James Sneed
Appearances
Planet Money
Planet Money complains. To learn.
Sure, yeah, okay. Like, driving is terrible. There's, like, traffic everywhere. Nobody knows how to drive. Everything's expensive. Nothing's cheap. Nothing's cheap.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And if you are wondering whether Peanut himself ever appeared on Mark's OnlyFans page, Mark says the answer is an emphatic no. Peanut was never a part of any adult content.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
They knew that Peanut wouldn't be around forever. Eastern gray squirrels can live up to 20 years in captivity, though their average lifespan is usually only around six. And they also knew they couldn't make adult content on OnlyFans forever.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
By the spring of 2023, Mark and his wife finally put together enough money to realize their dream. They bought a large plot of land in rural upstate New York and opened up their animal sanctuary, which they named Peanuts Freedom Farm.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
They got goats, donkeys, alpacas, eventually over 300 animals in total, sometimes costing over $30,000 a month. And in order to feed this growing menagerie, Mark's life became this bizarre encapsulation of the modern attention economy.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Until, that is, that fateful day last fall when a convoy of SUVs from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation pulled into Mark's driveway.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
At the same time, Mark was acutely aware that the charismatic squirrel whose fame had been helping him make money and feed hundreds of mouths was now gone. The stream of new squirrel content that had drawn in so many eyeballs and opportunities over the years had been cut off, and the magnitude of his expenses was starting to dawn on him.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And it's around this time that Mark was made aware of the latest and most lucrative new evolution of the modern attention economy, something that would present the possibility of previously unimaginable wealth, but also the peril of losing control of his story altogether.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
It turned out that there was an enormous new meme coin market fueled almost literally on attention. A kind of new casino where anonymous hordes gamble on viral memes in hopes of making outrageous sums of money.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
He dives headfirst into the meme coin casino to try to find financial justice for Peanuts.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark couldn't figure out exactly who was behind the peanut coin, and neither could we. The people who launched these meme coins are generally very careful not to reveal their identities. But from what Mark could see, these people were presenting the coin as if he had helped make it, and he felt like the story was being taken away from him.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Over the next month, Mark would get a lot more than a clue. He started to wade deeper and deeper into the world of meme coins in hopes of getting a cut of these massive profits they were making. And he discovered that not only had people made meme coins out of peanut, but several of his other farm animals.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Doing that caused the price of that coin to collapse at the expense of everyone still holding it. And Mark's reputation in the crypto world took a dramatic turn south.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
To get a sense of what this all looked like to the people inside the meme coin casino, we talked to a guy named Wilk Itzen.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
So when Rumi heard that a famous squirrel had become a right-wing political martyr and that he'd been turned into a meme coin, it got his attention.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
By dust, Rumi is speaking crypto for money. He says he bought $100 worth of peanut when it had a market cap of a few hundred thousand dollars.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Rumi says the next he heard about Peanut was when Mark Longo took to social media to start talking up his competing meme coin, the one he called Justice.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Misesi didn't really buy Mark's altruistic pitch for his new coin. And the other thing Mark was getting wrong was his timing. Mark was hawking his Justice coin weeks after Peanut's death. The viral curve around the story had already started to flatten.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
In the meantime, Mark has decided that if he can't join the crypto insiders that successfully made money off these peanut-based meme coins, he's going to try to beat them, legally, to go after them for using his intellectual property to create and promote their coins.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
As we wrapped up our interview with Mark, surrounded by peanut memorabilia inside the squirrel's old room, it's clear that Mark himself is still just trying to emotionally process everything that's happened over the last year.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Absolutely. You know, we're hanging on by a thread. Mark says if he's learned anything from his journey into the depths of the attention economy, it's how fickle and impermanent the world's attention really is. So he's doing what he can to keep Peanut's story alive. It's a big part of why he invited Planet Money into Peanut's inner sanctum.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
