How to tell your own story with Baratunde Thurston
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These days, we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh, and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Baratunde Thurston. He's an Emmy-nominated writer, cultural critic, comedian, and best-selling author. He's worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show. He hosts the podcast How to Citizen and the TV show America Outdoors. And he writes at Puck.News on tech, race, democracy, climate, and culture. Wow. Baratunde is also one of my favorite speakers. He's earned more standing ovations than I can count. Here's a little taste of him at TEDx.

My parents gave me an extraordinary name: Baratunde Rafiq Thurston. Now, Baratunde is based on a Yoruba name from Nigeria, but we're not Nigerian. That's just how black my mama was. Rafiq is an Arabic name, but we are not Arabs. My mom just wanted me to have difficulty boarding planes in the 21st century.

So I think the last time we saw each other was about a year ago in California. Yes. When I sat in the audience and watched you speak and again had the reaction of no matter how many

hours and weeks and years I put into speaking, I will never be that good. That's a high compliment because you're a good speaker. I'm curious, how much of this is natural and what parts have you worked on? If you tell me all natural, I'm just going to watch you and try to learn from it. If you tell me there are parts you practice, then I have questions for you. It's a mix and I'm trying to be thoughtful about what I think the mix might be.

I'm 45 years old. I was born in 1977 and I've been on stage in some form for most of my life. I remember my first school play was like this Olympics of the Mind skit that we did where we were Smurfs. I did the Youth Orchestra program in Washington, D.C., where I grew up and played upright bass. I played Suzuki violin.

And I did musicals in middle and high school into college and a kind of student leader of some kind. So I was giving addresses or speeches or sitting on panels and I was drawn to it. I was really drawn to it. And I think I can select a few moments where I leveled up some and it wasn't just from like natural ability. It was like, I was trying really, really, really hard. One was standup comedy. In the early 2000s, my friend, Derek Ashong,

He said, I'm going to take a stand-up comedy class and I'm going to do an open mic. And we all thought, good for you. We can't wait to see it. And he never did it. But he planted a seed in my head when he said that. And I did it. That set me on a course for a decade of like grinding away in comedy clubs all over New England, the ground round like steakhouse world.

Sports bars, Chinese food restaurants, hotel lobbies, real glamorous stuff. This is how you forge your blade. The other shift that happened was around that TED Talk. A woman at TED, Helen, was my talk coach, which frankly, I didn't think I needed. I was like, I do so many talks all the time. That's cute, TED. You think you have notes for me? I know who I am. I've done comedy. I've done corporate presentations and everything in between. Cool.

But with Helen, the value was she told me, I want you to push yourself, do something uncomfortable, get more vulnerable. And my wife, Elizabeth, independent of Helen, said the same thing. She was like, this is a potentially massive moment. What do you want to be known for? How do you want people to feel you? And so I dug below the thing I knew. And the thing I know is good. It pays bills. I enjoy it. People like it.

But these other women in my lives were like, go harder, go deeper. And so what that talk became was much more vulnerable, emotional. I delivered that TED Talk. I went to the backstage and I exploded in tears. The first time that had ever happened. I moved myself.

And I was like, what just happened? And it was so much emotion and so much energy and so much release. It was almost like an explosion. My body couldn't contain it anymore. And I just wept hard, like so hard backstage. And that was a change because of some mentorship, some coaching,

some feedback and some love, you know, from other people. Wow. Okay. There's so many things to react to here. So much of the speaking we do and so much of the storytelling we do. Not only do we not know the individuals in the room that well, but it's also unclear, what's my role? What's my contribution? What do they already know? What am I bringing to this experience? And I think what you gave me last year was an answer to that question.

which was to say what you can always bring to an experience is a story from your personal life that other people find moving and relatable. And I think that was a little bit of a frame shift for me to say, I don't necessarily have to know what the audience wants from me. What I do have to figure out is what have I lived that's relevant to them and relatable to them? Yes, that is exactly it. I had always felt...

