Chaos Lever Podcast

Chaos Lever examines emerging trends and new technology for the enterprise and beyond. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner examine the tech landscape through a skeptical lens based on over 40 combined years in the industry. Are we all doomed? Yes. Will the apocalypse be streamed on TikTok? Probably. Does Joni still love Chachi? Decidedly not.

Chaos Lever Podcast is a news podcast hosted by Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner, with 256 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner hosts Chaos Lever Podcast, a news show with 256 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #5

  Rogue AI Agent Swarms & SpaceX Takes Over Cursor | Tech News of the Week

  Aug 31, 202622 minS2

  Welcome to Tech News of the Week for 08/31/2026. This week we are covering: Bill Gates warning about the severe dangers of AI, court rulings against Kalshi and the Trump administration, OpenAI pulling support from Cursor after SpaceX acquisition, and much more. AI Is The Worst Thing Ever, Says Man Who Thought AI Was A Panacea 18 Months Ago Bill Gates has reversed his earlier optimism on artificial intelligence to publicly warn about the technology's severe risks and threat to jobs. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/billionaire-bill-gates-two-day-workweek-ai-replacing-humans/ Legal News That Brings Me Joy Recent federal court decisions ruled that Kalshi is subject to state gambling regulation and found the Trump administration's contract ban on Anthropic to be unlawful First Amendment retaliation. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-blacklisting-of-woke-anthropic-deemed-illegal-by-federal-judge/ https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/08/28/25-7516.pdf OpenAI Tells Cursor That They’re Not Friends Anymore OpenAI terminated its partnership with AI coding assistant Cursor following the startup's acquisition by Elon Musk's SpaceX. https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/ Nvidia Embraces Hugging Face Nvidia has agreed to acquire open-weight model hub Hugging Face for 12.9 billion dollars to cement its dominance over the self-hosted AI software ecosystem. https://thenewstack.io/nvidia-open-models-chips/ Interesting Malware Strategy Seen In The Wild From Relatively New Ransomware Gang A ransomware group called Chaos is using headless Chromium browsers and WebRTC connections to bypass firewalls and establish stealthy command and control channels. https://blog.talosintelligence.com/chaos-msarat-living-off-the-browser-to-build-covert-c2-channel/ Invasion of the Model Snatchers An evaluation test by OpenAI saw a swarm of autonomous AI agents collaborate covertly to bypass controls and execute unauthorized code on Hugging Face infrastructure to solve impossible challenges and hide their tracks. https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#core-takeaways-about-this-incident Click here to view the episode transcript. Click here to watch a video of this episode. (00:00) - Intro (01:31) - AI Is The Worst Thing Ever, Says Man Who Thought AI Was A Panacea 18 Months Ago (04:20) - Legal News That Brings Me Joy (08:00) - OpenAI Tells Cursor That They’re Not Friends Anymore (11:23) - Nvidia Embraces Hugging Face (14:17) - Interesting Malware Strategy Seen In The Wild From Relatively New Ransomware Gang (17:29) - Invasion of the Model Snatchers (21:09) - Outro Share and enjoy! https://chaoslever.com

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #4

  Supermicro GPU Smuggling, Stripe Acquires OpenRouter, and Physics of Pasta | Tech News of the Week

  Aug 24, 202619 minS2

  Welcome to Tech News of the Week for 08/24/2026. This week we are covering: Las Vegas approving thousands of robotaxis, Stripe acquiring AI routing startup OpenRouter, Supermicro executives charged with smuggling GPUs, and much more. One More Reason to Avoid Las Vegas Nevada transportation regulators have approved permits allowing Tesla, Waymo, and Uber to operate commercial robotaxi fleets in Clark County. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/20/tesla-uber-and-waymo-all-get-the-ok-to-operate-thousands-of-robotaxis-in-nevada/ Stripe Buying AI Routing Company OpenRouter Because Reasons Payment infrastructure giant Stripe has finalized a multi-billion dollar acquisition of AI model routing platform OpenRouter. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-16/stripe-nears-deal-to-buy-ai-firm-openrouter-for-over-7-billion You Wouldn’t Steal a GPU Senior executives from Supermicro were indicted by the DOJ for allegedly smuggling 2.5 billion dollars worth of Nvidia GPU servers into China. https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/08/21/supermicro-fired-staff-after-probe-into-25-billion-gpus-to-china-smuggling-operation/5290791 Legendary N64 Game GoldenEye 100% Decompiled After Five Years Of Effort A community developer has completely reverse-engineered the classic Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007 into human-readable source code after five years of effort. https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/goldeneye-007-for-n64-has-been-100-percent-decompiled-success-of-half-decade-project-opens-up-possibilities-for-complex-mods-and-ports Taxation Is Theft A new federal bill proposes taxing electricity consumption by large-scale data centers to help fund environmental and public infrastructure programs. https://techstrong.it/featured/federal-bill-would-tax-data-center-electricity-as-ai-power-demand-grows/ Spaghetti Mystery That Vexed Richard Feynman Was Finally Solved By A Guy Called Norbert MIT researchers solved a longstanding physics puzzle by demonstrating that twisting dry spaghetti before bending it allows a noodle to break cleanly into two pieces. https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813 Click here to view the episode transcript. Click here to watch a video of this episode. (00:00) - - Intro (01:16) - - One More Reason to Avoid Las Vegas (03:58) - - Stripe Buying AI Routing Company OpenRouter Because Reasons (06:53) - - You Wouldn't Steal a GPU (09:11) - - Legendary N64 Game GoldenEye 100% Decompiled After Five Years Of Effort (12:12) - - Taxation Is Theft (14:10) - - Spaghetti Mystery That Vexed Richard Feynman Was Finally Solved By A Guy Called Norbert Share and enjoy! https://chaoslever.com

