How many times have you gone to McDonald’s for a nice frozen treat only to be told that the ice cream machine is broken? One couple attempted to get to the bottom of why the Taylor ice cream machines that McDonald’s uses are always breaking and found that there is a secret repair menu that most workers don’t know how to access which forces them to contact the manufacturer for maintenance. This couple eventually created a way to hack the machines, only to have Taylor and McDonald’s stop them. Andy Greenberg, senior writer at Wired, joins us for the fight over hacking McDonald’s ice cream machines.
Next, some 2020 election ballots are still being counted in Arizona. This is coming in the form of an unofficial recount and audit of the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County. The Justice Department has signaled that the recount may violate federal law and the AZ Secretary of State has said that other problems have also been noticed such as ballots left unattended on counting tables. The audit is being run by Florida based contractor Cyber Ninjas who have been employing unorthodox practices such as checking ballots with UV lights. Rosalind Helderman, reporter at The Washington Post, joins us for this recount that many Trump allies are keeping a close watch on.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday, May seven. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles,
and this is the Daily Dive. How many times have
you gone to McDonald's for a nice frozen treat only
to be told that the ice cream machine is broken.
One couple attempted to get to the bottom of why
the Taylor ice cream machines that McDonald's uses are always
(00:21):
breaking and found that there's a secret repair menu that
most workers don't know how to access, which forces them
to contact the manufacturer for maintenance. This couple eventually created
a way to hack the machines, only to have Taylor
and McDonald stop them. Andy Greenberg, senior writer and Wired
joins us for the fight over hacking McDonald's ice cream
(00:41):
machine next. Some election ballots are still being counted in Arizona.
This is coming in the form of an unofficial recount
and audit of the two point one million votes cast
in Merricoba County. The Justice Department has signaled that the
recount may violate federal law, and the Arizona Secretary of
State has said that other problems have all have been noticed,
such as ballots left unattended on counting tables. The audit
(01:04):
is being run by Florida based contractors cyber Ninjas, who
have been employing unorthodox practice, such as checking ballots with
UV line. Rosalind Helderman, reporter the Washington Post, joins us
for this recount that many Trump allies are keeping a
close watch on it's news without the noise. Let's dive
in when it works well, it's it's an incredible display
(01:27):
of efficiency and they can put out like ten ice
cream cones in a minute when one of these things,
But they just break constantly because they're very fragile and
finicky and over engineers. Joining us now is Andy Greenberg,
senior writer at Wired. Thanks for joining us, Andy, glad
to be here. You wrote a very interesting story about
(01:47):
the McDonald's ice cream machines. They're always broken. There the
butt of jokes on social media. There's tons of memes
about it. There's websites dedicated to trying to find out
which machines are working and when. There's so much interest
surrounding these ice cream machines. But there's this secret code
that is actually on the machines, and you can get
(02:07):
into the machines kind of see all the inner workings,
details about what might be wrong. But there's this whole
ecosystem where McDonald's buys these machines from a company called Taylor.
They don't really put any of these types of codes
in the instruction manuals, so the franchisees that buy these
machines are often left to Taylor and their distributors to
(02:29):
come out and fix them. And you profile a man
in your story. His name is Jeremy O'Sullivan who created
this hack to get into the machines, let these people
know what's wrong with the machines, and it just started
this whole war between McDonald's, Taylor, and Jeremy O'Sullivan and
his partner. It's a really great story, Andy, So tell
us a little bit about it. Well, Yeah, Jeremy O'Sullivan,
(02:51):
who is one of the co founders of this little
company that you referenced called kitch kyh. He and his partner,
Melissa Nelson, they basically observed that there was this terrible
problem with McDonald's ice cream machines. And I just tracked
actually the number of McDonald's ice cream machines that are
broken today in the US. It's about eight percent, which
(03:11):
is enormous for a but in but in New York
city where I live, like one in five New York
City McDonald's ice cream machines are offline right now, according
to mcbroken dot com, which is a site that tracks
this really closely. So this is a real, real issue.
