Surprising Factors That Influence What You Buy & The Strange Story of Ice

Why do mosquitoes seem to love some people and completely ignore others? It isn't your imagination. Researchers have identified several factors that make certain people especially attractive to mosquitoes—and some of them are things you have little control over. https://theweek.com/articles/462191/5-things-that-make-irresistible-mosquitoes Most of us believe we make rational decisions when we shop. But behavioral scientists have discovered that many purchasing decisions are influenced by factors we barely notice. The way a product is described, where it is placed, how many alternatives are offered, what price is shown first, and even seemingly irrelevant details can dramatically affect what we buy. Richard Shotton has spent years studying the hidden psychological forces that shape consumer behavior. In this conversation, he explains why our choices are often less objective than we think, how marketers use these insights to influence us, and what you can do to become a smarter consumer. Richard is a behavioral scientist and author of The Illusion of Choice: 16½ Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy (https://amzn.to/3q2Vne9). Ice seems so ordinary that it's easy to forget what a miracle it once was. Today, ice is available instantly at the push of a button. But not that long ago, obtaining ice was a massive undertaking involving dangerous harvests, international shipping routes, fortunes made and lost, and an industry that helped reshape the modern world. In fact, long before electric refrigeration existed, people were cutting huge blocks of ice from frozen lakes and transporting them thousands of miles. How did this unlikely commodity transform the way we eat, drink, preserve food, and live? Amy Brady, executive director of Orion magazine and author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—A Cool History of a Hot Commodity (https://amzn.to/3MKX7Rc), reveals the remarkable story behind something most of us never think twice about. Finding a green potato chip in the bag can be a little unsettling. Is it safe to eat? And what about those unusually dark brown chips that occasionally show up? The answers have everything to do with how potatoes grow, how they're stored, and what happens before they ever become chips. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30746/whats-those-green-potato-chips-you-sometimes-find PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty! RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know. Why mosquitoes seem to like some people more than others? Then, what determines what you buy? It's often not what you think.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  A lot of people have a belief that they weigh up their choices in a very deliberative, reflective manner. Whereas an awful lot of research from psychologists suggests that there are subtle influences on our choices that have a much bigger-than-expected impact.

• 0:28Mike Carruthers?

  Also, when you get that occasional green potato chip in the bag, should you still eat it? And the amazing story of ice and how man-made ice transformed the world. So what about the guy who invented it?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  He was met with cries of blasphemy. People saying, "How dare you create ice? Man can't create ice, only God can create ice." And Corey actually died relatively young and penniless with his reputation in tatters.

• 0:57Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place.

• 1:39Mike Carruthers?

  So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 2:38Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, there are a lot of reasons to like summertime. Warmer weather. I'm sure you can name a bunch of them. But there is something about summer weather and warm weather that is just not so great, and that's mosquitoes. And as I'm sure you've noticed, mosquitoes often seem to be attracted to some people more than others. Why? Well, here are five things that can make a person more appealing to a mosquito. First of all, consuming alcohol may make your blood tastier to mosquitoes, according to a French study in 2011. Exercise.

• 3:18Mike Carruthers?

  According to another study, exercise triggers this trifecta of biological signals that makes your exterior especially delicious to mosquitoes. Your blood type seems to matter. People with type O blood are much more susceptible to mosquito bites than any other blood group. Being male. Lady mosquitoes, which are the only ones that bite, the male mosquitoes don't bite, it's just the female mosquitoes, they seem to prefer men. In fact, larger people in general attract more mosquitoes than smaller people. And pregnancy is an issue. Mosquitoes are attracted to women who are pregnant. In one study, pregnant women attracted twice as many mosquitoes as those who were not

• 4:03Mike Carruthers?

  pregnant. And that is something you should know. When you buy things, when you make purchasing decisions, it often seems like you're making that choice of your own free will. What you buy is your choice. Well, maybe, sometimes. But there are a lot of other factors coming at you, often under the radar, that influence what you buy. Marketers spend a lot of money and effort figuring out what these influences are and put them into practice to get you to buy their products or services. And you are probably unaware of many of them. But you're about to be made aware of them by my guest, Richard Schotten.

