Welcome to the deep dive. Today is Sunday, March
29, 2026. And I'm really excited you're joining
us today because we have a fascinating one. Oh,
absolutely. This is this is one of those topics
that just completely changes how you see the
world. It really does, because, you know, we
talk about. the internet today using all these
very physical spatial metaphors, right? Yeah,
like calling it a web. Exactly, a web. Or, you
know, we talk about storing our whole lives in
the cloud. Or navigating an information superhighway.
Right, because human beings fundamentally need
a map for the infinite. I mean, we can't really
comprehend endless branching information without,
you know, giving it a shape. Right, a boundary.
But what if... And this is the crazy part. What
if the blueprint for that exact mental architecture,
like the concept of endless virtual realities
and branching networks, what if all that was
drawn up decades before the first computer screen
ever turned on? Yeah, before the hardware even
existed. Exactly. Mapped out by a guy working
in a municipal basement in Argentina in the 1940s.
So today, our mission on this deep dive is to
explore the life and the mind of the legendary
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It's just
a phenomenal life to examine because we're looking
at someone who essentially bridged the 19th century
world of swords and soldiers with our 21st century
world of digital infinity. And he did almost
all of it while working as a librarian. Which
is just the best detail. It really is. And our
main source for this, where we're pulling a lot
of this incredibly rich detail from, is a very
comprehensive biographical and literary profile,
basically, his main Wikipedia article, which
is just fantastic. It's a great distillation
of his life. OK, let's unpack this. To understand
the literal worlds that Borges built, we have
to look at where he started. Right, the foundational
soil of his mind. Exactly. So he's born in 1899
in Buenos Aires. And right from the jump, his
brain is wired for like multiple realities. Yeah,
he grew up completely bilingual. Right, speaking
Spanish and English, to the point where he was
actually reading Shakespeare in English by the
time he was 12 years old. Which is wild. It is.
But the real center of his universe wasn't the
city outside. I mean, Borges later said that
if he had to name the chief event of his entire
life, it was his father's library. Yeah, that
library is basically the foundation of his entire
psychology. How so? Well, his father, Jorge Guillermo
Borges, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher.
But more importantly, he was a man who desperately
wanted to be a successful writer. Ah, right.
The unfulfilled dream. Exactly. He even published
a novel in 1921, but it completely failed to
leave a mark. It just didn't do anything. So
Borges grows up kind of internalizing that failure,
right? Yeah, heavily. Because he comes from this
lineage. of military heroes on his mother's side,
literal men of action who fought in the Argentine
War of Independence. Right, the guys on the horses
with the swords. Exactly. But Borges himself
was physically fragile. He had terrible eyesight,
even from a really young age. So he felt this
profound, almost shameful destiny. Yeah, he wrote
about feeling like he was supposed to fulfill
his father's thwarted literary ambitions because
he was just you know, a bookish kind of person
and not a man of action. Right. And for the first
part of his life, he's following a pretty conventional
path for a brilliant intellectual. He travels
Europe, absorbs philosophy in Switzerland and
Spain, moves back to Buenos Aires and becomes
an avant -garde poet. Yeah, writing verses about
the streets of his city. And it was good work,
but... It wasn't the reality -bending genius
we associate with him today. Exactly. That Borches,
the guy who mapped the infinite, didn't truly
emerge until this massive catastrophic sequence
of events in 1938. The inciting incident. Yeah.
So first his father dies, and then... Just weeks
later, on Christmas Eve, Borsche suffers a severe
head injury. Yeah, he basically hits his head
on a freshly painted open window frame. Right,
and the wound gets severely infected. He develops
sepsis. Which, in 1938, was often a death sentence.
It really was. He is hovering on the absolute
brink of death, hallucinating, running a massive
fever, just completely unmoored from reality
for weeks. It's almost like his brain was broken
down to its base component. Yes. I always think
of it like rebooting a computer that's completely
crashed, and when it finally turns back on, you
find it's mysteriously upgraded to this incredibly
advanced, almost alien op - That's a great analogy.
Because, I mean, how did that trauma shift his
writing? He goes from typical poetry to this
profound, mind -bending fiction. Well, when he
finally recovers miraculously, he's terrified.
