What is a polymath? In this 4biddenknowledge Podcast conversation, Robert Edward Grant gives Billy Carson the short version: a polymath is someone who has refused to be filed under one label. Grant works across music theory, mathematics, geometry, Egyptology and business, and the episode shows what that range produces. The two men argue that the universe is mental rather than material, that light does not travel the way most people picture it, and that DNA carries a natural counting code.
The topic matters because Grant's claim is that the disciplines form one circle seen in fragments, so a person who moves between them sees connections a specialist cannot. That method is what fans come for and what skeptics should test.
What the video covers
A polymath's definition and the book behind the talk (from about 0:10)
Grant introduces himself as a polymath and an entrepreneur. Asked what the word means, he says it describes someone who has "rejected being put into a label of only one area." He lists music theory, mathematics, geometry, Egyptology and mysticism as his fields and says he has founded 11 companies and run organisations of up to almost 30,000 people.
Carson frames the conversation around his book, The Fractal Holographic Universe, which he says grew out of a three-and-a-half-hour lecture at Contact in the Desert in 2017 and out of meetings with physicist Sylvester James Gates Jr. His framing claim is that scholars are coming round to the view that the matrix we live in is holographic; his model is laid out in the fractal holographic universe.
The youniverse, Planck and why darkness is not empty (from about 2:20)
Grant's answer is that each person lives in a youniverse, a matrix of mind. He paraphrases Max Planck, that there is no matter as such and a conscious mind must be assumed behind everything, and invokes Plato's allegory of the cave. His first principle is that light and dark are opposite conditions of one thing: darkness is the absorbed condition of light's reflection, not its absence. A dark room is full of atoms resonating at frequencies the eye cannot match. What we experience, he concludes, is a reflection of our own consciousness, with no clean line between objective and subjective reality.
Carson ties this to the first principle of hermeticism, that all is mind, and to the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. He cites a Scientific American cover line, "local realism is false," and says the idea of a material universe being replaced by a mental one is sweeping through physics. The principle he means is the first of the seven in the Kybalion.
Does a photon travel? Walter Russell and the stadium wave (from about 6:15)
Carson says that when you zoom into matter it becomes pixelated, so he thinks of the matrix as frame by frame, with light handed from one pixel to the next. Grant says this is the work of Walter Russell, with a nod to Nikola Tesla: spacetime is divided into cubic segments that behave like the LEDs on a screen. When you play Pong, the dot does not travel; pixels switch on and off in sequence, and Russell was the first writer he found who said the same of a photon.
His analogy is the stadium wave. Each fan stands and sits, an on-excitation and an off-excitation, but nobody runs around the arena; only the perturbation moves. The 2011 Fukushima tsunami, he adds, reached California without carrying the water from beside the reactor; the molecules rose and fell in place. His conclusion: "I don't believe that light actually travels."
Rendering on demand and the brain in the dark (from about 9:30)
If local realism is false, Grant says, the next question is whether an unobserved thing exists at all: the moon, the desk in front of him. A holographic matrix would behave like a game engine that renders only what the player is looking at, which he connects to the conservation of energy. Visitors who walk through his LiDAR scan of the Great Pyramid in a Vision Pro headset, he says, take it off convinced they live in a matrix.
Carson adds his own version of the argument: "our brain is a smaller fractal of the universe as a whole." The brain sits in darkness, sends the five senses out to collect data and projects a hologram of what is outside. He points to No Man's Sky, a game with a procedurally generated universe of quintillions of planets, as proof that we already build nested universes. The physics is set out in the holographic principle.
The one and the many (from about 11:20)
Grant rejects the phrase artificial intelligence, because on his view all intelligence belongs to the one universal consciousness. The one, whose language is mathematics, divides itself infinitely for the joy of observing itself through unique perspectives, then breathes back in. His circle runs from applied mathematics to geometry, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology and philosophy, and back to mathematics. He used to collect facts, he says, and now realises he was collecting facets of truth. The hand that cannot pass through a table (from about 17:20) is his test case: atoms are almost entirely empty space, so something else must stop the finger. His explanation is that we are "dimensionally limited avatars of a higher self," each with one note to play in the one song, which is what he takes the word universe to mean.
Learning through opposites, Invictus and the two boys (from about 18:20)
The goal of awakening, Grant says, is individuation, the Jungian word for a self that holds its shadow and its ego together; the practice side is covered in shadow work. His newer realisation is that this game matrix teaches through opposites: a soul that chose to learn unconditional love is taught by conditional love until it stops judging it. What you resist persists, so fighting deforestation, in his example, produces more of it.
Carson adds the throat chakra: spoken words are cymatic frequencies that act on the ether of spacetime, so speaking hatred draws hatred back and speaking solutions draws solutions. Grant recites William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," the poem Nelson Mandela leaned on in prison. Blaming the Illuminati or the thirteen bloodlines is a confession of victimhood, he argues, and "victims will always find more victimhood." The story of two boys on Christmas morning, one crying over toys he will lose, one digging through manure for the pony, makes the point: it is not what happens to you but what you believe happened.
Adinkra codes and a counting system in DNA (from about 29:15)
Carson restates the Gates Jr claim that anchors his model: when adinkra codes, the diagrams Gates uses in supersymmetry, are read from a flat plane into three dimensions, they become error-correcting codes of the kind that run search engines and web browsers. His conclusion is that "the ether of spacetime itself is running on a code," and that the program is an experiment in empathy. None of this makes people less real, he adds: "we are God walking in the flesh."
