  We study pole skipping in holographic CFTs dual to diffeomorphism invariant
theories containing an arbitrary number of bosonic fields in the large $N$
limit. Defining a weight to organize the bulk equations of motion, a set of
general pole-skipping conditions are derived. In particular, the frequencies
simply follow from general covariance and weight matching. In the presence of
higher spin fields, we find that the imaginary frequency for the highest-weight
pole-skipping point equals the higher-spin Lyapunov exponent which lies outside
of the chaos bound. Without higher spin fields, we show that the energy density
Green's function has its highest-weight pole skipping happening at a location
related to the OTOC for arbitrary higher-derivative gravity, with a Lyapunov
exponent saturating the chaos bound and a butterfly velocity matching that
extracted from a shockwave calculation. We also suggest an explanation for this
matching at the metric level by obtaining the on-shell shockwave solution from
a regularized limit of the metric perturbation at the skipped pole.
