Every Hermes Concept explained for Normal People

0:00Hermes is the world's most powerful AI agent, but if you're new, it can be incredibly overwhelming. You're probably looking at the app and asking, "How does this make my life easier? What is a habit? What is an operating system? How does this work?" And without knowing the basics, you will never unlock its full capabilities. So, in this video, I'm

0:19going to give you the exact tutorial I wish I had when I first started. We'll break down 21 Hermes concepts, starting from extremely simple building to its most powerful features. And by the end of the video, you'll understand this incredibly powerful technology, even if you're a complete beginner. And if you're new, I'm Jack. I built and sold

0:40my last tech startup with a gazillion customers. Now, I'm building my own AI startups, and I share here the stuff that actually works. So, if you haven't already, grab that beautiful coffee, and let's dive straight in. So, let's begin. Every Hermes concept explained for normal people. Now, this is going to be the Hermes tutorial. If you just watch

0:57this video, you will be able to walk into any room, and people will think, "Dude, who the hell is this guy? Who is this Hermes genius? Does he work for Hermes?" That's what you They're going to feel at the end of the video. Now, Hermes is massive. 271 billion tokens have used, which is around about 240 billion, 230 billion words. It's across

1:1822 messaging platforms. It is huge.

1:21First concept is the foundation, which is basically it is what we call an agent, not a chatbot. This is fundamental to how you understand and think about the Hermes agent. A chatbot tells you how to book a flight. An agent will actually go ahead and book the flight and find it for you. So, think about this. With a chatbot like ChatGPT

1:41and Claude, you give it a goal, and it creates a plan. But with an agent, it has tools, and it can actually go ahead and do actions for you. So, for example, what a lot of people don't really understand here, if you think about it like this, right? It's like a smart friend versus is personal assistant. Hermes is a personal assistant. Let me

1:59show you what I mean. So, here for example, I have the Hermes agent connected. If you haven't set it up and you want to learn that, I'll put a link on screen to check out. I can say, "Hey there, my man. I'd like to find for me the cheapest flight from Dubai to Toronto. Flying out, let's say, at any

2:13point within the next 2 weeks. Let me know what that looks like." You can ask it questions and this will go ahead and use its tools, its agentic capabilities to take actions for me, find information, and enables me to do anything that I like with it. And so, it's done a manual check. I then said, "Find me one flight and open it up for

2:29me in the HTML." It looks gorgeous. It went ahead and did that and as you can see, I now have it there. So, conceptually, Hermes is an AI with access to tools. Could be your Gmail, your calendar, many different things that makes it so powerful. So, wherever you are, wherever your phone lives, you can enact things, you can affect change

2:47with your AI equipped with these tools. The second concept of Hermes is what it actually is and when you would use it versus using Cloud Code, ChatGPT, Codex, Grok, all these different things. I want you to think of them in this as a framework to understand where Hermes fits in with this. So, think about this. Hermes is like your beautiful Labrador.

3:05It's your dog. Cloud Code is your contractor. Um OpenFlow itself is your roommate. And then, Antigravity can be like your your IDE. It's your it's your buddy, the guy that you work with. The best way to think about this is if Hermes is your dog, it lives with you. It knows you. It gets smarter year over year. And Cloud Code is a contractor.

3:24It's brilliant for a specific job, but it doesn't necessarily remember you. The core thing about Hermes and the whole point of it is that the more that you use it, the more it gets to know you, the better it gets, and the more specific it is with you. And what it basically means is you can use it

3:39wherever you go, wherever your your mobile, you're in a coffee shop, a gym, you can whip out your phone, chat to an agent whose memory is always always improving about you. Now, can I have, for example, Cloud Code learn stuff about me, too? Of course, you can. We can get those memory systems. But I did with Hermes is we can take it anywhere

3:55where there's an it enables us to be fully mobile, fully custom, and just unlock some incredible capabilities. So, if I'm at the desktop, I might be using Claude, but if I'm out and about, I'm going to be using Hermes because the more you use it, the better it understands you. And its whole design ethos it's built to live with you and

4:13improve with you over time. Which brings

4:14us on to, importantly, the third concept, which is one brand, 22 mouths. What do I mean about that? Hermes itself can be accessed from over 22 different interfaces. We use Telegram, but for example, we could talk to it on Discord. We could talk to it on WhatsApp. We could talk to it on any different interface. You can even talk to it on

4:35different operating systems. For example, this is my Hermes operating system that connects to my Claude code operating system. And I can ask it questions. I'm like, "Hey there, man. What day is it today?" And I'm just speaking directly to my Hermes agent. I can see every single chat I've had on the left-hand side. And with Hermes, you

4:51can actually access the same brand, the same intelligence from all of these different locations. You aren't just constrained to one single input because where the Hermes is running, whether on your computer or VPS, it's the same intelligence and we can connect to it all these different interfaces. For example, if you come and use the Hermes setup code, for example, you'll be able

