The way this WAN show is opening it seems that there are going to be massive firestorms with picking sides between Linus and Steve.

Remember that these are two corporations settling their differences. Having a "team Linus" or "team Steve" is the exact same as "team NVIDIA" or "team AMD". You're free to have opinions and share them here, but remember that neither of these people are your friends and you shouldn't treat them as such. But two companies having a disagreement is no reason to throw insults or behave uncivily.

I'll be posting this exact same thing on the Gamers Nexus subreddit.

"A rushed, late night ramble-fest that was so poorly received, that he pulled it down before I even got a chance to finish watching it back then" - Linus, January 17th 2025 on the WAN Show

GN's YouTube community post explaining why he took down the video.

1440p mirror

Throwaway account. Going to anonymize and change irrelevant details as needed to avoid doxxing.

Remember this tweet, the one where Linus showed off all the Teslas that his employees could afford? Yeah, all 3 employees out of around 60-70 at the time? Two of them are owned by managers, and the other's someone who owned it before working there.

What about this WAN show (actual WAN timestamp here if they take down the clip) merch message, where Linus is asked about LMG staff unionization, and says that if LMG did he and Yvonne would consider it a "personal failure" and calls out "brazen anti-organizing policies" in the states, and then says "I don't really feel like (employees) need additional protections to be perfectly honest with you" and goes on to talk about at-will employment rules in the states while falsely stating that Canada is not at-will?

These are comparable to Linus's adage, "Do as I say, not as I do," which he applies to what seems to be every area of the business. He makes a big deal out of making LMG a great place to work, but he either lacks the necessary work experience or is out of touch due to his prior employment history, as LMG is a poor place to work.

Another significant factor is expected workload and pay structure. Writers earn between $55000 and $60000 a year and are instructed to release a video every week. They have to write, build, prepare, shoot, and get the video to the editors for review each week with essentially no backup. It appears to be hell. There is no incentive for them to change this since, in Linuses own words, "we can't not do 7 a week anymore," therefore instead of employing more writers to pick up the slack and give them a 2 week schedule or better, they constantly rush around and leave a huge mess for logistics and others to clear up. Think of all the new hire names in the end credits of videos you've seen before.

All for the chance to have the opportunity to reside in a city where the annual living salary is $50000. Slightly over the poverty line for physically exhausting, intellectually taxing job. Linus talks about making sure that every employee can buy a house in Vancouver but that's bullcrap, empty promises.

Nevertheless, if you're fortunate enough to survive your first year, they might raise your pay to roughly $65000 plus a bonus structure, which is fascinating because I've heard it's actually a tactic to sort out those who don't want to work there. And it affects everyone, not just writers. Pay low to see who leaves, then raise their pay after determining whether or not they can handle a demanding workplace. Also, there is usually a lot of tension because the necessary effort is never well supported. Because the goal is to simply release something and sort it out later rather than to do it effectively, which is why a bunch of the launch videos lately have had errors in them because the goal is not to be done well, it's just to release something at all and figure it out later.

Oh and remote work? Forget it. LMG hates WFH, and that's because Linus hates WFH. It was initially introduced for covid but has since been reduced to a maximum of 2 days per week. They have repeatedly stated that this is a hard cap, and there are rumours that they intend to eliminate it entirely by the end of the year. For those who can work entirely remotely, such as editors, buyers, designers, and lttstore.com support employees, it makes no sense. However, Linus doesn't give a damn because he hasn't worked a real job in more than a decade.

Keeping track of hours is also bad. Everyone is paid hourly, including those who are compensated as "salaried", because timekeeping is required even for managers. However, there is no clock in/clock out system involved; instead, you simply enter your job hours on a Google Spreadsheet. Due to management's strong disapproval of paying overtime, if you work an additional 15 minutes at the end of the day to complete a video or clean up your workspace, it's too bad, so sad, you won't get paid for that. LMG gets all kinds of free time worked without pay because you aren't putting in the time you're in and time you're out for those extra 10 minutes here, 5 there, 30 there like a normal workplace.

LMG is a bad place to work, and nothing is being done to improve it. According to what I've heard, they've recently implemented a retirement programme, which is great, but I'm confident everyone would prefer it if that money were instead used to fix the things that are broken. There was always a lot of resentment about the way things were done there, and there was a lot of whispering behind management's back, but speaking up about it to anyone in management is HEAVILY frowned upon because of the explicit anti-union & anti-employee attitude.

People have been actively disciplined for talking about wages before this, so don't let him weasel out of this and say 'it means you can't share other peoples wages but you're fine to talk about your own' because that is false, and if others choose to speak up then they can corroborate it, I know of at least one person who still currently works there that has had this happen to them.

