We Tried TikTok’s Disgusting Vinegar “Coke”
Speaker 1: Listen, there’s a link in my bio. Can you go over there and tell Congress to make this a permanent action? And please tell me how it’s helped your family down there in the comments.
Rachel Hampton: Hi, I’m Rachel Hampton.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And I’m Madison Malone Kircher you’re listening to. I see. Why am I.
Rachel Hampton: In case you missed it.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Slate’s Podcast About Internet Culture. Rachel, can I interest you in a delicious, refreshing carbonated summer beverage?
Rachel Hampton: I mean, I love an ice cold coke on a hot summer day.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Excellent. Well, then let me introduce you to this yummy alternative. It. No, it’s. Damn it. You have to at least let me deliver. What? You know.
Rachel Hampton: There’s no turning back to coke.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Yes, there is. Balsamic vinegar and seltzer water.
Rachel Hampton: Okay. And definitely not that.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Alma voiced balsamic vinegar.
Rachel Hampton: And a paper towel roll. That sounds disgusting. I don’t even really like seltzer, and I definitely don’t think I like balsamic vinegar with seltzer. Why are you doing this?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Well, because, as with most things, I found it on TikTok.
Rachel Hampton: Of course. Of course. You found this demon spawn recipe on TikTok.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: I’m going to play it for you. I’m sorry. Okay. My whole lot is.
Speaker 4: Instructor makes this drink almost like every day. I think she told me.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And it’s a healthy alternative to a Coke. See, it honestly already looks like a Coke.
Speaker 4: But I swear to God, it tastes like a Coke.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And it’s healthy.
Speaker 4: And it’s good for you. You guys should try it out.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: That’s Amanda Jones, a.k.a. Mandy Jones on Tik Tok. She just posted the video on Tuesday of this week and it’s already got almost 5 million views and that number just keeps growing.
Rachel Hampton: I feel like most of the people watching that are disgusted.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Okay. But some of them are me who’s about to try it.
Rachel Hampton: Listen, Godspeed.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: All right? I have my cup. I have my straw.
Rachel Hampton: Oh, is that a metal straw?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: We’re eco friendly girlies in this house.
Rachel Hampton: Save the turtles, baby.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And I’ve got. I’ve got my ice.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Next up, a splash of balsamic vinegar. Whole Foods finest store brand.
Rachel Hampton: Garden.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Allegedly a product of Italy. This, I don’t necessarily believe. Allegedly.
Rachel Hampton: So how much balsamic vinegar are you putting in here?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Just like a little splash. Splash.
Rachel Hampton: Okay.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: I really have a newfound respect for my favorite ASMR artist. This is horrible. I was going to be. And then the final ingredient is a can of flavored seltzer. Any flavor. Mine is lip ombre mousse.
Rachel Hampton: Wow. Grapefruit. I can’t have that.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: If you know you know.
Rachel Hampton: I have hot ssri summer all year, baby.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Just going to pour.
Rachel Hampton: That in Madison. It really what’s disgusting? Oh, it doesn’t even look like coke.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Let me stir it. Let me stir it.
Rachel Hampton: Okay. Sorry. Madison’s stirring it. Madison’s holding this up for me on camera. It’s a very light brown, not the color of coke, but the color of, you know, when you get a Coke at a restaurant and it’s just ice and water down Coke at the bottom and you keep going back to sip it because you’re thirsty. That’s what it looks like. It looks like watered down, leftover backwash coke.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: That’s not an accurate look. We respect all of you and we’ve learned our lesson. So I will not be making any drinking noises on this here.
Rachel Hampton: So the O.G., I see why my fans know exactly what we’re talking about. We continue to apologize for that.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Here goes nothing. It doesn’t taste like coke.
Rachel Hampton: Oh, wait. You have to describe to me what it tastes like.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Well, I don’t think I started enough because it did at first taste like I had just stuck a straw into my bottle of Whole Foods despite a small stomach vinegar.
Rachel Hampton: This is just giving me something about the taste of, like, raw vinegar. It just gives me full body. Full body chills.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: It tastes like vinegar, but not as vinegary as I thought. It doesn’t taste as bad as I thought it would. I will say.
