McBroke

Speaker 1: So what do you say we end this year by talking about some just, like, just just low stakes? Some super light, not full of dread?

Speaker 2: Sure. Sounds really cheery and happy and jolly.

Speaker 1: Festive? Festive.

Speaker 3: Giblet? Yeah. So for today's video, I'm going to be answering the world's most asked question, which is, why is McDonald's ice cream machine always broken?

Speaker 1: Scott, have you heard about the ice cream hackers?

Speaker 2: I have not. They sound fun, though.

Speaker 4: Why is the McDonald's ice cream machine always broken?

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's pretty good. So I want you to go to mc broken dot com. Mick as in McDonald's.

Speaker 2: Should I be, like, incognito for this? Should I be,

Speaker 1: like No. On a laptop that

Speaker 2: I don't care about? Like

Speaker 1: Yeah. You probably don't you probably wanna do it on, like, an air gapped computer connected to a WiFi that doesn't know no. You can do this on a normal, normal browser. Mcbroken.com. Oh. So what you're looking at is a map of every one of McDonald's 38,000 plus locations that has an ice cream machine along with the answer to a simple question. Is their ice cream machine broken? McBroken is the creation of, like, a software engineer who it's pretty cool how he does this. He pulls the data by having a bot process an order for ice cream that through, like, a reverse engineered ordering API, which means that every minute at every McDonald's in North America, this site is placing an order for $18,752 worth of ice cream just to see which ones can even process it. Along the side, like, to the right of the map, you're gonna see the number that this process kicks out, which is the percentage of those machines in any given area that's down. And it looks like the average around the world right now is 10.11% currently broken, which is actually pretty good.

Speaker 2: On New York, 30%.

Speaker 1: 30% of McDonald's ice cream machines are down in New York right now.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Speaker 1: So this is all part of, like, a meme. If you were to look up broken McDonald's ice cream machines on Twitter or YouTube, you're gonna get a basic idea that people have started noticing, like, wow. The ice cream machines at McDonald's are always down. Like, a weird, kinda conspicuous amount. And that machine is the Taylor c six zero two. They cost $18,000 They have been described as the Italian sports cars of the soft serve ice cream machine world. They're, like, crazy meticulously designed, but they're super over engineered and a giant pain in the ass to fix. So that's kind of the whole meme. The ice cream machine and McDonald's is McBroken. The line is broken. So the question that sort of naturally emerges is, is 10% actually high? Taylor, who makes that machine, makes a lot of stuff. They make ice cream machines. They make equipment for making burgers and fries. They also make ice cream machines, basically identical ice cream machines for other fast food restaurants, Wendy's, Burger King, mechanically identical. And the failure rate for their other products, including those other ice cream machines, compared to this, like, 10 to 30% failure rate, is less than 1%.

Speaker 2: I'm hooked, Jordan. I'm hooked. I need to know why.

Speaker 5: Like a McDonald's ice cream machine, I'm always broken.

Speaker 1: And where it gets really interesting is when some people decided that they wanted to hack together a solution, like, essentially a backdoor through this insane labyrinthine set of weird menus. They would just try and make these machines that are notorious for failing work a little bit better. And in doing so, they kind of opened up this door into a world of alleged corporate espionage, all of which came to head in a big lawsuit that just got dropped this month. There's a lot of, crazy stuff happening in the world of cybersecurity right now, but we're gonna ignore all of it for this holiday episode.

Speaker 2: And we're gonna talk about ice cream.

Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about ice cream right here on Hack. So the first thing to understand here is that most of the time, the ice cream machines at McDonald's, the ones on mcbroken.com, aren't actually broken. They're being cleaned. That makes sense. Yeah. It does. And we'll get to why. So McDonald's has been selling ice cream cones basically as long as there have been McDonald's. And Taylor, a company that's headquarters are, like, down the road from McDonald's main headquarters, has been selling them ice cream machines that entire time. This is a decades long, business relationship. If you want to open a McDonald's franchise, you have to sign a contract saying that you're gonna use all of the stuff that McDonald's uses, the same supplies, the same ingredients, the same contractors, so that your McDonald's is like every other McDonald's. And since 2003, when the Taylor C six zero two came out, every franchise has to use that one machine. It's in the contract. Most stuff you get maybe a choice. You can buy this set of prongs or that set of prongs, maybe this fryer or that one. But ice cream, it's gotta be the Taylor c six zero two. The way this kind of machine works is the c six zero two has this big open, like, hopper essentially on the top that you put all of the liquid ice cream ingredients into. And then it freezes them in these two big spinning barrels where the frozen mixture is then, like, pulled off with metal scraper blades over and over again until you get these really tiny, tiny little ice crystals, which is why, you know, that soft serve ice cream is so smooth, which is then pushed through a nozzle into a cone. What makes the c six zero two special is that it has two hoppers and two barrels and, like, a pump system, which means you can produce a ton of ice cream by the standards of these machines. Like, a person that just learned how to use it can kick out, like, 10 ice cream cones in a minute, which if you do a deep dive into ice cream machines is crazy town. So that's the Taylor c six zero two. You know, really well engineered, can produce a lot of ice cream machine. But remember, this is dairy, and dairy will make you sick if you're not careful about hygiene. So to keep this whole, you know, kind of semi industrial system working, Taylor machines use this thing called a heat treatment. This is basically a process that ratchets up all of the contents inside of the machine to a temperature where it gets pasteurized, lets it, you know, just essentially cook for half an hour, and then it brings it back down and refreezes it. The alternative would be to have someone, like, essentially disassemble the machine every single day. So this process, which Taylor cooked up, is pretty incredible. Saves a bunch of money and lets, you know, a person with minimal training produce a ton of ice cream cone and then clean the whole thing with a push of a button. But that process takes four hours. So when you first start going down the rabbit hole of McBroken, that's the answer that starts coming back. They're not broken. They're being cleaned. And that takes four hours, and that's why it's down. So when this meme first started popping off, there was the first rush of headlines outlining this issue, and then a second rush that presented the answer. The real reason the McDonald's ice cream machines are down, they're being cleaned. The trouble is that Taylor sells a mechanically identical machine to Burger King that does not have this problem. They sell the same machine to Chick fil A, which has other problems, but not this one. They sell it to In N Out. They sell it to Wendy's. They sell it to a bunch of different people, all of which need to clean their machines, but whose failure rate is way closer to that one percent that you see in other industrial machinery. So what's up?

Speaker 2: What is up?

Speaker 1: The way it's supposed to work is a McDonald's employee working the night shift right before they close-up, is supposed to set this cleaning cycle to run overnight. They hit, like, the clean button right before they lock up, and they show up the next day. They check this little kinda screen. It's like a almost like an alarm clock, 30 character, you know, low pixel kinda LCD thing. And it just says in that kinda, you know, old watch typeface, like, heat cycle successful. The other thing it can say is heat cycle failed. You walk into that store, you open it up in the morning, can only be one of those two things. And importantly, the display does not say why it has failed. They're they walk in, they're looking at the display, and, you know, it just says this didn't work. And there might be, like, a status code, some obscure kind of oblique string of numbers. It doesn't really tell you why anything went wrong. It doesn't say, oh, like, you overfilled the hopper by a centimeter, just filled a little bit less, and it'll work this time. So Ricky, you know, working at McDonald's shows up in the morning to heat cycle failed, error code C863249. And Ricky at McDonald's has one move. He doesn't know why it failed. He doesn't have that information. All he can do is run that four hour heat cycle again, meaning no ice cream for four hours. And of course, it fails again because they have no clue why it didn't work the first time. So they didn't do anything differently, didn't add less of a gradient or more of one, so it's still broken. Without knowing why it's broken, you can't fix it, and the machine won't tell you why it broke. So people are freaking out. Everyone wants their ice cream. The machine's been down for you know, you run it twice, eight hours at this point. It's a whole big mess. So Ricky, having run this thing and run it again, does the last thing he can, and he calls up the franchise owner and says It's like, it's ice cream disaster down here. What the heck do I do? And the franchise owner says We need to call the guy. The guy being the Taylor certified service technician. And I'm probably gonna put, like, an echo or something big on Taylor, certified service technician. Taylor. Because he's a big character in all this. Before we get to him, because he's kind of the, like, crux on which all this turns, there's two characters that you gotta meet. In 2011, there was somebody else panicking because the Taylor c six zero two was not working. It was not Ricky at McDonald's. It was two software entrepreneurs, Jeremy O'Sullivan and Melissa Nelson. O'Sullivan and Nelson, decide that they wanna get into the frozen yogurt game.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: And they decided that most of the cost of running a frozen yogurt business is renting, like, a whole brick and mortar store in which to put, you know, basically one Taylor c six zero two. Then you gotta spend all this money getting a staff to operate it. You gotta spend all this money on your lease. And the idea was, well, what if we could basically, like, wrap a vending machine around the Taylor c six zero two and turn it into just, like, a little autonomous machine. Sure. You know, build that physical front end that turns this into, like, a kiosk, and you can drop it in a mall, drop it on a campus. You don't have to pay the expensive lease, and you don't have to pay for a bunch of staff. You can just have one technician cleaning and refilling a bunch of them, instead of a whole crew. And then suddenly, you're just making all this frozen frozen yogurt money.

