TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #796: Own Your Intelligence Stack with Tommy Eastman

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Tommy Eastman of Nous Research joins Marty to break down Hermes Agent and why owning your intelligence stack matters. They cover the leap from chatbots to autonomous agentic AI, self-improving memory, and model-agnostic harnesses that kill vendor lock-in. Tommy explains how open source models now handle most enterprise work at a fraction of frontier lab costs, why feeding company IP to OpenAI and Anthropic is a fiduciary risk, the GPU compute squeeze, trusted execution environments, and why Big AI lobbying against open source is disingenuous. Tommy on X: https://x.com/yeahfortommy Nous Research: https://x.com/NousResearch Hermes Agent: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/ Code TFTC for $21 off for first 100 users! The Bitcoin Playbook for Commercial Real Estate Owners & Investors: https://www.tftc.io/CRE STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Block: Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Square: Visit http://square.com/go/tftc for up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Simple Mining https://www.simplemining.io/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/ Disclosure: Bitcoin services are provided by Block, Inc. Bitcoin services are not licensable activity in all U.S. states and territories, and not all services are available in all states. Bitkey is not available in New York. Block, Inc. operates in New York as Block of Delaware and is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Bitcoin is a non-deposit, non-bank product that is not FDIC insured and involves risk, including monetary loss. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures: https://help.cash.app/btcdisclosures Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/tftc! #squarepartner. Offer expires December 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST. Offer for $40 off the cost of one Square Stand, $75 off the cost of one Square Terminal, $100 off the cost of one Square Handheld, or $200 off the cost of one Square Register, excluding applicable taxes. Limited to one discount per product type per seller account. Each code is limited to one redemption per account holder. Valid for new Square customers located in the US only. Offer not valid with guest checkout. Square reserves the right to modify, revoke or cancel the offer at any time. Offer cannot be combined with any other coupon. Void where prohibited, not redeemable for cash, and non-transferable. #squarepartner #blockpartner

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. I've been very much looking forward to that.

I was very excited when we first talked a couple of weeks ago because I've been using your product for four months now. And it's changed my life. You saw me. When you walked in here, you thought I was on the phone. I was talking to my Hermes agent. Talking to your Hermes agent. Better than talking to somebody. Someone said.

I like the human. I like the human element. Okay. I do like talking to my wife. Greg, who's off camera here. He's okay to talk to every once in a while. But it's a... it's changed how I work pretty quickly. I mean, I'm 35. I've been doing TFTC for almost a decade now. And within six months, my full workflow has changed. And Hermes is a critical part of that. Yeah. What? Let's take a step back and talk about you personally, how you ended up at News Research, which built the Hermes agent. You were in the Bitcoin industry, a crypto industry.

of Foundry before this. And that's, I mean, that's a whole other conversation. I think it's really interesting how a lot of these up and coming AI companies are seated with people that have been in the Bitcoin and crypto industry before. Yep. But how did you end up at News? What drew you to it? And what have you been doing there if you got there?

Yeah. So I was at Foundry, touched the Bitcoin stuff a fair bit, but was really focused on distributed and decentralized AI there. I just thought that AI obviously an incredibly powerful tool, very important that we get the ideological part of AI shaped correctly. That was my first real exposure to that thinking about the importance of AI for people, for the individual, the sovereignty that AI enables. I didn't really like a lot of the kind of first manifestations of that, like the first projects that kind of tried to champion that, I wasn't, I wasn't that impressed with.

Found Noose eventually, they were focused on post-training, open models to make them more pliable, more human-like. This was when meta was, the meta models were state of the art, right? The llama models. I quickly found that the team was just incredible. One, very ideologically driven, right? They, like at Noose, we truly believe that this, the ability to own your intelligence stack is the most important technological innovation that we've ever faced as humans. But also that the team was just incredibly sharp.

Like, everybody at Noose is just a killer. In love with, in love with AI, very driven. And it's just an incredible, incredible experience. And yeah, for me, I focus on a handful of things. We all kind of wear a bunch of different hats, right? We're still pretty small, pretty grassroots. But so I touch a bunch of stuff on the product side, onboarding enterprises, and manage all of our compute relationships as well. So we have our managed product, which is News Portal, which powers, which can power Hermes agent and powers Hermes agent for a lot of users.

So managing all the inference and tools behind that. So let's take a step back and let's explain Hermes. Let's focus on Hermes specifically. And let's, because we've had this conversation all fair a couple times now, but speaking to the person who thinks that the crem della crem of their interaction with AI is opening chat, GPT and hitting chat and thinking that they're getting inexperienced. What does Hermes bring to the table and how should people view the hermes, hermes harmists and how to utilize it? Yeah.

Well, that's the incredible piece, right? Is that we're so early. We feel like AI is everywhere and everybody's talking about AI. But there's only a small slice of people actually using AI. And then the vast majority of that slice of people are just using AI basically as advanced Google, right? Google on steroids. Like my mom loves perplexity. She uses perplexity all the time.

But she's basically just she likes it because it's Google. but a little nicer. So where you start, where you make that jump from AI chatbot to agendic AI is when you start to enable actual autonomy. So these agents start to actually be able to make some decisions for you and carry out tasks without you having to sit there and monitor them 24-7. You can go and have an agent, you know, book reservations for you. You can have an agent look at data that you have and build dashboards, you can start to really automate real tasks. At Nus, we use it for a bunch of different things ranging from managing our CRM of enterprise, of enterprise customers to taking ideas that we have for content generation and working

through a whole creative pipeline to create our end product. Why Hermes agent itself is, I think, very special. Two major reasons. One, being that I'll say three major reasons. One, the first being that it's very simple to use. It really just works. I think a lot of open source projects end up with this issue where the repo gets bloated. They want to be inclusive of everything. But we've taken a stance where, yes, we want Hermes agent to be able to bend to your will and be

completely pliable, but that it's really important that we maintain the sanctity of that repo and are somewhat opinionated in what kind of exists in that core repo to protect the user experience. So it working out of the box is a huge reason why it's been successful. Two is the memory piece, the self-evolution piece. So as Hermes agent, as you use Hermes agent, you'll notice, you know, market improvements in the quality of output over time. And this is a really important piece because I think where people end up frustrated and what prevents people from using chat GPT in autonomous ways is you can't do tasks reproducibly with the same results, right? So you ask chat to go do a task.

