DC ExtraTime: Someone You Should Know - Steezy, Rohan & DAD

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BY DC CUEVA                        

■ @DC408DXTR  @ IG/YT/SC/TB

From left, Dylan "DAD" Polley, Rohan Kohli
and Steezy Kane (IG @rohankohli55)

When the calendar turns to the month of May this Wednesday, college students across the country will be thinking many things at the end of the academic year. For many, they are dreading those final exams which will see them trade party and friend time for many hours of studying before the big tests that await them. For others, they're looking forward to finally getting this school year done and dusted so that they can have some fun in the sun the next few months. And for those who are nostalgic and have completed the necessary amount of credits, they are counting down the days until any young adult's ultimate coming of age moment: putting on the cap & gown and graduating college.

What happens after students receive their diploma and getting feted by family & friends in this important passage in their lives will vary depending upon what route they want to take: getting a job, starting their own business, and whatever pleases them as they enter, as they say, the "real real world." But for three college students, they are already superstars beyond just their inner circle... something that wasn't even possible at the start of this century. And thanks in part to YouTube and the viral culture we are living in now, they've amassed over a million total social media followers thanks to getting to create content that can make everyone laugh and to brighten their day.

With the help of someone who also gained a fortune by winning a one-time MTV Reality show, we'd like you to meet the latest trio of Someone You Should Know: College YouTube Royalty of Steezy Kane, Rohan Kohli and Dylan Polley.

If the story we're telling here is familiar, then it is: two of those previously featured on ExtraTime have made a living out of becoming social media influencers in beauty icon Rachel Levin and one-half of YouTube's most notorious pair of brothers in Jake Paul, who collaborated on videos featuring alumni the same season of MTV's Are You The One notorious as the one that didn't win any money - Season 5 of two years ago. They are part of a generation who has grown up with a video website whose reach has expanded considerably in the space of over a decade, but are one of those who use it for the purpose of posting original content as both a hobby and as their day job, such as trick shot specialists Dude Perfect, video gamer Pew Die Pie, Mr. Beast and Ryan ToysReview.

IG @Steezy.Kane

While America was fixated on what happened that first full week of November 2016, a 16-year-old high school junior from Austin, Texas decided to launch his own YouTube channel on the Monday before presidential Election Day. Isaiah Shepard adopted the alias of Steezy Kane when he released his first video on November 8th, and offered needing to escape the final act of a divisive campaign by telling a story worth remembering: being stranded by himself in the middle of town when a friend of his dropped him off at his high school.
   Although his goals were to become a skateboarder and to help foot the bill at the local CVS, Steezy then realized that doing videos like this would become a favorite hobby of his, which would then grow into making him the biggest star at East Austin College Prep School once he walked the graduation stage last summer. Like any other person who can mix making videos with having a good sense of humor, he has created almost 100 videos (spanning both his primary and second channels) creating hilarious pranks in public, doing the now ubiquitous challenges to win money, and things to grab everyone's attention... That includes a video of Kane jumping off the Santa Monica Pier just to get a girl's number, and listening to Travis Scott's Sicko Mode out in the public - which ranks as his most watched video at 7.7 million views.
   And unlike what we've seen with other influencers who've made headlines for the wrong reasons, Steezy has been able to earn his place in this elite without resorting to controversy or sparking tabloid rumors that could send one's career into a tailspin. All the hard work and maintaining a good deal of professionalism in everything he does was rewarded earlier this month when YouTube sent him a package that contained a coveted award inside: the Gold Play Button, a gold-plated brass trophy featuring the company's app avatar logo, and symbolic of his channel surpassing one million subscribers, with his videos chalking up over 79 million views.
   For someone who also spent some time in Germany while his dad was serving in the Army, next up for Steezy is adding the name "movie star" to his growing resume. Last month, it was revealed that he will be part of a short film called Street Flame, a story about street teens in the Austin area coming to grips with losing one of their own in a different way than other would usually deal with. And this past weekend, the film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and Steezy and his fellow cast members got to experience the big premiere in the Big Apple.