And this little tiny company, I mean, it's basically just
(03:32):
Melissa and Dreamy to be honest. At some points they
started to grow and then thanks to McDonald's and Taylor's efforts,
they have kind of been squashed. But their goal was
to sell this tiny device to let you hack a
McDonald's ice cream machine. And this was something that they
were selling to franchise e s, the owners of McDonald's restaurants,
to put inside of their tailor ice cream machine, and
(03:52):
essentially it would intercept all the data inside of it
and then send it out to web interface or an
app and allow you to kind of monitor the conditions
of the machine and prevented from breaking. And it worked
really well according to a lot of the franchisees that
I spoke to who had been using it. But then,
as you might imagine, Taylor, the ice cream machine maker,
was not happy about this and McDonald's they're kind of
(04:14):
corporate ally together. These two companies essentially went after the
Kitchens destroy their business more or less. So I tried
to tell the story here of this kind of, you know,
two year long war between these massive fast food superpowers
and the tiny little company, and Kitch is now essentially
just starting to counter attack, and they're planning a lawsuits
(04:36):
against some of the franchisees who gave their device to
Taylor for to be analyzed, and then also likely Taylor
itself and maybe even McDonald's too. Right, Okay, let's take
a little step back and talk about the machines, because O'Sullivan,
the way he puts it, he says, it's kind of
a shakedown. Franchisees really have very limited information on how
to monitor the device. That's why you have to call
(04:56):
out the distributors and to come and fix them. So
Ler will sell these franchisees is complicated machine. It's very fragile.
They don't give them all the information how to fix
it or why it's constantly being broken. Distributors come out
and fix it, and everybody makes a lot of money
on that front. So that's kind of how it goes.
But let's talk about the machines themselves, because they are
pretty sophisticated on one front, super simple on another front.
(05:20):
And I guess so Sullivan kind of said they're kind
of like an Italian sports car. When they're working perfectly,
they were great, but any little tiny thing that breaks down,
then it becomes a huge mess. So let's talk about
why these machines are so special. Well, that wasn't actually
sheremy who said that. That was this other source who
calls him or herself Micke the Truth, and they're an
anonymous Twitter account that basically analyzes McDonald's secrets. And there's
(05:44):
also they are also a franchise franchise themselves, and so
they know a lot about how these restaurants operate. And yeah,
The Truth was the one who described it as a
like an Italian sports car, where when it works well,
it's it's an incredible display of efficiency. And they can
put out like ten ice cream cones in a minute
when one of these things, but they just break constantly
(06:05):
because they're very fragile and finicky and over engineered, and
you have to disassemble them every two weeks to clean them.
And there are so many parts that practically nobody seems
capable of reassembling it reliably. There are like twenty five
or more different tiny rubber o rains that you have
to put all in the correct place or it breaks
(06:25):
and it just doesn't work, and things like that. So
this is essentially like a it's kind of like a
nassive level of complexity for an ice cream machine. And
that's not a great idea when you know these are
often operated by, you know, high school age teenagers who
are not very invested in their fast food careers and
don't know the ins and outs of all these technicalities.
(06:46):
It also has two hoppers and two barrels, so you
can do a milkshake and a soft serve simultaneously. Not
all the machines are capable of that, the ones that
they sell to McDonald's are. And then they have this
four hour cleaning process, the heat treatment. If anybody's gone
to a McDonald's overnight and they say, oh, the machines
cleaning right now, this is the other thing of wise
they might be out of out of service a lot
(07:08):
of times is because they go through this rigorous four
hour cleaning treatment and it messes up. It's got to
start all over. So that's another big component to this.
This heat treatment is really interesting because if you don't
have this kind of pasteurization feature in the machine, then
the restaurant owner has to throw out all of the
ice cream at the end of every day that that's
left in the machine. And so instead this machine can
(07:28):
heat it up and basically like kill all the microbes
inside the the ice cream mix before it's you know, refrozen,
which is kind of gross but also probably more sanitary
than a lot of other machines. But the problem is
that that that cycle constantly fails in these machines, you know,
according to all the franchise is that I've talked to
for reasons that are often really difficult to figure out.