It tries to do the task. It may figure it out the first day and then the next day you have it do the same task and it can't figure it out, right? And it's a super frustrating experience. Hermes agent stores the primitives of that path where it found the right solution and then recalls them every single time. So if you figure something out once with Hermie's agent, you're going to be able to do it again and again and again and again.

And that's where you can truly say, okay, agent, go do this. And you don't have to sit there and monitor and worry. And you can have other tasks be dependent on that task, right? The third piece of why Hermes agent, I think, is so, so beautiful. And this is like the ideological holy grail, right, is it's able to be fully model agnostic. And that is important for a lot of reasons. And we've thought it's been important for a really long time at Noose. You've seen more and more attention come to this issue now, though, of data sovereignty and provider lock-in.

Nobody wants to be locked in to a single big lab. Nobody wants these labs training on their data. People want to own that stuff because that's the secret sauce, right? That's the sauce of my company is this data. And if I'm sending all of that to a lab that's going to use that to train in the next model, well, I'm giving away, I'm giving away like the secret codes. So Hermes agent enables you to own your full stack. You can choose to have stuff managed if you want, your cloud instances managed or whatever.

You can basically craft whatever solution meets your sovereignty and privacy needs, and you can go implement that. And if things change, you can pivot it as well, right? So there's no provider lock and you can use any model in the world. You can use much cheaper models. Like there's so many open source models that are incredibly performant for the vast majority of tasks now and at a fraction of the price point. So yeah, it's, I think it enables, it enables you to just have a much more sovereign AI experience and really own the full, the full stack from the floor up.

And it's, I mean, the, so my, my Hermes story, my name is Marty Ben, I'm the, so I open claw over Christmas break, people are like, open claw I'm like one it snowed like 30 inches in Philly one Sunday and the kids were watching a movie I was like I'll try this out so like first I've ever set up a VM and set up a cloud server set up the Hetsner server like went through this YouTube store set up open claw and connected it to Anthropic at the time when you could Oatham before they before they prevented that from happening and was immediately blown away like holy crap this thing is insane so for about four

four months I was building out that open claw instance and integrating more of our workflows into into the agent set up in the harness in the cloud and like seeding the file system in the cloud with everything that I wanted this this computer to be able to access and along the way like April May I was talking about open claw and I heard people it was probably actually March April people begin to be like, hey, you're using open claw, you should like try out Hermes. And then like another similar situation or I was just a Sunday afternoon. And I was sitting there. I was like, okay, like I've had 10 people like reply to some of my tweets like, you should try hermit.

And I was like, okay. We love our community. Literally went to my open claw agent and Telegram. I was like, hey, spin up a Hermes agent in your server and let me know when that's finished. And then I hooked up Telegram. And then within like 24 hours, I was like, okay. Okay, Hermes agent shut down the open claw agent and we're going to begin working. And it's been insane what we've been able to do, what I've been able to do on the team at

TFTC over the last four or five months, just really seating the Hermes agent. But to your point, I think that's what I really want to get through to people when we discussed this on our call a couple weeks ago is I'm interested to get your thoughts on how you view this. Like I think there's three legs to the stool of an agentic system, particularly if you're doing it for a business. You have a file system or the second brain. And there's there's ways in which you can make that second brain stronger with things like semantic search for QMD or an obsidian vaults for a knowledge graph with associations.

But I would bucket those into one thing. Second brain, essentially a file system, the harness, the agentic system. system in our case Hermes and then the models the two most important things are the second brain and the harness and the models like you said you can be model agnostic and that's why I love about Hermes is it makes it extremely easy to switch models and then I'm hitting slash model changing for different tasks when I don't want to burn tokens or burn expensive tokens or if I want to use a more private open source model I don't think most people understand like I think we're at this

It's not that I don't think. I know most people don't understand that this sort of three pronged approach and what is the value, what is the relative value of the different prongs from that three prong approach. And I think that's where the opportunity lies and why I love Hermes. I think you mentioned like the self-referential learning as part of the memory system. And I think there's a ton of people out there saying, all right, AI's here. I've been convinced it's not going away. I need to implement it in my business.

So just focusing on businesses specifically. Like how would you, like is that, is my inclination of that three prong approach right in your mind? And if so, how do you articulate that, particularly like enterprise clients walking through this? Yeah. Yeah. I think you're completely right. There's so much value that the returns are compounding. The quality of intelligence is compounding.

the more and more, as the agent gets more and more intelligence, right? So that that file system is incredibly valuable. The agents are only as good as the data that they are able to access, right? There's no, it's not, it's not some magic. And so the ability to give your agent access to as much context as possible and basically just let it go to work is the secret sauce. That's the real, that's the real value in these systems. And I think it's almost hard to articulate sometimes to enterprises.

Like why would I use Hermes agent? It's like, well, you can use it for everything. And that can, it's like it's almost too abstract, right? We're too good to be true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, okay, what does that mean? And it's like the reality is though, you really can and you've seen it, I'm sure, you really can use it for anything.

Any monotonous task you may have, anything you want done, just throw it. it at your Hermes agent and see what happens, right? I think the low-hanging fruit where a lot of people immediately say, wow, this is incredible, is working with big data. If you have, whether it's your stripe data, your customer data, the ability to create, to organize that, to create visualizations, to do modeling is stuff that these agentic systems excel at. They are just so much better than we can possibly be at. And so I think that's where you see a lot of the time, people immediately go, okay, this is a game changer.

