This content was created by Lewis Howes. This content was uploaded by Lewis Howes. This is a YouTube video titled "The POWER of storytelling" created on August 27, 2025, featuring a conversation between an unidentified speaker and Morgan Housel. They discuss the impact of storytelling, using examples like Ken Burns' documentaries, and how storytelling often outweighs factual accuracy in influence and success.
What else did you learn in Same as ever, this new book, a guide to what never changes. That really shocked you or surprised you?
I think what's always blown me away, that is one of the chapters in the book is the power of storytelling, where the person who has the right answer doesn't necessarily win. The person who says the accurate thing doesn't necessarily win. The person who tells the best story and the story that people want to hear is a person that people line up behind and they're like, yep, that's. This is my guy. You see it in politics all the time when people can. Politicians can propose really bad policies, but if it's what people want to hear, that's the one who's winning. And the. And the policy wonk who's like, well, according to the data, we should do that. Politician is never going to win. It's a person who pounds the table who's going to win every time on both parties. Doesn't matter who it's from. Barack Obama, very charismatic. Trump, very good storyteller. Like, on both sides. That's always who's going to win. But I think you see that in almost every endeavor in business and media, the best story always wins. I use the example of the book of Ken Burns, who makes these documentaries about history. He's the best documentarian who's ever lived. And he'll make a documentary about the Civil War. It came out in 1990. More Americans watched it that year than watched the Super Bowl.
Wow.
And this was for the Civil War. This is not a new topic. Everybody knows how it ends. Everyone knows what happens.
They know the story.
But he told such a captivating story that you will sit there. It's a 14 hour documentary and like 100 million Americans watch. And Ken Burns has talked about what is so powerful in a documentary that's easy to overlook is the background music. And he said that he will literally edit the script so that a certain beat in the background music will match up with a certain word. And the timing of it. The timing of it, so that when this powerful word is spoken by the narrator, boom. There's this beat in the background music to catch your attention.
Probably also what's visually on the screen at the same time too. Like all of it creating that emotional connection. Reaction.
Yeah. So here's the thing. Is Ken Burns the best historian? No. Is he finding new information that we didn't know about the Civil War? By and large, no. He is the best storyteller that's ever existed. And because of that, he's the most successful historian who's ever existed.
He's telling the story of the past.
Better than anyone, better than anyone else, even if all this information is already known. And all of his documentaries, World War II, Vietnam, the great Depression, all these big events in American history, every single one of his documentaries, you know how the story ends, and yet it is utterly captivating.
