I asked Doug straight out whether we're in a market melt-up, and he didn't hesitate. NVIDIA is worth about $5.5 trillion. Jensen Huang name-drops an AI company on stage and it pops 30% on the spot. I brought up Micron — it's gone from a $30–60 billion company eighteen months ago to north of $1.2 trillion today. That kind of move makes the dot-com era I sat out feel small.

"We're living in a fool's paradise in the market," Doug told me. And it isn't just the headline names. Everybody's trading options now, same-day expiration included. "It's a gambling casino. It's completely crazy." When I looked it up, there are now roughly as many ETFs as there are listed stocks. The whole thing, the way Doug puts it, is "a floating abstraction, a moving paper fantasy. It's gotta end badly."