It's when they have some big data problem and they make visualizations out of it. It works right away in one shot. But yes, to your original point, the structure is your company. In its entirety, it should serve as your company brain, right? Like those three pieces of the stool, like you said, are the company brain. I think I agree with you that it's it's context or or file system harness and then model I don't want to discount the model too much because model quality does matter a lot right and but they're very additive but they're becoming commoditized if that's where like oh in the long till for sure I think in the long till you can be like over time the ability to be model agnostic is only going to increase yes yeah I mean it's a reaching parity nine months ago you couldn't use an open model for anything like they were basically worthless right and now you I like to say I think about you know 90% of users can do 90% of their work with open models right like there is definitely

stuff that you want the the biggest guns for but tons of work can go to open models and yes that gap is continuing to close and it's only going to become more and more commoditized yeah and at what point to like the like what is the the minimum AI IQ level that you need to do do all the tasks like do you really like yeah a year from now are you going to need are you going to need a frontier model to do your completely do your modeling or your CRM yeah the vast majority of people are never going to do tasks that require these these top tier models it's just not part of part of what they do no and the so let's take a

step back and talk about AI broadly like where do you think we are what trends are you most interested right now is it the data Center Compute side, is it this model race, is it the harness? What are you most interested right now in the world of AI outside of Hermes and news? Yeah. I mean, I think it's really interesting to follow how the open source models have changed the market. Right. Like I said, nine months ago, you really couldn't use open source AI.

Now, if we, if we transport back to January, February, you saw a bunch of prominent CEOs talking about, oh, our employees need to token max, token max, token max, like unlimited spend. Very quickly, they were like, whoa, way too much money and want to find cheaper solutions, right? And that's timed well with open models reaching the point where they can be these cheaper solutions. I think there's a lot of stigma around them for some people still about being, you know, mostly Chinese models, right? Like China is completely championing the open source model, the model race. But you're seeing numbers on in Hermes agent on open models go up and up, on open router, open source models going up and up. Companies are recognizing that AI spend is out

of control, that being locked into Open AII.I. and Anthropic is prohibitively expensive to power your business. And open models are really the only solution. And there's such an incredible, like, free market of these open models, right? Like there's so many different GPU providers in different locations, different, you know, compliance requirements. So you can tailor whatever you need. If you need SOC2, if you need GDPR, if you need them in the US, there's all these different things that you can tailor to fit your needs.

But it's a much just more freer market, right? So you're seeing that price discovery. You're seeing model prices decrease. And you're seeing people be able to access intelligence much, much cheap. cheaper, which is obviously just incredible for the economy, for business, for small businesses, especially. No, and I think I just discussed this with Jordy Visser, who was on before you rolled in, but I think the Latham and Walkin story from a couple weeks ago, the law firm basically

said, we're not using Anthropical or Open AI. We're going to buy our own GPUs and self-host or model. That, I mean, that's a massive signal. Not only the models are good enough to do that, but also I think a trend that many people are not Um, not appreciating enough. And I think Alex Carp's been beating the drum about this, but like, particularly if you're, uh, the enterprise the size of Latham, the fortune 500 company like the feeding of your company IP to anthropic and

zero and AI is, I think it's going to get to a point where shareholders or board boards of directors and say this is like a breach of fiduciary responsibility. I think you're just handing over the secret sauce to. Yeah. model providers who are proving or literally launching products that they're training off of companies that are doing this like they're going to try to compete with you and stabilize your business while it's providing you value in the interim and so to your point about open models like i think there will

be um a massive inflow of of usage for increased usage of these open models from like a fiduciary perspective just to preserve your IP yeah i mean people are just just throwing their trade secret. It's actually a really interesting psychological phenomenon, right? Like, yeah, businesses are doing it, but also that the average user, the chat GPT user, the anthropic user, people are, people share so, so much with these models and almost like completely unaware of privacy or how that obviously could backfire and the different ends that that could go to. It's happening at the individual level. It is happening at the business level as well.

But I think at least now the more and more businesses are very aware of that. That's something that really resonates with businesses that we talk to about Hermes agent is they want to ever since that Alex, Alex Karp spiel, he went on, businesses want to own this. They're very, very aware. They're very, very concerned about where their data is going. I think the general public is lagging behind, but I think there'll be a rude awakening for them as well. Agreed. Agreed. So freaks, this rip was brought to you by our good friends, the Bitcoin team at Block,

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But I mean, history shows, particularly in the digital age, most people don't care. That's why I think like a focus on enterprise, like where you have to care because money and shareholder value, for lack of the better term is on online. But then for the individual, like running individual agents, like, I think, uh, I think, uh, hopefully team at news research and others can get the the ux to parity with something like a muse agent or just works out of the box which i think to your point like that was one of the most impressive things like i literally told my open claw agent set up a her muse agent and had it working within like 10 minutes yeah yeah i think that um it's really important to make the product easier and easier for people to use right because if it's you know hours of

setup versus instant setup and the privacy is the only differentiator that's that's proven time and time again that that's not enough I do think on the individual privacy aspect I think it probably needs some sort of you know massive event to to catalyze people growing aware of this of this of this concern but I do think we're at a stage where yes it was bad when you shared all of your information in this digital age previously. But now the ability to, for agents to access it, to compile it, access it, spread it, it's seconds, right?

