Planet Money - The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Memecoins are having a moment. Everyone from Hawk Tuah to President Donald Trump to animal influencers like Moo Deng the pygmy hippo have been turned into cryptocurrency. But what are the costs of all the hype?On today's show — a modern parable. How an orphaned baby rodent became a world famous animal influencer, became a political martyr, and was finally transmuted into a billion dollar cryptocurrency. It's a tale about how a chance encounter can lead to fame and fortune. But also how all that can spin wildly out of control in this brave, new – kind of terrifying – attention economy we're all living in. For more:The Memecoin CasinoHow the memecoin game is playedWhere'd The Money Go, And Other QuestionsWho Let The Doge(coin) Out?This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Nic Neves. This episode was produced by James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang. Fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. And engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from NPR sponsor Ted Talks Daily, a podcast from Ted. Ted Talks Daily brings you a new talk every day. Learn about the ideas shaping humanity, from connecting with your inner monologue to finding out if aliens exist. Listen to Ted Talks Daily. Just a quick warning, this episode talks about sex and sex work. It's an economic show after all. This is Planet Money from NPR. On the morning of October 30th, 2024, Mark Longo was doing what he does most mornings. He was at his animal sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, feeding the several hundred horses and goats and pygmy donkeys he's rescued, many of which P and his wife have saved from the slaughterhouse.

So where were you when the raid began? I was at the end of the driveway in the beginning. That is when Mark saw something strange and menacing approaching the property. A convoy of SUVs with New York State government decals on the door. They're from an agency called the DEC. What does DEC stand for? Department of Environmental Conservation. One of these Department of Environmental Conservation officers gets out of the car and tells Mark they'd come to his farm in order to take somebody

into custody. And then he produced a search warrant. But the warrant wasn't for Mark or his wife or any of the people on the farm. The warrant was for a squirrel named Peanut. And I remember I got a call off to my wife to say they're here hiding the animals. And I tried to buy myself some time to maybe figure out what's going on here. What was going on here was that Mark's pet squirrel, Peanut, had become one of the most famous squirrels

in the world. Thanks to social media, Peanut had reached the status of animal influencer. He had over a million followers on Instagram and TikTok. But as the DEC officers reminded Mark, it is illegal in the state of New York to keep wildlife as a pet without a special permit. A permit that Mark did not have. The DEC said they'd received several complaints, and based on dozens of extremely popular and

frankly quite adorable videos on Peanut's social media page, the officers had determined that both Peanut and a relatively newly acquired raccoon named Fred were somewhere on the premises. Over the next several hours, DEC officers made Mark and his wife stand by as they scoured the property in search of Mark's celebrity squirrel. Until, finally… I was midway on the staircase, I had three cops to my right, I had three to my left, and one of them yelled, I found Peanut. I found the squirrel. And I said, listen guys, like I'll take Peanut, I apologize, I'll put him in the car and I'll drive him to Connecticut, you'll never see him again. And the guy to my right, I'll never forget

this to the day I die, he looked at me dead in my eyes and said it was a squirrel, now it's a raccoon. When is this snowball effect going to stop? The DEC officers did not let Mark take Peanut out of state. Instead, they took Peanut and Fred into custody. And after a few days of waiting and wondering where they'd been taken, a local news reporter calls Mark with some unsettling news.

Day three comes around, I get a phone call from our local news station from a gentleman in tears and he's like, Mark, I don't know how to tell you, but they're gone. We reached out to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, but they didn't get back to us. According to a statement from the department, Peanut had bitten someone involved with the investigation. And as part of a protocol to test whether Peanut or Fred had rabies, both of them had been euthanized. And I remember just like feeling nothing, not even anger, like nothing, just sitting there as a shell of a human being, not really

believing it because what, this is a movie story, right? This is, this is just straight out of a, you know, a film. And, uh, and I found out, I remember hanging up the phone and there was a couple of volunteers there and I said, they killed them and they started to cry and I walked away. Mark takes to social media to tell the world what had happened and pretty soon, the story goes absolutely viral. My phone started buzzing. TMZ is calling. Every major news outlet wants this story. And that's when it just went nuts.