• 4:45Mike Carruthers?

  He is a behavioral scientist who has a great book out called "The Illusion of Choice: 16 and a Half Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy." Hi, Richard, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Oh, very good to see you.

• 5:00Mike Carruthers?

  So, explain and go in a little deeper to what I was just starting to say there about how there are these other factors that influence our buying decisions and what you call this illusion of choice.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  The illusion part is that often our choices aren't made for the reasons that we expect. I think a lot of people have a belief that they weigh up their choices in a very deliberative, reflective manner. Whereas, an awful lot of research from behavioral science and psychology suggests that there are subtle influences on our choices that have a much bigger-than-expected impact.

• 5:38Mike Carruthers?

  So, let's jump right into an example that explains what you just said, and maybe a good one is the subtitle of your book. Your title of your book is "The Illusion of Choice: 16 and a Half Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy." And that 16 and a half is one of these principles, so let's start with that.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Now, there is a lovely study by Schindler at Rutgers University that suggests a degree of precision makes a communicator more credible and more believable. So, in his study, he recruits a group of people, shows them an ad for a deodorant, and sometimes this ad claims that the deodorant reduces perspiration by 50%. Other occasions, the ad says it reduces perspiration by 47 or 53%. And when later on, Schindler asks people, how accurate is that geodran claim? How credible is it? There is a difference in people's responses.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So people think that the precise claim is about 5% more credible, 10% more accurate. So even though people see exactly the same content to a meaningful degree, by introducing this element of precision, it boosts credibility and believability. What Schindler argues is generally in life, people who know what they're talking about, talk very precisely. People who don't know what they're talking about, talk in generalities. And over time, people learn and conflate the two things.

• 7:12Mike Carruthers?

  And that translates to, so make the connection to how that influences my choice.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  So the, the argument there would be if you saw the geodran offering 50%, you might ignore it, you might not choose that geodran. That very subtle tweak by the advertiser, introducing 47 or 53%, introducing this almost illusory degree of precision. That's what influences you. Most people, if they were put on the spot, would say, oh, I chose the geodran because of the benefits that were listed. They wouldn't zone in on the fact that one of the levers of influence is that hidden point of precision.

• 7:50Mike Carruthers?

  So I'd like you to talk about what you call the Ikea effect. And it has to do with this old story in marketing lore about Betty Crocker cake mix.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:02Mike Carruthers?

  And how that, how that, because I'd heard this a long time ago, that, that when they tried to sell cake mix, just as a complete cake mix, didn't do as well. But when they made consumers add eggs, it made us feel like we were really baking and that helped. So explain all that.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So the story you're referencing is an old anecdote that's been passed around in marketing, but it was never really certain whether it was, was true or not. And the original claim was that when Betty Crocker launched their instant cake mix, this is back in the 1950s, when they had realized that there were an increasing number of mothers going out to work. So two parents out with jobs didn't have time to bake cakes from scratch. So they realised there was a market for an instant cake mix. They create a cake mix, very, very simple. You buy the mix, tear open the package, pour it into a tub, whisk it up with water, stick it in the oven.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Hey presto, twenty minutes, you've got a cake. Now, when they launched it like that, there were limited sales. It wasn't very popular. But then a psychologist who's working with Betty Crocker begins to wonder if they've just made the whole process too easy. Because a cake, it's not just about getting calories on board very quickly. It's about expressing your love for the family. And how much love are you really expressing if you've put no effort into it all? So what Betty Crocker did was add in an artificial extra step. Now, they change the cake mix. You buy the cake mix, tear open the packet, pour it into the tub, whisk it up with some water. And now you add an extra step in, which is they tell you to crack an egg into it.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And it's only when they add that extra step that sales take off. It's only when there's this degree of effort involved that it boosts the sales. Now, two psychologists, Ann Ariely, Michael Norton, back in, I think, twenty twelve. They begin to wonder whether that anecdote was just a story. So they tested that principle in more controlled circumstances. They recruit people and they ask them to bid money to take home an Ikea box. And people will bid a very small sum.