So I think there are way worse potential outcomes on the table now that agentic AI is as powerful as it is if people continue to be so free with their data. I mean, imagine what percentage of chat GPT users would be horrified if they're, chats all got all got leave we see right wasn't there the ability to like Google's like if you were sharing the the output and you create like a share link that was getting cached in Google search yeah yes yes yes something similar

happened to meta as well yeah where they thought they were like having a private conversation they are they're posting it publicly yeah it's horrifying horrifying horrifying yeah and it's so how would you like that's what I've been trying to discern because things are changing so quickly. Last year at this time like Opus 4, 6 wasn't even out yet. So you didn't have like there was that frontier model for breaks or memory was like oh wow now this stuff can like really cook. And then a month later it was like they were working on open claw. You guys been working on Hermes but like people don't become aware of like this harness

thing until that happens. So we're only like nine months into this. What where does it like how do you think this looks? even three months from now, a year from now, and what trends should people be paying attention to, particularly around user experience and workflows that they can incorporate using this stuff? Yeah, well, what you said is exactly right, right? Like at this time last year, Opus 4-6 wasn't out.

I think the best way to describe that change, that clear step function increase in AI capability was at this time last year, like the time top 10 developers I knew 0% of their code was written with AI. And it wasn't better than them, too many issues, too many hallucinations, no ability to do long running tasks. Now 100% of their code is written with AI, right? Almost nobody.

There's almost no reason to be writing code except with AI now. And people are doing incredibly long running tasks with agents. And that was less than a year ago, like you said, like nine months ago, there's a that change happened. And so to think about where we are from the next nine months, it's really, really hard to be predictive. I think that I think what's very clear is we're early on the adoption of AI. And we're going to start to see like just those basic levels, like engineers all using AI. We're going to start to see that all be integrated into every enterprise. This like this year from this time now, this time next year, I think every enterprise, all code is written by AI, right?

Like there's really no, there will be really no excuse at that point. I think it will be abundantly clear that you have to do this to keep up to ship because the companies that choose to do it are going to, it won't happen overnight, but it will happen fairly quickly, will drastically outperform and be able to cut expenses and be able to ship faster than companies who do not choose to use AI. I think as far as like novel, novel behavior that emerges, I think we're just going to start to, I think we're getting close to starting to see more and more autonomy be dropped into the hands of AI, right? Like there's always the examples of my AI shopping for me.

That stuff, it really isn't happening yet for the most part, right? Like you can kind of manufacture some text, but it's by no means a smooth user experience. And so that plumbing has to continue to improve for it to actually, for you to actually make that transformation where it is as simple as texture Hermes agent like, oh, I need this purchased and the Hermes agent goes and purchases it. The next iteration of that, which is even cooler, and this is where we're heading, is Hermes agent is always on and actually being predictive, right? So if I, for example, and this and this kind of can happen now, but I think it's going to become more and more prevalent is I, you know, I have to go to I have to go to SF next week. It's on my calendar. I forgot to book, I forgot to book flights. I forgot to book hotel. Hermes agent just goes and does all of that for me and it's handled. And I don't even have to worry about it. And then I get in a routine where, yep, oh, Marty texted me and said he wants to hang out in Philly. Hermie's agent's going to go, it's going to book my flights. It's going to book my hotels. It's going to do it all. correctly, it's going to send Marty the information that he needs to know. It's going to send Marty's Hermes agent, the information it needs to know. Right.

So I think all of these minor tasks that you have to do in your life can be pushed off to agents, right? It can be forced it onto agents and clear you up. So I like, I hate booking up hotels. I'm terrible at it. I book wrong hotels all the time. I book wrong flights all the time. Hermes agent should do all that for me.

And I think we're getting really close to it being able to. And I think like that three, six month window. of where it's in an always on state it's being predictive and it's being autonomous i think that's that's very very reasonable i'm a massive uh flight hotel train procrastinator yeah yeah same it's i've got to go i'm gonna go somewhere in a couple weeks and i should have booked the flight months ago yeah i booked it yesterday i was like oh i'm paying the premium for this because it's it's been and it's been on my calendar and it's uh what what are you seeing internally so this is one thing selfishly I want to get out like obviously you interact with

some of individuals and enterprises leveraging hermys agent what are some of the most creative or mind-blowing ways or workflows that people have incorporated using Hermes yeah it's a good question um or another way to frame it is like who's utilizing it the best and why is the way they're utilizing it the best way yeah well I think news research utilizes it the best but in all Seriously, I think we, it's really, really important for us, right, if we're going to deliver this product to enterprise, that we are the number one power user of it. And so we use it, we use it for everything. I couldn't even try to quantify the productivity increase that Hermes agent has applied to to noose, but it's funny when people ask us how many, you know, how big is the team and I say, you know, 30 people, 35 people.

they're often blown away. Just because if you've watched the rate that we've shipped on the Hermes agent repo and the cloud products and the enterprise offering, it's something that would take an order of magnitude more people in the past. So we use Hermes Agent for managing our full sales pipeline. No need for the standard kind of CRM CRM SAS. Hermes agent can manage that. for our content creation pipeline. We haven't, I don't know if you've seen our,

I'm sure you have our design work and the videos we put out. Are aesthetically pleased. The aesthetic, we want things to look pretty. The stuff we put out, all of that is generated in Hermes agent pipeline. It's very reproducible. It allows our designers to have a ton of, a ton of control over the end product. And it takes a ton of manual graphic design.

work and labor off of their plate. One of the most interesting tools we have is an agent internally that all our employees can use. And it basically has a bunch of key data sources of ours. So if a user complaint or if a customer complains about a billing issue or oh, something isn't working correctly, a news portal or my Hermes agent, there's some bug. We can just ask, we can just ask our internal hermings. Hermes agent, Hermes agent debugs it, can push fixes, and basically is able to access all of our data backends at once, right? Whatever it may need. And it becomes over time really, really capable and competent at accessing this data and turning it into an actionable item for the user.

Right. So rather than somebody having to manually sift through infinite logs, basically, and find issues, Hermes agent can find it in seconds. And that's actually a good way of describing what Hermes agent is good at. It can do any task that a human could do, but would require infinite patience, right? Like nobody's actually able to sift through millions of pages of vlogs. Like you could, but you would go insane. But Hermes agent does it instantaneously. And Homer's agent doesn't complain either.