5:12to see all of the different locations that you can actually use with Hermes. For example, this shows you all the different message platforms Slack, Matrix, and all you can do is scroll through these, select them, and then you can connect and chat to the same AI intelligence from any platform that you like. You aren't locked in to just one

5:27software. And even in this one here, for example, if you download this Claude code operating system Hermes operating system, you can chat to it in your browser, which I think is a bit more of a dynamic interface. And so, if you think about it as as an analogy, that imagine that you have an operator sitting in the middle, and you can call

5:42into this operator from any different one of these interfaces, and she will route every single one of them to you guessed it, your Hermes agent. Which

5:50takes us critically onto the next one, which is going to be constant number four, which is where Hermes lives. Now, you've probably heard of it a few different terms like the terminal and VPS and locally hosted. And this is what's really important to understand. The first one is your own computer, which you can run completely for free.

6:08This is the easiest, it is the quickest, and in some respects, it's actually incredibly safe to do it this way rather than on other options that I'll show you in a second. You don't need to go and buy some crazy host somewhere. You can do it completely for free on your computer. To do that, all you literally

6:22need to do is come over to the Hermes website or click the link below. You copy this, you open up the terminal, and the terminal is basically the way you talk to your computer. It accepts code. And to pull it up, you do command and space bar, you type in terminal, and the terminal will appear. And all you do is

6:38control V that command, and effectively, that will install Hermes into your computer. Alternatively, you can go to an app like Cloud Code, and you can say, "Hey there, I'd like you to install Hermes, please. This is the install code. Go and grab it from the GitHub." Or whatever you want to, right? And you can paste it in like that. And

6:55literally, Cloud Code will install it for you. So, this is what we mean when we talk about the terminal. Now, it running on your computer just means that as long as your computer is on, Hermes will run. And this is why lots of people have got either like, you know, old MacBooks that they run it on or or

7:11MacBook desktop or different kind of laptop, and it just runs for you 24/7 on that computer, or it can just exist on your computer. But effectively, if the laptop shuts down, Hermes doesn't work. So, that's effectively this local hosting revolution. I'm a big believer in local hosting. It's here. It's in my room. It's It's here. I can I can touch

7:32it. I can feel it. The second one is a VPS. So, this is essentially where instead of running on your computer, it's actually running on someone else's computer somewhere else in the world. And these companies called hosting providers effectively say, "Hey, what we're going to do is buy like thousands of these like, you know, computers like this, and we're going to stack them up

7:51or whatever they're doing over there, and you're basically renting a virtual private server." Okay, so it's running over there. But one of the risks with this is the fact that it it's it's running somewhere else. They can be attacked. You need to do certain things to certify and protect the ports, and you pay monthly for renting that

8:10service. For example, our speech attacks at Glyder, that lets me say things and speak as if for instance, you know, we ran some space and for inference to make that fast. So, VPS is an interesting one, and you'll pay monthly for that. And that's what they mean when they say virtual private server. It's running remotely somewhere else. And so, just be

8:26aware that these virtual private server companies do pay people money if you sign up using links. So, it's not always necessarily the best thing. Now, this is run here on your computer and free. So, for example, if I come over here, I can say, "Hey there, I'd like to shut down my Hermes agent, please." And you can

8:43literally chat to Claude to basically do different things. Now, you'll see as it does that, you'll see my Hermes button now will come down and say, "Gateway is shutting down" as this process goes down and closes for us. And as you can see, just like that, Hermes says, "Gateway shutting down. Your current task will be interrupted." And it shut down, and I

8:59can say, "Awesome. Go ahead and reboot him up for me, please." And you can do the same thing. And this can happen because it's running on my own actual computer, which is on 24/7. And this leads us on to the next and fifth concept, which is OAuth versus API. What

9:14the hell does that mean? So, there's two ways that you can connect to something essentially. One is what we call open authentication. It is dead straight or forward, and all it basically does is opens up a new browser, and you sign in. Let me show you exactly what I mean. So, here we go. We've got, for example, a

9:29terminal. So, we can chat to Hermes. Might come down on my dashboard on the left-hand side to have a look at the Hermes setup command. Let me just go ahead and copy this, throw this in the terminal, and you'll see what I'm in. So, as you can see, it's actually popped up and said Grok, Super Grok, and

9:42Premium. Now, for example, if you look at models, which come to shortly, or any servers, we could either do an OAuth. So, for example, if I come down here and I press enter, I might come down and reauthenticate. So, let me come down here and press number two, and you'll see what I'm in. I just want to show

9:55you, rather than explaining that. Look, this has opened up a new window. This is open authentication. So, instead of me giving it keys, it just says, "Cool, well, you're signed in, right, bro?" So, why don't you just go ahead and allow me, so you can literally come over here, you click on allow, and then this will now be fully connected to Hermes.