Like doing comedy about myself just wasn't me. Like I watched other comics do and they talk about their sex lives and talk about the drugs they've done and the crimes or the depression or whatever. And I'm like, I talk about the outside world. I'm trying to make sense of that. I'm trying to make- It's not about me. You make sense. You don't need to know all my business.

And what I learned through all those reps, I just can't even describe the number of stages and rooms and distraction and cigarette smoke and hecklers and ethnicities and non-English speaking and cities and consonants. That amount of practice, I underestimate sometimes what it's done to me and how it shaped me.

But the lesson that I learned so much was what you described. Offer something from yourself that lets people connect to you and find a connection. It doesn't matter how small. My agenda needs to take a backseat to our connection. And the sources of that are, okay, something personal, something universal, and then something shared. Even just the wait to get in the convention center.

The cold temperature of the air conditioning. It's too cold in here. What are they trying to do? Is it a walk-in freezer or a salon in the Hilton? And so you just give a little something and you get a lot. And now there's a bond. And then with that bond, you can achieve much more. Just a little peek behind the veil of professional presenter skills.

It's like, oh, he's a person. I'm a person. That's all, like so many of us just need that. I just need a signal that you're also a person. We get disconnected from our leaders, business and political because they don't feel relatable. And we love and adore folks, even really abusive or selfish people who say,

We feel a connection to it. They're relatable. We watch garbage television about trash people because we relate to them in some way. They've shared something. And it's like, aw, they're just like me in some way. So giving that little thing, it pays off. Either that or there's some shot in Friday at your house.

I'm so much better than them. We also love watching people crash and burn and fail. That's a whole other dynamic. Your career as a public speaker is very much one anchored in storytelling. And the storytelling you do is much harder because it's autobiographical.

I've generally found the most difficult stories to tell are my own because I know too many details. And it's harder to figure out what's interesting to the audience, whereas a story about somebody else, I know what hooked me on that story. I know why I care about it. I was an audience member when I learned that story. But if it happened to me, I don't know if you'll care about any of it. I don't know if it has any relevance to you. And

This is really important, not just as a public speaker, but also in shaping identity. In psychology, there's a really interesting body of research on life stories as a window into our happiness and our well-being.

And there's a particular arc that struck me. I think this is originally Dan McAdams' research, but the basic finding is that if you ask people to narrate the story of their lives, some people end up with contamination narratives where they kind of go downhill. Not surprisingly, those are depressing. And other people end up having pretty consistently positive journeys. And those people do not end up as happy as the people who lived a redemption narrative.

where they started out with some kind of difficulty or struggle or obstacle, and they feel like they conquered or overcame it. That upward trajectory actually seems to be, in some ways, more satisfying, more fulfilling, more meaningful than just a good trajectory. Okay, here's a story. I did a podcast many, many years ago, and the host was obsessed with the sob element of my story, if you look at it on paper. So I'm born in 77.

Single mother. My father at the time of my birth is alive, but decreasingly a part of my life. He was exiled from the house for other terrible offenses, and he ended up being shot and killed.

And, you know, I'm in Washington, D.C., and it's the 80s, and it's the rise of the crack epidemic, and there's policing, and there's gangs, and there's shootings, serious beatdowns happening right in our front yard. And we're not in the worst neighborhood in the city. We're not in the most challenged neighborhood in the city. And there are statistics, you know, a Black man born in this period, a Black boy born in this period has greater odds of going to prison or jail than going to college.

So that's a lot of signal, you know, of nudging you in a certain direction. And I think this particular host was obsessed with the absent father story. And it's like, man, that must have been so hard. How was that for you? And I was just like, dude, I'm good. You know, like, I've had a lot of time to deal with this. Like, apparently this is really traumatizing to you. But like, I'm good.

totally like at peace. And it's just enjoying my life. I was like working at the Onion Nuts or something at the time, or maybe just after. I hadn't really accepted the negativity of my life experience as like the headline or like the defining feature of my life. So yeah, I guess if you looked at it that way, you could say, I really defied the odds, huh? Lucky to be here. But I was just like living the whole time. I was very...