• 10:25Mike Carruthers?

  You mean an Ikea box from the store, Ikea, like a box of furniture?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Next group of people, they make the same offer, how much you prepared to pay for this Ikea box. But this time, the box hasn't been assembled. The participants have to build the box themselves. And in that second scenario, people's willingness to pay goes up by the order of about fifty percent. Now that study was repeated again and again in slightly different scenarios. But each time you see essentially the same finding, which is the more effort people put into a product, the more they value it. So there is an interesting opportunity here for marketers, which is on some occasions, getting your consumers to go to a bit of effort, making them put a bit of work in, will make them appreciate your your product more.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So that's a another example of a driver of behaviour that people might not be aware of.

• 11:23Mike Carruthers?

  Let's talk about price because price seemingly is an objective thing. You you decide whether or not to buy something based on the price. The price is an objective number. It can't possibly be influenced by anything else. It is the price, the price is the price. And a lot of people say they're price shoppers, they're they're very sensitive to price. So how is that influenced by marketers?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So there are a couple of interesting parts there. The first is the same price can be made to appear very different for a few with a few little tricks. The second bit, which I think speaks exactly to your your point, is sometimes people labour under the assumption that high price equals high quality. There's a lovely study from Babishiv at Stanford where he serves five different bottles of wine. And people sample these wines and then they rate how much they like them. And each of the wines has a very prominent price label on it. The twist in the experiment is even though there are five different bottles, there are only four different types of wine. One of them has been repeated.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  So people are drinking, say, a Merlot, having a sip of Merlot. They think it comes from a $5 bottom and they will give it a mediocre rating. Then a few minutes later, they take a sip of the same Merlot, but from a bottle that says it costs $45. Now, the average rating in that second setting is 70, seven zero, 70% higher.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Shiv's argument is people assume that high-priced items are higher quality because they often are, but they take it too far. So in this setting, when people are drinking exactly the same liquid, they expect that second wine to taste better because it's more expensive and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So our expectations affect our actual experience. So if you're a business or a brand, you've got to be very careful about heavy discounting because what it will do over time is train your customers to think your product isn't very high quality and that expectation will affect their actual experience.

• 13:42Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about all the factors that influence how consumers behave and my guest is Richard Shotton. He is author of the book, The Illusion of Choice. So, Richard, you said, or I think you said, there are ways to manipulate the price, even though the price is the price. But if that's the case, how do you manipulate the price to influence a consumer?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  I did a study last year with Michael Aaron Flicker. We recruited 282 people and we told half of them that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale 12-pack cost $18.99. And when we said to those people, how good value is this brand? Just over 13% said it was good or great. The other half of the people, we showed them the same brand, same volume of beer, 12 cans or 12 bottles, same price, but we added on a couple of extra words. We said that's the same as $1.58 a bottle. And what we saw when we asked people that question about value, we saw a more than doubling of people thinking it was good or great value.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  We're up to 28% now.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  The the argument here, and this is an idea called unit reframing, is if you draw people's attention to that smaller absolute amount involved in a subunit of the product, it will boost their perception of value. The argument is that people, when they are presented a price, don't draw every relevant bit of information. They put too much emphasis on the elements of the price that are salient, that the business draws attention to. So these tiny little tweaks in how you present the price can have a significant change on behaviour. So if you run a business and you sell, say, broadband, don't go out and say it's thirty dollars a month, say it's a dollar a day.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  A tiny change that you can boost the margins and profitability of your business.

• 15:45Mike Carruthers?