10:12Connection successful, and it is easy as that. Now, we're fully connected, and it lets you pick the model. How cool is that, right? Now, if we come and do that again, little hack, by the way, if you press up on terminal, it will actually show you the last thing that you messaged it, which is Hermes setup. And

10:26let's say we go now and do a different one. Let's say we want to do OpenRouter. I press spacebar to select it. Okay, come down. It's going to say active provider, and it's asking here for an OpenRouter API key. So, what this means is it needs a physical key. So, you come over to openrouter.ai/models, and from here, we're going to grab a

10:43key, and then input it basically here. So, those are the two ways you're ever going to connect. One is open authentication, and the second one is API key. Now, OAuth itself, you can use basically Grok, which is incredible, and you can use ChatGPT, but you cannot use Claude. With OAuth and API key, you can access all the different models, which

11:03I'll touch on very shortly. Best way to think about it is that an OAuth is like a sign-in. Okay, so one is a button that you can take back, and the other is a string of characters that live on a server somewhere, and anyone that use an API key with, you can just rotate it anytime you want to. And then once you

11:19rotate it in that environment, which is what OpenRouter is so good, it will never work again. So, that's like the big difference. And this takes it on very nicely onto phase two, and actually concept six, which is choosing the right model that that powers us. So, if you

11:33think of Hermes as a series of systems, okay? And I'll show you this down and show you exactly what I mean. Hermes itself, right, is an agentic framework with tools and capabilities. But, powering Hermes is a brain. So, for example, in Hermes, I can do {forward slash} type in model like so, and it will let me change the model, the brain

11:52behind Hermes. So, at the moment, it's using Grok, but I could switch to Open Router, which gives me access to all of the models on the planet. I can get to Anthropic, I can get to OpenAI Codex, I can do any of these things that I want to, GPT 5.5. Now, if you're using Hermes, you must connect your ChatGPT

12:09account to it. And the reason for that is you can use your $20 subscription to code. You cannot do that with Claude. You have to pay for API credits with Claude. So, you're going to see that GPT 5.5 is like the one of the best ways you can use it there a lot using your existing subscription, and it's exactly

12:26the same with Grok, which is why it's so freaking cool. Now, the idea here is that we want to pick the right tool for the right job. I am model agnostic. I believe in the multi-brain strategy, which is basically model agnosticism, or we're agnostic. And effectively, we use the best model for the specific task. So, the best model at reasoning right

12:45now, we believe, is Opus 4.7. So, what I do when I want to reason is I come over, I change the model like so, okay? And I will just go ahead and chat to this on a daily basis. I click on Open Router, and I pick Opus 4.7. Now, I pay for credits on this, but in Open Router, when you

13:00create an API key, you can set I want this to be $10 maximum per month. That's it. And if it hits $10, it just stops working, and you can go ahead and switch the models, okay? Then you've got, for example, other models that can do volume. So, GPT is an amazing generalist. Grok, again, you can use for

13:18volume. Grok, when you authenticate with your X account, can also search Twitter, as well. And then you can bring in other models like Deep Seek, and actually run your entire thing completely for free using a series of free models if that's what you wanted to. So, I want you to think about your brain more as a toolbox

13:36rather than a one-size-fits-all because to a hammer everything is a nail, but sometimes you want to use different things like Claude for design and ChatGPT for reviewing code and being more general activities. So, we're just going to tag in the models that we want to and to do that we typically want to use something like OpenRouter because

13:52that's one connection that gives you hundreds of different models. little fact by the way, if you come over to openrouter.ai/rankings, you can see month on month by the way who where all where all the things are being used. Look at this. Deepseek V4 Flash, right? That's roughly The Flash model is not as powerful as the main model, but effectively you can get like

14:0995% performance for 1% of the cost. That's kind of how cool these different systems are. And Concept Seven is a data of what we call local hosted. And local hosted just means that not only is

14:20Hermes running your laptop, but the actual model itself is running on your own computer. Now, the trade-off for this is that the biggest models are billions and billions of parameters, which means you need data centers that are huge to run them. So, you're going to be limited based on that, but what you can do on your MacBook, for example,

14:37is click the Apple icon at the top, click on about this Mac, and you can see some information about it. So, you can basically screenshot that Mac, you can push that image into Claude or Hermes and say, "Hey, for example, if I come down here and do this real quick, I screenshot this, I share it to Hermes, I

14:51can paste the image in and be like, "Hey, based on my MacBook specifications, what do you think would be the most powerful local model that I could run?" Okay? And what we can do that is actually download that model using something called Ollama that lets you download stuff. And you can even do Ollama Cloud, which is a free model

15:08hosted somewhere, or I can download it specifically like Gemma 4, Qwen 3.6, whatever, and we can access all those things from your website, which means that whether you are a thousand feet on the ground, you are flying in the air, you're in a rocket ship to space, you will be able to use your Hermes agent anywhere with no limitations, 100%

15:27private cuz it is it only exists on your physical laptop. That is the That is the private and local aspect to it. And as you can see, it's come down and it's given us some different ideas like Quant 32. B's really powerful. That's 32 billion parameters. And these models are just getting better and better. And obviously, because it's local and

15:45private, you will compromise a little bit on performance and maybe speed because you're not on a huge server. But that's effectively what people mean when they say run local and run private. Now, we've covered this one. It leads very nicely onto concept number eight, which essentially is never starting from zero.

