The End of Season One (Finally) | Chaos Lever

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Ned: See, this is what the people come for, our witty banter, not the topics that we explore, which is good because I prepared nothing.

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Chris: You can't even do the intro. Look at you. This is a disaster. You're not wearing a shirt with flowers or whales or, I don't know, cockatoos on it.

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Ned: I would wear one with whales. I don't have one. Like the country, you mean just the map of Wales all over the shirt? Because I would wear the shit out of that. Lots unpronounceable towns with way too many continents in them. 6 Ls and 3 Ws.

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Chris: The Wales flag is also pretty badass. It's a dragon.

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Ned: Oh, yeah, it is. Man, Wales is awesome. We should do a podcast about wales.

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Chris: From whales.

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Ned: Destination podcast.

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Ned: Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot or a whale. I'm a real human person who does not have flippers or a blow hole and no electronics embedded in my skull. That would be strange. With me is Chris, who is also not a cephalopod. Oh, that's a different thing.

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Chris: You're just off the rails today.

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Ned: Immediately. It gets the people going.

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Chris: Yeah, guess I'm going to a different podcast.

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Ned: Oh, let's hope not. But they're going to need to for a little while because alas, dear listener, Chaos Lever is going to go on a summer break. Woohoo. We You've never done this before.

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Chris: Well, this is really your fault. You scheduled season one to start, and then you never scheduled it to end.

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Ned: That is remarkably true. I'm not sure when exactly our first episode was. That's the thing I could probably look up. Let's find out together because we're prepared.

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Chris: I believe it was, if I'm remembering, it was in March of-2022.

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Ned: 1733. Like I said, March 2022 was our first episode. That is over three years ago at this point, and we have been doing a podcast almost every week, with very few exceptions, for the last three years. You're right. It's because I didn't say, The end of Season 1 will be in 16 weeks. I just left it open. But this is what all the cool kids are doing, right? They're breaking their podcast into seasons.

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Chris: Yeah, but I think they're also doing that other thing where when they come back, they're going to be prepared. I know. It feels like a lot. When I was in school and we had summer break, I was I'm going to come back and we're going to be ready.

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Ned: How did that work out for you?

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Chris: It would be September, and I'd be ready for what?

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Ned: Well, you never really know when it comes to school. Is it going to be woodshop? Is it going to be pottery? Am I going to be studying Shakespeare? It could be anything or all three in the same day.

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Chris: I had a shopkeeper. A shopkeeper? Good God. A shop teacher that could absolutely have done that.

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Ned: Yeah, probably not your English teacher, but definitely your shop teacher. No, she's not your- The English teacher would be missing fingers. Sorry, I'm projecting from my experience with English teachers.

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Chris: Clearly.

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Ned: I think the plan is to come back in September and to actually come back with a little more structure, let's say. We keep saying that we're going to do three-part episodes, and then we do one and forget.

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Chris: Well, we get to them. It's just not in a sequence for one.

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Ned: Yeah. For listeners who have been around a little while, this is a little inside baseball for you. Chris and I traditionally trade who writes the main episode. For that reason, if I want to do a two-parter, it's going to be separated by at least a week. That doesn't make sense.

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Chris: You would think, why couldn't Ned just do the same thing two weeks in a row? Well, apparently that was preposterous.

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Ned: That's not the tradition, Chris.

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Chris: Not how it goes, Eric.

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Ned: I am a creature of habit. It's true. I think we're going to shake things up. If I want to do a three-part episode, we're going to do a three-part episode, and it's going to be one, two, three, not waiting six months for part two. Right.

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Chris: Which probably better for everybody.

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Ned: I think so. It also gives us the opportunity to bring guests on and schedule that in advance and not be like, Can you show up on a random Friday?

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Chris: Hey, total stranger. What are you doing on Tuesday?

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Ned: Because that has been our approach so far. Man, we got to get this thing recorded, and you have a real job unlike me. So we have to schedule around you, and now we have to schedule around this other person. How preposterous. Definitely easier if we do this a few weeks before it's supposed to publish.

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Chris: Right. So that's the hope.

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Ned: That is the hope, the belief. I've got a pretty packed summer in terms of other things I'm creating.

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Chris: Yes, I know you're on vacation every week.

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Ned: Yes, that too. I mean, I am going on vacation next week, and I was on vacation last week.

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Chris: The people who aren't watching the YouTube don't know this, but Ned is literally calling in from an air balloon in Cadiz.

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Ned: And the cell service is amazing. This must be that Google Loon thing they were talking about, but they actually did it right.

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Chris: 2025, man. Things are...

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Ned: It's the year of the Wi-Fi balloon. It could be. I don't know.

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Chris: But this could be an opportunity for you to put out one of your world famous listener surveys. If there are some specific longer term or longer scale topics that you would like us to explore.

