CARL KASELL, HOST:
From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell. And here's your host, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Peter Sagal.
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PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Carl. Thank you everybody. Thank you all so much. We've got a great show for you this week. Writer/director Nora Ephron will be joining us later to play Not My Job. That's really exciting.
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SAGAL: Thrilled to have her. So, listen, usually we spend all week reading news in the Internet and then we ask questions about them on our show. But I lost my computer privileges at work. Turns out, NSFW does not stand for nifty site for watching.
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SAGAL: So instead of the news this week, we're going to spend this hour asking questions about the media itself: TV, blogs, social networks and also something called magazines. Which, for you kids, is a kind of blog that they print on paper.
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SAGAL: So, the media is our message today. Give us a call, the number 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. Time to welcome our first listener contestant. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!
CAROLYN WILSON: Hi, this is Carolyn Wilson from Arlington, Virginia.
SAGAL: Hey, how are things in beautiful Arlington?
WILSON: They're - amazing.
SAGAL: Amazing?
WILSON: Yes.
SAGAL: Thrilling?
WILSON: Yes.
SAGAL: Great? I'm sorry; I could just go on.
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SAGAL: What do you do there?
WILSON: I'm a science assistant for the National Science Foundation.
SAGAL: So you do science at the National Science Foundation?
WILSON: Well, I help give people money so they can do science.
SAGAL: That's even better.
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SAGAL: That's great. Well, welcome to our show, Carolyn. Let me introduce you to our panel this week. First, say hello to a television personality and a contributor to "CBS Sunday Morning," Mr. Mo Rocca right there.
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MO ROCCA: Hi, Carolyn.
WILSON: Hi, Mo.
SAGAL: Next up, it's a humorist and author most recently of "Hail, Hail, Euphoria: The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup," Mr. Roy Blount, Jr.
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ROY BLOUNT JR.: Hey, Carolyn.
WILSON: Hey, Roy.
BLOUNT JR.: How you doing? Does it have to be science you give people money for?
WILSON: Yes. Unfortunately, yes.
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SAGAL: And lastly, say hello to a comedienne who's first CD "I Heart Jokes" is out now, Ms. Paula Poundstone.
WILSON: Hey, Paula.
PAULA POUNDSTONE: Hey, Carolyn. I was just performing some cash-strapped tests with gravity.
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SAGAL: Well, Carolyn, you, of course, are going to play Who's Carl This Time. Now, it's a special edition of Who's Carl This Time. It's going to be about the very beginning of some of the Internet giants that now so dominate our life and our culture. So, each of Carl's quotes are going to come from the first days of what were then just Internet startups, little gleams in some future mogul's eye. So, you ready to play?
WILSON: Yes.
SAGAL: All right. Here is your first quote.
KASELL: Look, if this thing pans out, then great. If not, well, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis.
SAGAL: So that was the adviser of a grad student named Sergey Brin, back about 15 years ago. He was assuring him that if his little Internet project didn't work out, things would still be cool. Well, the project worked out. What was it?
WILSON: I have no idea.
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SAGAL: Well, if you don't know, that's OK, because if you don't know, this is what you'd use to find out.
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WILSON: Oh, Google?
SAGAL: Google, yes.
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WILSON: Yay.
SAGAL: So, grad student Sergey Brin and his friend Larry Page came up with an incredibly efficient, accurate algorithm for searching the web. And because it used what were known as back links, they called it Backrub. That's right, that's what they called it. They called it Backrub. And they eventually changed the name to Google.
ROCCA: Yeah, a lawsuit.
SAGAL: I know. But we really wish they hadn't changed it. Wouldn't that be cool? I mean, you're like, oh yeah, you know, what movie was that with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear? Oh wait, I'll backrub it.
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SAGAL: Oh, you know, it was a decent first date, but then I backrubbed him.
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SAGAL: Anyway, Brin and Page's grad school...
BLOUNT JR.: I think Google is better, it's dirtier.
SAGAL: You think Google is dirty?
BLOUNT JR.: Yeah, yeah.
SAGAL: How is Google dirty?
