He grew up with kiddie pools in the attic catching roof leaks and frost forming on the inside of his bedroom wall, and today 1.33 million people watch him drag dead cars out of Iowa fence rows. Kevin Brown runs Junkyard Digs out of Ames, two hours up the road from the barn, and this one is mostly about what being broke actually builds.

The house sagged corner to corner and the ceiling collapsed while the family was gone for a weekend. Four of them lived in one room of an office building in town, no walls, three beds, for three years of his high school life. His dad pulled his entire 401k to put up a shell so they could finish the inside themselves. He paid for Iowa State by joining the National Guard as a Chinook mechanic, deployed to Kuwait and Iraq, and built the channel from a cot on government internet. He came home with 130,000 subscribers and two paychecks.

His rule is the part worth sitting with. He would not quit engineering school until the channel paid double an engineer's starting salary. He says the first time in his life he felt safe was the day the math cleared, not the day the subscribers did.

The farming is the cheapest operation in this state. Four and a half acres, a John Deere 620 with three gallons of gas in the oil pan, a $500 planter, and a 6600 combine he bought for $2,200 and drove home. He put $212 into inputs one year and sold the crop for $2,000.

Also in this one: only 3 percent of channels ever crack 100,000 subscribers, a million Shorts views that paid $412, copper at a record and the wire in your grain bin, and why his dad said the 1980s sucked while his buddy's dad called them the best years of his life.

His advice at the end sounds exactly like his dad: do not put your hands in your pockets. Learn to work hard and you will not fail in life.

What do you want us to dig into next week? Drop it in the comments and we read them.

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THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

● Propane Farm Research Program ➱ propane.com/farmfunding

● AcreEdge Soil NXT ➱ acreedge.com

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Cold open and guest introduction

04:25 800 shirts in three weeks for a stranger's roof

13:22 Sponsor break, Propane Farm Research Program

14:16 Kiddie pools in the attic, frost inside the walls

16:08 Four people, one room, three years

16:35 What being broke gave him that money never could

21:27 The Guard paid for college, so he fixed Chinooks

25:12 Building a channel on Army internet in Iraq

27:00 Home with 130,000 subs and two paychecks

30:47 Sponsor break, AcreEdge Soil NXT

33:15 No quitting until it paid double an engineer