Human First

By Mike Baker People ask about AI all the time now. They ask artists. They ask writers. They ask musicians. They ask podcasters.

Author, speaker, podcast host, songwriter, AI-assisted artist, EndoDad advocate, and CEO of a community health center in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Women do not need permission to lead. Men need to stop standing in the doorway. On authority, credit, protection, belief, and real resources.

What to work out before you commission a piece: what it is really for, what you are asking someone to make, and what makes the answer good.

Memorial Day, a hockey net, a sore body convinced it had one more save left, and the ordinary joy most of us manage to miss almost entirely.

Fifty episodes in. On public ugliness, women's health, and the work of staying human when the middle is the hardest place left to keep standing.

We are wasting too much of what makes us human. The future gets better when we stop feeding division, stop fearing every tool, and start building with purpose.

Season 2 of Still Here, Still Trying starts now. If this is the first you are hearing of it, you are coming in at a genuinely good moment.

The future gets shaped by what we build, what we fund, what we normalize, and whether we choose fear or shared humanity. You can feel it already.

One night, five songs, and a whole lifetime in fifteen minutes. Just the hot tub, the stars, and this EP playing straight through with no phone.

Someone asks how you are doing and you hand back the version that keeps things moving. Doing good. Busy, but good. On the habit of being fine.

Why the Tools Changed But the Voice Is Still Mine Mike Baker There’s a lot of noise right now about artificial intelligence and art.

The show is over and the walls are quiet again. This piece lives in the space between, between the Year of the Snake and the coming Year of the Horse.

Millions filled the streets under one banner. Not for chaos, not for attention, but for truth. A note about the image I made and called Resist.

October 18, 2025 | General | Liberty in the Static, by Mike Baker A Note Before You Read This reflection was written with care, not judgment.

Written with care rather than anger. I sit in the middle, I am not interested in taking sides, and I still think looking away costs us something.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. On Degas, perception, and the moment someone feels something they did not expect to feel.

Kellie and I went to St. Thomas for our twenty-sixth anniversary. I thought we were going for rest. What I found was considerably deeper than that.

Notes from the weirdest position in hockey. Fresh tape, skates sharp for about ten minutes, and a locker room cooler waiting like a holy grail.

John Oliver was not wrong about AI slop. The internet is flooded with work that looks clean and says nothing. Here is why I keep creating anyway.