The Career RelaunchPodcast

Episode Interview Transcript

Teaser (first ~15s): What I didn’t achieve was the ability to carve out a life as a musician, but what did come as a consequence, it gave me a lot of character building. It was my first true transition where I had turned my whole image around.

Joseph: Good morning, Deepak, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show today.

Deepak: Joseph, I’m really excited to be here.

Joseph: We got a lot to cover today. I want to talk about your time when you used to be an accountant at Deloitte, why you left that behind to become a rapper, and what that scene was like for you. I was wondering if we could just start off by having you tell us a little bit more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Deepak: What I do for a living is—I’m 32 year old—I run an SEO agency, and that’s what I believe I’ll keep doing for some time. What I’m about though is just finding ways that I can really try and help give back others and explore.

Joseph: I want to come back and talk a little bit more about your agency. For those people who aren’t familiar with SEO, can you just very briefly explain what your agency does related to search engine optimization?

Deepak: Our agency, if you were to Google us folks is called Pearl Lemon, pearl like you wear around your neck. What we do is ultimately help a business rank on Google for competitive search terms. The easiest example is if you’re a real estate broker or agency of some kind, you may have listings that go up in the area of let’s just say, for example Toronto. You may want to rank for a variety of words.

If there’s something called like Harbor Lane, Toronto and you have a listing there, it’s natural that someone will search for that initially if they’re thinking about buying. Then you would pay me for the service to make sure that your website or your listing comes up at the top Google when someone searches for something very specifically like that. That’s what we do and what people pay us for.

Joseph: Cool. I’ve actually used an SEO expert for this podcast. I definitely noticed a difference in my rankings on Google, so this stuff definitely works.

I know that you haven’t always been the owner of Pearl Lemon, and I do want to talk more about that at the end. Can you just take us back in time? I was thinking we could start all the way back to when you were working at Deloitte, and then maybe we can move forward from there. What were you doing at Deloitte? Then we’ll jump into your life as a rapper after that.

Deepak: Deloitte was in 2009 or ’10. It was just after I finished university. I majored actually in English Literature, so I was basically the only one in the class of 300 that went into work in the financial services space. One thing led to another.

I ended up walking into a graduate role as a tax consultant on their prestigious graduate program at that time, especially also having Indian parents from India. I’m B. Everyone was super pleased that I was at Deloitte because that seem to be the very good thing to do with my college or university background. I walked into there, and I absolutely hated the place.

Joseph: What did you hate about it?

Deepak: I was not a tax man. I had no interest really in tax, I discovered. Why I didn’t discover that before was because in the internship, one, they wine and dine you, but also two, it was just the kind of route that society, i.e. university, what everyone else is applying to and what people perceive to be or saw as success, working at Deloitte.

It was a great job, but I looked at the work that I was doing, number one. I remember then, number two, going to a networking event where you get to meet one of the directors. You get to meet a range of people, basically that are a lot more senior than yourself. I just remember asking one of the directors a little bit about his life and the work predominantly. I thought, ‘Okay. This is what success in this industry can look like after maybe six, seven years of hard graft.’ I just realized that that wasn’t actually where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

What I knew that I enjoyed was rapping.

Joseph: Okay. Now, how do you make the leap from accountancy to rapping? Can you tell me a little bit more about how you realized that you loved rapping, and where did that even come from?

Deepak: Rapping had been something that was with me since I was 15 years old. I had friends in music that I had perhaps different career or fortunately educational histories from. Really what it meant is that I had a bunch of guys I used to roll with that I did rap songs with, but these guys were not doing well academically. Some of them had been in and out of prison. Some of them were kind of dealing drugs. We were on a different path.

That path and our relationship really faded as I went to university and as I went off on that adventure. For some time, my relationship with the industry, if you will, at large kind of faded. What didn’t was my love for music. That remained, and some of the songs that you’ve seen on YouTube really relate to the period where I’ve broken away from the group and I still enjoy music, and I thought, ‘This is something that I want to do.’

What I didn’t really understand though when I was at Deloitte and I walked into the partners’ office to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to tender my resignation.’ They said, ‘Well, you know Deepak, we invested a lot of training. We love for you to complete it. You can go on to become a qualified tax consultant, charted tax accountant. There’s all these kinds of stuff. Why don’t you wait it out?’ I said, ‘Well, no. I want to go and be a rapper.’

