#pharma podcast

[multiplieraisworld]

5 Ways by which Artificial Intelligence can Boost Pharmaceutical Industry?

Pharmaceutical Industry can effectively leverage artificial intelligence for the better acceleration of innovation, enhanced drug safety, improving clinical trial success rates and so on by impacting every aspect from research and development to efficient patient care. AI in pharmaceutical industry also analyzes the real world data for detecting the adverse drug reactions and maintaining the safety of pharmaceutical products. For More Details - +919252177578 Contact Us Now.

[healtharkinsightss]

0:59 / 29:30

Measuring Effectiveness of Pharma Marketing - Healthcare Innovation Podcast S2E3

Welcome to Healthark Insights' healthcare innovation podcast season 2! In this episode, titled "Measuring Effectiveness of Pharma Marketing", our host, Shivang Bhagat, Senior Consultant at Healthark Insights, engages in a dynamic conversation with Preetha Vasanji, President of Emerging Markets at Doceree. As a distinguished leader in the physician marketing space, Preetha shares her perspectives on the evolution, new developments, trends, and challenges of the pharma industry. Join us as we explore how Doceree is innovating to solve some of these challenges and revolutionize pharma marketing. Don't miss this insightful discussion on our YouTube channel!

[helpimstuckposting]

My tags are so funny retrospectively like man I really had no idea exactly how gay this one would be

Juno: I am not being followed around by a guy in a suit all day

Sasha: Perhaps you can talk him out of the suit

Me: Haha gay

[ms-demeanor]

Knowledge Fight anon again - thank you for the list and recs! I look forwatd to checking them out. I was excited to see there's a West Wing podcast because I enjoyed that show, but yourself and the hosts hate it so maybe not for me lmao. Though I will still give the first episode a listen - very curious to understand why our feeligns about the show differ so vastly. And if you -want- to rant about why you hate TWW - feel free! I'm genuinely curious - I'm European, have never lived in the US, so for me it was one of the biggest tools of learning how US politics work, which made it absolutely fascinating to watch.

Anyways! I'll be looking at the other podcasts as well, they all seem very interesting, and the common-denominator format you describe them having does jive with me. Thanks again!

My very republican father and sister very much wish that all democrats would act like the democrats in the west wing. It's touted as a point of honor and a great example of compromise when Democrat Jed Bartlett appoints a republican justice to the Supreme court, any time there's an environmentalist or a union supporter on the show they're painted as extreme and uncompromising, in the later seasons the Jimmy Smitts character is running as a democrat on a pro-school-vouchers, anti-tenure/union (so anti-public school, basically) platform, the show as a whole is against entitlements (free college especially is something the ostensible dems in the show aren't even interested in enough to lament).

Idk at a certain point it gets frustrating to see anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-healthcare republicans being praised as the mature compromisers in the room with complicated motivations and good points when every time a leftist protest shows up it's a warehouse full of people without enough message discipline to talk to to cameras without erupting into a shouting match and getting brushed off as whiny babies by toby zigler.

"Oh, we need CJ to look a little loopy, let's have her agree with these cartographers who are pointing out that the mercator projection privileges the global north." "Oh we need to present something that's a ridiculous waste of money, how about a wildlife crossing that would prevent keystone species injuries in an area of urban incursion, that's bullshit that we shouldn't spend money on." "Oh, we want to explain why big pharma can't provide free HIV meds to african nations in 2003, let's suggest that it wouldn't matter even if they did because *Africans don't have clocks and can't take meds 12 hours apart.*" "this hollywood producer is pushing too hard for gay marriage in 2007, let's lecture him about how you need to slow down and respect the process instead of being an activist about it"

There's this interview with Aaron Sorkin where he's saying "America used to be the world's heroes, when my dad was a soldier people would say 'thank god, the Americans are here' and they don't say that anymore and it's because of Donald Trump" - Sorkin totally ignores US imperialism and the way that people in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't say 'thank god, the americans are here' to an extent that is genuinely startling, and that shows up in the show. At one point in the show president bartlett okays the assassination of a foreign leader and says 'today we enter the league of ordinary nations' as though the US hasn't backed coups or assassination around the world, as though the CIA isn't a thing, as though Henry Kissinger isn't a thing, and it's *bizarre* from a show that is supposed to be politically aware.

