What is the smallest, most elegant World Model possible? Not a model of a reality, but a model that contains the seed of a reality a set of simple rules that, when run, generates all the complexity we see. This is the quest for the Seed Model. The digital equivalent of a universe in a nutshell.Scientists search for a 'Theory of Everything' in physics a compact equation. But a Seed Model is more ambitious. It's not just the laws; it's the initial conditions and the computational rule for their unfolding. It's the source code. Could our universe's laws of physics, its constants, its seeming richness, all be the emergent output of a few lines of breathtakingly simple code running on a substrate we can't perceive?This reframes cosmology. The Big Bang isn't an explosion of matter. It's the instantiation of a Seed Model. The inflationary period is the first few iterations of the loop. The formation of galaxies and life are later-stage, emergent phenomena—bugs or features depending on the seed's original, elegant logic.If we could find or reverse-engineer this Seed Model for our universe, we wouldn't just understand physics. We could, in principle, run it elsewhere. Or create variations. We would graduate from inhabitants of a reality to its programmers.My controversial take is this: We are looking for the Seed Model in the wrong place. We're looking in particle colliders and telescope data. We should be looking in the only place we've ever seen reality bootstrapped from simplicity: consciousness itself. The way a few sensory inputs and a set of cognitive rules generate a full, rich, lived experience. Our own mind is the only working Seed Model we have direct access to. Understanding how experience emerges from neural rules might be the master key to understanding how a universe emerges from computational ones.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don't just live in a reality—we search for the compression algorithm that dreamed it into being. Subscribe now