Rachel Hampton: But like, I need more. Does it taste anything like coke?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: No, of course it’s nothing like coke. And this is where I want to hedge a tiny bit and say that shrubs are a real beverage. They’re these, like, vinegary, sipping drink, they’re yummy. They’re like a little funky, a little sweet. They’re usually, you know, carbonated vinegar drinks. So before you’re like, But Madison, it’s a shrub. Those are real people. Drink vinegar, stop. I know shrubs also usually include sugar and slash or fruit, which is also sugar.
Rachel Hampton: I mean, yeah, people drink kombucha, which to me has the kind of same tang as vinegar, the same kind of fermented tang. And it’s incredible because it has sugar.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: For me, the red flag is the coke comparison brought to you by a Pilates instructor.
Rachel Hampton: Oh, no. No. Sorry. No. Sorry. No, no. I don’t trust it.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: It just feels to me like a diet culture creep, right? It’s. Yeah. If you want to drink something that tastes like coke, may I suggest a coke?
Rachel Hampton: If you don’t even want all the sugar, there’s so many options for you that don’t have sugar. I mean, reminds me, do you remember? I think this was last summer. Do you remember the nature cereal trend?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Absolutely not.
Rachel Hampton: What? Oh, my God. So Lizzo also got involved in this, but basically it was like. Blueberries, Blackberries, raspberries in a bowl of, like, coconut water with ice. And the people called it nature’s cereal.
Speaker 5: I’m trying the coconut water berry. Breakfast cereal. I have blueberries, strawberries, pomegranate. Coconut water. I like ice for my cereal. Hmm. Are you ready to taste home? It’s good.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Nature. Cereal is just cereal fruit.
Rachel Hampton: It’s just fruit. Just even for you. If you want. Like, I don’t understand the point calling things that they’re not. It’s honestly, one of my least favorite things is someone who has a restricted diet is when people say, Oh, this tastes just like X, Y and Z. No, it doesn’t just call it what it is. Like, if I want a veggie burger, I want a veggie burger. I know it’s not going to taste like me. Stop lying to me.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Stop lying to me. Tick tock. If you’re thirsty, have a Coke. Have a Diet Coke. Better yet, a glass of water. A gallon of water. Just don’t try to drink it in an hour.
Rachel Hampton: Well, that is thankfully all the time we have for absolutely disgusting beverages brought by diet culture slash tick tock. Because on today’s show we’re talking about other terrible things people on TikTok do, which is getting paid for undisclosed ads.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Didn’t we just do this episode?
Rachel Hampton: Yes, and we’re going to do it again. We’re in Groundhog Day and it’s just ads all the way down.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: If this sounds familiar, it’s because we just did an episode about how makeup company Jones Road has gone mega viral on TikTok and is quietly paying normal consumers to post undisclosed, glowing reviews on TikTok. And it’s not just the beauty industry. This week we’re talking about how Democrats are getting in on the action. Anna Merlan published this great piece in Vice about a PR company working with influencers to post pro-Democrat content on TikTok. After the break, we’re going to be back with Ana to hear all about this messy, messy story. If you want to take this time to make yourself a little Coke alternative, go for it.
Rachel Hampton: Don’t do it.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And we’re back with Anna Merlan, a senior staff writer advice. Hi, Anna. Welcome.
Speaker 4: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Rachel Hampton: We are so excited you’re here to talk about this incredible piece that you wrote.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a weird email that I got, a weird PR email. Even in the annals of weird PR emails.
Rachel Hampton: That is actually exactly where we wanted to start. So your piece is titled A PR firm is paying Tic TAC influencers to promote Liberal Causes and Democrats middling accomplishments, which is a phenomenal headline. Middling is the perfect way to describe it. But you said in the piece that you got an email from a PR firm and we as journalists receive like thousands of PR emails a day. When did you start to suspect that this was like a story?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, pretty much immediately. So the email I got was from a communications firm called Hone Strategies. And Hone Strategies is, in their words, led by a veterans of modern presidential Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. So it’s a bunch of like ex campaign staffers who are now doing this politically focused communications firm. And they wanted me to write about vocal media, which is this influencer marketing firm, and specifically the associate from Hone Strategies said vocal media recruits, trains and pays influencers to, you know, deliver messages about things that they’re passionate about. You can pay influencers, though, to do undisclosed advertising of any kind. Like I think we all remember when this first became a thing from like the era when every Instagram model was suddenly really excited about like tummy tea and like diet pills and tooth whitening. And so I think people know that this is like not a thing.
