The author of In Praise of Failure, Costica Bradatan, joins me from Romania to share his wisdom on all things lack and loss. We talk about the true meaning of humility, the benefits of clumsiness, and just how broken democracy is — and has been — across time and place. Plus, we discuss quite possibly the biggest failure of all, the one none of us can avoid: death. I got to indulge my latent philosophical bent in this conversation, meaning I could even comfortably confess that I tried to work an 1880 parable into The X Files.

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