You have to remember, he's a man whose entire
worth is wrapped up in his intellect. Right.
So he's terrified. The fever has literally broken
his brain. He needs to test himself. But he doesn't
write a poem or an essay. No, he writes a story.
Right. A piece called Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote. And this story is completely absurd,
but it's brilliant. Just to give you a quick
summary, if you haven't read it, it's about a
fictional 20th century French author who decides
he's going to rewrite Miguel de Cervantes' Don
Quixote word for word. But not copy it. Right.
not copy it. He's going to live a life so specific
and immerse himself in so much history that he
will naturally, spontaneously invent the exact
same words that Cervantes wrote 300 years earlier.
It's an incredible exploration of context if
we connect this to the bigger picture. Borges
is arguing through this fictional reviewer that
even if the words are identical, a 20th century
Frenchman writing Don Quixote creates a fundamentally
different much richer book. Because the context
of history completely changes the meaning of
those exact same words. Exactly. And this marks
a definitive shift toward a style that critics
call irreality. Wait, let's pause on that term.
What does irreality actually look like on the
page? Are we just talking about fantasy, like,
you know, wizards and dragons and magic? No,
no, not exactly. It's not high fantasy. Irreality
is more like taking a philosophical or mathematical
concept and treating it as a literal, physical
reality. Okay, so give me an example. Like, instead
of a magical land, he writes about a world where
the concept of time is physically altered. Or
he writes about an encyclopedia from a completely
fictional planet that somehow, like... bleeds
into our reality and actually starts changing
our history. Wow. Yeah, he stopped using traditional
narrative plots. He started using philosophy,
other books, and pure imagination as his primary
sources of real lived experience. So for Borges,
a concept you read in a book is just as physically
real as the chair you're sitting on. Exactly.
So he installs this new operating system in his
brain and he starts building his labyrinths.
If you pick up a Borge's collection, you're going
to hit these recurring motifs constantly. Infinity,
mazes, mirrors, fake writers. The classics. Right.
But the absolute masterpiece that bridges his
1940s reality to our modern digital lives is
a story he published in 1941. The Garden of Fracking
Paths. Yes. The Garden of Forking Paths. It is
just a stunning piece of architecture. I mean,
on the surface, it reads like a standard spy
thriller. Right. The protagonist, Dr. Yusin,
is a Chinese professor living in England, but
he's secretly spying for Germany during World
War One. And his cover is blown. He's on the
run, trying to pass a vital secret message to
Berlin before he's killed. But the spy plot is
really just a Trojan horse. Because Yu Sun ends
up at the house of a man who's been studying
the life of Yu Sun's own ancestor. Right, an
ancestor who was famous for trying to do two
massive things. Write an infinite novel and build
an infinite physical maze. And no one could ever
find the physical maze. And the book he left
behind was just considered this chaotic, contradictory
mess. Until the Man Yu Sun visits explains the
secret. The book is the maze. The ancestor didn't
build a physical labyrinth out of hedges or stone.
He built a labyrinth of time. And this is the
part that just completely blows my mind. The
novel the ancestor wrote is one where whenever
a character is faced with a choice, they don't
just choose one path and move the plot forward.
Right. They don't just go left or right. No.
All possible choices occur simultaneously. If
a character can open a door or walk away, the
narrative splits. In one chapter, they open it.
In another, they walk away. And those chapters
branch out into infinite parallel universes that
sometimes converge again. What's fascinating
here is that by writing that, Borges essentially
invented the concept of the hypertext novel.
He described a theory of the universe based on
a network of diverging, converging, and parallel
times decades before the internet. OK, I have
to push back here a little bit. Sure. Did he
really invent hypertext? I mean, it's an incredibly
cool choose -your -own -adventure concept. But
isn't it a massive stretch to say a guy with
a typewriter in the 40s invented the architecture
of the internet and digital media? I get why
you'd say that, but it sounds like a stretch
until you look at who actually built the digital
era. OK. The non -linear structure of that story
directly influenced the pioneers of modern science
fiction and digital theory. I mean, William Gibson,
the cyberpunk pioneer who literally coined the
term cyberspace. Yeah, Gibson explicitly said
that reading Borschtis as a young man was like
installing software that exponentially increased
his bandwidth. That's a great quote. It is. Authors
like Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolf cite him as
a foundational text. Borschtis handed them the
conceptual blueprint for branching networks and
parallel processing long before the hardware
existed to actually build it. Okay, that makes
total sense. He provided the philosophy, and
the engineers later provided the silics. Exactly.