Speaker 2: Just literally a machine that makes money.

Speaker 1: Just a machine that prints money and frozen yogurt.

Speaker 2: I like it.

Speaker 1: So they do the entrepreneur thing, and they start building prototypes. And they start getting them into different places, campuses, and stuff to test this idea, to get more funding, rinse and repeat. But there is a problem. In order to make that machine fully autonomous, regulations set by the National Sanitation Foundation require them to, like, monitor the temperature of what's going on inside the machine to make sure that this, like, kiosk isn't selling like poison. Sure. And that temperature data is locked up inside of that Taylor c six zero two where they can't really access it. So they they have the machine. They they've built out the front end, but legally, they can't sell this product because they don't know what the temperature in the machine is, which is when they discover the secret code. If we remember Ricky, the McDonald's employee, who doesn't know why his ice cream machine isn't working and his only move is to either run it again or call the guy, Like, Ricky could refer to the manual to see maybe what the error code means, but those error codes are really broad categories, like there's nothing useful in them. But the machine that Ricky is trying to use that isn't working has all the information. It knows that you overfilled the hopper. It knows exactly why the cleaning process failed, and it could tell you. But that little software front end, there's it just won't give you that information. And O'Sullivan and Nelson figure out that when you go, okay, fine, I'm gonna call the guy, and that service technician shows up, what he does when he walks in is he punches in this secret code, 5231. The code is not in the user manual, It is not made available to franchise user staff. But the second that technician punches in that code, suddenly, they can see all of the information that is inside of this machine. They can see everything that's wrong. They can see why it failed. They can see, oh, you just turn this one little teeny thing, and it'll it'll work suddenly. They can see exactly how to fix it. So back with Nelson O'Sullivan, they go, okay. Well, here's a solution. We wanna sell ice cream from an autonomous machine. We need to be able to remotely monitor the temperature. And we know that these service technicians have this magic code that gives them access to this this data we need. So while at, you know, a tech incubator, they decide, let's just hack together a solution for this. Like, a Raspberry Pi that plugs into the machine, uses the secret code to tap into the data, and then wirelessly transmits it to, like, a simple app that we can build. That way, we can remotely monitor and make sure that these things are working autonomously. Suddenly, the problem's solved. And obviously, there would be many, many other users for such a tool. Like, every single McDonald's in the world. All 38,000 of them would love this. So O'Sullivan and Nelson did this with Taylor's, like, thumbs up. A top Taylor exec had come to one of their, like, prototype launch parties in DC. Taylor had offered them 10 of their ice cream machines on consignment to work on and, like, play with this idea. They'd shipped one to China for a manufacturer to work. Like, they Taylor was on board. They didn't see them as a competitor, but as, like, a partner.

Speaker 2: Sure. They were about to buy an infinite amount of ice cream machines.

Speaker 1: They were about to buy a ton of ice cream machines, and they were working on tools that seemed to make their machines work better. It was sort of a win win. 2017, their machine, which they called FroBots, which I skipped over but is an important detail, FroBots start to catch on. Tesla installed two in, like, a factory cafeteria. Levi's Stadium bought a bunch of them, and Taylor is is pumped. They're they they think this is really, really cool. They're inviting Nelson and O'Sullivan to prevent present at, like, food industry trade shows. Everyone is very thumbs up buddy buddy. And then Nelson and O'Sullivan start to experience what people working in all 38,000 of those McDonald's have been experiencing. Like, wow. These machines break a lot. And Nelson Sullivan, now they have all this really useful data for fixing it. They're way better equipped to solve these problems than any one of those tens of thousands of McDonald's. Instead of having to try over and over and over again, they can typically fix it really quickly, because of this this hack, this device that they invented. Mhmm. But, like, the difference is that a McDonald's is full of staff, and they're trying to run a vending machine company. So no matter how much faster they are at fixing this machine, a machine that still breaks this often isn't really compatible with their idea.

