Live @ Nvidia's nerd Super Bowl, poker takes over tech, and the future of AI banking

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If we do the best thing for customers, people will gravitate towards us, and I don't have, like, a fear around it. Uh, there's just so much to banking. Like, it's, it's not like Claude is gonna go build a bank. Uh-

We're gonna hold you to that, Emad.

Yeah, you say that. Don't give him an idea. [laughs] This week on the show, Ellis and I shout about how South by Southwest isn't a tech conference anymore, Jensen Huang's nerd Super Bowl at NVIDIA GTC, and Ellis's obsession with old school NVIDIA graphics card box art. Of course he is. Then we're joined by Mercury CEO Emad Akoun. We chat about his side hustle as a VC, whether AI will eat banking, if credit card points are a scam, and tech's poker culture versus the gamblification of everything. Welcome to Access. [upbeat music] I'm Alex Heath, here with my co-host, Ellis Hamburger. Ellis, how's it going, man? Good to see you.

You too. Uh, I'm good. I am hopefully looking good, 'cause I resolved a very embarrassing camera problem that no podcast co-host should ever experience. I could not figure out why I could not align my eye line with, uh, the camera. So it looks more like I'm looking at you, and the problem is that no matter where I put my camera, it always seemed like it was too zoomed in. And do you know what the problem was?

You were zoomed in.

The camera was too zoomed in. [laughs] I was on the 50 millimeter focal length. I did not realize that this camera Vox gave me zoomed, and ever since the beginning, I have been fully zoomed, which also is not very flattering for the shape of my head, right?

Yeah. I mean, I, I thought you were a camera guy. Every time I see you, you've got a different camera, so I thought you understood that camera's zoomed.

That's why this is embarrassing. I'm being revealed to be a, a poser.

Access is a safe space. Um, h- how's it going otherwise? Uh, w- I, I've been traveling. I've been in LA, um, the last several days. Uh, everything good?

While you've been traveling, I've been enjoying my daily rewatch of Moana with my kids.

Nice.

I think we're getting into the... approaching triple digits, I would say. Uh, I think what's interesting