos lever merch, there will be some and you will be able to purchase it. I just have to figure out how that works.

So stay tuned for that. It'll eventually get added to the Chaos Lever website and we'll let everyone know. But if there's a particular type of merch you'd like to see that's not just your standard t shirts, coffee mugs, onesies, etc., let me know.

Chris Hayner (12:12)
Hot air balloons, all the things people normally buy online.

Ned Bellavance (12:15)
Yes. Penny farthings.

what else does that is that cover just about everything? Have we rambled sufficiently for after after dark?

Chris Hayner (12:24)
I mean, I think we covered the basics. We just wanted to say, Hey, we're back. Hi. Say hi, Ned.

Ned Bellavance (12:28)
Hi. Hi Ned.

Chris Hayner (12:31)
my god.

Ned Bellavance (12:32)
Come on.

Chris Hayner (12:33)
I knew I was gonna end up being George Burns.

Ned Bellavance (12:35)
a matter of time. You look the part and now you can be the part.

Excellent. Well, we will be recording Tech News of the Week, I think starting next week. So we will start publishing Tech News of the Week in August. And then we'll see when the first big episode rolls out. But if you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Like and share and all that social media garbage. And you've reached the bitter end. Or perhaps it is bittersweet for you.

You find yourself on the precipice of more content filling and overwhelming your inbox. Your cup hath runneth over. We should all be so lucky. Thank you for tuning in. Now go away.

I don't know how to stop recording.