- [Narrator] At some point in your life, you've pointlessly scrolled
through social media, watched a TV show you don't care about, or just stood in the shower
vacantly staring at the wall. But no matter how much time you've wasted, you probably haven't sat on a
toilet for five days straight or watched all of one of
those 10-hour YouTube videos! But some people actually have! So, get comfy, because
we're about to take a look at some of the biggest
wastes of time in history. And before you get your
clever comments ready, no, watching this video
is not on the list. Nice try, though. (upbeat music) TV Marathon. We've all stayed up late
into the night watching TV because we just needed
to know what would happen to Sansa Stark, who would win Squid Game, or just how much stranger
Stranger things could get! But none of our watching
habits could hold a candle to Alejandro Fragoso, who in 2016 watched a butt-numbing
94 hours of TV straight. Alejandro and a few
friends entered into a bid to attain the world TV watching record while promoting a new
video optimisation software for a company called CyberLink. One-by-one, however, his
companions dropped out until only Alejandro remained. During his binge-session,
he watched shows including "Bob's Burgers," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Battlestar Galactica,"
and "Game of Thrones." But the experience was horrible, taking a toll on his mind and body. At one point during a short,
health-mandated break, Alejandro began
hallucinating a shopping list on the bathroom wall! After nearly four days of TV, Alejandro emerged victorious. It turned out he was a glutton
for punishment, however. One year later he
claimed a similar record, spending 50 straight hours watching TV in Virtual Reality. It's not all bad though, at least in VR you
wouldn't notice your body fusing to the sofa. Speaking of binge-watching, if you love listening to incredible facts and watching amazing
stories for hours on end, be sure to hit those like and
subscribe buttons down below! Hey, it's not time wasting
if you're learning! Alright, what have we got next? Hungry for Pi. Let's talk about Pi, and no,
I don't mean the dessert. Now that that joke's out
of the way, Pi, or 3.14, is one of the most useful
numbers in all mathematics. Simply put, Pi represents
the circumference of a circle divided by it's diameter. No matter how big or small a circle is, if you divide it's
circumference by its diameter, you're gonna end up with
a fresh, delicious Pi. Darn it! Pi is also interesting
because those decimal points after 3 go on forever. Pi is an infinite number,
though most of the time, you just need 3.14. This is what makes William
Shanks' life ambition so crazy. A schoolteacher born
in 1812, Shanks decided he was going to sit down and calculate Pi for the rest of his life. According to Shanks, he
would spend the morning calculating Pi, and the evening
checking his work every day. By the end of his life in 1882, Shanks had calculated Pi
to 707 decimal points. Now, there are two main reasons why this was a waste of time. First, these many digits of
Pi are practically useless. Even rocket scientists at
NASA claim they only use Pi up to 16 decimal places. Even worse, though, was the
fact that Shanks was wrong. He'd made a crucial
mistake in his calculations after digit 527, meaning the
next 180 digits he calculated were a complete waste! At the end of the day,
Shanks' Pi ended up leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. Gotta Catch 'em All. Unlike Pogs and Beanie Babies, Pokémon actually made it out of the 90's. In fact, the series is
currently more popular than ever, with eight generations of games and almost 900 collectible critters. That may sound like a lot to you, but at least one gamer
looked at the series tagline, "Gotta Catch 'em all", and
thought "Challenge Accepted". In the games, Pokemon has
a very, very rare chance of being shiny, meaning their
colors are slightly different. For example, a shiny Bulbasaur
is a more vibrant green, whereas a shiny Pikachu
has grey-tipped ears. How rare are these Pokemon? Well, in the newer games a
Pokémon has a one in 4096 chance of being shiny, while in older games it's a staggering one in 8192. Most players will go
their entire poke-reers without ever seeing one. Japanese player Kyudan is
not most players though, because in 2021, he announced
he had caught a shiny variant of every single Pokémon out there. Let's do some quick math here. Going by those odds,
Kyudan must have fought around 6.5 million Pokémon