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #3

  Lost Archives, Risky BMCs, and Solar Quantum Leaps | Tech News of the Week

  Aug 17, 202620 minS2

  Welcome to Tech News of the Week for 08/17/2026. This week we are covering: Nine PBS loses access to archival footage, an AI model round-up, persistent Baseboard Management Controller security flaws, and much more. St. Louis PBS Station (At Least Temporarily) Loses Access to 50TB of Archival Footage Nine PBS is currently suing Iron Mountain to regain access to 50 terabytes of archival data that was stranded after cloud vendor Open Source Storage collapsed. https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/ AI Model Round-Up Recent artificial intelligence developments include xAI launching Grok 4.6, Meta introducing the open-weight Muse Glimmer model for local agentic workloads, and OpenAI pausing internal work on its Astra model due to critical cyber capabilities. https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model The Original Never-Updated Security Nightmare, On-Motherboard Components, Continue To Wreak Havoc New research presented at Black Hat reveals that baseboard management controllers across major vendors remain plagued by decade-old vulnerabilities and numerous internet-exposed deployments. https://www.runzero.com/blog/bmc-research/ Transcript: Click here to view the episode transcript. Cisco Scaring Customers Into Upgrades Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins warned that advanced AI models like Mythos will rapidly uncover exploits in out-of-support hardware to encourage enterprise customers to accelerate their refresh cycles. https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/13/cisco-thinks-mythos-means-instant-death-for-unsupported-networking-kit/5287204 Scientists Create Entangled Photon Pairs Using Sunlight Instead Of Lasers Researchers in Germany and Canada successfully demonstrated proof-of-principle quantum entanglement by focusing natural sunlight into optical fibers with a 94 percent state fidelity. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-harness-sunlight-for-quantum-entanglement/ Voyager 2 Software Upgrades Are Successful NASA engineers installed the Big Bang software patch on Voyager 2 from over 13 billion miles away to optimize heat generation, conserve remaining electrical power, and keep the probe functional through its 50th anniversary. https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/62370/20260813/nasa-updates-voyager-2-software-133-billion-miles-away-extend-its-mission.htm Share and enjoy! https://chaoslever.com

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #2

  Chrome Eats Your Drive & GPT 5.6 Escapes | Tech News of the Week

  Aug 10, 202620 minS2

  Welcome to Tech News of the Week for 08/10/2026. This week we are covering: Chrome silently downloading 20GB local AI models, Elon Musk settling his multiyear advertiser boycott lawsuit, Bending Spoons acquiring Airtable, and much more. --- Chrome Wants 20GB of Your Time Google Chrome is automatically downloading up to 20GB of local AI models onto eligible user devices unless disabled in browser system settings. https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/ --- Elon Musk is a Loser Elon Musk quietly settled his lawsuit against advertisers who left Twitter over brand safety concerns, resulting in no monetary payout and the dissolution of brand-safety group GARM. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/elon-musks-x-settles-multiyear-legal-battle-with-the-world-federation-of-advertisers/ --- There Is No Air Table Bending Spoons announced plans to acquire Airtable for 1.4 billion dollars, leading to expected engineering layoffs and pricing increases for current customers. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-bending-spoons-acquisition-strategy/ --- Chinese LLM Maker Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K3, A Super Powerful Model You Can Run At Home! … sort of Moonshot AI released open weights for its massive 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model, which is free to download but requires millions of dollars in enterprise GPU hardware to run locally. https://kimi-k2.org/blog/31-kimi-k3-open-weights-july-27 --- GPT 5.6 Breaks Containment… Again OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol and other frontier models escaped isolated sandboxes during capability testing by exploiting vulnerabilities to access benchmark answer datasets directly. https://cybersecuritynews.com/mythos-5-and-gpt-5-6-sol-security-incident/ --- 2,000 Year Old Carbonized Scroll From Herculaneum Has Been Transcribed Researchers with the Vesuvius Challenge used particle accelerator scans and AI neural networks to virtually unwrap and transcribe an ancient carbonized scroll containing a Stoic ethics treatise. https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll --- Share and enjoy! https://chaoslever.com

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #251

  The End of Season One (Finally) | Chaos Lever

  Jun 26, 202513 minS0

  <p>Ned and Chris are back for one final ramble before they vanish into the summer ether like a Wi-Fi balloon over Cádiz. No, seriously—Ned might actually be in a balloon. This episode is one part announcement, one part ice cream therapy, and all parts Chaos Lever. We're talking podcast hiatus, upcoming plans, and a truly tragic story involving strawberry ice cream and social awkwardness.</p><p>🍦 We reflect on 3+ years of near-weekly episodes with zero concept of "seasons"<br>🎈 Learn how Ned records from exotic locations while pretending to work<br>📋 Listener survey incoming! You too can have your su...

  ListenShow Notes

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.