AI Trainers Live In Walmart Parking Lots

AI trainers now live in Walmart parking lots. Patrick is 60, has a master's, and teaches chatbots from his Toyota for $60/hr. The Guardian ran a piece about grey-haired ex-software engineers sleeping in motels and clocking in from Walmart parking lots to train the AI. Patrick, 60, master's in information management. Rebecca, 52, pulling $140/hr from her kitchen. Daniel calls fearmongering — swap "AI" for "DoorDash" and the article reads identically. Hunter pitches a counter-screenplay where we draft the elderly into mech warfare instead. He calls it "Tuesday." Mid-show, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7. Better on most benchmarks, worse on cybersecurity (on purpose), and apparently the cue for Hunter to ask Daniel why he's only running one Claude Max subscription instead of stacking multiples to dodge the four-hour rate limit. Then the real fight: tokenmaxxing. Reid Hoffman is pushing it as a workforce KPI — monitor employee AI usage, reward token burn, treat prompts-per-day like a productivity signal. Daniel calls it the X-era "lines of code" metric reincarnated. Hunter wants a token hurdle by department. They land on: welders exempt, marketers not. Plus Snap layoffs (16% gone, blamed on AI), Allbirds becoming an "AI company" overnight, and Gen Z's deep AI doom — only 15% think it's a net positive. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 — Gary calls in from the Shell station payphone 02:19 — Hunter pitches "Tuesday": elderly mech warfare 04:04 — Tech ageism: 30 is the new 50 05:49 — Claude Opus 4.7 drops mid-recording 09:53 — Patrick, 60, trains AI from a Walmart parking lot 13:01 — Gen Z hates AI: only 15% see a net positive 17:00 — Snap cuts 16%; Allbirds pivots to "AI" 22:17 — Tokenmaxxing: Reid Hoffman's gospel 27:04 — Should companies set a token-burn KPI? ⚡ Listen now & get self-aware before your tools do. 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🍎 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9DopLlG7IbOqV-WD25jcw?sub_confirmation=1 📢 Engage Allbirds is now an AI company. Your turn: pick a real brand and pitch its AI pivot in one sentence. Best pivot wins nothing. We're not VCs, we're a podcast. New here? Subscribe for twice-weekly AI chaos. 🧠 They Might Be Self-Aware — but are we? #AI #TMBSA #ClaudeOpus47