Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #796: Own Your Intelligence Stack with Tommy Eastman
Transcript
- 0:00You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
- 0:10If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
- 0:16So it's all acting like safe haven.
- 0:18I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
- 0:23currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- 0:28I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
- 0:31If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- 0:37I've been very much looking forward to that.
- 0:40I was very excited when we first talked a couple of weeks ago because I've been using your product for four months now.
- 0:48And it has changed my life.
- 0:49You saw me when you walked in here.
- 0:50You thought I was on the phone.
- 0:51I was talking to my Hermes agent.
- 0:52No, talking to your Hermes agent.
- 0:54Better than talking to somebody.
- 0:55I like the human.
- 0:57I like the human element.
- 0:58okay i do like talking to my wife greg who's off camera here he's okay to talk to every once in a
- 1:03while but uh it's uh it's changed how i work pretty pretty quickly i mean i'm 35 i've been
- 1:12doing tftc for almost a decade now and within six months my full workflow has changed and hermes is
- 1:19critical part of that yeah what let's take a step back and talk about you personally how you ended up
- 1:29at news research which built the hermes agent um you were in the bitcoin industry the crypto
- 1:36industry at foundry before this and that's i mean that's a whole nother conversation i think it's
- 1:40really interesting how a lot of these up-and-coming ai companies are seated with people that have been
- 1:45in the Bitcoin and crypto industry before.
- 1:48Yep.
- 1:49But how did you end up at Noose?
- 1:52What drew you to it?
- 1:54And what have you been doing there since you got there?
- 1:57Yeah, so I was at Foundry,
- 1:59touched the Bitcoin stuff a fair bit,
- 2:01but was really focused on distributed
- 2:04and decentralized AI there.
- 2:05I just thought that AI,
- 2:09obviously an incredibly powerful tool,
- 2:11very important that
- 2:13we get the ideological part of AI shaped correctly.
- 2:21That was my first real exposure to that,
- 2:24thinking about the importance of AI for people,
- 2:27for the individual, the sovereignty that AI enables.
- 2:32I didn't really like a lot of the kind of first manifestations of that,
- 2:38like the first projects that kind of tried to champion that.
- 2:41I wasn't that impressed with.
- 2:45I found Noose eventually.
- 2:47They were focused on post-training open models to make them more pliable, more human-like.
- 2:55This was when the Meta models were state-of-the-art, right?
- 2:58The Lama models.
- 3:02I quickly found that the team was just incredible.
- 3:06One, very ideologically driven, right?
- 3:08At Noose, we truly believe that the ability to own your intelligence stack is the most important technological innovation that we've ever faced as humans.
- 3:24But also that the team was just incredibly sharp.
- 3:28Everybody at Noose is just a killer.
- 3:31In love with AI, very driven.
- 3:35It's just an incredible, incredible experience.
- 3:38And yeah, for me, I focus on a handful of things.
- 3:41We all kind of wear a bunch of different hats, right?
- 3:43We're still pretty small, pretty grassroots.
- 3:46But so I touch a bunch of stuff on the product side, onboarding enterprises,
- 3:51and manage all of our compute relationships as well.
- 3:55So we have our managed product, which is News Portal, which powers,
- 3:59which can power Hermes Agent and powers Hermes Agent for a lot of users.
- 4:03So managing all the inference and tools behind that.
- 4:06So let's take a step back and just explain Hermes.
- 4:11Let's focus on Hermes specifically.
- 4:14And let's, let's, because we've had this conversation off air a couple times now,
- 4:19but speaking to the person who thinks that the creme de la creme of their interaction with AI is opening chat GPT and hitting chat and thinking that they're getting inexperienced.
- 4:31what does hermes bring to the table and how should people view the hermes hermes harmus and how to
- 4:36utilize it yeah well that's the that's the incredible piece right is that we're so early
- 4:42we feel like ai is everywhere and everybody's talking about ai but there's only a small slice
- 4:47of people actually using ai and then the vast majority of that slice of people are just using
- 4:51ai basically as advanced google right google on steroids um like my mom loves perplexity she uses
- 4:58perplexity all the time, but she's basically just, she likes it
- 5:00because it's Google, but a little nicer.
- 5:04So where you start where you make that jump from AI chat bot to agentic 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
- 5:24You can go and have an agent book reservations for you.
- 5:28You can have an agent look at data that you have and build dashboards.
- 5:32You can start to really automate real tasks.
- 5:35at Noose. We use it for a bunch of different things ranging from managing our CRM of enterprise
- 5:41customers to taking ideas that we have for content generation and working through a whole
- 5:48creative pipeline to create our end product. Why Hermes Agent itself is, I think, very special.
- 5:57Two major reasons. One being that, I'll say three major reasons. One, the first being that it's very
- 6:04simple to use it really just works um i think a lot of open source projects end up with this issue
- 6:11where the repo gets bloated they want to be inclusive of everything um but we've taken a
- 6:17stance where yes we want hermy's agent to be able to bend to your will and be completely pliable but
- 6:23that it's really important that we maintain the sanctity of that repo and are somewhat opinionated
- 6:29and what kind of exists in that core repo to protect the user experience.
- 6:34So working out of the box is a huge reason why it's been successful.
- 6:39Two is the memory piece, the self-evolution piece.
- 6:42So as Hermes Agent, as you use Hermes Agent, you'll notice market improvements in the quality of output over time.
- 6:51And this is a really important piece because I think where people end up frustrated
- 6:56and what prevents people from using ChatGPT in autonomous ways is you can't do tasks reproducibly with the same results, right?
- 7:07So you ask Chat to go do a task.
- 7:10It tries to do the task.
- 7:11It might 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?
- 7:16And it's a super frustrating experience.
- 7:18Hermes Agent stores the primitives of that path where it found the right solution and then recalls them every single time.
- 7:25So if you figure something out once with Hermes agent, you're going to be able to do it again and again and again and again.
- 7:30And that's where you can truly say, OK, agent, go do this.
- 7:32And you don't have to sit there and monitor and worry.
- 7:34And you can have other tasks be dependent on that task.
- 7:37Right. The third the third piece of why Hermes agent, I think, is so, so beautiful.
- 7:43And this is like the the ideological holy grail. Right.
- 7:47Is is it's able to be fully model agnostic.
- 7:50And that is important for a lot of reasons. And we 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.
- 8:05Nobody wants to be locked in to a single big lab.
- 8:09Nobody wants these labs training on their data.
- 8:13People want to own that stuff because that's the secret sauce, right?
- 8:16That's the sauce of my company is this data.
- 8:20And if I'm sending all of that to a lab that's going to use that to train in the next model, I'm giving away the secret codes.
- 8:29So Hermes Agent enables you to own your full stack.
- 8:32You can choose to have stuff managed if you want, your cloud instances managed or whatever.
- 8:37You can basically craft whatever solution meets your sovereignty and privacy needs, and you can go implement that.
- 8:46And if things change, you can pivot it as well.
- 8:48So there's no provider lock, and you can use any model in the world.
- 8:52You can use much cheaper models.
- 8:53There'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.
