The Wolf Of All Streets - HOW TO MANAGE YOUR MONEY IF YOU GET PAID IN CRYPTO| NASCAR RACER EXPLAINS | LANDON CASSILL

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

Before Landon Cassill could legally drive on the road, he was winning races as a teen driver and being scouted by high profile sponsors and racing teams. What few know is that he was also an early crypto adopter and miner. He managed to merge his two loves - Landon pulled off a crypto sponsorship with one of our team’s favorite companies, Voyager. This epic deal has spawned a whole new fan base for crypto, furthering the marriage of crypto and sports. Perhaps most interesting is that the foundations of Nascar are built around freedom of choice, a pinnacle of the crypto community. Landon Cassill: https://twitter.com/landoncassill --- Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Be the ONE to bridge to all blockchains. Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. Their mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and other chains. https://thewolfofallstreets.link/harmony --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Harmony. Please stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, if you've been around the crypto space for a little while, you've probably noticed that crypto is finally finding its way into the mainstream. One of the defining factors of 2021 has been the marriage of crypto and sports, which happen to be two of my favorite things. We have seen football players, fighters, basketball players, entire leagues, and today's special guest, a NASCAR driver, all dive head

first into the space with their own unique reasons as to why they chose to get involved in crypto and accept sponsorships from crypto companies. Landon Castle is no exception to this rule, as he has his own unique story that culminated in an epic sponsorship with Voyager on his car. Landon, I can't wait to hear your story and learn more about how crypto is interacting with professional sports. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Scott, for having me. Like I told you, I feel unworthy of some of the guests that you've had on here. It's amazing. You have a great show. You've given some great insight into the crypto world. So I'm just happy to be here. Thank you. That's very flattering for them. But I think that you definitely are at the top of your game and deserve to be here for sure.

Thank you. So I'm curious. I'm very curious. What does it feel like to have this new crypto fan base? You know, obviously, like you've had the fans of your sport and your fans, but all of a sudden, you've opened this whole new Pandora's box, seemingly. Yeah, it is. It is very interesting. I've been active on crypto Twitter for a while, but not, I haven't seeked it out necessarily. You know, I've used hashtags here and there. Bitcoin has been in my bio. But like I said, I don't know

if I've seeked it out. And so I've had plenty of crypto followers. And then a lot of my fan base also is involved in crypto. So I've seen a lot of feedback and I get I even get people at the racetrack that'll make comments. So I haven't been silent about it for many years. But this is the first real crossover for me between, you know, a personal interest or even you could say personal investment. Right. Because it's been part of my personal portfolio for a number of years to my professional side of things. And it has been interesting. The crypto community is passionate, it's powerful. And, you know, it's very driven, which makes sense. I mean, you know, people are dealing with their livelihoods, whether it's play money or, you know, a major part of their portfolios. Um, there's a lot of emotion tied in when you're talking about people's money. So, uh, I've enjoyed the feedback that I've

gotten and, and really that's a lot of the motivation behind why Voyager wants to be involved and wants to tap into, to my community and in the crypto community because it is very community driven yeah it is a very passionate community we just need to always make sure that we um focus that passion positively right yeah yeah that's a that's an uncontrollable beast, though. Social media has its quirks to it. And there's definitely a case study to be made about the positivity and negativity and the reactions to it. The engagement rates on social media, that's totally unrelated to crypto. That's just people in general, I suppose. I was going to say, is it much different in sports or is it just you know sort of the way it's all the same you know whether you're sports celebrity um business you know i think that people the way

people interact on social media is uh there's a there's an interesting human element to it i feel like i've i have a pretty big following and have for a long time, but I've been fortunate enough that I don't have a lot of haters. And I don't know if it's because I'm not Kim Kardashian level or something like that, where there's just hundreds of millions of people and you're bound to have 10 million that hate you or something like that uh i i haven't gotten tons of hate on social media and when i do get negativity it's usually a snarky comment here or there uh and a lot of times you can diffuse it just by responding yeah it just breaks right back the you know i'm a i'm a child i would call it i've called myself a child of the internet um as we most of us are i'm very well aware of the rules of

the internet and obviously one of those rules is don't feed the trolls um but but i can tell you for a lot of them you know sometimes i'll get some negativity or criticism from someone that's a race fan um and all it takes is just a little response and next thing you know they're like oh no no i was just pointing this out and good luck your buddies now yeah biggest fan and and so you know a well thought out rebuttal to criticism can actually turn into um you know a fan or something like that i think that's maybe difficult to do at scale. Yes, but it does work. Yeah, in limited cases when you use the proper judgment on who to respond to and which trolls definitely not to feed. So I'm curious, you said that you have Bitcoin in your

bio and your profile. Now you have laser eyes, right? So obviously you're a part of the community in that regard. But when did your Bitcoin journey start, so to speak? When did you start to get interested? Because clearly it had nothing to do with your professional career. As you said, it was something you found on your own. Right. Well, so it was a little bit to do with NASCAR. And like a lot of people, I could say that my Bitcoin journey started before i bought bitcoin because um