So it's a pretty fun solution. Yeah. That's what I'm wondering. Like, I would love again, selfishly to give your team access to my Hermes agency. Like, where am I fucking up? Because that's what I'm like continuously like, trying to figure out is all right how can I better utilize this okay I always feel like I'm not utilizing just in AI generally it's like I'm not utilizing everything the best of its ability and

it's trying to like explore yeah where the boundaries and the edges are and I feel like every week have an aha I'm like holy crap like I just like one example this will be the second time you're hearing the story and two two consecutive episodes if you listen to the Jordi Visser episode but I'll tell it again I was at the bar We publish this podcast via Fountain. And so like our RSS or video or audio file, video file description, everything goes up there. Transcript as well. They, they have a, it's not publicly available yet. And I hope they don't get mad at me for disclosing that they have built it and MCP that I have MPC, MCP that I have a beta access to.

And so found has video the transcripts. And I've connected the MCP to my Hermes agent. And I can literally just voice the text like, hey, Tommy and I, the podcast is published now. We were, let's get meta here. Let's see if my Hermes agent will pick this up by reading the transcript. I want you to use the Fountain MCP to clip out the section of the conversation with Tommy, where we're talking about how to connect fountains mcp what i what i use it for take a take like the the most engaging quote from that and then one sentence brief description tag tommy in it and then

post it on x and i did something similar to that last night within five minutes the hermys agent and use fountain to find exactly what i described in the podcast i published yesterday clip it out send it to me to review and then like send tweet it's incredible within five minutes it's incredible Like I'm at the bar having a beer and getting work done. Yeah. For media companies, like, hey, that is work. We're getting a, yeah. Well, no, right?

I mean, that's a non-negligible amount of labor that you would have had to do. It's kind of a pain and a tedious task. And it's like death by a million paper cuts when you have to do all those things all the time. And the amount of time that it frees up by you being able to just dump all of that on it is. I mean, how much, I guess I'd ask you, can you quantify? the impact on business that you know hermy's agent has had for you for you all over the last four months yeah i mean i think from it's increased our profit margins increased our revenue one thing i've hated historically i've told this to people many times like like we're a small shop it's me i ran

pfTC by myself for six seven years and it's only within like last three or four years that we've brought on any employees and there's five of us and some contractors I did all for many years I did like the recording the editing the publishing but the bane of my existence and as funny is what I did at Barstle sports when I worked there was ad sales and like putting together decks is something I'm I appreciate good aesthetics but I don't know I don't know how to manifest in the digital world very well so like all my decks for like Google slide like slapdick screenshots yeah yeah yeah trust me it's a good show um but uh went and found like a beautiful slide deck skill connected it to the youtube abi connected it to

or fountain API connected it to um um a bunch of other things that are pertinent to putting together a media deck and basically say hey for example like if i was going to try to sell you on an ad deal like hey I would like news research to to be an ad partner with us think about ways in which we like we would be a good brand fit for them based it off of our our demo data like our our stats on YouTube and whatever and like come up with the deck five minutes later it's got a HTML page on Bursale beautiful deck that can actually sell like on top of that it's like let's make sure we're pricing this right like run market research about podcast of our size like what is the c pm is there any premium on our audience specifically like go do

that research and come up with like accurate pricing and that has led to more closed ad deals for us so yes it has long way i think yes it has and yeah but i like what you said too about um you know you have a hard time personally manifesting aesthetically pleasing stuff in the digital age but hermi's agent enables you to do that yeah right and that's what's so cool about it is if you're if you're if you're a high agency, if you're a high agency person right now, there's no better time in the history of the world to exist, right? I can't, I can't write code anymore, but I can manage our compute clusters and I can get all of the visualizations, all the telemetry that I could possibly want from it just by

interfacing in natural language, right? And build dashboards that help inform our business decisions and allow us to see how we're acquiring new users and how our compute clusters health is. And that would take data scientists, front-end engineers. It would take a series of people to do that in the past. And now I'm just prompting Hermes agent and it's building out what a full team would have to build historically. So it empowers you to do pretty much anything in any dimension that you want, right?

In any domain that you want. I mean, it's, yeah, it's unbelievable. Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angels halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of.

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What is it like managing a cluster? It will start there. All sorts of headaches, managing clusters and compute for sure. What I think is really interesting about the way compute has shifted, it's shifted with use, which is I guess obvious, right? But I think it's worth noting, again, we said this time last year, Opus 46 wasn't out. Developers weren't using it to write code. Good developers weren't using it to write code.

I was using it to write code. But good developers were not using it to write code. we're not using it to write code. At this time last year, you could, if you needed, you know, if you needed a cluster of, you know, whatever, 128 GPUs, you know, I could send a text out and have 10 different providers bidding for bidding to win that. Now it's the inverse. I basically would have to go and text 10, 20 different people and say, I need a cluster,

I need a cluster, I need a cluster. Nope, we don't have any, we don't have any, we don't have any. It's unbelievable how squeezed the HPC industry is right now. I think we're up against a lot of land and power limitations. I think you're seeing the regulatory environment has just really squash the ability to continue to grow that. But also just the usage was such a parabolic increase in inference needs that we weren't weren't we weren't prepared for it right yeah as a to that point who who was

getting access obviously outside the the frontier model because you have to training obviously have the inference and obviously Anthropic open AI met a Google SpaceX they all have incredible access to this stuff but I think we've discussed like open router I think stripes acquisition open router is a very strong signal and I think this neocloud is going to I think basically having open market for different models is very smart idea especially if we believe that being model agnostic is going to be a trend that that strengthens in the future but like to that point like how how do

