Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Ladders

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why ladders are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Ladders, known for being long, famous for a person being up there. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why ladders are secretly, incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, simple opods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden.

Hi, Katie. Hello. Hello. And we have an additional wonderful guest joining us today. He is a best-selling novelist, and his next novel is up for pre-order. It's called There Are No Giant Crabbs in this novel, colon, a novel of giant crabs. It's available right now, releases in November. Please go ahead and pre-order because that's the lifeblood of being a novelist.

And please welcome Jason Pargin. Hey. Thanks for having me back on the show. Of course. It's a treat. Yeah. So much has changed since the last time we spoke, but we have no time to get into it now. Your listeners know there's been big life changes for everyone involved.

Well, not me. Things have been exactly the same for me for the last 20-some years. But still, what matters is that everyone else is progressing through the stages of life. I also, I really admire your new Stasis Pod, The pod you hop in and out of between taping and making amazing videos. You know, it's great. It's green science fiction. I was going to ask about the goo, but I didn't want to be rude.

And Jason inspired this topic with an excellent video he made, which will link. But we can just start with our relationship to it or opinion of it like we always do. Jason, you can go first. How do you feel about ladders? So ladders were not a part of my. life in my childhood for some reason. But in my 20s, I renovated, let's just call it what it was. It was a crack house that we bought for very cheap as a rental property. We spent like five years fixing it up. And so for the first time I found myself doing ladder work. And despite how many times

I was warned, don't fall off the ladder, be careful. It's actually really easy to fall off a ladder. I straight up fell off a ladder several times and was surprised at how easy it is to do that and thought, well, I must be an extremely clumsy man who should not be trusted with doing any man things at all and should not own any power tools. And then, yeah, saw what was that video I made was based on somebody on Twitter saying they, if you work in an emergency room, there's basically two things that I think shock you. One, no one should ever own a motorcycle. Sure. And if you are above a certain age, you should never, ever, ever get up on a ladder. Because if you fall from even a very short height, you will have an injury that you will not fully recover from.

Yeah. And the motorcycle one is something that's always been top of mind for me. Ladders? Never. Never think about it ever. Yeah. Katie, what about you? How do you feel about the ladders of the world? I mean, I do know that like if you have a ladder incident, what I've learned from cartoons is that like if all if all the rungs of, come out of a ladder. What happens is like you can use them as stilts. So I'm, yeah, that's what I understand. Yeah, that it's just like a, it's like fun and funny when a ladder falls over.

That's what I learned from cartoons. And yeah, I was surprised to learn later in life that ladder safety is quite important. I don't like, I don't like being on ladders. I'm just going to say it. That's my hot take. They're SIF, of course, and also they're truly under-discussed as a safety thing, as we'll talk about.

Because I had to get a ladder just to look at the one-story tall, flat part of our roof. And I hate using it so much. But I figured that's just me being a coward. No, they're pretty dangerous. I'm also a coward. I'm a proud coward. I never want to use a ladder without, like, a buddy. like I make my husband hold the ladder while I'm on it or vice versa because it's just it's it scares me too much it's like I hate like once I'm like on the second step it's like oh this isn't so bad third step like I don't love it and then by the time we get to the fourth or the fifth step I'm like I hate this why am I on here and also I shared with you guys a picture of a guy I saw on a ladder on the main street of our small town in New York I saw him

winter, he's just like up two and a half stories with no spotter. And it was a pretty rickety extension ladder. Like I could see it move side to side as he was on it because he was swinging an entire garden hoe at big icicles and also still making sure to use one hand to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette. Like his commitment to risking death, I just kept checking our local paper because I knew they'd cover it if he died. And he seems to have made it. But there's like several things. things there that are sort of safety and health issues. But like, can you, can you claim to have ever been this cool, Alex? No. When I, I chatted it to a couple of friends of mine, finished the chat with an American flag emoji because I felt like he was really embracing

freedom in an ironic, stupid way that I never have, you know? Here's the thing. Like, we keep talking about how you could die or whatever. I don't know that falling from this guy's head is probably, I'm going to say, 20 to, 22 feet off the ground, off the pavement. I don't know that falling 22 feet to a concrete sidewalk will kill you, but I can say you will get an injury that you will feel for the rest of your life. Yeah. That's the thing about being getting older is you start to have a different idea of what injuries do to you because when you're 50, you'd have friends who hurt themselves in the yard and it's like, okay, we've, you know, the doctors, you know, they've fixed the injury.

but they fixed it that you'll never have the same range of motion ever again for the rest of the time you have this body and you start to realize oh once you get once you're not 20 anymore there's some things you don't heal from there's yeah yeah yeah I slipped on some stairs and kind of like hit my shoulder and it was like I didn't have to go to the ER it was not a serious injury my shoulder hurt for like like when I lifted it in a certain way it hurt for like when I lifted it in a certain way it hurt for about one and a half years. And that was, that was like mid-30s. Like, you know, I still feel like I'm relatively young, but my shoulder didn't. So like when I would lift my arm up, like, above my head, I would feel it. So, you know, stairs and ladders seem, like anything that has steps seems like they're secretly, incredibly dangerous. That's such a better show. It just now occurred to me.

God. Man, it would be so much wealthier and more powerful. Spit off. Here's what can kill you. Here's the thing that, sure, it may not be likely, but if you think about it, you should also be scared of this thing. Seed oils. Right.

Yeah, that just my computer starts spitting physical money out of it somehow. Like, oh, wow. hey, ooh. But no, we do facts. Speaking of, on every episode, our first fascinating thing about this topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that is in a segment called, well, I guess it would be nice if I could say some numbers and not just any numbers because I'm talking about stats. Nice.

I need like a cassette tape of your songs, Alex, to. Play my son so that he can boogie during playtime. I like that it's a cassette tape. Like I made him a mixtape or I'm outside the window with the John Cusack boombacks. Please turn to side B. That name was submitted by Tim Coffee Lover Bruno on our Discord. Thank you, Tim. There's your new name for this segment every week.

Please make a Missilian whack-in bat as possible. Submit through Discord. or to siphot at gmail.com. And our first couple of numbers are ladders that go up the sides of mountains. Ooh. Because it turns out there's more of them than you would think. The first number is 400 feet or more than 120 meters. That's the length of a seasonal cable ladder attached to half dome.

No. In landmark at Yosemite National Park. Alex, no. No. No. Are you looking at the picture of it? Is that why you're saying that? No.

No. She's just imagining it. I think, yeah. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, no, sorry, but no. Half dome, you may know it. It's a giant mass of rock that is 5,000 feet tall in the Ossemody Valley. And it's famous for rock climbers trying to do, especially the big flat side. That's why it's called half dome. But most people who want to go to the top, they hike up the rounded side, and then they get a park permit to use the cable ladder for the, final 400 feet or so. Because otherwise you would need to do more climbing, climbing. And park rangers install it around May, take it back out around October. And they've been doing that since 1919.

More than a century, most years, they've put up a temporary ladder on half dome, the famous rock climbing thing. Yeah. Brett did this. Oh. I did not. Yeah. I opted to not do havedom. But yeah, he did it.

