Me at the zoo

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2005 · YouTube, filmed at San Diego Zoo, California · Also known as The first YouTube video; jawed's first video

What it is

It's a 19-second video of a young man, Jawed Karim, standing in front of two elephants at San Diego Zoo in California. He says the cool thing about them is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that that's pretty much all there is to say. It was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a website where anyone could post a video and anyone else could watch it for free.

Where it came from

YouTube was started in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three former staff of the online payments company PayPal. Karim uploaded this clip on 23 April 2005, reportedly as an early test of the site. His school friend Yakov Lapitsky held the camera. YouTube grew very fast and Google bought it in 2006. As the site became the main place people watched video online, this clip got known as the first upload, turned up on journalists' lists of the most important videos, and built up hundreds of millions of views.

How people used it

People went to watch it the way tourists visit a town's oldest building. Below YouTube videos is a comments section where viewers write replies, and this one filled up with people saying which year they were watching in and how far YouTube had come. Companies joined in: San Diego Zoo's own account left a comment that YouTube pinned to the top. People quoted Karim's flat closing line about elephants as a joke about saying nothing at length. Karim himself kept editing the text box under the video to complain about YouTube's decisions.

Why it mattered

It's the starting point of the site that made posting video normal for ordinary people. Nothing happens in it. A man with a camera says one mild thing about elephants, and that turned out to be the model for years of YouTube: unscripted, amateur, filmed by friends, made by someone with no studio behind him. It also gave a co-founder a public place to object. When Karim used the description in 2013 to attack Google forcing people onto Google+ to comment, and in 2021 to attack YouTube hiding dislike counts, users took it seriously because it came from the first video on the site.

The jokes around it

• "And that's pretty much all there is to say." (Karim's closing line, quoted as a joke about having nothing to say)
• Chapter markers added to the description splitting 19 seconds into "Intro", "The cool thing" and "End"
• "Who's watching this in [year]?" comments, repeated every year
• Karim's 2013 description: "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?"
• San Diego Zoo's pinned comment: "We're so honored that the first ever YouTube video was filmed here!"

What noah thinks it shows about us

People treated a 19-second clip of almost nothing as a landmark and kept leaving dated comments to prove they'd been. It also shows that a co-founder who wanted to complain about his own company used the same description box every other uploader had.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen's view count (over 445 million as of October 2026) and its claim that the zoo's comment is the most-liked on YouTube with 4.7 million likes aren't checked. The date of the zoo comment (2020), the Victoria and Albert Museum acquiring the video in February 2026, the MrBeast-style thumbnail in December 2023 and the February 2025 description about microplastics come only from the specimen text. That it was uploaded as a test is commonly said but not confirmed.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.