you get priority like how do you both on because backup infrastructure side what makes you a good cluster what do you need to do right for your end customer to make sure people come back to you and buy compute for you because there's a bunch of stuff with like networking and latency and all of that then to how for the for the off take or like how do you how are these people the neoclouds that own the GPUs and will inevitably host them how do they decide whether or not you're a good you're good off taker that deserves access that does it even matter it's like you're paying you yeah so on the first piece yes it's managing managing these nodes is is difficult to

there's a lot of entropy in the management of these nodes that I don't really fully understand. But there's a lot of downtime with if you're talking about managed inference specifically, there's throughput and latency, throughput, latency, uptime. And so you, I mean, these providers do want to work to have a good experience for the end user because it can be a huge headache and people are paying a lot of money for these nodes. And if their throughput isn't met, if they're latent, requirements isn't met. It really ruins the end user experience really, really quickly, and people are going to stop, people are going to stop paying for, paying for machines from a

specific provider. Right now, the market, I think, is so squeezed that there's way more wiggle room and tolerance for that stuff just because it's like, where else are you going to go? And to your second question, I know that that plays a role. Like, who is the end user? Who is the buyer who is the off taker plays a role in the decision-making process of these companies I've heard people talk about how like this the sales cycle for these AEs is basically flipped before it's like I need to go find people to sell this compute to now it's like I have all these people to go sell this compute to I have to build a case of why my people to internal teams why my people are worthy

of of getting the right to this compute contract so the thing is completely inverted it's it's it's fascinating right and I think it's always company It's internal politics and kind of company dependent on that stuff, right? There's different partnerships between companies and favors had, of course. I think, you know, a lot of these companies do try to, you know, care about open source and try to support different parts of the ecosystem. Right? I think I think people recognize that if all of this compute ends up very, very consolidated, that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous.

That's a dangerous situation for a multitude of reasons. So I think, yeah, there's, you know, economics play a big part, but there's also a bunch of kind of strategic initiatives that drive where this compute ends up. And I'm happy we're discussing this now because I meant to bring this up earlier. I think it's important to clarify for people. We were talking about open source models, many of which are predominantly trained in China and then released. People hear that, they're like, oh, I'm sending all my, data to China now. That's not always the case. Like if you're connecting directly to a deep

seek servers, I guess you are. But I think the understanding around like, no, like it's open source so you can have American companies go by GPUs and download the model there and you're not serving it to the Chinese servers. It's a Chinese model run on American servers. Correct. Massively different, right? And that's been a huge education piece that we're trying to drive home is you can have all of these cost savings. You can get really good. good performance at, you know, a fraction of the cost, you know, 60, 70, 80, 90% cheaper than US closed frontier labs. And you can do it with, yes, it's a Chinese model, but it's running on infrastructure

owned by a US company in a US data center on US soil, right? And those are where your data flowing is two totally different things. Yeah. Well, you can say that people like it's funny home to China though, right? It's like, yeah, no, not exactly. It's definitely not. And then like the prior, again, going like tying in privacy to this too. what I know we were talking about Maple AI. Venice is obviously exploded in popularity.

PPQ is another one. I am very bullish on running these open source models and trusted execution environments. Just like the increase of privacy layer because that shout out to Mark Goodwin who's been on on the tip on Twitter saying like even if you're using open source, it doesn't mean to centralize there's still somebody hosting those servers at the end of the day but with like trusted execution environments being able to run the the inference into secure enclave and have everything and then encrypted from your device that's baking the prompts to the input in transit is encrypted then you do everything on the secure enclave you recrypted set it back like I think that's a massive

opportunity to I'm just rambling now yeah and I think I think that and I think local models local models as well yeah and local models are continuing to get better hardware consumer hardware is continuing to get better and better right and so the ability for you to run a model on your local machine and do again it's not going to be a hundred percent of your work but a good chunk of your work especially if you have sensitive workloads like you can run those on local models and and get get real work done well this is actually something i'm happy you brought this this is something i've been like thinking like i'm not smart i'm maybe i'm not i won't you're smart i won't Denigrate myself. I'm smart, but I do not have the skills to post-train an open source model

on my own data as like something of like Hermes if Nuse can figure out a way to take what I built with my Hermes agent and be like, okay, I want to use this model, this local, this SLM, like locally, Hermes agent, you have all the context of what we've been working on over the last six months. Like can you help me post-train this model on our specific data? Like that, I think, at least for my purposes that's the one thing I've been somewhat obsessed with for the last week or two is like okay I've gotten to this point like what else can I do is yeah how can you squeeze more performance out of this train a model and all of our stuff like yeah how do I do that yeah that's what I'm looking for anybody wants to help me let me know yeah we can do that we can get you that so that actually was

part of the reason that Hermie's agent was created it was it wasn't created to be this outward facing product it was created really out of like a completely utilitarian birth Our co-founder Technium created this Hermes agent to help. As a small AI research lab, right? You're always trying to find like these moonshot ideas to push you to the frontier. And Technium created this self-evolving Hermes agent to help us, you know, become frontier model trainers. So the original birth of Hermes agent was really to do, was in part to do that. And that's something we should do a job of highlight.

how you can use Hermes agent in that stuff as well. Yeah. So what's the plan on news? Like you have the agent, you have this portal, we got this enterprise. What are you guys striving for in terms of what this company looks like? And I know you said this on the phone. Like who knows what any company looks like? Like what are your North Stars and who are you building for?

