I Work For Steven Bartlett - Here's What I Learned: Will Perez

0:00I'm Steven Bartlett's lead filmmaker in Editeb. She calls me and she says, Are you fucking crazy? Or what? I was dropping out of my second year of university in Edinburgh. Tried to go to Gymshark, got rejected, must have sent a thousand email pictures for docuseries. All of them got rejected. Last year we did 54 flights in 54 weeks. 45 episodes, 15 million views and 400 ,000 subscribers. No one cares about your story. You have to assume that people know, you have to assume that people care and you have to assume that people want to stay. They'll throw someone off a building with a paraglider. And then at the end, he drinks a Red Bull.

0:30There's a critical problem. It doesn't click. If you can outwork and you can outcare, then you'll outlast. I truly think I've been granted like the best job in the world. I don't think there's anyone who will work with the same tenacity. But I then say tomorrow you're going to wake up and work for Stephen Bartlett. What would they not like about it?

0:52Will, we have a meeting. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me on, you guys. It's a real privilege to be here. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. So big open question. Who are you and what problem do you solve? My name is Will Perez. I'm Stephen Bartlett's lead filmmaker and editor. And the problem I solve is that I help people understand that no one cares about their story. Truly, no one cares about your story. Now, to understand this, you should know that storytelling is truly at the heart of every single thing you do. how you speak to your partner, how you pitch your business, how you create an edit.

1:27So in the work I do on YouTube editing for Stephen and Behind the Diary on the behind the scenes channel, for me, it's really about understanding how do I find the story? How do I make sure I give the audience the context and the values that they stay watching, and then make sure we distribute it at kind of a consistent scale. So that's the problem I solve. Nice. So we know what good looks like. So if anyone's ever seen behind the diary, we know what good looks like. If I'm watching what bad looks like, what are probably going to be the things that flare up of somebody telling a bad story? To tell a bad story, you have to make three assumptions.

2:02You have to assume that people know. You have to assume that people care. And you have to assume that people want to stay. So let's work the opposite of that. What makes a really, really good story? Assume people don't know. Give them as much context as possible. we do this in every single way we do this in every single story we tell so from the way we open a scene we tell people this is where we are this is who this person is and this is what this meeting is about if the audience don't know how on earth are they going to care because whilst you're giving me your framework for the 10 steps of xyz i'm trying to figure out who's this woman sat next so the brain needs context in order to engage the second thing is we assume that they don't know they don't know the business you're talking about they don't know what the framework really means so we take time to like truly explain the value proposition to someone in an edit and the last thing they don't have any time they have no reason to stay if you run through this framework in your head that we always use with the work i do with steve where you put your piece of content in a story you say okay this woman has broken down on the side of a road it's raining she's late to her hair appointment her kids are screaming in the back car's broken down she opens the door it's pissing with rain she opens the phone and your piece of content is there what would you have to do to make her stay and if you understand your audience through that environment you will obsess over the smallest details to keep them watching to keep them retained i see so many edits and so many stories nowadays that start with like even podcasts they start with this like seven minute opening monologue yeah so i've been doing and it's like you're gone instantly you just assume that people care because we're used to traditional formats we're used to sitting in a cinema giving them two hours of time but on youtube it's a very different game they are 0.1 second away from the home screen from your competitors video from calling someone else so you need to make sure you give them the context you need to make sure they know what's happening and then you cannot cannot cannot assume that they will give you any more time than they already have those three principles for me are like what define a good story beautiful so it feels like we're an interesting time in in storytelling from a business perspective where let's take an example of meta or Facebook, like when we were all growing up, perhaps I wouldn't have known who Mark Zuckerberg was, but there's like a deliberate play of let's put the figurehead at the top and hear their story as well.

4:25What do you think people should be thinking about when it's brand-led storytelling and then say founder-led storytelling? What are the core differences? Really good question. I think the biggest mistake brands make is that they try and tell the brand story instead of telling a great story and making the brand a part of it. hmm so red bull are a fantastic example of this they they won't open on a 10 second shot of the red bull can slowly opening and it's ice cold they'll throw someone off a building with a paraglider and then at the end he drinks a red bull it's like a prime example of like the story should be exceptional and the brand should enable the story so i think from brand's perspectives understanding again that no one cares about your brand but they care about finding some value in a story can really really help from a founder perspective i guess there's this macro shift that's happened towards over consumption and over distribution of brands so the reason people are now tailoring towards human stories is because there's so much competition you could pick a million different brands the only real differentiator is on a human level who associates with that brand so as for founders people building businesses if they're in the public eye they win the audience because the audience trusts humans and the trust in a human drives the action to a purchase okay my grandmother used to have a saying never let the truth get in the way of a good story and i wonder about with founder-led storytelling are there moments maybe when you think of it from an editing perspective or putting a story together where let's actually round the edges of that a little bit let's let's add something or take something away where does the truth come into good storytelling?

