- Hello the Internet and welcome
to another episode of The Spit Take.
My name's Jack O'Brien,
I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Cracked.
I think we can agree that survival trainings
are for crazy people who call their houses compounds
and know the expiration date
of every different gasoline blend.
If you're like me, most of what you know
about surviving deadly situations
is based on movie tropes and old wives' tales,
which wouldn't be such a big deal
if film makers and elderly married women
didn't want us dead so badly.
I'm not sure what we did to anger
such highly specific and almost completely distinct
groups of people, but for whatever reason
they've been giving us advice that seems
to have been designed specifically to kill us
in the most spectacular and embarrassing ways possible.
Advice like, if a shark attacks you,
just punch it in the nose.
So, you ever noticed how the tip of a shark's nose
is small and kind of moves around a lot
while they're trying to eat ya'?
Especially compared to its much closer giant
razor toothed mouth and the also closer part of its face
below the nose which effectively functions
as a ramp into the said mouth.
Followup question.
How confident are you in your ability
to throw punches while treading water?
If you answered "Very, jack, I'm very confident
"in the accuracy of my swim punches,"
my condolences.
Being a stupid person probably
isn't gonna be any easier without arms.
If you insist on being confrontational,
gouge out its eye.
You know how their eyes roll over
right when they attack.
That's basically their shark equivalent
of screaming, "Not the eyes!"
Personally I'd suggest the equally advisable
and far less difficult playing dead.
Playing dead, it's the evolutionary Konami Code
cowards like me have used to cheat our way
through millennia of being wrong on the food chain
and thousands of wars.
Playing dead for when the going gets tough
and the only part of you that gets moving
is your bowels.
Playing dead works with almost any predator
except for bees, wolves, and certain sexual ones
who it only makes more interested in you.
Lost in the woods?
Check for moss.
It only grows on the north side of trees and rocks.
- I remember being told my whole life
that moss only grows on the north side of a stone.
- Logic is supposed to be that in the Northern Hemisphere
the Sun's generally down south with the comfortable people
who live closer to the equator.
Since moss can't grow in the direct sunlight
all you have to do if find the nearest rock or tree
and check which side the moss grows on.
Easy peasy Harry (beep) Weasley.
This rule of bull (beep) covered thumb
benefits from the fact that no one thinks
to check whether it's actually true
until you're lost in the woods
at which point you learn that--
- Uh-oh.
What the (beep) is that?
There's moss on the other side of this stone.
- Oh! Perfect!
There's moss on all of the sides.
Turns out the forest tends to be
a pretty shadowy place everywhere,
which you'd be sure to tell people
if you weren't about to die alone
and hopelessly lost in the woods.
If you have some time to kill
you can put a stick in the ground
and mark the end of the stick shadow
at 15-minute intervals.
The first mark will be west, the last will be east,
you're not gonna remember any of this.
If you've got a watch you don't even need
to do all that (beep).
Just hold your watch flat
and line up the hour hand with the Sun.
The point halfway between the hour hand and the 12
will be true north.
If you don't wear a watch because you have an iPhone
your iPhone has a compass on it.
You should have just done that.
"But Jack," you say, entirely too familiarly
if I'm being honest, "don't go outside!
"I'll never have to find civilization
"because I don't intend to leave it even for a moment."
Unfortunately, sometimes you find
that nature is coming from inside the house.
If you live in any of the states known as Tornado Alley,
which you might have read about in our article
The Five Worst Alleys,
you know that when a tornado hits
all you have to do is open all your windows
to let the pressure out or something sciency-sounding
that keep your house from blowing away.
- You see the door pop open on the left-hand side
and suddenly within four seconds
the whole house is gone.
- Totally gone.
- Unluckily, opening the windows or doors
does the opposite of that.
And if you're not at your house
do not listen to Kevin Costner's advice.
Just generally, but especially
his tornado advice from Man of Steel.
- Go for the overpass!
Take cover!
- Tornadoes collapse highway overpasses, Kevin,
and if your classmates are not supermen
those suck to be caught under.
If you can drive to shelter in time, do that oddly.
But if you can't you're actually better off
just pulling over, buckling your seatbelt,
and protecting your head.
So the idea that doorways are supposed
to be earthquake-proof got its start
in 19th century California
when homes were generally built of adobe,
the building material equivalent of wet toilet paper.
And the only thing that didn't crumble
was the wooden doorframe.
So it only applies if you think you live
in a 150-year-old house made of adobe,
which if you live in an earthquake country,
you're probably wrong about
since those all fell down 100 years ago.