He said it was, he was like, he heard it was sort of like that there were like stairs or steps. And then when he actually got to it, he's like, oh, this is like almost vertical. Yeah, it's a ladder. It is a straight up vertical ladder along a completely vertical rock wall. There's a slight grade. It's a very slight grade, but it doesn't feel that way. Not enough to help you at all. And if you look at the pictures, you kind of maybe think, well, this ladder is, you know, it's screwed into the side of the rock.

I'm sure it's extremely secure, but you look at the picture. It looks like there's 12 people on the ladder right now in that photo I'm looking at because they're just all lining up going up the ladder. So if you get exhausted halfway up, you kind of have to keep going. You've got people underneath you. And if you, you know, where to fall, I guess you're going to just wipe out the whole thing. family behind you. It'll sound like bowling pins. Yeah.

But people, whatever anchors things into the side of rock walls, people really, really trust those. They will just hang right off of those spikes or whatever. And I'm sure the science is on their side. I'm so fixated on the length of it because 400 feet, none of us have ever climbed a ladder nearly that long. You know what I mean? Like this is your first time doing this much ladder when you are doing this.

You don't know what you're going to get to. To me, that's what Jason said. It's the public pressure part is as scary to me as the height, where it's like, okay, I'm tired. And then you look behind you and there's like 15 impatient people. And like the social pressure like in combination with a ladder, which again, I'm not fond of ladders and also heights. Yeah, I'm sure there's some aggressive. of marmots as well to be worried about.

It's not a situation I personally would opt to be in. The marmots are only verbally aggressive. Yeah. They're not all over you. Look at you, you weakling. You weakling. Yeah, a link, this is what the National Park Service says about their own cable ladder. Quote, since 1919, relatively few people have fallen and died on the cables.

However, injuries are not uncommon. for those acting irresponsibly, end quote. Very few people. I love that. That's like such a great pitch. Like very few people. You know. That's not the world's only ladder like this.

There's a wooden one in the Andes Mountains. The elevation number is 2,500 meters, which is about 8,200 feet, well more than a mile into the air. That's the elevation of the peak of Putakusi Mountain, which has become a tourist destination in the Andes, mostly because it's close to Machu Picchu. The mountain Putakusi itself doesn't have historic sites, but it has a series of steps and cables and then several wooden ladders to get you to the top. The longest one is about 30 meters or almost 100 feet long.

So people seem to get a thrill out of just this horrifying climb, and then you can see Machu Picchu out there. These look like old-timey train tracks that go straight up. So. Yes. Yeah, it's just like big wood. And that's it. And you can just go up the ladder if you want to on the mountain side and the remote Andes people do it.

Like I'm not leg loss over here. I don't, I don't feel like this is for me. Same. I would never do any of these. And I'm also not a heights person. Like this is the one where other people like it more than me on like a regular household ladder. Yeah. And then the wildest version of this is one Jason sent my way.

It's a ladder going up and across a stretch of a mountain range just because the main numbers for this ladder are that it is 551 feet long and it is suspended at an altitude of 5,000 feet in the air. So in metric 168 meter long ladder, more than 1,500 meters up. I wasn't scared until you said it in metric. Now I'm scared. Right. And this is mostly a horizontal ladder. This is one where you're crossing. It's kind of like the equivalent of one of those rope bridges you saw in action movies,

where it breaks exactly 100% of the time when you're going to cross it because you're having an action scene. It's like that only in ladder form. So it looks like incredibly an exhausting way to try to go that stretch, that distance. and then you have just a straight, mild drop underneath you the whole time. Like you're just looking straight down at oblivion. Yes. Yeah. It's basically just dangerous, so that's why people do it.

What is this ladder called? It's, I think, maybe just nicknamed the Sky Ladder. It's between two cliffs in China and Hunan province. And it opened in late 2024, and it attracts about 1,200 tourists per day, 1,200 tourists according to CNN. So I'm looking at a picture of this and yeah, I don't

I don't like it at all. This is awful. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. It is it looks so like maybe it could be completely safe. I mean as safe as a ladder

hundreds of meters off the ground can be but it looks super flimmy It just doesn't... Yeah. It looks like, I don't know, some kind of a temporary thing that you just threw across a cliff. It's like steep, too. It's not like a flat ladder.

It's like a upwards ladder, but also over a crevasse. It's... It looks like people have hooked, like, that they hook themselves in there, though, like with... They've got, like, climbing gear. Not that that makes it, like, a lot. better but yeah parts of this trip are also something called via ferrata which means iron way and you're like clipping one carabiner to something while your feet are on just one steel wire kind of thing and then other parts are the ladder shape and and more diagonal than I would like

in terms of the grade of it and the entire point is just you're out in the sky and if you fall you fall a whole mile. That's the point, is it? Yep. Mathematically, how long does it take you to fall a mile? Like, how long would you have to think about it once your clip broke and you were just plummeting? That feels like that would be, it feels like you would take it a little bit. Let me see.

How long does it take to fall a mile? Are you Googling it? Rapid Googling says about 30 seconds. God, that would be a long 30 seconds, I feel like. That's hideous, yeah. Like you would try to call someone to say goodbye, right? And then boy, they should have picked up, you know, terrible. I would pull out my phone and think, I've got time to watch like four or five TikToks.

Yeah. I can get one just a little bit more scrolling in before I go. Because they're not going to have this in heaven. And the first one's about ladder safety and serves me right. Yeah. Yeah. So hideous stuff to me, but more than 1,000 people do it every day if CNN is right. And it opened late 2024, so it's a pretty new attraction.

But yeah, if you're one of these people, you can go do it. One of these people. People who, you know, I guess don't think about falling so much. Yeah, which I'm just not interested in falling ever. No, me either. Yeah, no. Back to sort of back to Earth here, the next number is 10 feet or less. 10 feet or less, about three meters. That's the height from which people fall in most of the deaths caused by someone falling off a ladder. Relatively low altitude. Yeah, like ironically, probably fewer, I mean, almost certainly fewer people have died on these like terrifying, you know, endless chasm.

ladders than they have on just like changing a light bulb ladder just because that's you know statistics yeah and you're paying more attention yeah yeah i think movies have misled us in terms of how much trauma your body can take without some effect because you know an action movie the hero can hit his head very very hard many times and he's fine and so it's like well gosh he was just changing a light ball but you know he's He was standing on the very top of a six foot ladder and then he fell and hit his head on a desk. And they're saying he had a brain bleed, like just from that height. It's like, yes, it doesn't take a lot. It doesn't take a lot of impact to bruise the brain.

It just doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, James Bond cannot be punched in the head for 60 years and just be cool still. Is that how works? James Bond would have serious CTE. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And this ladder fall material, one source here is the International Association of Certified Home Inspectors. They say they're citing the World Health Organization. I can't find the United Nations page to back that up. But they say that there's hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. alone from falling off a ladder. And beyond hundreds of deaths, it's hundreds of thousands of injuries, many of them important. And you don't have to be high up. You can be 10 feet or even less above the ground and still it can be fatal. They also, the other number here they say is five because there are five common ways ladder accidents happen. And when I read the list, they all make total sense to me.