5:59I think the truth is at the heart of it. So humans will always disconnect with something if it's disingenuine. Like you cannot fabricate a good story, but you, maybe the lie that your grandma's referring to for me is in enhancing it. So the decisions you make as an editor, the decisions you make as a storyteller, they're not lies, but they are proven psychological tricks that are going to make sure that someone stays. The foundation should be truth. You can't fabricate the fact that uh when we did an edit on san francisco steve left at 4 a.m and then we did this crazy kind of day with other founders in san francisco you can't fabricate that but you can make it more engaging by perhaps fabricating the jeopardy the sound design the music that keeps people engaged is he going to miss this flight well maybe maybe that's just a bit of tension that we've built in but the foundation is always truth and then you spoke there about like psychological tricks i think every content creator is thinking about retention retention 20 years ago probably wasn't a word that was used it's probably up there with the word delve now and so when you talk about those psychological tricks what what do they look like so i'll give you the the principle first and then from that you'll understand what the the tricks we actually use are the mistake i see a lot of editors and storytellers generally make is that they assume that they're a storyteller i actually think you're a story seller to understand this let's like imagine a real estate agent walking you around a house okay what a real estate agent is going to do is they're going to story sell you they're going to walk you down the drive slowly and they're going to say you see this oak tree on the right this wood is from an isolated forest in japan and your grandfather was a carpenter so i mean this would blow his mind then they're going to speed you into the kitchen.

7:45They're going to whiz through all the features. This is the hot cold tap. These floors are underfloor heated. These windows get light all day. Then they're going to walk you into the cinema, pace you through, and they're going to say, listen to that. It's completely silent. Then they'll race you upstairs. They'll list you through a bunch more features. And then at the end, they might even tell you that for them, this home makes them feel like they're back in the university room where they felt so alive. And then they'll ask you the question, will you purchase the house? You see what a real estate agent understands is that a story is never A to B.

8:14It dies when it's A to B. It's this emotional rollercoaster where you're pushing, you're pulling your audience, you're taking them through this rollercoaster of emotions to get the action you want. What that means for us is that when we're editing, we're not thinking of it as a straight line. It has to be this game of push the tension with pacing cuts, pacing music, sound design, release it with a bit of moment. You really have to ask yourself, like the way I edit is when I'm watching a clip of Steve, if he sat there telling me that he's struggling with something, has he earned that struggle have i as an audience member seen him struggle have i been through moments of tension so that when he sits down on the plane he's like man i'm so exhausted it's that dip and then we build the tension back up how much are you thinking about what's happening in the brain for that emotional roller coaster a lot i think this is one of the best skills that storytellers and editors can learn is that you have to be able to sit in your audience's seat and understand what they're viewing.

9:09The difficulty we have as creatives is that we know the art, we know what we're doing. We know why this is pretty cool and we know all the brand's context. We know the story context. Your audience member doesn't. So the hardest thing, but also the most empowering thing you can do is sit in the perspective of you watching at home and say, who is this guy in the brown jacket? Why the hell should I give him 30 minutes? Why should I give him an hour? And why is this going to change my life in some way? Every single edit for me is like, I am editing it as the creative, but I'm serving the person watching.

9:35So you have to look at it from that perspective. And it comes back to the do they know, do they care, will they stay principles that we mentioned at the start. There's an interesting thing where people will trust a 4.7 Amazon review more than a five star. Everything's absolutely perfect. What role do you think showing people the imperfections plays in making something accessible? I had an editor once tell me he was giving me some really good feedback on the work I do. He said, man, I just want to see Steven lose more. and it sat with me because i realized that so it's so easy for content to become a highlight reel so much of it today is but some of my favorite moments of the work i've done with steve is when you you actually see him struggle a little bit and it's because like as humans we're we relate truly so when we did this last episode which was on behind the diary it's steve talking about how he manages his time we spend the first 30 minutes where he's mastering productivity he's talking about all the principles he uses but then we see him get to mallorca and stay up until 3 a.m working instead of you know dealing with the team because he had urgent business stuff that he needed to do and you see in that moment like oh he doesn't have it figured out so i think for me like people need to feel like they can aspire to you but it also needs to feel somewhat attainable and relatable because they know that they spent three hours doom scrolling last night so if they see your perfection they're not really going to relate so i think it's a really interesting comparison um what was the maybe you could take us back to the moment that led you to to actually working for steven bartlett what was the what was the process i was 21 and i remember i was in edinburgh university and i just sent my mom a text she calls me and she says

11:22okay which in spanish she's spanish that means are you fucking crazy or what you see i just told her that i was dropping out of my second year of university in edinburgh to accept a job that i'd been offered the week before with stephen bartlett and to understand this we'll go back a tiny bit further you see i was 16 and i stole my dad's camera stole it off him started playing around with the buttons launched a photography business shooting weddings hilariously i used to show up at the wedding at 16 and the bride would say oh good to meet you when's the photographer here you know i'd like strap up my velcro spider-man shoes and i'd crack on um at 18 i launched a production company and went through sixth form trying to shoot as much as i could on the weekends and everything at university i was trying to manage my production company whilst also doing gardening on the side for like janet angus and other people in my local university just to get some money to fund it um and i spent so much my university degree trying to get out because i looked around and i was like man we're all doomed surely this can't be it like this can't be the aspiration we have this can't be it for our creative careers so i tried to go to Gymshark, got rejected, tried to go to AYBL, tried to go to Malawi to do a documentary, must have sent a thousand email pitches for docuseries, all of them got rejected.