  Framing is another one of these marketing concepts that you talk about, so explain what that is.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Framing is a is a related idea. It's essentially the idea that people relate or respond to descriptions of events rather than the events themselves. So there's a a classic study from, I think it's nineteen seventy four, and a psychologist called Elizabeth Loftus. And she creates a video of two cars crashing together. And she plays people this video. And you could Google Loftus framing car video, and you can see the actual video on online. She plays people this video. And then she says to some of them, some of the viewers, how fast were the cars going

• 16:34Speaker 01

  when they crashed together? Other people are asked, how fast were those cars going when they collided together? And even though people watch exactly the same video, you get markedly different responses. The people who heard the collided question guess the speeds about, I think it's saying like twenty five or twenty seven percent lower than the people who heard the smashed phrase in the question.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Her argument is we don't respond to the actual event, or that's not what we only respond to. The words that are used to describe an event act as a lens and that changes how we respond to the situation. So the argument here is how you frame an event, the language you use to describe an event will affect to a degree people's response. So if you are selling meat and you term that meat twenty five percent fat, you'll get a very different response. People will think it will be greasier and fattier than if you call it seventy five percent lean. Exactly the same statistic, how we respond to it relates to the the frame that's used.

• 17:47Mike Carruthers?

  So I I think most people have heard of the halo effect and know what it is, but but how does it apply to to the illusion of choice? What is that? Because it steers you to buy something because you think it's good?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  So the broad idea of the halo effect is if someone or something, so it could be a person or a product, rather than us evaluating that product and all its different attributes, if that product has one standout ability, or that person has one standout ability, it affects our judgment of that person on all the other attributes. So if you are phenomenally friendly, and that's the thing that we notice about you when we first meet you, the halo effect suggests that we'll also assume that you are kinder, that you are more ethical, that you're more intelligent.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  So it's the idea that a strong characteristic in one field bleeds into people's perceptions of ability in in other fields, even if they're unrelated.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  That affects people's commercial decisions. Because what it means is if you as a brand need to project the idea that you are trustworthy or well-priced. It might be quite hard to prove those things in a short TV ad or a short internet video. But what you can do is show that you are humorous or likeable. Those are things that are much, much easier to convey. And if you convey those attributes in a very powerful way, the halo effect suggests you will subtly influence people's perception of you on all these other different metrics.

• 19:34Mike Carruthers?

  You know, there's long been this idea in the world of market research that if you want to know what your customers want, just ask them, they'll tell you. But based on what you're saying about how consumers behave, what they decide to buy and why and all the influences, it doesn't seem like asking the consumer directly would give you much information.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I think you're completely right there. There's that is a longstanding idea and a very widely researched idea in behavioral science. There's a wonderful phrase from a University of Virginia psychologist called Timothy Wilson. And he says, "We are strangers to ourselves." That people don't have full introspective insight into their own motivations. So if you send them a survey or if you put them in a focus group, they'll give you lots of answers about why they buy your beer or your trainers. But the problem is, most of them are just plausible post-rationalizations. They don't actually reflect the genuine drives of behavior.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  So if as a business you are relying on what I would call claims data, be very careful. A lot of those statements will not be true reflections of what genuinely influences people. And what you should do instead is what most psychologists do, which is set up these simple test and control experiments. Don't ask people. Create an A versus B study, which flushes out some of these drivers of behavior.

• 21:07Mike Carruthers?

  Lastly, one thing you write about that I found particularly surprising was the pratfall effect. So explain the pratfall effect.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is both probably my favorite ever study, and it was conducted by Elliot Aronson, a professor at Harvard.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  He gets a colleague to take part in a quiz and he gives the colleague all the answers. So the guy gets ninety two percent of the questions right, looks like an absolute genius, wins the quiz by miles. But then at the end of the quiz, he spills a cup of coffee down himself.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Aronson has recorded all of this and he takes the recording and he plays it to listeners. But he splits the listeners into two groups. One group hear the entire incident, great performance and spillage. The other group hear an edited version, so they only hear the amazing quiz performance. Aronson then questions everyone as to how appealing is the contestant? And he sees a significant difference. The group who heard the spillage and great performance rate the contestant about forty, forty five percent more appealing than the group who just heard the amazing quiz performance. Aronson calls this the pratfall effect, this idea that we prefer people or products who exhibit a flaw.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Now, that idea, that is an amazingly powerful tactic for a business or a brand. If you think about some of the greatest ever ads, Avis, we're number two, so we try harder. Guinness, good things come to those who wait. VW, ugly is only skin deep. Listerine, the taste you have twice a day. Again and again, some of the best brands ever draw attention to a flaw. Now, why this is so successful is firstly, most brands brag. So if you tell people about a flaw, you're being distinctive and therefore you're memorable. We know that distinctiveness leads to memorability. Secondly, in any persuasion situation, commercial or face to face,

