Nine Books, One Question: Are We Still Human?

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Okay, everybody. Welcome to Still Here, Still Trying with your host, Mike Baker. Today’s episode is called Nine Books. One question. Are we still human? And yes, nine books. Mike did not write a trilogy. He did not write a cute little bonus guide. He sat down after bedtime, let the ADHD hyper focused take the wheel, brought an AI tool infrastructure, and somehow built a nine-book human first series. No one was supervising. To be clear, AI did not write Mike’s life first.

Mike brought the stories, the family, the healthcare work, the advocacy, the leadership, the stars, the music, the chaos, the heart. AI helped organize the storm. Mike still had to make it human. Also, big congratulations to Sammy, who graduated this weekend. Sammy, your dad is wildly proud of you. Last week’s episode started with your hand, and as this week, he gets to celebrate you walking across a stage that is full circle dad heart stuff. Today, Mike is walking through the full human first series without turning it into a commercial.

Nine books. One question. Are we still human? Here’s Mike Baker. Hello again. Welcome back to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m your host, Mike Baker. Hey, this show is for people who are just tired, but they’re still showing up. Uh, people that are just trying to stay human in a world that just keeps getting louder. People trying to love better, lead better, create something honest, and keep going without pretending that everything is fine. It’s really okay.

Last week we kicked off the human first book series with Believe Her the first time. And that episode started with women’s pain, endometriosis, medical dismissal, fatherhood, marriage, healthcare, and just the responsibility that men carry when someone they love is hurting. And I wanted to start there because I believe women’s pain is one of the clearest tests of whether we actually mean human first. When a woman says her body hurts, do we believe her before she has to prove it?

And that question’s been sitting with me for years. Uh the book started in one of the most personal places in my life. It started with my daughter’s hand in mind. And we talked about that last week. But before I go any further, I want to take a second for Sammy. She graduated this last weekend, and I am so incredibly proud of her. I could spend a whole episode on that part alone, but just watching your last kid grow up, it’s it’s strange because part of you sees every version of them all at once.

You see the little kid, the hard seasons, the pain they carried, the courage that they built, and then suddenly you’re watching them just walk across the stage, and your heart does this strange thing where it feels full and cracked open at the same time. I am so proud of her for graduating, but I am even more proud of who she is becoming. I’m proud of her strength, her heart, her grit, her humor, and just the way that she keeps stepping into her life.

As a dad, there are moments where words feel too small, and this is absolutely one of them. Sammy, if you hear this, I love you. I’m proud of you. Watching you keep going has just it’s changed me, it’s inspired me, and it’s made me better, made me a better person. Well, that connects to this week’s episode more than I expected when I sat down with it, because last week we started with one book, and this week I want to pull the camera back and talk about the full human first series.

I know it’s gonna sound crazy, but there are nine books in this run. There’s a tenth one almost done about Alzheimer’s. Yes, nine finished books. And I know that sounds like a lot. It sounds like someone who someone should have stepped in earlier and said, Mike, what the hell are you doing? Drink some water and make one normal decision in your life, will you? Fair. Look, I hear that. But I want to explain how this happened because I think people hear nine books and make one of two assumptions.

Some people might assume that I’ve lost my mind, which is depending on the hour of the night, is at least a reasonable concern. But others might assume that this is just some AI shortcut where I sat down, typed, write me a book, and out came a pile of generic nonsense wearing my name on the cover. Well, I want you to know that is not what this is. These books are deeply personal. There is a piece of my soul in each of them. They came from my family, my work, my marriage, my kids, my ADHD, my grief, my hope, my frustration, my leadership, my creativity, my advocacy, and the rooms I have actually stood in.

AI did not give me those things. Life gave me those things. What AI did was help me keep up with myself. And that might be just the best way I know to explain it. My brain does not always move in a straight line. And anyone who knows me knows that. My ADHD brain just connects everything to everything. Some days that is exhausting and some days it’s beautiful. At night, after long and busy work days, when the house gets quieter, I just get these creative bursts where the ideas start moving fast.