My journey then began by recognizing, ‘Okay, Deepak, you want to make music. Amazing, but you also need to make money.’ That reality struck me home quite hard. At that time, I just thought, ‘Oh, okay. You know what? I’ll start a recording studio. I can maybe have a studio, invite musicians, who are my friends in some cases, to my studio. We can record together, and I can also charge people for the service of recording their music.’ For me, it felt like, ‘Ah, this is a fantastic idea.’

Joseph: Before we get to that, I’d love you just go back to this moment when said that you resigned. Was that hard at all for you to be able to walk away from this stable job and this industry which I think you mentioned before, at least culturally, was seen as something that would be quite reputable and quite honorable. Was that hard for you? Was this a pretty simple thing for you to do?

Deepak: The act of doing it was very easy. The emotion attached to the act was incredibly difficult for me to work with. I found that the more I remove one from the other, the easier it’s been able for me to switch or turn or pivot and adjust. What I mean by that specifically is like, ‘Wow, I’m going to quit Deloitte,’ and then my heart rate goes up. You get a blood rush and all of the things that surround a little bit of fight or flight response biologically.

If I wrote it out on paper, ‘Do you enjoy being here, Deepak?’ My heart was like, ‘No.’ That became a very effective vehicle. ‘Is this you, or is this your future? Does this make you happy?’ I’d look at the piece of paper, and it was like, ‘No.’ It always served as a kind of reminder that, ‘Deepak, you’re not doing the work that relates to perhaps your highest value.’ That was the toll that then allowed me to go in and have what ultimately was a five-minute conversation and then write up a letter that took me another five minutes that say, ‘Hey, I resigned.’

That was very powerful to me in reminding myself that this isn’t what’s going to make you happy, but then very, very quickly also taken quite some massive action. I knew I had no idea about how to set up a studio. I knew that if I told my parents I was just resigning and there wasn’t a plan in place, that would be even worse.

Joseph, I just took to Amazon. I began looking up books that related to how to start a home recording studio, a guerilla home recording studio.

The second thing that I did was reach out to a couple of producers that originally produced some of my music and said, ‘Hey, can you teach me the kind of 80/20 for how to use Logic Pro on a MacBook at that time. I began the process of setting up a studio. All the activity came out of the action of talking to Matthew Ellis, because once I told him I’d resigned, that really lit a fire underneath my backside, because it was like, ‘Wow, what are you going to do, Deepak?’

That was very helpful to me that I leapt before I looked.

Joseph: Let’s shift gears here now then, Deepak. Let’s take these one piece at a time. What was your experience like to start your recording studio? I guess I’m mostly interested in the emotions you were feeling as you were trying to create something from nothing and walk away from the stable job to try to build something of your own.

Deepak: It was scary, Joseph. I recognized that this would be a little bit of a fall from grace in terms of the perception of what I was doing, which would be very quickly followed up by an expectation that if you’re going to take this route, you need to figure it out.

My mom and dad got married at 11 and 13. The first time they saw each other, they got married. They transitioned from villages in India, places where they’re born without birth certificates, no electricity, no doors, no windows, and this isn’t a hyperbole. I went and saw my dad’s village when I was 18 to see where he grew up.

What they had been taught and what they knew through their kind of migrant story and coming to the U.K. was hard work. My dad still works at Heathrow Airport as a driver. My mom still works at the local supermarket. They had the same jobs for years, decades.

This transition of me moving from stable employment into something that was extremely unstructured was not something that they would understand because it was just so alien to what they knew, and it was nothing like what any of my siblings do. It was scary. It was mostly scary.

Joseph: How much did you think about that as you were going through this?

Deepak: Initially, it was a little bit crippling. We come to a quote by Tony Robbins, believe. I think it aptly describes how I was able to move from that feeling of being crippled to maybe taking some of those actions. The quote goes something along the lines that, ‘Change only comes when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.’

I did not enjoy my work, Joseph. It was pretty clear to me that this wasn’t me fulfilling my potential in that environment because of the reality of what the day-to-day was alongside looking into the future, thinking, ‘Deepak, you’re not going to be well here. This is not for you. Get out, now.’

