A wide-ranging money Q&A that's cautiously bearish: the economy is quietly bleeding, but a stock-market party fueled by AI is papering over the damage — for now.

• To rebuild wealth, income beats investing: chase a trade, real estate license, or side hustle rather than expecting $300K to grow to $1M in five years.
• The weak jobs report doesn't matter yet because rising stocks make people feel rich and keep them spending; the real crash comes when credit dries up and spending stops.
• AI is called a "gift" holding the whole economy up — but when AI firms like OpenAI or Anthropic hit trouble raising money, the cycle could screech to a halt.
• Data center and AI-chip companies (Oracle, CoreWeave, Nebius) are a bad long-term bet: compute is a commodity with no pricing power, and they're piling on scary amounts of high-rate debt.
• Better bets are firms that turn AI into real profit (Palantir, Axon) and Meta, seen as the biggest winner from AI-boosted advertising.

Outlook: Expect the AI-driven boom to keep running a while longer, then break hard — with rates eventually cut to zero, making cheap loans and real estate the next big opportunity.