One book connects to another book, a chapter becomes a song, a song becomes a podcast episode, a title becomes a cover, a cover sends me back into a chapter because now I understand the emotional center better. It’s madness up there, I tell you. But that is just how my brain works. And when it gets into flow, man, it’s like the hard part is that flow creates more material than one person’s executive function knows what to do with. I have the ideas, I have the heart, I have the stories, and I have lived the experience.

Then I need structure. I need help holding the thread when my brain wants to run nine directions at once. And honestly, that is where AI has helped me. Using AI has felt less like replacing myself and more like writing with a partner who understands how my mind moves and is fast enough to stay with me. I bring the story, I bring the pain, I bring the memory, I bring the voice, I bring the sentence that matters. I bring the reason that the book needs to exist.

And AI helps me organize the chaos, test the structure, find the gaps, push the idea further, and get the mess into a shape that I can work with. And then I revise. I actually argue with it. I cut what sounds fake, I add the part that only I would know. I rewrite sentences until they sound like something that I would say out loud, and then I pull it back when it gets too polished. I make it more human, I make it more me. Now, that process has been powerful for my ADHD brain because it lets me stay in the creative flow without losing the project.

It helps me manage multiple books and songs and covers and podcast ideas and launch pieces without dropping every thread on the floor. It gives my brain a place to put the overflow. But the heart of these books is mine. The people are real, the work is real, the reason these books exist and the reason that these books matter to me is real. So when I say I created nine books, I know it sounds a little ridiculous. It is a little. I’ll give you that.

It also makes sense to me because this is what happens when my ADHD hyperfocus, my night flow, my lived experience, and the right creative tools start working together instead of fighting each other. And it feels like I found a way to let my brain just become useful at full speed. And that is part of the human first story, too. These books are not about pretending that technology does not exist. They’re about making sure that the human being stays at the center while we use the tools in front of us.

AI helped me build the container and it helped me keep pace with the madness. It’s definitely madness. But the reason these books exist is human. The full human first series releases on June 30th. And today I want to walk through and talk through the nine books without turning this into a sales pitch. Like nobody needs a long commercial disguised as a podcast. I want this to feel like me opening the door and just saying, here is what I have been building, here is why it matters to me, and here’s the thread that ties it all together.

So this is nine books, one question, are we still human? Let’s get into it. Well, when I wrote The Optimus Way, I was trying to name something that had been shaping me for a long time. I wanted to talk about hope without making it fake, and I wanted to talk about pain without letting it own the whole room. I wanted to talk about leadership and family and loss and faith and the decision to keep moving toward the good, even when life gives you plenty of reasons to get cynical.

And that book really helped me start. It mattered to me then, and it still matters to me now. It gave me a way to begin putting my inner life on the page, and it helped me find out what writing could become in my life, especially when it was connected to the things that I care about most. I am proud of that book, but I also know it was a beginning. A first book teaches you what the next book needs from you, and it teaches you where you were brave and where you were still hiding.

And it teaches you which sentences came from your actual life and which ones were trying too hard to sound like something a writer would say. And since then, life just kept going. And that sounds obvious, but that is the point. You write something and then life keeps teaching you. You think that you said the thing and then a new room opens. You think that you understand hope, and then someone you love hurts. And you think that you understand leadership, and then the stakes get higher.

You think you understand technology, and then AI just starts changing the ground underneath everyone’s feet. You think you’re you understand your own brain. And then your ADHD walks into a room wearing tap shoes and carrying 17 new ideas. Well, that has been this part of my life for me. My days have still been full of work and responsibility and decisions and people and the mission that matters deeply to me. And then at night, when the house gets quiet, the creative part of my brain just keeps waking up.