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit then about now that you’ve decided you want to move on, you’ve got the recording studio, let’s talk about your days as a rapper. What was the rapper scene like? Did you find that to be more naturally easy for you, or were there also some challenges there?

Deepak: The interesting thing about it is not only transition because transition’s a form of growth and new environments of course lead to new problems. I was, as a British Indian at Deloitte, someone who’s culturally extremely accepted because British Indians go and work at places like Deloitte, it’s what we do. I then transitioned to being a British Indian rapper. That is something that British Indians don’t do.

I got a lot of validation as an engineer, because then it was about me producing a music of others. It was a bit more difficult to perhaps get some validation or recognition as a musician. People are a lot less interested in hearing or talking of my music even though that that was the primary purpose that I was trying to fulfill.

That really just meant that you need to really work hard, or I presume, to kind of get recognized and appreciated. That often is also a path to success in some cases because it meant I had to work harder, which isn’t a bad thing.

I remember my first. It’s still on YouTube. I don’t think that that’s the link that I’ve sent to you, but there’s a music video with me with my former rap group – what they call Dark Side Soldiers. These are the guys I was kind of rolling around with so to speak from the age of 16, 17.

I’m in the video, and I’m the only Indian in the entire video. I don’t know if there’s anyone who isn’t of African or Caribbean origin or who’s mixed race. There was me that was kind of the stand alone. That was quite indicative of the environment, not that it’s a problem. It’s just the reality.

People were always, of course, surprised when they heard that I was a rapper. I definitely had more success as a recording engineer than I did as a recording musician.

Joseph: Can you explain what that was like for you to be a minority in so many ways, not only racially but also being outside of what is typically what a British Indian would be doing with their days?

Deepak: I had a lot of problems emotionally, I think, Joseph. I didn’t really appreciate that it was going out of the frying pan into the oven, because I have also never dealt with the lack of structure in my days. I resigned from Deloitte. I suddenly had no money, because any remaining savings were going into building up the studio. The studio didn’t have any income. I was at my parents’ place. The Deep Impact Recording, which is the name of the studio, started in what was ultimately the room next to my parents’ kitchen, my mom’s kitchen.

These musicians would come through, through my back garden, and my mom would be cooking like dal or chapatis, and then they would go through into the actual studio. There were time where a couple of musicians would turn up and they’d walk right out, because they’d be like, ‘WTF is going on?’

In some ways, it became a huge win, because it meant the music I produced had to be really good. That was the focus. If people could get over that initial hurdle, I then began to become known as, ‘Hi, have you been to Deep Impact Recordings? He’s our Indian brother, the one that records those tunes in his mom’s kitchen, man. You can cook up some wicked stuff there, man.’

This is actually what I perceive to be a big problem became a huge strength, because people would laugh about it. ‘You got to go see Deep Impact Recordings. He’s bagging. He’s our Indian brother. He’s really a good fam. Go eat some dal with his parents,’ because my mom would come in and talk to the musicians.

Within the African and Caribbean cultures, it’s very natural to be respectful of mothers. Actually, whilst these people were doing whatever they were doing in their private lives, professionally with my mom, they were so wonderful and polite. My mom was like, ‘Brilliant, your friends are so amazing, Deepak.’ There was all this kind stuff going on, and there was me in the middle of it trying to figure out, ‘What is going on? What am I doing?

It was also quite lonely, Joseph – lonely because one of the things that I think often gets missed about any form of, let’s call it, coaching tuition of music production is it’s very giving. In that hour that I was producing someone’s music, and these are like 18-year-old rappers that trying to make their fortune, it’s all about their music. It’s all about them.

I’d be doing this maybe six to eight hours a day at times, and I was left feeling completely emotionally exhausted. I didn’t really understand or have anyone that I could communicate about this with. There were some days that I just cried, dude. I felt very lonely, and I felt that I didn’t really connect necessarily that well with anyone else in the industry when it came to talking about what my true passion was, which is actually making music rather than the production of other’s music.

That was definitely something that I struggled with amidst this whole space, not knowing if I’m going to make money tomorrow. I need to say yes to every booking, but then being left by myself and being alone. It was this kind of weird vortex of emotions.

Joseph: How did you then make the transition into focusing on what you really did love which was to actually make your own rap music?

