Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with

siloism. I'm Ran Leavie. Is it possible to compress an entire movie into 8 kilobytes.

The first book that I wrote some 15 years ago dealt with a special class of machines, perpetual motion machines, which do not require energy to work.

Obviously, these contraptions are impossible. The laws of physics state that every machine needs a source of energy to run.

But this fact has not prevented thousands of inventors from trying to invent such machines throughout the last 2,000 years.

While researching that book, I stumbled upon an interesting fact.

For every generation or for every historical period, there were

perpetual motion machines typical of that period. For example, inventors that lived in the Middle Ages tried to invent water pumps that do not

need a bull to spin them because pumping water from the well was an important and basic

need in those days. Modern inventors tried to make cars that do not require fuel to drive or electricity generators that work without coal or gas.

When I did the research for this episode, I was reminded of this interesting feature of

perpetual motion machines.

Why?

Because the invention that will be at the center of our story today

symbolizes one of the most important needs of our time, data compression.

But since when is compressing raw video files into MP4s or wave files into MP3,

an essential need like petrol for car or gas for electricity generation.

Well, go to your living room and turn on Netflix, or open your phone and go to YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music

the TV series you binged on this weekend that movie you saw yesterday the new album you've heard? All of these would have been

impossible without information compression technologies. One second of

HD quality video if delivered as is without any compression of the raw information

takes about 1.5 gigabytes.

...