But to me, the most relatable part of his whole
approach was his attitude toward actually writing
these massive ideas down. Because Borscht just
notoriously claimed that writing a 500 -page
book just to explain a single concept was, and
I quote, a laborious madness. Yeah, he hated
Fuller. Right. He said it was much better to
just pretend the book already existed and simply
write a 10 -page review or a summary of it. Yeah,
he called it a lazy pleasure. He was heavily
influenced by the 19th century writer Thomas
Carlyle, who wrote a book called Sartor Resartus,
which was essentially a long review of a fake
German philosopher. And Boris took that idea
and just perfected it. He built his global fame
on literary forgeries, writing dense, incredibly
serious scholarly essays, reviewing books that
were entirely made up. And he calls it laziness.
But I mean, for anyone listening today who feels
completely overwhelmed by the constant fire hose
of information on the Internet, what Borges did
was the ultimate life hack for a learner. Absolutely.
He realized we don't have time for 500 pages
of filler and character exposition just to get
to a cool idea. Yeah. He was distilling a massive
non -existent book down to its purest five -minute
essence. That's not lazy at all. That is supreme
efficiency. It's an incredibly modern approach
to data. He was stripping away the mechanics
of traditional narrative to deliver a pure, concentrated,
philosophical payload. You get the mind -bending
concept without wading through the packaging.
But, you know, the great tragic irony of his
life is that just as his literary vision was
expanding to encompass these infinite universes
and endless bandwidth, His physical vision began
to fail him. Yeah. It was a progressive inherited
condition. His father had suffered from it, and
Boris's knew it was coming for him too. Just
a ticking clock. Exactly. It slowly destroyed
his eyesight over decades, until by his late
50s, he was completely blind. And he never learned
to read Braille. And the timing of this is almost
too cruel to be real. Here's where it gets really
interesting. In 1955, right as he is losing the
very last of his sight, when the world has basically
become just a blur of light and shadow, he is
appointed the director of the Argentine National
Library. It's an incredible historical moment.
He is officially given command of a building
containing 900 ,000 books. 900 ,000 books. Precisely
when he can no longer read a single word on the
page. That is just... It's devastating. I mean,
it's like finally being handed the keys to a
warehouse full of Ferraris on the exact day you
lose your driver's license. How do you even process
that kind of cosmic joke? Well, Borsch has processed
it through art. He didn't react with bitterness.
He reacted with awe at the symmetry of it all.
He wrote his famous poem of the gifts where he
says, No one should read self pity or approach
into the statement of the majesty of God, who
with such splendid irony at one touch granted
me books and night. Splendid irony. Just incredible.
To have your entire universe be reading and to
lose the ability to read just as you are crowned
king of the library. Yeah. How did he physically
function as a writer after that? He had to completely
change his mechanics. Because he couldn't see
the page to edit prose anymore, he focused much
more heavily on poetry. Oh, because he could
memorize it. Exactly. He could compose lines
in his head, revise them internally, and memorize
entire stanzas as he walked the streets of Buenos
Aires. Wow. And when it came to writing things
down or reading, he relied incredibly heavily
on his mother, Leonore, who lived to be 99 years
old. That's amazing. And later, he relied on
Maria Kodama, who became his literary assistant
and eventually his wife. They became his eyes,
his readers, and his So he is literally dictating
his infinite labyrinths to the people around
him. Yes. And on a deeper level, the blindness
actually sharpened his interior world. He once
observed that for the blind, every thought becomes
a tool. Because you're living entirely inside
your head. Exactly. Deprived of physical sight,
his forced inwardness perfectly aligned with
his lifelong themes. When you can't see the walls
of the room you're in, the concept of an infinite
boundless space isn't just a metaphor anymore.
