By Bruce Karnick

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When we think of the silly things our kids watch on You-Tube, we just shake our heads. Weird cartoons, goofy howto videos for how to make some messy project, and the best one, watching other kids playing video games. OK, I’ll admit, when you need mindless entertainment, watching people goofing around in a video game can be entertaining, so I get it, but I would still rather play the game myself.

I know what you are thinking, why the heck do I want to read about YouTube? This might be especially true if you fall in the older demographics. But those darn kids with their new fangly dangly contraptions have some things to teach us older folks. YouTube has a plethora of knowledge outside the entertainment piece. You can look up how to fix your car and odds are, some mechanic has filmed replacing the radiator of a 2007 chevy HHR, or in my case, upgrading the block of a 50cc scooter.

YouTube has even produced many internet stars. Jenna Marbles, Smoosh, Fred, Shane Dawson and Logan Paul just to name a few. Even I have channels that I love to follow, like Colin Furze, Mark Rober, Dude Perfect and Smarter Everyday by Destin Sandlin, because they explore interesting, everyday topics or create crazy contraptions in their garage. YouTubers have a few things in common, they make their online show interesting and entertaining, and they are personable. I would love to meet Furze, Rober or Sandlin just because they seem like super cool guys.

YouTubers actually make money from their channels. Yes, people get paid to do some of the stupid things you see on the internet. Thankfully, they also get paid for creating fun, intelligent, brilliant and entertaining content too!

For 2021, the top YouTubers are: PewDiePie with 110M subscribers. That’s right, 110,000,000 subscribers.

Kids Diana Show – 81.4M Like Nastya – 75.6M Vlad and Niki – 70.1M MrBeast – 65.2M Three of the top five most popular YouTube artists are for younger kids with younger kid stars. PewDiePie is a Swedish gamer who’s channel has been around since 2010, and that brings us to the ever so popular MrBeast.

Jimmy Donaldson launched his channel, MrBeast in 2012 where he frequently does viral challenges like eating the world’s largest slice of pizza or doing things like filling his brother’s house with slime.. He and his crew come off as a bit obnoxious, but they are a fun group to watch. The other thing, he is extremely generous. He has given away $1 million dollars to people for a shopping spree with the caveat they have one minute to spend it. He has done a plethora of online contests and that is where the Hastings tie-in comes in to play.

“I’m in this online group with like, I think 700,000 People that all know Mr. Beast, they follow him. And occasionally people get randomly selected from there to bring them into a contest. I was one of 200 people that got selected from that group, you know, almost a million people group. And then they brought me into a voice chat online where they decided that I was the one to be selected for the challenge, which is crazy,” said Ryan Lindner.

Lindner, a 16-year-old Hastings High School student who spends most of his extra time doing homework or practicing trumpet for band, spent several hours talking to the Mr. Beast crew, including Donaldson. He said the whole experience was fun and the crew was extremely nice.

The contest took place in Minecraft, a popular online video game where players explore, build, and mine. Mostly, they mine, a lot, and craft, almost as much. Players gather resources to create items they need, including materials to reshape land or build structures.

Lindner explained what happened after he was selected. “I got brought into the server with Mr. Beast and all these guys. And they’re like, ‘Okay, you have until the end of this video to mine up this island and try to find a chest that’s hidden somewhere.’ I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but they’re just like, go find the chest and then like halfway through, they told me that there’s $10,000 in the chest, which is crazy.”

Lindner was told he had until the end of the video, but they didn’t tell him how long the video was, so he started digging… and kept digging… and digging… This went on for almost five hours, during that time, the Mr. Beast crew was communicating with Lindner, chatting as people do in online games and that is when they found out about an interesting twist with Lindner.

“I was supposed to go on a date, and had to cancel because of the challenge,” Lindner laughed.

OK, so his date was informed of the opportunity, so like any gentleman would do, they discussed moving the date to a different day. Mr. Beast found out about this and added some excitement to the video, and to Lindner’s date. He said he would not only give the $10,000 to Lindner, but he would kick in an extra $1,000 to give to his date. I’d say that is a pretty cool reward for being flexible.

Lindner did find the buried treasure in time and was declared the winner of $10,000, his date got her $1,000 and yes, they went on more than one date. It only took about three weeks for the check to arrive from Mr. Beast once they worked everything out. There was one small problem, being 16, his parents had to be involved. Which was not much of a problem. The parents helped investigate the legitimacy of the event and then the legalities of taxes and investing the cash.

“I set up a Roth IRA and then I’ll just put in like 4k this year 4k next. So then for my retirement, I’ll be pretty set, especially if I keep putting a little bit into it each year,” Lindner explained.

This kid is smart, he gets it. At 16, he’s going to treat $10,000 like he never got it. Just stash most of it away to be a solid start for his retirement. A much smarter move than I would do with it at his age, or even now.

This one-in-a-million story ended up with a happy ending for a Hastings teen, all because he played a video game and followed some famous people online. Congratulations, kid!