Everyone knows you rarely learn much by reading interviews with movie stars. It's a less commonplace experience, though, to feel yourself becoming actively less well-informed as you read, as if the celebrity's words were eliminating your brain-cells, one by one, like bubble-wrap being popped. Yet take a look, if you dare, at this Q&A, in the current edition of New York magazine, with Will Smith and his son Jaden, to promote their forthcoming film After Earth. It should definitely win some kind of award, though I'm not sure the relevant Pulitzer category has been created yet.

Smith senior is, of course, one half of the uber-powerful Hollywood couple who insist they're not Scientologists but who do give money to groups affiliated with Scientology and who did set up a private elementary school that deploys teaching methods formulated by L Ron Hubbard. Here, he claims not to be religious (though a few years ago he described himself as a Christian) and explains that, anyway, his real worldview is all about "patterns":

I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

It's just a tiny bit unclear what Smith means by a "pattern": the two examples he endorses in the interview are a) that the sun rises every morning and b) that the Best Actor Oscar tends to be awarded to people portraying historical figures or characters with mental illness. One can also use patterns, Smith informs the interviewer, Claire Hoffman, to predict whether he will make another movie alongside his son:



If you were a student of the pattern, you'd have to say we were going to do another one.



Wait: "the pattern"? Is there one pattern, or are there many? I'm confused, but that's probably because mainstream media like New York magazine can't fully accommodate the profundity of Smith's thought:

You know, the forum of media that we're in can't really handle the complexity of things that we say all the time.

One feels inclined to cut Jaden Smith some slack, since he's only 14 and has been raised by Will Smith. But it ought to be noted that his contributions to the emerging Smith theory of everything are in many ways more mindwarping than his father's:

Jaden: I think that there is that special equation for everything, but I don't think our mathematics have evolved enough for us to even – I think there's, like, a whole new mathematics that we'd have to learn to get that equation.

Will: I agree with that.

Jaden: It's beyond mathematical. It's, like, multidimensional mathematical, if you can sort of understand what I'm saying.



I sort of can't, actually! But never mind. As Jaden – who has reportedly announced his desire to become an emancipated minor, free of parental control, when he turns 15 – explains about his mother, Jada Pinkett Smith:

If we're at a six, she's like at an eight and a half.

…whereas I'm probably more like a one or a two, so my confusion is understandable. (On what scale, you ask? We never learn.)

What to make of all this? It certainly demonstrates just how loopy your uncontrolled speculations can become when you're insulated, through fame and wealth, from people pointing out that they make no sense. Other than that, I'm fairly certain there are absolutely no conclusions to be drawn from it whatsoever. Sorry. Our mathematics just hasn't evolved sufficiently yet.

If you wonder where Smith is getting all this from, by the way, Jaden gives a hint at the end:

He's watching hours and hours of TED talks…

Ah, well, there you go.