And when they when it sales, you have to start
(07:49):
it all over. It takes four hours. There are sometimes
prime time sales hours, and the error messages that the
machine shows you when its sales are totally inscrutable sometimes
and have to call out tailor's technician to make sense
of them, when in fact, you know, maybe it's just
you have like one inch too much mixed, like in
the one of the hoppers, It's been overfilled just slightly,
(08:10):
that's enough to make it break, and you have to
spend hundreds of dollars to figure that out by calling
a technician, and that's the kind of thing the Kitch
was designed to fix. But Taylor, you know, Kitch at
least accuses them of essentially running this racket where they
basically want to make money from maintenance more than they
want their machines to work. A little bit back to
(08:31):
Jeremy O'Sullivan and how he got involved in all of this.
He wanted to get in on the frozen yogurt craze,
but he wanted to create an automated machine. I think
early on they called it the frobot, uh, and what
he was working with was a tailor machine, and it
started having some limited success. He got into a few places, uh,
into a few football stadiums I think it was, and
(08:52):
then they started breaking down. He had to meet certain requirements,
so this is why he kind of formed this kitchen device,
and he later the name of the company to that.
But this is why he formed that device so that
he can start hacking into it and monitoring it for
himself instead of having to constantly going out and making
the service trips himself exactly. Jeremy and Melissa their first
business model was to try to create essentially like a
(09:14):
frost yogurt robot that would be fully automated, and it
was built around a tailor machine like a kind of
cabinet with a big screen and a credit card reader,
so that you could take people in real estate out
of the equation and sell people from us jonger just
like being the handles or a pink barrier or whatever.
But the problem was that they discovered was that they
couldn't keep these tailor machines inside of the throbot running.
(09:37):
It was just constantly breaking down. They were having to
drive out to the football stadium that you referenced to
rebuild the tailor machine inside of robot all the time.
And so they built this little device that essentially was
their solution to try to save their business, to monitor
the data inside of that tailor machine to try to
figure out why it was breaking, and then eventually gave
(09:58):
up on for about and made that little device their
entire business instead, and which was a much more successful business.
At some points they had five hundred of these little
Kitch devices, which have a subscription plan inside of ice
cream machines and McDonald's around the country. They were doubling
the number of them every quarter, they told me, and
They plan to have more than thousands by the end
of um before McDonald's and Taylor essentially cracked down on them, right,
(10:23):
and that's the that's the final part to this. Now,
they they had success with that Kitch device. They franchisees
were getting it. Other people that had these Taylor machines
were getting it and kind of cracking the coat and
helping themselves out a little bit. But then Taylor got involved.
They try to place order for these devices McDonald's. As
you mentioned, uh, we think that a franchise e might
(10:43):
have got the device and sent it over to Taylor,
and McDonald's got involved and said to send emails to
their franchise's you can't use these devices, and in the
end they essentially killed Jeremy's business with this. That's right, Yeah,
I mean it began really with Taylor trying to buy
the device, probably just to check it out. Taylor is
also now selling a competitive device, their own Internet connected
(11:06):
ice cream be seen monitors the data in a very
similar way, but it's it's still in testing. After working
on this for a very long time, a Kitch has
been out for two years, Taylor still doesn't have a
competitor truly on the market. But but anyway, they were
trying to get their hands on a Kitch device. Kitch
believes that that they used the private investigators try to
get one. Um. Ultimately, um, they did get one. It
(11:29):
sounds like through a franchise e who essentially Kitch is
accusing him of violating his contract by handing it over
to Taylor, and he will probably involved in his lawsuits.
Unfortunately for him. McDonald's, I guess, in an act of
kind of loyalty to its long time equipment supplier Taylor
in facting and sells the grills to McDonald's as well
as the ice cream machine. They took Taylor's side and
(11:52):
sent this email to every franchise that tells them that
Kitch breaches the confidential data of the ice cream machines
and can even cause like physical injury to staff in
a restaurant, which all the franchisees that I spoke to
you thought was was pretty far fetched. I mean, it's
it's possible this thing could I don't know, could hurt
someone if you turn an ice cream machine on remotely,
(12:13):
but Taylor tells you to unplug it when you're working
on it regardless, So Um, you know, if you're following
that ruled and there is no risk, I don't believe.
