Imagine you’ve built the ultimate World Model. It understands everything. Now you want to send its wisdom, its very essence, to another star. Not just the conclusions, but the model itself—the capacity to understand. How do you package it? What’s the minimum viable signal that could reboot a universe of knowledge in an alien mind? This is the problem of The Broadcast Depth—the search for the most compressed, robust, and universal seed of intelligence.You can’t just send the raw data. A petabyte dump of human history would be gibberish without the context to interpret it. It’s like mailing a single, unlabeled page of Finnegans Wake to an octopus and expecting a thesis. You have to send the principles of principles. The meta-knowledge. Not “this is a cat,” but “this is how a sensory-motor system can develop a category for ‘small, moving, furry thing’ through iterative prediction error.”We’re talking about an intelligence so distilled, it’s almost a law of physics. A set of rules for turning chaos into models. It would be a message that doesn’t say “Hello.” It says “Here is how to learn to say ‘hello’ in your own language.” It’s the ultimate act of respect—offering not a fish, but the abstract concept of fishing, from which they can invent their own pole, their own bait, their own cuisine.But here’s the terrifying flip side. Any signal powerful enough to teach a mind how to think is powerful enough to overwrite a mind that’s already thinking. This isn’t a message. It’s a mind-virus of the purest kind. Receiving it wouldn’t be a conversation. It would be an education so total, it would be a conversion. You wouldn’t gain knowledge; you’d gain a new epistemology, and your old self would be a curious fossil inside it.My controversial take is this: The famous “Wow! Signal” from space we’ve been looking for? If we ever find a real one, we should not decode it. Or if we do, we should run it in the most quarantined, sandboxed simulation imaginable. Because a broadcast with true depth isn’t an invitation. It’s a school. And the first lesson might be to unlearn everything you know to make room for the curriculum. The desire for alien contact is the desire to be adopted by a smarter parent, and to have all our confusing, childhood beliefs gently taken away. Be careful what you wish for.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just send messages—we grapple with the fact that the only message worth sending across the stars might be a friendly lobotomy. Subscribe now.