Will Perez Interview: Inside Steven Bartlett's 'Behind The Diary', Building a 400K YouTube Channel & Creative Career Advice
Who is Will Perez?
Will Perez is the lead filmmaker for Steven Bartlett and the creator behind Behind The Diary, the YouTube channel documenting the world of Diary of a CEO, which he grew from zero to more than 400,000 subscribers.
- Role: Lead filmmaker, Steven Bartlett / Diary of a CEO
- Channel: Behind The Diary — 400,000+ YouTube subscribers
- Started: 2022, aged 21, after dropping out of the University of Edinburgh
- Based: London, UK
- Background: Started a photography business at 16
He started his first photography business at sixteen, dropped out of university two weeks after a phone call from Diary of a CEO co-founder Jack Sylvester, and has spent the last three and a half years filming Bartlett across 54 flights in 54 weeks — for most of that time as a team of one.
We asked him about getting hired, building an audience from scratch, what AI actually changes for creatives, and the advice he'd give anyone trying to break in.
How a school detention started a photography career
You started your first photography business at just 16 and later dropped out of university. Looking back, what was the biggest turning point that got you to where you are today?
Let me take you back to when I was sixteen. I was sat at the back of my design technology class editing on my phone. It was a photo I'd taken at the zoo with my dad's camera. And I was using this time to tone curve, split tone and crop until I heard a voice from across the room.
"William, are you texting down there?!"
It was our teacher, Mr Williams. He'd caught me red handed. By the time I look up, he's already there, taking my phone away from me.
"Come back at the end of class."
That time rolled around, and I walked up with my tail sheepishly behind my legs. Expecting the usual detention, phone call home, or confiscation until the end of the day. But as I was stood there at the front of the classroom, looking at my phone in his hand, something really special happened. Mr Williams looked at the phone, then at me, and turned it around with the screen on. He showed me my lock screen and said, "Will, who took this photograph?" I told him I did. He stepped back in thought, and said:
"Brilliant. Well, I want you to go away and try these three photography challenges. Take the images. Come back and show me them next week. Oh, and don't do this in class, you idiot. Off you go."
I was in total shock. Instead of walking out with a detention, I walked out with the start of what I now consider to be my career as a creative.
You see, up until then, I'd been hiding it — this passion thing of mine. I'd pretend to be in a meeting at break so I didn't get bullied for carrying a camera around. At 16 I'd turn up to shoot a wedding and the groom would ask me when the photographer was arriving. It felt like Mr Williams gave me permission. Permission to go and experiment, to go and learn, and have someone tell me, "Hey, this is good. That is bad. Try again."
I look back at that and I ask myself why I was so embarrassed about doing the thing in the first place. And today I really pride myself on the fact that when it's cringe, when it's difficult, when it's unorthodox, that is probably exactly where I need to be. If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, you will likely produce the same results as everyone else. I think it's always cringe until it works. I'm very glad that Mr Williams, at that early stage, kind of shook me out of my cage and said, "Hey, come on. You need to go pursue this thing."
How Will Perez landed the job filming Steven Bartlett
You're now the lead filmmaker for Steven Bartlett. How did that opportunity actually come about, and what do you think made you stand out?
So I was 21 at the University of Edinburgh, and I'd spent most of my time trying to get out. I had this sinking feeling that we were all doomed at university after watching half of my classmates sleep their way through lectures. And I felt like I wasn't really going to go anywhere from this.
Until one day when I got a phone call from a guy called Jack Sylvester, co-founder of Diary of a CEO. He was looking for a filmmaker for a new channel. They'd just let their old videographer go after a few weeks. Jack, on the phone, detailed filming seven days a week, everywhere, documenting an entrepreneur's worldwide story. I'd spent much of the last three years at university desperately trying to get out and find new work.
This was exactly what I wanted. But then he asked where I was based. "Edinburgh," I said cheerfully. "Oh, damn." They wanted someone to start as soon as possible, in London.