The five ways are you mount or dismount improperly, losing balance, of course, failing to set up the ladder properly in the first place, overreaching while on the ladder. So that tips. And then misstepping while going up or down the rungs. It all makes sense. Like the five different ways your ladder journey can go wrong. Yeah, I mean, because like don't most ladders have like that little warning on the one of the penultimate steps that's like, do not go past this step? The other steps are just decorative.

Yeah. I cannot. If the listeners take nothing else from this episode, because I think there are people listening right now who think we're being. very silly because it's a ladder. Everyone's been on a ladder. And here's the thing. If I took a ladder out, you know, on the sidewalk and I said, okay, go climb up most of the way up. You would do it and say, see, I feel a little unsteady up here, but I'm fine. That's not the problem. The problem is you're going to get up there and say you're trying to, I don't know, replace a ceiling fan because you've decided, well, how hard can that be? I'm a masculine,

strong person who solves my own problems. I don't have to hire somebody to do it. So now you've got the replacement fan in your left hand and it weighs like eight pounds. And now you're trying to wire it up by twisting the wires with your right hand because you now have neither hand to steady yourself in any way. And you are 100% concentrating on trying to get those wires twisted, get the little plastic wire nut thing on there. And at some point, you're going to realize, man, this would be way easier if the ladder was about

six inches to the right. Because I now have to push this up and get screws into the bracket that hold it to the ceiling, but the other, it's a weird angle. But to move the ladder, you would have to completely start over because the ceiling

fan is now dangling from those two wire nuts. That won't hold it. So what are you going to do, you're just going to lean over a little bit to get a better angle on it. And that little bit of leaning is all it takes to overbalance. And you will not, you will not notice until you are falling. Like there's no, once you start to tip it, it's, it's not easy to just correct it because of just the physics of it. It is so much easier to do. And when you're on a ladder, roughly unless you're just up there

for your own amusement for some reason you're up there to concentrate on something you're painting a little bit of trim you're trying to dig something out of the gutter you're trying to get your frisbee off the roof whatever it is your concentration is on everything but what your feet are doing

and it is just so easy to step off of it and it may be fine the first 20 times you do it but on that 21st time off you go and then now you're hoping to land on your feet. Well, I also wonder if, like, experience might actually not be helpful because experience

can make you overly confident. I know that for, say, rock climbing, often it's the more experienced rock climbers who actually get serious injuries or even die because they have done it so many times that they get a little careless or kind of aren't, they don't have that sort of like anxiety of like, I got to check, you know, the carabiner. I got to, you know. So it's like, I wonder if it's a similar thing with ladders where even if you have a lot of experience with ladders, that might actually, you know, even if you're consciously kind of thinking like, oh, you know, I, I'm being careful. It's like, you know, your body has gotten used to being on the ladder. So you're just a little less alert, a little less careful than maybe you would be if you were a little nervous. Yeah, that is all dead on. And it. we are already sort of into it. Let's get into takeaway number one.

Ladders are even less safe than you think they are. I mean, I think they're pretty unsafe. Yeah, and like the more I read about this, I feel like there should be driver's licenses for ladders or something, you know? Like, it is something that anyone can just buy, anyone can just use, and you can fall and meaningfully injure yourself or kill yourself, and nobody, like, speaks about that, I feel like, except Jason. talks to people about it, as he says in this video.

He asks people, hey, what's your ladder experience? And they all say they fell. Yeah. This was my other takeaway, because when I tell people, I won't, like I've got, like I just had a light, and next year your light fixture went out. And I hired it out. And if I tell people, I'm not going to get up there to do it. They all say, oh, so you're afraid of heights.

I'm not afraid of heights. I'm afraid of ladders. Yeah. And that's because when somebody comes to the house, I've been doing this for years. I asked to fix something high up. I asked him, have you ever fallen off the ladder? 100% of the time. I've literally never had someone say,

either they say, yes, I fell and hurt myself, or they have a horror story about a coworker who fell and broke their hip or whatever. They were permanently on disability because they fell everyone. Everyone has a ladder story. This isn't like flying where you tell somebody you're afraid to fly. And they're like, well, you know this technically,

the safest form of travel. No. Right. Ladders are the exact opposite. If anything, like your fear of the heights, that's your body telling you, no, this is this not irrational. It's not a phobia. If you fall from this height, you will walk with a limp the rest of your life. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's not being high in like a building or something. Like the ladder is liable to fall. You're right. You're just correct. And a lot of key sources here. Most of them are from Jason's video. We're citing the International Association of Certified Home Inspectors,

also the Public Health School at the University of South Florida, and then Washington State Government, their Department of Labor and Industries has resources on this. And I'll link at 2014 review in the Journal of Surgical Research by lead author Dr. Jorge Khan of West Virginia University. The quickest stats about ladder injuries, you can use the U.S. as a useful population for it. In 2022, the government's occupational health and safety administration, OSHA, they said ladder safety violations are the third most common dangerous problem across all U.S. jobs of all kinds.

Right. Like a lot of jobs you don't get on a ladder, really, and still at a population level, it's our third riskiest thing. And then the following year, 2023, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported that half a million people in the U.S. treated for later related injuries. Only about 300 were fatal, but out of that half a million there are some really serious injuries. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it is exactly how Jason put it. It's you combine a couple elements. You have, you're up at enough height. Like, it takes a, kind of shockingly not that much height to seriously injure yourself. And then you're also on a a thing that is even if it's somewhat stable it's not like it's not screwed into the ground so it does move and you're doing stuff like there's no reason to be on a ladder except to do things also like you're

saying jason like people who whose entire jobs are doing things on ladders still fall so it's not like everyone who falls are is just like careless or being inexperienced it's just like it's a kind of a dangerous situation. Yeah, and it's also something that is acute for all ages and situations of men specifically. In Dr. Jorge Khan's study, he says out of more than 27,000 hospital trauma records, they reviewed more than 89% of the injuries happened to men. So almost nine out of ten, it's men in the U.S. And it was across all ages, but the worst for older people. Older people were more likely to get a brain injury than skeletal injuries. So, Like, especially outside of workplaces and paid work, people just doing something on a ladder is a huge risk to men in the U.S. and worldwide.

And anecdotally, it sounds like a lot of guys retire from their longtime career at some kind of desk. And then they bust out their ladder to do that house task they've been meaning to do and ruin retirement. You know, it's awful. Yeah. I really want to hit that point about the age thing because I think part of it is if you, fall at when you're in your 20s, you're used to, you know, having cat-like reflexes or being very flexible or being able to absorb, you know, the same thing. The reason people can play sports in college or whatever. And your body bounces back in ways.

And you can convince yourself because, you know, I'm 51 years old. I still feel young at heart, mainly because I have a very silly job. I have to consciously remind myself that I cannot recover in the same way that, you know, a head cold now takes me like five weeks to get over. But this is, you get retired men, older men. And I think they are remembering a sense of balance and things like that that they don't necessarily have. And you, it's hard to admit to yourself that. And I mean, Jesus, how long have we known each other?