• 23:08Speaker 01

  most people are a little bit cynical about what they're told because they think the communicator has a vested interest to spin the truth. The brilliant thing about admitting a flaw is you have plausibly demonstrated your honesty. And therefore, any other claim you make afterwards is that bit more believable. So you get around this trust cap problem. And then the third and final reason is in many cultures, certainly the case in Britain and America. Flaws often have a mirror strength. So if you're Guinness and you go out and say we're slow, well, people assume if you're slow, well, most times, most situations, things that take ages to make, well, they're normally high quality.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  People assume slowness is associated with high quality. Or if you're lister and you say you taste awful, well, people assume if it tastes bad, it must be pretty potent. So the best brands apply the Pratt-Foul effect very selectively. They spend an awful lot of time thinking what their core strength is and then thinking, is there a mirror weakness, I could admit, that might emphasize that strength?

• 24:14Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I find this so fascinating that we can be influenced by so many different things, subtle and maybe not so subtle, because, because as we said in the beginning, it seems as if we're making our own choices and to some degree we are, but but seeing how these things influence us in many ways under the radar is surprising. I've been talking to Richard Shotton. He is a behavioral scientist and the name of his book is The Illusion of Choice: Sixteen and a Half Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy. And if you're interested in reading that book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for, thanks for being here, Richard.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  You're, oh, you're welcome, Greg. It's chat mic.

• 25:02Mike Carruthers?

  Most days, maybe not every day, but most days, you probably have some interaction with ice. In a drink perhaps, in your freezer, maybe ice on your windshield on a cold winter morning, maybe you put ice on a sore shoulder. Ice has long been a part of our lives, but not as long as you might think. Still, it's hard to imagine life today without ice. And here to tell the story of ice and how humans have tamed it and used it is Amy Brady. She's the executive director of Orion Magazine and she's author of a book called Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks: A Cool History of a Hot Commodity. Hi, Amy. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

• 25:46Mike Carruthers?

  So normally, when you ask people, what topics are you interested in, seldom does the topic of ice come up. So how, how is this, how did you get interested in it? Why is it a topic you wanted to look at?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I've always been interested in ice from an environmental standpoint, but I didn't start thinking about ice on demand and how this country, America, became so obsessed with ice until about five years ago, when we were experiencing this brutal heat wave. And the heat wave was so bad, it knocked out the power to my parents' house, and I was visiting them at the time. So we piled into their car, we drove to a nearby gas station that was operating on a generator, and I filled a cup with ice to try to cool down. And the more and more I thought about it, the more I started to think, well, how did I even know ice was was here at a gas station? I didn't even think, I just knew.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Now, I've traveled enough abroad to know that that is not the case anywhere else in the world. Only in the United States could you go to a convenience store or a gas station and just know that ice is going to be available.

• 26:55Mike Carruthers?

  And when did ice, as you look back, when did ice become like a thing, rather than just, you know, something that's in many ways a nuisance? But when did people go, hey, wait, we can do something with this?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  It's funny, our obsession with ice is only about 200 years old. It can be said to have begun in 1806, when a wealthy Bostonian named Frederick Tudor landed on the idea to start carving large blocks of ice out of his Massachusetts lake and sell them to people living in warm climates around the world for a profit. Most of the people in his social class thought he was a madman for even thinking of the idea, because nobody had ever shipped long distances, shipped ice long distances before. But he figured out how to do it, and he started bringing ice to these warm places where, through a lot of work on his part, he got them to accept the substance into their everyday

• 27:50Speaker 02

  lives, and they became crazy about it.

• 27:53Mike Carruthers?