It's why he's entertaining proposals to turn his story into a documentary for places like Hulu and Netflix. Maybe the next Tiger King will be about him and Peanut.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Special thanks to Jennifer Jenkins, Yaisha Yadov, Max Berwick, and Yulia Guseva. I'm Nick Nevis. I'm Alexey Horowitz-Gazi.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And in order to learn how Peanut's story began, Mark brought us to a special room that he's turned into a kind of memorial for his fallen friend.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark Longo was 27 back then, working as a building inspector on construction sites around New York. When he comes across the body of a squirrel that had just been flattened by a car. And when he looks a little closer, he sees there's a tiny infant squirrel next to her.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And as Peanut begins to grow, Mark starts to fold him more and more into his daily life.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And a large majority of the time, it was absolute gold. Peanut befriends Mark's cat, which people seem to love. And slowly but surely, Peanut's social media following starts to grow.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark says there was one video in particular that seemed to light up the Internet, one where Peanut jumps from the top of the fridge and into Mark's hand in slow motion.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
But over the last couple decades, social media platforms have tweaked that model by essentially allowing anyone to be a miniature broadcaster. Now someone or some creature can can go from total anonymity to worldwide fame in just a couple hours.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Then the messages started rolling in. Mark started getting calls from radio stations and TV shows from around the world.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark says his male friends would regularly post photos with Peanut on their online dating profiles. Two great success. And for Mark himself, Peanut turned out to be the ultimate wingman.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mostly nut-related. An investing app called Acorns reached out, expressing some interest. Mark and Peanut did some videos for a peanut butter company. Also, a website called nuts.com.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
But, but, Mark and Peanut had gotten their first taste of the strange ways you can turn attention into money on the internet. Their first steps down the squirrel hole.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
For listeners who missed Cameo, this is a site that blew up during COVID lockdowns that allowed internet celebrities to monetize their very particular level of fame by offering these, like, customized little shout-out videos to paying customers.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Cameo would take a cut, 25 to 30 percent, and In exchange, they would help their clients monetize their fame. One big part of that puzzle was helping these micro-celebrities to figure out the right price to charge.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Peanut, of course, did not have an annual salary that Mark could use to set a rate. They kind of arbitrarily picked like 30 bucks a video. But Mark says it wasn't about the money.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
But Mark says Peanut only ended up selling a few cameos a month. Again, it's just hard for a rodent to compete with the real housewives of Salt Lake City. The bigger acorn jackpot was still to come.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
But thirst trap or not, Mark told us he soon got a message from a kind of surprising source, a manager representing performers on OnlyFans. And this was Mark and Peanut's third step down the squirrel hole of the rapidly changing attention economy.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Like Cameo, the idea behind the OnlyFans model was to allow performers to sell their content directly to fans. Instead of selling targeted ads, OnlyFans takes a 20% commission of what their customers spend and sends the rest to the performers. For some creators, it's made digital sex work highly lucrative. And that's why the OnlyFans talent manager first reached out to Mark.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
So Mark went to his wife to talk about the idea of them starting their own page, making adult content together, and she was open to it. Then... He spoke with his parents and with his bosses at work to see if they would raise any major objections, and none of them did.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
We were just really fortunate that Philip Curtin existed and he did this work. And it's like, I mean, looking at his tables, just the differences. You know, when you see these mortality rate differences between different colonies, it was just mind-blowing.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
I said, these are too good to be believed. They were too good. Yeah, exactly. So I said, give me the data. I'm going to check everything. And then, you know, no, they were right.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
Well, first of all, I don't think India is a poster child for good institutions. It has had a very troubled period starting way before independence. It was a very exploitative colony. Independence was not easy. But more importantly, India has a social system that is very anti-inclusive. The caste-based system was very, very strong upon independence.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
Hey, Greg, how are you doing?
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
I don't believe you. You're a pro. I should be the one who's nervous. I'm going to get skewered here.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
Oh, I don't know. You have to ask him. He might say I was asking too many questions or something.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
In 1980, as I was in middle school, just the beginning of my seventh grade, Turkey suffered a big military coup. There were soldiers everywhere, including in our school. So Turkey was definitely not a democratic country at the time. And it was also suffering via a series of economic problems. So I got interested in exactly these sets of issues.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
So I was actually giving this talk at MIT, and at the end of the seminar, he came to me and started talking, and we hit it off.
Planet Money
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
And that's the problem I started talking to Simon about. Can we find some reasons why Europeans did one thing in one place and another thing in another place with long-ranging implications?
Planet Money
The habitat banker
So those like crop kind of thing that you were looking at are avocado. Those like big trees that look like a green carpet are pine trees. And all the rest is for cattle ranching.