Speaker 6: Totally.

Speaker 1: There's a little bit of a tension between the premise and what they're trying to do. So they did what all startups do, and they they decide to pivot. Right? They look at this little this little feature that they built for their FroBot, this little Raspberry Pi computer that they built that completely changes how this piece of, like, industrial machinery used around the world works. And they thought, well, like, what if this little hack was the product? What if we sell this little Raspberry Pi computer to every McDonald's franchise in the world? What if that's our business? So they name it Kitsch as in kitchen. And in 2019, they pivot, which is where our first story, the story of, you know, the McDonald's employee Ricky and his broken machine, and the stories of O'Sullivan and Nelson kind of finally intersect right after the break. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be downright terrifying. You put a lot of work into a thing. You're not entirely sure it's gonna work out. You're taking a huge leap of faith. I've started a few things. Now I know I was right for believing in, you know, the idea, the product, despite all of those fears and hesitations. But boy, does it sure help when you have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in The US. From household names like, well, hacked podcasts merch to brands just getting started, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Did I mention that that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? I don't know why I wouldn't. I should. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts, sort of getting abandoned in the parking lot and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/hacked. Go to shopify.com/hacked. One more time, That's shopify.com/hacked.

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Speaker 2: Kitsch.

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Speaker 2: Kitsch. I love that like they were like, hey. Yeah. We had this great business idea, and we did all this hacking, and we, like, made all this stuff work. And then, your machines just don't work good enough. But it turns out we figured out how to hack your machines and make them work better, so we're just gonna sell that now because it's a much better product.

Speaker 1: It's a much better product solving a real problem. Like

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: The the problem of I can't find frozen yogurt isn't like, oh, like, oh, I can find frozen yogurt. But it sounds like this is a huge problem. It's like, oh, you've actually solved it really well. To go back to, you know, O'Sullivan and Nelson, their Raspberry Pi kinda built computer hack, Kitsch, is a really big hit right out of the gate. And so they start adding more and more features to Kitsch that could automatically detect some of the c six o two's, like, most common pitfalls as they're happening in real time. And they're starting to figure out how to, like, tweak those variables inside the machine to prevent some of these mishaps. So, you know, Ricky shows up at McDonald's and instead of just knowing why it failed, it might not have even failed because the kitsch could automatically tweak something inside the machine to make sure the whole thing just actually works properly and the whole machine is is, you know, is Sure. Heat treated and sterilized by the morning. So suddenly, all these McDonald's franchisee owners who are paying thousands of dollars a month to tailor in service technician fees, often for making, like, pretty simple little changes that were just locked behind that five two three one secondret menu, are suddenly saving a whole bunch of money with this little little computer. And word-of-mouth starts to spread throughout McDonald's franchisees that that suddenly, oh my god, there's a solution to this really kind of embarrassing Internet problem about our broken ice cream machines and kitsch sales, like, start to just double every quarter.

Speaker 2: I imagine as a as a franchisee, you know, you probably spend so much money on maintenance calls that if you can buy a little box that just keeps everything going, like, why wouldn't you?

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. 100%. Brilliant. So O'Sullivan and Nelson hire, they hire a salesperson as their first, like, nonfounder employee. And by the fall of twenty twenty, their device was in more than 500 Taylor screw machines around the world. And based on, like, how the sales line was, you know, sort of trending, they were gonna knock out another 500 by the end of the year. And, you know, I think, like, a a real holiday special episode would just end right here.

Speaker 2: And ta da. They solved a problem. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Speaker 1: And that's why you can go buy a Kitsch right now, and you they're great.

Speaker 2: Visit kitsch.com, kytch.com. Order yours today.

Speaker 1: The sponsor of this episode, bait and switch. This was sponsored content the entire time. Within two days of Kitsch's April 2019 launch, O'Sullivan and Nelson noticed that an executive that they knew worked over at Taylor had put in an order for one of their devices. So they just kinda write up their Taylor contact and say, like, hey. You know, we love you. We know you love us. But we just kinda noticed that you ordered one of these things. So, like, what is Taylor's official stance on this awesome product that improves your product? And, like, why did you order one?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Would you like to buy us and fix your product?

Speaker 1: Maybe. Happy merry Christmas to us. And Taylor just does not reply, which is never a great sign when you ask someone what their stance on your product is. Taylor ghosts them.

Speaker 2: You get a response from a lawyer being like, this will be determined soon.