Alex, when did you start doing cracked stuff? Yeah, freelance like 2013, I think. Yeah. And I think we got in touch that way, yeah. Yeah. So 13 years, like in my youth, you know, sure, it was different. My life was 100% pure adrenaline. Everybody cracked like these, called me nitrous because it's like this guy lives life a quarter mile at a time. Yeah. Your stasis pod has great flame stickers on it, by the way. Yeah. I meant to say also. You just bounced in the office on moon shoes.

But yeah. And so you've at this point. my I can I can just recite everyone I know has got some injury their nursing that they've that they now have is it's going to be with you forever like that's the thing last thing for this takeaway I know it is grim but it could literally save people's lives and also I got curious about what you can do to be safer and there's a bunch of simple things you can do to be safer so you could there's like we're not just bumming you out here the the simplest safety is to pay someone else to get on the ladder for you because like we say they need to be careful. to, but hopefully they're at least trained or paying attention or, you know, not goofing around on the weekend doing a little house task. They do this for living. Second thing you can do, I haven't like taken the course. I can't speak to it. But there's an extremely specific nonprofit called the American Ladder Institute. I know it sounds like I made it up. Like that's what the made up one would be called. But it's funded by ladder manufacturers in the U.S. and Canada. They have a free online course for ladder safety. Like that's probably better.

that nothing, try it. And then finally, I wish there were statistics on spotters like Katie described like somebody hold the ladder for you. It just seems like a great idea. Like, why would that not be helpful do that, you know? So there's a bunch of ways you can just try to make sure nothing bad happens to you. I think also one thing that, I mean, I can't claim that I'm definitely safe on ladders, but if I can't reach something, I do just give up and go back down the ladder and reposition. Or make Brett do it because he's taller than me by a large margin. So like, you know, I am definitely like in favor of being a quitter when it comes to like safety stuff of like, oh, if I could just lean over there. It's like, no, I can't. I just, I have to get off the ladder. And yeah, it's going to like,

it sucks because I'm like, but there's a very annoying light bulb that I have to change in the kitchen every so often. And I never do it alone. And if I can't reach something, I just like switch places with, with Brett. I'm just, I'm slightly better at changing light bulbs. But he's taller. So it's,

you know, so I'll just like backseat light bulb change. Because it's, this is going to sound very silly because like, it's like what's hard about changing a light bulb. We don't have the screw in light bulbs. We have these like tricky ones that they're these like bars that you have to like

shove into these two nodes. It's, I hate it. It's very stupid. We should just replace it with like a giant, just like one. big light bulbs so that it's like really easy to change. Wait, one giant light bulb lighting your whole home?

Yes. What was I'm clear about that? Like the sun? Yes, Alex. I would like a miniature sun in our home. Like a lighthouse. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Think Seals thanks for five miles away. Yeah. Just like time to go in the kitchen. My eyes. Yeah. I love the light bulb example though because like maybe even more than ladders, You know, people joke about how many Italians to change a light bulb or whatever. I only picked on Italians because Katie lives in Italy.

Right. Like, I hope this takeaway makes people just like treat light bulbs and ladders on the whole process more seriously. If you do that, your risks go down. Great. And that's not all you need to do necessarily. You also need to like stop if the whole task is not reachable or something. But it's a lot of what you need to do. Just like be careful.

Yeah. There's always, there's nothing is so, like, Nothing is so urgent, right? No ladder task is so urgent or so important that you can't give up and reassess. Like I'm such, I'm a huge proponent of giving up and reassessing because that's like, sure, maybe you'll waste five, ten, half an hour or whatever. That's so much better than like, you know, months or weeks or years. I did that out of order, but, you know, like rehab if you get injured. If there's a thing among men, especially men of a certain age, where there is intense, like, shame that comes with hiring a man. It's not even about the money sometimes.

Yeah. Like hiring a man to come do man stuff at your house and then you're standing there, especially like the guy you hired maybe older than you. It's like, you know. And so it's like, well, I'm too big of a wuss to get up there to do this thing. No, pay him to come do it. It's fine. They can use the money. they're happy to have the work.

They know what they're doing. They're insured. It's worth it. Yeah. I also find it bothers me if they are younger than me or older than me or about the same age as me. Just each one is a different nuisance in my head. But no, these days I just straight up, just joke with them.

Like, I'm not getting up there. It's like, I appreciate you doing this. I'm not getting up there. I'm telling you right now. And I will use my age as an excuse. And I'll be like, as a younger man, I fixed up a whole house, got up on the roof, did all that crap. I'm not, not anymore. If this is what they do for a living, then, yeah, let them leave it to them.

It's worth it. It's, I know a lot of people don't. It's like, I'm going to pay somebody to come clean. My gutters is I can do it in half an hour. It's like, no, it's worth it. It's good for the economy. Yeah, it literally is. This is Mark Simpson's right.

Yeah. It's interesting because, yeah, for me, I actually, I don't. have like the pride thing of like I don't want someone else doing stuff. It's but I'm kind of a control freak. So like I always like like doing stuff myself because it's like if I could just like if I could just do this thing like if I could get access to this thing and do this thing. I'm sure I could figure it out. I'm sure I could do it. But like it is just like kind of realizing like oh this is like I could actually really hurt myself. Like I there's some issue with my washing machine and it's like, oh, the thing to access it is like on the bottom, so I'd have to like flip it over

and it's like electricity and water. And it's like, yeah, I was like, oh, I feel like I could just do this thing from the YouTube video if I could just get under there. But then it's like this, I'm probably going to crush my foot if I do that. Like, you know, so it's just, just, if I, if I just grab the ladder, then like I could nail this thing to the wall and I don't have to wait for. Brett to get home and it's just like, yeah, but, you know, man, that would just, it's, it's a, it's that little, a small chance, but, you know, not insignificant chance that I do something stupid. Because I did flood my

kitchen once, uh, trying to fix a plumbing issue. And that was just, um, you know, that wasn't a safety thing. That was just flooding my kitchen. So. And with all this stuff, I also like that in modern times, it's easier than ever to hire someone. And looking to our next takeaway, I feel like figuring out ladders and the rest of our tools, but especially ladders, this goes back tens of thousands of years, it turns out. Because takeaway number two, ladders are such ancient technology.

We're not totally sure if they were first used by Homo sapiens or by Neanderthals. Whoa. There is cave art that if we're dating it properly suggests maybe Neanderthals, invented these in parallel to us or before us. That's wild. Yeah. Well, there are certain inventions that seem like they kind of invent themselves. Like with stairs, there's natural rock formations that are basically stairs, right?