Speaker 4: So I asked to see examples of the videos that they had made in partnership with these influencers, and noticed that none of them seemed to have any kind of disclosure as ads are being sponsored. So then I went and like found them all and tick tock. Like they sent them to me just as video files. And I was like, okay, well maybe there’s something in the in the caption and there wasn’t. You know, so I found all of these ads and they are ads, despite what Hone would later go on to tell me in that these folks are being paid to promote some things that struck me as unusual. But we also know that this is not like a new problem for TikTok.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: It’s one we shout about a lot here on the show. You know, could you describe what one of those videos looked like?
Speaker 4: So the one that really struck me was a guy on TikTok who is like a single dad of young children. And that’s like kind of his his brand. And I’m not being snarky, like he does a lot of partnerships with, you know, companies that provide like products for children. You know, that’s his brand. And he was washing baby bottles at his kitchen sink and saying, you know, as a parent, we all worry a lot about our kids. And one of the things we worry about most is daycare. That’s why I’m so excited about the expanded child tax credit.
Speaker 1: A parent’s job is never done, and one of those things that is never done is us stressing about life, especially when we have littles and we’re trying to figure out how are we going to pay for daycare because it’s so expensive. You How have you taken advantage of the extended child tax credit payments?
Speaker 4: So this is pretty obviously like a partisan position hyping, you know, something that the Biden White House and the Democrats have been really proud of. And although it is a good cause, like it was still an undisclosed piece of political advertising. There are a couple of others like somebody with a Tesla account was really excited about more EV charging stations. There was a Taylor Swift influencer talking about how Glenn Youngkin, who’s now the Virginia governor, was the co CEO of a private equity firm that bought Taylor’s master tapes. And then she had like captioning on the video that was like, you know, we can’t let this man be governor swifties. You know what to do, which is, again, like extreme political advocacy. And it would be something that she would be totally free to engage in. But if she’s getting paid to do it, then like it’s a problem and it’s a problem that Tik Tok is like remarkably clear about.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: On behalf of Swifties, I apologize.
Rachel Hampton: You mentioned that they’re getting paid for it. Do you by any chance know how much did any of the influencers disclose or hone strategies?
Speaker 4: Well, so there is a really good teen Vogue story about this in either 2020 or 2021, and it specifically focused on the ways that political sort of entities were trying to partner with what they called micro-influencers, who are people with fewer than 50,000 followers. And the reason why they did that is that it’s like cost effective, you know, like you don’t have to pay people very much at that level. Some of the people that I was writing about have like millions of followers. So I don’t know if that allows them to drive a hard bargain and if any of them are listening to this. I would just simply love it if you just returned my email.
Rachel Hampton: Well, you. On Anna’s email.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: We said, So I know it’s so funny. Any time I get an influencer on the record about what they make, it’s either some astronomically high number that blows my mind or they quote some low figure. And I think you need a union.
Speaker 4: Right. Exactly. It’s really wild. And it is literally like the Wild West out here. Like there’s no pay transparency of any kind, let alone the kind of transparency that would lead to not having a bunch of undisclosed political ads. So, yeah, no, it’s wild.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: So you’ve mentioned these two different entities, hone strategies and vocal media. Can you explain the difference between the two?
