Jess Jiang
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jess Jiang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Just a quick warning, this episode talks about sex and sex work. It's an economic show, after all.
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 he and his wife have saved from the slaughterhouse. So where were you when the raid began?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mark takes to social media to tell the world what had happened, and pretty soon, the story goes absolutely viral.
Did you ever imagine that Peanut might find an afterlife on the blockchain?
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 bushiest tales we've ever told. 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 Squirrels fame helped build, the house that Peanut built.
Wow. Hello. The inner sanctum.
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.
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 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.
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 ranger's jersey.
When did you first get the sense you might have a viral social media star on your hands? It kind of just happened.
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