Trump's AI Framework Is Here, Your Retirement Is at Risk, and Engineers Are Quitting for Tokens

March 20, 2026:

The White House dropped its national AI legislative framework today — I go through the whole thing, because there's a provision about preempting state AI laws that is one of the most consequential things to happen in AI policy in years.

A columnist at The Sunday Times made an argument that stopped me: the real AI risk isn't losing your job — it's what happens to your retirement if AI disrupts your career at 50 instead of 30. Most people aren't thinking about it this way. They should be.

Jensen Huang proposed paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary, on top of cash. I explain what tokens are, why elite engineers are leaving high-paying jobs over GPU access, and what it means that the unit of value in the AI economy is shifting from time to compute. The New York Times is calling it tokenmaxxing.

And JPMorgan deployed AI to monitor junior bankers' hours — not because they're over-reporting, but because they're deliberately hiding how much they're actually working.