battles to catch every one. If we're generous and assume
they each only took 15 seconds, that still equates to a
total playtime of 1128 days. Now he may have traded with
other players in the newer games to speed the process up, but it still must have
taken at least 3 years. In fact, we know it did,
because another Pokemaniac named Robert Meehan did
the same thing in 2016. Unlike Kyudan, we know Meehan's process, the totally random, insane way. It took him three years to
get all the shinies in 2016, but since then more
Pokemon have been released, and he continues his quest to this day. I guess these guys
really are the very best, like no one ever was. Special Agent Kitty. We love cats for their adorable
faces and lazy attitudes. What they aren't known for, however, is their ability to follow
complex instructions. This didn't stop the
CIA who, in the 1960's, enacted their craziest ever scheme, Operation "Acoustic Kitty" in
an attempt to raise, equip, and train a housecat into
an American Superspy. The thought process was
that cats were so common that no one would think
twice if they saw one, let alone assume they were being tailed or recorded by one. The Acoustic Kitty had a
microphone placed in its ear, plus a wiry antenna and a
transmitter implanted in its fur. After adding all the robotics, the long and arduous process
of training the cat began. Acoustic Kitty would often
get distracted, wander off, and otherwise ignore
its handlers entirely. And all this equipment and training cost a whopping $20 million in total. Then, finally, after five long years, the CIA released Acoustic
Kitty into the field for its first training mission. But just minutes after letting the cat go, the poor thing was hit by a
taxi and sadly didn't make it. After five years of training,
Operation Acoustic Kitty turned out to be a complete
waste of time and money that never even reached its target. I'd like to say curiosity killed the cat, but it was probably just
trying to escape the CIA. RuneScape Cape. If you grew up in the early 2000's, there's a good chance
you remember RuneScape. This was a mass multi player
online role-playing game that worked in-browser. This meant it was a perfect game to play in a minimized window just
out of the teacher's sight, but it wasn't anything special. Well, to most people anyway. The Max Cape in RuneScape is an item so ridiculously tedious to
get it inspired its own lingo, "Cape-grinding". The Cape requires players
to have two things, an obscene amount of money,
and an obscene amount of time. In order to buy it, you need
to get each of your character's 23 skills to level 99. If you're wondering how long that takes, some skills can reach max level in as little as 30 hours, whereas some can take over 130. There are guides out there
that claim this can take up to 2000 hours, or three-straight
months of playing. If you're wondering
who would ever do this, the answer may shock you, according to the people
at RuneScape themselves, over 21,000 people have
achieved level 99 in all skills. If this wasn't bad enough, one
player by the name of Hauki got the cape on the hardest
difficulty in the game, taking just under 5000
hours of their life. All for a piece of virtual
clothing that just tells the world, "I have a lot of free time". Toilet Trooper. I can personally relate
to this next waste of time because it involves spending
a long, long, long time on the toilet. The man you're currently
looking at is Jimmy De Frenne, and this is his claim to fame. In 2019 the Belgian man
decided that he wanted to break the record for the longest
time sat on the toilet. De Frenne was training to
be a bus-driver at the time, and figured he may as well
get some sitting-practice in. He ended up perched on his toilet for a stomach-churning 116
hours, just under five days! During that time De Frenne ate, slept, and had conversations on a special toilet set up in the middle of a
bar just for the funny event. Unfortunately, this meant the toilet wasn't actually functional, so De Frenne was permitted a
five-minute break every hour, which often saw him running
from one toilet to another! Still, it's a gut-busting record I don't think will soon be beat. If only he'd been
watching TV the whole time he would have beaten two records! The Superconducting Super disappointment. If you head down to Texas
and take a short drive out from the town of Waxahachie, you'll be met by an
enormous, unassuming ditch. Looking at it, you probably
wouldn't think much, you definitely wouldn't