So after that call, I spent two hours crafting a hail mary text. It said something like: this opportunity is more important to me than my degree, I'll relocate next week, please know my priority is to start.
I sent that on a Wednesday. By Friday, I'd got the offer. By the following Wednesday, I'd dropped out of university, and by the following Friday, I was in an office in Shoreditch on my first day at 21.
I look back at that moment, and I actually don't think it was my technical ability that got me the role. It was an understanding that they just wanted someone who could move quickly, handle the uncertainty, and get started. I'd also done similar work to this before — kind of run and gun, very hard to predict, content style with a previous CEO that I'd worked for, so I also think that gave me credibility.
But really, this wasn't about being the best technical editor in the world; that was going to be determined in the first three months of working there. What they were really looking for is aptitude and attitude: someone who could deal with the uncertainty of what this role would provide, treat it with excitement, and try and solve some of their early problems for them — relocation, getting started, all those kinds of things.
I always think this when I speak to people who are applying for jobs: you must think of a way to become memorable for them in the sea of CVs and applications that they're going to be receiving. Humans are actually often very illogical and emotional, and you need to give them something exciting to think about when they think of you.
Ask yourself: what can I do that no one else will do? For me, that was the story I was giving them, and that I would drop out of university for this. I knew that would appeal to their ideology.
I also got immensely lucky - let's not lie here.
How Behind The Diary grew from 0 to 400,000 YouTube subscribers
Behind The Diary has grown from zero to more than 400,000 YouTube subscribers. What's been the biggest lesson you've learned about creating content that people genuinely want to watch?
It's that you can't achieve the things you want in theory.
The only difference between you and these creators that you look up to, or the entrepreneurs who run businesses, is that they've simply done the thing, done the thing badly, done the thing badly again for a consistent period of time until they have had no choice but to learn.
I experienced this myself first-hand. I had no experience in YouTube publishing and editing before, but I had to learn. It was just me for the first year, shooting and editing all hours of the day, and publishing on YouTube for a cadence that I couldn't really sustain. I quite literally had no choice but to learn, and I learnt in that process simply by doing.
For the first year and a half, I would shoot from 9:00am until about 9:00pm, editing throughout the day as we went. Then at 9:00pm, I would lock into some editing until about 4:00am, and on Sunday we would publish the episode. Now, if you do that for about 30 weeks, yes, you end up exhausted, but you also end up with a shit tonne of evidence and experience in doing the thing that you felt like you couldn't do at the start.
Will Perez's five-step content creation cycle
- Ideate — Come up with the idea. Think big picture about what this could be.
- Create — Paint, write, create, produce.
- Iterate — Edit, amend, revise, and make sure it's as perfect as it can be.
- Publish — Get it out into the world. This has to happen. Fail publicly, embarrass yourself publicly. I'm not saying send this to your family group chat. I'm saying put it there for the world to see.
- Learn — Spend as much time in the analytics of your content as you do creating it. Ask yourself why certain things are happening. For Behind The Diary, we understood when we would get a 1% spike in retention versus a 2% drop, because I'd spent so many hours in the analytics obsessing over what was happening.
That is the cycle. What you learn, you take forward, and that consistency in creation means you are constantly evolving as a creative. As I said, you can't do any of this in theory. You have to put it all into practice. Be willing to be bad. Be willing to publish your worst work and just understand that these things take time to compound.
What Steven Bartlett is really like behind the scenes
Everyone sees the polished final videos, but what's something people would be shocked to learn about filming with Steven Bartlett behind the scenes?
It's that the busiest man I know was never in a hurry.
That's the thing I still can't quite get over. Three years, 54 flights in 54 weeks, and I don't think I ever once saw him rush. Sydney, 15 minutes before he walks on stage to 2,500 people, he's in the greenroom with a black Sharpie writing fan names on his palm so he can deliver a point directly to one person in that room.
I watched him take an urgent, genuinely bad text from a business partner in a greenroom, put the phone down, walk out on stage, do the talk, then meet a hundred people afterwards and stay completely level. He has a remarkable ability to compartmentalise stress and context switch between situations.