So this seems to me to be much more like
a heavy handed way of killing off a competitor, but
a competitor who actually was trying to make these machines work,
you know. And um, if you want, if you want
(12:34):
McDonald's ice cream, if that's your goal, if you want
to go into McDonald's and actually be able to buy
their ice cream, then it seems like a very minor
tragedy that McDonald's and Taylor teams up to destroy this
little business. Andy Greenberg, senior writer at Wired, Thank you
very much for joining us. Well, thanks you for having me.
It's been fun to talk about it sped through all
(13:02):
of the audits that have already been conducted, legitimate independent
audits of the election results that were all, you know,
clear in terms of the results that this election was
free of fraud, and this exercise is designed to to
just repute that. Joining us now is Rosalind Hilderman, reporter
at the Washington Post. Thanks for joining us, Rosalind, thanks
(13:25):
for having me. Four months into the Joe Biden presidency.
Were after the hundred days and all that we're still
counting election votes. This is coming in the form of
an audit. In Arizona, they're recounting the ballots. In Maricopa County.
We have about two point one million ballots that they're
recounting there. It's looking to be kind of a mess.
(13:45):
There was a letter sent to the president of the
Arizona Senate on behalf of the US Justice Department that
said that there's concerns that this audit could be out
of compliance with federal laws. The Arizona Secretary of State
Katie Hobbs and a letter also saying that there's problems
that her observers have been seeing there with the way
these votes are being counted. Uh, ballots left unattended, just
(14:08):
kind of, like I said, just the general mess going on.
So Rosalind tell us what we're seeing in Arizona with
this audit. Yeah, I mean it's important to remember this
is not like a real audit or a real recount.
The people who are running it would not or should
not be insulted if they heard me say that. They
have argued that exact point in court because the Arizona
(14:28):
Democratic Party tried to go to court and say they
are not following the normal rules and laws that are
in place that you have to follow that an election
office would have to follow if they were conducting the recount.
And what they said is, this isn't a recount. Joe
Biden won the election. We're not rerunning the election. This
is a legislative investigation. It's being run by the state Senate,
(14:50):
which is led by the Republicans, and the goal, they
claim is to identify problems with the election system to
help write future laws. And so for that reason, they
don't have to follow basically any rules or guidelines, which
means that they are kind of making them up as
they go along. Now they insist that they are doing
(15:12):
the most comprehensive audit ever and that they're following really
intense procedures, although they have not widely made them public.
But as you mentioned, the Secretary of State's office has
secure permissions or some experts that she brought in from
out of the state who really know how election audits
are generally run to go in and see what they saw,
(15:33):
and they identified all kinds of problems. Yeah, there's a
private contractor they're called cyber ninjas. They're the ones that
are running this audit and tell me a little bit
about how things are going some of these unorthodox practices.
One that I've been hearing a lot about is that
they're using UV lights to look at the paper. I
guess there was a claim that some of these ballots
(15:53):
were flown in from Asia, so they're looking to see
if there was bamboo in the papers. I mean, these
are what the officials are saying at it. I mean
they're doing a lot of different things, some of which
are easier to kind of understand if you turn on
there is a live stream that runs all the time
and you can go and watch it. So the biggest
thing they're doing is they're doing a hand recount, or
(16:13):
at least they're trying to of all the early two
point one million ballots. They're moving very slowly, and their
process for doing that, the experts day, is really problematic.
But they're doing all kinds of other things which are
far less clear, and that includes some variety of examination
of the paper on which the ballots are printed. I guess,
to look and see whether there is some large number
(16:36):
that were fraudulent or smuggled in in some way. So
for a time they have now stopped but for a
time they were shining a UV light at the ballot.
