David Bresnik

If you were going to talk about pandemic overhiring, this would be the epicenter.

And I think that is confounding a lot of things that people are also trying to figure out.

I don't think we fully know whether these layoffs, to what degree they are driven by AI versus AI being a convenient boogeyman.

Coming up.

And I said to myself, if you don't try this out, you're going to kick yourself forever.

My name is David Bresnik.

I run Sparrows Nest Studio, and we are a Mahjong parlor in Midtown Manhattan at 35 West 35th.

Mahjong is a classic card game primarily played with tiles, and it's a hand-building game where four players are in a race to get their hand into the right shape.

First one to the right shape is the winner.

Sparrows Nest had been a dream of mine for a long time.

I've been involved in the Mahjong community since around 2006, 2010, like multiple phases of my kind of growth in that community.

And one of the things that I'd always felt is that it would be so great if there was a home for Mahjong, a place to do it.

I was very fortunate.

Several years ago, I had a little bit of a windfall and COVID, frankly, depressed office space prices immensely in Manhattan.

And I said to myself, if you don't try this out, you're going to kick yourself forever.

So I actually work full-time at a startup, and this is something that I've kind of taken on as my second life.

It's been my second life for a very long time.

My days are I start work, I do work, I finish work, I go to Sparrows Nest, I start that work, I do that work, we close at 10 p.m.

It's a lot.

We actually just raised our prices a little bit because we moved into a new space, because expenses have gone up, and because, frankly, our original prices were quite the bargain.