you know i heard about it many years ago i mean i was a 16 17 year old kid in 2009 2010 um trolling forums and and you know be just part of the internet and and so I had heard of Bitcoin, known what it was. My brother, I know, was using Bitcoin for who knows what it was, he was using it for. And... Charity. Lots of charitable giving. That's right. That's right. But, you know, I don't think I really, I can definitely say up to 2013, 14, to me was still a conference in, let's say, 2013. And the speaker was talking about culture and kind of looking into the future and referred back to the financial crisis in 2008, 2009 in the banks and talked about how future generations could potentially reject the idea of the banking institutions as we know it, because they watch their families go through turmoil, lose their homes. And the speakers sort of broadly

predicted, you know, that the future generations would may question financial institutions in the future. And so that kind of stuck with me. And then it wasn't long after that, a friend of mine, Josh Wise, for some viral nature, got crowdfunded sponsorship through the Dogecoin community. And they didn't pay in Dogecoin. They raised the money themselves. The community raised the money themselves through Dogecoin, found a way to liquidate it and paid the race team in US dollars. But that was like the kind of connecting of all those things was like, OK, this, this isn't, this isn't just, Oh, magic internet money.

There's something more here. And from that point on is where I really started to understand, really tried to understand it. And, and, and then, you know, I became, I'm kind of a learn by doing type of person. So my actual involvement in crypto and in Bitcoin was not just buying it, but, but I mined it as well. So at one point I had a small mining farm and I mined multiple coins, not just Bitcoin for, for a little over two years.

And what was that experience like? Did you find it to be profitable? Was the timing right? I mean, mining like anything else, obviously, it's another way of stacking sats, but certainly helps when the market goes up after you've been mining. Yeah. So what I did with mining was I still hold every coin that i mined and and so ultimately um you can say it was profitable but like what's you know i didn't really realize those profits it's not like i was cash flowing my mining operation right i was right the way i look at it is I was buying Bitcoin at a discount for those years that I was mining. Right. So, you know, I had a capital investment in the machines. But ultimately, if you amortize that over the two years that I mined and look at my cost of mining over the course of two years, even with the fluctuations in the market. I mean, I was mining,

I was mining Bitcoin when it was worth $2,500. I was mining it when it was worth $20,000. Right. So there were days that it was insanely quote unquote profitable. And there were days that it was maybe not profitable, but at the end of the day, I was just buying it at a discount because I still hold on to all the coins and you know I think that the mining business one thing I took away from the mining business was a comparison to auto racing because I felt like to keep up with the rest of the mining

industry I had to constantly find ways to improve my operation. And that's through, you know, better equipment, better power, better efficiency to get more out of your mining rigs, where in racing, you know, you're constantly trying to improve your race cars, you're iterating on the equipment you have uh you're buying new equipment when it's available and and you need a better power plant under the hood to to drive your car so um you know i think if you if i were to re-enter the mining space i i feel like i would do it from uh the power production side of things i would love to invest in a power plant someday, you know, whether it's a small one in the mountains or, or, you know, a big venture project

with, with lots of money, it would be cool to, to be in the power production industry and, and have crypto mining as, as part of that business. So I saw that you had like a pretty fun spat with the SHIB community. Obviously, you were pretty passionate. You knew about Doge in 2014, which that's the really early days. I started trading those Doge cycles in 16, right? Yeah. 15 sats, 180 sats, 20 sats, 150 sats. It's amazing to see what it's come. So clearly, you're not just into Bitcoin. So tell me about what else you're interested in, or at least trading and having fun with now.

Yeah. So, you know, generally speaking, I am a buy and hold person and I, my personal financials, I'm fairly conservative. My business, you know, racing is a, is a great business. It's provided an awesome living for me and my family for, for a number of years. I've obviously I've done it professionally for about 15 years now. Um, but it's can be volatile. And, and so, you know, having cash on hand for when you're unemployed is important to me. Uh, you know, keeping debt to a minimum is, is important to me. And, and then that's what's sort of afforded me to make my crypto investments. But even in my crypto investments, a small percentage of that is allocated towards trading and speculating on smaller cap tokens. So the SHIB community was one that embraced me very organically and with a lot of energy.

And it happened at the same time that we announced our Voyager sponsorship. Voyager added Shiba Inu to their platform. And this was all, I don't want to say unplanned but but it just kind of happened at the same time and the community started reaching out to me on social media and was just like you know um created either soft synergies or created synergies or whatever you want to say um and so I just started responding back to them and started looking into the project. And, you know, I'm not, you can look through my timeline. I'm not telling anybody to buy any tokens. And, you know, I'm not giving any financial advice, but I can tell you that I, being in the marketing business for in racing, engaging with energetic communities and and rallying around communities

is is a great part of what i do and and and so i just i really admire and love what that community is doing and i could tell you within five days of being involved on twitter with the shiba inu community i'm now in Telegram groups. I'm in Instagram groups. I've got all these chat messages and people are sending me all kinds of artwork and creatives and really cool stuff. So I would love to do more with Shiba.