  All right, so how do you ship ice long distances when you don't have refrigeration freezers to keep it cold?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Well, Tudor made a lot of questionable business decisions, but he was a pretty smart man. And what he noticed is that the ice that was kept in his ice house. Now, side note, an ice house is basically a large well that's dug about 10 to 15 feet in the ground where ice can be kept year round if it's packed properly. And what he'd noticed is that properly packed ice, even in the summer months, can withstand heats above ground into the 80s and 90s. And to pack it properly, you just have to make sure that there isn't a lot of room between

• 28:45Speaker 02

  the blocks so that air can't get through it because air does expedite melting. Ice blocks were usually packed in sawdust, in straw, which also helped to ward off some of the heat. And the blocks were elevated, so they weren't sitting in their own meltwater, which also sped up melting. So he basically recreated the conditions of an ice house in the cargo hold of a ship. And when he sailed as far as the Caribbean, he managed to make it with about 2/3 of his cargo still frozen.

• 29:16Mike Carruthers?

  And so what did those people who didn't have ice before, what did they use it for? It probably wasn't for cocktails, so it must have been just to keep cool? Or what was it used for?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Well, this is the funny thing. It actually at first was used for cocktails. Because here's the thing that sparked the American obsession with ice. It was an outrageous marketing plan. And the reason why Tudor had to launch this marketing plan is because when he first brought ice to these warm climates, to places where ice rarely, if ever, formed naturally, people had no idea what to do with it. They hadn't even seen the stuff, so they didn't know how to make delicious treats with it, or how to use it to reduce swelling from an injury, or anything like that. So in order to get people to buy the ice that he wanted to sell, he went to the local

• 30:10Speaker 02

  bartenders and baristas, and he said, "I'm going to give you some of this weird frozen wet substance for free if you let me show you how to use it to make the most delicious things." And let me tell you, as a fan of the an old fashioned, I can say you can't argue with a drink on the rocks. And neither could most of the people who tried a cold cocktail for the very first time. People went wild for it. And as soon as the bartenders saw that, they went back to him to ask for more ice. And this time Tudor sold it to them at an ever steepening price. And so Tudor basically created, you know, some of the first or helped to create some

• 30:55Speaker 02

  of the first fancy cocktails in the United States.

• 30:58Mike Carruthers?

  So when did or what was the next big moment in the history of ice that besides that guy that shipped it? So what happened next that made it, you know, helped to cement this whole thing?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Then the next big thing was the invention of mechanically made ice. And that also has a really strange origin story. The first person to develop an ice machine was a doctor named John Gory, who lived in Appalachia Cola, Florida, which was this tiny port town off the Gulf Coast. And the reason why he wanted to make ice was because he wanted to cure yellow fever. Now, yellow fever was a disease that ravaged the American South every single year. And doctors back then didn't know that it was caused by mosquito bites. All Gory knew is that yellow fever got worse in the hot months and it started to wane

• 31:54Speaker 02

  in fall and winter. And so he thought, if I can make a patient's body mimic the cycle of the seasons, maybe I can cure yellow fever. The only thing is that the only way he knew to cure or to make people's bodies colder was with ice. And in in 1820s Florida, the ice trade was brand new. Ice was still hard to come by and it was very expensive. It was referred to by white gold by some locals because of how pricey it was. And Gory, despite being a doctor, didn't have a lot of money. So he knew if he wanted to get enough ice to help his patients, he had to learn to make it himself.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  So kind of thinking about the laws of physics that he learned during his medical school days, he finally, after years of failure, figured out how to make a compressor that can produce ice. And the kind of funny but also sad part of this story is that Gory thought when he would announce his invention to the world, the response would be, you know, uproarious joy and gratitude. But instead, he was met with cries of blasphemy. People saying, how dare you create ice? Man can't create ice. Only God can create ice. And Gory actually died relatively young and penniless with his reputation in tatters.

• 33:21Mike Carruthers?

