Hacked - McBroke

Episode Date: January 1, 2022

Jordan Bloemen & Scott Francis Winder talk about why the ice cream machines are always broken. If you like the show and want to make sure we can keep making it, please subscribe and if you can visit https://www.patreon.com/hackedpodcast and show us some love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So what do you say we end this year by talking about something just like just low stakes? Something super light, not full of dread. Sure. Sounds really cheery and happy and jolly. Festive? Festive. Okay. So for today's video, I'm going to be answering the world's most asked question, which is, why is why is

McDonald's ice cream machine always broken. Scott, have you heard about the ice cream hackers? I have not. They sound fun though. Why is the McDonald's ice cream machine always broken? Yeah, it's pretty good. So I want you to go to mickbroken.com. Mick is in McDonald's. Should I be like incognito for this? Should I be on a laptop that I don't care about? Like, yeah, you probably don't, you probably want to do it on like an air gap computer connected to a Wi-Fi that doesn't know. No, you can do this on a normal browser. Mickbroken.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 there 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 going to 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.

Oh, New York. 30% of McDonald's ice cream machines are down in New York right now. Wow. 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 going to get a basic idea that people have started noticing, like, wow, the ice cream machines and McDonald's are always down. Like a weird, kind of conspicuous amount. And that machine is the Taylor C-602. 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. 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%. I'm hooked, Jordan. I'm hooked. I need to know why. Always broken. And where it gets really interesting is when some people decided that they wanted to hack together a solution. Like essentially a back door through this insane labyrinthine set of weird menus.

They would just try and make these machines that are notorious for failing work. 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 going to ignore all of it for this holiday episode. And we're going to talk about ice cream. We're going to talk about ice cream right here on half. So the first thing to understand here is that most of the time, you know, we're going to talk about ice cream.

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 or down the road for 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 going to 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-602 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 got to be the Taylor C-602. The way this kind of machine works is the C-602 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-602 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-in ice cream machines is crazy town. So that's the Taylor C-602. You know, really well engineered can produce a lot of. 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 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 just essentially cook for half an hour, and then it brings it back down and refreezes it. The alternative would be to have someone's, like essentially disassemble the machine every single day. So this process, which Taylor cooked up, it's pretty incredible. It 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 Mick Broken, 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. 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 1% that you see in other industrial machinery. So what's up?

What is up? 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 the clean button right before they lock up and they show up the next day. They check this little kind of screen.

It's almost like an alarm clock, 30 character, you know, low pixel kind of LCD thing. And it just says in that kind of, 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 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 C8663249. 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 ingredient 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, ah, it's ice cream disaster down here. What the heck do I do? The franchise owner says,

you just call the guy. The guy being the Taylor Certified Service Technician. And I'm probably going to 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 got to meet. In 2011, there was somebody else panicking because the Taylor C-602 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 want to get into the frozen yogurt game. Okay. 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-602. Then you've got to spend all this money getting a staff to operate it. You got to spend all this money on your lease. And the idea was, what if we could basically wrap a vending machine around the Taylor C-602 and turn it into just like a little autonomous machine? Sure. Build that physical front end that turns this into like a kiosk.

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 yogurt money. Just literally a machine that makes money. It's just a machine that prints money and frozen yogurt. I like it.

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 monitor the temperature of what's going on inside the machine to make sure that this kiosk isn't selling like poison. Sure. And that temperature data is locked up inside of that Taylor C602 where they can't really access it.

So they have the machine, 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, Ricky could refer to the manual to see maybe what the error code means, but those error codes are really broad categories. 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, it just won't give you that information. And O'Sullivan and Nelson figure out that when you go, okay, fine, I'm going to 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 franchisees

or 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 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 want to 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 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 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 thumbs up.

A top Taylor exec had come to one of their prototype launch parties in D.C. Taylor had offered them 10 of their ice cream machines on consignment to work on and play with this idea. They'd shipped one to China for a manufacturer to work. Taylor was on board. They didn't see them as a competitor, but as like a partner. Sure, they were about to buy an infinite amount of ice cream machines. 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 Stadium bought a bunch of them, and Taylor is pumped. They think this is really, really cool. They're inviting Nelson and O'Sullivan to 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 and 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 hack, this device that they invented. But 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.