16:02And so, I want you to imagine Hermes as a friend that never forgets what you tell her. And it will remember things like your birthday. And it could tell you things that you spoke about on specific days. This is what we mean when we talk about Hermes' memory. And so, for example, I could say something like, "Hey there, man. Give me an example of a

16:18question I asked you on May 19th." Okay, so I can ask actually ask it questions about specific days and it can recall that and let me know based on the way that this memory works. And as you can see, the question I asked it was something about a famous thing about being liked and a really cool interesting quote about throwing rocks

16:34at enemies. So, it has within it the Hermes agent does a couple of different memory systems. It has a memory.md. And by the way, MD is just a file type. So, you know how it's like .pptx like PowerPoint or .whatever Word is .x. .md is just markdown file. All it literally is is just text with no special

16:53characters. Like that's basically it. It's plain, it's readable, and it lives here on your laptop. Then you've got an SQLite full text search of every message and every session. So, this effectively it can recall everything you've spoken about. Don't need to worry too much about the complicated mumbo jumbo, but just know that it's checking everything. And then the idea is that Hermes agent

17:11will compound quietly. So, ideally, if you you need to use it about 2 weeks for it to start feeling magical. And of course, you can supercharge this and connect it to other things like Obsidian memory systems. So, for example, in the Hermes agentic operating system I have, I've actually connected it to my Obsidian system here, which means that

17:28all of my Obsidian memory, and I'll put a link on screen if you haven't learned about Obsidian or Pancourt systems, you can check that out. And it also is connected to all of my Claude memory. So, anything I ever talked to Claude Code about, or any of the apps that I use on my computer, I can actually

17:42access that and it will dream for me overnight back proactively with suggestions based on questions that I've asked it or how I'm using it or what I'm spending my transcriptions, and it pulls together all these different you get information sources together to give you really specific stuff. To take its memory to a completely interstellar level because if your Hermes agent isn't

18:02getting information from stuff you're doing on your computer, Claude Code, Codex, how can it possibly give you the correct and accurate advice? Which is why I think the everything system, bringing it all together into one beautiful operating system, is really, really important, absolutely crucial.

18:17And this brings on to the beautiful concept number nine, which is what we call the character Bible, also known as the soul.md. So, this is the file that turns your chatbot into your personal assistant. It's somebody who gets your vibe, your communication style. If you're somebody who says, "Hey dude, hey bro." or however you want to talk and

18:35communicate, it specifically explains that to the Hermes agent. And what you want to do basically is give it the information. For example, what is the time? What are your values? What is your style? How do you want them to communicate? And what I'm going to do for you down below is put a full soul.md template that I pulled together based on

18:51so many hours of using this stuff. It covers stuff like your identity, mission goals, you know, things about your business, how you want it to address. You want to give that to Hermes and think of it as like the character. Like, do you want to speak to like an honest watching type of character or like a Knight Rider type of character? You can

19:07give these soul.mds, and this is what makes your Hermes agent different from everybody else's is because it has a unique soul. Unless we specify what that is, how's it going to know what that looks like? So, super important, give it a soul, and make it fantastical. And again, if you're using an operating system, you can actually also see what

19:24those souls are in your own database. Now, concept 10 is the idea that Hermes itself comes off the shelf with many different integrations already locked in that. And then, what we would basically

19:34going to do here, guys, is just give it the specific API key for that thing. That could be text to speech, you can connect your entire world to Hermes' agent, and think of Hermes as a Swiss Army knife. For example, if I come back over here, and I open up my Hermes agent, I might say something like, "Hey there, dude.

19:54What was the title of the last meeting I was in, and what is one action that I said I was going to take away?" So, for example, I've connected it to Granola. Not a sponsor by any or anything like that, but basically, I use this to capture information on my meetings. It sits in there, and basically, now I can

20:09chat to this because I've configured it within my Hermes agent, and it will now allow me to ask any questions about anything. I could say, "Hey, dude. What did I talk about 6 weeks ago for this thing to happen?" Now, as you can see, it's going to come down here and ask my permission to run it. So, we're going to

20:22say, "Yeah, that's absolutely fine. We're going to allow it for the session." And what's really cool here, guys, is actually come back and said, "Hey, your your connection's expired," which is fantastic. I'm going to show exactly how you can add this in for any connection within Hermes cuz this is a great teaching moment. Now, check this out. "Hey, dude. I would like you to

20:37give me a terminal command so that I can add my Granola API to your environmental variables." Oh my gosh, Jack, what does that mean? Well, effectively, what we never want to do is publish our API keys in the chat with Hermes agent. Because, again, everything is indexed and saved. So, what we do, especially if it's running on our computer, is we save it

20:58somewhere on the computer that it can access, but never actually sits in that. Now, check this one out. Let's come down here. All I'm going to do is copy this right now. I'm going to open up the terminal like so. All right, here's the terminal. Let me exit out of this process. Let me create a brand new one.