People assume the calm comes from having 120 staff and a machine behind him. For most of the three years the behind-the-scenes team was one person, and it was me. The calm isn't resource. It's that he doesn't spend time in the middle. Most of your week isn't lost on things that don't matter, it's lost on things that sort of matter — and he'd asked himself a question I've stolen since: how many of the meetings I take are just for ego?
The shocking thing isn't the private jets or the boardrooms. It's how much of the work happens in silence, hours before anyone claps.
What working with Steven Bartlett taught me about feedback
You've worked incredibly closely with Steven. What's one habit or mindset you've picked up from him that's completely changed how you approach your own career?
Over the last three and a half years, I've got to a place where I understand that your relationship with feedback determines your partnership with success.
Steven pushes harder than anyone I've worked with. I need to be honest about saying "he pushed me," because it sounds like a compliment and at the time it wasn't. He sets you a mission, brings you onto it, and then asks for something you're fairly sure is impossible. It was tough at points. I hated him at times, for reasons that felt entirely irrational.
Often, if you are a creative, the work you produce is a small part of you. As a result, despite its intention, if you pour your heart and soul into something, feedback does feel personal. You've poured hours into something, and being told it's not good enough can often sound like you are not good enough.
I learned in that environment that whilst feedback at first might feel personal, your response must always be practical.
I remember calling my dad early on, properly frustrated, and he said one thing that reframed the process. I was on the phone there, wondering what to do with the feedback I'd just been given, and my dad stopped me and said:
"If he didn't think you could do it, he wouldn't have set you the task. It's a lot easier to fire someone than to hand them the privilege of doing something better."
Once I understood that, the frustration stopped being about him. It turned into fuel, because the game I was actually playing this whole time was me versus me. It's like I suddenly realised — ohhhh, you're just making me prove to me I can do better. That's a much easier game to play.
That's his real skill. He's not motivating you. He's setting you challenges that are seemingly impossible, giving you the road to complete them, and handing you, as a consequence of that, an immense sense of self-belief once you've achieved the thing.
Should filmmakers and content creators be worried about AI?
AI is changing creative industries at an incredible pace. Do you think aspiring filmmakers and content creators should be worried, or excited?
I'm excited. In fact, I probably spend about 50% of my day building or using AI. If the worry here is that it's going to replace you, then frankly I don't think you're focused on the right thing.
What's actually changed is the barrier to entry. You no longer need a six-year degree and a twelve-thousand-pound laptop. AI has democratised the tools that previously were held behind a £30,000 student loan.
So the question I often ask myself instead is: if making things got easier, what got harder?
A friend of mine built a digital product last year. Genuinely brilliant, beautifully made, and enormously complicated. I used it, got frustrated, and rebuilt it for myself with all the friction stripped out. Same problem with a fraction of the moving parts. When I showed him mine he said, "Wow, that's so simple." Exactly. We keep assuming people want complexity. They want a problem solved, without thinking.
That's what got harder. Taste, and understanding the person you're making it for. And taste doesn't come from tools, it comes from a wide palette. Poetry, music, architecture, whatever it is. It's understanding human psychology and first-principle thinking to really reason up from what your customer or audience actually wants. If your entire influence is the Explore page, you're going to make things that look like the Explore page.
I typically think that the romantics never win in history. The people who were romantic about the way that the printing press worked probably didn't survive when computers came along. The people who were romantic about how pigeons used to fly across the sky with notes attached to their leg probably didn't survive either. I think the better question to ask is: if this is happening, what changes and what do I need to learn as a result? In my mind, that is taste. If creation gets very easy, knowing what to create becomes harder.
The risk I see with AI isn't that it's going to replace us. It's that our standards for what to create are going to drop. There's a line I saved months ago that I love, from @grantbeans on Instagram:
The danger I see is not that machines are learning to paint or tell stories, but that man is forgetting why those things were ever worth doing. The human soul does not hunger for perfect imitation, but for the quiet testimony of another soul.