Totally. There's a little bit of attention between the premise and what they're trying to do. So they did what all startups do and they decide to pivot, right? They look at this little feature that they built for their, Frobot, this little Raspberry Pi computer that they built that completely changes how this piece of 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 Kitch 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. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world

where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora Super Intelligence Platform, a fully agenic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is full of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy, and all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real-world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context not synthetic training data. And the result is the new Aurora Agent SOC. It's the first SOC that is agent led by design.

You get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts. Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked.

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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 going to sell that now because it's a much better product. It's a much better product.

Solving a real problem. Yeah. The problem of I can't find frozen yogurt isn't like, oh, like, I can find frozen yogurt. But it sounds like this is a huge problem. And it's like, oh, you've actually solved it really well. To go back to O'Sullivan and Nelson, and their Raspberry Pi kind of built computer hack Kitch is a really big hit right out of the gate. And so they start adding more and more features to Kitch that could automatically detect some of the C-602's like most common pitfalls as they're happening in real time.

And they're starting to figure out how to 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 Kitch could automatically. automatically tweak something inside the machine to make sure the whole thing just actually works properly and the whole machine is, you know, is, you know, is 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 5, 2, 3, 1 secret menu, are suddenly saving a whole bunch of money

with this little, little computer. And word of mouse starts to spread. throughout McDonald's franchisees 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. I imagine 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? Yeah, 100%. Brilliant.

So Sullivan and Nelson hire, they hire a salesperson's their first, like, non-fessional. founder employee. And by the fall of 2020, their device was in more than 500 Taylor ice cream machines around the world. And based on how the sales line was sort of trending, they were going to knock out another 500 by the end of the year. And, you know, I think like a real holiday special episode would just end right here. Tadda. They solved a problem. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, everybody. And that's why you can go buy a kits right now and You, ah, they're great.

Visit kitch.com, K-Y-T-C-H.com. Order yours today. The sponsor of this episode, Bait and Switch. This was sponsored content the entire time. Within two days of Kitch's late 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 kind of write up their Taylor contact and say like, hey, you know, we love you. We know you love us. But we just kind of 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? Would you like to buy us and fix your product? Maybe. 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. Are you got a response from a lawyer being like, this will be determined soon? And so, O'Sullivan and Nelson, they just sort of cancel the order and they give Taylor their money back. And they're like, well, you tell us, a couple of months later, they get another strange order for a kitch. This time from someone at Taylor's outside law firm, Brinson Gelson. There you go. And they, like, recognize the name and they go, oh, 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. Right at this point is Taylor is starting to act a little bit kind of dodgy. Kitch 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 kind of backs off. They say, don't use our logo and then they chill out again. They go quiet. In February 2020, Nelson and O'Sullivan and get an email from someone named Tyler Gamble, the head of equipment team for the National Supply Leadership Council,

which is essentially a lobbying group for McDonald's franchisees. In a room full of McDonald's franchise owners, Tyler Gamble is the big person in that room. Owns like a dozen restaurants kind of thing. Gamble had been starting to hear all the buzz around Kitch. And he wanted to look into using it in his 10 restaurants. He's friendly, he's excited about the thing. But he has a little bit of a caution.

It's kind of being like, hey, you making a device, that lets people bypass this secret menu code. Taylor's not going to like that for reasons you've teased, but we'll get into. But Nelson O'Sullivan, they're riding high. They're selling these units. They think Gamble's going to 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 in 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 want to 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 want to 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. And then he goes on to hype Kitch 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 Kitch. He goes up and he's preaching this thing to the whole crowd. And about a month later, in November of that year, the bomb kind of, it goes off. Kitch's salesperson forwarded an email to Nelson O'Sullivan and McDonald's had apparently sent to every single franchisee, all 38,000 of them, telling them, if you install a Kitch 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, um, sure. Yeah. So they're rational. So their rationale is that Kitch 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 career 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 say, send out another note saying on a totally unrelated note,

Taylor is excited to announce the Taylor Shake Sunday Connectivity Machine, which is basically just a Taylor C-602 with a kits strap to it. But Taylor makes it now. And then another note saying don't, and again, don't use the kits. You've got to 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 got to at least respect that. Yeah.