So it seems like you wouldn't have to be that much of a tool user to say, well, I wish, I wish I had that over here. Yeah. So like the fact that multiple cultures all invented stairs on the road. own. And it seems like with ladders, I don't know, if you had a hillside with grape vines or something on it, you could grab. It seems like you've kind of got a naturally occurring ladder and that it just seems like it would be very easy to say, I'm going to take that over here. I'm going to recreate that thing with the way these branches, I'm able to just grab this branch than that branch. I'm going to just make my own branches over here. I don't know. It seems like an idea you don't

have to have. It's the thing you can observe and just say, well, it would be cool if everything had that little branch arrangement on the side. It's also I think that there's a misunderstanding about like Neanderthals weren't really dumb. Like they were actually quite smart. They weren't they weren't able to do as much sort of tool advancement as, you know, humans were able to do. But they were there, They were no slouches. Like they were very smart and they were around for quite a while before we came on the scene and married all of them, killed some of them. And, you know, the rest of them presumably fell off of ladders.

That was the end. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that's all dead on what both of you said. And yeah, I think me and Katie have mentioned on past Sifts too that some of our DNA is probably Neanderthal as homosaphypies. There was intermarrying before homo-sabians became the main hominid. And this ladders thing, it's really driven by cave arts,

our understanding that maybe Neanderthals did at first. The key sources here are a piece for Atlas Obscura by writer Omnia Saeed, a piece for NPR's All Things Considered by journalist Christopher Joyce, and then digital resources from the British Museum and the BBC. Because there's not an exact date for the broad invention of ladders, There's one date in the history of the step ladder that you might have in your home. An American in Dayton, Ohio, named John Balsley, got a U.S. patent in 1862 for a ladder that folds together at a hinged top, sort of that capital A shape went unfolded. And then when he tried to sell his invention, he named it.

J. H. Balsley's improved steps was the name. He didn't really focus on the word ladder even. The irony is that the inventor of the basketball was named James Laddersley. Oh, James Nathsmith is so mad in his grave right now. Oh, he's so mad. But yeah, so like those various kinds of models of ladders, sure, they have specific invention dates. And then like Jason was saying, people all over the world just sort of parallel invented, what if I built a specific version of climbing a tree?

or a cliff or a mountain or something. They did it with wood or bamboo or even grasses put together into a ladder. And then one cave art example of this being very old is something we found in modern Spain. In 2021, archaeologists found cave art of a human climbing a ladder to get to a beehive and the honey. And I'll link it. The ladder has rungs and everything in this cave art, even though we think the art is seven, 500 years old. What if this was just like speculative fiction, right?

Like a caveman sort of like, what if in future steps go up? It's like all the stories of science fiction prototyping where iPads and cell phones are from Star Trek, but ladders? Yeah. In future, we'll be round, not square. And they're like, he's crazy, cathunk, cuthunk, catholic, driving away. But in terms of just to orient the listener, this cave art, how would language have worked in this era? It's nothing we'd recognize, yeah. Like, it might be some kind of Indo-European roots, but, you know, writing would have been new.

Okay. If at all. And in modern Spain, they were not as caught up to, like, I don't know, Quneiform in Mesopotamia or something. So, yeah, they would have been depicting a lot of stuff with just pictures. So that's why, if this was like a political cartoon, that's why they haven't labeled, like, the latter is Texas. And then the bees are. Yeah. The bees are whatever, the corrupt government that's about to sting you off the ladder.

And this, you, stupid, dumb, you. I'm sick of those clowns in the hut where the chief lives, right? Those clowns in the hut. Yeah. This is Thrag, he wrong. And I have drawn him looking stupid. Therefore I am right. This is me with muscles, big, strong.

And so there's like lots of cave art like that drawn that way. And oddly I need to link our episode about the color red because we talk about other than dark materials, like just brown and blackish colored stuff. Red was one of the first colors people used to make art. And there's one piece of red art of a ladder that was found in a different cave in modern Spain. And it's debated whether it was done by homo sapiens or Neanderthals because of the dating. There's one date estimate where they claim this ladder art could be for. from 65,000 years ago, and that is before Homo sapiens migrated to Spain from Africa. It would also make it much older than the other oldest Homo sapiens art we've got.

But either way, if that date is wrong, okay, maybe Homo sapiens drew it. But if that date is right, it almost has to be Neanderthals. And it almost has to be an indication that Neanderthals also invented ladders. What kind of materials would they have been using at this time, just wood? We think possibly like strong grasses and, you know, early rope like braided together is the simplest way. Because you need pretty good tools to cut down solid wood and then, especially if you try to saw it or something, that's very hard. It's not like dinosaur rib cage like I've been taught by the Flintstones. Yeah, like probably not, but animal.

bone, I don't know, sure. Seems like it could be, that'd be a cool ladder, just animal bone ladder. Like, if we try to depict the invention of the ladder, it's, it's some sort of like hazy Neanderthal in the past. We know so little about the first ladder. There's just no possibility of us ever knowing. Do we know sort of like, what was sort of the first paradigm shift in ladder technology? We don't know. Yeah, it's just like across the world, people have used the solid long material they've got.

And then they made it. Like, you could make a stone ladder that's just hard to move around. Basically anything that can hold a person's weight and be assembled has been turned into a ladder probably. And we're talking about just like the like two poles and then rungs, that the basic ladder. Yeah. Because I would imagine it was a while until we got the hinged ladder.

That John Balsley guy is pretty proud of advancing it in 1860. So that step ladder is like that was the first hinged ladder. Yeah, unless like other people did it and there wasn't a recorded patent, you know. I see. Ladder history is so fuzzy. It's very frustrating. And then we also think the other innovation was just rope climbing, like a rope with big knots in it or something, is essentially a ladder for your purpose.

But it's just a lot more physically taxing. This is unspeakably ancient when you stop and think about it. That like it's so ancient homo sapiens might not have been first. Which I don't like. I'm homo sapiens. I'm very biased toward us. Well, you could have like a 0.05% Neanderthal in you. You never know.

We all probably do apparently. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, yeah. It's a little scosh of that. So if I fall off a ladder, I'm blaming that part. It's the Neanderthal and me.

And folks, that's two takeaways and a bunch of numbers. We're going to take a quick break, then wrap things up with firefighters and also gods. What? Ladders. It makes sense. It'll make sense. All right. And we are back. And I'm so excited for other two takeaways because it's a lot of modern stuff and also culture. The next one's takeaway number three.

Ladders are important global religious symbols in two separate ways. Oh, I thought it was just the Latter-day Saints. Jesus Christ. Right, the Latter-day Saints of Jesus Christ. Yes, that's right. What's the name? Anyway. You're going to trigger a boycott of the show among the Mormons.

I'm a mom now. I'm a mom now. I get to do this. Are they allowed to listen to podcasts? I actually think that's not, I think Mormons are not allowed to listen to podcasts. I think that's up there with, like, caffeine and the other things are not. Oh, wow. Depends on whether it's a hot or a cold podcast.

Yeah, right? Oh, sorry, Mormons. But this is all about faith. And the one way ladders are a religious symbol is there's a surprising amount of cultures with ladder metaphors for a connection between Earth and Heaven. And then we'll also talk about one ladder in the city of Jerusalem that represents a truce between a bunch of Christian, schisms, and denominations. But I guess maybe it's not totally surprising ladders as a metaphor because they're unbelievably ancient. It seems like basically anyone involved in creating any faith that has lasted had a ladder or had heard of a ladder. Also, like, if we think about the afterlife or gods being up high, which seems pretty common with the theology, a ladder is how you get to there.