It becomes your daily physical reality. That
gives me chills, but the thing about being trapped
in your own mind constructing these perfect infinite
libraries is that eventually the real world is
going to knock on the door. Always does. And
in mid 20th century Argentina, the real world
was incredibly volatile. He couldn't just live
in the clouds. No, he couldn't. And his political
life is a fascinating complex area. Now, Borges
famously claimed he wanted to keep his opinions
in. watertight compartments, completely separate
from his fiction. You wanted the stories to be
pure. Right, untouched by the daily news. But
reality constantly intruded and those compartments
leaked. OK, before we dive into this, I need
to put a quick disclaimer out there. Because
we are about to discuss some very polarized,
volatile political history. Yeah, it gets intense.
So just to be completely clear to you listening.
Our goal here is absolutely not to take sides
or endorse Borge's political views. We are simply
going to impartially report his beliefs and actions
exactly as they appear in the source material,
whether they lean left, right or center. Very
important point, because looking at his life,
his politics were incredibly complex and often
shifted based on a core underlying philosophy.
So let's look at how that played out in the 40s.
Juan Peron comes to power in Argentina in 1946.
Right. Borges had been very vocal in his support
of the Allies during World War II, which clashed
with the ruling party's more ambiguous, sometimes
axi -sympathetic stance. Yeah, there was friction
there. Definitely. So as a deliberate, calculated
insult to an intellectual, the government removes
Borges from his library job. And this is where
they promote him, right? Yeah. They promote him
to be the municipal inspector of poultry and
rabbits at the local public market. Inspecting
chickens and rabbits. It's just a classic authoritarian
move designed to humiliate him and put him in
his place. Right. But Borsch's refused to play
along. He resigned immediately and quickly became
one of the intellectual leaders of the anti -piranist
opposition. He started lecturing and speaking
out against what he saw as authoritarian overreach.
And this wasn't his first time clashing with
authoritarianism. In the 30s and 40s, he was
a fierce outspoken critic of fascism and Nazi
ideology. Absolutely. In 1934, Argentine ultra
-nationalists actually accused Borges of secretly
being Jewish, basically implying he wasn't a
true Argentine. And his response was brilliant.
It was. He fired back with his biting essay called
Yo Judeo. I, a Jew, where he basically said he
would be immensely proud to have Jewish heritage.
And he completely mocked the pseudoscience of
racial purity. He also explored the dark psychology
of fascism in his fiction. In 1946, he published
a story called Deutche's Requiem. What's that
one about? It's written from the perspective
of an unrepentant Nazi war criminal who's facing
execution. And Borchus wasn't defending the Nazi.
He was trying to dissect the tragic archetype
of a person whose ideology demands violence.
Getting inside the mindset. Right. The character
in the story actually welcomes his own defeat
in execution because to him, the fact that he's
being destroyed by superior force proves his
underlying worldview. Which is that violence
and power are the only things that matter. Exactly.
Borchus was showing how fascism essentially becomes
a death cult. Wow. But he was equally opposed
to communism too. Very much so. He described
himself, borrowing a term from his father, as
a Spenserian anarchist. He believed that the
individual should be strong and the state should
be weak to the point of near invisibility. So
he couldn't generate any enthusiasm for political
systems that placed the state above the individual,
whether they were on the far right or the far
left? Which brings us to perhaps his most controversial
era. In the 1970s, Argentina was engulfed in
chaos, and Borges initially expressed support
for the right -wing military junta. Yeah. He
viewed them, at first, as a necessary force for
restoring order to a society that he felt was
just completely falling apart. But as the horrific
realities of the Dirty War emerged, the forced
disappearances of thousands of citizens, the
torture, the systematic state terror, Borges
was profoundly scandalized. He realized what
he had supported. Exactly. And he didn't just
quietly change his mind either. He actively turned
against the regime. He stopped publishing in
a major newspaper in protest. And remarkably,
he actually attended the 1985 trials of the military
junta as an observer. Right. He wrote that failing
to condemn those crimes would make the entire
country an accomplice to them. So by the end
of his life, he had returned to a firm, renewed
faith in democracy. So if you look at all these
political shifts from opposing Peron to opposing
fascists to supporting and then condemning the
junta. So what does this all mean? How did a
man who wrote about infinite imaginary worlds
navigate such a dangerous polarized reality?