I would love to do more with the V vgx community the voyager token because that's a a great uh community in itself you know all these all these people that are so heavily invested in these tokens um obviously they stand a financial risk of potential gain with these projects but um but they're also using the power of their communities and their friend groups, even if they're virtual friend groups to create something. And so all these projects, you know, do have something to offer. And I think that's pretty compelling. Yeah. It's fun to watch at the very least. Yeah. That, that,

that's a great point. It is amazing how passionate the communities are around each of these coins, especially when the market is looking good. of a Bitcoin maximalist. And, and, you know, I can definitely see, you know, I'm not afraid to admit that or say that. But I think that now I look back on that. And I say, you know, and I do wonder, I look at all these powerful communities, I look at what they're accomplishing, at least for themselves, and for for the projects that they're invested in and the technology they're trying to build. And I think, you know, there's something there, you know, there's something to some of these other things.

But crypto is an interesting space and you do have to protect yourself. You do have to do your own research. You do have to think independently because you never know what's out there. But I think the funny thing is that's sort of the point right that's the point of crypto is this is this financial um individual liberty right it's it's a very uh it's a very free market and uh and i like that that's why we got in that's why a lot of people get involved in the first place. But with that comes great responsibility, right? Of course. So I'm curious. I mean, obviously you don't speak for every athlete in the world, but being that you're, you know,

a NASCAR driver, have you seen, since you've been in crypto so early, an evolution and at least awareness or interest in the space among other drivers among the teams you know even anecdotally among other athletes and in other uh in other sports yeah i mean i have and it's i i i would love to i i think over the next six months to a year i'll i'll learn the even deeper meaning to it all um among my peers you know obviously at a surface level, there's a lot of race car drivers that have approached me. And even before the sponsorship, a lot of people that I see on a weekly basis know that I'm invested in crypto, right? They know that I was mining crypto because I had a mining farm. And so there are people, you know, I'm kind of like that guy that

every time Bitcoin does something, right, whether it's plus 20% or minus 20%, I usually wake up to a handful of text messages that are like, how's your Bitcoin doing? And the fun, the funny answer to that is I was like, it's worth the same to me as it was yesterday. Right. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. Right. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. But you know, my peers are, I think in a similar way that the the mainstream retail market is

experiencing it my peers you know reach out to me with a lot of the same questions right they say they're dabbling things they want to know um if they should buy some other coins because bitcoin is so expensive you know that's at a that's like a base level. But there's a lot of people, especially since the Voyager partnership that have come out of the woodwork that have shared with me their crypto journeys and just haven't had anybody to talk to about it within the industry.

And a lot of those people are engineers on race teams and really smart people that have said, hey, it's cool that you were mining. I didn't know that you mined crypto. I've been mining Ethereum with a bunch of old graphics cards for, you know, a couple of years. Those are real stories that I get. And I say engineers because our sport is full of engineers and full of really brilliant people. And I've been pleased to find out that a lot of them have had crypto at least as a hobby, let alone a side hustle for a while. Guys, I'm really excited to be sponsored by Harmony. I know all of us have traded their

coin one in the past, but what they're fundamentally doing is a game changer. Harmony is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity and governance. Think of it as the one to bridge all blockchains. Harmony is open and insanely fast with two second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees than Ethereum. Their secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and almost every single other chain. Maybe most exciting is that Harmony, in cooperation with Sushi,

will be providing $4 million in incentives for liquidity mining. Find out more about this program and build something yourself at thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. That's thewolfofallstreets.link slash Harmony. Build on Harmony, run on all chains. Crypto has been a lot of people's dirty little secret for a long time. And now it's sort of okay to talk about it. Right. And I think that that gets across retail, but also we see it with institutions and Wall Street, right? It was like, you had this tremendous reputational risk, even mentioning Bitcoin before people think you're nuts. And now it's the opposite. It's like, you need to know a little bit about it if you're going to have any sort of financial interest or planning. Well, I think, you I think you look at the space over the last at least five years,

and it's been very retail-driven. And so people maybe are hesitant to be so public or outspoken about it. They don't want to, you know, when you have really smart people or really well-known people out there in the world saying that it's a scam or it's a Ponzi scheme. It's, you know, it's a basic person like me who I'm not college educated. To them, I'm not a smart person. It might hold someone back from saying yeah I've I've invested thousands of dollars or or my life savings into this space that you say is a scam I don't want

to look like a fool or something like that so um you could say it's a dirty little secret but it's it's just it's proven over and over again that it's real and that it's that it's not a scam um that's just like any other industry there's there might be scams in it but that doesn't mean that this the space as a whole is a scam and um and and i look at companies like voyager you know i i set out a couple years ago and and really did decide that i wanted to find a way to fold crypto into my professional work. And that's why I started networking in the space. I started going to crypto conferences, um, and, and, and felt like, you know, this, this is a, this is something that can be part of my professional work.