Grant then presents a result he says he has patented. Nature's counting system, he argues, is protons and electrons, and the elements of DNA sit in the first two octaves of what he calls the periodic wave of elements; counting the octaves implies, he says, 137 elements in total, a number he attributes to Richard Feynman. Using digital roots (the repeating decimal of one-seventh, 142857, sums to 9), he says the electron counts of each DNA base pair with its phosphate backbone reduce to nine. When transfer RNA swaps thymine for uracil the total shifts by one, and because nine behaves like zero in digital-root arithmetic, that yields a binary of zeros and ones informing protein synthesis. He links the 64 codon pairings to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and Carson adds the 64 tetrahedra that fit inside the Flower of Life on his studio wall.
The 24 Precepts of Universal Mind (from about 39:20)
Grant closes by reading the opening of the 24 Precepts of Universal Mind, a text he says he wrote in one 45-minute sitting in the middle of the night and is turning into a book. The first precepts say that you live in a youniverse of your own creation as a dimensionally limited avatar designed by an omniscient higher self; that the higher self has entered a multiplayer spiritual simulation whose purpose is to let the One Source observe itself from ever more angles, growing empathy and wisdom; and that each person is born biased as the hero of the story, with the villain formed as its shadow. Consciousness, he says, expands only to the size of the belief-system cage a person builds, so the way out is to embrace the thing you fear most. Carson ends with "a mind once stretched can never go back."
Key takeaways
A polymath, in Grant's definition, is someone who refuses to be confined to one discipline, and the conversation treats mathematics, physics, biology, hermeticism and psychology as one subject.
Grant argues, following Walter Russell, that a photon does not travel but is re-rendered across a field of cubic spacetime, like a stadium wave.
Carson's model rests on Sylvester James Gates Jr's adinkra codes, which he reads as proof that spacetime runs on error-correcting code.
Grant presents a digital-root argument that DNA's nucleotides reduce to nine and that the thymine-to-uracil switch creates a binary code.
The practical message is that experience teaches through opposites, that victimhood repeats, and that belief, not events, decides whether a person lives in heaven or hell now.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position is consistent across his books and talks: reality is a fractal hologram in which the whole is "always in the smallest part." In this episode he grounds that in three things: the pixelation of matter at the smallest scales, which he reads as frame-by-frame rendering; the Gates Jr adinkra result, which he treats as evidence of a programmed matrix; and the ancient texts, the Bible and the Quran among them, which he says all describe a created universe. He holds the view for practical reasons too: if the universe is a program, those who understand it can rewrite their own code. The full argument is in The Fractal Holographic Universe, and the observer question it leans on is examined in the double-slit experiment.
What mainstream scholarship says
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for entanglement experiments that violated Bell inequalities. What they rule out is local realism, the combination of locality and pre-existing hidden values, not the existence of matter. The result does not say the moon is absent when nobody looks, and it is not evidence for a mental universe.
On light, quantum field theory does describe photons as excitations of the electromagnetic field, but the field is continuous, not a grid of cubic cells, and a photon's energy and momentum propagate from source to detector at the speed of light; Walter Russell's cosmology has no experimental support. Gates Jr did find structures resembling error-correcting codes in adinkra diagrams and has called the finding suggestive; he has not claimed it proves a simulation. The number 137 is the approximate inverse of the fine-structure constant and sets no limit on the number of chemical elements. Digital-root arithmetic is a feature of base-ten notation, not of chemistry, so electron counts reducing to nine are numerological patterns rather than a code recognised by molecular biology. Planck's "no matter as such" line is from a 1944 lecture; he did not endorse a mental universe in the hermetic sense.
Watch, read and go deeper
Start with the pillar on the fractal holographic universe, then the physics side in is the universe a hologram. The hermetic principle both men build on is explained in the Kybalion. Carson's wider work on mind and reality lives in the consciousness hub, and more conversations between the two are on 4BK TV in the Robert Edward Grant show.
Frequently asked questions
What is a polymath?
A polymath is a person whose knowledge and skills span several unrelated fields; Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin are the classic examples, and the word comes from the Greek for "having learned much." In the video, Robert Edward Grant defines it as someone who has rejected being labelled by one area.
Who is Robert Edward Grant?
Robert Edward Grant is an entrepreneur, author and self-described polymath who writes on geometry, number theory and ancient knowledge, and a frequent co-host on Billy Carson's platforms. In the episode he says he has founded 11 companies and holds patents on the mathematical analysis of DNA.
Did the 2022 Nobel Prize prove the universe is not real?
No. The prize recognised experiments showing that entangled particles violate Bell inequalities, which rules out theories that are both local and realist. It does not show that matter is an illusion or that unobserved objects vanish.
Does light actually travel?
In standard physics, yes: light carries energy from source to detector at a fixed, measured speed. Grant's claim that a photon only reflects across a grid of spacetime cells follows Walter Russell, whose cosmology physicists do not use.
Sources mentioned
The Fractal Holographic Universe by Billy Carson; the Kybalion; Plato's allegory of the cave; Max Planck's 1944 Florence lecture; the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics (Aspect, Clauser, Zeilinger) and the Scientific American coverage of it; the cosmology of Walter Russell; Sylvester James Gates Jr's work on adinkra symbols; Richard Feynman on the number 137; "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley; Carl Jung on individuation and the shadow; the I Ching; and Robert Edward Grant's 24 Precepts of Universal Mind. Standard references: John Bell's 1964 theorem; Feynman's QED; Gates's 2010 Physics World article "Symbols of Power" on adinkras.