21:11Okay, beautiful. And what I'm going to do is just paste this one down here. And all it's going to ask me to do is change the API key, which is going to be right here. Then I come over to my app. I click on API keys. And then once you've created it, I've got this even simplified version here. And then you

21:24just literally replace this information here with your API key. And you're going to copy that, come to the terminal, and paste it in. That's done. I can say, "Awesome. I've updated that. Please go ahead and try it again." And I wanted to include that in just so you get a sense of how you securely and privately update

21:39these, again, API keys within your system. Giving Hermes the ability to connect to anything. Anything that has an API key, you can connect to Hermes in exactly the same way. And what's cool about this is Granola also has an OAuth. So, if you just give it the name of the Granola MCP like this, it will actually ask you to authenticate and sign in. And

21:57look at this, guys. Hermes Agent would like to access your account. And the Hermes Agent actually opened up this MCP MCP server for me. So, I come down and allow access. And you can see authorization successful. You can now return to the CLI. And all I did, guys, honestly, I just came down. I copied this page. I just sent the link and

22:14shared it straight to Hermes. And as you can see, it's come down here and it's confirmed that it's Farm Blast Meeting, which is a community call I had, and exactly one of the questions that we asked. And that's And it's such a wonderful example of how you can connect your Hermes agent to your entire world. So, I could be anywhere and ask it any

22:29question I like. My concept 11 is the fact that Hermes lives on your computer.

22:33If you've set it up this way. Which means that not only can it do things like create files on your desktop or organize things on your desktop, it can also take actions on your computer. So, for example, it can do what? It can do browser vision, bash, fuse. What the hell does that mean? It has native Chrome DevTools, visual screen reading,

22:51real cursor movements, not a screenshot bar, an actual agency. So, if you're running to the gym and you're like, "Damn, I completely forgot this thing." Basically, Hermes Agent can go ahead and do that. Now, to be fair, this isn't a feature I tend to use a lot, but again, if you just think about the fact that the agent lives on a computer, it can

23:07take actions and do various different things for you once you enable it with the tools. Concept 12 is around about using MCPs. MCPs stand for model

23:16contacts protocol. So, think of it like this, okay? You have an an API is like the wiring, and the MCP is like the instruction manual around that wiring. So, instead of having like a like, you know, a remote, for example, with a lot of exposed wires, MCPs are basically like instruction packages. It's like a universal remote control that lets you

23:34connect Hermes to effectively anything. We just used the Granola MCP to connect to basically my meetings. And we can do the same thing, for example, with Zapier MCP. So, Zapier MCP lets you spin up these servers like so, new MCP server, and I can go ahead and I can connect to anything that I wanted, right? If I come

23:52down here, for example, let's say that I want to come down and do other, I come over here and I connect to things that, you know, through this you can't connect to other applications. I can add tools. So, for example, I wanted to give it the ability to read emails, right? Well, how would I do that? Well, we can just

24:05basically select all the stuff that you want it to do. The one thing I wouldn't give it access to is the ability to send emails just yet. I would just hold off on that and its ability to reply. And when that's done, I can add these 10 tools. I can add in things like Google Drive, I can add in things like whatever

24:19I want to, Zapier. It's really cool. Then, all I do, I've got skills over here as a second tab. But, what we're really going to want to focus on here is the connection. And basically, what we can do now is generate a token here. And I've got an MCP server to connect to Zapier, which is awesome. Now, what I

24:33can do is come back over to Hermes, and I can say, "Hey there, I'd like to connect to the Zapier MCP server. I've got my tokens. Could you give me a command to run through the terminal so I can add these to your environmental variables?" Again, you can paste it, but I I'd often recommend that you do this

24:48in the terminal so it doesn't get recorded in your chat logs. And once you've done that, you can say, "Awesome, I've done. Could you tell me the title of the last email I received?" Again, then it will use an MCP to go ahead and do it. Now, why would you create an MCP versus just using an API key? It is way

25:03more what we call token efficient because all the checking it needs to do builds up the cost. An MCP basically explains exactly how it works so AIs can basically just look at the MCP manual and they'll know exactly all the stuff they can do, all the buttons they can press in that individual application. So, it knows how to draft emails, create

25:23emails. It has full understanding because it standardizes the use of that incredible tool for the agent. And just like that, we've got all the information that we need from this MCP. Concept 13 is understanding muscle memory for the

25:36agent. The idea here is that the longer we use Hermes agent, the better it gets. What I mean by that is consistently give it feedback as you go so it can iterate and improve as you're doing it. It has a series of Hermes skills it can pick up the more that you use it. It has various other things it can do and you can even

