Epsiode 23: Live - 9 Months with Agentic AI
About this Episode
Recorded live in front of an audience at the W Hotel in Abu Dhabi, the second half of Holly and Ewan's evening goes back to where it started: the end of 2025, when OpenClaw launched and people were handing an AI agent the keys to their computers. Ewan, who works with regulated institutions, spent December dithering. Holly dived in. Nine months on, how are they actually living with their agents?
Holly's answer is that her daughter thinks she talks to her agent more than her family. Hamster greets her every morning with the weather, her calendar, her email and a nudge about whether she's focusing on the right things. Podcast Hamster takes her voice notes and asks questions back, and Wellie checks in on sleep, energy and mood. Ewan takes the more cautious route: read-only access first, then Marvin, his chief of staff, which now runs on around ninety tools. Setting up a client's domain used to take him half an hour; now it takes eight seconds. Granola meeting notes become tasks, live train data tells him when to stay in the pub at Waterloo, and Eddie publishes FinTech Profile interviews. There's a lesson in caution too: the agent connected to a WhatsApp group of CIOs that the whole group learned to control.
Then the bigger picture: OpenClaw is free to download, Google is testing Gemini Spark, Microsoft Scout is on its way, and you can build your own, as Holly and Ewan have with Lumen at Beacon58.
The audience pushes back hard. Are we automating our lives away? What happens when young people outsource their thinking and their emotions? Should exams measure a human-plus-AI score, the way they accepted the calculator? Holly makes the case that critical thinking now matters more than knowledge, and Ewan points to the book that warns if anyone builds it, everyone dies.
Links & References
- OpenClaw - https://openclaw.ai/
- Granola - https://www.granola.ai
- Luma - https://lu.ma
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares)
Chapters
- 00:00 Welcome, live from the W Hotel Abu Dhabi
- 00:55 OpenClaw and the great dithering
- 02:59 Naming agents: Hamster versus Claudia
- 04:55 Holly's day with Hamster, Podcast Hamster and Wellie
- 07:52 Ewan's route in: read-only first, then Marvin
- 09:35 An eight-second domain setup
- 12:11 Ninety tools: Granola and live train times
- 14:08 Read-only WhatsApp, and the CIO group warning
- 16:01 Eddie and FinTech Profile
- 18:25 Half-built bridges
- 19:13 Context in action: Luma and a tight connection in Doha
- 22:20 Agents for everyone: OpenClaw, Hermes, Gemini Spark, Microsoft Scout
- 24:05 Building your own: Lumen
- 25:19 Audience Q&A: are we automating our lives away?
- 28:37 Emotional and intellectual outsourcing
- 32:33 The calculator argument and a human-AI score
- 37:57 Critical thinking and education
- 39:44 If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- 40:49 Closing thoughts