I'm actually super hesitant to recommend the west wing thing to general audiences because i don't always agree with the hosts or their guests but as an analysis of the surprisingly right-leaning politics of the show it's a worthwhile listen.

It's honestly something i could rant about for way too long because I had early warning signs about it. My sister *loves* this show and its politics. She's got a "my president is Jed Bartlett" sticker that she keeps next to her signed copy of one of Ann Coulter's books. If my sister thinks your liberal character is reasonable and level headed and has good policy positions, your liberal character isn't all that liberal.

The show is steeped in American exceptionalism and imperialist apologia but it's got a tearjerker soundtrack and maybe the best and most charming cast ever assembled so you ignore it when CJ wants to brush off constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure or cruel and unusual punishment (she's a huge fan of cops and intelligence agencies and not a fan of oversight) or when she shits on affirmative action (she believes her father lost his dream job to a less qualified candidate who was selected due to minority status, and that that job loss led to his mental decline - CJ Craig thinks that DEI hiring practices killed her father) because Allison Janney is an incredibly talented and charismatic actress who is elevating the hell out of her character.

But, you know, it would be kind of fucked up if a Democrat president's chief of staff was cheerfully on-record about the fact that she thinks intelligence agencies are more effective when nobody knows what they're doing so we should leave them to their own devices.

Thank you for the opportunity to rant i cannot fucking stand this show and i kind of want to do an episode-by-episode breakdown of various flavors of bullshit but there are much better things to do with my time so i don't but it's nice to have a chance to yell about the stuff that makes me crazy off the top of my head.

That said: if you want a podcast that is less vitriolic but does actually get into how parts of the US political system work, check out 5 to 4, which is a podcast by 3 lefty lawyers talking about Supreme Court decisions. It's great!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[ephemeralgalaxies]

Y'ALL. Re-listening to The Penumbra Podcast (s3 now lol bc yes I am specifically looking for Nureyev lore since s4/5 new info) and Man in Glass has me SOBBING IT WAS RIGHT THERE ALL ALONG.

s3ep2, Buddy telling Nureyev his "calling card"

Buddy: "An endoring moral core, coupled with a strong desire to excise that core completely...like having a heart embarrasses you. I brought you on this ship for that moral core. If I distrust you, darling, it is only because you have proven that you can do anything you set your mind to, and so I am certain that you are capable of excising those morals for good. You just haven't done it yet."

Then later, s3ep2 still, Nureyev is talking with Juno in his room and Nureyev narrates:

Nureyev: 'I feel the weight of potentiality sit heavy on my shoulders, I hear Buddy's words about the excision of my moral core and about my ability to do it. And I realize, for the first time, that there is a kind of helplessness in complete freedom[...]when trouble arises, I disappear. [...]but looking at this new man [Juno], there is nothing I want more than to stay.'

AND THEN AND THEN IN S5ep14 The Sixteen Tons,,, yeah I know this line by heart :')

Nureyev and Juno talking (arguing) after Juno takes him into the closet at the facility (near the beginning of the ep)

Nureyev: "I do not want to see you anymore, Juno."

Juno: "...What?!"

Nureyev: "You said that it would just take those words to excise you from my life entirely, didn't you? Well, I've said them..."

THE EXACT WORD CHOICE. THE WAY HE WANTED TO STAY ON THE SHIP AND JOIN THE AURINKO CRIME FAMILY FOR (money, but also) JUNO. BECAUSE JUNO IS HIS MORAL CORE, THEIR MORALS DO ALIGN. THAT'S WHY THEY WORK SO WELL. SO OFC HE HAS TO "EXCISE" JUNO TO CARRY ON WITH THIS.

Because the reality of it: keeping someone between life and death for YEARS, helping fund the Big Pharma that has vowed to safe Slip and yet also commits such horrific acts, but he has to do it or else he never gets to know Slip or have someone know him as he thinks they should bc surely he must not be worth all of this to Juno, the lady's just being stubborn again and inconsiderate, but deep down Nureyev KNOWS that's not it at all. He knows that Juno does know him and will continue to know more about him, and if he can do that and love Nureyev... well, that means Nureyev could have a future.

But Nureyev has been trying to stretch out the future for over 20 years. He's set his mind to it, and he can do anything he sets his mind to. Including destroying himself until there is nothing left to bother with a future anyway. Until there is nothing for Juno Steel to know and love and so he gets the punishment he believes so adamantly that he deserves long before Juno first left him in that hotel room.