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Ned: Yes, this is- Happy to take suggestions, and the ones that I like, I will cherry-pick and claim were my own. As is tradition. So yes, dear listener, when this publishes, if you go in the show notes, there will be a link to a listener survey, and we'll post it on the LinkedIn, which is the only social network I actually use anymore. People get angry when you call LinkedIn a social network.

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Chris: They really do, but they also really continue to try to make it one.

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Ned: Yeah. It's the only one that hasn't completely filled up with things that spike my blood pressure constantly. It's the only one I can really tolerate at this point. We'll post the link there as well. And maybe even a blog post, who knows? It'll include questions like, What do you enjoy? What do you not enjoy? We'll ignore your feedback on those. And then what topics would you like us to cover or guests should we have on the show to discuss said topics? I'll come up with some more questions that might be of interest to people.

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Chris: What is your favorite ice cream? Why is it mint chocolate chip?

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Ned: I mean, it's not a terrible choice. It's not what I would go with, You're right.

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Chris: Chocolate mint chip is also good.

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Ned: You are so boring. I mean, I do like a rocky road.

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Chris: You just reminded me of a story. Hold on.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: You are familiar with a little mom and pop shop called Ben & Jerry's?

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Ned: Mm-hmm.

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Chris: They make a lot of flavors of ice cream. Indeed. They have a factory in Burlington, Vermont, I believe, was where they got started That sounds correct to me. I was in high school, and we did a bus trip to Canada for a band competition. Yeah, I shouldn't have said that last part. We stopped there on the way, and they did a tour of the factory, which was super cool. They went into this tasting room, and they were basically like, Pick whatever you want. We were like, What do you mean? They were like, Not only do we have every single flavor that we sell in the store, we a lot of flavors that we don't sell in the store. Here's the menu. It was a phone book. Everybody lost their shit because we were not expecting this. No. I didn't know what to expect at all, but conversation went bananas. It took about, I think, four days to get everybody under control. Everybody goes up and starts to order, and this girl comes over and talks to me. It's a girl that had not really talked to me. Immediately Immediately, I'm afraid. And she says, I'm going to get yellow strawberry, starkest Express Lemon Explosion, Banana Cream pie, whatever it was.

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Chris: And she asked me what I was going to get, and I said, I don't know. I think I'm going to get strawberry. And she just left.

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Ned: You had one chance to be interesting.

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Chris: I will never forget that. I don't even blame her. I look back at it, I'm like, What is wrong with you?

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Ned: It's like the worst of the three flavors that every place has, too.

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Chris: I panicked. I panicked.

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Ned: It was a strawberry panic. It's great. I wish I had a similar great ice cream story, but I don't. So cool story, bro. Well done.

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Chris: Cheers all around.

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Ned: Cheers all around. Maybe we'll do a history of the technology of ice cream. We could do that. How is strawberry made?

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Chris: It all started when we invented cold. It's like fire, but in reverse.

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Ned: There is no such thing as cold. There's just the absence of heat. Think about it.

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Chris: Does that imply that you have the absence of personality?

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Ned: More of a cult of personality. By the way, Living Color just did a Tiny Desk concert. I feel like you should know about this so you can go watch it because I know what a big fan you are.

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Chris: How do you know that I didn't?

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Ned: Because I know. It's all the cameras in your house. Well, I think we wasted enough of people's time. Yeah.

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Chris: The one thing I will say, because we do want to be educational, people have noticed... I have seen an increase of people on LinkedIn complaining about the content on LinkedIn, which I think is completely fair and justified. I just want everybody to know that there is an option you have at your fingertips. If you see a post that you don't like, even if it is a post that someone else shared, you click the... And then you click not interested. Then you click the button that says, I'm not interested in the author. And whoever the original poster was will then be blanked and muted on your posts and on your page forever.

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Ned: That is goddamn amazing.

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Chris: I use that probably five times a day.

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Ned: We buried the lead on this whole episode. Just open with that. The other option is to just not go on LinkedIn at all.

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Chris: Well, that's also an option. I use that one on Facebook to great success.

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Ned: It has enhanced my life in so many ways. So The plan is to come back in September with a little more prepared content. We'll still do the tech news of the week in September, and that will be a weekly thing that we do at the last minute. We'll be furiously writing right up until we hit the record button. But our regular episodes that come out on Thursdays will be a little more robust, pre-planned, and maybe have some guests. We're going to do a whole thing.

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Chris: They might even be edited.

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Ned: Yeah, you're right. Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Although, if we do actually have stuff ready ahead of time, I could have someone edit it because otherwise, they charge you a lot of money to do...

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Chris: Last second.

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Ned: Quick turnaround, 24-hour turnaround. If you give them something a couple of weeks in advance, it's not as expensive. Hey, everybody's learning all kinds of things about the podcast biz. So that's the plan. I'm going to go take a nap now for two months, and I'll see everyone in September.

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Chris: By a nap for two months, he means first class to Tahiti. But you do you.

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Ned: Well, I got to get off this air balloon first. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.