I did not tell him that I disagreed and thought that was his ego talking, but given the tech industry and everything we collectively do, it got me to thinking.
How often are you the smartest person in the room at your company?
To make matters worse, the topics will be of any sort of topic, even those where there's really no more room to argue about the truths of the subject (or even the concept of "truth", which was especially exhausting if they reject the idea of propaganda). Yet they only ever fall back to their bibles and continue to make the same mistakes and never really get better as developers, and in some cases, as people.
Now I do have to agree a bit with it sounding like a big ego problem, but you never want to actually be the smartest person in the room either. You have nothing to gain from it except an ego boost while everyone else gains from your knowledge and expands themselves. Ideally, you want to be somewhere in the middle, that way you have knowledge to give, but also room to grow and challenge yourself to achieve the level of those above you.
My favorite job was when I was surrounded by coworkers that had expansive knowledge in areas I knew nothing about, as they had a lot of great insight to share and resources they would suggest to me so I wouldn't have to rely on them.
If you persistently feel like you're the smartest person in the room, either you have an exceptionally large number of mentoring opportunities or you need to do some introspection. Almost certainly the latter.