The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Asura Client Show. I am thrilled to have this

episode for you this week. My guest is Tana Hasek Hoats. He is one of those folks who really need

to know introduction, but he is at the Atlantic. He's one of my brother,

genius grand. He's writing an amazing comic book or form Marvel. He's the author of the

National Bookboard winning between the world and me. And he's come out this week with a tremendous

piece, the product of hours and hours of interviews of President Obama about the role that race played

in his life, in his presidency in America right now in the election of Donald Trump. It's a really

powerful piece of writing, very, very, very thought provoking. And Tana Hasek and I talk about it

quite a bit in this piece. I've always really valued Tana Hasek's thinking as a writer, as a friend

because he has something I think a lot of folks in American politics lack, which is a sense of

historical sweep and also a sense of tragic imagination, a sense that things don't always go right.

And at this moment that I think has been proven out to be true. So we talk about that in this

discussion. We talk a lot about the difference between Tana Hasek's, I don't want to call pessimism,

maybe it's a realism and President Obama's optimism. That's really the gap that powers his

piece. And frankly, a lot of his work, we talk a lot about where American politics is right now,

how race is or is not playing into it, how polarization plays into it. We talk about Tana Hasek's

path into being a writer and why he has found it hard to keep learning in the way he wants to,

how it's become harder to be wrong. The discussion gets very personal towards the end in a way,

I really appreciated him going there. And I think it'll be of a lot of interest to all of you.

He talks a lot about what he would recommend to young writers who want to break into the industry,

not just in terms of tactical goal oriented work, but how do you structure your life? What do you do?

...