- 9:00um so yeah it's i think it enables it enables you to just have a much more sovereign ai experience
- 9:10and really own the full the full stack from the floor up and it's uh i mean we the so my my hermy
- 9:18story my name is marty ben i'm a hermy's user yeah so i i open claw over christmas break people
- 9:27like open claw i'm like one it snowed like 30 inches in philly one sunday and the kids were
- 9:31watching a movie i was like all right i'll try this out so like first i've ever set up a uh vm
- 9:37set up a cloud server set up the hetzner server like went through this youtube store set up open
- 9:42club and connected it to anthropic at the time when you could oauth in before they uh before they
- 9:50prevented that from happening and was immediately blown away like holy crap this thing is insane so
- 9:57for about four months i was building out that open claw uh instance and integrating more of
- 10:03our workflows uh into into the agent set up in the harness in the cloud and like seeding the file
- 10:11system in the cloud with everything that i wanted this this computer to be able to access and
- 10:18along the way like april may um i was talking about open claw and i heard people it was probably actually March April people began to be like hey you using OpenClaw you should try out Hermes and then another similar situation
- 10:30where it was just a Sunday afternoon
- 10:31and I was sitting there
- 10:34and I was like okay, I've had
- 10:3610 people reply to
- 10:38some of my tweets like you should try Hermes
- 10:40and I was like okay
- 10:40we literally went to my OpenClaw agent
- 10:44on Telegram and I was like hey
- 10:46spin up a Hermes agent
- 10:48in your server and let me know when that's finished.
- 10:51And then I hooked up Telegram.
- 10:53And then within like 24 hours, I was like, okay,
- 10:56Hermes agent shut down the OpenClaw agent
- 10:58and we're going to begin working.
- 11:01And it's been insane what we've been able to do,
- 11:05what I've been able to do on the team at TFTC
- 11:07over the last four or five months,
- 11:09just really seeding the Hermes agent.
- 11:12But to your point, I think that's what I really want to get through to people
- 11:17when we discussed this on our call a couple weeks ago
- 11:19is I'm interested to get your thoughts
- 11:22on how you view this.
- 11:23Like I think there's three legs to the stool
- 11:25of an agentic system,
- 11:27particularly if you're doing it for a business.
- 11:28You have the file system or the second brain
- 11:32and there's ways in which you can
- 11:34make that second brain stronger
- 11:38with things like semantic search for QMD
- 11:40or an obsidian vault for a knowledge graph
- 11:43with associations.
- 11:44But I would bucket those into one thing.
- 11:47uh second brain essentially a file system the harness uh the agentic system in our case hermes
- 11:55and then the models the two most important things are the second brain and the harness and the
- 12:00models like you said you can be model agnostic and that's what i love about hermes is it makes it
- 12:06extremely easy to switch models and i'm hitting slash model changing for different
- 12:11tasks when i don't want to burn tokens or burn expensive tokens or if i want to use a more
- 12:16private open source model uh i don't think most people understand like i think we're at this
- 12:24it's not that i don't think i know most people don't understand that this uh this sort of three
- 12:28pronged approach and what is the value what is the relative value of the different prongs from
- 12:33that three-pronged approach and i think that's where the opportunity lies and why i love hermes
- 12:39i think you mentioned like the self-referential learning as part of the memory system and i think
- 12:46there's a ton of people out there saying all right ai's here um i've been convinced it's not going
- 12:52away i need to implement it in my business so just focusing on businesses specifically like how would
- 12:59you like is that is my inclination of that three-prong approach right in your mind and if so
- 13:06how do you articulate that particularly to like enterprise clients walking through this yeah yeah
- 13:11I think you're completely right.
- 13:14There's so much value.
- 13:17The returns are compounding.
- 13:19The quality of intelligence is compounding as the agent gets more and more intelligence.
- 13:26That file system is incredibly valuable.
- 13:30The agents are only as good as the data that they are able to access.
- 13:34It's not some magic.
- 13:36And 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.
- 13:49That's the real value in these systems.
- 13:53And I think it's almost hard to articulate sometimes to enterprises, like, why would I use Hermes agent?
- 14:01It's like, well, you can use it for everything.
- 14:03and that can that's it's like it's almost too abstract right or too good to be true yeah yeah
- 14:08yeah it's like okay what does that mean and it's like the reality is though you really can and
- 14:14you've seen it i'm sure you really can use it for anything any monotonous task you may have
- 14:19anything you want done just throw it at your hermes agent and see what happens
- 14:24right i think the the low-hanging fruit where a lot of people immediately say wow this is incredible
- 14:30is working with big data.
- 14:34If you have, whether it's your Stripe data,
- 14:36your customer data,
- 14:39the ability to create, to organize that,
- 14:41to create visualizations, to do modeling
- 14:43is stuff that these agentic systems excel at, right?
- 14:50They are just so much better than we can possibly be at.
- 14:54And so I think that's where you see a lot of the time
- 14:57people immediately go, okay,
- 14:59this is a game changer. When they have some big data problem and they make visualizations out of
- 15:04it, it works right away in one shot. But yes, to your original point, the structure is your company,
- 15:13in its entirety, it should serve as your company brain. Those three pieces of the stool, like you
- 15:20said, are the company brain. I think I agree with you that it's context or file system, harness,
- 15:28and then model.
- 15:29I don't want to discount
- 15:30the model too much
- 15:30because model quality
- 15:31does matter a lot But they very additive But they becoming commoditized That where I Oh in the long tail for sure i think in the long tail you can be like over time the ability
- 15:43to be model agnostic is only going to increase yes yeah i mean it's a reaching parity nine
- 15:47nine months ago you couldn't use an open model for anything like they were basically worthless
- 15:53right um and now you i like to say i think about you know 90 of users can do 90 of their work
- 16:02with open models right like there is definitely stuff that you want the the biggest guns for but
- 16:08tons of work can go to open models and yes that gap is continuing to close and it's only going
- 16:13to become more and more commoditized yeah and at what point do you like do you like what is the uh
- 16:19the minimum ai iq level that you need to do all the tasks like do you really like
- 16:24a year from now are you going to need a frontier model to do your completely do your modeling or
- 16:29or your crm yeah the vast majority of people are never going to do tasks that require these these
- 16:34top tier models it's just not part of part of what they do no and the so let's take a step back and
- 16:41talk about ai broadly like where do you think we are um what trends are you most interested right
- 16:50now is it the data center compute side is it this model race is it the harness uh what are you most
- 16:58interested right now in the world of AI outside of Hermes and news?
- 17:02Yeah.
- 17:02I mean, I think it's really interesting to follow how the open source models have changed
- 17:10the market, right?
- 17:11Like I said, nine months ago, you really couldn't use open source AI.
- 17:16Now, if we transport back to January, February, you saw a bunch of prominent CEOs talking
- 17:23about, oh, our employees need to token max, token max, token max, like unlimited spend.
- 17:28Very quickly, they were like, whoa, way too much money and want to find cheaper solutions.
- 17:36That timed well with open models reaching the point where they can be these cheaper solutions.
- 17:41I think there's a lot of stigma around them for some people still about being mostly Chinese models.
- 17:46China is completely championing the open source model, the model race.
- 17:51But you're seeing numbers in Hermes Agent on open models go up and up, on open router, open source models going up and up.
- 18:02Companies are recognizing that AI spend is out of control, that being locked into OpenAI and Anthropic is prohibitively expensive to power your business.
- 18:14And open models are really the only solution.
- 18:18And there's such an incredible free market of these open models.
- 18:24There are so many different GPU providers in different locations, different compliance requirements.
- 18:30So you can tailor whatever you need.
- 18:32If you need SOC 2, 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.
- 18:40But it's a much just more freer market.
- 18:43So you're seeing that price discovery.