And then you're hearing Elon Musk talk about it and you're hearing, you know, JD Vance and now Trump Jr. And it turned into a political stunt. Our government will let in 600,000 criminals across our border. But if someone has a pet squirrel without a permit, they go in there and kill the squirrel. That's the Democrat Party. But it also turned into one of the biggest

tragedies in 2024. You know, I, my squirrel sits next to Harambe now. And I always tell people, like, this shouldn't have been a story. Did you ever imagine that Peanut might find an afterlife on the blockchain? No, I didn't even know what the blockchain was. Had no clue. But you would find out?

I would. I would soon find out. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. You can think of the story of Peanut the Squirrel as a kind of modern parable. A tale about how a chance encounter can change your life, bring you fame and fortune, but also how that attention can spin wildly out of your control. Today on the show, how an anonymous baby rodent

rose to become a world famous animal influencer, then a political martyr, and finally a piece of cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars, joining the ranks of Dogecoin, Hoctua, and President Donald Trump. And what all of this says about the brave new, kind of terrifying attention economy we are all living in. It's one of the busiest tales we've ever told.

This message comes from Wyse, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wyse, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit Wyse.com. TNCs apply. About a month ago, freelance reporter Nick Nevis and I took a trip to Peanuts Freedom Farm in upstate New York. We were there to visit Mark Longo and see the tiny empire that his celebrity squirrel's fame helped build,

the house that Peanut built. 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. Wow. The inner sanctum. This is Peanut's room.

The room is filled with peanut memorabilia sent in by fans around the world. The walls and ceilings are covered in newspaper clippings and drawings and under glass, the pièce de résistance, a tiny squirrel-sized, like, one-ounce cowboy hat. The most iconic piece is in here, and it is your cowboy hat. Now, the story of how this one squirrel rose from an anonymous street rodent to a world-famous animal influencer begins seven years ago on a sunny spring day in midtown Manhattan.

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. And now I'm seeing this baby squirrel walk in the middle of the street. And he's looking at me, he's only got one eye open. And then he just made one hop and was down on my pant leg

and just started to crawl up my leg. So as he got closer, I kind of like brought him up into my hands and I put him in my hoodie. Mark is a lifelong animal lover, doesn't want the squirrel to die. So he brings it home and starts trying to figure out how to nurse it back to health. The little guy seems to love peanuts at first, so that is what Mark names him, but pretty

soon peanut reveals himself to be a pretty picky eater. The only way I can get him to eat was through, you know, mashing up an avocado in the powder, and he would just stuff his face into it. Classic millennial. Yep. I literally like avocado toast. It was 100% his menu the whole time. And as peanut begins to grow, Mark starts to fold

him more and more into his daily life. You know, I played video games. He's in my pocket. You know, I went to go to CVS. He's in my hoodie. You know, we, I remember bringing them to PetSmart and put them in one of the hamster balls and he's running down the hall and the woman's like, oh, what do you have in there? A gerbil? And I was like, yeah, sure, it's a gerbil. You know, and there's Peanut running around this little baby squirrel.

You know, and then we just started to, you know, take photos and videos of him. Mark decides to start an Instagram account for Peanut. He starts posting videos of Peanut wearing little costumes like that cowboy hat or a miniature Rangers jersey. 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. When did you first get the sense you might have a viral social media star on your hands? It kinda just happened.

Mark says there was one video in particular that seems to light up the internet. One where Peanut jumps from the top of the fridge and into Mark's hand in slow motion. And this is where the story of Peanut the Squirrel meets the modern attention economy and the central question it raises. When you have the world's attention, how do you actually turn that into money?