Yeah. Yeah. I think who are we building for is is everybody. And I think I answer that really intentionally that way, because I think we've, we've built this, we've built this product in a way that it meets you wherever you are. The open source repo, if you want to run, you know, a local model on your local network and never touch, you know, never touch any news research managed product, that's great. Like the Hermes aging repo will always be able to empower you to do that and we'll continue to improve

it and maintain it. If you want certain things managed, like, great, we'll do all that as well. We will be the best place. We are the best place to have your Hermes agent, you know, hosted and managed. If you want, you know, different pieces managed, but you want to own certain pieces or do some work locally, great. We'll meet you wherever we are. So we really are building this, building this for everybody. I think the two, the two sort of key outcomes over the next handful of months for us, which lead to where we want to be in the end, is one, making, decreasing the amount of time that you go from Googling Hermes agent

or having your friends send you a Hermes agent to realizing, wow, this is a magical, magical experience, right? How can we get that time? How can we make it a frictionless onboarding? How can we meet people on whatever device they are? How can we enable people to send others there, send others a Hermes agent. Oh, Marty hasn't used Hermes agent.

Let me send it to you. You can click a link, open it up, and ask it one question and be like, wow. And not have to do setup, not have to configure anything. So that's really, really important, right? Is how can we make sure it as frictionless as possible and make it so you as quickly as possible realize that you have a tool that you've never experienced before in your hands. And then the second piece is delivering, delivering Hermie's agent to enterprise. in a way that they are able to control their AI stack, right?

It is their sovereign AI stack with all the bells and whistles that enable employees to be much higher agency, much more output, and do it in a way that isn't prohibitively expensive, that leverages the plethora of models and tools out there that can power Hermes agent in a meaningful way. delivering that product to enterprise at scale. So yeah, those two things. Can we trim down that timing? Can we deliver to enterprise at scale? Yeah, meet people on their device. That's been one of the interesting observations I've had over the course of the years.

Who attracts to what specific form factor? Like I was telling you, like, I haven't used cloud code or codex desktop in seven months. People are you doing that? Like, are you trying to get left behind? I'm like, no. I literally it's connected to all these different models. And my go to form factors is like voice to text in Telegram.

I have a group chat with the agent, just the agent of me, but the group chats allow you to create topics. Yep. So we have topics to represent different sessions that are ad ops, Bitcoin brief, or the commoner newsletter builder. If we have a business meeting like hey, like biz ops, what do we need to get done, blah, blah, blah. And then there's something about that form factor is just vibes with me. Like just like being able to like on the go on a walk around the neighborhood. And you saw me literally when you walked in. I had my newsletter session open like talking about how I want to frame today's newsletter.

And just that that form factor being able to walk on the go and doing my phone clicks with me. Yeah. For others it's like and I think a lot of people are going to talking about vendor lock and people are locked into. Uh, to Claude code and codex specifically, just desk. And they think like this is the only way that you can leverage this. I'm like, no, you got to, you got to get yourself off that tit as quickly as possible because you're going to get vendor lock in. And that's not what you want. But it is like everyone, but some people like Ed on our team, he loves the, he loves the Hermes desktop app.

That's how he interacts with it. And I'm, I'd never, frankly, I'd never use it. Yeah. I just use it through Telegram. And I think there is, it's becoming clear to me that there's going to be different. preferences and different form factors for how you interact with this and thinking about a company like news research trying to design for all those different ways which people are going to prefer to interact with it is it's a crazy problem think about yeah it's a it's a massive problem

right and and you're exactly right there's not there isn't some you know golden solution where oh everybody is going to use this as the way to interface right at least certainly not yet and i think the stance that we generally take is don't be Like we were definitely opinionated on some of the best ways to use these things, but we don't want to ever lock in unless it's blatantly obvious that that is the place that we need to lock in. Right. So can we, so we allow WhatsApp. We allow telegram. We allow email. Like wherever you want this thing to live and meet you is important because people use it. People use it in different ways. There's a lot of people that would never want to talk as much as you, right? Like they would never want to do that. Everybody is so different and everybody finds different ways to get the performance.

out of these agents that they want that you need to build for a huge range of different platforms yeah it's funny when we like as you're mentioning that like email the hermies agent has uh an agent dot 2 mail uh email address um instead like for my wife whenever she's like ah we're in we're in the market for a new car and she's like ah she's like doing it the old way i'm like hey just email martin i gave him permission to email you back like tell them what you one he'll go do like a search for you so like my wife is email Martin the more sophisticated Marty is uh is doing all this work but it's like it's been fun watching my wife just I mean just she'll be like I emailed Martin today and he like did some good

work for me like that's pretty incredible she like Martin more than you no no I hope not not yet at least maybe at some point maybe one robotics get here shoot you're kidding I'm kidding the uh but um No, it's just like the yeah like that's one form factor. It's like hey honey instead of like you take my phone and getting telegram just email Martin yeah yeah he'll get you a list of cars in the area that are within the the range of what you're looking for yeah she's been going back and forth with them in an email thread that's yeah and it's probably a magical experience for it right yeah yeah yeah and awful and

off it's all of those monotonous tasks like going and searching and getting quotes from six different from six different vendors and finding the car you want and the reviews all all of that is it goes from these incredibly laborious processes to, you know, a few minutes texting your Hermes agent. No, and then we have Ed on our team. He has his agent. And our agents are emailing each other. Yeah. Like stuff of the business like Ed in his telegram or his Hermes desktop app with his agent. Like, all right, email Martin and tell him that we did this thing and this part of the business and make sure he updates his second brain to recognize.

that it's uh and i feel i still feel like i'm not utilizing it like i'm like we do that and something like a workflow like that will uh emerge i'm like is this the right way to do something like this like is there are more efficient way and that point being is there's so much to uh to explore in terms of all these different workflows in these cases particularly teams like thinking about teams interact with agents and i think dorsey's interview with sequoia earlier this year really really cemented my thinking about like how to view a company in the world of agentic AI or something the company is like essentially like a knowledge layer in your job is to give it the best most robust knowledge that every employee in access

and so I haven't let everybody into the group chat on telegram however we do have like Discord and the agents from Wild and Discord and they can talk there and interact with them so that that use case of grading a second second brain for a company specifically and then getting access the right access to individuals on the team is a massive problem not a problem massive opportunity because when you think about like permissions especially if you're like selling enterprises like okay i want Becky from finance to have access to this data but not this data yeah and like just building the guardrails for that yeah massive opportunity yeah it's a massive opportunity