Pomp told me, um, back in 2017, that he thought that the crypto space was two to three years away from true mainstream marketing and mainstream adoption from that side of it. And he was dead on. And so when he told me that I said, okay, cause at the time I was thinking like, Oh, who can I find to sponsor me or to be a part of the me? Because I've, I've been in this space now and I want to be a part of it. And Anthony said, no, I think we're still two to three years away from a real compelling marketing effort. And so I stopped like trying to find it at that moment. And I just said, okay, I'm just going to try to meet people. And so that's how I met Steve Ehrlich. And, and, you know, he was building Voyager very early at the time. And so we just stayed in touch, but I look at that team now and I look at this space where people say you know this is

this is you know edge it's like the edge of of institutional finance but this is i see the voyager team and i'm like these are these are pros like these people know what they're doing this is a real company and this they have real services to offer right and they're they're building on a platform. I didn't mean to start on like an ad, I guess, but it's like, they mean, they're building out a platform that is a real use case for the future of how I'm going to deal with my money. Right. I mean, I can put USDC in my Voyager account and earn 9% interest. That's,

that's a little bit better than what my dollars earn at Bank of America. Yeah. I talk about this all the time. Buying Bitcoin was a hard sell for me on my friends in real life. I've been saying it for years. Buy Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin. You get the normal pushback. Buy USDC stable coin and earn nine or 10% has not been a hard sell to a single person. And I think that's the new gateway drug into crypto is a savings account that's not volatile that people are familiar with. It reminds them of when they were kids and you could actually earn interest. Right. Well, and like I described before, I have personal pretty conservative financial values

in terms of how I handle my portfolio. And because my business can be volatile, I keep a certain amount of my monthly expenses in cash, no matter what I think the market is doing. And so the thought of that cash earning 9% interest is like insane to me. And so it's a no brainer. And, you know, for a platform like Voyager to, you know, eventually have tools where I can debit straight out of that and make purchases make purchases through usdc and they're you know transacted at whatever vendor merchant you're at is is uh is a great thing so my my my process

through you know you talk about like hard sell to family and friends my wife is like a great barometer for me because at one point in our crypto lives was like what is this thing you're not using like a significant amount of our actual money right this is like yeah you're not using fake money right and to you know uh being being very uh you know critical or or or you know trying to understand more i catch her in bed at night like checking the crypto the bitcoin price on google i'm like why are you looking the Bitcoin price on Google. I'm like, why are you looking at the price of Bitcoin? I heard it was up today or down today or whatever to, you know, in May of this year, she said, I wish you would have bought more. And I was like, Oh, there's the moment. And then, and then also, yeah, that's it.

I literally, I've literally made the joke countless times that the minute that you show your spouse or like your best friend, how well your portfolio doing is the perfect moment to sell. Right. Right. Sell it. Yep. Yeah. Well that, and when my grandma called me and asked me, uh, that she was interested in buying some Bitcoin and asked me how to help her with it. So it's good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I really do think that that's a very compelling case. So I want to talk about what a sponsorship looks like for you. I mean, Voyager specifically, but I guess any, because I don't think anyone knows, like we see the names of a company on a car. We don't know what that means. Is it for one race? Is it for

a season? Is it the entire crew? How's that work? And, and then I want to talk about the fact that you actually got paid in crypto for doing it. So yeah, for sure. So, you know, in, in racing, um, it costs, it costs money to put a race car on the track ultimately. And, and a lot goes into our cars, building them, developing them, you know, my, are these teams, um, employee, depending on the size of the team they're going to employ anywhere from 20 to 50 people per car that you race um so or per race team so uh so your race teams are funded through sponsorship they've they we also are partly funded through the prize money but it takes you know at least the same amount of sponsorship prize money as it does sponsorship to to field a successful race team so uh you know fortunately in our sport nascar has

a tremendous fan base um and we have a tremendous tv deal we're on nbc we're on fox uh we have a we have great viewership you know sports live viewership on TV is, is a challenge lately anyways, but you know, our, our events in terms of the audience and the viewership on a weekly basis are drawing, you know, a hundred thousand people through these racetracks over the course of the weekend, plus, and millions of people watching on television. So there's a compelling marketing effort for any company that wants to invest in the branding side of things. But there's also a great business to business and hospitality opportunity for businesses as well. So as a team or as a driver pitching sponsorship, we're kind of pitching both of those things depending on the company. For a company like Voyager, there's a great branding exercise there.

And they're a brand that wants to build trust in the mainstream. They wanna to build trust in the mainstream. They want to build their brand in the mainstream, but they also want to build the community. And they want to build the people, the community of the Voyager investors and fans. And by traveling week to week and having a race car on the track at all these different venues in the future, you know, we can entertain people at the racetrack. We can engage with race fans at the racetrack and build a community that way as well. It's so absolutely, absolutely cool. So does that, as the structure, you talk about this team of 20 to 50 people per race and putting that all together, you're the driver. Are

you sort of the CEO of this small business or is there somebody else who runs it? And your role is to drive and test the car and do that. And there's someone else who sort of oversees all this sponsorship and the engineers and the build. So on a team operation side, the team operations is run by Johnny Davis and that's the team is called JD Motorsports. And Johnny is what we call the car owner. And, and he's someone that I've worked with many times over the course of my career. He's, he's an old school guy. He's a South Carolina boy. Him and I actually, you know, do a lot of our business on a handshake sometimes. And, you know, we've, we've had a lot of trust in each other over the years. And he's, he's the one that puts the car on the racetrack. For my business, I'm a hired driver. And that's where I've made my living my entire career.

And I've served a lot of race teams from a development side of things. So I've found a niche as a driver because I started out as a test driver for Hendrick Motorsports. I found my niche as a driver by going to smaller teams that need quick improvement. They need development. And I'm able to use my, my feedback to help get a team on the right path. So with that, it attracts sponsorship. And when we have sponsorship, sometimes that sponsorship is brought through my business. And in the case of Voyager, I manage obviously my driving services with JD Motorsports, but I also manage the Voyager sponsorship. Sometimes the teams manage the Voyager sponsorship.

Sometimes the teams manage the sponsorship depending on where the relationship originated. And in those cases, the team has the sponsor and they have the team and they go hire the driver and say, okay, we need this driver to be the spokesperson for the sponsor, but we also need them to be our driver. So it's somewhat complex and there's a lot of nuance

to how each and every deal can be. It's really interesting to hear about it because it's somewhat complex and there's a lot of nuance to how each and every deal can be it's really interesting to hear about it because it's so different i think from from other sports it is it is different and i've you know in the industry we've um said people have said that nascar is the wild west of professional sports uh it can be that way because we don't have a player's union. There's no driver's union. We don't have salary caps or minimum salaries and there's no guaranteed money. There's no retirement funds. We don't pay our own insurance and you run your own business as an independent contractor. So you you know, you could simplify it by saying it costs money to race a car and somebody has to pay for that, right? So between

the prize money and a sponsorship, those are your two biggest levers in terms of finding a way to put a car on the track. And at that point, it's a question of who's driving that, right? Is the team the one that's funding that or is the team the one that's funding that? Or is the driver the one that's able to come up with the sponsorship and fund that? Or does the sponsor want to start a team themselves? You know, that's happened in the sport as well. There's really no rules. I mean, it's just a matter of how do you get a car to the track?

And so for me as a driver, it's great for my business to be able to be aligned with a company like Voyager, who obviously is aligned with me personally because I'm in the crypto space, right? So I'm representing a product and I'm representing a brand that I can align with. So the two of us together can find the best solution on the racetrack to deliver the exposure that they're looking for and the hospitality for their guests that they're looking for. And you chose to be paid in Litecoin, correct? Yes. Yes. A portion of the sponsorship was led with Litecoin, you could say. There was some Bitcoin in there as well, and Voyager token as well. So do you have, are you passionate about Litecoin? Was that something you asked for? Was that something they offered? Why those three? I mean, obviously, the VGX and Bitcoin, I think are pretty

straightforward. But you know, that third one could have basically been anything. Yeah. So Litecoin, um, Litecoin is one that I very early on was mining, um, connected with Charlie Lee from Litecoin several years ago and, and built a relationship with him. And, um, I've, I've spoken at the Litecoin summit as well. And, uh, you know, I think it's, I think it's a great token. I think it takes some, some heat on, on social media, but I think it's, it's fast. And it's, it's the, you know, it has very low fees. It's easy to move money on it. It has a tremendous amount of, of wallets and users. If you look at the, the, the on-chain data and litecoin there's a lot of activity there and so you know i think that it's a it's it's a coin that can be tend to be overlooked and it was something that i asked for with voyager and and as a result um you know charlie lee is

also part of the program through um hedge which is get.io, a startup that he's a part of that is bringing crypto to your paycheck. If people want to accept their salary in crypto, they can use Hedge as a tool to do that, to convert their paycheck to crypto. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I'm curious, we hear a lot of stories and it's clearly, it's different for you guys, like you said, without the player association and without sort of, really it's like a safety net, right? But countless stories about athletes making a ton of money, but ending up broke, right? Whether it's they're young and it's poor mismanagement or it seems more often a wealth manager that takes advantage of them

or something like that how do you do you see that in your sport how do you mitigate that and i guess where does crypto fall into helping to avoid that? Um, I think that, you know, we, we, we definitely see it in our sport. Um, and, and I think that there's a lot of race car drivers and, and I mean, I've heard from old race car drivers. I've gotten advice from old race car drivers. I'll never forget one that told me when I me when i you know when i was 20 years old and and i was a teammate on the team that we were driving for uh with this guy he he said look man he's like 10 years ago this is how much money i was making i had 10 employees i had a jet i had a bus i had a property and he's like for what what did i have 10 employees for what were they doing and he's like, for what, what did I have 10 employees for? What were they doing? And he's like, I didn't have a business. I was driving race cars, right? That was my business.

So, you know, that was a, that was some interesting advice. You know, I don't think your race cars, the race car drivers can be flashy and have been flashy. So, you know, that's when we think of people wasting their money, we think of them buying fancy things and things like that but but sometimes in our business you can get caught up in just the pure expense of it all right we travel 40 weeks a year um so you know you're you're buying a plane you're buying a motor home your employee you've got pr people you've got a manager you've got an

agent you just end up with this huge overhead because you know the drivers over the year made over the years have made 5 10 15 million dollars a year it's easy to spend that pretty fast um so i i don't you know i think that um i think that for me, crypto and investing in crypto has been, maybe it's been an exercise of financial independence and just like individual liberty, right? it out with the basic concept of having the keys to your Bitcoin is probably the foundation of it all. And then as these financial services start coming up in platforms like Voyager that are offering rates that you're not getting from your bank. It's make you start realize maybe what your money in the bank is doing. So for me, it's just been a personal experience of, like I said earlier, I've learned by doing.