If that's, yes, that would. would be worth respecting if that was what was going on. Like there would be, there would be, yeah, if that was what we're 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. 100%.

I bet Taylor's revenue is grotesquely biased towards service. than it is towards sales. Man, you're making some accurate holiday predictions here right now, Scott. Ayo, Merry Christmas. And again, remember, Taylor has announced the Taylor Shake Sunday, whatever connectivity machine. They have announced it in a 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 Shake 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 kitch 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 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.

It's 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 kitch had signed a contract saying they wouldn't share it. So Nelson O'Sullivan start wondering, like, 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 kind of hyping it up.

Had told them six months ago that one of his Taylor machines, equipped with the kitch device, had a broken compress. And so he'd sent it in for repair. When they saw Gamble at a conference six months after that, he said, oh, yeah, that same machine is still in the shop, which they kind of 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 kind of torpedoes their business, O'Sullivan and Nelson are looking up the logins on Kitch'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 went by the name Matt Wilson. And they started to check 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 up in 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 Kitch account. This person that purportedly worked for Tyler Gamble actually worked for this Taylor Ice Cream machine distributor. A Taylor Distribute that had gotten

their device, sat on it for six months, and allegedly used that time to hand over the kitch 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. It's like a shitty, shitty roundabout. Yeah, pretty rough. 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%. I think that that's probably part of it, too, like this is where it's getting into a lawsuit that's basically dropping this month. Sure. I'll put this back on my radar.

They finally dropped the lawsuit. We'll talk about that in a minute. I imagine it's just lawsuits on lawsuits. It's just lawsuits all the way down. Like Taylor, like do we know that Gamble knew that they had the kits? And that's why it was taking so long. Did he intentionally? It's like, it's all speculation.

I guess that's what's going to come out in the lawsuit. So at first pass, it seems like there's kind of one thing going on. right? Like Kitch added a bunch of functionality to these machines and Taylor wanted to cut. So they boxed out Kitch 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 we Whatever was wrong before is still wrong.

So he calls the owner who 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 kits 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 $144 for the first half hour, and then $315 U.S. dollars for each additional 15-minute increment. Whoa. 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 big consortium called Middleby. Taylor doesn't really lead with talking about their products anymore. You tease this earlier. That's not really what they identify is their big growth area. Sure. 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. $144 for 30 minutes. It's probably the drive-out time. Yeah, 100% of it is. So then once you're on-site, you're billing, what was it, 3-something, I mean 15 minutes? This is up to, but it's up to 315 U.S. for each additional 15 minutes, which makes you're at 630 for a half hour, over $1,300, over $1,300 for an hour. That's $1,250, $1,000 plus an hour.

U.S. Yeah. Like, you're in like seeing your partner law firms in big city money at that point. You're at like a neurosurgeon, I would think, like, yeah, you're a thousand plus bucks an hour. That's madness for literally a basic compressor technician for like a basic piece of equipment. In most instances, for a guy to punch in 5, 2, 3, 1, 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 Kitch was able to tap into.

But it turns out that Kitch had tapped into something that they were charging over $1,200 an hour to do themselves. It's madness. 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 about ice cream, which is like our gift to everyone. We'll probably do a Log 4J 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 big lawsuit. Taylor's name, McDonald's is named, and Tyler Gamble is named. And it would 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 is kind of an interesting question about, like, I guess, right to repair. Like, 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 going to 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 hacking on the show, we're talking about the cybercrime and Infosex stuff and really just people going where they have kind of maybe no right being. But then there's like 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 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 going to get super angry when you then try and fix it. Big holiday shout out to our new patrons on Patreon. Azat Hashim, thank you. Asher Perishini. Thank you. Nicholas Lopez.

Thank you. Brian Nichols. Thank you. Jan Heinsvig. Thank you. Seved Zero. Thanks. Simon Baines.

Thank you. Ross Siegel. Thank you. so much. December, y'all showed up. Curse Shadow. Thank you. Copperty, 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 Patreon throughout this year. Really appreciate you being here and excited to be back for the next one.