TanGent Show

In this episode, I sat down with an extremely special guest: my dad. He has since passed away, so this recording is very special to me. It serves as a lasting memory of the love and kindness he shared with everyone he met.

Vinay Kumar Satyal: November 12, 1944 - May 8, 2024

Payal Kadakia is the founder of ClassPass and the founder and artistic director of The Sa Dance Company, a contemporary Indian dance company. An MIT graduate who went on to work at Bain & Company and Warner Music Group, Payal managed to turn the thing she couldn't imagine giving up (dance) into the foundation for both her artistic career and one of the biggest fitness platforms in the world.

Payal and I have known each other for a while, so this conversation has a pretty natural, catching-up feel to it. She tells me about growing up as an Indian kid in New Jersey, being the nerd who also happened to spend her weekends competing in Indian dance, and the process of finally realizing that she didn't have to choose between the different parts of herself. That eventually led her to quit a secure career without a Plan B and build what became ClassPass.

Payal doesn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur so much as an inventor. Whether she's building a dance company, a technology platform, or simply designing her own life, she's constantly asking how to create something that makes people feel something they haven't felt before. Her advice to other founders is similarly straightforward - stop obsessing over the name, the office, the lawyers and the marketing, and make sure the actual thing you're creating works first. It's a conversation about ambition, identity, and making room for the things that give you energy instead of treating them like distractions from your "real" career.

Watch Payal Kadakia's interview with CBS about how Payal built ClassPass into a billion dollar company.

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Parvesh Cheena is an actor and voice performer whose career has taken him from Barbershop to memorable roles in NBC's Outsourced, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, A to Z, and The Mandalorian, along with an extensive run in animation including Transformers: Rescue Bots and Centaurworld. He's been working professionally for two decades, which, as he explains to me, is roughly when you can finally say you're an actor because somebody is actually paying your rent.

Parvesh brings the kind of openness that makes it very easy to forget we're recording. He's thoughtful about his career, wonderfully candid about anxiety and therapy, and has a lot to say about identity and the strange boxes we create for ourselves and each other. And because this is Parvesh, even the serious stuff has a sense of humor underneath it. I had a great time sitting down with him, and I think you will too.

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Dean Delray is a stand-up comedian and podcaster who has spent years building a career around two things he clearly loves: comedy and rock and roll. He's the host of the long-running Let There Be Talk podcast, where he's interviewed an incredible range of musicians, comedians, and entertainers, and his own comedy career has taken him from The Comedy Store to touring stages around the country.

Dean is one of those people who seems completely incapable of pretending to be interested in something he's not interested in, and honestly, I mean that as a compliment. He's unapologetically obsessed with music, especially the kind of rock records most people have spent decades listening to, and hearing him give me a roadmap for properly getting into The Rolling Stones was worth the conversation by itself.

But underneath all the rock-and-roll stories is someone with a genuinely fascinating relationship to comedy. This conversation ran long because Dean has opinions about pretty much everything, and fortunately, he's willing to share them. Music, movies, comedy, smoking, the internet, meeting your idols, and what it means to live a life without many regrets all somehow make their way into the mix. Dean has a serious lust for life, and by the end of our conversation, I found that pretty contagious.

Catch Dean on tour!

Watch Dean's new special "5836"

Grab some of Dean's merch!

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Avantika Vandanapu has already had a pretty wild career for someone who started acting as a child. The Bay Area-born actress began working in Telugu cinema before moving into American projects, eventually landing the lead in Disney's Spin and appearing in Senior Year, Mean Girls, Tarot, and Prime Video's Big Girls Don't Cry.

We talk about growing up between California and India, starting her career so young, and making the jump from Telugu films to becoming a Disney lead. Her story about getting the Spin audition through her mom's relentless detective work is particularly great, as is the moment when Disney asked her to translate something into Hindi and she realized that understanding a language and actually translating it on command are two very different things.

We get into being South Asian, being Gen Z, and how those identities shift depending on the room you're in. We also manage to talk R&B and DJing, and establish that I apparently have enough dad jokes to justify my new(ish) status as a father.

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Hari Kondabolu is a comedian, writer and podcaster whose work has landed him everywhere from Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Conan to Comedy Central, and his documentary The Problem with Apu. He also has a Master's in Human Rights from the London School of Economics, which may explain why a conversation with Hari can go from tennis and punk rock to race, power and colonialism without ever feeling like that much of a detour.