For a long time, attention, this scarce resource, was monopolized by newspapers and TV or radio companies who used the power of celebrity or news or scandal to draw in as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell ads. 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 go from total anonymity to worldwide fame in just a couple hours. Which is exactly what happened when Peanuts first viral video popped off. After that a popular animal

video website called The Dodo posted a video featuring Mark and Peanut. Then the messages started rolling in. Mark started getting calls from radio stations and TV shows from around the world. We went on British TV and they deemed him the world's most famous squirrel. And that's when his TikTok blew up and that's where, you know, a hundred thousand followers became a few million. And we just kind of rolled with the wave. Mark says Peanut warmed to this newfound limelight

right away. He was just a preter, naturally charismatic mini fauna, especially when the cameras were rolling. I fist pumped that squirrel so many damn times because he just nailed these interviews like it was something that he was meant to do. Peanut knew how to turn on the charm. Did he ever, especially with ladies,

like he was a ladies man. Mark says his male friends would regularly post photos with Peanut on their online dating profiles to great success. And for Mark himself, Peanut turned out to be the ultimate wingman. I met my wife because of Peanut. No way. My wife DM'd me on Peanut's page, and that's how we met. She ended up calling me wearing a flying squirrel costume.

Wow. And I was like, I think I'm in love with you. Now, when it came to monetizing all this newfound attention, Mark says he never set out to make money off his tiny furry best friend. But as Peanut's profile grew in the attention economy of social media,

all sorts of strange new opportunities started to present themselves. 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. Sorry, what is nuts.com? So nuts.com is just a website where you can buy a variety of different nuts. So it definitely worked out perfectly.

Now, Mark says there's just a natural limit to the kind of brand opportunities that'll flow to a squirrel. Peanut wasn't exactly Kim Kardashian. 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.

And then one day, Mark says, someone from the website Cameo reached out to get Peanut on the platform. And this is the second big moment where Peanut's story intersects with the modern attention economy, and how it's changed over the past decade. 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. Like you could get your favorite side character from Seinfeld to wish your aunt Vovie a happy birthday. So happy birthday, Vovie. It's the soup Nazi from Seinfeld to wish your aunt Vovie a happy birthday. So happy birthday, Vovie! It's the soup Nazi from Seinfeld, remember me? No soup for you!

Hey yo, what's up peeps? This is Sean Paul. I'm Lindsay Lohan. Hi everybody, Stormy Daniels here. Hey Ida. It's Sean Spicer. Hey Alyssa, John Lovitz here. I want to congratulate you on graduating college. Cameo was an innovation on the attention economy model because before, while creators had been able to make money through brand deals, it was the platforms like Instagram and YouTube

that were making the lion's share of the profits from all this attention by using user data to sell targeted ads. Camio offered a way for niche celebrities to sell themselves directly to individual consumers. Camio would take a cut, 25 to 30%, 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.

Early on, Cameo suggested people set their prices by calculating how much they are usually paid per minute, based on their salary. Like, if you are an NBA star making $25 million a year, you should be making about $200 a minute, which could help you set your rate for a 30-second birthday video. 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. They were just happy to be there. The coolest part about it was they were classifying Peanut as the same as like a lot of the celebrities that you see in movies. Mark would dress Peanut up in costume and have him hold a little Post-It note

with whatever message had been ordered. They did birthdays, valentines, even a proposal. With Cameo, they had taken their second step down the squirrel hole of the attention economy. 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. And it was actually Mark who would become the star of this next chapter. He says it wasn't too long before he started to notice that a lot of the attention they were getting was directed toward him. Mark is a buff guy, works out a lot, and he explains he'd often wear these tight-fitting

gym pants in Peanuts videos. The internet did what the internet does best and sexualized every ounce of that page, you know? And it's like, oh, you hike up your pants. I like where my pants are. Again, it's just, you're, you're turning this story into something it's not. They're accusing you of like thirst trapping.

Oh, 100%. I'm like, guys, you can go on any social media platform and literally see people naked. If you're going to put me in the realm of thirst traps with a squirrel, I'm fully clothed, not showing off anything. And I'm just jumping around with a squirrel. Get your head out of the gutter.

Enjoy the squirrel. 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. OnlyFans for the uninitiated is a video streaming platform where content creators make customized content for paying subscribers. Mostly it's homemade adult content.

It's kind of like the Etsy of porn. OnlyFans customers can subscribe to a performer's channel for a flat fee and then pay for premium perks like private video conversations with their favorite performer or access to increasingly intimate photos and videos. 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. They were like, listen, like, you might not understand your value on social media, but we do. And you come off as a very innocent man with an animal, could you imagine if we were to kind of shift from A to Z and put you on OnlyFans, what you can make?