25:53if you want to build out different skills quite easily. So, for example, you can go to this website here, which is agentskills.ai. This gives you a good overview of what skills are if you want to go deeper on that. One of the things that I did actually guys is I built out something called the Pantheon, which effectively enables me, say for example,

26:08I want to add a persona, right? I can choose let's go with the alchemist for instance. I can explain its job. I can explain its description, give it a system prompt and then actually choose the model that I want to do it with because again, if it's like very intellectualized, we don't want Albert Einstein, you know, washing our car for

26:24example. You know, we want him working on the most impactful tasks. And so, you can build out skills like this. Look, I have a deep reasoning task I use for Claude, but you know, for autopilot jobs, I might use a lower cost model. So, you can build out these skills which give it the ability to do something

26:39different. So, for example, I could say something like, "Hey there dude, I'd like to do some research for me, some very deep research on the best country in the world to live. Um you know, spin up a sub agent. Why don't you go ahead and use Deep Seek V4 and ChatGPT 2 critically analyze it in a nice little

26:54loop with Opus 4.7 reviewing everything. Um, just let's go ahead, use a cheap powerful model to go ahead and do loads of deep research, take some time with it, and then come back and share the results based on everything you know about me. Now, what's cool about this is it can delegate to different models to do different things for me, and it can

27:11use that as a skill. Now, it will use here for me the deep research skill that I've already created, which is fantastic and it just enables you to get so much more out of Hermes. Now, if anytime you want to stop it from doing a task, you can do {forward slash} stop, and that will actually basically stop Hermes from

27:25doing the thing. The concept 14 is about six keys to make it so unbelievably

27:30powerful. So, here we've got we've got Q. Now, what's interesting thing about Q here, okay? Now, Q is this, which means that let's say I ask it a question like, "Hey dude, find out for me the best country for octogenarians. Which country world has the highest number of octogenarians?" Okay? Really cool. I can send it off. Then let's say I want to do

27:48a follow-up task, I can do {forward slash} Q. And what this will do is send a prompt on the next turn so it doesn't interrupt. I can also do {forward slash} background, okay? And what {forward slash} background lets me do is effectively ask it let it do different tasks in the background. So, for example, I could come down and do

28:04background, and then I might come back and say something like, "Hey, find out which country in the world has the healthiest 35-year-olds or 32-year-olds?" Okay? Now, this will run in the background. Cuz normally when you use Hermes agent, basically what's happening is it's it's interrupting. So, this enables us in one chat window to have met multiple streams of thoughts

28:26running concurrently by using those two tasks. And as you can see, background task has gone ahead and actually physically got started. You got Kanban, which is for a a task board functionality you can have. Reset will clear it all up. Compress will compress the memory. So, important thing to bear in mind on the memory is that there is a

28:42certain size of the window. So, if you have, say for example, 10,000 words, and you ask it a question, every time you ask that chat agent a question, it is literally using all 10,000 words plus your question. And the longer it gets, basically, the lower its performance gets. So, what I do is one session, one window done, you want to reset. So,

29:02compressing basically means, "Dude, could you just do me a favor and just summarize everything we talked about?" So, it goes from this to like this, basically, and then you can continue the conversation. And as I showed you earlier, we can switch the models super easily. And what we can go down here and do {forward slash} model, and then we

29:18can basically Now we're talking to Opus, we're talking to ChatGPT, we can talk to anyone that we physically like. And I put a lot of the interesting ones down here that I thought were really quite interesting that you may find yourself using, you know, basically depending upon what situation you're in the moment. Now, concept 15 is what we call,

29:33basically, safety and security for the agent. These are house rules. Now, these agents have access to many different things, and because of that, I think it was Peter Parker told us this, right? With great power comes great responsibility. Might have been Ben's uncle. >> Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. >> But the point here is we basically don't

29:52want to give it the keys to the kingdom because that's responsible years, which is why I don't let it have the ability to send the emails to you. A lot of my buddies have done that, they've had their hands burned in the process, and it will get to the point where it will have less errors than humans. But at the

30:05moment, we want to follow what's called the principle of least access. And what that effectively means is Herme Herme's and any agent or system or anything you're building ever. I do this with all my clients. You only ever give it the minimal amount of access that it actually needs. The very, very minimal thing. So, for example, there's certain

30:22things that we don't want it to go ahead and do. API keys, never, ever, ever post into any chat like a Herme's especially specifically if it's keeping it. It's not that Herme's is bad person, it's just that if you're backing up your Herme's on a daily basis, we just don't want these keys. It's just one less thing for you to think about. So, if you

30:40can actually think about using it responsibly like that and follow this principle of this access, you will generally across all of your AI systems be extremely safe. Now, next thing to think about here in concept 16 is called the North Star and this is what's called the goal function. So, think about like this, okay? Rather than going question

30:57answer question answer, the idea of the goal functionality within Hermes is that you give it a North Star for a short-term project. So, I could say, "Hey, I want to create a YouTube thumbnail that is pretty freaking epic." So, for example, I I come over to Hermes, right? And I come down here and why don't I just go ahead and clear this