I would have to imagine actually that rationally the message of Bitcoin and like you said, freedom and liberty should resonate well in NASCAR. Because I would say that you have a very, you know, representative of the population of America fan base, right? Who probably are very passionate about liberty and freedom and American ideals. So I would think that actually NASCAR could be a place where the fans would

really, really be passionate about adoption if they understood it. For sure. I think that's part of why Voyager wants to be involved. I think that's a huge... I think that we have... Well, I will say overall, we have great demographics as a sport.

And we have fans from all walks and we have all different types of fans. But I will say that even before my Voyager sponsorship, I have seen a lot of race fans that have engaged with my crypto content on social media that have told me that they were in the space or have asked questions about it. You know, we've seen gold sponsorships over the years, we've seen, you know, those types of things. So, you know, you're definitely on the right track with that thinking. And I think that's a legitimate, there's a legitimate crossover there. So we got your Bitcoin and crypto journey, but I'm actually curious because I've never had the opportunity to ask. I always wonder how someone becomes a race car driver because like every other sport, it's obvious, right? And we've read outliers. You're the biggest kid and you get the best coaching and you go to baseball camp and you

play in the minor leagues. And it's a very, very defined path for most sports. Like I was not driving cars fast when I was five. So I was playing other sports. So how does that work? Yeah. NAST racing is an interesting business because there's so many different disciplines of, of grassroots racing where you can work your way up, but there's also multiple disciplines of professional racing.

Right. And for me i started out in go-karts i raced go-karts on all different types of track surfaces i raced on asphalt i raced on dirt i raced road courses i raced oval tracks i traveled the country and raced um and and from there i started racing full-size cars and i traveled that kind of honed in the track surfaces into a certain type of car and so from the early to mid-2000s I was racing a full-bodied stock car to someone that doesn't know any better it might look just like a NASCAR race car I was traveling around the country racing that on on short track asphalt ovals and the the reason that my little kid, you were a kid. Yeah, I was 14.

I was 13, 14 years old racing. Raised him till I was 16, 17. And the really the reason that my career path went that direction was because at the time that's where the industry, that's where all the money in the industry was being invested. So the top teams, the top manufacturers were pulling their drivers out of those types of cars. And for, you know, that could be a reason that the people that were having success at the highest level were coming from those backgrounds, right? So they said, okay, because of these drivers having success, we're going to find the next crop of drivers to come from that background. And so as a result, as well, that form of racing,

the short track asphalt racing that I was doing was highly competitive. I was not just racing against other 16 and 17 year old drivers that wanted to get NASCAR opportunities like I did, but I was racing against actual professional drivers that race those cars for a living. They didn't even race NASCAR for a living. They race those cars for a living. So, um, that's just what creates this, this tons of competition. Um, and, and at that level, I won a lot of races, had a lot of success. And by the time I was 15, 16 years old, I had an agent and I was being scouted by Toyota and Chevrolet and, and Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing and big, big teams that were looking

at me as a driver saying this could be our next driver. So from there, when I was 17, I signed a contract with Hendrick Motorsports to be a test driver, to be Jimmy Johnson's test driver. And so my first job, Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon were the two lead drivers at Hendrick Motorsports at the time. And my first job when I was 17 years old at Hendrick Motorsports was to test drive Jeff Gordon's Daytona 500 car for that year this is the childhood hero of mine I was doing at 17 yeah it was a childhood hero of mine uh I was basically fresh out of high school I graduated high school early um I completed all my credits and was able to get out of Iowa and get to North Carolina before the end of the school year and yeah I mean I had a

brand new fresh Hendrick Motorsports polo on and climbed into Jeff Gordon's Daytona 500 car and fired it up for the first time it was it was an incredible time but for the next five years I was Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon's test driver won championship rings driving for them. And that's what laid the groundwork for what I said earlier, where I became this kind of driver that, that smaller teams that were maybe lacking performance or lacking funding said, Hey, this guy has been driving really good equipment.

Even though he hasn't been racing those cars, he's been driving them. He knows what a good car is supposed to feel like. We need to hire him to help our organization. And so, you know, I've, I've had this long career in NASCAR. I'm, I'm approaching 500 starts this year, which is a really big milestone because there aren't a lot of drivers, um, active drivers right now that have 500 starts. Um, and, and I have served a lot of race teams from a development side of things and really the one last thing for me to check off of my my list as

as a career nascar driver is is to win races and win championships um and to get to that level i've i've got a and now i need to drive for those teams as their primary driver, not, not just be the test driver. Such a crazy story. You must've been an absolute local legend in high school by God. You know, it's, I, I do come from a small, you know, I come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I wouldn't say it's a small town. You know, in Iowa, in terms of Iowa, it's, it's one of the bigger, bigger cities in Iowa, but but I grew up in the family business where we, you know, have a fairly recognizable name in town. Castle Motors is my