BLOUNT JR.: I Google myself.
ROCCA: I Google myself sounds dirty.
BLOUNT JR.: Come one.
ROCCA: Yeah.
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BLOUNT JR.: I don't know how you were raised, but I was not allowed to say words like that in the house.
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SAGAL: Google, of course, has been expanding its empire over recent years as Google Maps, Google News, Gmail, public restroom finder gee whiz.
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SAGAL: Evangelical search engine Gee-sus. We could go on.
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SAGAL: And it's competitor Jugle.
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SAGAL: Do you guys worry about this though? Because we always worried about computers taking over lives, we never imagined that we would beg them to. And we just are trusting that Google will stay benign and they won't, you know, finally decide - or it won't finally decide it's done with us. Because it'd be like, you know, well I don't think you put cyanide in chicken tetrazzini, but I Googled the recipe and that's what it said to do.
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ROCCA: Well, what do you do - if you forget the name of the search engine, what do you do?
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SAGAL: You're just stuck.
ROCCA: If you're trying to figure out, I need to find something but I can't remember what the name of the search engine is.
POUNDSTONE: You know, I'm not like you guys at all.
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POUNDSTONE: I mean, maybe this goes without saying. I don't really use the computer that much. I don't find out my information there.
ROCCA: What do you do?
POUNDSTONE: Yeah.
ROCCA: Do you have books?
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POUNDSTONE: I do. I have some books and there's just a lot of junk I don't know.
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SAGAL: All right, for your next quote, we have two very brief messages.
KASELL: Trying to hold my pants up while I walk home.
SAGAL: And the next morning?
KASELL: Walking to the office and still having pant problems.
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SAGAL: Those were some messages sent by the founder of a new micro-blogging site just after that service was launched. What was it?
WILSON: Twitter?
SAGAL: Yes, Twitter, of course.
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WILSON: Yay.
SAGAL: Twitter, the latest phenomenon, simultaneously lowered the standard for what's worth saying and made it incredibly easy to say. It basically turns the entire world into the guy you're trapped next to on a plane.
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POUNDSTONE: I twitter, but only because I want to be in the Library of Congress.
SAGAL: Yeah. That's true. All the tweets are going to the Library of Congress.
ROCCA: Is that right?
WILSON: Yeah.
SAGAL: Yeah.
ROCCA: Oh gosh.
POUNDSTONE: Yeah, that guy's pants problem will be...
SAGAL: I know.
POUNDSTONE: It would be read by people years from now.
SAGAL: Civilizations of the future will know in the 20th century they were ruled by a man named Justin Bieber.
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BLOUNT JR.: Well, why did they call it twitter? Do we know?
POUNDSTONE: Because Google was taken.
BLOUNT JR.: Yeah.
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SAGAL: Here we go, Carolyn, here is your last quote.
KASELL: All right, so here we are in front of the elephants and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say.
SAGAL: That was the entire transcript of the very first video posted on what service?
WILSON: YouTube.
SAGAL: YouTube, yes.
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WILSON: Yay.
SAGAL: The very first video…
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SAGAL: ...uploaded to YouTube was a boring, short film about elephants. Now, YouTube was first conceived as a dating site, a version of hotornot.com, but in this one you could see people move on video and thus judge them by how much their chin shook.
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SAGAL: The original dating concept fell apart when judging from the submitted videos, most of the eligible singles out there were adorable kittens.
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ROCCA: Oh, this isn't funny but it's interesting that every minute, 10 hours of YouTube video are uploaded.
BLOUNT JR.: Wow.
SAGAL: Wow.
ROCCA: Yeah.
SAGAL: That's really great.
ROCCA: And the space between the silence right now, there's probably hours being added.
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SAGAL: Carl, how did Carolyn do on our quiz?
KASELL: Well, Carolyn, you had three correct answers. That's a correct score and a complete score and that means you win our prize.
SAGAL: Well done, Carolyn. Congratulations.
WILSON: Oh thank you, this is awesome.
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SAGAL: Well done, Carolyn, and thanks for playing.
WILSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.