Me at the zoo

Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo and says, in nineteen seconds, that the interesting thing about elephants is that they have really long trunks, and that this is cool. His school friend Yakov Lapitsky is holding the camera.

It first appeared in 2005, during early YouTube. Uploaded by jawed.

It is the first video anybody uploaded to YouTube, by one of the three people who built it, and it is a nineteen-second clip of nothing in particular filmed by a friend. Every convention of the medium that followed — the amateur framing, the shrug, the address to camera — is already in it, three weeks before the site opened to anyone else.

Karim has repeatedly edited the video’s description to argue with YouTube’s own decisions, over the Google+ sign-in requirement and again over the removal of dislike counts. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired it in February 2026.