IG @RohanKohli55

Another person who has notched a considerable social media following and who can still not yet party at a nightclub on a Saturday night is Rohan Kohli, who's a year older than Steezy and who grew up in Cincinnati... and proudly shows his fandom wearing black and orange for the hometown Bengals. He was born in the Queen City and is currently in his sophomore year at Xavier University, and grew up down the way in Clearwater, Florida.
   Videos Rohan has posted since then have seen him blast music in drive-thru's while waiting out getting fast food, daring random girls to kiss him on the beach, and doing hide-and-seek's at the local department store. Those videos, viewed 48 million times, only represents part for what he has been able to post on his own personal account by his 600,000 YouTube followers which launched three months after Steezy, And he has also collaborated with Ireland Boys Productions, where he teamed with siblings Nick and Ricky Ireland for a channel that began in 2015 and has grown substantially since, recently surpassing the 3 million subscriber mark.
   The Ireland Boys and Rohan are best known for making epic fort and hide & seek videos, and most especially their overnight challenges of having to stay up all night at a restaurant or major retailer, and whose videos in that category went viral. Their video of them attempting to spend 24 hours at the world's largest McDonald's restaurant just up the road from Walt Disney World in Orlando garnered over 23 million views, among the nearly 400 million hits their videos have received.

Twitter @DylanPolley

Lastly, there's the least well-known of the trio we're meeting: Dylan Polley, who likes to call himself "DAD" despite being the youngest member of this group having being born on August 31, 2001 and still can't open a bank account, vote in an election, buy a lotto ticket or get drunk in Canada or in Europe. He grew up in Laguna Beach, CA, but was only three years old when this Orange County town became the focal point of America's attention as where the tale of The Hills began.
   Dylan only has a fraction of Steezy and Rohan's amount of followers and views in having only 2.8 million video hits and nearly 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, but it doesn't mean that Dylan has also garnered a notoriety on there. On YouTube, his most notable videos have seen him give kids money in front of their parents, doing what he can to impress the ladies, and the video that started it all for Dylan when he did a bottle flip onto the balcony of his house... which was posted in May 2016, older than his colleagues here.
   But for any lack of big reach on YouTube, Dylan has been able to make up for it on Instagram, where he has a larger following on there than anywhere else. The "DAD" acronym he refers to himself as actually means in its larger wording, "D__k Around Dylan." And it's on IG that he's been able to push the envelope a bit more in posting pictures featuring an inflatable private part around town. It's so much so that we can't even embed anything from that site to include in this post.

Back in March, Steezy got to welcome Rohan and DAD to his Austin digs for the annual intersection of music, pop culture and technology known as the South By Southwest festival, where they partook in the festivities of the Texas state capital city's single biggest event. They got to obsess over Steezy's newly YouTube award, where Dylan got a new Dad hat months before Father's Day, spent some quality time away from the madness in downtown walking with the animals in the local park, and made use of that megaphone while driving around town.
   One day, they decided to go to the Barton Creek Square mall near the University of Texas campus, where all three got to congregate. And given how social media can figure out where their favorite celebrities or people are at all times nowadays, the scene below in the YouTube chronicle of their meet-up shows the guys with a collective social media following of 1.7 million on YouTube and 475,000 on Instagram being inundated by the young kids as they were members of BTS, and taking pictures with them too.

Cody (2nd R) w/ Steezy, DAD & Rohan (@CodyDunlap)

Another person who also go to meet the guys is also why were featuring this YouTube trio here in the first place: two years ago at this time, the lone season of MTV's foray into survivalist-style reality competition shows, Stranded with a Million Dollars, wrapped up with the four remaining islanders marooned on an island in Fiji gaining their equal share of a nearly $500,000 prize fund -- Nashville news reporter Alex Apple, San Diego bartender Gina Lam, the girl who we saw last month on Naked & Afraid Makani Nalu, and along with Alex the other key figure in the drama in the South Pacific, Texas paratrooper Cody Dunlap.
   Cody may be best remembered as the guy who took off his pants and did some business into the water system that served as the group's principal source of water, which epitomized the rivalry he had with Alex, which saw the group of ten that began that 40-day ordeal in Fiji split themselves up between the two figures, and was the overarching storyline of Stranded. Since he rode on that helicopter that sent them to safety and gave each of them a $124,000 paycheck for surviving that month in the wild, Cody has turned his attention to becoming an eBay reseller and an enthusiast in sports betting that saw him be one of those handful who actually followed the Alliance of American Football. And last month, he and his girlfriend Autumn Maurer become Mr. & Mrs. Dunlap.
   And just days before he donned a wedding ring, Cody ran into Steezy, Rohan and DAD while on the UT Austin campus. His caption: "LETS GOOOO!!!!"  Maybe another job of working with this trio could be at hand for Mr. Thrive? Don't bet against it...

View this post on Instagram

LETS GOOOO!!!!

A post shared by Cody Thrive (@codythrive) on Mar 11, 2019 at 5:21pm PDT

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