Sometimes that has meant writing, sometimes music, sometimes cover design, sometimes AI art, and sometimes it’s just me staring at a title and wondering if it’s brilliant, terrible, or written by a man who should have gone to bed two hours earlier. And my doctor’s gonna tell you, I should have gone to bed two hours earlier. Sleep is important. Listen, somewhere inside all of that, the books just started talking to each other. At first, they looked separate.

One book about endometriosis and one about menopause, and one about women leading, one about men growing up, one about ADHD, one about AI, one about just daily survival, and one about hope, and one about the whole human first idea. They looked like different topics, but they had the same heartbeat. Human first. And that phrase has been showing up in my music, my leadership, my writing, and just the way that I think about the world. To me, human first means we start with a person before we rush to the system, the role, the diagnosis, the argument, the title, the technology, or whatever assumption that we carried into the room.

It means a patient is a person before they are chart. A woman in pain is a person before she is a complicated case. A worker is a person before they are productivity. A creator is a person before they are content. A man trying to grow is a person before he is the worst thing that he learned. A person with ADHD is a person before they are the missed detail, the late reply, or the idea that got bigger than the calendar. The series became nine books because the idea kept showing up in different rooms.

And that is how life works sometimes, at least for me. The same truth comes back in a new shape until we finally pay attention. Well, the anchor book is human first, obviously. That one holds the center of gravity for the whole series. It takes a question that sounds simple until life puts pressure on it. What would change if we put the person back at the center? And that’s easy to say when everyone is calm, but it gets harder in the actual rooms where life happens.

The meeting is tense, the patient is hurting, the team is tired, the leader is defensive, the family is scared, the man is embarrassed, the woman is exhausted, the technology is moving too fast, the future feels like it’s being built by people who might not have to live with the consequences. All of that is happening. Human first is a nice phrase until it costs us something, and then it just becomes a choice. And that is what I wanted the anchor book to hold.

I wanted to write about the pressure to reduce people. We reduce people to output, diagnosis, job title, political category, mistake, symptom, role, content, or inconvenience. And we do it in healthcare. We do it in families, we do it online in particular, we do it in leadership. We do it when we are tired and do not want to deal with the full humanity of the person in front of us. Look, I have done it too. And that is part of why I write about it.

I am not interested in pretending that I have lived every one of these ideas perfectly. I have not. And I’m sorry for the times that I have not. I am trying to name the work because I am in it too. The book is more like a field note from someone trying to lead, love, create, parent, listen, and fix things while the world keeps pulling people into categories that are easier to manage than real human beings. Start with a person and then let that change the way that you listen, lead, love, create, build, decide, apologize, and show up.

And once that became clear, the other books just started making more sense. Last week we talked about Believe for the First Time, and I’m not gonna re-record that whole episode here, but I do want to explain why that book belongs so early in the series. It is personal. It started with Samantha’s hand in mine while she was in pain, and it grew through Kellie’s experience and through Endodad and through the stories women have trusted me with over time.

It is about endometriosis, women’s pain, medical dismissal, fatherhood, marriage, healthcare, and men just learning that belief has to become behavior. The heart of that book is simple. A woman should not have to prove pain to people who claim to love her. And that should not feel like a radical statement, but for too many women, it has been their experience. Women have been asked to explain too much, defend too much, wait too long, smile through too much, and just become experts in conditions that they never asked for, while also managing everyone else’s discomfort around their pain.

And this is one of those places where the human first idea gets tested immediately. When a woman says something hurts, the person in front of us matters more than our discomfort, our assumptions, our impatience, or our need for the story to make sense quickly. That book is for the woman who needs someone in her life to understand. It’s for the dad who loves his daughter but gets awkward around the real words. It’s for the husband who loves deeply but still needs to grow up around pain and sex and change plans and support.