We know they're also taking photos of them and using
some kind of microscopic camera to study the paper fibers
or the folds in the paper. They have not been
incredibly clear about why they are doing those things. At
(16:58):
one point they said that they were looking for possible
water marks on the ballot, though county officials have said
ballots in Meracoca County do not carry water marks. And yeah,
there was this sort of volunteer official who said yesterday
that he was told by one worker that the thing
he was hunting for with signs of bamboo in the paper,
(17:19):
because that might indicate that the ballots had been smuggled
in from Asia. Which there's a lot of problems with
that theory. I probably don't have to elucidate them rear listeners,
but the notion that you could tell if paper was
from Asia because it contained bamboo seems highly problematic. I mean,
it really seems like they're looking for anything to kind
of throw a wrench in, you know, whatever the final
(17:41):
numbers were there. The other thing that's an issue is time.
Because the taling began in April. It's supposed to last
till May fourteenth, but the location where they're counting the ballots,
they have other engagements that happened days after that that
deadline is supposed to be and they're moving so slow.
I think by when day they only had about two
(18:01):
hundred thousand that were counted. They got to get two
point one million counted, so that timing is also an issue.
It's important for people to understand the reason why they
are active colosseum and the other engagement that starts on
May fourteenth is high school graduations for kids in Phoenix.
The reason they are there is because the Maricopa County
Board of Supervisors, which has four Republicans and one Democrat
(18:24):
on it, so it's a Republican led board that they
could not use county facilities. They believe that their election
was accurate and fair. They've conducted multiple sort of confirmational
processes audits of their own and so they told the
State Senate, you want to do this, you come get
the ballots. The State Senate issued a subpoenis for the ballots,
and you do it wherever you can find to do it.
(18:45):
So they rented out while the Colosseum where the Phoenix Sons,
the basketball team used to play, but they only have
that building until the fourteenth, and as you know that,
there's no way they're going to finish all two point
one million by the four keeenth. Now they're having various
conversations about trying to pack every up on the fourteenth,
store it somewhere for some period of time, a week
or more, and then come back to the Colosseum and finish.
(19:06):
I was told just this morning that there is also
another engagement for the Colosseum in early July, So even
if they did it, they would only pick up the
month of June. And they're counting so slowly right now,
it's not clear to me that they would finish even
by early July. Rosalind Helderman, reporter at the Washington Post.
Thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having
me here. That's it for today. Join us on social
(19:35):
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Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Although us and
I heard radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcast.
This episode of The Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright
and engineered by Tony Sarrentina. Hi'm Oscar Ameres and this
(19:56):
was her daily dive
It's Friday, May seven. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles,
and this is the Daily Dive. How many times have
you gone to McDonald's for a nice frozen treat only
to be told that the ice cream machine is broken.
One couple attempted to get to the bottom of why
the Taylor ice cream machines that McDonald's uses are always
(00:21):
breaking and found that there's a secret repair menu that
most workers don't know how to access, which forces them
to contact the manufacturer for maintenance. This couple eventually created
a way to hack the machines, only to have Taylor
and McDonald stop them. Andy Greenberg, senior writer and Wired
joins us for the fight over hacking McDonald's ice cream
(00:41):
machine next. Some election ballots are still being counted in Arizona.
This is coming in the form of an unofficial recount
and audit of the two point one million votes cast
in Merricoba County. The Justice Department has signaled that the
recount may violate federal law, and the Arizona Secretary of
State has said that other problems have all have been noticed,
such as ballots left unattended on counting tables. The audit
(01:04):
is being run by Florida based contractors cyber Ninjas, who
have been employing unorthodox practice, such as checking ballots with
UV line. Rosalind Helderman, reporter the Washington Post, joins us
for this recount that many Trump allies are keeping a
close watch on it's news without the noise. Let's dive
in when it works well, it's it's an incredible display
(01:27):
of efficiency and they can put out like ten ice
cream cones in a minute when one of these things,
But they just break constantly because they're very fragile and
finicky and over engineers. Joining us now is Andy Greenberg,
senior writer at Wired. Thanks for joining us, Andy, glad
to be here. You wrote a very interesting story about
(01:47):
the McDonald's ice cream machines. They're always broken. There the
butt of jokes on social media. There's tons of memes
about it. There's websites dedicated to trying to find out
which machines are working and when. There's so much interest
surrounding these ice cream machines. But there's this secret code
that is actually on the machines, and you can get
(02:07):
into the machines kind of see all the inner workings,
details about what might be wrong. But there's this whole
ecosystem where McDonald's buys these machines from a company called Taylor.