family's car business. And, and, you know, the family business has served the community for over 50 years. And so I, I always, I was raised with this small town mentality of like my dad would always get on me about driving across town and always having castle plates on the car. Like don't drive like a jerk or cut people off because he always would say that he would hear about it. People walk into dealership and say, oh, Castle Motors car cut me off the red light, whatever. So I'm literally a race car driver dude but i was i was raised you know with this mentality that that there's always somebody watching and and you know and and so i think that helped me um helped me going into the professional world it helped me on the internet um and and and so those are those are good things but racing is an interesting sport there's no

defined path i mean like you said i was fortunate because i took this route with short track asphalt racing but it wasn't long after i became a nascar driver five or six years later that path for young drivers kind of dried up and um and it changed to grassroots dirt track racing. So now you have drivers in NASCAR right now, like Chase Briscoe and Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell. These guys came from dirt track racing, racing sprint cars in Indiana and California and like little pockets of the country where dirt track racing is really popular. And that's the discipline that is a really popular discipline right now. That's where the most competition is at. And those drivers learn car control in a different way than I do. And at the end of the day, we all race against each other. So they have these different

nuances about their driving styles that, that I don't have, but I have nuances about my driving style coming from asphalt racing and the way that we learn to conserve our equipment and the way about their driving styles that I don't have, but I have nuances about my driving style coming from asphalt racing and the way that we learn to conserve our equipment and the way that we learn to manage the car over the course of a race. I learned in a way that they didn't learn. So it's such an interesting dynamic

and that's just NASCAR, right? We're not even, that doesn't even address IndyCar or Formula One or the different ways you get to those other disciplines. Yeah. I think anyone who rises to the top of a sport profession, anything, there's always timing and luck involved. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what you, you know, you mentioned outliers and I, I'm a big believer, you know, in that, that, that sometimes the universe is just gonna gonna it's just gonna put you where it puts you and and yeah and but i do i do believe in hard work i believe in 10 000 hours um especially because i i've i've always you know felt humbly that maybe i don't i don't know if i have the

most raw talent i feel like i learned things through repetition. Um, and I think that's why stock car driving fits me well, because our races are endurance races. They, there are races of survival and, and driving a NASCAR race car, 200 miles an hour on a mile and a half racetrack. Um, the cars have a lot of grip and they go really fast. You use a lot of throttle, you know, you're wide open for a long time, but to make make a car to get that last one percent out of the car you have to really pay attention to the nuances of the pavement and the tire and the aerodynamics and and so learning through repetition lap after lap after lap after lap is what I feel like I've picked up on as a driver. And that's what drives me lap after lap in a race to make my car better. Some of that I learned through testing when I was testing at Hendrick Motorsports, we would go to the racetrack and do simulated

races. And I was by myself. So I would go to a test track and we did a full 500 mile simulated race where I just literally ran 500 miles for three hours straight in the car without getting out because they were testing components or they were testing longevity of certain pieces or the car performance or brake heat or whatever it may be. But for me as a driver, that was an opportunity to drive a car at 200 miles an hour for three hours non-stop and those are the types of things that just compound on your experience um and and have helped me make it as a professional what happens when you have to go to the bathroom i tell you just go man yeah you know what at one time i was at a race one time and i was in the i

was in a suite i was doing an appearance with my sponsor before the race. And the sponsor asked me, he goes, Landon, what, I got a question for you. What do you do if you have to go to the bathroom? And I, so I was like, well, I said, I'm going to turn the question back around to you. I said, you've spent a lot of money to get your name on my car and to get me out on the racetrack. I'm like'm like what what do you want me to do i was like do you want me to stop and pull in he's like no no i want you to stay out there i'm like all right there's the answer the real answer is if you if you go to the bathroom before you go out on the racetrack generally you can hold it for at least three

or four hours yeah and i'd imagine that you're like so hot and sweaty that you're probably like losing sweat so fast that uh yeah yeah it's uh it it'll be just a couple weeks ago we had a thermometer in the car at texas and it was 147 degrees in the cockpit of the car so um usually in wearing a helmet fire fire suit, gloves, everything strapped into the seat. Um, I will lose anywhere from seven to 12 pounds of water weight, um, in a race, you know, trying to, trying to replace that as much as you can. Right. It's not a, I mean, it's, it's a function of the body to sweat, but you don't want to just lose 12 pounds. Right. So, uh, for me and endurance sports has helped me understand my body and help me understand the limits of my body. So, uh, my dad and I trained together. We competed, um,

in Ironman triathlon together. And that, that really helped me understand the limits of my body. And so my nutrition, I have a nutrition plan inside the car during a race. And that involves taking in, um, anywhere from 20 to 30 ounces of fluids per hour and, and about 300 calories per hour in the car. And that's just to keep up with that, that weight loss. How are you doing that? How are you doing that in your suit? Is it, do you have tubes fed or like how does that work pop your helmet off and chug a Gatorade and eat a protein bar yeah no I I keep um it's I all I do it all through fluids and I keep a a 24 ounce bottle in the car um and the reason I do it through bottles and not like a camelback or anything like that is because I like to keep track mentally of how much I am drinking in the car where if it's a camelback

