Quitting, and what you land in.

Mad Mark deleted 540 videos and came back bigger than before. Thomas Howell is about to become a father, and there is exactly one hobby he refuses to let turn into income.

Trailmark 25 · 10 September 2024

Mad Mark

Five hundred forty deleted videos, six weeks gone, and a stranger's homemade mug in the post.

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Episode 25 · 1:28:00

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Mad Mark lives in a van and works as a nomadic tradesman, chasing building jobs up and down the country whenever the local work in Portsmouth dries up. YouTube runs alongside all of it, and by his own account it has never once been the point.

In April he deleted five hundred and forty videos and disappeared for six weeks, for legal reasons he flatly refuses to discuss, the way a man mentions a bad tooth he's already had pulled. He calls it getting ghosted, though he was the one doing the ghosting. Then he came back, and within three weeks he was monetised again, and things have apparently never been better. A subscriber tracked down his PO box and mailed him a package of merchandise, Mad Mark mugs, Mad Mark t-shirts, that Mark had no idea existed until he was standing in the Portsmouth post office holding it.

He tells this whole story with the same flat cheer he'd use to describe a good breakfast. No mourning for the five hundred and forty videos, no anxiety about whatever the legal reason actually was. He burned the entire channel down and walked back into a bigger one, and as far as I can tell it never once occurred to him that it might not work out.

Trailmark 43 · 13 July 2026

Thomas R.
Howell

A baby due any month now, and one hobby he is refusing to let anyone turn into a job.

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Episode 43 · 1:05:00

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Thomas Howell films weddings for a living and has a baby on the way, which by his own telling has mostly made him grateful the wedding season runs in the fall. Books are the day job's shadow, a channel and a career built on talking about what he reads. Dungeons and Dragons, he says, might matter to him even more than the books do.

A viewer left a comment thanking him for having a hobby he hadn't monetised, and it apparently lodged in him like a splinter. He brought up crocheting, unprompted, a genuinely lovely couple who turned their crochet and their reading into a channel and made it work. Then he said, more or less, that if Dungeons and Dragons ever became his job too he would hate it, and he meant it the way you mean something you've actually thought through at three in the morning.

Put the two of them side by side and the asymmetry is almost funny. Mark detonated five hundred and forty videos and a whole channel's history and never broke stride, remonetised inside three weeks, mugs and all. Thomas is standing guard over one table, one set of dice, one Tuesday night with friends, terrified of exactly the thing Mark treats as a Tuesday. Neither one is wrong. They are just answering completely different questions about what a life is actually for.