Successful OnlyFans performers can make six or even seven figure salaries, more than Mark was making as a building site inspector. The manager told Mark if he could convert enough Peanut fans from Instagram into paying customers on OnlyFans, they could make a killing. BOWEN 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. MARK So, I kind of just sat down and was like, you know what, let's give this a shot. If this turns out to be something, None of them did. So I kind of just sat down and was like, you know what, let's give this a shot. If this turns out to be something, then here's the start of a new chapter of our life.

If it gets shot down or it doesn't work, I'm naked on the internet. Everybody's got the same parts, like, so what? 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. Apparently, when you are building a social media empire

consisting of both wholesome animal content and bespoke homemade pornography, just like the Ghostbusters warned, it is essential that you never cross the streams. When did you get a sense that OnlyFans might actually be a much more lucrative way of harnessing the attention of the internet? Within minutes.

Literally, we launched at like 10 o'clock in the morning, and within the first 20 minutes, I had a couple thousand subscribers because I already had kind of that group of people that were just waiting for me to open that door. And when I did, it just, everybody just flowed in. We call that pent up demand. Yes. Yes, and it very much was. And when I did it just everybody just flowed in. We call that pent up demand. Yes. Yes.

And it very much was. And when it came to Mark's OnlyFans business strategy. My thing was like, I kept my subscription price low, you could come in, see kind of highlights, but also, um, you can incentivize people to buy the more, you know, X rated stuff, kind of pick from my so-called menu of what you liked.

Um, like for instance, like put a cowboy hat or put my construction hat on, you know, do a strip tease or whatever you want. Um, you know, I am willing to sell my underwear. So literally anything that I was putting out turned to gold. How much did the underwear go for? I think it was like between 50 and $200, but it ranged. Like if you wanted me to wear them three times at the gym, you know, it was a little bit

more. Pretty soon, Mark says, he and his wife were bringing in over $10,000 a month through their OnlyFans page, thanks to this enthusiastic group of Peanuts followers. It was enough money that they started to think about how they might build something bigger and longer lasting out of these eclectic streams of attention. 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. And that is when they went in on the idea of creating an animal sanctuary. Peanut had been a rescue animal. Mark was like, what better way could there be to turn Peanut's brand into a lasting legacy and source of income? They thought that if they could run it as a nonprofit, they'd be able to take donations

and use Peanut's massive social media following to build a community who could help sustain it years into the future. Peanut has millions of followers. And we just went, okay, if we can get a dollar, we can get $5, we can get $20 from a fraction of those people. We already have the following. We have the foundation of what we need here. 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. Around the same time, Mark quit his job as a building site inspector to dedicate himself full-time to the farm. He and his wife started buying old and injured horses who'd been neglected or were destined for the slaughterhouse. 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. On a typical day last year, before everything changed, Mark would wake up at 5 a.m. to feed the animals. Then he might take a shower while making a sexually explicit video for a paying stranger on OnlyFans. Then he might run peanut through some of their classic bits to make content for the Instagram account. Followed by a video for the Animal Sanctuary's nonprofit donors to show them that the rescue donkeys were actually getting the care they needed.

It was this kind of miraculous, precarious social media Rube Goldberg machine. 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. Internet sensation Peanut the squirrel has been killed. DEC officers seized that animal. It was found injured on the streets of Manhattan seven years ago.

You've got to wonder what is going on in America. Let's hear from- In the aftermath of Peanut's death, Mark was devastated and confused. On the one hand, he just lost his best friend and business partner. And on the other, he'd never been so squarely at the center of the internet's attention in his life.

All of a sudden he had politicians and celebrities and strangers from all around the world reaching out to offer their outrage and condolences. You know, I had the owner of the Yankees reach out. I have Quentin Tarantino on my DMs. I have my favorite bands reaching out and going, what can we do to help? 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. How the hell are we going to continue this nonprofit without our star and our golden squirrel? Those are the things that are going through, like, wow, Instagram's gonna go down,

TikTok, I'm not gonna be able to build this stuff, where am I gonna get the funding for these animals? I already have the animals, what are gonna happen to the animals if I can't feed them? This place is gonna ultimately shut down. Mark was in a kind of anxiety spiral, thinking about where all of this might lead. That I'm going to be just reamed in the news and PR, like Mark failed at his nonprofit.

