A curious thing is happening at graduation ceremonies: students have begun booing speakers who mention AI. Meanwhile, builders are using the same technology to do things that seemed impossible three years ago. In Episode 88 of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard sit down with venture capitalist Jeff Abbott — founding partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, founder of the global AI Salon community, and Andrew's co-author on *AI and the Art of Being Human* — to explore the widening gap between those two experiences of artificial intelligence.
Abbott offers a rare insider's view of what he calls the new gold rush, and it's stranger than the headlines suggest. Technical moats have largely evaporated; everyone builds on the same foundation models, and those models change without warning. Software itself is becoming liquid — apps described in natural language, generated in seconds, used once, and discarded. A teleprompter for a single video shoot. A custom CRM coded in two weeks. The conversation traces what this means for the future of work, for startups, and for a generation being told AI will transform careers they haven't yet been able to start.
But the episode's most striking turn is inward. Abbott built an AI tool that performs much of his own job — analyzing startups, scoring them, generating reports instantly. What it lacks, he argues, is judgment: the lived experience and relational trust that make venture capital, and arguably every business, a human business. The data crunching is the tip of the iceberg; the weight beneath is intuition and relationship.
The trio also explores one-person unicorns and the "minimum viable human team," why the entrepreneurial mindset matters more than entrepreneurship itself, and a question Abbott poses to his academic hosts: what would an investment framework for human flourishing actually look like? True to form, the episode doesn't resolve that question — it opens it. Because if AI really can do more and more of what we thought defined our work, the things that remain — judgment, trust, knowing where you want to go — start to look less like soft skills and more like the whole point.
Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
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🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4goqIjF
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2JosPwJazSUxYL3iQmf2rj?si=UxJN_WTVTzqif09lqnJN3A
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/YA8vS02lhss
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