confused and a little annoyed by that host because I thought they were projecting something onto me. And that might have been the case, but there was also the case that there were parts of my experience and story that I hadn't really dealt with. And I just moved on quickly thinking I'm good without actually sitting with what does the absence of my father mean? What does his exile before his murder even mean?

what was the positivity with which I projected a narrative onto my mother and her role in my life. Sacrificial, savior, heroic, good. I also hadn't examined that. That interview I'm referencing was over a decade ago. And in the decade plus since, I've been able to see and been willing to sit with

the negativity, the hurt, the pain of some moments of my life. And it just adds richness, appreciation, depth. And it almost gives me like a little mission to work on where to just say I'm good at papering over a lot of detail. It's a high altitude flyover. It's a low resolution picture. There's a lot of metaphors I could keep going, but I'll pause and just say it's not as full as it could be.

And so I look back at that interview, which used to annoy me so much, and I'm thinking, oh, maybe he sensed something. Maybe he was like Helen and my wife with the TED Talk, trying to push me to be more intimate, more vulnerable, to go deeper than where I was comfortable. And I had found a really comfortable pocket within my own story. I don't think of my story as redemptive. I've increasingly explored healing,

in my story, which means I've had to acknowledge hurt. And I think a lot of the way I survived through circumstances that were not ideal is to quickly move past the hurt. I can handle it. I can just handle it. I can take care of myself. I remember once my mom... There's probably so much in this story I'm about to tell you. It was a Sunday evening and the lottery was a big deal. I was under 12 years old. My mother...

told me, "I'm leaving town. I'm going to the Pennsylvania border to buy a lotto ticket." Just the fact that my mom would just leave town to go gamble on an opportunity for cash infusion. It was just like, "Okay, my mom's going to play the lotto in Pennsylvania." Totally normal. I'm riding my bike in the neighborhood. I'm hanging out with friends. And I see my best friend's older sister, who I have a huge crush on, Michelle.

She's in a car and she's driving down the street just in front of me. A little pre horny boy, like excited to like see the woman I have a crush on. And like maybe if she sees how fast I can ride my BMX, she will ditch her grown ass boyfriend and choose me. There's no like full plan, but I'm chasing the car and I'm not catching up because it's a car and she moves off into a greater distance. And I something goes wrong with my bike.

And I skid across on my face. And then I see blood. I come up like a zombie, just blood pouring from my face. I am one and a half blocks from my house. I limp home. Mother's still not home, but I've got keys. I'm like a little grown person. She's a single mom. I'm used to this. I go, I clean out the wound. I get the first aid kit. I apply the ointment. I make myself an ice pack. I'm starting to feel chills. I'm probably going into shock.

I get in bed, I wrap myself in blankets, and I just wait for my mother to come home. And she does. And I tell her what happens. And she's like, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm good. I handled it. Oh, that's like a very important moment. I'm excited in the moment immediately about my ability to solve a problem, to withstand pain, and to keep fucking moving.

And also to reject assistance, right? What's the cost of so quickly seizing that independent, resilient narrative? Lots, lots. An inability slash unwillingness to fully know myself. At times in my life, I've only been willing to know the withstander, the perseverer, the resilient one, the strong one, the diplomat, and not the wounded warrior.

and not the non-warrior. So I have had a lot of time in my life committed to fixing, easing, solving for me, for people in my life, for my mother. A lot of energy spent thinking about, is she okay? It was very transparent and obvious to me that she wasn't, and she's the only person I have. So if she's not okay, I'm not okay.

If she freaks out and flips out, that's all on me. I need her to be very good because her goodness is inextricably linked to my own sense of goodness. Her safety, her survival, that's all me. If something happens to her, I'm done. If she decides she's done with me, I'm done. So there is a lot of peacemaking going on and not a lot of acknowledgement of rage, of disappointment,

When I so quickly move to resilience, I miss a chance to fully feel into my needs. Yeah. When I crashed that bike, I needed help. I really did. There's no sane world where a 10-year-old kid is just like, I'm good after an accident like that.