think the government paid nearly $2.5 billion to dig it. This is the now dead
Superconducting Supercollider, an enormous, ambitious, and sadly abandoned scientific endeavor. The supercollider was
going to be a giant tunnel 54 miles in circumference that scientists would use to accelerate and smash tiny particles together. By doing this, they'd be able to study some really crazy things, including collisions that haven't happened since the big bang. Does that sound a little
ambitious for Texas? The US government thought so, too. The project was first proposed in 1976, and work began in the late 1980's. But not long after, the supercollider's cost began to balloon. Originally budgeted at around $4 billion, by the early 90's its
estimate was actually closer to a bank-breaking $12 billion. In 1993, President Clinton signed a bill officially canceling the project. What was Texas left with? More than 17 years of wasted time, a 14-mile-wide series of
holes, and a $2.4 billion bill. Oh, and a very big, very expensive ditch. Can't forget that! One Million Wrist Cramps. If you've ever been in an
argument on the internet, then you know the pain of
typing out a long, agonizing series of words no one will ever read. That said, no amount of
debate in a comment section could ever compare to
what Australian retiree Les Stewart achieved in 1998. His journey began way back in April 1982, when he decided he was going
to earn a world record, no matter how insane or inane it was. Les began typing numbers,
starting with one. But he didn't just type
1, he typed, o-n-e. He then moved on to t-w-o, then three, with the eventual goal of
making it to one million. While this may not seem
like much at first, imagine typing three hundred
and sixty-six thousand, nine hundred and
ninety-eight before typing three hundred and sixty-six thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine, knowing you still have Six
hundred, thirty-three thousand and one more words to type. According to Les, in order
to achieve this goal, he typed for 20 minutes every
single hour he was awake. As he began his quest in the 1980's, he did this using a typewriter,
and it took him 16 years and 19,990 sheets of paper. Or, as Les would put it, Nineteen thousand, nine
hundred and ninety. Venus Genius. Back in 18th Century
France, Guillaume Le Gentil was a highly respected astronomer with an equally respected head of hair. In 1761, he decided he wanted to record the transit of Venus, a rare phenomenon where the planet passes
in front of the sun. To do this, he journeyed all the way from his home of France to India. Unfortunately and this isn't a joke, ye olde thugs stole his ye olde wallet, which delayed his journey. By the time he reached India, the brief window to observe
the transit was over. Guillaume didn't give up, though. He decided he would wait
in India for eight years for the next visible transit. During this time, Guillaume
wrote to the Royal Academy and his family back in France, continuing his studies in India. When Guillaume's second
chance finally came in 1769, it was too cloudy. Guillaume couldn't see a thing! Defeated, he finally decided to go home. But on the way back his ship crashed, and he ended up stranded,
because life hated Guillaume. When he eventually arrived
back home, 11 years had passed. But his story doesn't end there! Guillaume discovered
that none of his letters had ever arrived, the ferryman
had been taking his money and dumping them in the sea. He had been declared dead years ago, his position at the
Academy had been filled, his wife had remarried and,
if you can take any more, his relatives had divided up his estate. For the love of God people,
look after your wallets! Capital Conundrum. What's the biggest city you can think of? New York? Pretty big. London? Yeah, that's big too. But in terms of land
mass, Naypyidaw in Myanmar is four times larger than either of them! If you didn't know that,
don't feel too bad, because googling that
question will bring up dozens of answers that leave out Naypyidaw. Why does everyone forget Naypyidaw? Well, it's probably because
the city is basically one giant ghost town. It boasts just 131 people per square mile, which is nothing compared
to London's 7,700, or New York's 27,000. Despite its size, this
makes it's one of the most vacant capitals in the world. But how did this happen? Well, in 2002 the Myanmar government made the bizarre decision to