They don't really put any of these types of codes
in the instruction manuals, so the franchisees that buy these
machines are often left to Taylor and their distributors to
(02:29):
come out and fix them. And you profile a man
in your story. His name is Jeremy O'Sullivan who created
this hack to get into the machines, let these people
know what's wrong with the machines, and it just started
this whole war between McDonald's, Taylor, and Jeremy O'Sullivan and
his partner. It's a really great story, Andy, So tell
us a little bit about it. Well, Yeah, Jeremy O'Sullivan,
(02:51):
who is one of the co founders of this little
company that you referenced called kitch kyh. He and his partner,
Melissa Nelson, they basically observed that there was this terrible
problem with McDonald's ice cream machines. And I just tracked
actually the number of McDonald's ice cream machines that are
broken today in the US. It's about eight percent, which
(03:11):
is enormous for a but in but in New York
city where I live, like one in five New York
City McDonald's ice cream machines are offline right now, according
to mcbroken dot com, which is a site that tracks
this really closely. So this is a real, real issue.
And this little tiny company, I mean, it's basically just
(03:32):
Melissa and Dreamy to be honest. At some points they
started to grow and then thanks to McDonald's and Taylor's efforts,
they have kind of been squashed. But their goal was
to sell this tiny device to let you hack a
McDonald's ice cream machine. And this was something that they
were selling to franchise e s, the owners of McDonald's restaurants,
to put inside of their tailor ice cream machine, and
(03:52):
essentially it would intercept all the data inside of it
and then send it out to web interface or an
app and allow you to kind of monitor the conditions
of the machine and prevented from breaking. And it worked
really well according to a lot of the franchisees that
I spoke to who had been using it. But then,
as you might imagine, Taylor, the ice cream machine maker,
was not happy about this and McDonald's they're kind of
(04:14):
corporate ally together. These two companies essentially went after the
Kitchens destroy their business more or less. So I tried
to tell the story here of this kind of, you know,
two year long war between these massive fast food superpowers
and the tiny little company, and Kitch is now essentially
just starting to counter attack, and they're planning a lawsuits
(04:36):
against some of the franchisees who gave their device to
Taylor for to be analyzed, and then also likely Taylor
itself and maybe even McDonald's too. Right, Okay, let's take
a little step back and talk about the machines, because O'Sullivan,
the way he puts it, he says, it's kind of
a shakedown. Franchisees really have very limited information on how
to monitor the device. That's why you have to call
(04:56):
out the distributors and to come and fix them. So
Ler will sell these franchisees is complicated machine. It's very fragile.
They don't give them all the information how to fix
it or why it's constantly being broken. Distributors come out
and fix it, and everybody makes a lot of money
on that front. So that's kind of how it goes.
But let's talk about the machines themselves, because they are
pretty sophisticated on one front, super simple on another front.
(05:20):
And I guess so Sullivan kind of said they're kind
of like an Italian sports car. When they're working perfectly,
they were great, but any little tiny thing that breaks down,
then it becomes a huge mess. So let's talk about
why these machines are so special. Well, that wasn't actually
sheremy who said that. That was this other source who
calls him or herself Micke the Truth, and they're an
anonymous Twitter account that basically analyzes McDonald's secrets. And there's
(05:44):
also they are also a franchise franchise themselves, and so
they know a lot about how these restaurants operate. And yeah,
The Truth was the one who described it as a
like an Italian sports car, where when it works well,
it's it's an incredible display of efficiency. And they can
put out like ten ice cream cones in a minute
when one of these things, but they just break constantly
(06:05):
because they're very fragile and finicky and over engineered, and
you have to disassemble them every two weeks to clean them.
And there are so many parts that practically nobody seems
capable of reassembling it reliably. There are like twenty five
or more different tiny rubber o rains that you have
to put all in the correct place or it breaks
(06:25):
and it just doesn't work, and things like that. So
this is essentially like a it's kind of like a
nassive level of complexity for an ice cream machine. And
that's not a great idea when you know these are
often operated by, you know, high school age teenagers who
are not very invested in their fast food careers and
don't know the ins and outs of all these technicalities.
