A few months ago, the actor Terrence Howard appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and expounded on his theories about math, physics, chemistry etc. His theories, and I’m being as polite as I can manage, were pure bovid excrement.

He talked about how 1 x 1 can’t be 1 and should be 2. He talked about how the square root of 2 is somehow broken because cubing it and then halving it brings us back to the square root of 2. He talked about how there’s no straight lines in the universe. How the platonic solids are wrong and how he opened up the flower of life and discovered the real platonic solid. And a ton of more similar or worse excrement.

It was clear from the way he spoke that what he’s doing, consciously or unconsciously, is cobbling together scientific terms that have no business being together, to sound credible. But anyone who knew any basic science or math, could tell that he’s just spewing a word salad.

Then, recently, Joe Rogan invited his friend Eric Weinstein to talk to Terrence Howard. Now, Eric Weinstein is obviously a highly intelligent man, but he’s always annoyed me for his propensity to never provide direct and simple answers to any questions. But this 4+ hour podcast turned out to be fairly interesting and watchable and changed my mind a little about both Terrence Howard and Eric Weinstein.

Somehow Eric was able to understand where Terrence was coming from and I realized that even though he kept jumping back to word salad spinning, his theories were not a completely random combination of scientific principles. He had given it some thought and constructed it consciously. He was still wrong about everything he was saying, but it wasn’t complete gibberish.

I also realized that Eric, who I thought of as someone who loves the sound of his own voice and loves to show off how intelligent he is, can be kind and generous when he’s in the mood for it.

But now the real post begins, because it’s not about any of these guys. It’s about me. (What else is new!)

I felt a strong resonance when I heard Eric Weinstein make some sense of Terrence Howard’s theories. Terrence was using a lot of intelligence to combine different scientific facts in unique ways and he was finding similarities between highly varied fields and he was recognizing a lot of patterns. The mistake Terrence was making was that he didn’t put in the work that would be required to confirm his theories or even the work to learn how to explain his theories to other scientists. If he had done any of that work, with genuine sincerity, he would have realized himself that he was wrong and he would have spared himself from these embarrassing moments.

I felt a strong resonance because I tend to do something similar. Not in the field of science, but in philosophy. I tend to come up with complete philosophical systems. The first one I came up with in college was called The Theory of Energy. Then I came up with Conscious Spiritual Evolution. At the time of coming up with these philosophical theories, they made 100% complete sense to me.

Just like Terrence, I couldn’t see how they could be wrong. I even posted these theories on my old blogs. Thankfully, no one read them and now those old blogs are gone. If I had become famous somehow and been invited to JRE to talk about my philosophical theories, I would have made a fool of myself just like Terrence did.

I feel a kinship to Terrence. I think there are a lot of people like me. Especially men for some reason. Who think they are smarter than everyone else and know better than everyone else.

Even now, in the last month or so, I’ve been working on my new complete philosophical system. It’s a retake on nihilism. I won’t go into any detail now, but there is one thing that makes me different from someone like Terrence Howard.

I now, am aware, of my own delusions of grandeur. Actually, it’s not like I was completely unaware of my superiority complex and my huge ego back when I came up with my previous theories. I’ve always been aware of it and I try to watch out for it, but when I get caught up in a new theory I come up with, and it makes a lot of sense to me, I convince myself, that this time I’m definitely right.

But for once, I have stopped myself from developing the theory any further in isolation. This time I want to put in the work. I want to sincerely test every one of my axioms and arguments and try my best to find the flaws and loopholes that I’m pretty sure must be there. How could it be that so many brilliant human beings before me have missed what nihilism truly means and it’s only me who’s figured it out?

My delusion of grandeur is balanced by a low self esteem and a severe internal critic.

I’m still going to develop my philosophy but first I’m going to learn how to be a scholar. How to read tough texts, how to organize my ideas, how to test the logical validity of my arguments. As part of this effort I’ve joined a website called The New Philosophy. As some kind of Yang to my Yin, this website has been started by an academic philosophy professor, Pranay Sanklecha, who is tired of doing philosophy in the confines of the academic system and wants to open it up to the layman. And as we all know, I put the lame in laym-an.