 Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us today. It's Rachel Wolfson here with Cointelegraph. Today I'm doing a very special interview with Mike Thompson. Mike is a two-time Clio award-winning artist and illustrator who has made quite a name for himself in the art world. Mike has worked with some major brands including Nike, Marvel, Coke, and other well-known brands that I'm sure all of you have heard of. So it's just a pleasure to welcome Mike here today. Hey Mike, how's it going? Hey Rachel, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here. It's such a pleasure and honor to be speaking with you. You're a very talented artist. If you could just go into your background a little bit to tell the audience a little bit about who you are, that would be great. Absolutely. I'd love to. Thank you first of all. So yeah, I am a digital artist and sculptor. I've been working in the industry for over 20 years or really over 25 years if I'm being honest. Worked with a lot of different clients. I kind of started off in the t-shirt industry. So on the textile side I was designing t-shirts for whatever hip-hop songs were big in the summer. I won't tell you what year that was but summertime might have been a big song by Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff at the time so dating myself. But yeah, so I did t-shirts for a while. I started working with companies who were in the kind of the young men's clothing space and ended up with a company called Echo Unlimited which was doing a lot of really nice kind of clothing and gear and stuff like that. And so it was great because Echo had this ad campaign and they got these rappers like Method Man and DMX and all these guys to pose and they take photos of them wearing the gear and then I would paint the images of them for the ads. And those came out in magazines like XXL and Vibe and all that. And it was fantastic because that allowed me to move on to start doing illustration for magazines and books and movie posters and things like that. So go forward a bunch of years. I've always been a big superhero fan. I don't know if you could tell but you know I got into working with companies like DC and Marvel doing package design for toys and you know like promotional stuff like that and eventually got into sculpting and I mean I've been doing a lot of stuff doing a lot of stuff. And how did you get involved in the crypto space? So I met Fred and Christina almost two years ago and you know the pitch was hey Mike you're doing all this great artwork. We would love to you know create an NFT with you and sell it on there at the time it was an online gallery called Pixios. And so you know he's explaining me to me what NFT is and I was like I don't know. I don't know. And I was just like yeah this sounds weird like people are going to pay me for what they usually just steal as a JPEG. I don't know. So I kind of I didn't do anything for a little while and then the people sale kind of happened and I was like oh man let me call Fred. So called him up and we got my original piece which actually was in the LA Grammy Museum. I turned that into my first NFT. It went up for a while and sat there until Flow announced my partnership with them in Epic's to do the Icons collection. And then and then it sold. So I was like oh man I'm hooked. So then we're working on you know Fred decided he was going to form Epic's with Christina and their partner Mario. And so we kind of you know went full steam ahead. We're like all right for this collection you can do whatever you want to do. And I decided I wanted to put my my lifelong love of hip hop into this this this set. And are there any other benefits that you want to elaborate on just having the collection virtual versus physical? I love the idea of having collections of things with me at all times you know like I'm a big comic book collector and I had these long boxes that are in a closet and they've been there forever. Everything's in plastic with boards and all that you know and video games are all like in the in the sleeves and and just music walls of CDs and things like that right. But being able to have my entire audio collection on my phone at any given moment is compelling to me right. So like I think that that's the way we're moving with everything. And you know I'm all for physical things as well right like so the statues that are behind me I love the fact that I can look at them and grain you know get inspiration for working on other things from those. We actually have something that is in the works that's going to allow you to have the best of both worlds. So you know I don't want to talk about it too much but you'll be able to combine physical with the unique NFT ID chips as well. And so that's that's pretty exciting. So if a friend of yours or family member wanted to see it you just hold out your phone and show them. Exactly. Exactly you know I've got my whole comic book collection on my iPad. It's crazy. Yeah what a world. How has the transition been going from that into the NFT world? Was it an easy transition for you to take you know your physical artwork and kind of make that digital or was it challenging? So it's interesting because I have I started freelancing back in 2004 so I've been kind of working remotely for a big chunk of my life you know and so if you had asked me about transitioning from physical into digital as far as artwork when I first did it it was challenging just getting used to the whole space but I've worked that way so long that the biggest challenge with NFTs was kind of wrapping my mind around the concept of them and you know why having something that you're allowing to someone you know you're allowing someone to have ownership of something right? So you're not only getting you know a print of my artwork where there are a million prints you're getting something that has a very kind of finite availability that you have ownership in so it's it's pretty exciting you know but it took me that was probably the biggest part is realizing what they are. I still can't announce the F part in the middle fungible I think that's what it is but I don't have to so that's good. Are you doing anything to educate the public friends family you know children on what NFTs are? I think a lot of the world you know they know they know of NFTs but they're so unfamiliar as to what they actually are yeah as an NFT artist are you doing anything to educate the world on you know what NFTs are? Absolutely you'd be surprised so since Flo started talking about my collection everybody is coming to me so I've had to kind of ramp up my own knowledge and and tell people so I'm I'm actually an instructor at an online digital art school right this school called the CG spectrum and I just had a kind of a panel discussion with you know the instructors and the teacher like the students and everyone in there about NFTs and you know creating them how difficult is it to do it yourself and and you know sell them and things like that uh with family members every day you know since since the presale of uh of my collection I have been I've been telling people every day you know okay go do this do this I've become like a one of the the the technical support guys you know that you you call when you can't figure something out so uh yeah I'm I'm doing quite a bit of that. Can you explain maybe the personal benefits for you creating NFTs for instance you know like you said it allows ownership all of that but any any personal benefits that you want to discuss? So the biggest personal benefit for me is so I have two kids I have a boy and a girl and uh and I and I wanted to leave some type of a legacy with them and you know it's it's one thing to um you know to to be in a co-commercial here or do this infinity thing there or whatever but I think creating a collection like this with the level of quality like I I put everything into this and and like I said you know I I truly love hip hop so I want people to get that when they see it it's not just a cash grab it's something that that's near like near and dear to me um being able to create that and put that out there in a space where it can live on and sell you know and and and be traded and things like that like that's a big deal for me um I I really um I want my grandkids to be able to look back and be like oh man grandpa was killing it with this thing um you know so that's the that's the biggest thing for me I think you know as a creator and an artist it's fantastic because you have ownership in your own work you know like that's the biggest thing cool awesome if people want to get in touch with you or if they want to find out more about your collection uh how should they do that so my name online is um at Mike T artworks looks like Mike T artworks I didn't think about that when I when I kind of bought that but uh that's what it is I'm not a baker uh unless you count me cooking up all that good stuff um so yeah they can reach me on uh Mike T artworks my site is is is that my instagram is that my twitter is that without the s so Mike T artwork and so yeah you can reach me that way but you're gonna find me on epics as well thanks for sharing those thoughts with us Mike it's been a great interview it's been a real pleasure meeting you and I'm looking forward to you know all of your NFT collections in the future and I'm sure the audience and that is as well thank you thank you so much