It’s for healthcare people who care but need to listen sooner. And it’s for men like me, men who have been changed by the pain of someone that they love and who do not want to become one more person, she has to convince. That book began this whole run because belief is one of the first tests of human first. If someone tells us they are hurting and our first reaction is doubt, inconvenience, discomfort, or defensiveness, then we have work to do. Well, the women’s help thread continues in Man versus Menopause, and that title has humor in it because the book needs humor.

Menopause gets talked about in ways that are too clinical, too dismissive, or so awkward that everybody starts acting like the floor is suddenly very interesting. And I wanted this book to feel human, honest, funny, direct, and useful. This book is about marriage and midlife. It is about hormones and sleep and sex and hot flashes and body changes, identity, patience, and the strange way that men sometimes act like menopause is a mystery, a joke, or a personal attack.

It is none of those things. It is a real season in a woman’s life, and men need to stop being useless about it. And I say that with love mostly. A man who loves a woman has to keep learning her as life changes. Her body changes, his body changes, the relationship changes, the old scripts just stop working. What used to feel easy might need more conversation, and what used to be assumed might need tenderness. What used to be funny might not be funny.

Sleep matters, stress matters, pain matters, hormones matters, sex matters, feeling scene matters. A lot of men enter midlife with a weird mix of confusion and entitlement. They want their relationship to keep working the same way, even when the people inside it are changing. They want closeness without learning, and they want patience without offering it. And they want the woman that they love to explain everything, but they also get overwhelmed when she does.

That is where the book pushes with humor in heart. It says, man, learn something. Read a little, ask better questions. Stop turning every symptom into a referendum on your marriage. Stop making the woman you love carry the full emotional weather report for the entire house. I wanted man versus menopause to be a field guide for the husband who wants to show up better, but does not need a textbook dropped on his head. He needs someone to say, here is what might be happening.

Here is why your reaction matters. Here is how to stop making this harder. And here is how to love the woman in front of you instead of chasing some old version of the relationship. And that book sits next to Believe Her the first time because they both ask men to take women’s bodies seriously. And that should be a really low bar, but apparently the bar has been doing basement work for a very, very long time. Well, after women’s pain and women’s health, the series moves into women’s power with get out of the way.

And that book has some heat in it. It needed to. It is about women leading, and it is about the way that men say we support women until women actually take up space, hold authority, challenge systems, and stop performing comfort for everyone else. Support is easy when it stays symbolic. Remember that. But it gets more honest when power moves. A man saying that he believes in women leaders does not mean much if he only supports women who make him feel safe, grateful, or centered.

Real support means telling the truth about misogyny, double standards, tone policing, credit stealing, religious and cultural baggage, and the small daily ways that women are asked to be excellent without becoming inconvenient. This book came from watching patterns repeat. A woman leads strongly and suddenly people call her difficult. A woman names a problem, and people act like her tone is the issue. A woman is direct and the room gets uncomfortable, and a woman stops doing extra emotional labor for everyone else, and somehow she becomes the problem instead of the system that needed her unpaid softness to function.

That is exhausting to watch, and I cannot imagine how exhausting it is to live. The title is direct because the issue is direct. And that does not mean that men disappear. It means that men stop blocking. Controlling, correcting, rescuing, explaining, and centering themselves in rooms where women are ready to lead. It means we stop giving speeches about support and start asking where our power needs to move. It means we need to stop being congratulated for standing beside women after years of standing in front of them.

And that book belongs in the humans first series because women in leadership are still human beings before they are threats to somebody’s comfort. They are not there to make men feel enlightened. They are there to lead. Let them. Now, get out of the way connects naturally to the better man field guide. Because once you start talking about women’s pain, women’s health, and women’s leadership, you also have to talk about men. Men as human beings who need to grow without turning them into the villains of every story or fragile little kings who need constant praise for basic decency.

The better man field guide is practical. It is about listening. It’s about fixing things. It’s about emotional responsibility, marriage, fatherhood, friendship, leadership, defensiveness, and accountability. It’s about men becoming more useful without turning growth into a performance. I wrote it because I think a lot of men are stuck between two bad rooms. In one room, they get told that they are terrible and they shut down. In the other room, they get surrounded by men who never challenge them.