- 18:45you're seeing model prices decrease and you're seeing people be able to access intelligence much
- 18:49much cheaper which is obviously just incredible for for the economy for business for small
- 18:54businesses especially no and i think i just discussed this with jordy visser who was on
- 19:00before you rolled in but i think the the latham and walk-in story from a couple weeks ago the
- 19:04law firm basically said we're not using anthropic or open ai we're going to buy our own gpus and
- 19:10self-hosting model that i mean that's a massive signal not only the models are good enough to do
- 19:15that but also i think a trend that many people are not um not appreciating enough and i think alex
- 19:23carp's been beating the drum about this but like particularly if you're a enterprise the size of
- 19:28latham and walk-ins or any fortune 500 company like the feeding of your company ip to anthropic
- 19:37and open ai is i think it's going to get to a point where shareholders or board boards of
- 19:43directors gonna say this is like a breach of fiduciary responsibility i think you're just
- 19:47handing over the secret sauce to yeah these model providers who are uh proving or who are literally
- 19:55launching products that they're training off of companies that are doing this like that they're
- 19:59going to try to compete with you and abolize your business while it's providing you value in the
- 20:03interim and so to your point about open models like i think there will be um a massive inflow of
- 20:11usage for an increased usage of these open models from like a fiduciary perspective just to preserve
- 20:17your ip yeah i mean people are just throwing their trade secret it's it's actually a really interesting
- 20:22psychological phenomenon right like yeah businesses are doing it but also that the average user the
- 20:28the chat GPT user, the Anthropic user,
- 20:30people share so, so much with these models
- 20:35and almost completely unaware of privacy
- 20:39or how that obviously could backfire
- 20:42and the different ends that that could go to.
- 20:43It's happening at the individual level.
- 20:46It is happening at the business level as well.
- 20:47But I think at least now, the more
- 20:50more businesses are very aware of that that's something that really resonates um with businesses
- 20:55that we talk to about about hermes agent is they want to ever since that alex alex carp um spiel he
- 21:02went on businesses want to own this they're very very aware um they're very very concerned about
- 21:08where their data is going i think the general public is lagging behind but i think there'll be a
- 21:12rude awakening for them as well agreed agreed what's up freaks this was brought to you by our
- 21:19are good friends, the Bitcoin team at Block. Bitcoin at Block. Bitcoin was originally introduced
- 21:23as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. We all know that. The idea wasn't just to buy and hold,
- 21:26it's to use Bitcoin in many different facets. Holding is one facet. Spending, receiving is
- 21:30another facet. I've been working towards this for 17 years and Block has put together a whole
- 21:35ecosystem of companies to really bring about the reality of Bitcoin as everyday money. So with
- 21:39Cash App, you can buy, spend, send, receive, earn, get paid in Bitcoin. When you're trading over
- 21:45$2,000, you're not going to pay any fees on that. So then there's Square, which is helping bring
- 21:49Bitcoin into real world commerce. Eligible businesses can accept Bitcoin payments over
- 21:53lightning with settlement in seconds and 0% processing fees. Customers can pay with Bitcoin
- 21:57or even dollars over lightning through Cash App and help local businesses keep more of every sale.
- 22:01It's making Bitcoin payments feel as easy as tapping a card. And when you're ready to hold
- 22:04Bitcoin, there's BitKey. It's a Bitcoin wallet built for real life. No seed phrases to two is
- 22:09free multi-sig, so no single points of failure. It has recovery and inheritance processes and
- 22:14and capabilities built in.
- 22:16And the new BitKey device includes a screen
- 22:17so you can verify important actions
- 22:19directly on the device before approving them.
- 22:21So you know exactly what you're authorizing.
- 22:22So together, Cash App, Square, and BitKey
- 22:24are helping make Bitcoin easier to earn,
- 22:25save, spend, and secure.
- 22:26It's a simple idea.
- 22:27Bitcoin works when people can actually use it
- 22:29in the way that they want.
- 22:30That's Bitcoin App Block.
- 22:32What's up, Freaks?
- 22:32This episode was brought to you by Simple Mining.
- 22:34I'm sure many of you listening to this right now
- 22:36own Bitcoin and own it the same way.
- 22:38You go into an exchange, you buy it,
- 22:40sweep it to the cold storage,
- 22:41maybe keep it on the exchange,
- 22:42and you pay full price.
- 22:43but there's a smaller group of business owners,
- 22:45family offices and investors with sharp CPAs
- 22:47that are quietly getting theirs a different way.
- 22:49They own the machines that make it.
- 22:51Here's how it works.
- 22:51You buy the miners at Simple Mining.
- 22:53Simple Mining hosts them,
- 22:54runs them at their facilities in Iowa
- 22:56on industrial power rates you can never get on your own.
- 22:58The Bitcoin they mine goes straight
- 22:59from your machine to your wallet.
- 23:01Two reasons I find this interesting right now.
- 23:03The second one is the one that nobody's talking about.
- 23:05One is the economics, cheap power.
- 23:06This lets you convert your electricity into Bitcoin
- 23:08at a discount to spot.
- 23:09You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price
- 23:11everyone else pays.
- 23:12two and listen closely if you've had a big income year making a lot of money out there i know a lot
- 23:17of you freaks are making a lot of money miners are classified as computer equipment with the big
- 23:20beautiful bill equipment means depreciation qualifying buyers can write off the entire
- 23:24purchase and year one it's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades pointed at
- 23:29bitcoin your cpa will want to see this before the end of the year and with attractive financing
- 23:33available you can deploy without selling assets to do it this is not a garage operation simple
- 23:37mining runs over 40 000 machines which just ranked the fastest growing company in iowa
- 23:41on the Inc 5000 chart.
- 23:43They put together a valuable resource
- 23:45called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint.
- 23:47It covers the five mistakes investors make
- 23:49when allocating to mining
- 23:50and how to avoid them before deploying capital.
- 23:52You can access it for free at simplemining.io slash tftc.
- 23:57That's simplemining.io slash tftc.
- 24:01It's funny, I was taking the MetaMuse agent
- 24:04for a spin this morning.
- 24:05I was like, wow, this thing's powerful.
- 24:06But then, how much of this information
- 24:08do I want to give to Meta and Zuck?
- 24:10and i think that's a question that a lot of people are not to grab yes but i mean history shows
- 24:17particularly in the digital age most people don't care um that's why i think like focus on enterprise
- 24:21like where you have to care because money and shareholder value for lack of a better term is on
- 24:25on the line um but then for the individual like running individual agents like i think uh
- 24:32hopefully uh team at news research and others can get the the ux uh to parody with something
- 24:40like amuse agent or just works out of the box which i think to your point like that was one of
- 24:44the most impressive things like i literally told my open call agent set up a hermes agent and had
- 24:49it working within like 10 minutes yep yeah i think that um it's really important to make the product
- 24:56easier and easier for people to use right because if it's you know hours of setup versus instant
- 25:02setup and the privacy is the only differentiator that's that's been proven time and time again
- 25:07that that's not enough. I do think on the individual privacy aspect, I think it probably
- 25:15needs some sort of massive event to catalyze people growing aware of this concern. But I do
- 25:25think we're at a stage where, yes, it was bad when you shared all of your information in this
- 25:31digital age previously, but now the ability for agents to access it, to compile it, access it,
- 25:38spread it, it seconds. I think there are way worse potential outcomes on the table now that
- 25:46agentic AI is as powerful as it is if people continue to be so free with their data.
- 25:53I mean imagine what percentage of chat GPT users would be horrified if their chats all got leaked Well we see wasn there the ability to like Google like if you were sharing the output
- 26:08and you create like a share link that was getting cached in Google search.
- 26:11Yeah, yes, yes, yes.
- 26:13Something similar happened to Meta as well.
- 26:16Yeah.
- 26:17Where they thought they were like having a private conversation with the AI or they're
- 26:19posting it publicly.
- 26:21Yeah, it's horrifying.
- 26:22Horrifying, horrifying.
- 26:25Yeah.
- 26:25and it's so how would you like that's what i'm i've been trying to discern because things are
- 26:31changing so quickly like last year at this time like opus 4 6 wasn't even out yet correct so you
- 26:39didn't have like there was that frontier model or breaks or memories like oh wow now this stuff can
- 26:45like really cook and then a month later it was like they were working on open claw you guys
- 26:50been working on hermes but like people didn't become aware of like this harness thing until
- 26:53that happens we're only like nine months into this what where does it like how do you think
- 26:58this looks uh even three months from now a year from now and what trend should people be paying
- 27:05attention to particularly around user experience and in workflows that they can incorporate using
- 27:11this stuff yeah i well what you said is exactly right right like at this time last year opus 4 6
- 27:18wasn't out. I think the best way to describe that change, that clear step function increase in AI
- 27:25capability was at this time last year, the top 10 developers I knew, 0% of their code was written
- 27:33with AI. And it wasn't better than them. Too many issues, too many hallucinations, no ability to do
- 27:40long-running tasks. Now, 100% of their code is written with AI, right? Almost nobody. There's
- 27:47almost no reason to be writing code except with AI now. And people are doing incredibly long
- 27:52running tasks with agents. And that was less than a year ago, like you said, like nine months ago,
- 27:59that change happened. And so to think about where we are from the next nine months,
- 28:05it's really, really hard to be predictive. I think that
- 28:08I think what's very clear is we're early on the adoption of AI.
- 28:18And we're going to start to see just those basic levels, like engineers all using AI.
- 28:23We're going to start to see that all be integrated into every enterprise.
- 28:26This year from this time now, this time next year, I think every enterprise, all code is written by AI.
- 28:34There will be really no excuse at that point.
- 28:38I 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.
- 28:55I think as far as like novel, novel behavior that emerges, I think we're just going to start to,
- 29:03I think we're getting close to starting to see more and more autonomy be dropped into the hands
- 29:10of AI, right? Like there's always the examples of my AI shopping for me. That stuff, it really
- 29:16isn't happening yet for the most part, right? Like you can kind of manufacture some text,
- 29:20but it's by no means a smooth user experience.
- 29:24And so that plumbing has to continue to improve
- 29:28for you to actually make that transformation
- 29:33where it is as simple as text your Hermes agent,
- 29:35like, oh, I need this purchased
- 29:37and the Hermes agent goes and purchases it.
- 29:40The next iteration of that, which is even cooler,
- 29:42and this is where we're heading,
- 29:44is Hermes agent is always on
- 29:46and actually being predictive, right?
- 29:48So if I, for example, and this kind of can happen now, but I think it's going to become more and more prevalent is I have to go to SF next week.
- 29:58It's on my calendar.
- 30:00I forgot to book flights.
- 30:02I forgot to book hotel.
- 30:04Hermes agent just goes and does all of that for me, and it's handled.
- 30:08And I don't even have to worry about it.
- 30:09And then I get in a routine where, yep, oh, Marty texted me and said he wants to hang out in Philly.
- 30:14Hermes agent's going to go.
- 30:15It's going to book my flights.
- 30:17It's going to book my hotels.
- 30:18It's going to do it all correctly.
- 30:19It's going to send Marty the information that he needs to know.
- 30:22It's going to send Marty's Hermes agent the information it needs to know.
- 30:25Right.
- 30:25So I think all of these minor tasks that you have to do in your life can be pushed off
- 30:33to agents.
- 30:34Right.
- 30:34It can be foisted onto agents and clear you up.
- 30:36So I like I hate booking hotels.
- 30:37I'm terrible at it.
- 30:38I book wrong hotels all the time.
- 30:39I book wrong flights all the time.
- 30:41Hermes agent should do all that for me.
- 30:42And I think we're getting really close to it being able to.
- 30:45And 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.
- 30:52I think that's that's very, very reasonable.
- 30:54I'm a massive flight, hotel, train procrastinator.
- 31:00Yeah, same.
- 31:01It's horrible.
- 31:01I've got to go somewhere in a couple of weeks.
- 31:04I should have booked the flight months ago.
- 31:06Yeah, I booked it yesterday.
- 31:07I was like oh I paying the premium for this because it been on my calendar and it what are you seeing internally So this is one thing selfishly I want to get out Obviously you interact with individuals and enterprises
- 31:23leveraging Hermes agent.
- 31:25What are some of the most creative or mind-blowing ways
- 31:28or workflows that people have incorporated using Hermes?
- 31:32Yeah, it's a good question.
- 31:34Or another way to frame it is like,
- 31:36who's utilizing it the best
- 31:37and why is the way they're utilizing it the best way?
- 31:40Yeah.
- 31:41Well, I think Noose Research utilizes it the best.
- 31:43But in all seriousness, I think it's really, really important for us, right,
- 31:49if we're going to deliver this product to enterprise,
- 31:51that we are the number one power user of it.
- 31:55And so we use it for everything.
- 31:59I couldn't even try to quantify the productivity increase
- 32:03that Hermes Agent has applied to Noose.
- 32:08But it's funny when people ask us how many,
- 32:10you know, how big is the team?
- 32:11And we say, you know, 30 people, 35 people.
- 32:14They're often blown away.
- 32:15Just because if you've watched the rate
- 32:17that we've shipped on the Hermes Agent repo
- 32:20and the cloud products and the enterprise offering,
- 32:22it's something that would, you know,
- 32:24take an order of magnitude more people in the past.
- 32:29So we use Hermes Agent for, you know,
- 32:31managing our full our full sales pipeline um you know no need for these you know the standard kind
- 32:39of you know crm crm sas hermes agent can manage that for our content creation pipeline um we
- 32:48haven't i don't know if you've seen our i'm sure you have our our design work and the the videos
- 32:53we put out aesthetically please the aesthetic we want things to look pretty um the the stuff we put
- 32:58out all of that is generated in hermes agent pipeline it's it's very reproducible it allows
- 33:04our designers to have a ton of um a ton of control over the end product and it takes a ton of you
- 33:12know manual you know graphic design work and labor off of their plate um one of the most interesting
- 33:19tools we have is uh an agent internally that all our employees can use and it basically has a bunch
- 33:26of key data sources of ours um so if it you know if a user complaint or if a um a customer complains
- 33:34about a billing issue or oh some something isn't working correctly a news portal or my hermes agent
- 33:40there's some bug we can just ask we can just ask our internal hermes agent hermes agent debugs it
- 33:46can push fixes um and and basically is able to access all of our data backends at once right
- 33:53right, whatever it may need. And it becomes over time really, really capable and competent at
- 33:57accessing this data and turning it into an actionable item for the user, right? So rather
- 34:02than somebody having to manually sift through, you know, infinite logs basically and find issues,
- 34:07Hermes agent can find it in seconds. And that's actually a good way of describing what Hermes
- 34:12agent is good at. It can do any task that a human could do, but would require infinite patience,
- 34:19right like nobody's actually able to sift through millions of pages of logs like you could but
- 34:24you would go insane but hermese agent does it instantaneously and homers agent doesn't complain
- 34:29either so it's a pretty it's a pretty fun solution yeah that's what i'm wondering like i would love
- 34:35again selfishly like give your team access to my hermese agency like where am i up like
- 34:41because that's what i'm like continuously like trying to figure out is all right how can i better
- 34:45utilize this okay i always feel like i'm not utilizing just in ai generally it's like i'm not
- 34:51utilizing everything the best of its ability and it's uh trying to like explore yeah where the
- 34:57boundaries and the edges are and i feel like every week i'm an aha i'm like holy crap like i just
- 35:03like uh one example this will be the second time you're hearing the story uh in two two consecutive
- 35:09episodes if you listen to the geordie viscer episode but i'll tell it again i was at the bar
- 35:14we publish this podcast via fountain um and so like our rss or video or audio file video file
- 35:23description everything goes up there trans trans uh transcript as well they uh they have a it's not
- 35:31publicly available yet i hope they don't get mad at me for disclosing that they have a built
- 35:36It's an MCP that I have beta access to.
- 35:44And so Bound has video of the transcripts,
- 35:47and I've connected the MCP to my Hermes agent.
- 35:51And I can literally just voice the text like,
- 35:53hey, Tommy and I, the podcast is published now.
- 35:59Let's get meta here.
- 36:00Let's see if my Hermes agent will pick this up by reading the transcript.
- 36:04I want you to use the fountain MCP to clip out
- 36:08the section of the conversation with Tommy,
- 36:12where we're talking about how to connect Fountain's MCP,
- 36:16what I use it for.
- 36:18Take the most engaging quote from that,
- 36:21and then a 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 hermese agent had used fountain to find exactly what i described in
- 36:33the podcast i published yesterday clip it out send it to me to review and then like send tweet
- 36:38it's incredible within five minutes it's incredible like i'm at the bar having a beer
- 36:43yep and getting work done yeah yeah for a media company it's like hey that is work yeah yeah well
- 36:48Well, no, right. I mean, that's a non-negligible amount of labor that you would have had to do.
- 36:53It's kind of a pain and a tedious task. And it's like it's like death by a million paper cuts when you have to do all those things all the time.
- 37:00And the amount of time that it frees up by you being able to just dump all of that on it is I mean, I guess I'd ask you, can you quantify the impact on business that, you know, Hermes Agent has had for you all over the last four months?
- 37:17uh yeah i mean i think from it's increased our profit margins increased our revenue
- 37:26one thing i've hated historically i've told this to people many times like like we're a small shop
- 37:33it's me i ran pftc by myself for six seven years so it's only within like last three or four years
- 37:39that we've brought on any employees i mean there's five of us and some contractors uh
- 37:46I did all for many years I did like the recording the editing the publishing
- 37:53but the bane of my existence and as funny is what I did at Barstool Sports
- 37:57and I worked there was ad sales and like putting the other decks is something I'm
- 38:01I appreciate good aesthetics but I don't know I don't know how to manifest them
- 38:06in the digital world very well so like all my decks were like Google slide like
- 38:11flap yeah yeah yeah trust me it's a good show but uh went and found like a beautiful slide deck
- 38:19skill connected it to the YouTube API connected it to a fountain API connected it to a bunch of
- 38:27other things that are pertinent to putting together a media deck and basically say hey
- 38:31for example like if I was gonna try to sell you on an ad deal like hey I would like news research
- 38:39to to be uh an ad partner with us uh think about ways in which we like we would be a good brand fit
- 38:46for them base it off of our our demo data like our our stats on youtube and whatever and like come
- 38:52up with a deck five minutes later uh it's got a html page on versell beautiful deck that can
- 38:58actually sell like on top of that it's like let's make sure we're pricing this right like run market
- 39:04research about podcasts of our size like what is cpm is there any premium on our audience specifically
- 39:10that could do that research and come up with like accurate pricing and that has led to more closed
- 39:17ad deals for us so yes it has long way away saying yes it has yeah but i like what you said too about
- 39:23um you know you have a hard time personally manifesting aesthetically pleasing stuff in
- 39:29the digital age but hermys agent enables you to do that yeah right and that's what's so cool about
- 39:33it is if you're a high agency person right now, there's no better time in the history of the world
- 39:40to exist. I can't write code anymore, but I manage our compute clusters and I can get all of the
- 39:48visualizations, all the telemetry that I could possibly want from it just by interfacing in
- 39:53natural language and build dashboards that help inform our business decisions and allow us to see
- 39:59how we're acquiring new users and how our compute clusters health is and that you know that would
- 40:05take data scientists front-end engineers it would it would take a you know a series of people to do
- 40:10that in the past and now i'm just prompting hermy's agent and it's building out what a full team would
- 40:15have to build historically so it empowers you to do pretty much anything in any dimension that you
- 40:20want right in any domain that you want i mean it's it's yeah it's unbelievable freaks look at
- 40:26at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good.
- 40:31I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member.
- 40:36My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for five years now, literally this month. Five years
- 40:40ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had two babies. We've had multiple health events and we're never
- 40:45going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for Crowd
- 40:50Health, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills. And it's significantly
- 40:55cheaper than health insurance. We were on Cobra as a family of three. When I left my last job
- 41:00before I went full-time to CFTC, went on the crowd health. Now as a family of five, we pay,
- 41:06I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper. They're going to negotiate prices
- 41:11lower for you. They've consistently negotiated healthcare prices as much as 50, 60, 80% in many
- 41:17cases. They help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and the
- 41:22crowd covers the rest. If you have a regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays
- 41:28the rest. Go to joincrowdhealth.com. Sign up today. Use the code TFTC. Opt out of health
- 41:33insurance. I'm an insured baby and I love it. Use the code TFTC at joincrowdhealth.com.
- 41:37You'll get $99 a month for the first three months.
- 41:39that you're on the CrowdHealth platform in the community.
- 41:43Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money.
- 41:45Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare.
- 41:48All right, freaks.
- 41:49You know I don't take sponsor money from products
- 41:50I wouldn't use myself, so listen up.
- 41:52The Avon Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things
- 41:54I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time.
- 41:57Here's the deal.
- 41:57You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars
- 41:59backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single SAT.
- 42:02No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws.
- 42:05And your Bitcoin is custodied by Bitco,
- 42:07one of the most trusted names in digital asset security.
- 42:09AVEN never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control.
- 42:13You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years. 10 years, that's 10 times longer than most lenders
- 42:19out there. Or go interest only for up to five years. Rates start at 8.99% APR. For a product
- 42:25that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity, it's hard to beat. On top of this,
- 42:30that's what? You also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card.
- 42:33Spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin. That's the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and you
- 42:38liquidity without triggering a taxable event this is worth a serious look go to aven.com
- 42:44bitcoin that's aven.com bitcoin check it out i mean let's shift this is the compute side what
- 42:51are you what are you seeing on the company you're talking about your cluster what uh on the physical
- 42:57side of things like you actually need the gpus you need to download like what what are you seeing
- 43:02there like what is it like managing a cluster maybe we'll start there all sorts of headaches
- 43:06managing clusters and compute for sure.
- 43:11What I think is really interesting about
- 43:15the way compute has shifted, it's shifted with use,
- 43:17which is, I guess, obvious, right?
- 43:19But I think it's worth noting, again, we said this time last year,
- 43:22Opus 4.6 wasn't out.
- 43:24Developers weren't using it to write code.
- 43:26Good developers weren't using it to write code.
- 43:28I was using it to write code, but good developers
- 43:30were not using it to write code.
- 43:33At this time last year, if you needed a cluster of whatever, 128 GPUs, I could send a text out and have 10 different providers bidding to win that.
- 43:48Now it's the inverse.
- 43:50I basically would have to go and text 10, 20 different people and say, I need a cluster.
- 43:55I need a cluster.
- 43:55I need a cluster.
- 43:56Nope.
- 43:56We don't have any.
- 43:57We don't have any.
- 43:58We don't have any.
- 43:58It's unbelievable how squeezed the HPC industry is right now.
- 44:06I think we're up against a lot of land and power limitations.
- 44:13I think you're seeing the regulatory environment has just really squashed the ability to continue to grow that.
- 44:20But also just the usage was such a parabolic increase in inference needs that we weren't prepared for it, right?
- 44:30Yeah. And so to that point, who is getting access, obviously, outside the frontier model?
- 44:39Because you have the training, obviously, you have the inference, and obviously, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google, SpaceX, they all have incredible access to this stuff.
- 44:49But I think we've discussed like open router.
- 44:52I think Stripe's acquisition of open router is a very strong signal.
- 44:55And I think this neocloud sector is going to, I think, basically having open market for different models is a very smart idea.
- 45:05Especially if we believe that being model agnostic is going to be a trend that strengthens in the future.
- 45:12But to that point, like how do you get priority?
- 45:15like how do you both on okay let's back up infrastructure side what makes you a good
- 45:21cluster what do you need to do right for your end customer to make sure people come back to you and
- 45:27buy compute for you because there's a bunch of stuff with like networking and latency and all
- 45:30that then two how um for the for the offtaker like how do you how are these people the neoclouds
- 45:39that own the gpus and will inevitably host them how do they decide whether or not you're a good
- 45:44you're a good off taker that deserves access to you yeah does it even matter it's like you're
- 45:48paying you yeah um so on the first piece yes it's managing managing these nodes is difficult um
- 45:59there's a lot of entropy in the management of these nodes that i don't really fully understand
- 46:04um but there's a lot of down time um with if you're talking about managed inference specifically
- 46:10there's throughput and latency, throughput latency uptime. These providers do want to work to
- 46:21have a good experience for the end user because it can be a huge headache and people are paying a
- 46:25lot of money for these nodes. If their throughput isn't met, if their latency requirements isn't met,
- 46:29it really ruins the end user experience really, really quickly and people are going to stop
- 46:33people are going to stop paying for paying for machines from a specific provider.
- 46:38Right now, the market I think is so squeezed that there's way more wiggle room and tolerance
- 46:44for that stuff just because it 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
- 46:58Who is the off taker?
- 46:58Plays a role in the decision making process of these companies.
- 47:02I've heard people talk about how, like, the sales cycle for these AEs is basically flipped.
- 47:07Before it's like, I need to go find people to sell this compute to.
- 47:10Now it's like, I have all these people to go sell this compute to.
- 47:13I 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.
- 47:21So the thing is completely inverted. It's it's it's it's fascinating. Right.
- 47:24And I think it's always company. It's internal politics and kind of company dependent on that stuff. Right.
- 47:31There's different partnerships between between companies and favors had, of course.
- 47:36I think a lot of these companies do try to care about open source and try to support different parts of the ecosystem.
- 47:47I think people recognize that if all of this compute ends up very, very consolidated, that's a dangerous situation for a multitude of reasons.
- 47:59um so i think yeah they there's you know economics play a big part but there's also a bunch of um
- 48:07kind of strategic initiatives that drive where where this compute ends up and i'm happy we're
- 48:12discussing this now because i meant to bring this up earlier i think it's important to clarify for
- 48:16people we were talking about open source models many of which are predominantly trained uh in
- 48:21china and then released uh people hear that they're like oh i'm sending all my data to china now
- 48:27that's not always the case like if you're connecting directly to a deep seek servers
- 48:32like yes you are but i think the understanding around like no like it's open source so you can
- 48:37have american companies go buy gpus and download the model there and you're you're not serving it to
- 48:43the chinese servers it's a chinese model run on american servers correct massively different right
- 48:48and that's been a huge education piece that we're trying to drive home is you can have all of these
- 48:55cost savings you can get really good performance at you know a fraction of the cost you know 60 70
- 49:0080 90 cheaper than u.s closed frontier labs um and you can do it with yes it's a chinese model
- 49:07but it's running on infrastructure owned by a u.s company in a u.s data center on u.s soil right and
- 49:13those are where your data flowing is two totally different things yeah well you can say that people
- 49:17like it's phoning home to china though right it's like yeah no no it's not it's definitely not and
- 49:22And then, again, tying in privacy to this, too.
- 49:26I know we were talking about Maple AI.
- 49:30Venice has obviously exploded in popularity.
- 49:33PPQ is another one.
- 49:39I am very bullish on running these open source models in trusted execution environments.
- 49:44Just to increase the privacy layer.
- 49:45Because that, shout out to Mark Goodwin, who's been on the tip on Twitter, saying,
- 49:51Like even if you're using open source, it doesn't mean to centralize.
- 49:53There's still somebody hosting those servers at the end of the day.
- 49:56But with like trusted execution environments, being able to run
- 50:00the inference in a secure enclave and have everything end to end encrypted
- 50:04from your device that's making the prompts to the
- 50:08input in transit is encrypted, then you do everything on the secure enclave.
- 50:14You re-crypt it, send it back.
- 50:15Like I think that's a massive opportunity to I'm just rambling now.
- 50:19yeah and i think i think that and i think i think local models local models as well yeah and local
- 50:25models are continuing to get better hardware consumer hardware is continuing to get better
- 50:29and better right and so the ability for you to run a model on your local machine and do again
- 50:36it's not going to be a hundred percent of your work but a good chunk of your work especially if
- 50:39you have sensitive workloads like you can run those on local models and and get get real work
- 50:45done well this is actually something i'm happy you brought this up this is something i've been
- 50:48like thinking like i'm not smarter i'm maybe i'm not i won't you're smart i won't denigrate myself
- 50:55i'm smart but i do not have the skills to post train an open source model my own data
- 51:01as like something of like her if noose could figure out a way to take what i built with my
- 51:06hermes agent and be like okay i want to use this model um this local this slm like locally uh hermese
- 51:14agent have all the context of what we've been working on over the last six months like can you
- 51:17help me post train this model on our specific data like that i think at least for my purposes
- 51:23that's one thing i've been uh somewhat obsessed with for the last week or two is like okay i've
- 51:28gotten to this point like what else can i do yeah how can you squeeze more performance out
- 51:31of this train a model and all of our stuff like yeah how do i do that yeah um that's what i'm
- 51:36looking for anybody wants to help me let me know yeah we can do that we can get you that so that
- 51:40actually was part of the reason that hermes agent was created it was it wasn't created to be this
- 51:46outward facing product it was created really out of like a completely utilitarian birth our our um
- 51:54co technium created this hermes agent to help as a small ai research lab right you always trying to find like these these moonshot ideas to to push you to the frontier And Technium created this self Hermes agent to help us you know become frontier model trainers
- 52:15So the original birth of Hermes agent was really to do, was in part to do that.
- 52:20And that's something we should do a job of highlighting, how you can use Hermes agent in that stuff as well.
- 52:26yeah so what uh what's the plan with news like you have the agent you have this portal we got
- 52:33this enterprise what uh what are you guys striving for um in terms of what this company looks like
- 52:40um and i know you said this on the phone like who knows what any company looks like
- 52:44like what are your what are your north stars and who are you building for at the end yeah yeah i
- 52:50think who are we building for is everybody. And I think I answer that really intentionally that way
- 52:57because I think we've built this product in a way that it meets you wherever you are.
- 53:07The open source repo, if you want to run a local model on your local network and never touch any
- 53:15noose research managed product, that's great. Like the Hermes agent repo will always be able
- 53:20to empower you to do that and we'll continue to improve it and maintain it. Um, if you want
- 53:25certain things managed, like, great, we'll do all that as well. We will be the best place. We are
- 53:30the best place to have your Hermes agent, you know, hosted and managed. If you want, you know,
- 53:35different pieces managed, but you want to own certain pieces or do some work locally. Great.
- 53:40We'll, we'll meet you wherever we are. So we really are building this, um, building this for
- 53:45everybody. I think the two sort of key outcomes over the next handful of months for us, which
- 53:54lead to where we want to be in the end, is one, decreasing the amount of time that you go from
- 54:00Googling Hermes agent or having your friends send you a Hermes agent to realizing, wow,
- 54:07this is a magical, magical experience, right? How can we get that time? How can we make it a
- 54:14frictionless onboarding. How can we meet people on whatever device they are? How can we enable
- 54:20people to send others a Hermes agent? Oh, Marty hasn't used Hermes agent. Let me send it to you.
- 54:25You can click a link, open it up, and ask it one question and be like, wow, and not have to do
- 54:31setup, not have to configure anything. So that's really, really important, right? Is how can we
- 54:35make sure it is frictionless as possible and make it so that you as quickly as possible realize
- 54:39that you have a tool that you've never experienced before in your hands.
- 54:44And then the second piece is delivering Hermes agent to enterprise in a way that they are able to control their AI stack.
- 54:56It 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.
- 55:24so yeah those those two things can we trim down that timing can we deliver to add a prize at scale
- 55:29the uh meet people on their device that's been one of the the interesting observations i've had
- 55:35over the course of the years uh who attracts to what specific form factor like i was telling you
- 55:41like i haven't used cloud code or codex desktop in seven months people like are you doing that like
- 55:49are you are you trying to get left behind i'm like no i literally it's connected to all these
- 55:53these different models. And my go to form factors is like voice to text in telegram, I have a group
- 55:59chat with the agent, just the agent and me, but the group chats allowed to create topics. Yep. So we
- 56:04have topics that represent different sessions that are ad ops, Bitcoin brief, or the common or
- 56:11newsletter builder. If we have a business meeting, okay, like biz ops, what do we need to get done,
- 56:18blah blah blah uh and there's something about that form factor is just vibes with me like just
- 56:24being able to like on the go on a walk around the neighborhood and you saw me literally when you
- 56:29walked in i had my newsletter session open like talking about how i want to frame today's newsletter
- 56:34and just that that form factor being able to walk on the go and doing my phone clicks with me
- 56:40for others it's like and i think a lot of people are talking about vendor lock and people are locked
- 56:45into uh to cloud code and codex specifically those desktop apps and they think like this is the only
- 56:52way that you can leverage this i'm like no you you gotta you gotta get yourself off self off that tit
- 56:57as quickly as possible because you're gonna get vendor locked in and that's not what you want
- 57:01um but it is like erin but something like ed on our team he loves the uh he loves the hermes desktop
- 57:08app that how he interacts with it and i i never frankly i never use it yeah just use it through telegram um and i think there is it becoming clear to me that there going to be different preferences and different form factors for how you interact with this and thinking about
- 57:24a company like news research trying to design for all those different ways which people are going to
- 57:29prefer to interact with it is it's a crazy problem to think about yeah it's a it's a it's a massive
- 57:34problem right and um and you're exactly right there's not there isn't some you know golden
- 57:40solution where, oh, everybody is going to use this as the way to interface, right? At least
- 57:45certainly not yet. And I think the stance that we generally take is don't be like, we're definitely
- 57:51opinionated on some of the best ways to use these things, but we don't want to ever lock in unless
- 57:55it's blatantly obvious that that is the place that we need to lock in, right? So we allow WhatsApp,
- 58:02we allow Telegram, we allow email, like wherever you want this thing to live and meet you is
- 58:08is important because people use it people use it in different ways there's a lot of people that
- 58:12would never want to talk want to talk as much as you right like they would never want to do that
- 58:16everybody is so different and everybody finds different ways to get the performance out of
- 58:20these agents that they want that you you need to build for a huge range of different um platforms
- 58:27yeah yeah it's funny when we like as you're mentioning that like email the hermes agent has
- 58:33an agent.to mail email address um instead like for my wife whenever she's like ah we're in the
- 58:42market for a new car and she's like oh she's like doing it the old way i'm like hey just email martin
- 58:47i gave him permission to email you back like tell him what you want he'll go do like a search for
- 58:51you so like my wife has emailed martin the more sophisticated marty is uh is doing all this work
- 58:57but it's like it's been fun watching my wife just i mean just she'll be like oh i emailed martin
- 59:02today and he like did some good work for me like that's pretty incredible does she like martin more
- 59:05than you no no of course i hope not not yet at least maybe at some point maybe when robotics get
- 59:14here shoot i'm kidding i'm kidding the uh but um no it's just like the yeah like that's one form
- 59:23factor it's like hey honey instead of like you take my phone and getting telegram just email
- 59:27martin yeah and he'll get you a list of cars in the area that are within the the range of what
- 59:33you're looking for yeah she's been going back and forth with them in emails right that's yeah and
- 59:38it's probably a magical experience for her right yeah yeah yeah and awful and awful it's all of
- 59:43those monotonous tasks like going and searching and getting quotes from six different from six
- 59:47different vendors and finding the car you want and the reviews all of that is it goes from these
- 59:52incredibly laborious processes to you know a few minutes texting your hermes agent no no we have uh
- 59:59ed on our team he has his agent uh and our agents are emailing each other yeah like so we have stuff
- 1:00:06for the business like ed in his telegram or his hermes desktop app with his agent like all right
- 1:00:12email martin um and tell him that we did this thing in this part of the business and make sure
- 1:00:18he updates his second brain to yeah to recognize that it's uh and i feel i still feel like i'm not
- 1:00:24utilizing it like i'm like we do that and something like a workflow like that will uh emerge i'm like
- 1:00:29is this the right way to do something like this like is there there are more efficient ways that
- 1:00:33point being is there's so much to uh to explore in terms of all these different workflows in these
- 1:00:40cases particularly teams like thinking about how teams interact with agents and i think dorsey's
- 1:00:46interview with sequoia earlier this year really uh really cemented my thinking about like how to view
- 1:00:55a company in the world of agentic ai the company is like essentially like a knowledge layer and
- 1:01:00your job is to give it the best most robust knowledge that every employee can access and so
- 1:01:08um i haven't let everybody into the group chat on telegram however we do have like discord and the
- 1:01:14the agents from wild and discord and they can talk there and interact with them so that that
- 1:01:20use case of creating a second second brain for a company specifically and then getting access the
- 1:01:25right access to individuals on the team is a massive problem uh not a problem massive opportunity
- 1:01:32uh because when you think about like permissions especially if you're like selling enterprises like
- 1:01:37okay i want becky from finance to have access to this data but not this data yeah um and like just
- 1:01:42building the guardrails for that. Yep, totally. Massive opportunity. Yeah, it's a massive
- 1:01:46opportunity. I think there's a bunch there too, as far as how can you use Hermes agent to get more
- 1:01:53out of every employee, right? And I think what you see is certain employees, it's a skill to be able
- 1:01:58to prompt these agents, right? Like different people get different performance out of agents.