If he is alone, then when trouble comes he can just disappear. If he is alone, there is no one to hurt when that bomb goes off.

[st-just]

Please tell me you have ideas for what the modern versions of the rest of the Greek Pantheon would look like (and that you'd be willing to share them).

So only for like half of them (I just, do not have thoughts about Poseidon, sorry), and none of these are exactly original (and are all probably overly meanspirited), but for the ones I do-

Zeus - Honestly just want to say 'literally Berlusconi' but that's not that interesting is it?

Hades - Trad-masculinity influencer. Not even as a grift, he owns a mining company or something, he just has a lot of advice to offer young men about dating and how to make women commit.

Apollo - Yeah this one's just going to have to be 'med school golden boy sex pest/future #metoo scandal wherever he gets hired'

Artemis - Has significantly more dogs than human friendships. Takes probably excessive pride in hunting her own meat. Shared a lot of 'humanity are the real virus' memes during lockdown, and still hasn't gotten vaxed because big pharma. Probably not online enough to be an actual terf but like, the spirit's there.

Hermes - Thoughtleading Thinkfluencer tweeted and instagramed and youtubed and substacked his way into relevance despite zero expertise in anything except brand-building and now he's got a podcast with a six-digit subscriber count. Actually very funny, but has definitely dunked on numerous people with his million-follower twitter account and basically ruined their lives.

Aphordite - okay this one's just obvious. Beauty vlogger and tiktok star and the picture next to 'toxic femininity' in the dictionary. #girldinner #girlmath #coquette etc. Directly responsible for at least a dozen eating disorders.

Ares - from everything my friend whose really into it has ever said, he would 100% be an MMA guy, or at least a former one. Like, Joe Rogan wannabe except with none of the chill or comedy and significantly more macho bragging about fucked up stuff he's done. Most likely to get high at a party and commit a hate crime.

[galwednesday]

This week's deep dive rec is a combo pack exploring radicalization and the wellness industry, starting with this Guardian piece "Everything you've been told is a lie! Inside the wellness to fascism pipeline" by James Ball, which gives an overview of how these concepts became intertwined:

Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. “New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,” he says. “Conspiracy theories provide the missing link, turbo-charging an existing account of what’s happening by claiming that it is not just the result of chance or the unintended consequences of policy choices, but the result of a deliberate, secret plan, whether by big pharma, corrupt scientists, the military-industrial complex or big tech.” Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them. [...]

“Alex Jones perfected the grift of selling snake-oil supplements and prepper kit to the libertarian right wing via his conspiracy theory media channels,” Knight says. “But it was Covid that led to the most direct connections between far-right conspiracism and wellness cultures. The measures introduced to curb the pandemic were viewed as attacks on individual sovereignty, which is the core value of both the wellness and libertarian/‘alt-right’ conspiracy communities.” The problem is, it rarely stops with libertarians. While they may not recognise it, those drawn in from the left are increasingly ending up in the same place as their rightwing counterparts. “Although many of the traditional left-leaning alternative health and wellness advocates might reject some of the more racist forms of rightwing conspiracism, they now increasingly share the same online spaces and memes,” he says, before concluding: “They both start from the position that everything we are told is a lie, and the authorities can’t be trusted.”

Part two of this combo rec is an episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast, hosted by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, with journalist Mike Rothschild joining them to talk about his research into the wellness to QAnon pipeline:

Special guest Mike Rothschild tells us how the road to wellness can be an on-ramp to a conspiracy theory. Along the way we debunk oil pulling, explore Instagram aesthetics and bemoan anti-vaxx argumentation tactics. Mike gets the date of the January 6th insurrection wrong and he is sorry.

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

One of the most psychotic things to me is that people find Joe Rogan’s podcast to be…. Controversial. And some even think it should be banned for “spreading disinformation” LOL. Over time I’ve grown to appreciate Joe because he’s an inquisitive meathead who makes complex topics accessible for Americans who don’t read or engage intellectually with subjects bc their brains are fried by screen damage and tiktok, so I actually think he’s doing our dumbed down society a favour by being the modern day steroided Fear Factor version of Socrates.