move the Capital city to a jungle in the middle of nowhere, because the old capital of Yangon was apparently too crowded and congested. Ten years and $4 billion later, construction of Naypyidaw
was finally finished. It has fast wi-fi, a
couple of golf courses, and even a safari park. It's just missing people,
who for some reason, didn't want to move to
the middle of nowhere! This has led Naypyidaw to
become an eerily vacant city. The shining jewel of
the Capital is no longer the giant gold pagoda at its centre, but the insane 20-lane
highway leading to the city, which is always empty. Personally, I think Myanmar
should put this thing to use, can you imagine a "Fast and
the Furious" chase scene here? The Philmarilion. Sometimes you post
something on the internet, and it gets a bunch of
likes, retweets, or reposts and it's a nice feeling. You can have too much of
a good thing, however, which is what 4chan poster
UTV discovered in 2013. UTV was a pretty unremarkable user, mostly posting about sports. It was strange, then,
when he discovered he had a very, very dedicated fan. An anonymous user kept
showing up wherever he posted, praising him, and demonstrating
a shocking familiarity with his history. The user claimed to have
printed out UTV's posts, given them to the homeless, and even made a belt out of them. Many thought the user was a troll, after all, the idea of
someone becoming obsessed with a 4chan sports poster
is ludicrous, right? Well, no. One day the poster claimed
his parents discovered his UTV paraphernalia and
forced him to get rid of it all. He made one last post, the Philmarilion, a 97-page upload of
all his UTV obsessions. In the Philmarillion,
you can find an apartment the creator imagined he
could live with UTV in, a script for a TV show starring them both, 3D modeled cities made from his posts, and many more weird endeavors. Did this guy seriously
have nothing better to do? Well, shortly after this, UTV understandably stopped posting. Capone Zone. In the 1920's, Al Capone was
the biggest mobster in town. Capone wasn't just the kingpin of one of the largest criminal
outfits the US had ever seen but was also at the top of
the FBI's most wanted list. Funny how that works. Not long after he was arrested,
rumors started spreading about some great, secret treasure of his that was never recovered. When a secret vault was discovered in the catacombs of Capone's
hideout in the 1980's, it captured the country's imagination. Reporter Geraldo Rivera
leapt on the story, looking for a way to restart his career after ending his partnership with ABC. So, he pitched a massive special, "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault", in which they'd open it on live TV, with a production cost of $900,000. For over two hours Rivera
shouted over construction workers and jackhammers, theorizing what could be in the 60-year-old vault
to 30 million viewers. America was abuzz with excitement about what could be inside, was it cash? Jewels? Maybe a secret fortune? When the vault was finally opened, the answer surprised
everyone it was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Worse than that it was dirty nothing. The entire recorded waste
of time is still available on Rivera's website, and you
have to hand it to the guy for taking the
embarrassment in his stride. Well, maybe in 30 years
we can expect a livestream where a down-and-out PewDiePie opens a long-forgotten Fortnite Lootbox? Nyan Cat Crazy. This is Nyan-Cat. The adorable rainbow
pooping, pop tart-cat hybrid that took the internet by
storm over ten years ago! Although Nyan-Cat was just
a few frames of animation over a 10-second audio loop
of a Japanese pop song, it found its way into all
of our hearts and ears! It didn't take long for
tributes, imitations, and unauthorized
merchandise to creep its way onto the internet. One such piece of nyan-original content was a mind-boggling
ten-hour loop of the meme. This was clearly a joke and not a video intended
for actual viewing. Well, the internet is
full of stupid people doing stupid things for stupid reasons. In 2012, a mysterious
user called TheGamePro uploaded evidence of them
doing the unthinkable, watching the whole thing. The whole 10-hour video. For the entire duration, he bopped along, ate his meals, and tried to entertain himself by tapping. Amazingly, he made it. And when he reached the end,
he only had this to say. - Hell yeah. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Either this guy
has nothing better to do, or he just really, really loves Nyan cat! Revel in Failure. In 2006, Morgan Stanley
