When New Orleans-native Sami Khan co-founded a mobile game seven years ago, he could’ve never imagined it would land him and three New Yorkers on a farm in Thompson’s Station.
Atlas: Earth is a mobile metaverse game that allows players to buy virtual real estate, which mimics the real world, to earn and cash out rewards.
“ We started thinking about building entertaining content that can help mobilize our community and include them in more ways to earn/win money,” Khan said. “So our next task was how can we get our community to earn even more money and tie it into something entertaining that the rest of the community will wanna watch?”
The result, a YouTube game show called “Cashtronaut.” With the success of “Squid Game” and creators like Mr. Beast, game shows where you complete a variety of tasks for money are all the rage on social media.
When they originally began to plan for this “fish out of water” concept of having people from large cities live in rural or semi-rural areas, they chose to have people from Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
Khan and his group landed on only New Yorkers solely by chance.
“ The original idea was to find somebody in Miami and Los Angeles and New York but around that time we actually got the opportunity to have an ad in Times Square,” he said. “It was at that moment that we were like, wait a second. If we’re gonna have an ad in Times Square, why don’t we use three New Yorkers?”
From then, they completely shifted their original plan, and several months later they ended up on the Whispering Willows Farm in Thompson’s Station.
“ We were very excited and thought it would be a lot of fun,” said Jen Wilson, the co-owner of Whispering Willows Farm and Dairy. “ This is not the first time that we’ve done videotaping but we just really enjoy it.”
Besides a background in agriculture, Wilson also is a research scientist with degrees in biology and physics. She and her husband are also foster parents, and the space of the farm allows their children to gain new skills while relying on the animals as a sort of therapy.
“We’ve been foster parents for over 20 years, and as we grew older, we realized that having animals was really helpful for the foster kids,” she said. “So we ended up with a garage full of rabbits and then decided we needed to move. We got a farm and then just kind of grew from there.”
Upon arrival, the contestants were dropped straight into Thompson’s Station and forced to adapt quickly as they took on a series of hands-on challenges far removed from their city comfort zones.
The three Manhattan-based contestants from different walks of life included a DoorDash driver, fashion designer and lifestyle content creator.
They took part in challenges such as milking a cow in below-freezing temperatures, searching a potato field to locate potatoes marked with each contestant’s initials, and navigating a tractor through a timed obstacle course.
The episode also culminated in a high-energy farm race featuring an egg relay, crawling through mud, lassoing, and leading a sheep up a hill to the finish line. After a tightly contested final push, Courtney Moore, the content creator, emerged victorious, taking home the $10,000 grand prize.
“I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into, and that’s what made it so fun,” she said. “Going from Manhattan life straight into farm challenges was wild, exhausting, and honestly empowering. Winning the $10,000 was incredible, but the experience itself was unforgettable.”
In addition to awarding the cash prize, Cashtranaut donated $5,000 directly to the Thompson’s Station farm as a thank you for hosting and supporting the production.
“ Our dream is to build a learning barn where kids and adults could come learn about agriculture as well as some other things,” Wilson added. “I’ve homeschooled my biological children but it’s hard to teach biology without a lab. We would love to create a space where we could host homeschool lab classes for other students where we could do dissections and learn various skills.”
As with any challenge, Khan explained although earning money is a big part of it, they aim to educate the players and viewers.
“ If you watch the New Orleans episode where, you know, teaching people about the Napoleon House and a little bit about the history of the French Quarter,” he said. “These houses in the French Quarter were also slave quarters, and we’re trying to educate in a way where it’s not like preachy or aggressive. We’re just showing people what happened here.”
Their next challenge will take place at a public school in Seattle.
“ We’re making a video where we allow the school to earn up to $20,000 of fundraising,” he said. “We’re realizing that we can actually use these videos to educate a bit more about things like the lack of public school funding. So it’s a full loop because although we are creating content and making money, we are also giving it back.”
You can follow and learn more about Cashtronaut’s challenges on their YouTube page, www.youtube.com/channel/UCdXRY4jVYEmXaPfWskicV8A. Additional information about Whispering Willows Farm can be found at wwfarmanddairy.com/.