Like he’s made zombified reactionary leftists defecate themselves once again bc he had RFK Jr on his show eviscerating big pharma and poor khoevid decisions which led to a literal Great Depression 2.0. They freaked out and called RFK Jr an anti-waxxer and “far right” etc. The latter of which has no meaning anymore because anybody who isn’t on a permanent CNN IV drip is apparently “far right.” We’re living in a timeline where Bobby Kennedy’s son is considered the equivalent of a /pol poster lmao.

It’s not like RFK Jr is a perfect candidate but I think Joe had a lot of guts to bring him on his show. And I’m stunned at how Bobby JR has the nerve to point out that the CIA literally murdered his dad and uncle bc he’s putting his own life on the line to do so. Not only that, but he called out the industrial military complex and the US funding of massive wars etc so I feel like he’s going to be the newest whacked Kennedy soon RIP I hope he and Joe both lift and inject TRT together and have some happy last days

[multiplieraisworld]

[airbrickwall]

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[onbearfeet]

Apparently there's some kind of big marketing push right now for flibanserin, the decade-old, remarkably shitty "female Viagra" sold under the brand name Addyi in the US. Every podcast I've listened to in the last two weeks has featured an Addyi commercial.

So, friendly reminder those who forgot: while there are definitely women and other humans with vaginas who experience sexual dysfunction and would love to take a pill about it, Addyi is almost certainly not that pill.

A few facts:

Flibanserin was officially approved to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a diagnosis removed from the DSM before the drug hit the market. As far as I can determine, Addyi is not currently approved to treat HSDD's replacement diagnosis, female sexual arousal/interest disorder (FSAID).

One of the major differences between HSDD and FSAID is that HSDD could be diagnosed on the basis of a partner's report of insufficient sexual desire, while FSAID must be diagnosed based on patient reports. Basically, you can get diagnosed with HSDD if your boyfriend doesn't think you're putting out enough, whereas you can only get diagnosed with FSAID if YOU, the patient, think there's a problem. And Addyi claims to treat the boyfriend version.

Side effects of flibanserin include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, sleepiness, and (ironically) trouble sleeping. Those are not the kind of side effects anyone would put up with from Viagra, but hey, apparently they're fine in a "little pink pill".

When flibanserin was first released in 2015, it included a "Don't drink alcohol ever" warning on the bottle because mixing the two substances could torpedo blood pressure. Apparently that's been downgraded to "either sober up before you take your daily pill, or skip it for the day if you've had 3 or more drinks".

Daily pill? Daily pill. Unlike Viagra, which can be taken more or less at the moment of need, flibanserin is supposed to be taken daily if it's to be effective.

And how effective is it? Not very! The most recent published studies are vague (or at least their publicly accessible summaries are), but the studies released with the initial marketing push in 2015 were touting effects like one whole additional satisfying sexual event per month, and the more recent ones are vague about everything except "it's totally better now". That's not a lot for an expensive daily med with serious side effects.

So if this med doesn't really work, it has serious side effects, and it claims to treat a disorder that hasn't been on the books since two years before it was released, how the hell did it get FDA approval? The answer is a massive marketing campaign, including an astroturf group called Even The Score that was put together by the pharma company Sprout Pharmaceutical after the FDA initially denied approval.

But don't worry! Sprout was acquired by a bigger pharma company, Valeant, for $1 billion right after Addyi hit the market. So there's a happy ending after all. 🫠

I realize griping about the marketing of a decade-old drug is kind of off-brand for me, but I'm frankly creeped out that someone decided to follow up The Misogyny Election with a massive ad buy for a daily roofie that can be prescribed if a woman's partner wants more sex than he's getting. It's very "your body, my choice".

Oh, and it'll run you $400 a month.

Anyway, talk to your doctor about literally anything other than this shitty drug.

[mariacallous]

The members of PleasrDAO are, well, pretty displeased with Martin Shkreli.

The "digital autonomous organization" spent $4.75 million to buy the fabled Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which had been produced as only a single copy. The album had once belonged to Shkreli, who purchased it directly from Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million in 2015. But after Shkreli became the "pharma bro" poster boy for price gouging in the drug sector, he ended up in severe legal trouble and served a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud.

He also had to pay a $7.4 million penalty in that case, and the government seized and then sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to help pay the bill.