with 150 ounces in it or something like that it's hard for me to keep track of how much I've drank so I actually literally have like a bike bicycle cage right that you would have on your bicycle to hold a water bottle attached to my seat. And that's that bottle has a hose on the end of it. And when it's empty, I asked the team for more and they'll refill it. And then that mixture, um, I, I drink, uh, um, a custom blended mixture from a company called infinite. And it's a, it's a blend that we've honed in over the years. I use it in my army of triathlons. I've used it in the race car. Um, it's got carbs in it. It's got sugar. It's got protein. Um, a little bit of protein helps curb hunger. So you don't get any hunger pains. Um, it's got caffeine in it and, and it's a, it's a little over 300 calories. So in each bottle, so I'll drink one of those.

Yeah. I drink one of those per hour in the car. Um, and, and that usually is keeps me right. So much to consider. Now I know that we have only a few minutes because you're going to catch a flight to Vegas, but what you're going to Vegas for is awesome. So I want to talk about that really quick because I saw Charlie Shrem tweet about it, which is what made me even ask you if that's why you were headed there. Yeah. Symposium for new NFL athletes. Imposium for new NFL athletes. I saw hundreds of new NFL athletes. You guys are going to be up there talking about crypto.

Yeah, it's awesome. Voyager is sponsoring this symposium out in Vegas for new NFL players. And there's I think there's an e-sports element to it as well. So they asked me to come out and speak and and so steve and i are going to steve erlich the ceo of voyager are are gonna make a presentation i think steve's gonna do some of the heavy heavy lifting uh i probably will be on stage with him and and they hello guy what's that you're the color guy color commentary you know yeah i will i'll be there and and uh and speak from an athlete's perspective um kind of like the stuff that we talked about and just my experience in crypto maybe some of

my aha moments and sort of the why and and um you know i i know what these players are going through i've been there in my life my career you know those first couple years of being a professional it's something i've dedicated my life to and now all of a sudden you're making money at it and how do you balance the professional side versus the sport and still you know build a business around that so it'll be interesting to speak to these players and offer some perspective not just on stage but after the fact uh you know look forward to making some connections as well and um and just be there maybe as a resource or just as a friend. And I think it's a cool symposium that they've put together and I'm glad that Voyager is a part of it. Yeah, it sounds amazing. It sounds like it's primarily about that financial aspect

that we talked to. How to not go broke. Luckily, I guess you guys have longer, you guys tend to have, it seems like you can have a much longer career, at least in some manner in the sport. Football, I mean, you might make all your money and never make it again after three or four years one bum ankle or or you know acl tear and it can be it can be over so it's really important for these guys to manage that first money that they get well i would imagine so yeah i know you gotta go catch your flight so where can everybody follow you and what you're doing after this conversation? Yeah, I'm on Twitter a lot, at Landon Castle on Twitter.

And I talk just about everything from racing. You can get some insights on NASCAR from there and crypto and you'll see some Shiba Inu retweets and there's the Shiba community is involved. And also on instagram as well um at landing castle on pretty much all the social media platforms did i see that you have another crypto sponsorship now or another company that you're working with yes yes so trade the chain um is uh is a new uh yeah is a new sponsor which is really a new sponsor, which is really cool. You know, I've never really looked, you know, there's a lot of investing communities and things like that, especially on crypto Twitter.

And some of them, you know, I think you need to put some thought into what is the service that this community is really offering me, especially if I'm paying for it. But one that I think, you know, I've been impressed with in this, which is why I've connected with them is trade the chain because they actually, they offer some pretty cool tools that, that I think are very simple and easy to understand. And, and, and, and that is, you know, public sentiment. I, you know,

we all kind of seen how public sentiment drives a lot of these crypto markets. And if you are a trader, whether it's a day trader or you're trading monthly or quarterly or there for the long term, I think it's worth a look to see what trade the chain, how their sentiment tools can help you and make informed decisions.

So it's not like some pump and dump group or anything like that. I look forward to seeing you with like 17 crypto companies everywhere. You know, like get your Ricky Bobby. Is Talladega Nights your favorite movie? No, Days of Thunder. It's gotta be Days of Thunder, right? Yeah, of course. No, I definitely, you know,

I look forward to having more crypto related partnerships. You know, Voyager is obviously leading the way and they're the primary focus for this whole program. And they're the ones that are making it all happen. And I've had, I've gotten reached out to by a lot of folks and had to turn some away and say, look, you know, I want to be able to channel my energy on these, on these, these partners, um, and make sure that, that everything is as, um, compelling as an authentic, um, as I want it to be, because, you know, if I can't speak for something the right way, um, you know, then I don't know if I want to represent it. I don't, I don't want to just be, be, you know, get paid for a couple of tweets or anything.

Right. Of course. Yeah, no, yeah. Totally get that. Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, shake and bake. There you go. Have a good trip and thank you so much. I think this is really valuable and it gave me so much insight in so many questions I wanted to ask, even just about the sport beyond the crypto side of it. So just really, really cool.

Thank you, man. And we'll have to do this again down the road. Thanks, Scott. Have a good one.