#NFTCast

# Interview with Sirsu - https://twitter.com/sirsuhayb

Artist, advocate, leader, and mesch

Philly born and "raised", but he moved around a lot

Parents encouraged art and art career

Pokemon voice acting

MySpace as the foundations for his business career

Every time he found something he loved, they pushed him. 

Why it is important to encourage art and artists

How we all benefit from what Sirsu's parents did to encourage his artistic path

How that became part of his mission to support and grow artists and lead

Digital vs. traditional for his choice

His path to crypto pre NFT

How he lost a lot in a wallet from when he had bitcoin as a kid

His crazy path between art and a crypto hackathon healthcare crypto project and how he ended up in Japan

How Instagram filters introduced him to NFT

How he understood early that art on blockchain equaled creative immortality

Was struck with the idea that decades or more later, that people will discover art

Dove headfirst into NFT at that point with Discord, the web, friends, etc. 

Started recruiting people

Saw gas increasing and realized it would be difficult

How curation is a mess and categorization is so difficult for artists

How old styles of art may not apply to new artists, especially if they didn't go to art school

Concerned that people see it as a bubble rather than where equity, wealth distribution, and inclusion can happen. 

Agrees with me that NFT  is the gateway drug to crypto and he saw that early on

# The Mint Fund - https://twitter.com/themintfund

Helps artists get their art on blockchain with funding

Provide marketing and legal guidance

The system is meant to be self-sustainable

How to get involved with them - DM them on Twitter

# HeatCheckMe

An effort to create an influencer platform for growing art exposure for artists

How it came about from just asking a community "Can I get a heat check?". He wanted to build consensus around the best things people were creating. Then the whole thing got out of hand with heat related gifs and deep fakes of Sirsu.

Whether black artists are having more success in the NFT space than they get the opportunity for in the traditional art world. 

His most brilliant or important person in NFT/Crypto