And they stay the same. There has to be another path. Grow up with love. Take responsibility, learn to fix things, stop making the people around you pay for what you refuse to face. This is not anti-man. I think it is deeply pro-man. I believe that men are capable of more than avoidance, ego, anger, silence, or jokes that hide fear. And I believe that we are capable of tenderness, courage, accountability, real friendship, and love that becomes visible in our behavior.

But we have to choose it. Sometimes somebody has to tell us the truth plainly enough that we stop hiding behind I’m trying and just start changing. This book also has me in it because I am still working on all of this. I have been married a long time. I have raised kids, I have led people, I have made mistakes, I have gotten defensive, I have wanted credit for good intentions before my behavior fully caught up. I have had to learn that being a good man is not a status that you claim.

It’s a practice that you return to, especially after you miss. And that is why this one matters. A better man is not a perfect man. A better man is a man who keeps letting love turn into responsibility. And then there is beautifully unfocused. And that one is deeply personal in a very different way. This is the ADHD book. It’s about having a brain that moves fast, connects everything, misses details, creates constantly, feels deeply, starts too much, forgets something obvious, and still sees patterns that other people might miss.

ADHD has become easier to joke about online, and I do joke about it because some of it it is funny. And there are days when my brain feels less like an executive function system and more like a golden retriever that’s just loose in an office supply store. But ADHD is not only funny, it can create shame. It can hurt relationships, it can make people doubt their own reliability, and it can make you feel like you are working harder than anyone else sees and still missing things that other people think should be easy.

It can make daily life feel like you are constantly trying to catch a train that left five minutes ago. And at the same time, ADHD is part of how I create. It’s part of how I connect ideas, it’s part of how music and art and strategy and writing and leadership move through me. I do not want to hate my brain. I also do not want to make everyone else suffer because I refuse to build support around it. And that really is the tension inside the book. How do you build a life where your brain has room to be powerful without becoming destructive?

And that question ties directly back to the way that this whole series came to life. AI has helped me turn the flood into a structure. It has helped me hold multiple projects without losing the core of each one. And it has helped me take the late night burst and turn it into chapters, outlines, edits, covers, podcast ideas, and songs that still feel connected to the heart of the work. But this is the part that I want people to understand. AI is not the soul.

AI is not the pain. AI is not the memory of holding my daughter’s hand. AI is not my marriage. AI is not my leadership scars. AI is not my grief. AI is not my love for my kids. AI is not the reason that these books matter. It is a tool, a very powerful tool, but still it is a tool. For my ADHD brain, it has become a way to keep the table from collapsing under the weight of too many ideas. It helps me see the shape of the mess. It helps me move faster, but I still have to decide where we are going.

I still have to read the work and say, no, that does not sound like me. I still have to add the part that only I know. And I still have to take a clean paragraph and put a little dirt back under its fingernails. That is why Beautifully Unfocused belongs in this series. It’s about refusing to reduce a person to the hardest parts of their brain. It’s about telling the truth about the chaos without missing the beauty. And it’s about building systems that honor how a person actually works.

Human first means that my brain gets structure without shame. And that question leads right into just kind of a silly little book that I built, but it’s called This Book Won’t Fix Your Life. Which might be one of my favorite titles because it tells the truth from the first second. It will not fix your life. Look, no book does that. No podcast does that. I mean, maybe this one. But no quote on the internet does that. No matter how nice the font is or how dramatic the mountain looks in the background.

We’ve all seen those things. This book is for the person who is just tired, overwhelmed, overthinking, trying, failing, trying again, and maybe feeling a little ridiculous about how hard normal life feels sometimes. It’s definitely lighter than some of the others, but it still has heart. And I wanted it to be funny because life is insane and absurd. I wanted it to be honest because fake inspiration makes tired people feel worse. And I wanted it to be useful because sometimes people do not need a complete life transformation.