Speaker 1: And so O'Sullivan and Nelson, they, like, they just sort of canceled the order, and they give Taylor their money back. And they're like, well, you tell us. A couple months later, they get another strange order for a kitsch. This time from someone at Taylor's, outside law firm, Bringson Gilson. There you go. And they, like, recognized the name, and they they go crap and they cancel that sale too. And suddenly more of these weird attempts from Taylor to like covertly buy one of these things start coming through. But the whole time Taylor will not talk to them. Taylor is ghosting them but trying to buy one of their products. So Nelson and O'Sullivan start checking those addresses, that the attempted orders are coming through against public records. And they find that one of them matched with someone listed on LinkedIn as an employee of an intellectual property, private investigation firm called Marksman, was trying to now buy one of the machines. So at this point, they know, like, oh, Taylor is investigating us, and they're using fake names to try and get their hands on one of these devices that we've built. Which is when Taylor finally comes out of the woodwork years into this relationship, close to a decade at this point. And they send Nelson and Sullivan a cease and desist letter telling them to stop using Taylor's branding at their displays at food industry trade shows. The years of robot friendship are over at this point. But right at this point is Taylor is starting to act a little bit kinda dodgy. Kitsch is just blowing up. And after that cease and desist letter, you know, a nod of the product, not saying you can't sell this, just saying you can't use our brand, Taylor actually kinda backs off. They say, don't use our logo, and then they they they chill out again. They go quiet. In February 2020, Nelson and O'Sullivan get an email from someone named Tyler Gamble, the head of equipment team for the National Supply Leadership Council, which is, like, essentially a a lobbying group for McDonald's franchisees. In a room full of McDonald's franchise like, franchise owners, Tyler Gamble is the big person in that room, owns, like, a dozen restaurants kinda thing. Gamble had been starting to hear all the buzz around kitsch, and he wanted to look into using it in his 10 restaurants. You know, he's friendly. He's excited about the thing, but he has a little bit of a a caution. It's kind of being like, hey. You making a device that lets people bypass this secret menu code, that's tie Taylor's not gonna like that for reasons you've teased, but we'll get into. But Nelson O'Sullivan, they're they're riding high. They're selling these units. They think Gamble's gonna be a great collaborator, and they're pretty just stoked on the idea that this guy with a lot of clout amongst McDonald's franchisees who has all this sway is, you know, pumping up their product. And they give him four of these kitsch devices to go test at his restaurants. At the annual conference of the National Owners Association, big trade group thing, Gamble, goes up and gives a big speech pledging, you know, I think we found the solution to the ice cream meme, saying, quote, I wanna assure you guys like, picture him up on a big stage in front of, like, McDonald's franchisee owners in a conference hall. Quote, I wanna assure you all that you will not feel that my tenure as your equipment lead has been a success unless we find a way to ensure that McDonald's is no longer the butt of the joke. Then he goes on to hype Kitsch to the whole crowd. Quote, I've had the opportunity to have their devices in my restaurants over the last several months. To be clear, this is not a McDonald's approved piece of equipment, and suppliers are not fully yet on board with it. But it's my job to bring you feedback on equipment, and I really think this device can reduce complexity in your restaurants. So Gamble, you know, he's the patron saint of Kitsch. He goes up, and he's he's preaching this thing to the whole crowd. And about a month later, in November of that year, the bomb kinda goes off. Kitsch's salesperson forwards an email to Nelson O'Sullivan that McDonald's had apparently sent to every single franchisee, oh, 38,000 of them, telling them, if you install a Kitsch in your store, consider the warranty void. We're no longer dealing with this. We want you to not use this device. We're telling you not to install it, which is, like, apparently a super common threat from corporations fighting in, like, right to repair battles. But, Sure. Yeah. So their rationale is that Kitsch allows you complete access to all of these controllers and confidential data, like Taylor's data, not the restaurant owners. And then it creates this really potential safety risk for a crew or technician. That's their argument that this thing is actually dangerous. And they give out a final warning saying McDonald's strongly recommends you remove this device from all your machines and discontinue use. So Nelson O'Sullivan get that email and they go, oh, crap. We're now at war with Taylor's and McDonald's. And the next day, they send out another note saying, on a totally unrelated note, Taylor is excited to announce the Taylor Shakes Sunday connectivity machine, which is basically just a Taylor c six zero two with a kitsch strap to it, but Taylor makes it now. And then another note saying don't and and, again, don't use the kitsch.

