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Welcome back.

Kyle, not too long ago you wrote a piece about what you describe as a booming shadow market of sketchy AI investments.

What did you find out?

What is the shadow market and what are the sketchy investments?

A headline that we workshopped for a long time.

Continue talking about media matters, the booming and the sketchiness of it.

So, I mean, basically, what I noticed was a lot of chatter on X, as one does, about people buying and selling equity in OpenAI and Anthropic.

And this was just as Anthropic was doing this, like,

even more exponential growth over the past few months, huge valuation tripled.

And suddenly everyone is just trying to grab a piece of this rocket, as it were, and get any bit of equity any way they can.

This is pre-IPO equity, obviously.

Pre-IPO equity.

So retail investors, the normal people, cannot get access to this stuff yet.

The only way to get it is to grab a piece of, you know, some investment firm's piece that they got from an early employee or that they invested themselves

in an early round so i i reported out this this shadow market that's going on in bits of equity that are packaged with other bits of equity that are packaged again that are packaged again and it's this kind of like this one guy described it to me as like your local butcher is being offered five thousand dollars in anthropic equity like in a sketchy paper bag um