All of this is now transpiring and I'm like, I got to figure this out. Mark and his wife started by creating an emergency GoFundMe page while Peanut's death was still at the top of the news cycle. They also began a legal campaign to try to press the government for answers about what had happened to Peanut. 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. How did you first find out that Peanut had been turned into some form of cryptocurrency? I'm sitting in the gym working out. I get a phone call from my lawyer. And she's just instantly, Mark, what is this Peanut coin on crypto? It's at two billion.

Are you involved in this? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. It took a while for Mark to piece this together, but it appeared that just hours after the news of Peanut's death started going viral, some anonymous person or group online had turned Peanut into a meme coin, a kind of joke cryptocurrency.

The meme coin featured an iconic image of Mark holding Peanut with a cowboy hat, and it had the ticker sign PNUT. 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. Now Mark knew barely anything about crypto at this point, but he understood there were now thousands of total strangers cumulatively making millions of dollars off of Peanut's good name on the internet, and none of those profits were flowing to Mark or the animal

sanctuary. And I'm like, you're kidding me? Like it's, you know, we're not talking about like you made a thousand bucks, like you made a hundred million dollars off of this story and you didn't include me in my family. After the break, Mark Longo takes his final step into the deepest, darkest recesses of the Squirrel Hole. He dives headfirst into the meme coin casino to try to find financial justice for Peanut.

Okay, so for the first seven years of his life with Peanut the Squirrel, Mark Longo had managed to keep control over the growing streams of attention they generated together, like on Instagram or TikTok or OnlyFans. But in the wake of Peanut's death in the world of meme coins, Mark discovered he had little or no control. Peanut's viral popularity had been leveraged by a group of anonymous crypto insiders into ludicrous amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars. 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. Because when you go on their website, the first photo on there is me with peanut. People were representing this coin as if it was mine.

So I can't even tell you the amount of thousands of people reached out like, bought your peanut coin, made money off your peanut coin, hope you're doing well, I hope all this works out for the farm. And I'm like, I have an clue what you're talking about. 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. At first, he says, some of the people who seemed to be behind these coins did offer to make donations to the animal sanctuary. All they asked was that Mark basically promote their coins on social media. Once he did, they sent him donations, some in the form of meme coins. But Mark says, soon after, some of those traders figured out a way to take back their donations. And partly in retaliation for that, and partly because he needed real money to feed his animals,

Mark sold off a big chunk of the coins he'd been given. 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. People started calling him a scammer. And that's when it started to flip like, oh, we donated money to Mark and coins, he sold the coins, he ruined the chart. Still Mark was not deterred.

Vast sums of money seemed tantalizingly close, maybe within reach. If he won big on a meme coin, he could stop doing OnlyFans. He would never have to worry about the money to feed his 300 plus rescue animals. So he says when some acquaintances offered to help him create a competing peanut meme coin that they could market as the one true peanut based cryptocurrency, he took them up on their offer. He wanted to fight meme coin with meme coin. 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. In the real world, I am a real estate agent, but in the meme coin world, I identify as Rumi. You're numb to crypto? Yeah, my numb to crypto.

Rumi says that finding the most profitable meme coins is all about keeping track of what's popping off in the zeitgeist. He keeps news notifications on for all sorts of outlets, but he says that sensational stories from the right wing of the political spectrum often get the most traction. Another big thing he watches for are animal coins. From the original meme coin Dogecoin to a recent one based off of Mudang the Pygmy Hippo, animal coins have proven to be a highly lucrative asset class. 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.

And at what point did you decide to get in on the peanut coin? I got in pretty much when it was created and I threw some dust at it. 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. And it was going so fast it took me like three attempts to buy into it. But Rumi says he got nervous pretty quickly. He decided to hop off the peanut rocket after making only a few thousand dollars.