So yeah, bear that in mind, but also focus on improving your taste, and understand that your fear of what is coming is likely due to your understanding of what it could do for you. Lean in, learn, and most of all, develop your taste.
What skills should aspiring filmmakers learn today?
If someone wanted your job in five years' time, what skills should they start learning today?
You need to get really fucking good at observing.
The biggest risk in this job isn't a bad camera, it's complacency. The moment you think you know a person or a room, you stop seeing it. When a guest arrives at Diary of a CEO I'm reading where their hands go, what they're wearing, where they're looking. I think assumption kills creativity, because you start assuming that you know what the audience wants, what your subject is feeling, or what's happening in front of you — and you stop observing. I try never to guess how Steven's feeling. I try to notice. I obsessively study whatever is happening in front of me: facial expressions, small details, reflections, different perspectives that I could take.
Then two things I learned simply by repeatedly getting them wrong.
The first is speed. There's this famous idea in freelancing that you can either have it good, cheap, or fast, and you can only pick two on those triangles. Working with Steve proved to me that you can actually do all three if you're willing to hold preconceptions about how things are usually done very loosely.
For example, when Steven would speak on stages or we'd have events throughout the day, my job, amongst filming, would be to shoot and capture photography of the entire event, edit them wherever I can — on my phone or on a floor on my laptop — and deliver them into a photos folder for him. Typically, by the time he sat back down in the car after the event, he should have those images with him.
In order to get to that place, I basically had to learn to work as fast as possible and edit and deliver at a speed that, when I first joined the job, I would have said was physically impossible. I think a lot of our creative process is romantic, and we obsess about making something perfect, because if it's not perfect it feels like we are not good enough.
I have understood now that my job is not to make something perfect. It's to serve what this person wants, which at the time was 1,500 images delivered in the car by the time he sat down. I think one of the greatest skills you can have as a creative is holding assumptions about how things are done very loosely, and finding ways to get to the outcome by understanding very clearly what someone wants from first principles.
Five years is enough time to become genuinely excellent at any of the technical stuff. Cameras, software, colour — all of it is learnable in months now. Nobody is going to hand you a channel because you know a piece of software. They'll hand it to you because you noticed the thing in the room that nobody else did, and you got it back to them before they asked.
The biggest mistake young creatives make
Looking back at your younger self, what's one mistake you made that you'd encourage every aspiring creative to avoid?
I'm 24, so I'm very much still figuring this out, but there's one feeling I deal with very often, and it's the sense that I am rushing life.
To understand this, I'll take you back to a conversation I had with Steve in Los Angeles. We were driving back from a football session where we'd been training together, and in the car he was asking me about the YouTube channel. I began my usual spiel about how I thought we were doing okay, but there was so much more to do. If only this could happen, then that could happen, and I felt like I was at 20% of my potential. I rambled on and on. Until he stopped me and said:
"Will, you are going to do great things, but you need to be short-term impatient and long-term patient."
I think one of the things we forget at my age is that we have so much time left, and doing exceptional, great things takes a lot of that time. But we don't have any reference points, and we are so trained on instant gratification that often we can feel frustrated that things we want and the goals we are working towards aren't coming as quickly as we want them to.
There are two sides to what he said here that I think are really important:
- Short-term impatient means you are urgent, you are obsessive, you are trying to get things done as quickly as you can, and you work really hard.
- Long-term patient means understanding that really great things take a long time to produce. You need to be able to sit in that uncertainty and continue to do the work, and continue to be urgent in the short term.
I think this is also a really useful lens through which you can frame your present anxieties or worries. I often find myself asking my brain, "Is what I'm worried about a short-term impatient problem or a long-term patience problem?" If it's a short-term impatience problem, that often means I can solve it, or do the action that relieves the pressure. If the worry is stemming from a long-term problem that just requires patience, I tell myself there is actually nothing I can do right now that is going to solve that, so I just must let it go. Having some way to distinguish between the two feelings helps resolve some of the anxiety within your brain.