This raises an important question about what
actually drove him. For Borges, the ultimate
enemy across all his political eras was the suppression
of independent thought. I mean, why did a man
who loved infinite possibilities hate authoritarianism?
Because authoritarian regimes demand a single,
unchangeable narrative. They demand a straight
line? And he was the architect of the forking
path. Exactly. He had a brilliant quote where
he noted that dictatorships breed oppression
and cruelty, but more loathsome still is the
fact that they breed idiocy. Breed idiocy. Regimes
of absolute power supply people with ready -made
opinions, passwords, and slogans. They hand you
a script so you don't have to do the hard, uncomfortable
work of thinking for yourself. That is such a
chilling and vital observation, especially today.
The warning that systems of power, or even algorithms
on our phones, want to hand you a ready -made
opinion so you never have to think, that feels
incredibly urgent in an era of mass digital propaganda.
It really does. His life, despite its contradictions
and its blind spots, is a testament to the absolute
necessity of critical independent thought. He
demanded that we read actively, that we question
the text, and that we question the world around
us. And the world eventually recognized that
genius. I mean, for a long time, Borges was a
secret known only to the Argentine avant -garde.
And maybe if you translating admirers in France.
Yeah, he was a writers writer. But in the 1960s,
he achieved massive international renown. In
1961, he shared the very first International
Four Mentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, and that
just catapulted him into the global spotlight.
Suddenly he's touring the United States, lecturing
at Harvard, and collaborating with translators
who brought his multi -layered, intricate Spanish
prose into beautiful English. He was celebrated
by the greatest writers of the 20th century as
an absolute master of the craft. But despite
all of that, despite literally mapping out the
philosophical architecture of the modern digital
era, he never won the Nobel Prize in literature.
Which is wild. He was nominated over 30 times.
Over 30 times. It actually became a running joke
for him. He used to say, not granting me the
Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition.
Since I was born, they have not been granting
it to me. That's a great sense of humor about
it. Yeah. There is endless speculation about
why he didn't win. Some say his conservative
political views during the 70s or a controversial
award he accepted from the Pinochet regime in
Chile kept the committee from granting it. Yeah,
that makes sense. But in a strange way, it fits
his narrative perfectly. The ultimate prize always
remaining just out of reach. It's like a missing
book in his infinite library. It really is. It
leaves his story slightly open -ended. And, you
know, to wrap up this deep dive today, we want
to leave you with one final puzzle from the mind
of Borges to apply to your own life. The Borgesian
conundrum. Exactly. It's a philosophical concept
that actually bears his name. It comes from an
essay he wrote called Kafka and his precursors.
Right, where Borges was looking at writers who
lived long before Franz Kafka, but whose work
somehow seemed to have a Kafkaesque vibe to it.
And Borges argues something totally counterintuitive
here. We usually think that the past creates
the present, right? Like A leads to B. Cause
and effect. Right. But Borsch has argued that
a true genius actually creates her own precursors.
If Kafka had never been born and never written
his books, we wouldn't read those older texts
same way. We wouldn't see the hidden patterns.
The modern genius literally changes our conception
of the past. The present reaches back and rewrites
the meaning of history. So here is our final
thought for you to mull over today. Take that
Borgisian conundrum and apply it to yourself.
Do we write the story of our lives as we move
forward? Or does the story write us in reverse?
Oh, that's good. Do the chaotic, confusing, seemingly
random events of your past only make sense, only
have a cohesive shape because of the specific
person you have become today? If you fundamentally
changed who you were tomorrow, would your entire
past change its meaning along with you? It's
the ultimate forking path. The map isn't just
guiding us forward, it's constantly redrawing
where we came from. Just like mapping the internet
before the first screen was ever turned on. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the labyrinth. Keep questioning the maze
and we'll see you next time.