They just need enough oxygen to get through today without turning on themselves. And that counts. It follows a very similar structure as the Optimus Waits, short paragraphs, swears a little bit in there. It’s a lot more me. Um, but it’s just a really cute book. And some days, like the win is just answering the text. Some days the win is eating something with protein in it. Some days the win is taking the walk and making the bed, apologizing, drinking water, or deciding not to believe every ugly thought that your exhausted brain hands you.

That is not glamorous, but a lot of real life is not. Real life is mostly just small decisions made while you’re tired. And I wanted this book to feel like a friend who tells the truth without being mean about it. I wanted it to give people just a little laugh and a little breath, and I wanted it to remind people that being a mess in the middle of the story does not mean that the story is over. That is human first two. A tired person is not a failed person, a struggling person is not a project, a hard day is not a whole identity.

And sometimes the most human thing that we do is just make it through the day without giving up on ourselves. And then the series turns toward the future with the future still needs us. And this is the AI book. And honestly, it’s one of the books that I felt like I had to write because AI is not some far-off topic anymore. It is here, it is in creativity, it’s in work, it’s in healthcare, it’s in education, it’s in energy infrastructure and politics and power and fear and the way that people imagine what comes next.

I use AI. I’m open about that. I use it in my writing process, my art, my music, my planning, my creative systems, my therapy. It has helped me turn brain noise into structure, and it has helped me catch ideas that I might have lost. It has also helped me build more than I could have built alone. But I also think we have to be serious about this moment. Who benefits, who gets left behind, what happens to work, what happens to art, what happens to communities when massive infrastructure lands in real places with real water, real power grids, real people, and real trade-offs.

What happens when we move faster than our ethics? The future still needs us because technology should answer to human need, human dignity, human creativity, and human judgment. And I am hopeful about AI, but I am not naive about power. This book is my attempt to hold both Jews at once. AI can be a gift. AI can also become a weapon, an extraction machine, a replacement fantasy, or just another way for powerful people to move faster while communities are told to deal with the consequences.

I do not want the future to be built by fear, and I also do not want it to be built by hype. I want a human future. I want technology that helps us care better, create more, solve real problems, reduce suffering, and expand what people are able to do. I do not want a future where human worth gets measured by efficiency alone. And that is where human first matters. If we build the future without the human being at the center, then we should not act shocked when the future starts feeling less human.

The future still needs us. That is not a throwaway line, it is a responsibility. The final book I want to talk about today is still here, still trying. Of course that book had to be in there. That phrase has just become part of me. It’s the name of this show because it is one of the most honest ways that I know how to describe life. Most of us are not living inside some perfect breakthrough story. We are living inside the daily work of just trying again.

We are carrying grief, we are carrying family stories, we are carrying work stress, we’re carrying health stuff and money stuff and aging stuff and parenting stuff and marriage stuff and face stuff and regret and hope and the strange feeling that life is beautiful and brutal in the same breath. We have a lot on our minds, right? Still here, still trying is not a shiny success slogan. It is not pretending that everything is fine. It is the honest place that many of us live.

And this book is about continuing without turning survival into performance. Nobody wants that. It is about hope that still tells the truth. It is about trying again after you got it wrong. It is about loving people while you still have them. And it is about staying open in a world that keeps giving you reasons to close. In some ways, this book is the emotional home base for the whole series. Human First is not only an idea, but it is a way of surviving with your heart still working.

And that matters to me. I have lost people that I love. I have watched my kids grow up faster than I was ready for. I have sat in hospital rooms and boardrooms and quiet rooms after hard days. I have made mistakes. I have tried to repair those mistakes. I have had moments where I felt strong, and I have had moments where I felt like I was held together with monster energy drinks, stubbornness, and a very questionable calendar system. And I am still here, still trying.