  So, the, the idea of drinks with ice in them, soda, cocktails, when, when was that? When did that? I mean, because all of this seems to be a relatively short period of time.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of this really happened kind of in the last 200 years. So, I mean, there is evidence that people were mixing ice with, you know, alcoholic spirits, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Tudor likely did it himself in Massachusetts. But what really launched kind of the, the idea of the classic American cocktail, happened in the 1820s when Tudor brought ice to New Orleans. New Orleans was the first city that knew, that Tudor set his eyes on to become an ice city. And that was partly because of the climate, that was also partly because of where it was located, you know, with access

• 34:18Speaker 02

  to, to ports for shipping. But it was also because of the culture there. There was so much happening. It was this transformative moment that was going on in New Orleans at this time, with people there from, you know, French Creole and, and Spain and Africa. And, you know, this was in a time when musicians were getting more bold with their musical choices that would eventually give birth to jazz. And so when he arrived there, he went to the bartenders and said, you know, I'm going to show you how to make cold drinks with ice. And not only did the bartenders allow

• 35:00Speaker 02

  him to do that, but then they ran with the idea. Because this was already a cradle of innovation, they were ready immediately to start experimenting with different sizes and shapes of ice, to make all different types of flavors and textures. And, you know, by the 1860s, we are starting to see the first celebrity bartenders in America who are, you know, making drinks named after themselves because they're so popular.

• 35:29Mike Carruthers?

  Are there any examples of industries that have been transformed, or changed, or even born because of ice?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  So, for example, the fishing industry exists because of widespread uses of ice. Until ice was able to be shipped, you know, far, long distances, fish was just eaten at the coast, because there's nothing worse than eating spoiled fish. And, but with ice, fish could be packed in ice and traveled, or in shipped to long distances. So, the fish industry is one example. The brewing, the brewery industry is another great example. The American beer like Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, Miller Lite, these are all forms of lager, which is a type of beer that can only be brewed at cold temperatures. And ice allowed

• 36:25Speaker 02

  that brewing to take place. And then it allowed bottles of lager to be shipped as well. And so, we can thank ice for the fact that we can now buy Budweiser at almost any grocery store in the country. But perhaps one of the most interesting industries to happen because of ice is the convenience store. So, going back to kind of the late 19th century, there was a mechanical ice company in Texas called the Southland Ice Company. And this was a very large company. It had ice stores across the state. And people would stop at these places, usually on the way to run other errands,

• 37:10Speaker 02

  kind of like the way we stop for gas today, to pick up blocks of ice to put into their iceboxes. Well, one of the managers of one of these ice stores noticed that some of his clients complained about how they had forgotten a household staple like milk or bread. And so he started to stock those things. And then people started going to the ice stores instead of the grocery store to pick up the staples. Then they started installing fuel pumps, because if people are going to be stopping to pick up the ice and kitchen staples, they might as well fuel their car as well.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  This model of ice store became so popular that the Southland Ice Company expanded its hours and then eventually rebranded itself to be named after those hours. And the 7-Eleven was born.

• 38:05Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that interesting? And so 7-Eleven basically started as an ice store?

• 38:11Speaker 02

  That's right. It was an ice store.

• 38:13Mike Carruthers?

  How expensive was ice? If you wanted to go buy some ice, was it much more expensive back in the day when they were harvesting it in lakes and shipping it across the country?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  It sure was. In the very early days, ice was very much a luxury. It was expensive to ship and it was expensive to store. After the rise of mechanically made ice, the cost of a block of ice started to come down to the point where most Americans could afford it. And then, of course, today, you can go to the local convenience store and buy a bag of ice for $2.

• 38:50Mike Carruthers?

  When people had iceboxes, where the ice would be delivered and you'd put it in the box to keep things cold, how did that work? That the ice just didn't melt in a couple of hours or over the course of a day and just disappear? Or is that what happened?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Ice usually lasted about a week. So ice boxes were, you know, kind of small wooden boxes that were lined with tin. And, and the early ones weren't very great, but like anything else with time, you know, technological advances made them a bit better. And so, you know, by time we're in the late 19th, early 20th century, they're pretty much airtight. And the ice, yeah, would last for about a week. The ice was usually stored in an upper compartment of an icebox and there was a hole in the bottom of that compartment so that the cold air would kind of, kind of snake its way through into the bottom compartment where people would store their perishables,

• 39:52Speaker 02

  like milk and meats and fruits and vegetables and the like.

