YouTuber Linus Sebastian is unpacking that on-air tech snafu he suffered on a recent episode of NBC’s The Tonight Show.
The host of the popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips relived the moment that left him “mortified” in a new video, sharing his theory on what went wrong. On the January 15 Tonight Show, Sebastian—on the heels of the annual CES trade show—was demonstrating some cool tech for Jimmy Fallon and guest co-host Marcello Hernández when his planned demonstration of a Lenovo laptop that boasts an expandable screen failed to function properly on-air.
“I was full deer-in-headlights, guys. I was mortified,” Sebastian admits in the new video. “I was sitting there in full panic mode.”
Currently in the proof-of-concept phase, Lenovo’s Legion Pro Rollable Concept gaming laptop purports to expand the OLED display outward from 16” to 24” with a couple of simple keystrokes. But when Sebastian attempted to show off the feature on-air, the screen didn’t budge.
“I can tell it wants to do it,” Hernández quipped to break up the dead air, sending Fallon and the audience into hysterics.
“This happens to a lot of laptops,” Fallon winked. “Don’t take this personally. It’s his first time. He’s in front of people and stuff.”
After several more jokes of that ilk, Sebastian abandoned the demo altogether and moved onto showcasing a new screwdriver from his LTT line of tech gear. The Tonight Show cut the entire hiccup out of the NBC broadcast, but offered an extended version online, which expanded Sebastian’s five-minute segment to nine, half-cringey minutes.
The next day, a clip of the debacle spread on social media, prompting some to wonder why the segment wasn’t cut out altogether. But according to Sebastian, there was even more footage left on the cutting room floor.
“It dragged on for so much longer during the taping,” says Sebastian.”We were there for a while. We rebooted it.”
In the moment, the YouTuber was worried that he was operating the machine wrong. According to Sebastian, the Tonight Show staff showed him how to operate the laptop before the segment, then handed him an instructional note from Lenovo that he forgot to read.
But with the moment behind him, Sebastian has a theory for why things went wrong. And as it turns out, it was a fear he had all along.
Sebastian carried out all of the tech products in a backpack for the segment, and left the laptop running in the bag so it would be ready when he pulled it out.
“But I never had it in for so long,” he notes, explaining the confined laptop may have simply run too hot. “I think that’s what actually killed us. What I suspect is there was some kind of thermal fail-safe in the motors that open up the rollable OLED display.”
“As soon as it cooled down a little bit, it started working again,” he adds, noting it was functioning properly within a minute after the segment ended.
The issue was one Sebastian foresaw before he took the stage. “When I opened my backpack [on-air] to start taking things out, I really opened it… because I knew that the laptop… ran kind of hot,” he says. “It’s a prototype.”
Regardless of the reason for the error, Sebastian isn’t carrying any hard feelings about the snafu. “It wasn’t really anyone’s fault,” he shrugs. “It was just a thing that happened.”
The YouTuber is also quick to shout out Fallon and Hernández for their improvised quips, which he says “saved” the segment while his own brain was “going a thousand miles-a-minute.”
At the end of Sebastian’s Tonight Show hit, he beelined out of the studio before Fallon had a chance to cut to commercial, prompting smirks from the host and Hernández.
“I was so hyper-focused on… troubleshooting the laptop!” Sebastian explains.
Notably, while the blooper was memorable, it didn’t even wind up being the most successful part of Sebastian’s interview.
Sebastian’s demo of the Lollipop Star musical lollipop has pulled in a staggering 56.7M views on The Tonight Show‘s TikTok, making it one of the show’s most-watched shorts on the platform.
“You put it in your mouth and you hear music,” Sebastian told Fallon and Hernández.
“I wish you all the best in your career,” Hernández responded, “but I have a problem with the stuff that you have been saying today.”
Sebastian’s Tonight Show appearance was his second visit to the show. He first visited Fallon (and co-host Bad Bunny) last year.
