Hello, today is the first official episode of Tech and Business. Last week was a little bit of a fake first episode, just because I actually had to train some people who were shadowing me to learn how to have their own radio shows. But this is the start of something wonderful, something beautiful is being built. This is the first episode of the tech and business weekly radio show. And this week we're going to take it a little bit easy because it's been a, it's been a rough week work wise, but let's start it out with a new tradition. Let's start the episode with Long Time by PlayboiKart.
Hello. Right now, I would like to talk about some interesting developments recently, some things I've been using in my daily life as a student. Here at Amherst College, I've been using Clod Cowork a lot for my LinkedIn and my resume. It's kind of like Anthropics imitation of like maybe OpenClaw. It has a lot of tools that you can connect to, plugins, or integration with the Google Suite, or with your with your Moodle, or any type of calendar note taking app. So I've been using it a lot to revamp my LinkedIn and Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 came out recently, so they're honestly a lot better than 4.5. I would highly recommend incorporating something like Claude into maybe some of the more mundane tasks of your life. Highly recommend. But let's get into our next song here. I was gonna play a song I've been listening to a lot recently. I don't even know how to introduce
Spotify also recently introduced this new setting that allows you to do mixing between songs. So let's try out one of these weird transitions that I've made. I think you guys know the first.
Hello! So, I have an interesting little fact to share, or maybe a series of facts. For my urban economics class that I'm taking this semester, we were tasked with writing about how the five colleges in the Pioneer Valley came to be, and potentially maybe some economic frameworks that could explain why any type of industrial cluster develops. As you could tell from the name, Urban Economics talks a lot about cities and how cities form based on firms' understanding that there's lower transaction costs for transportation. Maybe there's labor pooling or specialized assets or knowledge spillovers, but a number of reasons lead to certain industrial clusters forming. Specifically in the US, we see places like Silicon Valley, Detroit for automobile industry, New York City for finance, and many more examples. But Western Massachusetts is not very obviously similar to any of those for-profit industrial clusters.
Originally, Amherst was the first college in this region, and then offshoots of Amherst faculty or Amherst itself had its hands on the lineage of the other four colleges forming around. I had found out that the UMass president was actually a 15-year chemistry professor at Amherst before bringing a lot of the Amherst institutional, low-cost education emphasis to what was originally the Massachusetts Agricultural College with a very different purpose, but similar industry in terms of higher education to Amherst. But that was born from an Amherst faculty member. And then Smith College, the money that developed Smith College was originally going to go to Amherst. then it was used to create a research institution for women in the area because Amherst was still only open to men. And so Smith, Smith's first president, was someone by the last name of Sealy, and you might find that familiar if you're on campus. Sealy, mud, or the Sealy dorm. because he was a professor at Amherst and then he became the first president of Smith and last semester when I took a class, math class at Smith, differential equations. It was actually held in the Sealy building on Smith campus. So that was very interesting to find out. Mount Holyoke, Mary Lyon was originally going to donate to Amherst and then chose to create Mount Holyoke, which was ran by another former Amherst faculty member.
And then, finally, Hampshire was actually created on behalf of something called the New College Plan that was proposed by the four colleges at the time to create a new liberal arts experiment in the area where new teaching strategies could be tried out and piloted without necessarily changing the ethos of the other four colleges in the area. Amherst had certain vested interests, the stakeholders of UMass, Smith, Mount Holyoke had certain interests and reputations to maintain, but being able to approve the funding for this new college Hampshire in the area was huge and it relied a lot upon the pre-existed network of the four colleges in order to take cross registration and use the PIVDA and all of that that we see today. But in the end, even though it's in the education industry rather than finance or Silicon Valley with tech or the automobile industry, there are a lot of economic motivations and a long lineage from Amherst faculty that explains why the five colleges formed in the Pioneer Valley of all places in western Massachusetts with few very obvious cost-cutting criteria that's met in such a remote area but thought that was a very interesting paper and a lot of interesting history that I learned through that. But let's get into the next
Yo, we have something special coming up. We have something really special coming up. Oh no, everything's falling apart. The studio's on fire, nothing is savable, but at the very end of the day, something shines through the fog, through the smoke. In the midst of when you think it's all over, It's actually all just beginning, and we're so back. Forget about it. You gotta listen to this transition right now, for the second time in this show, just for Chris Toon, former WAM Royalty.
Oh my god, it's messed up. It's messed up. It's all messed up. It's all over. It worked earlier Hold on Just give me one second
This next one, this next one is mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing, unprecedented, never heard something like this before. Stop it, stop it, we've already forgotten, please.
Soon we will be coming to an end, but for now grateful to have this platform, and we have some wonderful transitions coming your way right now. Expect more to come for this radio show. Today is a little bit informal, but on March 12th we will have Michael Elliott Thursday, March 12th for an hour exclusive interview talking about the future of higher education liberal arts education as artificial intelligence will change everything so stay tuned stay tuned for more structured content to come in the future
This next one this next one's really good. The next couple are really good. Every song on this show is really fucking good. Oh Really good, it's really good