• 39:57Mike Carruthers?

  What about the ice cube? Where, where did that come from? Whose idea was that to create a ice in these little cubes?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the ice cube was a marketing ploy by a lot of companies to sell first iceboxes and then ice makers. And what's really, I thought was really interesting in my research is that a lot of early manufacturers of iceboxes sold not just the trays that people would freeze ice cubes in, but also recipe books with quote unquote recipes for how to make interesting ice. And all of these recipes would involve things like freezing unusual things in the ice cubes or, you know, using coffee or juice instead of water.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  But they were a huge draw for owning an icebox, being able to have these tiny little cubes that you could pop out of metal trays, they eventually became rubber and plastic, to put in your drink and cool down on a hot day.

• 41:04Mike Carruthers?

  And then somebody came up with like shaved ice.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Shaved ice in some ways, you know, goes all the way back, at least until the 19th century, the early 19th century, when bartenders were experimenting with how to make interesting drinks. Because shaved ice has a lot of surface area, it dilutes quickly, and so it was really good in cold boozy drinks.

• 41:29Mike Carruthers?

  As you look at the evolution of ice and how we've used ice, what part of the story do you find particularly fascinating?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the history of ice is actually the phenomenon of the Iceman. The Iceman doesn't exist anymore because we don't get ice delivered to our houses. But in the late 19th, early 20th century, when the ice industry was at its peak, in order to get ice from the ice manufacturers or ice harvesters into people's homes, it required this strong, burly man who was willing to drive blocks of ice to a person's home. And these blocks were like 50 pounds each. You know, pick that block up with a pair of tongs, sometimes toss a second 50-pound

• 42:21Speaker 02

  block over his shoulder with a burlap sack, and then hike up six flights of stairs to a person's apartment before putting that ice into someone's icebox. It's really an incredible, an incredible job, and it's, and they were ubiquitous, and they were everywhere. And they also, they were the subject of song and story. I was amazed when I was doing research on the Iceman, at how many songs from this time period had lyrics involving a woman stealing a kiss from the Iceman? And how many Valentine's Day cards I found that had puns based on the Iceman?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  And I was trying to think about this, like, why, why did America have this romantic fascination with the Iceman of all things? And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized, of all the delivery men of the day, right? So there was also, there was the milkman, there was the mailman, the Iceman was the only one to cross that forbidden threshold and enter into the home.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And he was often home alone with the wife when the husband was out at work. And so rumors started to fly. And what also is interesting is that this, this obsession, or I would even say anxiety about the Iceman seemed to peak during the world wars when many, many men were overseas, you know, fighting for this country. And I can't help but think of that 1930s song that was popularized by Ray Charles, I think in the 50s or 60s with lyrics that say something like, "I'm moving to the outskirts of town and I'm gonna buy my woman a frigidaire." Just to get rid of that icebox and the Iceman altogether.

• 44:13Mike Carruthers?

  Well, when you think about it, ice is one of those things that we really, we take for granted, but boy, if we didn't have it, life sure would be different. So it's interesting to hear the story, the evolution of ice and how we've tamed it. I've been speaking with Amy Brady. She is executive director of Orion Magazine, and the name of her book is Ice: From Mixed Rinks to Skating Rinks: A Cool History of a Hot Commodity. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, Amy.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

• 44:50Mike Carruthers?

  Have you ever been eating potato chips? And you reach into the bag and you pull out a green one, or it has green edges around it? Is it okay to eat? Yeah, probably so. If you've heard that green potatoes have turned poisonous, that's true. But you'd have to eat about two pounds of whole green potatoes in order to feel the effects of that poison. The toxic solanine in green potatoes is mostly near the surface of the skin, and once peeled and processed, the fraction of that toxin that remains is not really enough to do us any harm. If the potato chip in question is really dark brown, that one you might want to skip.

• 45:30Mike Carruthers?

  The sugar levels and the amino acids in that chip are off, and so will be the taste. And that is something you should know. I know that you know someone who would love listening to this podcast, so please do us a favor and share this with a friend. I'm Mike Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.