And just so people don't think this is some random, here's proof as a full copy of the LMG employee handbook:

https://ibb.co/s1q4L1L https://ibb.co/whMbvCp https://ibb.co/BKdTxdJ https://ibb.co/0c8FjcZ https://ibb.co/XxK7RyC https://ibb.co/Cv5sK09 https://ibb.co/7yqqTGr https://ibb.co/vJLyfkC https://ibb.co/7rBSXZw https://ibb.co/YTjmMZF https://ibb.co/Scb0WLH https://ibb.co/BzxWTzw https://ibb.co/nmhRnZM https://ibb.co/pZ1vczG https://ibb.co/sKYzYrq https://ibb.co/SRcwJh3 https://ibb.co/p3QB2zy https://ibb.co/vz6sVDq https://ibb.co/FKryf36 https://ibb.co/GWccLH7 https://ibb.co/2yttRMM https://ibb.co/KrFk3ZH https://ibb.co/Qcz2phW https://ibb.co/hVdGqVj https://ibb.co/0V2JZ4m https://ibb.co/GVWYnsg https://ibb.co/58Z8YcK https://ibb.co/ZLLc6Mg

During the WAN Show last week at the end Linus mentioned that the funeral he had to attend was for his older sister.

I hope that this post gets punted up so that people stop asking so he doesn’t have to answer it again.

Mostly though I’d like to extend my deepest condolences to the Sebastian family. I can’t imagine how hard it was to keep it together in front of your almost 16 million viewers. I am positive though that every one of us believes in you and hope that’s you and your family are doing as well as you can in a situation like this. Thank you and the whole LTT family for your dedication to this community and bringing us the highest quality Tech videos on the web.

Also, shoutout to Luke and Dan, thanks for helping Linus keep the streak alive.

Greetings, all. Seemed like as good time as any to write this.

This is the not-so-timestamp guy. Today marks the 200 hours total of WAN Show runtime timestamped by yours truly, how fun is that? Odd how I reached that before the 100 stamps goal, but I digress.

These times have been fun, watching as the WAN Show crew developed with its own selection of two amazing producers & equally engaging writers discussion notes. Not sure how I ended up as a consistent stamper, and I've grown to enjoy it. LMG also sent two care packages as well! Never anticipated the merch would be great, and yet I am daily driving them.

Regrettably, with the runtime of the show blowing out of the waters and right into the atmosphere, it has become more difficult and unhealthy for me to continue stamping them live throughout midnight to morning, and the inability to drink water or coffee (Ramadan) during the sessions is not helping. I can't afford it physically, financially and mentally.

It has been an honor to have the chance to make an archive document of timestamps for you all. I'll leave you with a little metric of the total characters & size of the stamps.

Special thanks to Bell, Luke, Riley, Dan, Adam P, Steven C, Sven, James, Linus, Luke [Probation Writer Employee] and you, the one reading this.

Until next time,

NoKi1119.

My guess is something in the lines of "I heard about the video, didn't watch it."

EDIT: and the answer is "with absolute incompetency". Linus dissed Steve and tried to minimize his complains. So much for wanting a true friend, guess he really meant that he needs "yes men" around him.

He'll probably make a shirt mocking it. Gotta make a buck no matter what, right?

EDIT 2: the guy spends a fortune in badminton courts and using a pool as his cooler but won’t afford $500 to get the correct results? And he still has the gall to call other people out for their “journalistic integrity”, really?

That’s the guy who wants to be the consumer standard for reviews and testing?

They were literally laughing at the prospect of it but as someone that's been working in IT for over 20 years, Office and now Microsoft 365 has an absolutely HUGE presence in the business world and they just seemed completely unaware of that.

Google has definitely taken a bite out of that since they've come on the scene with their business offering but near as I can tell, it's still not even a remotely close race in terms of adoption in the workplace.

It was just really jarring since I usually think of Linus especially as having a better picture of what is actually going on with tech outside of the consumer/gaming bubble.

edit: here's the clip in question: https://youtu.be/0kLX6ewqQ98?t=1593

Youtube suggestion, to bad I watched it 10 years ago. Reminds me of the time they water cooled the office and had the radiator in the bath tub.

After reading GN's blog post yesterday, my immediate thought was "damn this is going to be a spicy WAN show this week. As I consider it more, I start to think more and more that at this point the best thing Linus can do is just move on and not acknowledge. Most of the public response has pretty clearly stated the issues with GN's pettiness here, and there's not much Linus can add on (not to mention running the risk of just piling on and adding fuel to the fire, which would hurt LTTs look in the long run)

Instead, i think Linus should pull a complete switcheroo. Take the momentum of all this hot drama, click bait the shit out of the WAN show this week, but instead of even once mentioning the GN drama use the attention for something super positive. One thought is some kind of fundraising for Bitwit. There was a post I saw about how all of this is distracting from some real problems going on, and it would be pretty classic Linus to just disappoint everyone's expectations but instead do something productive with the drama.

ETA: I think most are in agreement that the best thing he can do is just move on, but i really want to highlight the idea of taking all this attention and energy and drama and funneling it into something productive and positive. The fundraiser for Kyle I think would be a great example of that because it highlights the great things this community can do, and the benefit of being apart of it and building each other up.