12:34And then one day, the CEO of a company I was working for in London phoned me and said, Will, I'm going to have to fire you. You'll get a call from someone called Jack, who's the producer of the Diary of a CEO, and he'll take you through the next steps. I was like, okay. Jack calls me, he tells me this insane opportunity, he says, Will, you've been recommended by your ex-CEO, we're launching a behind-the-scenes channel called behind the diary we're going to document steven bartlett it's going to be insane you're going to travel the world are you in and i was like well yeah of course like what do you need he was like are you in london i'm in edinburgh oh okay okay okay well you know we're gonna put a linkedin post out so don't worry about it too much we'll potentially get in touch and then i see the linkedin post that steve did he did this linkedin post that i don't think i've i didn't even know the LinkedIn bar could have that many numbers on it but it absolutely flew and I was like okay there's no chance there's no chance I'm getting this job but I was desperate to get out of uni I spent four hours crafting this text to Jack which I still have to this day which essentially said Jack this is more important to me than my degree I will drop out of university my only priority is getting started with you and Steve sent the text that was a Friday by next Wednesday in true uni student fashion I woke up from a nap and I had a text from Jack saying can I call you called me gave me the job offer on the Wednesday by Friday I dropped out of university and by next Friday I was in the office in London starting behind the diary with Steve and in the midst of all of that there was the conversation with my mum where she asked me the question are you fucking crazy and honestly a part of me thought maybe maybe she is right you see my parents have always been supportive but it was a decision that I decided to make and that I hold to this day as the biggest risk, but also biggest benefit I've ever made.

14:23I walked into the office in London and said, maybe I am fucking crazy, but like, I have to take this bet. I just have to see. And that was three years ago. So what's changed since then is that we launched Behind the Diary, a behind the scenes channel of Stephen. We've done 45 episodes, 15 million views and 400 ,000 subscribers. It's been a crazy journey. Oh God, I'm so tired. I've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time. How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai.

14:55Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No other better connection, right? Right. Wow. Nox.ai. I think it would be easy for someone to assume, oh, you've got that job. You spent all this time with Stephen Bartlett. So you've you've you've kind of you are who you hang around with. You've kind of mimicked that mindset and you've got that. But it sounds like the mindset was kind of already there. I want to ask you about like expectations.

15:33So like that conversation with Jack and Stephen up front. I think anybody that would work for the company and know that knows we're here to do a job and like whatever it takes to get the job done, we're going to do. What were your expectations from conversations going into that role? I knew it was going to be difficult, but I guess I had two set of expectations. I had the expectations for what I want my 20s to feel like, and then I was assuming their expectations. For me, the expectations I have currently are, is this going to be immensely challenging? does it feel like I probably can't do this I've never launched a YouTube channel I've worked freelance shooting weddings this genuinely feels impossible and is it going to lead to some kind of growth in some sort of way can I trust that yes that was my expectations from their perspective one of the the brilliant things that Jack and Steve did when I started was just give me the chance to run they didn't really sit me down and say this is exactly what this is going to be we think you can do it this is exactly how you're going to report to us we need you to go i literally on the first day arrived had a meeting with them explaining what behind the diary they thought would be and then they said cool steve's got a couple speaking engagements here's his calendar follow him so they gave me a ton of autonomy and the expectation from them was that in that autonomy you can either freeze or you can flourish and somehow i mean i spent the first year being like i do not know if i can do this you just keep moving you keep moving and with the pressure and also the like guidance that they give you eventually you start to just flourish and i've seen like an insane development from that kind of management style where they say we think you can do this show us um and it's it's it's changed the way i operate massively i imagine if we were sat with will four years ago you've completely different man mindset but probably skill wise as well understanding the psychology thinking about the consumer behavior science all of those different things what would what would will four year four years ago have been getting wrong when it came to hacking attention and telling stories the problem with will four years ago was that he was just so romantic okay now i don't mean i don't mean personally i mean professionally so as a creative i came into this job thinking that it was my genius my storytelling the way i shot a frame the way I edited that would lead to this working and that fundamentally shattered with a conversation I had with Steve one day where we just produced an edit we were in Vegas at the time I think I'd been editing for like the majority of the night and then we came to publish and he was like okay how much time have you spent on the title testing and I was like who's testing I don't even I don't even understand what this is and he said man you need to learn this wouldn't it be a shame if the genius work you do as an editor as a creative as a storyteller was left to chance because you just guessed the youtube algorithm wouldn't it be a shame if this podcast all this money you spent to put this on didn't work on youtube because you just guessed the title and as a result the algorithm doesn't know who to show it to and the episode flops it was this paradigm shift for me that my job is no longer about producing the best creative work it's about understanding the best data and pushing that into my creative work so what does that mean for me it means I'll probably spend more of my time in the YouTube back end than I will in the edit because I understand that everything I'm learning from what's happened in an episode should be feeding my craft it means that when we're producing an episode I'm not spending time thinking about the story structure until I've really nailed down a tested title a tested thumbnail that I know people want to engage with because otherwise what am I doing I'm guessing I'm being romantic about this story arc that I've got in my head when truly no one cares um so for me four years ago i was such a romantic i would have opened on a drone shot and i would have said steve listen here listen here steve we're going to come in with this drone shot it's gonna be about 15 seconds long and then we'll have a title sequence and steve's like everyone's gone and there's no one knows if the storyline even works so now it's a very different process it's data first uh work second and then somewhere along there you put your creative spark on it i think it'd be great if you could maybe make that as accessible as possible just take us through how that would maybe like a last example of a video you brought out where you started with the data how that then led to creating something so for example i'll take the the episode we did on time very recently we start by finding data that what we're doing works is there previous proven resonance on steven's channels that the framework that he's talking about works that people engage with it so we're not guessing because we could have made the episode about time look a million different ways but we chose this topic because we saw it resonate in a couple LinkedIn posts and we know it relates to his content widely.