And then he just kind of moved on, watched the peanut coin situation from afar. When Elon Musk started tweeting about peanut, the price of the coin skyrocketed and eventually reached a market cap of over two billion dollars. 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. And listening to Mark's pitch, Rumi says, it was clear that Mark was getting something fundamentally wrong about how the meme coin world works. Mark seemed to be making a sort of earnest appeal about how switching Peanut meme coins

would somehow bring justice for his untimely death. But Rumi says Mark was speaking largely to people who were just looking to profit. Most of these people are just getting involved in these projects to make money for the dream of making generational wealth and walking away from your nine to five and never looking back, right?

It's the world's biggest Ponzi scheme. Let's not get it twisted because whoever buys first makes money off of whoever buys next. It goes up and up and up from there. Let me say he 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. The energy of it was already used up. And that's the thing. It's all in Attention Economy.

People moved on. And it's sad, but that works for everything that creates an uproar. It lasts for a week, two weeks, and people are already in Peanut, they're not gonna go to Justice, right? Peanut was the thing that represented Justice for Peanut. Nevertheless, Mark persisted. The Justice meme coin fell apart after Mark and his partners started accusing each other

of fraudulent behavior. So Mark actually launched another peanut coin. But so far that one too has failed to gain traction. It's currently stalled at a market cap of just a few hundred thousand dollars. 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. You go on their website, it literally has a photo of me, literally had my sanctuary, literally had my photos, and they use this to base, base their whole project on my story. So I was like, you have two options, either

include me or I sue you guys to get everything taken back and they just like, you, you have two options, either include me, or I sue you guys to get everything taken back. And they're just like, you have no power here. We made peanut story. We did this. And I'm like, your crypto game didn't do to my story. The story was already here and you're using it to make money. Because the people behind the peanut coin are anonymous,

Mark isn't able to sue them directly. So instead, Mark's lawyers have filed cease and desist letters against the major crypto exchanges where the biggest peanut meme coins are listed. He alleges they violated his copyright by using his photos and that they violate a trademark that he's recently applied for. The strategy is still something of a long shot,

but there have been some successful court cases arguing for ownership of memes. And if he were to successfully get some of these coins delisted, he could have major implications for the whole world of meme coins. BRIANNA 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. I never thought I'd be somebody who has to fight trauma.

Like, I'm about, I cried before you guys came here. I don't have enough time in my day to focus on grieving. So, you know, I have to focus that anger into motivation and positivity because if I don't, I'm gonna just mentally break down myself. So the house that Peanut built feels a bit like a straw house at the moment. 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. 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.

In the meantime, Mark says that he and his family are making ends meet. They're covering their costs through a mixture of donations and OnlyFans revenue. He's still holding out hope that the anonymous traders behind the most popular peanut-based cryptocurrencies will eventually cut him in on the proceeds. And he hopes that one day, he won't have to keep making OnlyFans content to keep his rescue animals alive. If you want to know why everyone seems to be releasing meme coins these days, from literal children to C-list celebrities to the President of the United States, check out our recent episode The Meme Coin Casino.

It's the story of how meme coins went from a one-off joke to a massive speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars. This episode was produced by James Snead, it was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Jimmy Keighley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Jennifer Jenkins, Yeisha Yadav, Max Berwick, and Yulia Guseva. I'm Nick Neves. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Rethinking, a podcast from TED. On Rethinking, organizational psychologist Adam Grant talks to some of today's greatest

minds about the ideas people take for granted and what assumptions should be reconsidered. Find Rethinking wherever you listen. Are we overlooking the challenges facing men without college degrees? Richard Reeves thinks so. There are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads. Reeves heads the American Institute for Boys and Men. Have we updated our view about the role of men as quickly as we've changed the economy around them?

And the answer is no. That's from a recent Planet Money bonus episode, a look at the economic and cultural struggles of working class men. To hear it and get sponsor free listening, sign up for NPR+. Just go to plus.npr.org. Bella DiPaolo is glad if you're happily married, but she is perfectly happy being single. I would love to have someone who took care of my car or someone who cleaned up the dishes after dinner, but then I'd want them to leave. From yourself to your dog, to your spouse, our significant others. That's on the TED

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