The worst thing I've made is the only thing that works

Before anything else, a correction.

Last week I told you video one was five weeks old. It wasn’t. It was sixteen days old. I got that wrong in two places, and then helpfully attached the wrong view count to it as well. The worse bit wasn’t even the mistake. I spotted it about three minutes after the email went out, swore at myself, fixed it on the website and carried on. So the version sitting in your inbox says one thing, the website says another, and until now I hadn’t actually told you. That is exactly the sort of quiet little repair this newsletter is supposed not to do. So there it is. I cocked it up. Fixed now, out loud.

Now the thing I actually sat down to write.

I had a theory, and I was rather pleased with it, which should probably have been the first warning. My theory was that my videos were dying because I kept putting AI all over the thumbnails. The first video did well. No robot, no gadget, no AI baby. Just my face and a number. Everything after that had laptops, AI agents, Baby Mark, screens, tools, all the clever shit. And everything after that sank. Lovely. Clean diagnosis. Problem solved.

So I made two videos without any of it. No AI on the thumbnail. Just me and a sentence. They are the two worst-performing videos on the channel. Brilliant.

Here is the whole channel as of this morning.

The bottom two are the two I made specifically to test my clever little theory. So once again, I took half the picture, built a confident explanation around it, and then reality wandered in and kicked it in the nuts.

And the top one keeps climbing, which is making this more annoying.

Video one was on 605 views on Wednesday, 723 on Friday, and 843 this morning. Nobody is sharing it. I haven’t touched it since August. It is just sitting there, quietly picking up forty to sixty views a day, twenty-four days after I uploaded it. It now has more views than everything else I’ve made put together, several times over.

And here’s the really irritating bit. It is also the worst video I’ve made. It takes thirty-three seconds to explain what the bloody channel is even about. There’s a wrong date on the thumbnail. I would probably bin it tomorrow if it wasn’t the only thing actually working. Four attempts to make another one. Not one of them close.

There is one caveat. YouTube is currently warning creators that it has changed how some views are counted, so I’m not pretending the numbers are carved into stone tablets. The direction is real. I just wouldn’t remortgage the house based on the exact size of it.

So what the hell is actually working?

It took a screenshot of my own channel for me to finally see it. The video that works isn’t the one where I explain a tool. It’s the one where I actually say something I mean. Just under two minutes in, I talk about the cage. The cage isn’t locked. It’s comfortable. And being comfortable is exactly what makes it a cage.

That is probably the best thing I’ve said in any of these videos. Average viewer leaves at one minute sixteen. Thirty-six seconds before I get there. Which is, frankly, hilarious. The one thing worth hearing is buried inside the one video people actually watch, and most of them bugger off before I say it. There’s the whole problem.

So here’s what this actually is, properly stated for the first time.

This is not a channel about AI tools. It is not a media company. It is not me trying to become some fucking productivity guru with a ring light. It’s a bloke in his fifties who did pretty much everything he was told to do, looks reasonably successful on paper, and keeps wondering why the life all of that was supposed to buy is permanently being pushed back another year.

So I’m trying to build a way out. Eight hours a week. No idea what I’m doing. Learning in public. And there is a very real chance I eventually sell up, move to Thailand and see what happens. That’s it. That’s the whole bloody thing.

Which brings me to Sunday.

This is the last one of these that arrives because a calendar told me to write it. I’m not stopping the newsletter. I’m stopping the schedule. Because the schedule was making it worse.

Every Sunday I’ve sat down and tried to manufacture evidence that a meaningful week happened, whether one did or not. And three issues in a row have basically ended with me shrugging and saying I’ll have a think. That isn’t honesty. That’s a man filling a slot.

The slightly ridiculous part is I’m not sitting here with nothing to do. I’m also halfway through redesigning TidyDesign.shop, which is currently swallowing a fair chunk of my time and proving, yet again, that every “quick little project” on the internet is a lying bastard.

So between Tidy, YouTube, the newsletter and actual life, I don’t need a Sunday deadline standing over me asking whether I’ve manufactured enough progress to justify an email.

So there’s no Sunday anymore. No fortnightly either. This will turn up when something actually happens that’s worth writing eight hundred words about. Could be twice in one week. Could be nothing for a month.

And I’m retiring the whole “every number published” thing as well, because that turned out to be another schedule in a cheap disguise. It created this stupid obligation to always have something worth measuring.

I don’t.

Sometimes fuck-all happens.

So from here: no schedule, no fake momentum, no promises to perform progress on command. Just what actually happened.

The numbers, and then I’ll leave you alone.

Still absolutely smashing it.

No question this week either.

Last week I asked you to choose one of three doors and tell me which one you’d put your money on. Nobody answered. Fair enough. Because in hindsight, what I was really doing was asking twenty-three people to do my thinking for me.

So I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve picked one.

It’s door one. Content. Which is comfortably the hardest of the three, and I know it. It’s also the only one still standing until I work something else out.

It might be right. It might be complete bollocks.

You’ll find out roughly when I do.

— Mark

The Escape Report documents one person’s attempt to build a way out of the cage in his fifties — the real numbers, the mistakes, and what actually happened. No schedule. It arrives when there’s something to say.

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