Right. It really, if you think the sky has anything interesting going on, great, magical ladder. Like, makes sense. Big ladder. Yeah. Yeah. And the key sources for these religious stories are Sapiens magazine and also NPR reporting and then digital resources from Chapman University and from Pacific Lutheran University. Because, yeah, there's a lot of symbols of ladders as a path to something supernatural in the sky. One example is the Pueblo people, native people, in North America. That Pueblo name is sort of based on what other people called their homes, but they built a spiritual tradition tied to the wooden ladders in their homes because they tended to live in clusters of structures where most of the rooms are entered by a ladder

through a hole in the ceiling, and then they could remove the ladder in a defensive way if the community is being attacked. Modern times those homes tend to have front doors, but ladders are used for reaching the upper floors, and then also for descending into underground ceremonial chambers called Kivas. And that last bit, the underground ceremonial chamber physically matches the Pueblo creation myth. Their creation story involves the first humans ascending a notched reed from the underworld. Whoa.

Going up into the world we live in. So the latter represents that creation of humanity. So they too believe we were one small people. I also want to point out the way that they had the ladder they could escape up and then pull the ladder up so that invaders couldn't follow them upstairs. The concept of climbing a ladder and then pulling it up behind you. Also a powerful metaphor for just that is a very common human experience in all sorts of areas of life. You can speculate listeners among yourselves of examples of people doing that. I think I think the very first person to invent a ladder after they climbed up to a high place that no one else in the village could get to.

I think the moment they pulled the ladder up, that was like the best feeling in the world. Like, I've just discovered a new feeling. No one can get up here now because I've taken my ladder with me. Now I'm up here and you're all stuck down there. And then that led to the political cartoon in the cave of this. jerk pulled up the ladder, Ed's making him look funny. Like there's just bees waiting for him up there. Yeah, yeah.

He's so hot. He's going to get his head stuck in a beehive as the rest of the panels show, but those were all washed away by weather. But they were all three panel comics. It's always just one panel that survived. And then another culture here is in modern Mali in West Africa, it's the Daugan people. They have centuries-old traditions of what they just call a granary ladder or a granary ladder. It started out, we think, with practical ladders for climbing real granaries or climbing up onto the roofs of houses.

But then they also started crafting miniature figurines of ladders that are a spiritual icon and symbol. The idea was that ancestral spirits could climb to the roof of a Daugan home and inhabit an altar dedicated to the deceased love. loved ones of that household and family. So they made real ladders for getting on top of their homes and where they store their food and then turned that into a religious icon. Another example, on the Indian subcontinent, Hindu people created the board game snakes and ladders, which some, especially U.S. board game companies, turned into shoots and ladders.

I find it interesting that across millennia, people changed up whether it's snakes or shoots bringing you down, but always had ladders as the pop. positive route. And it's hard to source exactly. There's claims that that game started as like moral instruction. If it did, that means ladders had a positive connotation. So it's still snakes and ladders like in the UK, I think. I think it's only shoots and ladders in the US. Is that, am I wrong about that? That's what I read. Yeah. Like maybe the US is globalizing the shoots. But yeah, we across the British Empire, they were comfortable with snakes. And we were like, I'm afraid it has to be a water slide or whatever.

Are you sliding down the snake? I don't understand that so much. Well, the snake, it's always been the thing that sends you back to the start of the game, right? Like if you, so the idea is that the snake has bitten you and you've fallen off the ladder is what I thought. Whereas we have is like, oh, no, you've hit the shoot. You can take the fun slide down.

But it's like, no, the snake is the punishment. This is board games is supposed to be a negative experience. It's supposed to teach you what it's like to lose. because sometimes in life that's going to happen. You think you're climbing the ladder to success. And then what is that? It's that co-worker. It's a snake.

I had a board game as a child called Payday, and it was all about like receiving bills and scams and stuff. And then sometimes getting your paycheck. And it's like, here's a financial instability, kids. Get used to it. So rough. Yeah. Yeah, I think Americans want to soften the game, and the rest of the world was like, mistakes are as bad as being bitten by a venomous snake or whatever.

And needing to recover like an Oregon Trail character by laying down, you know, like, yeah, it's tough. Pretty mean to snakes. Right, any anti-snake, a lot of nice snakes. Well, speaking of being mean to snakes, the Jewish and Christian traditions, right? The story here is Jacob's Ladder, which is in the book of Genesis. Jacob, important characters, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, his 12 sons become the 12 tribes of Israel. In the book of Genesis, there's a story where Jacob has a dream, and he dreams about a gigantic ladder between heaven and earth, and he sees angels going up and down the ladder. There's a lot of theological interpretations of it.

One is that it's a contrast with the Tower of Babel, right? Like if humans try to build a tower to heaven, that's bad. but God, it's good that he has a ladder down from heaven to us and that angels are, I guess, commuting up and down the ladder. And then also apparently there's translation debate about whether Jacob's ladder is a ladder or more of a staircase. And artists like William Blake made it stairs. I like how that reading feels like the Led Zeppelin song, Stairway to Heaven. But either way, a ladder is very important in the Bible as a magical connection. And the sort of a religious text of Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse, it's an escalator that goes to cat heaven.

All right. When the really itch and scratchy-ish parts happen? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Tom goes to cat heaven at some point, but I can't get in because he was so mean to Jerry and is threatened with hell. And then he tries to be nicer to Jerry. but, you know, Jerry's not having it. Anyways, it's basically like Dante's Inferno,

but it did have Thomas the cat. There are many commit multiple episodes where somebody's suicide in the Tom and Jerry series, including one where both of them sit on train tracks with the intention of being killed by a train. So not only committing suicide, but also putting that on the conscience of the train conductor that he had to watch this sentient cat and mouse be exploded under his train wheels.

So now you're putting the guilt of your death onto the stranger. What a selfish act. It's a lot more understandable when you watch Tom and Jerry with it in mind that they are both in a toxic relationship where they're codependent. Because then everything makes sense. Yeah. And then like separate from all these. spiritual ladders to heaven, there's one physical historic ladder that apparently has come to represent arguments and fights between Christian denominations. And Atlas Obscure is our main source here.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it was built around 1700 years ago, around the start of the early Christian church in what was a Christian section of Jerusalem. It's supposed to represent the location of the tomb where Jesus was buried and then rose from. the dead. So it's a very important church to early Christians. Sepulchre is a word that means a tomb. But the thing is, the church was built so early in Christian history, it was built just basically just sort of for Christians. And then there were a lot of different schisms and sub-denominations of the faith. And then every sect proceeded to say, we control the sepulchre church. And apparently that's led to centuries of negotiations and debates negotiated by

and Empire Sultans and various kings. And today, quote, care over the churches shared by no less than six denominations. Primary custodians are the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic Church, with lesser duties shared by Coptic and Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches. The whole edifice is carefully parceled into sections, some being commonly shared while others belong strict to a particular sects. And quote. And the upshot is, There's one ladder that somebody just put on an exterior ledge of the church to get up to a window. And the claim that I'm reading online, and I feel like a wooden ladder would just get old over time. This feels like more of a recent thing.