But I was wired at that age. Conditioned, self-sufficiency, don't be a burden, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those are all strengths and they're all worthy of some kind of celebration. We've set up a world where like, that's pretty damn noble, kid. Look at you. You're tough. But they can be overused to your own detriment. It's sad. It's also a sad story. Once I open that door to that feeling of disappointment or hurt or pain, it leads to another door.

with more hurt and more pain in another door because there are a lot of doors I never opened. There's a whole house that I never entered on the block that is my life. What is my internal architecture? What are my true wants and needs? And if I haven't examined those painful parts, the parts that hurt me, then how much do I know the pleasure parts too? Hearing you reflect on this makes me think about something that didn't crystallize and probably should have sooner.

So I think part of what you're describing is emotional intelligence. And normally when we talk about emotional intelligence, we think about it as a bundle of skills that go together, right? So emotionally intelligent people are genius at recognizing emotions, at making sense of them, and at regulating them.

I had this weird experience about a decade ago where I was doing a study on emotional intelligence. I gave a big sample of people a test to try to measure their skills and then predict their job performance and a bunch of other dynamics at work. And I found that there was effectively no correlation between how good they were at managing and regulating emotions and how skilled they were in recognizing and making sense of emotions. And it didn't hit me at the time, but as I was listening to you, I realized...

I've gotten feedback multiple times in my life that...

I'm so quick to regulate emotions that I don't always even fully process them. And that can make me not only worse at navigating my own complex experiences, but also it makes it harder to understand what other people's emotions are. I'm like, wait, why are you mad about that thing that happened? It doesn't matter. Just make it go away. If it's not consequential and or if you have no control over it,

Like, don't bother to emote in this situation in the first place. And people look at me like I'm an alien. Why are you emoting? You just really captured why that happens, right? Because your task when you go through pain is to make it go away and reduce it or minimize it as quickly as possible. And that means you don't understand your pain and you don't understand other people's pain as well as you could. We are...

In many ways in this disconnected world where facts differ amongst subgroups of people, that's going to increase in many ways. We will customize experiences. We'll have bespoke content and entertainment experiences due to AI and other technologies. And so we'll have less common ground. But those emotions are binding, right? If I am in touch with my emotions and my full experiences and my pain in this case,

then I can identify with yours. Our facts can be miles and miles apart. Pain is the same. And that's a bridge we can work with. That's a bond we can build on and travel together and maybe arrive at some shared informational reality too. But sharing emotional reality is still a real possibility for us. So you're saying that

That an antidote to a lack of cognitive shared reality is emotional shared reality. Yeah. That we might not agree on all of the same facts, but that we can move toward understanding each other better if we have some common experiences that we recognize. That is exactly what I'm saying. You know this more than most. We're not rational beings. We're not pure economic actors. Yeah.

We're just balls of chemicals and emotions interacting. And then we write a story to make sense of that stuff. And we try to make ourselves feel better about some of these things. We write the logic after.

The idea of starting with shared feelings as opposed to trying to establish shared thoughts, it completely reverses the way that most of us tend to approach these kinds of debates and divides. And it reminds me a little bit of what psychologists and political scientists have been doing around deep canvassing, right? I'm amazed by these randomized controlled experiments where just having somebody knock on your door and ask you questions, right, and really listen to you.

makes you less extreme in your ideological positions, more nuanced and more caring and more thoughtful. I'm like, okay, that's an example of trying to establish shared emotional reality. So I'm going to go way out on amateur psychology limb here, but...

Maybe not that far. You tell me. You're actually the credentialed one. We say we want a lot of things. We want justice. We want freedom. We want opportunity. We want righteousness. But I suspect strongly that a core need of ours below all of that is belonging. And we will choose belonging at the expense of our values, our stated values, in many circumstances, maybe even the majority of circumstances. How could someone do that?

Okay, so if you're just operating at rational brain level, it makes no sense. It was against their community. But there was some belonging. How do terror cells work? How do gangs work? They recruit into belonging. They create bond. They create family ties.

And a sense of loyalty. It's double-edged. It's like, oh, cool. We can use emotions to build connection and sense of belonging. What kind of emotions? Yeah. It's like, what kind of glue is this? And it can build armies that raise nations and pillage. It can also build a shared sense of humanity that collaboratively achieves much greater things than we could do on our own.

