"That moment was the epitome of my life," Logan Paul told me as he reminisced about his recent fight with Floyd Mayweather.
But he wasn’t just talking about the fight. He was talking about his walkout to the ring. While most boxers make their entrance with rap music blaring through the arena, Paul walked out to The Greatest Showman soundtrack. In many ways, that musical is the perfect metaphor for Logan Paul’s career, as he may be our generation’s P.T. Barnum.
When Paul moved to Los Angeles in 2015, he'd look himself in the mirror every morning and repeat the following phrase ten times: “I will be the biggest entertainer in the world.” It was his way of manifesting his dream into reality.
“I really do believe I was put on this earth to create and entertain.” Paul told me. “But people would ask me: ‘Okay, how are you going to do that?’ and I never had an answer. But I knew where I wanted to be.”
Ironically, not having the answer was Paul’s superpower. Not being tied to how he’d be successful is why he became successful.
Think about it. Most people have specific dreams (“My life goal is to be on SNL!”). But once their plans don’t pan out, they fall apart. Paul realized that being an entertainer could take many forms: YouTuber, boxer, Pokemon card collector, and now creator of an NFT project called CryptoZoo.
“I've got my ear to the ground,” Paul said. “I’m actively listening, changing, and adapting everyday. I am literally the definition of a work in progress.”
I sat down with Paul to ask how he's grown over the years, what lessons he’s learned, and why CryptoZoo could become the next Pokemon if executed properly.
GOING BEYOND THE “YOUTUBER” LABEL
That “actively listening” mindset helped resurrect Paul’s career after his infamous video from Japan’s Aokigahara forest. Two months after returning from Tokyo, Paul watched another top creator, KSI, challenge him after beating Joe Weller in one of the first YouTuber boxing matches.
"If any YouTuber wants it, you can come get it,” KSI said in his ringside interview. “Jake Paul, Logan Paul, any of the Pauls, I don't care."
At that moment, it would’ve been easy for Paul to ignore KSI’s challenge. Instead, he listened and saw an opportunity to take control of his own narrative by proving he’s more than a YouTuber.
“We love labels,” Paul explained. “Like, ‘he's a YouTuber. He's a boxer.’ Why can't he be both, right? Don't let anyone tell you what they think you are. You can be whatever.”
Since boxing KSI in 2018, Paul hasn’t just revitalized his career; he’s revitalized the sport. Along with his brother Jake, they’ve ignited the public’s interest in boxing. This Google Trends chart shows how often people searched “boxing” in the United States. Each spike comes from Logan Paul’s fight with Mayweather last June and Jake’s fights with Nate Robinson and Ben Askren.
“The fact that we have an effect like this in a completely different vertical that has nothing to do with content creation is insane,” Paul said. “If you’re between the ages of five and twenty, now you got to see a Floyd Mayweather fight.”
IT STARTED WITH A TEXT FROM GARY VAYNERCHUK
Like boxing, Paul brought the same curiosity to collecting Pokemon cards. It started with a text from Gary Vaynerchuk in August 2020, encouraging him to buy sports cards.
“He asked me if I liked sports cards,” Paul recalled. “I go, ‘Bro. I don't care about sports cards.’ Then he goes, ‘What about Pokémon?’ I told him I love Pokémon and he told me, ‘Do some research on Pokémon. It’s big.’”
Once again, Paul listened. He asked questions, met with fellow collectors, and studied Pokemon like he did with boxing. And once again, public interest followed what Paul became interested in.
A month after Paul posted about buying an “estate worth of Pokemon cards,” the value of perfectly-rated PSA 10 Pokemon cards skyrocketed by 96%. Four months after Paul bought a 1st-edition base set booster box for $200,000 and hosted a popular livestream to open it, prices for that same box rose above $350,000.
But the real question: can Paul do it again? Could his showmanship turn another niche into a phenomenon? As they say: once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a trend. His latest venture, CryptoZoo, could prove to be his greatest (and riskiest) move to become today’s greatest showman.
COULD CRYPTOZOO BE THE NEXT POKEMON?
Similar to boxing and Pokemon, Paul’s NFT journey started by listening. Yet again, it was Vaynerchuk who reached out. “I spent half a million dollars on CryptoPunks because Gary Vee called me and told me that it would be the next Facebook,” Paul told me.
Since then, Paul has built quite the NFT collection, which includes CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, 0n1 Force, and World of Women. It was only natural that he started his own NFT project.
“How can I be a creator in this space as well? My mind just started firing off and I again educated myself.” Paul recalled. “I really started with Pokemon. I've been wanting The Pokemon Company to come up with a Pokemon fusion game for decades. I've been wanting to combine Squirtle and Charizard and fight my 'Squirt-izard' or my 'Char-tle' forever...so what's the next best thing that's probably even more relatable and universal than Pokemon? Animals on the blockchain.”
So CryptoZoo was born. It’s a platform where you breed, collect, and trade exotic hybrid animals as NFTs. It’s like Pokemon meets Club Penguin, but for Web 3.0. During its launch on September 3rd, CryptoZoo’s initial 10,000 “Base Eggs” sold out within seconds.
These eggs will hatch a "base animal" (i.e. panda) that you breed with another base animal (i.e. elephant) to make a “hybrid animal” that looks like the following variations.
Each hybrid animal has rarity levels that generate different amounts of $ZOO (the game’s currency). For example, here’s the amount of $ZOO you’d make from the different offspring of a Butterfly and Gorilla.
CryptoZoo details its full vision in their whitepaper, but what’s most fascinating is that the game may be entertaining enough to educate younger generations about cryptocurrency.
“I think that's the most important thing we're doing,” Paul said. “Kids are going to care about the blockchain because of my project. Imagine if your first experience on the blockchain is with CryptoZoo. We're coming up with really, really fun plans for six months, a year down the line, two years down the line. Like this could be the one of the biggest things I do.”
There’s been a buzz around CryptoZoo ever since Paul teased it on his podcast, Impaulsive. To dig deeper, I spent hours in CryptoZoo’s Discord community, talking with people who spent thousands of dollars on $ZOO and waited by their laptops for days to get one of the base eggs.
“I think Logan is a very intelligent person and still vastly underestimated,” NFT collector and entrepreneur Mikey Ahdoot said. “His curiosity in different projects has sparked my own curiosity. Not only did I buy $ZOO token and base eggs, but I have a whole calendar of upcoming NFT drops thanks to Logan's conviction and buying in this space.”
LOGAN PAUL & P.T BARNUM: ENTERTAINERS WHO ARE ENTREPRENEURS
The reason Paul is similar to P.T. Barnum isn't just his showmanship. It’s not just his ability to bring attention to the overlooked. It’s because he’s as entrepreneurial as he is entertaining.
We forget that Barnum wasn’t just the circus act that Hugh Jackman portrayed in The Greatest Showman. Like Paul, he was multidimensional: Barnum started a successful newspaper, got elected mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and built one of the country’s first lotteries. Though people tried to label him, he chased his dreams with the same curiosity Paul did.
So let’s put it this way: From Now On, if you think Paul is just a YouTuber then you’re missing The Other Side. He may be The Greatest Showman of our generation because he’s Re-writing The Stars of what it means to have A Million Dreams, accomplish them, and not be defined by labels that say you’re Never Enough.
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Special thank you to Mark Rodriguez, Jordan van der Weyden, Uli Abundis, Charles Benoit and Mastermynd Media team for all your hard work on the shoot, to Newinflux for creating an amazing trailer for the interview, to Chloe Ginsburg, Mikey Ahdoot and everyone I spoke with on the CryptoZoo Discord for helping with research.