Speaker 4: So vocal media is specifically like an influencer marketing firm. Like that’s what they do. They partner with influencers. And it became very clear to me that Hone Strategy is was partnering with vocal and then like a third party, which is like the political or partisan entity that actually wanted the ad made. So some of the partners that they mentioned were Natural Color of Change. I emailed both of those organizations and didn’t hear back. And so, yeah, essentially it’s like clear to me that Vogel’s whole thing is social platforms and Hone has sort of a like a broader reach and a broader view. They describe themselves as being sort of experts or having a deep understanding in what’s called opposition research, you know, which is essentially creating like embarrassing content about your political opponents or like digging up like true but unflattering things about them. Yeah.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: And I’m wondering you describe the dad and the child tax credit. Were any of these tiktoks out of character from the people who posted them?
Speaker 4: No. And I actually think that that’s a good and important question, because in my conversations with Hone, which, you know, they were saying, like, we are partnering with creators who are passionate about these issues. Like one of the creators is a native woman who is urging her followers to sign a petition to protect like a sacred native cultural site in southern Nevada. So these were all like totally in keeping with the kind of content these people might make. However, as soon as you’re getting paid to make it, you have crossed a Rubicon that is not allowed. But I will say that like there was nothing where I was like, why in the world is, for instance, this dad of small children enthusing about, you know, more even charging stations like they had matched. Message to message deliver quite well. Hmm.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Which is arguably even shadier.
Speaker 4: It’s interesting because it’s like I wondered and my editor wondered and we talked about this, like, would some of these people have done this without being recruited or paid or trained? Like, I don’t think that that is out of the question. You know, I mean, a lot of these were important causes that impacted these people personally. So, you know, there’s a chance that they didn’t need to be paid to do this.
Rachel Hampton: As savvy Internet consumers, I’m speaking very humbly. Do you think that you would have spotted these as ads had you not known they were ads beforehand?
Speaker 4: Yes, because of the incredibly wooden way in which the legislation was named or the sort of like careful phrasing. For instance, like there was a video of a woman just celebrating Caitlyn G. Brown Jackson like the nomination of Caetano Brown Jackson.
Speaker 5: Biden-Harris administration has just nominated its first black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. And you should know her name. Katanga Brown. Jackson. Tunji Brown Jackson.
Speaker 4: But it struck me, and I think it would strike a lot of people who spend time on the Internet as just a tiny bit wooden. The delivery was a tiny bit off, but I would not have been able to figure out where any of this was coming from or who was paying for it. As I was discussing with my editor, like we would have had spent a long time trying to figure out what was going on with these ads. Had the people involved making these videos not just emailed me about it?
Rachel Hampton: Yeah. Yeah.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: I am just picturing like an influencer reading to camera and then like eyes diverting to, you know, a written out name of a bill or a piece of legislation to make sure they get it right. Like that’s the energy I am perceiving here.
Speaker 4: They’re a bit better than that. I don’t know that everybody would necessarily peg them as being sponsored content, you know what I mean? And that’s kind of what is so insidious about this stuff is that when these firms or organizations are paying influencers to deliver messaging like influencers are very good at selling stuff to their audiences and they have a high degree of trust from their audiences. So like, you know, if you love somebody’s content, you watch it every day. You might not necessarily assume that they’re turning around and making an ad you.
Rachel Hampton: Wrote in your piece. What is clear, however, is they’re honing vocal or working in a highly specific gray area where FEC rules and TikTok guidelines don’t quite reach. Can you tell us a little bit more about this grey area you’re describing?
Speaker 4: Yeah. So Tech Talk eventually got back to me about this and they have some stuff that is very clear and some stuff that is less clear. So there are advertising guidelines and I’m going to read from some of what they sent me is basically that adverts. Pfizer’s and ad content have to follow their community guidelines and their advertising guidelines and their terms of service. Political discourse is allowed as long as it complies with community guidelines and has organic content. And then what they call cause based advertising or public service announcements from nonprofits or government agencies might be allowed. So it’s not that like, for instance, a public health department can’t get on TikTok and say like, hey, everybody, please get your flu shot. That can be allowed. Or that an influencer can’t work with a health department to say, Please get your flu shot. I did it.