But either way, this has become nicknamed the immovable ladder because no sect has permission from all the other sects to change enough of the church that they would move the ladder at all. And so this one ladder is a symbol of how everybody very angrily shares this church and can't agree on anything. Who put the ladder up? Some miscreant? We don't know. We don't know. And there's a bunch of stories of like fistfights between monks and priests, the actual fistfights over very tiny changes to this church because they feel nobody's empowered to change anything. Well, based on your research,

which of the Christian factions is correct? Like which one is going to go to heaven and which ones are going to go to hell? None of the above. No, I don't know. Yeah, I do. I like the idea that I should say the Unitarians and not everyone gets mad at them and they're not mad at anybody. The joke's on everybody, you know? How do we have a fight?

I am imagining like priests and monks and various religious garbs like on stilts sort of fighting. over this ladder. And it's very funny. Yeah, Atlas Obscura says there's one sect that was debating another sect over a section of the roof, like one small area. So then they started sending a guy to just sit on a stool in that location to like physically hold it with his body. And then he tried to move one day because it was sunny. And then people thought he was encroaching on another part of the roof that belonged to another. Like it seems like it's a truly silly fight if this is real. Okay, don't say, you can't say that.

We have the photo of the ladder. A lot of you are picturing like an ancient ornate ladder that's a sacred thing that nobody can move. It 100% looks like a ladder that's maybe 10 years old that is one that was bought at a hardware store. And clearly somebody is continually replacing the ladder and they can't, they just can't admit it. It's like, oh, the ladder is eternal. It never is like, no, this is I think I know this model of ladder. matter. It's and it's just this little five foot. It really does look like you can get up to that ledge just by crawling up there. It doesn't even necessarily. You could put a box or something down there and stand on it. But anyway, but we're not, we're not mocking these people's their values or whatever. I'm sure they have a reason for acting the way they do. This whole thing, I'm so specifically mocking the ladder. Yeah. Like it just like Jason said, it looks new and fresh. It doesn't seem like it's actually important. in any way.

And I would believe this whole story is fake and just somebody puts out a new cheap wooden ladder from the shop across the street once in a while. It doesn't look like it's been there very long. So, yeah, maybe it's just a tourist attraction now. It's so silly. And moving up to the last bit of the episode here, takeaway number four. Ladders only became firefighting equipment after a philosophical shift. toward saving lives rather than focusing on saving property. Before them, they were, so I was like, save my baby.

And it's me like, well, but, you know, the chandelier. Now that. It's an antique. Like, no joke, there's a long stage of firefighting company history in modern times, where the main goal was home insurance and money and property. And then like a second set of charitable people said, what if we save anybody who's in the building, you know? Hmm.

It's hard to overstate the degree to which, for much of history, nobody cared if you died. Yeah. Death was just part of the, part of how it goes. Like, oh, you had a disease or a weird fall or there was an invasion? Yep. Maybe your loved ones would, but society at large, unless you were in a very, very, very tiny class of people, to whom the burning building belonged and not one of the many servants in it. You know, fewer people's lives, quote, unquote, mattered in the sense of,

statistically speaking, not going to be born into a family of wealth and power where any kind of like fire brigade would care about you. Yeah. Yeah, like a public service of firefighting is quite new. that really, really gets going 200 years ago or less, and a few cities like London kind of invented. Yeah, in the process, ladders were not all that necessary to their goals of stopping the fire.

The ladders got involved for saving people from like the outside of the building. And there's no one history of firefighting people have been trying to prevent things from burning for millennia. But the idea of like a modern European or colonial North American fire departments. It really started with maybe bucket brigades of people just on the spot trying to prevent a fire.

And then in the 1700s, the first insurance companies start funding actual firefighting brigades because basically actuaries said it's cheaper to fund a fire brigade than to let things burn all the way down. So, okay, we'll fund that. because like other than that the most advanced version of a city fire department might have been in Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin in 1736 created the union fire company as like a do-gooder volunteer bucket brigade but other than him in Philly that was pretty rare you mostly have like insurance company teams

and then some private firefighting brigades that made money stopping fires doing this I'll link our siff about fire hydrants where we talk about people fighting over the access to the water to get paid for stopping fires. But then, like, the start of the Victorian era in England starts to change this. Basically, these companies protecting property allow other citizens to start a second kind of firefighting company. In 1836, Londoners set up the society for protection of life from fire. Right? And, like, the name was a novel thing. Like we're actually putting out the fire to save people. That's new 1836.

Yeah. No, it's wild because I feel like that's when we talk about like fires, that's one of the things that is used sort of in political philosophy of like, hey, like if we want a, you know, good society, like we need to fund things like, you know, firefighters. Otherwise you just let people's houses burn down. But yeah, we used to. We used to not like obviously not throughout all of human history and not all societies, but during sort of this narrow window of like when you had like firefighters, but also, you know, incredibly inequitable society. Yeah, that was literally, yeah, they would just let your house burn down if you were not to, I don't know, landed gentry. Exactly. It was a feature of capitalistic and colonialistic societies of the 1700s and 1800s. One of the many drawbacks of that is that's so money driven, they don't necessarily fund preventing stuff and people from burning. If you think that sounds cool, like again, statistically speaking, you were not one of the dudes who had the manor. You were digging out potatoes with your hands, with your bare hands. That's who you were. Yeah. And so a fire was pretty devastating for you, especially as things urbanized and they just rapidly built a bunch of cruddy housing for factory workers and things. Those were tinderboxes. They would burn. Yeah. Factories themselves, too, like the triangle shirt waste factory fire was like one of the first sort of factory fires that actually got mass public outcry. Yeah. And then the solution of that, it really develops in two separate philosophical ways. there's well-funded firefighters for saving property.

And their main tools were buckets or big hoses. And they didn't really need ladders to get to higher positions. Like, why would you bother if you have a powerful enough hose? You just shoot the water up there, especially in the relatively short buildings of the mid-1800s. And then the life-saving kind of firefighter was often considered so different. Some communities gave them different job titles. Like the job title of conductor was assigned to people who,

tried to conduct the humans out of the building that was burning at one point. It was seen as different from fighting the fire almost. And these groups like the Society for the Protection of Life from Fire in London, which was the SPLF, they were focused on tools like ladders. Apparently in 1836, one of their first tools was a revolutionary vehicle, which was just a ladder on a pair of big wheels. so you can roll the ladder to the building to get people out from the outside on upper floors. Yeah, just incredible.

And I love the name of that group, just like Society 4. What if we let fewer people die, maybe? Yeah. Also, did they not feel the need to make their acronyms into words that you can remember? And they said to have a string a bunch of letters together. It seems like with 20 minutes of thought you could make that spell help or something. Right. Just don't be so Victorian about it, where the titles of things are gigantic and arcane. Yeah. You're in your house and it's on fire and you're having to shout to somebody in the street, go get the, and you've got to try to remember the long-ass name of that organization.