invested in the construction of a $2.4 billion behemoth,
the Revel Casino and Resort. Originally planned as two giant casinos, the Revel was intended to attract a new, more upmarket clientele to
Atlantic City, New Jersey. Six grueling years later, a lone Revel resort opened
its doors to the public. Unfortunately for Atlantic city, the Revel wasn't quite the tourist trap that had been envisioned. And by that, I mean it was
a billion dollars in debt and filing for bankruptcy
less than a year later. As it turns out, opening a giant Casino in a city already known for casinos isn't a great way to attract new tourists. After shutting down, the
Revel sold to Glenn Straub for $82 million less than 4% of its construction cost. Straub tentatively
renamed the Casino to TEN, but ultimately just let the building rot. AC OCEAN WALK then bought
it for $200 million. After three owners and three name changes, the OCEAN Casino opened
its doors in June 2019, and enjoyed a few months of
business before being forced to close down in March
2020 due to COVID-19. Today, the OCEAN Casino
is still chugging along, and still being pawned off on new buyers. If you're interested, you
can stay in the cursed hotel. Just avoid the 12 floors
that are still empty in the middle of the building! Fan Fiction, or Fan Fact? Many great works of
literature have been written in the English language
throughout history, and many of those have been pretty long. Can you guess the longest one ever? What if I tell you the names
of some of the chapters? (clears throat) "Hedgehogs of Evil". "Mario the Dishonest". No? How about "Yoob's Belly:
Fat Alien Yoshi's Stomach!" Well, if you didn't
guess, these are chapters from a work called "The Subspace
Emissary's World Conquest," a piece of Nintendo fanfiction. In it, you can expect to see
various videogame characters fighting, playing sports,
and saving the world. Oh, and it just so happens
to be the single longest work of fiction in the English language! That's right, author AuraChannelerChris, who claims to read solely fanfiction, has written a story more
than 4,100,000 words long. That's longer than
"Ulysses," "Infinite Jest", and the entire "Lord of the
Rings" trilogy combined. As of 2021, the fanfic has
and insane 221 chapters, and it's a sequel, so the entire saga is
actually even longer. It was started way back in 2008, with it's last update in 2018. By that math, this guy's
currently written more than 410,000 words of fic a year, that means every three
years, he writes more words than are in the entire
"Harry Potter" Saga for free! Well, at least this fanfiction
was a creative outlet. The real scary waste of
time is that some reviewers on Fanfiction.net claim to have read the entire story multiple times. Wow. The Mother of All Timewasters. Whatever your record for time-wasting is, there's no way you can beat
Simeon of the Stylites. This guy makes everyone
else we've mentioned look like an Olympic sprinter, because Simeon sat down, shut his eyes, and did nothing for 37 years. Simeon was born to a
poor family around 390 CE in what is now Syria. Simeon saw the quiet, modest,
and contemplative lives of the monks around him
and said "Hold my beer" not that he was ever coming back for it. In an attempt to achieve enlightenment, or perhaps just show the other
punk-monks how it was done, Simeon decided to sit
on a pillar and think. And there he sat, day after
day, night after night. He survived only after several
local boys grew concerned for his health and began
leaving him food and milk. After a while Simeon became
a bit of a celebrity, and soon the locals had leaned
a ladder up on the pillar so visitors could chat with
him and ask for guidance. Imagine the kind of state you must be in to ask the pillar dude for advice. Oh, and if you're wondering
if this is just a folk tale or some kind of ancient gossip, dozens of people wrote about Simeon, so it looks like this
guy was the real deal! Simeon reportedly sat on
that pillar for anywhere between 37 and 42 years before eventually dying up there. He was made a Saint for his efforts, so if he didn't achieve enlightenment, at least he achieved fame. The real tragedy is Simeon
apparently inspired copy-cats, and those guys don't even get
the honor of posting first! There you have it, the greatest wastes of
time in all of history. What do you think? Reckon you
can beat any of these records? Let me know some of your
creative wastes of time in the comments below! And thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