Speaker 4: And what Ticktalk says here is that that kind of cause based advertising or public service announcement is allowed if it is not driven by what they call partisan political motives, which is a little bit of a sticky thing if you’re talking about nonpartisan or bipartisan legislation, does that still fall in there? And then the other thing here is that advertisers have to be working with a tick tock sales representative. So like in no case can you pay somebody to make content and not tell tech talk about it, which was sort of what was happening here. But we also know that they are not the first and they will not be the last to pay influencers to make content. This has been a recognized problem for quite a while, really starting I think, in the 2016 elections.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Well, on that incredibly cheery note, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back to get further into this gray area with Anna.
Rachel Hampton: I hope you’re enjoying today’s show. This is your first time listening to. I see. Why am I even a welcome? We are so glad to have you here. In case you missed it. Yes, that joke is made every single week. We actually come out twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays. You’re listening to Saturday’s episode and on Wednesday we talked about the musician tick tock, hostage crisis, if you want to know what exactly that is, and I cannot recommend listening to the episode highly enough. All right. We are back with Anna to talk about the incredibly murky areas of undisclosed ads on Tik Tok.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: The Home Strategies founder said something to you that sort of just made my eyes roll so far back in my head, they may never return. Which is that political ads are different from creators advocating on issues they are passionate about, which I just don’t know how someone says that with a straight face while you’re paying those creators.
Speaker 4: I agree with him. Political ads are different from creators advocating about issues that they’re passionate about. And the reason why they’re making an ad and not doing advocacy is that they’re paying these people and we know they’re paying them because they told me. You know, but this has come up in much more interesting and murky ways before. One of the groups that Mozilla highlighted in their report was turning point. Mm hmm. So Turning Point USA. Their whole thing has been advocating for, like, conservative causes at the college level. And one of the things that they do and that they do very openly is they create Turning Point USA influencers. You know, they have these people representing them. However, they say that they’re not being paid a salary and they say that they’re not being paid to promote specific content on TikTok.
Speaker 4: What does happen with Turning Point USA, as we know from their tax filings, that they have like a big budget that is going towards influencer efforts and we know that once somebody is in their influencer network, they can do things like apply for travel stipends to go to conferences and whatnot. So there isn’t this sort of direct like I’m handing you $20 and then you’re going to make a video about, you know, how great deregulating the food supply would be or something.
Speaker 4: But it’s a much sort of murkier situation where there is almost a requirement for social platforms to evaluate what these influencers are doing, sort of outside of their platforms and how they’re on platform behavior that ties in with a larger set of behaviors. And that’s difficult. And that’s not really how moderation on social media platforms works. They tend to just look at a specific piece of content and be like, Does this break the rules or not?
Rachel Hampton: And it’s really interesting that you bring up Turning Point USA. And also you said earlier in the interview that had you not gotten this email about local media, there’s really would have been no way to tell whether or not these were ads or else they would have taken like a lot more work. Right. And it kind of gets into the question of like paid ads are so rarely disclosed. And I’m curious whether you have like an idea as to why, like FTC guidelines, which are kind of really clear about what you’re supposed to do, are so rarely followed, especially on TikTok.
Speaker 4: I think that there are increasing efforts to try to get them to be followed. You know, like TikTok introduced this toggle thing where you can mark a video that you’re making as branded content much more easily, which they hadn’t done really until Mozilla started asking them questions about this, but they did do it. But, you know, ultimately, if the influencer doesn’t know what the rules are and if the organization paying them are offering them, you know, donations or gifts or something doesn’t tell them, then there isn’t necessarily a reason for, you know, a 22 year old making videos about how cool their Tesla is or whatever to know what these rules are. So it requires a bunch of people to both kind of know what the rules are and to act in good faith, which is not how social media works generally. Yeah.
Rachel Hampton: You know now how social media works and how the world works. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Which was sort of the attitude from some folks when I published this story, folks in the Democratic Party and on the left were saying, you know, well, conservatives do this, so why wouldn’t we do it, too? You know, we have to fight fire with fire. And that was a somewhat common sentiment that I saw. And I find it really disturbing that that’s kind of where we are. But there is definitely this sense out there that everyone is cheating. So why wouldn’t we also?
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Fire’s a bad thing. Y’all here. Let’s rewind. The metaphor is inherently textured.