Yeah. You could totally help would be helping everybody live through fire, but with a pH. Yeah, there you go. It took 30 seconds to come up with that. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. At least people deserve to die. Especially the Victorian British people, you have words like, hazza available for the H, right?

Like, we don't have that anymore. In retrospect, if your acronym is help and then having the H also stand for help, probably. But still, it's, you could workshop it. But what about, what about, what about shut up? Now, the one thing I was wondering about, because like as terrifying as this prospect is of climbing down on this ladder on wheels while your house is, the entire apartment building is burning in front of you, like in a cartoon, the firefighters have like that little trampoline thing. And then the joke is they jump and they bounce off it and then they fall on the pavement anyway. Is that real or is that just a cartoon thing?

Yeah, looking that up, that is basically the other gear, this second kind of firefighters came up with. Around the 1880s in the U.S., people patented what was called a life net or a safety net. And in cartoons, it bounces more like a trampoline, but it's basically a big piece of canvas on a solid frame. And you need lots of people to hold it. So that's part of why the property firefighters were not interested. Like, it takes a lot of manpower to hold it. But then the do-goating firefighters would catch people with those things. And then they just wouldn't bounce that much.

So it was totally different sets of tools and gear, depending on whether you wanted to save the building or save the people. Yeah. Do they still, like, do that to some extent, like those big inflatable things, like to help people out of fires? Or is that, am I wrong about that? I think they do the inflatable thing now. Yeah. Yeah, there's like safety air cushions for emergency rescue. Yeah.

Yeah, and no one has to hold it. You just use a machine to pump it up, yeah. Right. That'd be so much fun. Yeah, fun. So then you have multiple decades from, especially in London, from the 1830s all the way to the 1860s, where there's basically corporate property saving firefighters. There's also building construction philosophies where a building would be, quote, unquote, fireproof in the sense that it's a total Tinder box except for the, frame and structure and it's relatively cheap to redo the inside. But so you have the corporate saving property, do-goating or charitable saving the humans, and then that finally merges, at least in London in 1865, when they established the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, a publicly run and funded

firefighting group that is publicly driven to do both things. And then like later on, other communities and countries did that too. But until you have, like publicly run firefighting. These are often separate services all over the colonialist world. They actually still have private firefighting companies. And it's like kind of wild because they still have to use like public infrastructure, like public water infrastructure, but they're like private firefighters. Like in Italy?

No, in the U.S. Oh, no. Yeah. I don't like that. Yeah. I mean, I don't like know. I can't go deep into the subject because I don't really know. But yeah, it's a, I feel, because I vaguely remember some news during some California

wildfires about this being controversial because they would like go and like protect some rich person's house but also use public water. Yeah. So to some extent, it still kind of exists, which is pretty wild. Then it plays into all of our debates about whether we're publicly funding things enough. Right. Because once you do set up a public solid firefighting service, that can innovate a lot. And especially with ladders, once we started to have combined public firefighting, the hook-end ladder technology gets invented in the 1890s in France.

Ladders on a truck with a turntable gets invented in 1906 in Germany. it really drove innovation in terms of using a ladder for all firefighting. Like maybe now you're spraying the water from the ladder. It became a core firefighting tool once we really modernized firefighting while focusing on bothering to save anyone. There's also that ladder that slides out. So like you have to make it even taller attached to the fire truck. It's very cool.

I know that because I had a toy fire truck and it did that. So I'm pretty much an expert. As a consumer, I would like to be able to shop for which fire department is going to come to my house. I want to be able to make that decision in the private food market and say, well, no, I want the deluxe. I want the one that's got the fancy ladder. I'm going to pay a little extra. I'm going to treat myself. Like in the event of a fire, I want to be able to decide.

Like, no, this time, you know what? We're going to, we're going to splurge. we're going to go with the gold plan. I want them to use alkaline water when putting out the fire. It's pH balanced. A giant water tank that says Fiji on it. Like, where'd you even get that? Why is it square?

There's coconut water. Everything's sticky for the next year. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. And I want to say another thank you to our special guest, Jason Pargin. Like I say, each time he comes on SIF, he is a full-time novelist. The main thing he does is write books. And so he appears on shows like this and shares his humor and wisdom and more, you know, in the hopes of letting people know that he writes books.

The next one coming up is there are no giant crabs in this novel, colon, a novel of giant crabs. It's the fifth book in the John Dies at the end series. And I also know he makes sure each of those stands on its own if you're brand new and just want to dive into cosmic horror and humor and more. So that's available for pre-order. It's out in November. If you want to give yourself the gift of a wonderful book toward the end or middle of fall, depending on your climate, that title is there are no giant crabs in this novel, colon, a novel of giant crabs. And don't type the word colon. It's the punctuation.

You get it. I'm going to link to that in our show notes. Also welcome to the outro of this show with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode. With a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, ladders are even less safe than you think they are. Takeaway number two, ladders are such ancient technology. We're not sure if they were first used by Homo sapiens or by Neanderthals. Neanderthals might have invented the first ladder.

Takeaway number three, ladders are important global relations. symbols in two separate ways. They're a powerful metaphor for all sorts of creation and heaven and so on, and then there's that funky ladder on a church in Jerusalem that no one is allowed to move. Takeaway number four, ladders only became firefighting equipment after a philosophical shift towards saving lives rather than just focusing on saving property. And the other key element there was the public interest and publicly funded version of firefighting, finally becoming the dominant thing in modern Europe and North America. On top of that, tons of numbers throughout this show,

especially for lengths and heights and so on, some truly weird ladders going all the way up the sides of mountains, and also some other wild dates for the potentially Neanderthal origin of this topic. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore

one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is fish ladders, which are a real thing, and also the surprising new way fish are using doorbells. Visit sifpod.fod.ffund for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFund bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund.org. This one particularly leaned on museum digital resources. In the firefighting section, I don't know if I even said are resources during the flow of the show. Key sources are digital resources from the London Fire Brigade, digital resources from the Denver Firefighters Museum, and digital resources from the Henry Ford. a museum in Michigan. We also got our ladder safety information from the International Association of Certified Home Inspectors, the Public Health School at the University of South Florida,

the Washington State Government's Department of Labor and Industries, a journal article from the Journal of Surgical Research in 2014, lead author Dr. Jorge Khan of West Virginia University, and then tons of journalism about Ladders, old and new, from Atlas Obscira, from Sapiens Magazine, from CNN, from NPR, and more. That page also features resources such as native-dash-land.ca. I'm using that to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others.

Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Saatsahya people's. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another

episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 61. That's about the topic of rest areas. Fun fact there, there is a long highway across most of the state of Utah with no rest areas whatsoever. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend Jason's podcast. He co-hosts an amazing show called Big Feets with our friends Robert Brockway and Sean Baby. They cover the ridiculous antics of the crew behind the show Mountain Monsters, which has also gone through a schism and kind of has different shows now. Anyway, amazing, hilarious podcast by Jason. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more,

which is on hiatus for now and has a giant back catalog. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory. for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.