Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, October 24th, and that means it's time for Long

Reads Sunday. And today we have a fun one for you guys. So, our story starts in 2015.

Well, really, it starts in the seven years before 2015 as one of hip-hop's

most legendary ensembles secretly recorded an album that they called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Yes, of course, I'm speaking of the Wu Tang Clan. So they had secretly been recording this album for seven years,

and in 2015, instead of releasing it as normal, they held an auction. There would be only one

copy of this album, and it was going to be auctioned off. Now at the time, there were two very

strong takes on this. The first held that this was some bullshit elitist art stunt. The second was that

it was a perfect skewering of the way that digital and streaming has eroded musical value.

For my part, I believe that it could have simply been that cash ruled everything around them.

And in either case, if one thing has ever been true, it's that Wu-Tang Clan ain't

nothing to f*** with. Whatever the real story is, baby Dr. Evil pharma exec, Martin Shikrelli,

won the auction for $2 million and took this incredible piece of culture with him in his much-hated

hands. Now, for those who aren't familiar with this comic book villain, he was a hedge funder

and pharmaceutical exec who acquired a drug called Deriprim, which had an expired patent but no generic

version. This drug was used as an anti-malarial and an antiparic drug, and was used treating

both AIDS-related and non-AIDS-related toxoplasmosis. After his firm bought this drug,

they jacked the price from $1350 a pill to $750 a pill overnight. It's way beyond the scope

to dig into all of the elements of this here, but the key thing, again, is that it was a bummer

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