So there are a bunch of other themes I want to talk about, but first we need to do a lightning round. I always love the balance in your talks of rich storytelling and quick wit. So this is your window for quick wit. Oh boy. On demand. You host a great podcast, Hottest Citizen, where you remind us that it's not just a right we were born into or a portal we pass through, but it's a daily action.

What's the most important thing for us to know about how to be a good citizen? When you think about citizen as a verb, it opens every action that we take to contribute to our ability to live together better. Citizenship is a complex and loaded term. Democracy is a weighty but often meaningless term. And when we strip some of those away, I think what we're trying to do is live together. And we're just trying to do that better.

Tell me what the worst advice is you've ever gotten. Just work harder. It strips so much context from the world and life to do that as if work is all measured the same. It's as if kind of diminishing the value of rest will help long-term in life. Just like hustle harder, work harder. I find the unidirectionalness of that very unhelpful, actually. Agreed.

What is a book you think we should all read? See No Stranger by Valerie Kaur, K-A-U-R. Valerie is a Sikh religious leader, S-I-K-H, civil rights lawyer, activist, damn near a prophet of our times. She's something special amongst humans. And the core message of her book is that a stranger is a part of myself I do not yet know. So she is trying to create new bonds, new senses of shared reality and belonging.

amongst even opponents who she refuses to call enemies. Her movement is of revolutionary love, love of self, love of others, even love of our opponents. There's a lot of wisdom in her work. Wow, hadn't come across her. Excited to check it out. Thank you. Is there something that you've recently rethought? I just had a very moving experience watching a talk by Tristan Harris and his colleague Eiza. I don't know Eiza's last name, unfortunately. They called it the AI Dilemma.

It was a masterclass in argument. And they've made a strong case. I'm rethinking how we address the potential harms of this thing. And have I been conditioned myself to just be like, well, we can't possibly just stop and decide to figure things out before we resume because market forces or innovation or impracticality. But Tristan and then my friend Molly Crabapple

who initiated a petition on behalf of illustrators to cause for like not using this stuff if you are in a media publication and value your own creativity and intellectual property. Aza Raskin, is that the name? Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things I've learned from you is you're very careful about deconstructing words and their meaning.

And I think it's one of the reasons that I feel like I need to stop and listen when you say a sentence because you've actually thought through what's going into it as opposed to talking first and thinking after the fact. Do you have a process when you're deconstructing a word that you like to go through? As a kid, I was very sensitive to being misunderstood. And I hated it. I hated when my intentions were not received accurately.

And folks assumed or misunderstood or maliciously misinterpreted what I meant. And so part of how I think I developed to deal with that is, well, I just have to be very clear about my intentions, which means I have to be very clear with my speech. And so I've got to think about these things and leave less margin for error. My whole world is words. I write them, I speak them, I do them on camera and TV shows.

I love words. So I also think there is a, almost a gardener's sense of reverence. Words have life too. And so I want to be like a good steward of words and not abuse them or misuse them. It shows. I don't want to speak on behalf of words, but if they could speak, I feel like they would appreciate it. Is there a question you have for me? I see you as someone who's on a constant journey of curiosity and you remain curious.

so open and inquisitive at a point in life when many people are starting to shut the doors and make more statements that end in a period rather than those that end in a question mark. And that doesn't seem natural to me for most people. So where does that come from for you? Your consistent, persistent curiosity across time? It comes from three places. One is just...

interacting with people who have that curiosity and finding it contagious and saying, I want to be more like that person. And every time I have that reaction to someone, sometimes they're charismatic, sometimes they're brilliant, sometimes they're knowledgeable, sometimes they're kind. They're always curious, no matter what else I admire about them. The people I admire always want to know more. And so I'm trying to follow in those footsteps of role models. I think, secondly, for me, curiosity about ideas and...

curiosity about people is like the way that some people feel when they go to a museum or a symphony. I have that about thoughts. That's cool. The shivers on your spine or the goosebumps that you get when you're appreciating art. I don't get those with art. I get those with ideas. I think the last thing is that I chose to become a teacher in part because I love to learn.