Speaker 2: Well, you gotta kind of you gotta kind of respect and appreciate the fact that Taylor at least saw somebody else fixing their problem and then tried to emulate it. You know? You gotta at least respect that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. If that's yes. That would would be worth respecting if that was what was going on.

Speaker 2: Like, there would be there would be yeah. If if that was what were going on. Because the thing is is, like, so many like, if you just think about anything that has a maintenance cycle, like, vehicles make more money. Dealerships make all the money from the maintenance of the vehicles, not the sale of them. Right? And it's like, I'm sure that's very much the same thing here.

Speaker 1: A 100%. I bet

Speaker 2: I bet Taylor's revenue is grotesquely biased towards service than it is towards sales.

Speaker 1: Man, you're you're making some some accurate holiday predictions here right now, Scott.

Speaker 2: Hey, yo. Merry Christmas.

Speaker 1: And, again, remember, Taylor has announced the, Taylor Shakes Sunday whatever connectivity machine. They have announced it in the press release. That is all they have done so far. So for context, a wired journalist that was reporting on this last year, was not able to find a single franchisee who had ever even seen a Taylor Shakes Sunday connectivity machine in the world. And every single franchisee that this journalist talked to agreed to the idea that the kitsch like, just the notion that a kitsch could cause harm to humans was wacky, if not impossible, to understand. It's just not it doesn't engage with, like, the big moving parts. Everything about how you, like, repair this machine says to un like, unplug it before you do it. There's really no way having one of these things on a machine could cause harm to an actual human being. And this is me editorializing, if anything, a thing that helps you sterilize and pasteurize a dairy machine work better is, like, if anything, it's going the opposite direction. An important note here, for the legal side of all this is that, every single person who bought a kitsch signed a contract saying they would not share their device with anybody else, including Taylor, who could then, you know, theoretically do what they did, look at it and reproduce their own version of it. Every single person that had a kitsch had signed a contract saying they wouldn't share it. So Nelson O'Sullivan start wondering, like, who who gave their kitsch over to Taylor? Like, who broke the deal? So Nelson and O'Sullivan start digging. Tyler Gamble, the, franchisee, you know, guy that I mentioned a while ago who loved their product, I've been kinda hyping it up, had told them six months ago that one of his Taylor machines equipped with a kitsch device had a broken compressor. And so he'd sent it in for repair. When they saw a gamble at a conference six months after that, he said, oh, yeah. That same machine is still in the shop, which they kinda thought, oh, that's like a weirdly long time for a machine to be in a shop just to fix a compressor. That's like a couple day or week thing. Like, why has it been there for six months? So after McDonald's sends out this big press blast that kinda torpedoes their business, O'Sullivan and Nelson are looking up the logins on Kitsch's website. And they saw that one of the profiles tied to Gamble's machine that was in the shop for six months had been deleted a couple of months after the McDonald's email went out. And that deleted user was went by the name, Matt Wilson. And they started to check, you know, his location based on the IP address used, and none of them lined up with any of Gamble's restaurants. And all of the points that did line up happened to be facilities owned by a company called TFG, a Taylor ice cream machine distributor. Nelson O'Sullivan had actually met a TFG executive back when they were first building for a bot, and they had his business card still. And they look up they crack open the business card, and they look at the cell phone number, and they see that the cell phone number on this TFG executive is the exact same cell phone number that was used to sign up the Matt Wilson Kitsch account. This person that purportedly worked for Tyler Gamble actually worked for this Tyler Ice Cream machine distributor. A Taylor distributor had gotten their device, sat on it for six months, and allegedly used that time to hand over the kitsch to Taylor. Meaning, if you boil all that down, their machine had been handed over to Taylor by none other than their friend, Tyler Gamble.

Speaker 2: It's like a shitty shitty shitty roundabout.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Pretty pretty rough.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's also not like he did it intentionally. You know? It's just, like, goes away for just like who was last holding the bag. 100%.