20:14Then the second data point that we found was this Instagram carousel where this guy put up post-it notes and explained his life in post-it notes and it went super, super viral. And this person on my team called Zara Jarvis, exceptional social media manager, showed me this and was like, oh, you could use this visual reference to explain the story. And I was like, okay, perfect. We have two data points. Then we play the game of like, okay, from this, what is our title? We have a bunch of proprietary software in-house with Flight Story that we can use to run tests on 100 different titles so that we understand that this YouTube title for this video on this topic gives us X percent better CTR than the worst performing one.

20:51So before we've even touched the edit, we have some proof that what we're about to build could work. Then the fun part, with this topic, with this title, how do I build the edit into that? We film so much with Behind the Diary that we kind of have two processes. We go in with a pickaxe and then we go in with a toothbrush. We take the 40 hours, we chop out all the rubbish with a pickaxe. We find the bits that relate to the title. And then after that, you do the fun part. You get the toothbrush out, you polish, you build. And that's where you end up with the finished polished edit. But the testing doesn't really stop there.

21:23Like the data then goes into running thumbnail tests on YouTube. And anyone can do this. YouTube have a built-in A-B testing tool. You run a series of tests when it drops. You then run a second series and a second series and a second series. because the difference between your best performing video and your worst performing video, let's say you get 100 ,000 views, apply a 1 % click-through rate to 100 ,000 views versus a 7 % click-through rate. You're talking about the hundreds of percents of difference in terms of how a video performs just because a title or thumbnail is different. For me, that's like a gamble that I'll never play.

21:57So I don't want to waste all this creative energy by just chancing it either end. so that process there once that yeah okay i'm finished that's done i'm gonna i'm gonna hit publish what are the things that you need to see that make you say i'm happy with that that works the first two hours after you publish the most critical and people typically publish and then you know you're exhausted so you go you go do whatever you need to do but those first two hours are critical for a few reasons you should start to see how the video is doing out the gate now Now, it's not necessarily a time where you need to change everything, like let a video find its feet.

22:33But you should start to see early signals of like, how are people engaging with this? In data, also semantically. In the comments, are people giving good feedback? Or is actually something here not quite resonating and you've missed the mark? In the data, we're really looking for like, is this performing really well on CTR? Are people really choosing this episode? Or actually, is the AVD really low? So let's say, I guess I'll give some context for viewers at home. CTR is how many people, the percentage of people that saw and clicked the episode. AVD is another really key YouTube metric. It's the average view duration.

23:04How long are they watching for? You could see that you have a great title, great thumbnail. The CTR is 10%, but the AVD is super low. How interesting. Okay, so people are clicking for this, but they're not staying. So that tells me that perhaps they've been misled in the promise. Perhaps they're not really engaging with the rest of the video. If it's not really finding its feet in those first two hours, you could start to look at repackaging. should we actually position this in a way that doesn't drive the click so much but is more aligned to the story so that people feel like they're not being you know sold down a river and not really understanding what the rest of it is about those first two hours for me are like super super critical i'm gonna ask you probably something selfishly now obviously we run a podcast so because we're doing long form i want to see where your brain would go creatively so you can maybe use it as a bit of a live action brainstorm obviously there's a long form video like like we're recording now so maybe some of those retention tactics we can't do we can't do interesting shots but like where would you think about taking a long form podcast and putting that emotional roller coaster into it i mean i'd do it in the first 90 so you know the first 90 seconds will be where probably 60 % of your people watch.

24:17Past that, it's a much more complex game, but I would try and invoke that emotional rollercoaster into the first 90 seconds. I'm not the best trailer editor, but I understand that the goal in that first 90 seconds should be to start with something specific, broad appeal and emotional to grab them and then give them like hooks and revalue points throughout this episode. That's going to mean that they're almost like ticking a box in their brain of like, okay, I'll give them another minute for that point. Actually, that's interesting. I'll wait five minutes I'll wait 60 minutes so I think in that first 90 seconds that's where you're really trying to take them on this emotional roller coaster um and I I don't know I I'm I'm not necessarily the the podcasting expert but I generally think in these conversations giving people a chance to get value but also build context um is really important like I think a lot of podcasts make the mistake of like spawning you in and being like listen one of the things I think Steve does exceptionally well as a podcaster is he starts by asking them like why should the audience give you the next two hours of their time and he establishes their credentials he gives them context on what they're doing and then he makes the person interviewing them say if you stay you will learn this now at that point you give them the audience everything they need to decide whether they'll give you their time um for me that's how i'd start to think about it for you guys at least nice how do you think about it i think you're right there was a period where trailers were in trailers stopped trailers have come back massively and we've seen like um increase from that thinking about the packaging i think the payoff and then what what seems to respond well is like following that genuine curiosity of like too many podcasts go very linear okay well where did you grow up what did you do then what did you do next where i think it's a case like our job is sales people well, we are meant to shut up and ask good questions.