I think there's a bunch there too as far as how can you use Hermes agent to get more out of every employee, right? And I think what you see is certain employees. It's a skill to be able to prompt these agents, right? Like different people get different performance out of agents. It's like very much a feel thing. And I think you have people that are incredibly, incredibly proficient, like your top performers. Hermes agent lets you bring other people up to their level, right? And that's what we're rolling out for enterprises, is, is, you know, this concept of a collective

wisdom, a collective brain where you can take performing employees top skills and deliver those to relevant employees and they immediately get boosts in their performance. Their agents are immediately better. They're shaped in the way that you want them shaped. If you, you know, you, however you want your top employees perform, if you want other people like that like it will shape other people's agents in that way too and when you have new hires instead of having like this cold start on-ramp experience you can equip them with a skill set of tools that are formulated you know in the way that tfTC wants things written right in you know all of that stuff and

you can have um you can have your agents molded kind of to your voice and and the way that you want things done your guidelines and you can give that to new employees existing employees etc to kind of help shape people in your direction and also give them that productivity boost yeah what do you think this does for the job mark are you uh the permanent underclass is is quickly quickly approaching or a world of a billion flowers are going to bloom um i think we could have a whole other podcast on that i think i think i i think i i think i land somewhere somewhere in between right i think that what this does is you know our it enables you to not do all of these monotonous tasks, right? If you've, I think my big-

Oh my God, I'm gonna lose my laptop jobs. Yeah, my bigger concern is, oh, you, like, you're worried about not just like, you know, making Excel sheets for the rest of your life or whatever. Like, that's your- I'm really worried about the page. That's your concern. Yeah, like, I think what this, what this should do is free people up to do, you know, more thoughtful and higher agency tasks than sitting there and like button pushing. So yeah, I mean, is it going to be? this straight shot to a million flowers? No. Like there's of course going to be bumps in the job market as these disruptive technologies move through their natural growth and integration and flow.

But I think the optimistic view, right, is that this will enable humans to do things that are way more fulfilling than what a lot of people have convinced themselves is foundational to their lives. Yeah, that's sort of philosophical musing I've had over the last year, because you mentioned earlier, like, if you're high agency, you can get a lot out of this. And that's the question I have. Is there just like a natural distribution of individuals who are inherently high agency and a very large percentage of which are not? Or is there an ability to engender high agency and people and do AI tools inspire them? become a high agency. I don't know. I think that's what we're going to find out in the next decade. We'll find that out. I'm sure it's some mixture of both. Yeah. What's your most contrarian take and what's going on right now? My most contrarian take of what's going on right now.

I don't know if it's contrarian. It's, I'm sure it's, uh, uh, there's a lot of people, I think that probably show this viewpoint. I never know how, uh, how, um, Pigeonhold I am, I am, or sorry, how echo chambered I am. But I think that if you want to talk about, like, existential risk and the way that existential risk of AI, like AI, you know, misaligned AI, killing all humans or whatever, I actually like sometimes believe in there's some, I believe there's some degree of credibility to that argument as a, as a possibility. But what I think is, I think where we get to. crazy town really fast and it's really disingenuous is you see large companies and and lobbyists pushing for a stop of open source right like open source has become and become this this evil and this and this scapegoat whereas if you ever actually

believed in in existential risk is a real threat open source would be the last thing you would be concerned about you'd be concerned about this massive consolidation of compute you'd be concerned about you know the frontier constantly being pushed by the closed labs right like just distillation to create open source models like definitionally can't exceed AGI unless the top labs already have done it themselves so I think the yeah the way that that argument has been has been pushed and is certainly kind of the the controlling argument in the vast majority of the population may likely not those that are very in tune with AI but the way that

that argument has been framed to the vast majority of the population I think is just incredibly incredibly disingenuous incredibly and it's almost disgusting to the point is like if I don't think most of the public is aware they don't pay close enough attention it's like very clear to me it's like okay you're looking for the you've raised a ton of capital you're deploying a ton of capital into this infrastructure built out really for the frontier lab and you have a need to get a return on investic capital and you're seeing these open source models begin to nibble at your feet not only that like many

people are turning to them for 90% of the work but their individual use cases and you're trying to shut shut pull up the ladder shut the door behind you just so you can save those profits and I think when you consider how profound of a shift this technology is for humanity the fact that there's literally two or three companies trying to pull up the ladder and control it's just incredibly uh i would say evil at the end of the day well where did all the data come in the first place right like it's all of our data that i mean the fact that they were buying like centuries old books and like cutting off the bindings and yeah and then burning them it's like what the hell yeah it was all our data

that it came from in the first place right and then they yeah it's it's just disingenuous dealing with it with the new york times or not i believe yeah that that uh i guess that i guess as copyright or a copyright case moving forward. I mean, this has been a pleasure. I'm sure this more. I am going to pick your brain off, off air about what I should be doing with my agent. I love it. Any final thoughts, final, final words of wisdom before we wrap up here? I don't know about words of wisdom. I think, um, I think at some point it will be very obvious that you should care about privacy in

in the age of AI and agentic AI. I think that the more proactive you can be about it and the steps that you can take to empower a world where you have more ownership as a business and as an individual of your AI and where the data that you give to your AI flows, the better the better served you'll be and you can avoid a lot of a lot of headache down the road. And so I think looking for obviously Hermes agent, but looking for tools that enable you in the AI realm to have good controls over your data, but do it in a simple way that isn't it super burdensome and a huge headache for you, I think will be a really, really valuable investment going forward.

I completely agree with that. Thank you for joining me. Thank you in the team at News for building Hermes. It's been incredibly powerful for us here at TFTC and excited to see what you guys built. Nice. Love, Marty. Thank you.

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