31:14entire session. And so, for example, you come to the Hermes agent and you can give it a prompt like this, which is goal. I would like to decide whether I should take an opportunity A or B. Should I do a big consulting role at Anthropic or do I become head of innovation at OpenAI? I would like it to

31:26help me out. Help me make the best decision. And look at this. Now, it's come and said, "Look, I'm going to assign a 20 goal budget as well a 20 turn budget to this." And effectively, what will happen now is our entire conversation exists to hit and crush that specific goal. So, it will ask me questions about what's about, what's

31:43going on, and it will get there on a mid-term basis. Now, what's really cool here is Hermes will not stop until it

31:49hits that decision. But, it does run into one limitation and that's the fact that not all goals we do in life can be solved in 20 turns and sometimes we've got to do things. This is why I built this idea of super goals and I'll put a link on screen if you want to look into this. The idea of super goals is that

32:04you explain the goal you want to, use the super goal skill, and effectively, what happens here is Hermes comes and asks you loads of questions and the output of that is like say four to 10 actions. Some that you do, some that Hermes does. For example, on this one, which is to launch a Hermes course and get 500 sign ups, one is shape the

32:23course promise, build an opt-in engine, write course sequence. Then, it's my turn. I have to go ahead and record the video promo and it lets me mark this task as complete when it's done and then my progress bar goes up. But, if I were to remove this and start from scratch, you'll see right now, look, every hearing is a great goal. I can copy this

32:39prompt. I can shoot straight back over to Hermes. What I can do is {slash} and I just come down here and click on stop. As if for instance, say gold pause is what we want to do. And the command I believe is goal clear. This will end the

32:50goal. And what I can do is come down, give it this information here, and in effect from now what this does will allow me to have a medium-term goal. And I'll say, "Hey Jack, what is the goal that you want to go ahead and set?" And so say, "Hey dude, I would like to launch a paid course and get 1,000 uh

33:04email sign-ups to my new Hermes masterclass." Or whatever the thing is that you want to sell or or help people with. And then it starts to ask questions. I'll say, "Hey, in 4 weeks, okay?" And then it asks you questions dynamically. And I tested this so much, which is why I built all these different specific rules into it. And it's all

33:20connected to the dashboard. So when this is done, it will literally load up in the dashboard dynamically. And again, ask you different questions to get context. Cuz without context, how can it know that it's helping you out? Then all you ever do is you land on your mission control, you command it in Hermes, or if you wanted to, you can come down and use

33:35Claude. And it's the exact same thing, so you can pick up whenever you want to. Honestly, these mid-term goals, these chief working loops, are so freaking powerful. You can plan your life, hit these mid-term goals using Hermes agent. But concept 17 is about using Hermes agent as a team. So the idea is that we can tag in different models to various

33:52different things. You can spin up what

33:54is called sub agents. So for example, if I come back over now to Hermes agent, what I might do is just say, "Hey, I'm just going to pause that for a second. What I would like to do is go ahead and research for me the best AI companies to work for on the planet. I'd like you to

34:07spin up two sub agents. One is going to go ahead and look at the ones in America, and the other one is going to look at alternative jobs maybe internationally, okay?" And what Hermes can do is spin up sub agents. And what sub agents are is think about like this. You're at Hermes, and then underneath Hermes you have two other agents, each

34:25with their own fresh contacts. And it delegates these tasks, these two agents go ahead, they do all the work, and they report back. Now, this is happening in parallel, not sequentially, which means that I could have four, five, six different agents all researching things like a team doing work individually and at the end of the day or the end of the

34:43turn, everyone hands in their paper, their research, and instead of waiting, you know, six hours, it's done in one hour instead. This is called parallelization, parallel agents, and gets you significantly further faster using Hermes. I use this strategy all the time to get the most out of the agents. For example, here, Hermes co-founder Teknum, 12 parallel Hermes

35:03agent enters. I hope I pronounce his name correctly there. Every day to build Hermes itself, monitoring issues, dog food in the Kanban good board, parallel sub-agents are the power user move. So, even the guy that built Hermes agent used parallel agents to do it. So, again, multiple agents working together in tandem to one objective. Or it could

35:20be individual objectives, right? One could be doing research, one could be writing, one designer, one scheduler, and they all put these beautiful folders inside your desk. The concept 18 is so powerful. This was called the heartbeat or the cron job. Cron job sounds so freaking complicated. One of the coolest

35:35things you can do is this idea that it keeps working whilst you sleep, the 24/7 AAA agent, okay? A heartbeat effectively is something that you set up to happen every single day. It's essentially called a zombie as well, a zombie process, if you like. And effectively, what it will do is you give it something to do. So, effectively, a heartbeat is

35:53silent until something dies. So, a sub-agent pings every few seconds, zombie detection, fresh agent reclaimed to task. Per task retries with hallucination recovery. What does that mean? Let me show you what a cron is first, and then I think it'll make a little bit more sense. So, a cron agent here, if I come down here and just say,