26:06And I hope that that's what comes across. And if you ask enough questions, you kind of get there. If your life is probably crazy, some people would view your life and think, wait, so if you're behind the diary and you follow Stephen Bartlett around, well, I follow him on Instagram and I know that one day he's in London, next he's in LA, then he's in New York, then he's doing a speaking gig in Istanbul and all these different things, he lives a crazy life, which means you must mimic it. So if we look back at the last year for Will, what would we have seen? You would see an app I have called Flightly, which tracks the flights you do.

26:49And last year we did 54 flights in 54 weeks, which goes to show you're right, you know, to operate as an entrepreneur at that level. It is mental. And I think the thing that sometimes people don't understand is what it takes. I can you know from seeing Steve work over the last three years I can vouch of like I don't think there's anyone who will work with the same tenacity with the same kind of effort for as long and as competently as he will that is truly the difference it's the ability to work harder for longer and obsess over the things that only he can really really do exceptionally well and it's it's a mental lifestyle but it's also an insane privilege I have so many people who will come up me and be like man like wild huh it must be so exhausting i'm like yeah but i chose this first of all i'm in a privileged position to be able to do this but i fully accept that like i chose to do this and what a crazy experience you know to like to to be able to say that i chose this difficulty it's building my life and as a result like how can i complain well so you can't complain generally you're being flown to all these crazy experiences i tell so many people that i I truly think I've been granted like the best job in the world.

28:02So I can't sit here and say I'm tired. Tired from something that I chose that builds my life. What are you on about? You know, like you guys, you couldn't, you must have so many moments where you're like, man, like I just, I don't know if I can be bothered to talk to this Will guy. I'm shattered from that run we did this morning. Like, I don't think I can do it. But like, but you chose it. Then don't do it if you don't want to. But I think so many people get lost in the circumstances they're in because they forget the reality that they chose this circumstance. For other people, that's not necessarily true.

28:31And that's a really difficult place to be. But for me, I know I chose this. And as a result, I relish it. I'm gonna ask a difficult question. Ooh, hit me. Let's say I pick someone just completely random. They're a business, they're professional. They've got the skills that you would need. So this isn't gonna be alien to them. But I then say, tomorrow you're gonna wake up and work for Stephen Bartlett. what would they not like about it?

29:00They would very quickly either flourish or fail. It wouldn't take long. We've seen this in, you know, the exceptional team culture that Steve's built. When you have a strong team culture, like the culture we have at Flight Story, people stick out like a sore thumb. So if it isn't for someone, you kind of instantly know because you're around other people who are obsessed about what they do. They work exceptionally hard. You're sat next to someone who is probably the best at the world in what they do and you're not really sure if you even know what you're doing. But that relationship means that when someone comes in and they either don't care as much or they don't want the hard work as much as you do, it instantly sticks out.

29:43So the thing that they would struggle with is the mirror that's being held back up to them. We said, how bad do you want this? Because the reality is, especially I think in the exceptional thing that Steve and all the other execs at Flight Story do is they say where you go is solely determined by what you do and how you choose to do it it's not up to us you will get as much as you give from it and that's a choice that people have to make what role do you think I'm just trying to imagine like you're all you know we've interviewed a few people from from Steve's team and like you're all exceptional you've included you know amazing people probably at the at the top tier of what you do i sometimes wonder behind the scenes what what role ego might play in like i'm the guy this month no i'm the guy this month this trailer has just done amazing like this linkedin post just kicked off like what role does ego play in terms of bringing you all together or does it make you clash sometimes talk to us about that i'll tell you where we have the biggest ego uh the biggest ego we have in the office is around who has won the experimentation trophy okay so the ego gets the biggest when you've genuinely failed the most the culture we have is like it's not necessarily about the best trailer the most views or everything that's working what we really get like excited about is like man i ran all these experiments and they all failed but because we ran them well i get the trophy so when we as a team celebrate it's because we've followed through with that process we like celebrate the fact that it didn't work and we learned why more so than a billboard that's popped up on the other side of the world it's not really about that um it comes back to what i said to you before we started around like the process is the podium for us so you know i i like to say like the only person who wants to see me win more than myself is the team and we all embody that like it's hard to describe that culture when you're not in it because it just looks like the results but when you're in it we're obsessed over like the process more than the results um so yeah it's a really it's a really special place for me there is no room for ego like it it trickles down from the top of like from the way execs work like i'm working with someone who's three times my age and has been in the game for like 25 30 years the best in the world at what they do and i'm a 21 year old with like velcro shoes on asking them questions there's just no room for ego it's all collaborative so it's strange for me as well because this is the first job i've ever had yeah when you think about it like from starting my business to this it's like my perception on what work is is so skewed whereas there must be so many places where you walk into the office you say nothing to no one you sit down you do 20 of the work you're meant to do and you leave at five man not me i don't know i can't imagine and i i don't say that to to boast in a way but i say that when you find a place like that that empowers you in the way that what i've experienced it's um special man it's special some people will do that and call it a life and that's probably like the sad thing um let's talk lessons and mental models so you have probably been in the same room with some of the smartest most influential thinkers on the planet you spend every single day with stephen bartlett who is multi-millionaire who's built some of the biggest brands on on earth and had so many accolades what are if they were medals that you could wear around your neck what are some of the biggest lessons and mental models that you've collected that you apply into your daily life it's a great question thank you the first principle that i think has led to some of the success that we've had is around how much you care to understand this let's let's go right let's go back to 2001 okay Steve Jobs is stood in a warehouse with 13 ,000 iPhones in front of him it's the day before the launch of the iPod Nano and Steve Jobs it's an amazing story he picks up the iPod and he's looking at it he's inspecting the design looks great obviously it's about to launch the media are like in the next room ready for the next day and he plugs the headphone jack in he takes it out and he plugs it back in and he takes it out again and he looks up at the engineers and says there's a critical problem it doesn't click he ordered every 1 300 engineers that night plus the rest of the team that had to help to rebuild every single one of those ipods because the headphone jack did not click Now, to understand this behavior, you should know that Steve Jobs' father, Paul, I think it's Paul, was a carpenter.