And that does not make me special, it makes me human. And I think that is why the phrase connects. It gives people permission to be honest without giving up. You do not have to be fixed to keep going. You do not have to be fully healed to be worthy of love. You do not have to have the whole plan to take the next right step. You are here, you are trying, and that counts. So that is the human first series. Nine books. Like I said, I’ve got a tenth one that’s almost done, but it’s not quite ready.

It’s about my mom and Alzheimer’s, and it’s just breaking my heart to write it. But the world needs it, and we have to get it out there, and it has to be part of this. But I just need a little more time. But I know that’s a little ridiculous. I hope that you see that it is a little bit beautiful. But this is very me. And I am proud of it. I am proud because these books feel like growth. They feel like what happened after The Optimus Way opened something in me, and life just kept handing me deeper, harder, more human things to write about.

They also feel like a new way of creating, one that fits my actual brain. My ADHD hyperfocus, my night flow, my lived experiences, and the right AI tools all came together in a way that just helped me hold the work without losing the heart of it. These books are not random, they are connected by one question. What happens when we put the human being back at the center? A woman in pain. A wife in midlife, a woman leading, a man just trying to grow up, a person with ADHD, a tired person trying to make it through today, a future shaped by AI, a person that is still here, still trying.

That is the series. The human first books release June 30th. And over the next few weeks, I’ll keep sharing stories behind the books. I’m gonna give some give some sneak peeks. I’m gonna have some giveaways through the show. If one of these books sounds like it belongs in your life, the hands of someone you love, stay close. The Kindle pre-orders are ready to go. You can search the titles and I’ll put the links in the show notes. Last week we started with belief.

And this week I wanted to show you the map. Nine books, one heartbeat. Start with the human being. And before I close, I want to say it again. Sammy, congratulations. I am so proud of you. Your graduation means more than a ceremony. It is a marker of your strength, your growth, your work, and the life that you keep building. I love you so much. And to everyone listening, thank you for being part of this. Thank you for letting me bring the real work here.

Not the polished version, not the easy version, but the human version. This is still here, still trying. I’m Mike Baker. Stay human, keep going, but keep trying. I’ll see you next week. Okay, well, before I let you go, I want to leave you with a song called The Man They Think I Am. And this one feels right for this episode because we spent the whole whole show talking about the nine books in the human first series, but underneath all of that is another story too.

It is the story of trying to become the person that people need you to be while still being honest about the fact that you are human. People see the work, they see the books, the songs, the podcasts, the leadership, the advocacy, the ideas, the energy, and whatever else I’m trying to build inside an already full life. Sometimes they see strength because that is the part that has to show up. That’s the mask I always wear. They see steadiness because the room needs someone steady, and they see confidence because the job requires it.

They see answers because leadership often asks you to speak before you feel fully ready. But there is always more happening inside a person than the outside shows. This song lives in that place. It is about the pressure that men and women carry to look stronger than they feel. It’s about holding a house together with worn-out hands. It’s about the quiet fight, the late night pacing, the regret, the fear, the pride, the love, and the stubborn decision to stay.

And that connects to this series for me because these books are coming from the real version of my life. The one where I am proud and tired, hopeful and overwhelmed, creative and scattered, strong in some rooms and still learning in others, trying to lead well, love well, father well, create honestly, and just become a little closer to the man that people sometimes think I already am. And that is a hard sentence, but it is true. I have let people down.

But maybe that is part of just being human first too. We stop pretending that people are only the role that they play. The leader is still human, the dad is still human, the husband is still human, the creator is still human. The person trying to help others still has his own quiet fight. The Human First series releases June 30th. I’ll keep sharing more over the next few weeks. Thank you for being here for this part of the story. This one is for anyone who is trying to be strong for other people while still figuring out how to be honest with themselves.

Here’s the man they think I am. I hope you enjoy it. Like I got answers, like this plain ain’t real. They think I’m steady, think I’ve got a plan. Most days I’m faking it the best I can. I’m gonna be the man.