Deepak: Number one, I stuck it out. Meaning that I committed to trying to produce music for these others. I, as a consequence of being able to get musicians, then became better at the production of music. Meaning that I began to develop some regular clients. That meant a little bit of stable income. That meant that I could carve out space to work on my music.

The stable income led to a regularity of phases which also led to me actually getting referrals which also led to me developing some friendships to some of these musicians that did come in. All of these things started to come together. That made me feel a lot more fulfilled.

Joseph: Now, I’ve got to ask you a little bit about your music itself. I did go the YouTube channel that you shared with me. I did watch a few of your videos. Speaking of sticking things out, I checked out one of your videos called ‘Winners Get Bruised.’ I think the line—and I think you could probably say this better than I can—you said, ‘Winners get bruised, winners get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment.’ Can you just explain what the inspiration was behind that particular line in this particular song?

Deepak: I love the chorus. I have my little trim that ‘winners get bruised, winner get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment. Sinners just talk. Sinners just walk to lay down… [rap music plays] yes.

[Winners get bruised, winners get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment. Sinners just talk. Sinners just walk when the going gets tough…]

Joseph: That’s great.

Deepak: I’ve recorded that particular song actually a few years after I left the studio behind in terms of timeline. It’s really interesting that that was the song you picked, because for me, one of the things that transitions have taught me is that hang in there. Stick it out. The true mark for me of how I measure a person and how I also measure success is your ability to come back from abject failure or your ability to endure environments where you’re not able to demonstrate your skillset or your strong suite.

These kinds of situations and that song really takes me back to ultimately, ‘Did I succeed as a musician?’ Well, objectively no. I failed, because no one’s heard of me. I’ve got a history and an archive on YouTube, which of course we post rationalize, and a lot of this other things. What I didn’t achieve was the ability to carve out a life as a musician.

What did come as a consequence, and I didn’t really appreciate it at the time but I did when I made this song which is later in the timeline, was that, ‘You know what? Wow, it gave me a lot of character building.’ It was my first really true transition where I turned my whole image around to being, ‘Ah, Deepak, yeah. No, he’s the…’ the dinner party’s with my parents, ‘Ah, you know my son. He’s an accountant.’ My dad’s Indian accent, ‘Ah, my son’s working at Deloitte. It’s a very good company. He’s an accountant now, brilliant.’ These are the conversations, and these are the things that my dad would tell his people at work. In those days, my dad didn’t tell anyone that I’ve left.

That song ‘Winners Get Bruised, Winner Gets Broken,’ it brings back a lot of memories.

Joseph: One of the other lines in there was, ‘I put my blood and sweat into every song I make then upload to SoundCloud and only get three plays.’ Did you have that experience, and if so, what was that like?

Deepak: Yeah. Life and experiences, of course, they toughen you when you go through stuff. I look back at it now, and I smile. At the time, it sucked. If people were to look Deepak Shukla up on SoundCloud right now, they would see that there’s literally over 100 songs on Sound Cloud, just my music, not my podcast or my SEO. It’s my music. It’s me rapping.

I didn’t succeed in the journey of becoming a recognized rapper. Part of me wonders whether that even was meant to be. Was that the journey that I was on? I’m not really sure. I know that I love music, and I know that what’s also interesting is that less than 5% of those songs are actually commercial songs. I never really transitioned or went on that journey to try and make music for a mass market audience.

I’d say that if people objectively look back, did I succeed in becoming a recognized rapper? No. Was that my intention? I’m not sure. Even this call reminds me that music is still a love of mine. What I’m really most please about in looking back at all of that is that I can say, ‘You know what? I tried.’ I really made the transition. I’ve left Deloitte. I started the studio. I didn’t become a rapper, but my god, one thing is definitely absent when I look back. I don’t feel any sense of regret about it half.

Joseph: I think one of the things that really stood out to me as I was watching your videos was that I would really struggle to put myself out there like that. I think that for people who listen to this show, one of the challenges that people struggle with is they’ve got an idea, they want to ‘put themselves out there,’ but the idea of putting themselves out there is incredibly scary. It feels incredibly vulnerable. I’m just wondering, what was it like for you to put out your first music video? What was it like to watch yourself on there?