34:31To understand this behavior, you should know that Steve Jobs' father was a carpenter, did all his work with his hands in his studio, and the rumor goes that he would finish the back of the cabinet just like the front. You see Steve Jobs do this. He polishes the inside of the circuit boards, even though the customer is never going to see them. Steve Jobs fundamentally knew that how much you care equates to how much you win. Johnny Ive, his designer, chief design officer, exceptional brain, has this amazing quote where he says, as humans, we can sense carelessness. So obviously we can sense when someone's care, but it's not quite obvious.

35:07You see, there's a study, it's called the Kruger study that they ran in 2004. They took a set of poems and they gave them to people and they said, this one took four hours and this one took 18 hours. which one do you think is better what they continuously found was that people derived the quality of the poem by how long it took to make the poems were the same so that's a very like conscious example but subconsciously as humans we can just feel care you understand that when you lift this box off the iphone package and it takes a while that it feels premium there's like fingerprints of someone spending hours on this design that you can't quite articulate but you know it's there.

35:48Now, the benefit of this is that how much you care as a creative, as an entrepreneur, isn't determined by your skills or your capital or where you grew up or the people you have in your team is determined by you. You will make a choice after hearing this story where you will say, will I care outrageously so more than my competition over the smallest possible details. But there's a catch. The rewards will take a long time. You will care unreasonably more than your competition in silence, in a studio where no one sees, on your desk editing your podcast for four extra hours because you want it to be perfect and no one knows and no one cares.

36:35But what happens is that over time the compounding of those small continuous gains where you care more than your competition just grows and grows and grows until one day long after your competitors have stopped caring stopped obsessing over the small things they'll look back and see the gap and they'll say man well how did he how did he get up there for you one day whilst obsessing over it for long enough like it did for Steve's jobs it will just click and that's the power of like if you can care more every single day without expecting the returns if you can outwork and you can out care then you'll outlast for me like seeing that in the team has been the most important mental model so if somebody really really pushed you for an example of care that you see from steven day to day that maybe hasn't been shown on behind the diary what would that be he cares steve never wastes time caring in the middle so his job as a ceo is to do like the biggest things and the smallest things.

37:38He understands that this is where his power of caring really, really matters. I'll give you an example. He can do the strategy, the innovation, where we're going, the vision, leadership, all of that. That's the thing that the CEO is going to do. It's the top 20%. The bottom 20 % is where he understands that it's the smallest things that he can do that have the biggest impact. I'll give you an example. We were in Australia. We were in Australia on the last show of his business and life tour. and we're all knackered we've just been all across australia to new zealand back to australia it's the last show we're running i think 10 minutes behind production and nervous steve's in his dressing room so we're all kind of like i guess he must be getting ready i knock on the door no response i knock on the door again no response so i'm like okay i need to get some stills i'll go in i go in and i see steve in the corner and he's whispering to himself he's like whispering in the corner he's like drawing something on his hand i was like okay we've lost him this is it he's gone crazy but no what he was doing is he was writing down the names of the 200 people that he just met in the meeting greet trying to remember some of the stories of the people he'd spoken to and incorporating it into his talk on stage so that when he went on stage he could speak to them directly and reference them personally in his own story because what steve understands is that the biggest things yes they matter but for him he needs to out carry on the smallest details remembering someone's name when he comes back from travel going around the office and saying to jenny on her desk hey how was the how was the wedding last weekend because he knows that's where his influence lies it's like the smallest things i think entrepreneurs try and do everything good entrepreneurs understand that their power lies in the biggest and smallest things so so that mindset there and even the the steve jobs example that you gave those are the things that you would be praised for in the public eye right that attention to detail wow that is aspirational but perhaps in your private life if you were like that with your wife or child it might be something where they're like i actually don't really like that about you so what do you think the cost is of what you're praised for in public you're punished for in private how do you think that relates to personal life to go back to the steve jobs example johnny ive has another quote which which i absolutely love which is like what we design um articulates who we are and how we design articulates who we are it's words to that effect i'm probably butchering it but for me it's like if i care in my professional work it tells a story about who i am myself because the energy i'm putting into this reflects on who i am so it's the same in my personal life like i don't i don't see yeah i see a difference in terms of you're not going to be playing that potential game of like okay I'm just going to ignore everything in the middle but in terms of how much you care I think you can play that game you should be saying to yourself like is how I show up here slightly better than I probably could have last time and will I put in more effort even in like the smallest things did you make the dinner look nice on the plate because it's just a small signal that you care and honestly it's a selfish act because you're not really doing that for them you're doing it for the story that you tell yourself about how you show up and how you show up in the world um so So I think in terms of like the game, there's a difference, but in terms of how you care, it's just a choice you make.