Speaker 1: I think that that's probably part of it too is, like, it's this is where it's getting into a lawsuit that's basically dropping this month. Sure. I'll put this back on my radar. It's like, they they finally dropped the lawsuit. We'll talk about that in a minute, but it's like

Speaker 2: I imagine it's just lawsuits on lawsuits It's just lawsuits

Speaker 1: all the way down. Like, Taylor Yeah. Like, do we know that Gamble knew that they had the kitchen that's why it was taking so long? Did he intentionally it's like this it's all speculation. I guess that's what's gonna come out in the in the suit. So at first pass, it seems like there's kind of one thing going on. Right? Like, Kitsch added a bunch of functionality to these these machines, and Taylor wanted a cut. So they boxed out Kitsch, announced their own version. But I don't think that's actually really what's going on here, which brings us all the way back to the Taylor certified service technician. So it's some morning at McDonald's and, you know, Ricky shows up for work at a shift, and the machine has failed to clean itself. So he runs it again, and it, of course, fails because whatever was wrong before is still wrong. So he calls the owner and tells him to call the guy, the authorized service tech from Taylor, the manufacturer. If you call someone else, you void the service warranty. If you try and repair it yourself using a kitsch or some other kind of hack solution, you will now void the warranty. You have to call the guy. Every single one of those tens of thousands of franchisees has to call the guy. And here is what the guy costs. It's different based on where you are. The average is a $144 for the first half hour and then 315 US dollars for each additional fifteen minute increment. Woah. Which the franchisee owner pays to Taylor who made the machine that is being fixed. Something interesting about Taylor, and we really get to see how they sell themselves as a company a few years back when they were in talks to get acquired by this comp this big consortium called Middleby. Taylor doesn't really lead with talking about their products anymore, and you teased this earlier. That's not really what they identify as their big growth area.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: They're really big on their technician program. Ice cream machines make up a pretty small fraction of their hardware business, but their service technicians make up a quarter of their revenue.

Speaker 2: A $144 for thirty minutes is probably the drive out time.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A 100% of it.

Speaker 2: So then then so then once you're on-site, you're billing what was it? $3,315 15 minutes?

Speaker 1: This is up to, but it's up to 315 US for each additional fifteen minutes, which makes you're at $6.30 for a half hour over 12 over $1,300 for an hour.

Speaker 2: That's $12.50. $12.50 plus an hour. US. Yeah. Like, you're in, like like, you're in, like, seeing your partner, law firms, and big city money at that point.

Speaker 1: You're at, like, a neurosurgeon. I would think, like, yeah. You're a thousand plus bucks an hour. Like

Speaker 2: That's madness for literally a basic compressor technician for, like, a basic piece of equipment.

Speaker 1: In most instances, for a guy to punch in 5231, read a little display, check that number against his technician manual, and say, oh, you overfilled the hopper. A piece of information that the machine already knew, and that's what that Kitsch was able to tap into. But it turns out that Kitsch had tapped into something that they were charging over $1,200 an hour to do themselves.

Speaker 2: It's madness.

Speaker 1: We're talking about this because I think, a, it's the holidays, and this isn't, like, a terrifying story. It's low stakes. It's got ice cream, which is like our gift to everyone. We'll probably do a Log four j episode at some point in the new year. But we're talking about this now, I think, because last month, O'Sullivan and Nelson finally launched their their big lawsuit. Taylor's named, McDonald's named, and Tyler Gamble is named. And it will be a long, winding legal road, and probably the least interesting part of this. You know, the contract breaches and the legal boring stuff. But I think at its heart, it's kind of an interesting question about, like, I guess right to repair. Like, if you're if you're like me, this is the time of year when you're probably buying a lot of electronics. And in about a year, you're gonna be thinking about how some of those products sucked. And sometimes it felt like they kind of intentionally sucked. Most of the time when we talk about, like, hacking on the show, we're talking about the, like, cybercrime and infosec stuff, and really just people going where they have kind of maybe no right being. But then there's, like, the the whole kind of other kind where someone looks at a system that works one way and hacks together a new way to use that system. So I guess the, like, holiday lesson here is next time you're in the market for an ice cream machine, maybe just ask them why you would buy one that breaks all the time if they're gonna get super angry when you then try and fix it. Big holiday shout out to our new patrons on Patreon. Eza Hashim, thank you. Asher Puraschini, thank you. Nicholas Lopez, thank you. Brian Nichols, thank you. Jan Heinzvig, thank you. Sevd zero, thanks. Simon Baines, thank you. Ross Siegel, thank you so much. December, you all showed up. Cursed Shadow, thank you. Copperti, thank you. Chase Tucker, you signed up as a Patreon while we were recording this episode on Christmas Eve. You rule thank you. And a thanks to everyone who signed up for the for the Patreon throughout this year. Really appreciate you being here and excited to be back for the next one.

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