Deepak: It felt exactly like the moment that people feel when they go to approach perhaps a pretty girl at the bar. You have so many butterflies, and you don’t know what you’re going to say, and you are almost just waiting for yourself to screw it all up. That was the experience of it.

For example, a musician will come and produce a music in my studio. I’d ask him to listen to one of my songs. You could see him begrudgingly say, ‘Okay, cool,’ but really just doing it to be polite and then me thinking this song needs to be so mind-blowing that it needs to knock him off his chair.

My music isn’t mind-blowing, but it’s really important that you’d still go out and go and show someone that is an industry expert something that you’ve made. That’s an integral part of getting better at the work. It’s important to recognize that, and I thought I didn’t always successfully did.

There’s a hundred songs on SoundCloud, but there’s probably another hundred that I’ve lost or have been scattered or that I decided not to upload and lots of other things. I think that it’s a continual journey that people go on.

For me, it’s like the experience of pain tolerance, like when you do, for example, ultra marathons or anything that’s extremely painful physically that the only way to build up your tolerance is to go and do more of it. The SEALs do it in their training, continual exposure to high pressure environments. It’s always been hard. It still is hard.

That’s also why I go out and still try and do stuff that I know that I’m not good at, like swimming, because actually I find transitions, and it bleeds into other parts of my life. It helps me do some of the other work that can hopefully lead towards some of the success I’ll have in my career.

Joseph: One of the last things I want to talk about, Deepak, is some of the things you’ve learned along the way here about career change, and it relates to something you’re talking about which is picking yourself back up and bouncing back if maybe your music video doesn’t land that well with somebody or it doesn’t get that many views. How do you go about bouncing back? How do you go about dealing with things like rejection?

Deepak: With rejection, the best way to manage it is avoid dwelling. Avoiding dwelling is to go out. It means for me to go out and take new actions. Spend a very small moment of time wondering what you could have improved about the process rather than what went wrong when you fail at some things, ‘Oh wow, that sucks.’ I’d rather be like, ‘Okay, what was the feedback? Okay, fine. Let me take that, and let me go out and do something new or something different.’ Action and activity is a practical way for me to move forward from failure.

The second thing that relates to transition, like relaunch, what’s been really liberating for me is realizing that, ‘Deepak, the world doesn’t care about you. You could dance on the street naked, and within two day, everyone will have forgotten that you were ever there.’ That really helps me, because it makes me recognize that the person who cared the most actually is me.

Joseph, I’ve been on maybe a dozen or so podcasts, and everyone has had access to my YouTube videos, but you’re the only one that’s taken the time, for example, to look specifically at some of my rap songs. What that reminds me and it’s quite helpfully reminding me is that, ‘Deepak, you know what? You can still put everything out there, and people are so busy with their own lives that you can relaunch yourself in any way you want. The biggest obstacle actually is yourself and realizing that no one cares.’ For me, it’s been very liberating.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, because I know we talked about that before when we spoke prior to this call: this idea that we are all so focused on what other people think about us. We think that other people are thinking about us, but actually, people are really concerned about their own image, their own issues. I found that really liberating the idea that, actually, people aren’t as focused on you as you may think that they are.

Deepak: I agree. I agree. The one acid test that people could do is think of someone who’s in their network and then think, for example, Luke’s my best friend – how often do I actually think very carefully about Luke’s career decisions, about what he’s doing? Not that much. I just think, ‘Okay, cool.’ I’ll ping him to be like, ‘Hey dude, let’s go have some beers,’ or, ‘Hey man, what’s up? How’s your day?’

Joseph: One of the things we talked about when we chatted prior to this recording is about the fact that you’re able to shift and reframe your personal brand and professional narrative to help open doors during each stage of your career change.

I was wondering if you could just share a couple of the way’s that you’ve managed to take control of your own personal brand and your own career narrative. I know you mentioned before, there was a major shift between accountancy and then becoming a rapper. How did you manage to remake your identity so quickly and so effectively?

Deepak: When I switched from my recording studio and that all got put to bed, I then launched within two months a tutoring agency. I went from being someone who is Deep Impakt the rapper to being Deepak Shukla the academic teacher and tutor.