36:09"Hey, dude, I want you to do two things for me. I want you to send me a reminder in 30 seconds that the sky is blue, okay?" This is a scheduled task. This is basically in a certain amount of time, it is going to come and give me an update. Now, for example, I have a daily morning briefing, okay? And I say, "I

36:26want you to go through my um, email list, I want you to go through my calendar, I want you to go through everything I'm doing that day, use all the information that you know about me, and give me, you know, a daily morning brief of, say, I don't know, five things that are relevant. And it can build that

36:39for you. So, every day you get that on repeat, basically. So, you can schedule these wonderful things inside Hermie's Agent, get to come to you at 8:00 a.m. every single morning. But, the one that you're going to find yourself using most of the time are these scheduled tasks that make it feel like it's alive because proactively coming to you and

36:56asking questions. You could say, "Hey, uh, periodic times randomly come and ask me questions to check in on me, do a lot of other things." Then, we go to concept number 19, which is essentially the dirty secret not a lot of people want to talk about, which is, can you believe, 73% of every quest is fixed overhead.

37:11So, what we're talking about here is budget, okay? Now, what I mean by that is that, like, if you are using API keys, you can very easily burn through a lot of money, which is why we want to be very specific about the specific models we're using. Now, tokens, you know, um, a parking meter takes maybe dollar

37:27coins, um, AI models take tokens. Roughly speaking, it a token, I guess a 10 tokens is about seven words. It's about seven seven 70 75%. That's effectively what the translation looks like. So, just make sure that you often clear the session and that you're using the right model for the right job when you're using Hermie's to keep your token cost usage

37:48all the way down. And there's loads of mini strategies, like, don't overload it with a bazillion skills that you don't need, don't make it system prompts too long, keep it nice and clean, and one conversation, one goal, then it's always best practice to clear, and refresh, and start again. And just point it out, some

38:03guy actually spent 4 million tokens in 2 hours of light usage, 21,000 tokens, just asking about the weather because he made a mistake. So, it just gives you a good a good idea of how you can reduce those down. Now, the 20th concept here is this idea that it isn't just a

38:19chatbot, Hermie's Agent can be part of an operating system. Well, we have various different personas in the Pantheon. We can have a memory vault that extends its memory capabilities to a significant level, basically enabling you to call upon any email or meeting that you've ever had, any knowledge source from any YouTuber you've ever seen,

38:39connected to notebook 11, a gargantillion different things. We can have, for example, so many different tools and effectively when we create an operating system, it just gives it a place to manage everything. I call this a kind of everything of AI. So, if you look at this Claude code operating system, we have our AI spendage, how much money we're making from our skills,

38:57we can see our usage in real time, dreaming improvements. Like I said, they will come to you proactively, mission control, our skills and memory systems. Now, in the Hermes operating system here, I can see at a glance all of the connections it has available to it. So, I know exactly what it's connected to. I know what model I'm using, I know my

39:14memory, I know my usage. I can chat to it directly. I have this ability to manage goals and plans with Hermes agent. So, whatever I'm working on, I can work with Hermes agent in tandem on that. I have this Pantheon, so I can create these beautiful I don't know I personally like to visually see my graphics and what I'm dealing with. So,

39:31I can like, well, actually now I really want to kind of upgrade that like I'm missing this or I'm missing that. I can grab different things and build various different things. I just think it's a nicer user interface to be able to go ahead and build things like that. Again, and what we can do here crucially and I

39:43highly recommend you do is connect your Hermes to GitHub. Now, GitHub is a basically code for place where we store stuff. Okay? It's like the world's repository. It's basically you can store information and files. And what you can do with Hermes agent, guys, is essentially have your entire Hermes agent backed up on GitHub every single day. Mine does that. And what that means

40:04is if you ever change your computer or God forbid you lose it or something, you have that backed up somewhere, right? We can connect to GitHub. We've got all the profile information here. We can connect to our Obsidian brain, which is this beautiful memory system here that basically just lets us see everything we're doing with different memory

40:19systems. We've got there's my Claude and it just enables you to get a level of control. And crucially it comes on to the 21st concept which is the idea of one brand. The idea that we are going to connect the Hermes agent, the business

40:33brand, with Claude code. We talked about the differences but here's the difference guys. If we can actually connect them together, it unlocks incredible capabilities. Hermes knows your projects, your customers, your decisions. It lives everywhere. everywhere. Maybe it's like cotton who knows what it is. And then you got Claude code is this precision tool that we use for building. And actually what

40:50happens is when we can physically connect these ones together, we have this shared memory and understanding where we're not operating in isolation. It's like you say one thing to Hermes agent, another to Claude code. How do you know they connect together in a meaningful way unless they have access to basically what they're doing at different times. And so now we've

41:09covered these 21 core concepts in plain English. The next thing we need to do is leverage all of these and get one of these operating systems ourselves which you can learn about in this video right here.