Hari and I had actually been talking before we started recording, and at one point we realized, "Wait, this is the conversation." So we hit record and just kept going. I really enjoyed getting into his journey from working in immigrant rights in Seattle and treating comedy as a hobby to accidentally having a career take off around the same time he got accepted to the LSE. We get into why he has such little patience for comedians who hide behind "it's just a joke," the difference between shocking an audience and actually saying something, and why he thinks comedy is art in the first place.

Watch Hari's recent comedy special "Vacation Baby"

Grab up some Hari Merch

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The second time Hasan Minhaj joins me on the podcast, we get a little deeper into the question of what it actually means to "make it." By this point, Hasan had already worked on The Daily Show, and released multiple comedy specials, but he was already thinking beyond the next accomplishment and toward the larger body of work he wanted to build.

We get into the idea of burning the boats, why the moment of victory is never quite long enough, and the difference between playing offense and playing defense in your career and your life. Hasan also shares some lessons he's picked up from working alongside people like Jerry Seinfeld, Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, including one particularly good reminder about what happens when fame becomes part of your identity. It's a conversation about ambition, perspective, longevity, and figuring out how to enjoy the thing you're actually doing instead of constantly waiting for whatever comes next.

Listen to Hasan Minhaj's Podcast "Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know"

Catch Hasan live on tour for "Hasan Hates Ronny"

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Hasan Minhaj has built one of the most distinctive careers in comedy, from The Daily Show and the White House Correspondents' Dinner to his Peabody, and Emmy-winning Patriot Act and Netflix specials like Homecoming King and The King's Jester. But for me, Hasan is also my old roommate, which makes this episode feel a little different from the usual celebrity interview.

We talk about why he chose comedy in the first place, the insecurity and ambition that can fuel a comedian, and why he believes the best comics eventually have to dig deep enough to find themselves. Hasan also has some very strong opinions about Jay-Z, Friends, and whether humanity is actually getting better. It's funny, surprisingly philosophical, and very much a snapshot of Hasan before the rest of the world knew what he was capable of.

Listen to Hasan Minhaj's Podcast "Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know"

Catch Hasan live on tour for "Hasan Hates Ronny"

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Deepak Chorpa is a bestselling author and one of the most recognizable voices in modern spirituality and wellness. The author of more than 90 books, including The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and Metahuman, he has spent decades exploring the intersection of consciousness, health, science, and human potential. And this isn't even our first time sitting down together - Deepak has been kind enough to return for another conversation, which gave us a lot more room to go down some pretty interesting rabbit holes.

One of the ideas I keep coming back to from this conversation is Deepak's argument that defining yourself can actually limit you. We put ourselves into boxes based on nationality, religion, profession, family, history, even our own names, and then spend a lifetime defending those definitions. Deepak's challenge is much more radical: don't just get out of the box - get rid of the box altogether. For a comedian, that's a pretty irresistible idea to explore.

Deepak has a way of taking a seemingly simple question and opening five more doors behind it, so I mostly just tried to keep up. I've now had the chance to sit across from Deepak multiple times, and each conversation seems to leave me with a different question to chew on. This one is no exception.

Pre-Order Deepak's upcoming book "Awakening in the Final Chapter: Aging with Grace, Love, and Freedom"

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Ian Edwards is a stand-up comedian and writer who has performed on Def Comedy Jam, The Tonight Show, Conan, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and Gotham Comedy Live. He's also written for shows including The Boondocks and Black-ish, but if you ask Ian to describe himself, his answer is much simpler: "lazy and ambitious."

That combination pretty much tells you what kind of conversation this is. Ian has a wonderfully sideways way of looking at things, and I get him talking about the strange logic behind his comedy, performing in England, growing up Jamaican American, and the completely ridiculous situations that somehow become great comedy material.

There is also a pretty great running battle between Ian's ambition and his laziness - including a day when he woke up early, exercised, watched The Borgias, took a nap, watched more The Borgias, and ultimately considered waking up early to be his major accomplishment. Honestly, I respect the commitment to the bit.

Ian is the kind of comedian who can make an ordinary observation feel like a completely new thought, and this episode gives him plenty of room to do exactly that. It's loose, weird, very funny, and full of the kind of stories that make you understand the comedian a little better without ever feeling like we're sitting down for a formal lesson in comedy.

Watch Ian's recent special: "Untitled | The Comedy Special You Didn't Know You Needed"

Catch Ian on tour

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