He Learned to Weld in Prison. Now He’s Teaching Kids to Build a Future.

How Joe L. Brown, Jr. turned a $100-an-hour welding ad into a 200,000-follower platform — and why Chicago’s META24 initiative is putting him in front of the next generation.

Joe L. Brown, Jr. was fourteen the first time the system got hold of him. By sixteen, he was in prison — and he’d stay there for the next ten years.

He tells that part of his story plainly, without asking for sympathy. What he wants people to hear is what happened next. Inside, he had a choice to make about who he was going to be, and he made it. He got into serious trouble early on and spent time in solitary. Word got back to his mother — and instead of panic, she felt something close to relief. She’d been afraid of what could happen to her son in there. Now she wanted to give him something to hold onto.

She found it on a TV commercial. It mentioned welders making $100 an hour. That was the number that caught Joe’s attention — and it’s the reason he’s spent the twenty-one years since building a life around a torch and a helmet.

Learning to read came first

Before Joe could get into the prison’s welding program, he had to earn a GED — and before that, he had to learn to read. An older man inside, a man Joe still calls Charlie Rock, sat with him and taught him, session by session, while other guys were out on the yard. That relationship is the reason Joe can run a business, write curriculum, and stand in front of a classroom today. He says it plainly: without Charlie Rock, none of the rest happens.

Welding gave Joe something structured, skill-based, and entirely his own to build. He stayed with it for the rest of his sentence and came out with a trade in hand.

From job sites to 200,000 followers

Joe worked for other people for a decade after his release — Arkansas to Washington State and back — before starting his own venture in 2016 under the name Hogon Welding. He wasn’t trying to build an audience. He was documenting jobs.

That changed when an older mentor told him people would listen if he started sharing more of himself on camera. Joe was reluctant. He posted anyway. When he came back to Arkansas in 2022, he rebuilt the brand as Your Welding Coach and kept posting — job sites, technique breakdowns, the occasional one-minute clip on how to safely light a torch.

That one clip is now past 6 million views. Joe’s YouTube channel alone has grown past 70,000 subscribers, with tens of thousands more across TikTok and Instagram — over 200,000 followers in total. He says the reason isn’t complicated: people saw someone who looked and sounded like them teaching a skill they didn’t think was available to them. Schools now use his videos as instructional material in their own programs.

Full circle at Arkansas Baptist College

Today, Joe teaches through META24 — a Chicago-founded workforce initiative (the name stands for Make Enterprise Teach and Achieve) that partners with schools and community organizations to move people from limited options into real trades and businesses. Through that partnership, Joe runs the welding program at Arkansas Baptist College.

The program doesn’t stop at technique. Students move through a structured block — six weeks of TIG, six weeks of MIG and flux core, seven weeks of stick — paired with metal fabrication, blueprint reading, and assembly, so graduates come out able to build, not just weld. Joe pairs every technical block with what he calls the ten things: character habits like showing up on time and holding yourself accountable, the fundamentals he says will get someone hired — or fired — faster than any weld ever will.

Some of his students come through the same juvenile and reentry pipelines Joe did. That’s not incidental to the program — it’s the point. Joe says watching someone with his background stand in front of a class and say “I did this, so can you” changes what students believe is possible for themselves before a single torch gets lit.

That’s the work Chicago recognized him for: not just building a following, but building a pipeline that turns a hard start into a real trade, a real income, and — for some of his students — a real way out.

“Don’t despise the day of small beginnings. The person who might not look like what you think they should be might be the very same one who comes back to save you.”

Joe Brown Jr.