I did a couple of things. Number one, practically speaking, I would take for example my professional resume. That would be LinkedIn. I began to focus upon anything that could support the narrative that I would wanted to communicate. ‘Okay, Deepak, you want to move from being a rapper to being a tutor. Have you ever taught anyone anything?’ People be like, ‘Oh, well no, I haven’t, but actually everyone has taught someone else something.’

Everyone assumes that if it’s not a paid exchange, therefore it’s not experience. That is not what work experience is. Work experience is experience of doing the work. If you take it very literally, then you quickly recognize that you have done some things to support the narrative you’re trying to communicate. Furthermore, I would extend that onto a place like YouTube.

If I was to give you a URL for my tutoring channel, there are multiple videos there that I go on and talk about the process of studying, the process of tuition, the process of education. I took all of those things, and then I used that to really angle and position my resume.

That’s what’s become very powerful for me, which is, ‘Okay, where’s the space that you’re trying to go into?’ Right now, I’m an SEO guy, and it took that exact same process I’ve just described, positioning my LinkedIn, producing some content that relates to SEO and making them the massive focus of what I communicate to the world.

Joseph: Very cool. Yeah, it’s very helpful. I really do think that a lot of times, people sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about reshaping their career narrative, and they kind of feel like, ‘Oh, I’m misleading somebody, or I’m not being accurate about what I’ve done.’ I actually think that, like what you just said, it’s about being selective and being intentional and choiceful about the things you do share to help build a specific narrative, which I think is slightly different. Very helpful.

I want to wrap up today, Deepak, with what you’re up to right now. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what’s next for you at Pearl Lemon. I’d love for you to start, first of all, by just telling us about the structure of Pearl Lemon. I remember back from my marketing day, I used to work with agencies that are in a physical office, but that’s not how you’re set up, right?

Deepak: Pearl Lemon, we’re a team of seven. I work from my local café or my flat here in London all of the time. The team is based in London. We’ve been working together for two years. I’ve met her four times in two years, even though we live less than 5, 10 miles apart.

We’ve got Semil, Raj, and Atit doing some of the production work in India. You got Melanie in New York, Rebecca in Texas, Lincoln in Kingston, Jamaica. The team is remote. The team is distributed. Why? Because of my 20’s, Joseph. I’ve spend most of my time abroad traveling, living, exploring.

I started this business with the same question in mind which is, ‘Deepak, how can you run a business that’s distributed and remote?’ number one. Number two, ‘How can you scale trust?’ Number three, ‘How can you convince someone to pay you invoices at the start of the month instead of at the end of the month?’ Again, that meant number four. Everything came about it well, position yourself as an expert in the space, produce a lot of content that also relates to, or publicly put out stuff about your personal life. Try and build things that way.

Starting with those questions that I sought to answer in mind, that has helped the business grow and be where it is today. Again, I’ve never met any of my clients, Joseph, I think. I met one once four months after we started working together.

As to the future, Joseph, naturally I want to continue growing the agency to do what it can do. Outside of that, I like to tinker. I’ve got online course launches happening at the moment. We’ve just made our four or five sales, so that’s really interesting.

There’s these things that I’ve been exploring and experimenting with, alongside the main focus of growing the agency and then continuing to experiment and explore, Joseph.

Joseph: Okay. Any plans to get back into the rap scene?

Deepak: You’ll be the first to know. I definitely will promise you this. I’m going to record at least one more song again, and I will send it to you once it’s done, on the basis of the inspiration you provided me through asking me such amazing questions and taking the time to go through my music. I feel so grateful about that.

Joseph: Well, if you do manage to do that, then we’ll definitely include it in the show notes. If you get it to me quickly enough, we can maybe include snippets of it in the actual show. There’s some incentive there for you right there. Cool.

If people want to learn more about Pearl Lemon or if they just want to learn more about you and check out some of your music videos, where can they go?

Deepak: You could literally go to DeepakShukla.com. You’ll find everything about my agency as well as my personal life there. YouTube Deepak Shukla, or just Googling my name works perfectly.

Joseph: Perfect. We will make sure that we include a couple of those links in the show notes. If you don’t mind, I might even include one of your YouTube videos that we’ve referenced during this call. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you so much for your time and for walking us through your really interesting career.

Deepak: Joseph, thank you for taking the time to ask me such excellent questions. I’m excited and nervous at the same time to see my music, of all things, in your show notes