The album was truly “one of a kind”—a protest against the devaluation of music in the digital age and the kind of fascinating curio that instantly made its owners into “interesting people.” The album came as a two-CD set inside a nickel and silver box inscribed with the Wu-Tang logo, and the full package included a pair of customized audio speakers and a 174-page leather book featuring lyrics and “anecdotes on the production.”

In a complicated transaction, PleasrDAO purchased the album from an unnamed intermediary, who had first purchased it from the government. As part of that deal, PleasrDAO created a non-fungible token (NFTs—remember those?) to show ownership of the album. The New York Times has a good description of what this entailed:

Makin’ Copies …

But after purchasing the album and sharing the collective ownership of its NFT, PleasrDAO discovered that its "one of a kind" object wasn't quite as exclusive as it had thought.

Shkreli had, in fact, made copies of the music. Lots of copies. On June 30, 2022, PleasrDAO said that Shkreli played music from the album on his YouTube channel and stated, "Of course I made MP3 copies, they're like hidden in safes all around the world … I'm not stupid. I don't buy something for $2 million just so I can keep one copy."

Shkreli began taunting PleasrDAO members about the album, telling one of them, "I literally play it on my Discord all the time, you're an idiot" and claiming that PleasrDAO was concerned about an album that ">5000 people have." Shkreli claimed on a 2024 podcast that he had "burned the album and sent it to like, 50 different chicks"—and that this had been extremely good for his sex life.

Shkreli even offered to send copies of the album to random internet commenters if they would just send him their "email addy." He also told people to "look out for a torrent" and hosted listening parties for the album on his X account, which reached "potentially over 4,900 listeners."

We know all of these details because PleasrDAO has sued Shkreli, claiming that he is acting in violation of the asset forfeiture order and that he is misappropriating "trade secrets" under New York law.

Shkreli "knew that by distributing copies of the Album's data and files or by playing it publicly, his actions would decrease the Album's marketability and value," said PleasrDAO. They have asked a federal judge to stop Shkreli—and also to get them a list of everyone he has distributed the album to.

Not a Secret

Shkreli's response to all this is, in essence, "So what's the problem?"

When he purchased the album for $2 million in 2015, he also acquired 50 percent of the copyrights to the package. Before the album was seized by the government, Shkreli says he took advantage of his copyright ownership to make copies as he was "permitted to do under his original purchase agreement." The government, he says, seized only the individual, physical copy of the album, and Shkreli was within his rights to retain the copies he had already made.

As for trade secrets, well, a trade secret actually has to be "secret." Thanks to his own actions, Shkreli has made sure that the album is not a secret. "Because Defendant legally purchased and shared the work before the Forfeiture Order and the Asset Purchase Agreement, the work is no longer a trade secret," his lawyers wrote in his defense.

The Empire State Strikes Back

On August 26, 2024, a federal judge in Brooklyn issued a preliminary injunction (PDF) in the case as the two parties prepare to battle things out in court. The injunction prevents Shkreli from "possessing, using, disseminating, or selling any interest in the Wu-Tang Clan album 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin' (the 'Album'), including its data and files or the contents of the Album."

Furthermore, Shkreli has to turn over "all of his copies, in any form, of the Album or its contents to defense counsel." He also must file an affidavit swearing that he "no longer possesses any copies, in any form, of the Album or its contents."

By the end of September 2024, Shkreli further must submit a list of "the names and contact information of the individuals to whom he distributed the data and files" and say if he made any money for doing so.

[jonasgoonface]

Your art has always been a huge inspiration and a source of comfort for me since i was like 13 so thank you. You have any suggestions for anarchist theory books, zines, or resources?

Anarchy can be ur sword, shield, map, or song. I don't know u so I'll just tell you what I'm on - If you like history podcasts there's cool people who did cool stuff. (margaret killjoy & friends) If you like queer nihilism texts there's Bædan and Blessed is the Flame (serafinski) If you want (A) updates, events, communiques, and neato conversations there's A News Podcast fiction-wise, I don't wanna project the A on anyone but I've gotten a lot out of these recently Autonomous - Annalee Newitz (cyberpunk book with pharma pirates, good examples of infosec fragility and infiltration, affinity groups) Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie (space opera hivemind book, the value of ineffective doomed resistance) Sunless Skies (unbelievably good videogame about fantasy steampunk space trains, speaks about time and futurity)