Linus Tech Tips Almost Ruined His Career

There's a certain beauty and a curse that comes with live streaming.

If you make a mistake, there's no undo button.

You can't just cut it out.

If it's there on a live stream, it's there forever.

And we've seen time and time again that one simple single blunder, one little split second mistake

can cost people their entire online career whether that's from something they say or something they do in fact we actually just saw this very phenomenon happen a month ago where a big streamer named Atrioc was live and alt tabbed which for a literal fucking nanosecond flashed his deepfake porn on stream

and that cost him everything years upon years of work undone in an instant because he jump scared everyone with his deep fake porn which revealed a lot of awful things about the whole situation and everything that was going on there point is on live streams there's no going back and we've seen time and time again this lead to the downfall of an entire career

And we almost saw it again last night with Linus Tech Tips.

Linus has built an empire online.

He is an incredible creator who has done amazing work for so long now.

And last night he almost wiped his ass with the entire fucking thing.

I mean, it's been kind of eye-opening.

I've just sort of randomly here and there picked up episodes of old shows that I hadn't watched in a long time from like the early 2000s.

And just the casual sort of gay humor

we've entered the danger zone here on stream this is like chernobyl just waiting to melt down because of something he's about to say but to paint the picture what he's talking about here is how not that long ago things were more acceptable in content and media that aren't acceptable today he's talking about how things have changed and in particular he's mentioning how like some shows would have casual gay humor

where back in the earlier 2000s, that was a very common thing.

Calling something gay was used pretty much everywhere for everything.

If someone got a cheeseburger that didn't have enough cheese on it, they'd say, that's gay.

If you were walking down the stairs and you missed a step and you started to tumble down the stairs, you'd be screaming, this is gay.

Like all the way down.

If a buddy of yours asked to bring his girlfriend along to like the boys night out, you'd say, stop being gay.

That kind of shit.

That's what he's talking about.

And he's saying, you know, it hasn't been that long.

And going back and watching shows that still have that humor in it was jarring to him.

Casual use of the hard R. Oh, really?

It's jarring.

Yeah, it's jarring now.

Casual use of hard R?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, okay, it was an episode of American Dad.

Really?

Yeah, it wasn't for shock value.

It was just used.

Fuckle your seatbelt because this ride's getting real bumpy now.

The train is getting off the tracks.

We're going wacko mode here.

So Hard R, as I'm sure all of you probably understand, is a very serious slur.

Like, that's, you know, that's not, you know, empty calories.

That's no sack of potatoes.

That's a big fucking slur.

And he's saying that it was used casually back in the early 2000s and even mentions an example with American Dad.

Now, with my hand on a stack of Bibles, I'll just tell you, I'm not the biggest American Dad fan.

Like, I'll just be honest with you.

I haven't watched a ton of it.

I'm not the biggest spectator of the show.

So maybe this episode he's talking about flew under the radar.

I never heard of it, never watched it.

But that took me by surprise.

And I really love Luke's reaction, his co-host here, because you can see him like, hard R, excuse me, what, what, what?

What kind of fantasy land are you living in, Linus, where hard R's were casual?

Because I and Luke and probably everyone else in the world can't really recall a time where normal TV shows were dropping racist slurs casually like that.

Well, I mean, here's the thing, right?

That was in 2003 or something, like 2002.

I'm not going to deny that I dropped my fair share of hard R's back then because the term hard R didn't even exist.

We didn't think about it, right?

And it's funny because to me, that doesn't feel like that long ago.

As a big fan of Linus, when I heard that, I had to stand up from my chair, hands on my hip.

I was like, all right, it's over.

i felt like a coach who had just watched his team lose the championship ball game like you take my hat off you know put it over my chest and say a prayer for him because i was like god rest his soul this is the end of linus and you can see luke luke like he shakes his head like in disbelief and then he's just looking down and i already know during this moment where linus is like admitting to using hard r's casually he's processing this is like yep

Back to the old grind.

This is where it all ends, huh?

This is the end of our run.

He was just seeing all the walls around him starting to crumble, the empire burning to a crisp, all because Linus is just freely loosey-goosey admitting to using the hard R casually often.

But do not despair because not all is as it seems here.

But to my kids... Are you talking like N-word hard R?

What?

No.

Okay.

I'm pretty sure that's how people use that term.

No.

I think so.

That's the N-word.

What are you guys talking about?

Am I mistaken?

I think so.

No, the one with the... Like for mental disability.

I'm pretty sure people use hard R in a very different way than you just used it.

Oh.

Okay, either way.

Hard R means ending the N-word with a hard R. I understand what you mean.

No, I'm not talking about that.

You can feel life be breathed back into the room.

Like, once Linus elaborates that, he wasn't talking about the N-word, he was talking about the word used with mental disabilities.

And collectively, all at once, the whole room comes back to life.

This reminds me of a very famous quote from the late great Uncle Ben, God rest his soul, when he sat down Peter Parker in that car and he said, with great power comes great responsibility.

In this case, it's with great power comes great fucking blunders.

This was an amazing disaster to watch unfold with like the wackiest plot twist of an ending.

I have never once heard the hard R refer to anything other than the racist slur.

So when he just started willy nilly admitting to using it casually, I couldn't believe my goddamn ears and I know every coworker was panicked texting each other saying like, hey, really enjoyed our time together.

It's fucking over.

Tune into the stream.

Like, I have no doubt that was probably the scariest moment of their careers, listening to Linus just for some reason admit to using the hard R often.

And then, of course, the grand reveal where he wasn't actually talking about racist shit.

He was referring to something different entirely.

And then this is the aftermath of that.

Okay, cool.

So, I'm glad that we cleared that up.

I'm freaking Neo over here, dude.

We're dodging bullets.

That was bad.

Okay, yes.

All right.

Right.

I forgot about the part where I said, yeah, I just like used a cat.

No, actually.

We can breathe.

Everything's okay.

Cool.

So I hope everyone likes not having a job anymore on Monday.

Because apparently I'm a giant racist.

We didn't lose our money in the bank crash.

In the audience run.

What a journey we went on for about two minutes there with this whole section.

Yeah, I just wanted to talk about this because this was the closest I've seen to someone just committing career suicide with a smile on their face during it.

Big misunderstanding here, I suppose.

And yeah, I just wanted to talk about it a little bit.

That's really about it.

So yeah.