40:51How do you want to show up? Do you want to give it as much as you can? Because it's a story. It's like holding up a mirror. You know when you've done bad work. You know. You know when you've not been the right boyfriend. Now, you obviously have to accept that you can't care about everything, but when you do care, like choose it. Really, really choose it. Don't like put one foot in. One of the things that me and Jack noticed in the early days of the business and the podcast growing and things is you start to be almost not relatable in the same way so like I've certainly had certain friends that I don't really hear from anymore that I used to when I was maybe in the same you know we're both neck and neck doing the same thing living the same life I can't imagine for you how unrelatable you probably are to a lot of people that are maybe your age and you've been friends with of like it's all right for you you work for Stephen Ball well, it's all right for you, you were in Cape Town last week.

41:42There probably is a bit of that narrative that snuck in and maybe social media makes that a little bit worse. I wonder how you feel about who you are in your life and how you relate to other people that are around you in your personal life, maybe friends and people that you've grown up with. I think for the good friends you have, it doesn't matter. Because if you're friends with them for what they do, then you're already on the wrong kind of terms. The core five mates that I have, it's something we talk about but fundamentally if i was you know busking on the side of the street you know chasing another dream that wasn't this it wouldn't fundamentally matter but there is i think the the point you're kind of getting to is there is this shift where in order to choose the goals you have to chase them there's a difference where like you can have x amount of hundred unread whatsapp messages because you've chosen to do this thing and you've accepted that you're not going to get the third and fourth year of university when all your friends are partying because you've chosen this thing it's a sacrifice that like you you choose but also you can't get lost in it i'd actually love your advice because this is something i struggle with like how do you how do you balance it is there a fucking balance you know like when do you when do you chase the dream and when do you just go and be the mate like relationships for me are the best investment you can possibly make so like my core five friend my partner like i always ask myself like where's the balance and I have this illusion in my head of like okay well it's your 20s so like chase the balance chase the balance but then you get to 30 and you haven't spoken to anyone so man like how do you know you're busy entrepreneurs you work exceptionally hard when do you know in yourself it's slipping what are the signals well I mean one of the things that has worked well for me and and my wife is she's a therapist and runs her own business as well so sometimes if we you can kind of feel like even though you live under the same roof like this is happening yeah kind of moving away from each other but one of the things that we did that's been a really good idea is on a friday lunchtime it's in the diary that we'll do something together and it might be like take the dog for a walk it might be like we'll go out and have something to eat whatever it is but we do something no children they're at school and preschool and we do something that's together no phones and just have that conversation but you know if you are feeling a bit like this that that's in that that's a non-negotiable we have to come back together on a friday and i think that has really improved like the closeness um and like for this i'll be away tomorrow doing some more recordings so the friday date would get moved maybe to like a tuesday but it has to stay there so we have to do it so yeah probably just in the same way that you would schedule your own processes in your own life like treating yourself and your personal relationships like that as well has been beneficial but it's definitely a seesaw there's there's it's not always bang on and also doing it as much as you do it for others doing it for yourself as well like scheduling that like block for you where you're like okay this is my time yeah for me it's been a game changer like i try and have like from five to eight thirty is like whatever you want to do whatever you want to do because i know like the the work i do tends to start like steve will take the morning to recover if we work late and then all his meetings will start at 11 a.m so for me i'm like okay perfect like this is my this is like my nugget i'll go for the run i'll do the time for myself and then on top of that as you said you know making sure someone doesn't become the residual beneficiary how about you there's seasons of life isn't there yeah and i think there are trade-offs one thing that is probably me and zach have slowly become the same person even though we have like different things and stuff like that one thing that has definitely changed for me over the years is zach at 23 probably had three mates yeah all right and i was very much like hundreds of mates big social groups stuff like that i think it's about prioritizing things you you can't do everything so it's a case of like right okay i've got two kids now i've got a partner i've got a business and let's let's wrap all of that into that so it's a case of like getting into running and training and things like that it's a case of i know that there's going to be a trade-off when am i gonna and it's just working it out so that when the weekend comes there's no i want to go to the football and drink 12 pints there's no i want to do this thing for me actually that's the point where i'm like it's not about me anymore this is where i can be present and it's it's it's hard i think anything entrepreneurial you can be there but you're still not there and that's the thing of like the the being present so allowing that time of like even even just like we go away for a few few few days or if like you you're driving it's just like i sit in the car the car part for like 15 minutes and we'll just like say just take that moment before i go back in and i'm in dad mode i'm in parent mode and and you see your kids and they don't care like this this for us is this is exciting we're sitting with like some of the best brains on the planet they don't care they want to know what you had for lunch they just want you to talk about Zog the flying dragon it doesn't matter so it's a case of like knowing who to show up as in what things and and there is a trade-off of like I can do anything but I can't do everything so it's like a case of my weekend they're my family time which means over time less and less friends but like you said the friends I wanted they show up they're there I still speak to speak to Zach obviously we worked together we've still got other friends i speak to every single day because i've got that time for that and that feels like it's a habit but i could make effort with those friends but that would be the cost of my family and does it work maybe not um you you were saying four years ago you're i won't try and say it in spanish but your mom said you're fucking crazy what what would be her response now she would say but it's that's local which means you're fucking crazy again so fundamentally it doesn't change because you know they're parents i'm very lucky to have parents who care and i think as a result of caring they protect um but i think they've seen this pattern in me that i basically i started taking them problems with solutions so i would say to them i'm dropping out of uni but this is what's going to happen and what it's forced me to do is sit in like decision purgatory a lot more so when i'm making big decisions in my life i've basically found that so much of the rush to get to a decision means you make the wrong one whereas if you can sit in decision purgatory which is where you're not entirely sure you're saying yeah i'm going to do that absolutely not no chance you're going up and down if you can sit there and still do the work still show up continue whilst feeling it it means that when you make a decision you can be a hundred percent conviction because the worst thing you can do is have the feeling make the decision and then spend the like aftershock deciding whether it's the right one sit in decision purgatory make the decision and then know that if you've made it you've made it with 100 conviction conviction doesn't mean you've made the right decision conviction means you've chosen the decision so you will make it the right one now i'm very lucky like my my parents care and they support me massively um but they protect they want to make sure you know is this going to ruin your career what if you don't graduate what if you know what's happening with your degree but you've made the decision and then they trust okay if you've made it go go run figure it out um but yeah she'd ask me if i'm still crazy i think the answer might i think i know the answer i was thinking about this a few weeks ago because i was doing a big shop and i got my toddler two years old out the car and he went to he went to run away like inquisitive and i just grabbed him i was like stop i was like like a level of like what are you doing because you're going to get hit by a car you're going to get hurt we're in a busy car park something might happen it's dangerous and i think that as we move forward in life our parents our friends our family members our acquaintances that they're screaming stop because they think you're in a car park but actually the biggest risk there is no danger and like we sit here with so many entrepreneurs that go if it all went tits up i'd be i'd get a job at cost coffee i'd go back to amazon i'd do this and i'd start again and i think like it's a real great philosophy for life of like for people that are in in this space where they feel like there's this abhorrent like danger it probably isn't true so you've got to ask yourself is this real or like what is the worst case scenario so true man it's so true i'd love this the worst case scenario is someone else's nine to five yeah exactly you know and someone said to me like you You know, if it all went tits up, what would you do?

