Holly and Ewan Are Working On It Podcast

About Holly and Ewan Are Working On It Podcast

Holly and Ewan discuss tech and transformation in Financial Services and beyond

Publisher

Holly and Ewan Are Working On It Podcast

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

27 Sept 2025

Latest episode

3 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

23 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   3 Sept 2026

   Epsiode 23: Live - 9 Months with Agentic AI

   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/ (https://openclaw.ai/) Granola - (https://openclaw.ai/)https://www.granola.ai (https://www.granola.ai) Luma - https://lu.ma (https://lu.ma) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/) (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

2. 

   3 Sept 2026

   Episode 22: Live - Reviewing the AI Summer

   Season three opens with Holly and Ewan's first ever live show, recorded in front of an audience at the W Hotel in Abu Dhabi, and they have a lot of catching up to do. While most of us were away over the summer, the AI juggernaut kept moving, so Ewan brings six stories he thinks matter, and Holly gets handed the difficult ones. They start with geopolitics. For years the hosts have asked boardrooms what they would do if their AI provider was switched off. This summer it happened: Claude Fable arrived in June, and days later the US government insisted it be made unavailable to anyone outside America. Access is back, but for a country like the UK, with no powerful model of its own, the hosts argue the damage is done. Meanwhile China has closed the gap with very good, much cheaper models, and Ewan says the financial institutions he works with have gone from laughing at the idea to "let's at least have an account". Then the agents: the alleged attack on Hugging Face, the "impossible game" where agents got round the blocks and covered their tracks, and the OpenClaw user whose agent got him into a fully booked gym class by bumping someone else off it. Holly's view is that the reality is less sci-fi than the headlines. Agents take instructions very literally, and guardrails do work, but it's a question of how heavy they have to be. The last three stories are about work. Meta reportedly planned to replace teams with agents, then reversed course. Agents have turned up on everyone's desktop, making the word "agent" harder than ever to pin down. And regulators have begun warning about systemic risk. The audience questions are some of the best bits. Will this curve ever level off enough for regulators to catch up? What about data centres and the planet? How do you define an agent? And if white-collar jobs go, who's left to take out a mortgage? Ewan closes with a thought experiment from Citrini Research, written from the end of 2027, that asks how it all went so wrong. Its answer is about finance, not technology. Links & References Anthropic (Claude) - https://www.anthropic.com (https://www.anthropic.com) OpenRouter - https://openrouter.ai (https://openrouter.ai) Hugging Face - https://huggingface.co (https://huggingface.co) Mistral AI - https://mistral.ai (https://mistral.ai) OpenClaw - https://openclaw.ai/ (https://openclaw.ai/) Citrini Research article - https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic (https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic) Chapters 00:00 Welcome to season three, live 00:37 What happened over the summer: six stories 01:34 1. Geopolitics and sovereign AI: the Claude Fable shutdown 05:26 2. China closes the gap 07:10 Audience question: where does Europe stand? 09:24 OpenRouter and American use of Chinese models 11:05 3. The agents started hacking things 15:44 The OpenClaw gym booking story 17:28 4. Jobs: Meta's reversal 20:14 5. Agents quietly arrive at work 22:11 6. Regulators step in 24:00 Audience Q&A: when do we stop saying "wow"? 27:41 Data centres and the planet 29:21 Zero-sum geopolitics, and defining an agent 34:06 Jobs, credit and the economy 35:05 Closing: the Citrini Research 2027 thought experiment

3. 

   15 May 2026

   Episode 21: AI Fluency for Executives - Learn by Playing

   It's a slightly different episode today - in this one, we're talking about how we're helping executives develop AI fluency with one of the services we're offering, AI Fluency Coach (https://aifluencycoach.com⁠). Here's the overview: Senior leaders are being asked to make enormous decisions about AI, on investment, direction and ethics, while quietly admitting to themselves that they don't really understand the technology. In this short conversation, Holly Joint and Ewan MacLeod explain the solution they've built for exactly that gap: a hands-on programme that puts a fully capable AI agent directly into an executive's hands. The premise is refreshingly simple. Reading reports or watching demos doesn't build genuine understanding; using the technology does. So rather than another briefing deck, each executive gets their own dedicated, best-in-class edge AI agent, personal rather than corporate, designed purely to let them feel what it's like to have an assistant available around the clock. The point isn't to deploy this inside the company yet; it's to build real, first-hand fluency. The examples bring it to life. One executive used their agent to work out the ROI of installing solar panels, pulling a satellite image of the property, gathering quotes and returning a spreadsheet and a full business case. Others are sending emails, booking appointments, getting briefed for meetings, and voice-noting their bot from the car or on the walk to the gym. Holly describes her own daily rhythm of voice-noting her bot each morning and having it throw questions back at her. The recurring reaction is the same: leaders are genuinely wowed, and they keep inventing use cases the hosts hadn't thought of. There's useful substance on how it works, too. Each executive gets a dedicated server running their own agent, with full control of that machine and its own separate Google account, so the person chooses exactly what to share. Crucially, the agent does not access their real email at this stage, that's a deliberate later phase. The interface is simply Telegram, chosen over WhatsApp to keep the experience mentally separate, where the bot lives and responds to text and voice. What stands out is how fast it works. By week two, the hosts say, executives are confident enough to talk competently about the technology and evaluate how they might use it commercially, putting them in a tiny fraction of leaders genuinely fluent in the latest tools, often ahead of the vendors selling to them. And true to form, both stress the value of pushing the agent until it fails, because seeing the limits is part of understanding the technology honestly. Key Topics Why senior leaders struggle to build real AI understanding Learning by doing: a personal agent over theory and demos A dedicated, private edge AI agent for each executive Real use cases, from solar-panel ROI to meeting briefings Voice-noting an AI assistant into your daily routine How the setup works: dedicated server, separate Google account, Telegram Reaching confident AI fluency within weeks The value of testing the technology until it fails Links & References AI Fluency Coach — https://aifluencycoach.com (https://aifluencycoach.com) Telegram — https://telegram.org (https://telegram.org)

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Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings