#796: Own Your Intelligence Stack with Tommy Eastman

September 28, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Marty Bent was already deep into self-hosted AI agents when he heard about Hermes Agent. He had spent four months building out an OpenCLAW instance, wiring it into TFTC’s workflows, integrating file systems and cloud servers. Then, on a Sunday afternoon in spring, he told his existing agent to spin up a Hermes Agent instead. Within 24 hours, Hermes had replaced the old system entirely. “It’s been insane what we’ve been able to do over the last four or five months,” Bent says. That is the entry point to this conversation: a demonstration that the gap between tinkering with AI and running a business on it has collapsed faster than most people realize.

What Makes an Agentic System Work

Tommy Eastman, who works on product and compute relationships at News Research, argues that most people still use AI as “Google on steroids.” The real leap happens when you move from asking a chatbot questions to giving an agent autonomy—letting it make decisions and carry out tasks without sitting there monitoring it. Hermes Agent was built for that leap, and Eastman points to three design decisions that make it distinct.

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (01:23) **Tommy Eastman's Path to News Research** - From Foundry's decentralized AI work to joining News Research, driven by the mission to let individuals own their intelligence stack
3 (04:07) **What Hermes Agent Actually Does** - Moves beyond chatbot AI into true agentic autonomy with self-evolution and model agnosticism
4 (09:14) **Marty's Personal Hermes Adoption Story** - From OpenClaw over Christmas to full workflow migration within months
5 (11:21) **The Three-Legged Stool of Agentic Systems** - File system (second brain), harness (agent), and models—with the surprising value hierarchy
6 (13:10) **Why Context Is the Real Secret Sauce** - The compounding returns of giving agents access to rich organizational data
7 (15:46) **The Open Source Model Revolution** - Nine months ago open models were worthless; now they handle 90% of work for 90% of users

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Marty Bent

Show Notes

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/

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