- 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 and there should be, it'll say Subscribe. Leave your words. Comment, leave a comment. And, that's good. - It wasn't great! - It was good though.
