Introduction

Why I’m Doing This/Happy Birthday Mom

Strange Brew & Ric Moranis

Fatherhood: Could Mike be a stay-at-home Dad?

How we met

Competing and comparison in art & design

"Comparison is a death spiral once you start comparing yourself to other people. Yet you have to acknowledge how good and bad your work is."

Lifespan of Work / Porano Case Study

Revisiting work from other eras vs. staying in touch

Life & Design is one of those things where we’re constantly solving the same problem over and over and over.

Karlsson Wilker - Tell Me Why

90% of the work that you do ends up in the trash heap, art has a longer lifespan

Expression is Hard

"Art for me is trying to figure out a way to take my life philosophy and tie that in to things that I’m proficient at."

How you constrain yourself is the key to making art

- "When I was young, I had all the ideas but no way to execute them. When I got older, I had methods to execute them, but forgot how to have the ideas. And now, I have the ideas, I have the methods it’s a matter of trying to find fucking time to get them done."

Artistic process and outlining a concept

This isn’t an art and design podcast

Mike’s Story

Never knew what he wanted to do

Community college and needing an art credit

Seeing his and other students work in the hallway

Parody and irreverence were alluring

Buying a PC, playing games and designing loading rooms

The beginning of Atomicdust

Learning to code

It’s impressive to make a successful company

Important to sit back and reflect

"It’s hard to make a living doing creative work, it’s more deeply personal."

Is college necessary?

The internet is the great equalizer

RZA: "Whether I went to school or not, I’d always study."

Encyclopedias to Internet

"Learning no longer has a barrier to entrance, it’s a barrier of interest, time and stamina."

The unexamined life

Whatever you do, make sure you enjoy it

Contemporary business and pressure

Vlogging & routine

Casey Neistat’s older video work

Appeasing larger audiences

Finding things early on and feeling “ownership”

Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point

Anderson Paak & Kid Cudi

Hold yourself up to a higher level and push forward

Does the work suffer after appealing to a larger audience

New work by an artist should almost confuse their fans

You can’t worry about the audience

Steven Pressfield - The War of Art

Taking in content vs. producing

Doing Something in the "FuturePast"

Keep it interesting

Tattoo Story & Tattoos in general

Mike’s Hair, Cheap Beer

Outro