- 1:02:03It's like very much a feel thing. And I think you have people that are incredibly, incredibly
- 1:02:10like your top performers,
- 1:02:12Hermes Agent lets you bring other people up to their level,
- 1:02:16and that's what we're rolling out for enterprise
- 1:02:19is this concept of a collective wisdom,
- 1:02:23a collective brain where you can take
- 1:02:25the performant employees' top skills
- 1:02:27and deliver those to relevant employees.
- 1:02:29and they immediately get boosts in their performance.
- 1:02:32Their agents are immediately better.
- 1:02:34They're shaped in the way that you want them shaped.
- 1:02:36If you, however you want your top employees perform,
- 1:02:39if you want other people like that,
- 1:02:40like it will shape other people's agents in that way too.
- 1:02:43And when you have new hires,
- 1:02:45instead of having like this cold start on-ramp experience,
- 1:02:48you can equip them with a skillset of tools
- 1:02:51that are formulated, you know,
- 1:02:52in the way that TFTC wants things written, right?
- 1:02:55In, you know, all of that stuff.
- 1:02:57and you can have your agents molded kind of to your voice
- 1:03:03and the way that you want things done, your guidelines.
- 1:03:06And you can give that to new employees, existing employees, et cetera,
- 1:03:10to kind of help shape people in your direction
- 1:03:11and also give them that productivity boost.
- 1:03:14Yeah.
- 1:03:16What do you think this does for the job, Mark?
- 1:03:18Are you, the permanent underclasses is quickly approaching
- 1:03:22or a world of a billion flowers are going to bloom?
- 1:03:25um i think we could have a whole nother podcast on that i think i think i i think i i think i land
- 1:03:33somewhere somewhere in between right i think that what this does is you know our
- 1:03:38it enables you to not do all of these monotonous tasks right if you've i think my big oh my god
- 1:03:47i'm gonna lose my laptop job yeah my my bigger concern is oh you like you're worried about not
- 1:03:52just like, you know, making Excel sheets for the rest of your life or whatever. Like that's your
- 1:03:56concern. I'm really worried about the paycheck. Yeah. Like I think what this, what this should do
- 1:04:01is free people up to do, you know, more thoughtful and higher agency tasks than sitting there and
- 1:04:06like button pushing. Um, so yeah, I mean, is it going to be this straight shot to a million
- 1:04:12flowers? No, like there's of course going to be bumps in the job market is, you know, these
- 1:04:17disruptive technologies move through their natural growth
- 1:04:21and integration and flow.
- 1:04:25But I think the optimistic view is that this will enable
- 1:04:29humans to do things that are way more fulfilling
- 1:04:32than what a lot of people have convinced themselves is foundational to their lives Yeah that sort of philosophical musing i had over the last year uh because you mentioned earlier like if you high agency you
- 1:04:46can get a lot out of this and that's the the question i have is there just like a natural
- 1:04:51distribution of individuals who are inherently high agency and a very large percentage of which
- 1:04:59or not or is there an ability to engender high agency in people um and do ai tools inspire them
- 1:05:08to become a high agency i don't know i think that's what we're going to find out in the next
- 1:05:12decade we'll find that out i'm sure it's some mixture of both yeah um
- 1:05:20what's your most contrarian take and what's going on right now
- 1:05:23my most contrarian take of what's going on right now um
- 1:05:27I don't know if it's contrarian.
- 1:05:31I'm sure it's, there's a lot of people, I think, that probably share this viewpoint.
- 1:05:36I never know how pigeonholed I am, or sorry, how echo chambered I am.
- 1:05:41But I think that if you want to talk about existential risk and the way that existential risk of AI,
- 1:05:53like AI, misaligned AI, killing all humans or whatever,
- 1:05:57I actually like sometimes believe in there's some I believe there's some degree of credibility to that argument as a as a possibility.
- 1:06:05But what I think is I think where we get to crazy town really fast and it's really, really disingenuous is you see large companies and lobbyists pushing for.
- 1:06:17a stop of open source, right?
- 1:06:21Like open source has become this sort of,
- 1:06:24has become this evil and this scapegoat.
- 1:06:29Whereas if you ever actually believed
- 1:06:31in existential risk as a real threat,
- 1:06:34open source would be the last thing
- 1:06:35you would be concerned about.
- 1:06:36You'd be concerned about
- 1:06:37this massive consolidation of compute.
- 1:06:39You'd be concerned about, you know,
- 1:06:41the frontier constantly being pushed
- 1:06:43by the closed labs right like distillation to create open source models like definitionally can exceed AGI unless the top labs already have done it themselves
- 1:06:55So I think the. Yeah, the way that that argument has been has been pushed and is certainly kind of the controlling argument in the vast majority of the population,
- 1:07:07likely 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.
- 1:07:15incredibly disingenuous incredibly and it's almost disgusting at some point because it's like if
- 1:07:24i don't think most of the public is aware because they don't pay close enough attention it's like
- 1:07:29very clear to me it's like okay you're looking for the you've raised a ton of capital you're
- 1:07:33deploying a ton of capital into this infrastructure built out particularly for the frontier labs uh
- 1:07:39and you have a need to get a return on invested capital.
- 1:07:44And you're seeing these open source models begin to nibble at your feet.
- 1:07:47Not only that, like many people are turning to them for 90% of the work,
- 1:07:51but they're individual use cases.
- 1:07:54And you're trying to pull up the ladder and shut the door behind you
- 1:07:57just so you can save those profits.
- 1:08:00And I think when you consider how profound of a shift this technology is for humanity,
- 1:08:06the fact that there's literally two or three companies trying to pull up the ladder and control
- 1:08:10yeah it's just incredibly uh i would say evil at the end of the day well where did all the data
- 1:08:17come in the first place right like it's all of our data that i mean the fact that they were buying
- 1:08:21like centuries-old books and like cutting off the bindings and yeah and then burning them it's like
- 1:08:26what the hell yeah it was all our data that it came from in the first place right and then they
- 1:08:30yeah it's it's just disingenuous dealing with it with the new york times right now i believe yeah
- 1:08:34i think that that uh i guess copywriter that copyright case is moving forward i mean this
- 1:08:42has been a pleasure um i'm sure there's more i am gonna pick your brain off uh off air about what i
- 1:08:48should be doing with my agent i love it any any final thoughts final final words of wisdom before
- 1:08:53we wrap up here i don 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 the age of AI and agentic AI I think that
- 1:09:14the more proactive you can be about it and the steps that you can take to empower a world where
- 1:09:22you have more ownership as a business and as an individual of your AI and where the data that you
- 1:09:28give to your AI flows, the better served you'll be and you can avoid a lot of headache down the
- 1:09:35road. And so I think looking for obviously Hermes agent, but looking for tools that enable you in
- 1:09:41the AI realm to have good controls over your data, but do it in a simple way that isn't a super
- 1:09:47burdensome and a huge headache for you, I think it'll be a really, really valuable investment
- 1:09:51going forward i completely agree with that um thank you for joining me thank you uh in the team
- 1:09:58at news for for building hermes has been incredibly uh powerful for us here at tftc and uh excited to
- 1:10:04see what you guys build next love it thanks marty thank you peace and love freaks thank you for
- 1:10:10listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of
- 1:10:15the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get
- 1:10:20the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify,
- 1:10:27make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting
- 1:10:33platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes
- 1:10:37a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm
- 1:10:44to find that $5 a month,
- 1:10:47get you every episode a day early,
- 1:10:49ad-free, helps the show,
- 1:10:51gives you incredible value.
- 1:10:53So please consider subscribing
- 1:10:55via Fountain as well.
- 1:10:57Thank you for your time.
- 1:10:59And until next time.
- 1:11:00Okay.