And to me, curiosity is the foundation of learning. So if you're not curious, you've stalled your own growth. Yeah. And teaching, you've got to remain curious in it. I want to talk about some of the current things you're working on right now. Yeah. You wrote, I thought, a really provocative and challenging piece a few months ago about whether the next Tina Fey is going to be a bot. Yeah.

Talk to me about that. So I wrote this in Puck. It's a new media company. I'm a founding partner and writer there. And it's a chance for me to go long in words. Will the next Tina Fey be a bot? No. We have an unchallenged assumed motivation for much of AI development. And that unstated assumption is that more faster is better.

that we need to increase output and throughput and generate more. This is generative AI and it can generate a script and it can generate a painting in seconds. Yay? Like to what end? And so that same impetus, right? That is the impetus that drove fossil fuel extraction. That's the impetus that drove

Forced labor and enslavement. That's the impetus that drives a lot of things that when they're unchecked are very, very harmful. I'm in this space of thinking a lot about capitalism. We're like, okay, great. We can generate a Bible-length text in a few minutes. Why? We are industrializing creativity. We're industrializing art. We're just ratcheting it up. Who's going to process all that? We're going to need AI to summarize everything

The crap created by AI. We already can't finish Netflix. With AI, the ability to generate and create things seemingly out of emptiness is actually based on data sets that someone chose. And those data sets are super limited. They're largely English language. They are generated in Western worlds of thought. They exist in documentable form.

They can be scanned and ingested by a machine. So now we're being told you can write anything with this, but it can only generate based on what it's ingested. And it's only ingested this narrow slice. So we are reducing humanity. We're hitching ourselves to this vehicle, dragging us at exponential speed into the future, built on a slice, a tiny representation of our past.

And we will create on that new narrower foundation. So we're shrinking. As we grow in population and technological capacity, we are shrinking ourselves down. So interesting. That's not innovation, right? There's something else going on there. So that's some of the critique. I'm also thrilled and excited about a few things, but that's where my head's at in this second. When I think about creativity, I always think of Carl Weck's

definition of putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations. And if you start there, generative AI is pretty cool. Very cool. Because there are a lot of old things at your fingertips that can be put in new combinations. And there are also potentially new things getting added to the data set that could be put into old combinations. It's a remix machine. Yeah, exactly. But you wonder, to your point, how many things are being missed.

And the fact that even if I give it the same prompt, I get a different answer every time makes me realize, well, I'm not going to prompt a thousand times. Generative AI is exciting as an input to human creativity, not a substitute for it. Right. You're in your second season of a PBS series called America Outdoors. What have you learned from not only spending more time in nature yourself, but also spending time with people who make that a big priority?

I love making the show so much. It is How to Citizen Outside. It's people deeply invested in relationships with nature and with each other through nature. I have loved seeing the country with these fresh eyes, with other people's perspective on our common ground, literally common ground. I have loved the reminder that we are a part of the natural world.

and that it is here to do more than serve us in an economic sense, that we can also serve it. So much of what we've done as humans is separate ourselves from nature. We use technology to separate ourselves from nature. And when we reconnect, we find a different generative power, a humility, a joy, a connectedness, a sense of belonging. And when we can recognize that we are able to belong

not just to human cohorts and groups, but to a larger system of life, that's really satisfying. And it's really beautiful and it gives me a lot of hope and continued momentum to do all the things I do. Sign me up for more of that in my life. Yeah. Thank you. This was awesome. Thank you. Hell yeah. It never occurred to me before that being too quick to regulate an emotion could actually interfere with recognizing it and understanding it.

I'm now wondering if before I start managing an emotion, I should ask, where is this emotion coming from? And is now the right time to begin trying to shape it? Or do I need to let the story unfold?

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Ben Ben Chang, Hannah Kingsley-Mogg, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Rethinking. Wow. Oh, shit, that's the name of your show. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Well, I mean, it's intended to have a double meaning, right? The show is also just about thinking. That was slow lightning. No, no, you're the first person to make that connection right there. I like it. Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks Running.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.