Instead get under a sturdy table
and, again, cover your head.
How to tell if the table's sturdy?
Stand on it.
If it just collapsed, it's probably not stable enough
to withstand your entire house falling on top of it.
Repeat this step until you find one that works.
Strap that to your back
and wear it around like a turtle shell.
Now you're safe and everyone thinks
you're (beep) crazy, which will come in handy
when they're trying to decide whose house to loot
after the big one hits.
And lie you down there on the ground like a jerk.
This one is about the advice to lie down to avoid lighting.
I couldn't find a movie clip
because movie lightning is magic,
makes robots sentient and cars go back in time
so nobody avoids it.
But real lightning hurts,
and even if it strikes next to you
it ripples up from wherever it strikes in circles.
If you're flat on the ground
you're just increasing that surface area
for the lightning ripples to electricity up your body.
The best move is to crouch down and lean forward
on the balls of your feet, like a distraught person
taking a shower to rinse off a loved one's blood
after accidentally murdering them.
Or like a catcher, let's go with that.
That crouch puts you as low as you can go
without being annoyingly good at yoga,
and you've made yourself into a tiny target.
This one's particularly insane
because there're catastrophes
where the best thing you can do
is lie flat on the ground,
namely being on thin ice and/or in an elevator
that's plummeting to earth.
I guess just or.
Those scenarios probably rarely overlap.
You may have heard that you're supposed to jump
at the moment before the elevator hits the ground,
which is both gonna be really hard to time
and will still cause your skeleton to crumble so fast
and completely that gravity will scream "Jenga!"
In both scenarios you want to lay flat
for the exact reason you shouldn't do that
during a lighting storm.
Your body's making contact with more surface
so your weight pressing down on the ice
or the elevator floor slamming up into you
gets spread out across more of your body.
Alright, lighting round.
Get it.
Cacti aren't filled with safe drinking water,
they're filled with greed liquid
that will make you sick out of all your holes.
You're been shot.
You've got to get that bullet out of you
so take off your shirt.
Thus begins the sex scene in every John McClane
Sarah Connor slash fiction I've ever written,
and now I come to find out that's not even true.
Bullets have just been flash disinfected
by the explosion that send them shooting into your body
in the first place, so there is also a chance
that digging around in there with something
that hasn't just been baked at a million degrees
in a gun barrel will cause an infection or open an artery.
So don't do that.
Stay with me!
Don't go to sleep!
Live, God damn it!
Clear!
Are the sorts of things that are on enough
Valentine's Day cards in my opinion.
They're also a pretty much stuck dialog
for any movie character trying
to keep someone they love from dying
using the old "can't die if you're actively annoyed"
medical procedure.
In reality you can let people go to sleep.
They're not gonna be more or less likely to die,
you're just being selfish because you can't stand
to be by yourself with the paramedics.
Also, defibrillator pads won't restart someone's heart.
In movies they're used after pounding
on the dead person's chest doesn't bring them back,
but in reality they're only used
to shock someone's still-beating but erratic heart
back into the right rhythm,
like Mrs Becker, my really strict dance instructor.
Make sure to have someone suck the poison
out of a snake bite;
if you want your friend to poison himself
while getting the most bacteria-filled wet part
of his body all over your open wound.
The best thing to do is just to keep your pulse low well
making your way to the emergency room,
which is another reason you shouldn't have
your friend or a stranger suck on any part of you.
Unless that's like the only thing that calms you down.
When you get a bloody nose don't tilt your head back.
Instead pinch and hang your head forward,
like the self-respecting dork
or shame-filled cokehead that you probably are.
If you see someone having a seizure
do not try to stick a wallet or a wooden spoon
or (beep) anything between their teeth.
I know you've seen it in countless movies
and it supposedly stops them from swallowing their tongue
but swallowing your tongue is impossible
and also, and probably most importantly,
what are you, a (beep) asshole?
And finally, if you're stranded in a blizzard
you should eat snow to stay hydrated.
If you want to keep your corpse well preserved
for the people who find it.
If you want to stay alive, the snow actually
robs your body of too much heat.
Melt it in a container and let it warm up
before you drink it.
And if you're dying of thirst on the ocean
don't drink your own pee.
I don't have any life saving advice, just don't do that.
Die with some (beep) dignity.
(jingle)
- Everybody, thanks for watching that video
on YouTube and make sure to, uh,
it's like a little thumb, you click Like
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And, that's good.
- It wasn't great!
- It was good though.