How to build a creative career from scratch in 30 days
If you suddenly had to start from scratch tomorrow, with no audience, no contacts and no portfolio, what would your first 30 days look like?
I think one of the traps that people fall into when they start from zero is that they convince themselves that they just lack confidence before starting. And they sit there and wait for this confidence to arrive at the end of a vision board or the end of a journal prompt, and only then will they be ready to proceed.
I don't think confidence is a decision. I've understood the theory of self-perception, which tells us that the brain doesn't assign our beliefs from what we tell it to believe. The brain assigns us our beliefs by literally watching what we do, our actions, and how we live — and from those actions, assigning us a set of beliefs about who we are in this world.
So if your brain has been sat there watching you doom scroll, or watching you vision board, it's probably going to think you're really good at those things.
So when you're starting from zero and you need to gain confidence, understand that what you really need here is evidence. I would spend the first 30 days doing as many random shoots as I could, connecting with as many people as I could, going to local bakeries and local businesses asking them if they needed photography for free or at a hugely reduced rate. I would just shoot, execute, and send it to them at the highest possible standard I could, as many times as I could.
The goal here is to gain more evidence that you can do the thing. Because confidence is just the receipt to evidence that you've collected that you are who you say you are in this world. No one is just more confident than you. They just have more evidence.
Three questions for any career decision
Finally, what's one piece of advice you'd give someone reading Sam's Social Media Club who's trying to break into social media, content creation or filmmaking?
An 18-year-old messaged me a few months ago, stuck between a hard job that was pushing him and a comfortable in-house role. Reading it back, the language gave the whole thing away. When he described the hard job: stuck, hectic, rushed, quality's dropping. When he described the opportunity in it: growth, development, world class.
I sent him three questions I now use on myself. Three W's.
1. What do you want?
What do you actually want from this stage? Is it money? Is it impact, speed, recognition, or mastery? What do you want your life to actually feel like at this stage? This question is really important to start with, because often we will say, "I want to have a YouTube channel with a million subscribers, but I want to feel like I can just work a 9-to-5 and not be under any stress." Those two things are in direct conflict. So think about it. Do you believe you can get that here?
2. What if it works?
What happens if all this work pays off? If you do the thing, you get what you want, and down the line you arrive at that finish line thinking, "Man, I got the thing I wanted" — what happens there? Is the potential upside worth the inevitable hardship to get there? Who will you be at that stage, and does that matter to you? Does that excite you?
3. What do you do now?
Give it everything. If you know what you want and you can see it's available where you are, it won't come and find you. What is the next smallest action that you can take in the pursuit of what you want? Do it.
But there's a catch here, and it's that you will never have all three at the same time. You'll know exactly what you want and see the opening clearly, and the work will feel impossible. Or you'll grind daily with no idea if it's leading anywhere.
That's the deal. There's no version where the doubt clears first and then you begin. You just have to answer those three questions and keep moving forward.
What people get wrong about Steven Bartlett
What's one thing people assume about working with Steven Bartlett that's completely wrong?
I think often people see Steven Bartlett online and forget that there is Steve behind all the polish, all the health metrics and the incredible podcasts. One of the privileges I've had over the last three and a half years is seeing what he's truly like: how funny he can be, how great his taste in music is, how normal and human he is behind closed doors. I think we forget on social media that we are seeing 0.1% of someone's life — and of that 0.1%, you are seeing 100% of the best parts.
So I just always tell people that he's really funny, and we have had so many laughs on the road, through silent looks or hilarious moments where he makes a funny comment. And more often than not, just working in an incredible location, or the back of a car with great music blasting, or singing our lungs out.
I think working hard with the wrong people feels like hard work, but the core team around Steve just truly love what they do. That's a really infectious energy to be around. Great people make hard work feel easy, and I feel very lucky to be a part of that.
Follow Will Perez and Behind The Diary on YouTube.
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