Speaker 4: I’m from New Mexico. And so I can say that fighting fire with fire like a controlled burn can be very dangerous. It can burn out of control. New Mexico is literally in the middle of the biggest forest fire in our state’s history because of a controlled burn that got out of control. So, you know, your intentions might be good. Your your flamethrower might be really well honed, and some things still might go right.
Rachel Hampton: Rosa how baby pave with good intentions.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Also on fire.
Speaker 4: Probably.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: In a did you come across anything in reporting this story that you wish had made it in the piece but landed on the edit floor?
Speaker 4: Oh boy. I came across something actually after the piece went up that I’m very embarrassed that I didn’t find, which is that vocal media was also offering TikTok users in Australia $300 to make anti-IS Scott Morrison videos. I did not find this. I wish that I had a Cameron Wilson, who’s a journalist in Australia who worked for, I think BuzzFeed and now had written this piece for Crikey. Again, just got. An email from local media that was like, Hey, do you want to make a anti Scott Morrison video? Like, here are the guidelines. We’ll pay you $300.
Rachel Hampton: My God.
Speaker 4: And again, like Australia has really, really clear federal election guidelines, it’s not great at all. And then the email said, you know, we’ll pay $300 to make an posted Tik Tok video. Quote, Based on the overarching theme of Scott Morrison is too slow and always late. And then it said, this campaign aims to help shift the political discourse on Tik Tok. This goes to his essential character as someone who isn’t quick to care and instead waits until it gets really bad to do his job. So this was again like extremely clear.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: To pay users to make negative tiktoks about the I guess now former prime minister of Australia.
Speaker 4: Right, who is pretty unpopular anyway, especially among young people. It wasn’t like I don’t think TikTok users were rushing to, you know, promote this dude. I don’t I don’t think he had like a strong base of support on that platform. Yeah. So I was sort of horrified that I hadn’t found this earlier because it’s suggestive of perhaps a larger pattern.
Rachel Hampton: It’s kind of galling how willing this company is to actually email journalists and basically just turn themselves for a practice that, as we’ve said, is kind of hard to figure out unless you, you know, who’s paying who.
Speaker 4: The question that I had and again, the question that we didn’t get to because of the sort of nature of our interaction is like, does this work? You know, like are these TikTok videos that to me seem a little bit wooden? Are they working? Like, are they is there any actual way to measure their impact beyond the impact they have on the sort of fray of the social fabric? I would be very, very, very curious of any of the companies doing this, and I’m sure there are many of them can point to an argument for why this works.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: An upper I love to end on an upper on this show. We do that often.
Rachel Hampton: I mean, we’ve gotten to one of the core. I see why maintenance, which is everything is an ad unless told otherwise.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, that worries me too, because I primarily write about conspiracy theories and we know that exposure to conspiracy theories about climate change or voting can make people less likely to, you know, want to recycle or want to vote. It can be really sort of disempowering in a very literal sense. It makes people just think that it’s pointless to engage in the discussion because the discussion is rigged. And so while I’m sure that everybody on an individual level making these videos or paying for these videos to be made is doing what they think is best. I think more broadly, it might create much bigger issues than maybe they recognize right now.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Okay. That was actually a slightly more positive note than I thought we’d end on. Once again, this was Anna Merlan senior staff writer advice, and I thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Yeah. But already that’s the show. We will be back in your feed on Wednesday, so definitely subscribe. It’s the best way to make sure you never miss an episode. Leave us a rating and review an Apple or Spotify and tell your friends about us. You can follow us on Twitter. We’re at ICI. Why am I underscore POD, which is also where you can DM us your questions, your disgusting seltzer recipes. We will also accept those via email. We are ICI. Why am I at Slate.com?
Rachel Hampton: I feel I am. I was produced by Daniel Schroeder, Medicinal and Kircher and me, Rachel Hampton Hampton’s special thanks to Kevin Bendis for helping us produce this episode, and Alicia montgomery, a slave, the VP of audio film online.
Maddison Malone, Madison Malone: Or at the Democratic National Convention. Undisclosed tick tock and, you know, with less of the undermining of our democracy going on.
