Show Notes:
[00:00:40] – What this intro episode is about
[00:01:13] – Who am I?
[00:03:40] – What this podcast aims to be
[00:05:00] – What to expect content and quality-wise
[00:07:11] – What I hope you gain from this + wrapping up
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favourite podcast platform.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Compounding Curiosity. I’m your host Kalani Scarrott, and this podcast is all about compounding your curiosity alongside my own, through thoughtful interviews with interesting guests. For transcripts and detailed show notes, check out the links in the description.
Hopefully you’re as keen as I am to learn something new. So let’s get stuck in.
This podcast episode zero is basically just to give a rundown of who I am, and what the podcast is, and what you can expect in terms of quality and content as a listener. So hopefully this is one of the few times that I’ve talked this much in one go, because for me, the sole focus of this podcast is the interviewees.
I want to really shine a spotlight on them and hopefully learn a few things along the way. And also for myself, if I’m talking, it means that I’m listening and learning. So for me, my goal is to ask questions and get out of the way.
So in terms of who I am and my background, I live, and I grew up in Perth, Western Australia, basically an hour south of Perth and not even in the city itself. And Perth is probably the most, I think it is the most isolated city in the world. Adelaide is about three hours away. Bali’s about three and a bit.
And for me, my goal with this podcast, or the reason, a big reason why I’m doing it was it’s my chance to sort of bridge the gap and meet interesting people that I wouldn’t get to otherwise, because I just don’t have the physical access to them. But that’s sort of my spiel about where I live, where I grew up.
And while I’m doing this a little bit, I’ll get more into it later. But in terms of education, I did my undergrad in commerce. So I majored in accounting and I minored in Mandarin. I’m happy I did accounting because it gave me a good baseline for finance and investing, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be something I work with full time. And Mandarin was just a side project hobby, type of thing. I love learning languages. Mandarian was very hard. I’m not sure I’ll continue it, but currently I’m just learning it in Asia and having a much better time and enjoying it a bit more.
After my undergrad, I just went straight through and continued and did a master’s in finance. The reason I did that was I didn’t take my undergrad seriously and didn’t have the grades to really get a job. So the master’s in finance is basically a reset button for me. And just to really knuckle down and focus on what I enjoyed and wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So I worked at a quant fund for a little bit during that master’s and I thought that was, I loved it. It was the best thing ever getting to meet with and chat with interesting people all the time. And just constantly being intellectually tested, I think was really beneficial for me, but that fund ended up getting wound up due to insufficient assets under management. It just, it was a whole complicated process. Shit happens. Such is life. Didn’t work out.
So now, I work casually as a lifeguard, which I really love. I maybe work 28 hours a week. I get to play golf a few times. The hours are great in terms of eating it mornings afternoons off. And it’s just really fulfilling. I love it. The plan pre COVID was to travel abroad with my fiance and we were going to just bounce around Asia Pacific, but that’s sort of been put on pause for the moment. So I’m just continuing along and doing stuff I get to enjoy and do, which is play golf, working with side projects and do a little bit of work on the side. But yeah, that’s basically me.
So in terms of what this podcast is going to be about, I’ll be having conversations with investors, operators and entrepreneurs across the Asia Pacific region. And the reason I chose this region is because it’s what I’m interested in, to be honest. And it’s familiar to me, I’ve traveled there. I know of the companies and the people that operate in the region. So for me, it’s much more interesting and engaging for me if I focus on this region than it, if it was to be a US focused podcast.
And I know the Asia Pacific region, isn’t spoken about as much as US-based counterparts. So I think hopefully through this podcast, I can hopefully highlight a bit more and showcase the people that operate around here as I’m very bullish on the APAC region. I think there’s a lot of future growth here. It’s super exciting to be in the area and I’d just hoping to highlight a bit more and hopefully you’ll learn some things along the way to be honest, selfishly, if someone is from outside the region, but I think they’re a great fit for the podcast. I’ll still have them on as a guest, like say moonshot possibility here, old mate, Warren Buffett wants to be on the podcast. I can’t say no to that, but overall, the core focus will be on Asia Pacific because I think that’s the most interesting spot to be at the moment. If I’m honest, what you can expect in terms of quality and content, I’m hoping to deliver, I’m aiming to compress, to impress. So I want to give you as much information and value in as short as possible time. So the episode length are going to be about 45 minutes, give or take. It’s not concrete. I’m happy to go over, but there will be like a 30 minute minimum. I usually schedule the podcast to go for about an hour. So once they’re edited down for brevity and mistakes, it’s usually ends up about 45 minutes, but it’s not a concrete rule. It’s just a guide.
So the podcasts themselves are edited for brevity, I make it as impactful as possible in terms of supplementary stuff, all the transcripts show notes, summaries, they’ll all be supplementary. So hopefully they’re all good enough that you don’t even have to listen to the podcasts.
That’s my aim. Honestly, if I can give you a good enough summary notes, key takeaways, and provide a transcript, so you don’t even listen to my voice in the first place, great, cool. Let’s go on with our lives.
You’ve learned something new in a lot less time than what it had to take to listen to a 45 minute podcast in terms of the information. I’m really hoping that’s timeless. It doesn’t matter if you listen to it today, next week or next year, the principles and lessons should still apply. But I know the content will age. I’m hoping it just doesn’t age too bad. So I’m not going to be talking about what happened this week or two current topics. I really want to focus on timeless principles and lessons that you can learn from.
The episodes themselves will released weekly. I still didn’t figure it out a day yet, but we’ll come around to that.
But either way, I want to keep it consistent as possible and compress to impress in terms of what I want you, the listener to get out of this podcast. It’s like I’ve mentioned before, the Asia Pacific region, I think is super underrated. Am I allowed to say underrated, underrepresented?
I just think there’s so much stuff going on here that isn’t spoken about enough. So hopefully for me, I can give you a few lessons and principles and exciting things that are coming out of this region and what people are doing over here. Because I think if I don’t do it, then who will. So for me, hopefully we can all learn together and go from there.
If you enjoyed this podcast episode, be sure to check the website, compoundingpodcast.com on the website. You’ll find every episode complete with transcripts, show notes and other related resources. Also be sure to sign up to my weekly newsletter, Curated by Kalani, where I share what I’ve been reading and learning and watching for that week. Same as the podcast.
It’s compressed to impress and I aim for maximum return on your time invested. So sign up at kalanis.substack.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter @ScarrottKalani. Once again, links to all content mentioned, be in the description, but until next time have a good one.