50:32I'd do it again. Oh, let's start again. Great, well then go. Now I'm in a lucky position. I'm in my 20s. So for me, I can play that game where I'm like, great. If I get to 28 with five massive L's under my belt, brilliant. Like brilliant. That's the process that I'm kind of pursuing. But yeah. You've won. You've won. You're winning. Well, I'm trying. I've loved this. You've been, you're a brilliant storyteller. Like obviously we watch you on screen and I think your work is brilliant. But even like when you're talking about Steve Jobs, I'm like leaning in going, what is the, what happened? Your storytelling in person, the psychology obviously rings true.

51:11So I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. Well, thank you. If somebody's listened all the way through, which they will have because the retention tactics, we're going to make a sick trailer for this. They're here. What's one question that they should ask themselves? Okay. that's a it's a good question i think i'd ask the audience what the story they tell themselves about who they are is so when something goes good what's the story you tell yourself i'm great man i'm the fucking best when something goes wrong what's the story what's the story that you tell yourself then about the failure that you feel you are about how embarrassing it is to x to y to z because so many of us just look at the feeling and don't think of it like this story that we tell ourselves and the story you tell yourself is honestly the thing you become in both the bad and the good if when something bad happens you tell yourself the story of like wow another one under the belt before i'm in my 30s if the story you tell yourself when you fail is like man they were so right in the playground when they said that to me understanding that story means you can then start to change it there's this amazing theory called self-perception theory which says that the brain doesn't understand who we are by what we believe it understands who we are by watching what we do your brain is literally seeing what you do and how you carry yourself to decide who you are so with that with understanding your story with understand that the brain is watching you what will you do what story will you tell yourself and how will you follow through with that that's what i'd say amazing if people want to follow you if they want to check out the content how can they do that my instagram is bts with will um when's this going out when do you want it to go up that's the service we provide you tell us god damn it we can live stream it now if it goes out after july 10th i'll be full time on myself wow yeah whoa yeah big news it's coming out after july 10th what does that mean um yeah i'm taking a taking a bet on myself so i i think it's last last week of july roughly but if people want to follow me my instagram is at bts with will i run a youtube channel called will peres i tell exceptional stories of brands moments places entrepreneurs stories that i really want to tell um i do that once every two weeks on youtube and i create short form about storytelling about content creation and i write a sub stack very inconsistently but if you if you like the steve jobs story you'll like the sub stack too so yeah thank you so much you guys thank you thank you so much