(06:46):
It also has two hoppers and two barrels, so you
can do a milkshake and a soft serve simultaneously. Not
all the machines are capable of that, the ones that
they sell to McDonald's are. And then they have this
four hour cleaning process, the heat treatment. If anybody's gone
to a McDonald's overnight and they say, oh, the machines
cleaning right now, this is the other thing of wise
they might be out of out of service a lot
(07:08):
of times is because they go through this rigorous four
hour cleaning treatment and it messes up. It's got to
start all over. So that's another big component to this.
This heat treatment is really interesting because if you don't
have this kind of pasteurization feature in the machine, then
the restaurant owner has to throw out all of the
ice cream at the end of every day that that's
left in the machine. And so instead this machine can
(07:28):
heat it up and basically like kill all the microbes
inside the the ice cream mix before it's you know, refrozen,
which is kind of gross but also probably more sanitary
than a lot of other machines. But the problem is
that that that cycle constantly fails in these machines, you know,
according to all the franchise is that I've talked to
for reasons that are often really difficult to figure out.
And when they when it sales, you have to start
(07:49):
it all over. It takes four hours. There are sometimes
prime time sales hours, and the error messages that the
machine shows you when its sales are totally inscrutable sometimes
and have to call out tailor's technician to make sense
of them, when in fact, you know, maybe it's just
you have like one inch too much mixed, like in
the one of the hoppers, It's been overfilled just slightly,
(08:10):
that's enough to make it break, and you have to
spend hundreds of dollars to figure that out by calling
a technician, and that's the kind of thing the Kitch
was designed to fix. But Taylor, you know, Kitch at
least accuses them of essentially running this racket where they
basically want to make money from maintenance more than they
want their machines to work. A little bit back to
(08:31):
Jeremy O'Sullivan and how he got involved in all of this.
He wanted to get in on the frozen yogurt craze,
but he wanted to create an automated machine. I think
early on they called it the frobot, uh, and what
he was working with was a tailor machine, and it
started having some limited success. He got into a few places, uh,
into a few football stadiums I think it was, and
(08:52):
then they started breaking down. He had to meet certain requirements,
so this is why he kind of formed this kitchen device,
and he later the name of the company to that.
But this is why he formed that device so that
he can start hacking into it and monitoring it for
himself instead of having to constantly going out and making
the service trips himself exactly. Jeremy and Melissa their first
business model was to try to create essentially like a
(09:14):
frost yogurt robot that would be fully automated, and it
was built around a tailor machine like a kind of
cabinet with a big screen and a credit card reader,
so that you could take people in real estate out
of the equation and sell people from us jonger just
like being the handles or a pink barrier or whatever.
But the problem was that they discovered was that they
couldn't keep these tailor machines inside of the throbot running.
(09:37):
It was just constantly breaking down. They were having to
drive out to the football stadium that you referenced to
rebuild the tailor machine inside of robot all the time.
And so they built this little device that essentially was
their solution to try to save their business, to monitor
the data inside of that tailor machine to try to
figure out why it was breaking, and then eventually gave
(09:58):
up on for about and made that little device their
entire business instead, and which was a much more successful business.
At some points they had five hundred of these little
Kitch devices, which have a subscription plan inside of ice
cream machines and McDonald's around the country. They were doubling
the number of them every quarter, they told me, and
They plan to have more than thousands by the end
of um before McDonald's and Taylor essentially cracked down on them, right,
(10:23):
and that's the that's the final part to this. Now,
they they had success with that Kitch device. They franchisees
were getting it. Other people that had these Taylor machines
were getting it and kind of cracking the coat and
helping themselves out a little bit. But then Taylor got involved.
They try to place order for these devices McDonald's. As
you mentioned, uh, we think that a franchise e might
(10:43):
have got the device and sent it over to Taylor,
and McDonald's got involved and said to send emails to
their franchise's you can't use these devices, and in the
end they essentially killed Jeremy's business with this. That's right, Yeah,
I mean it began really with Taylor trying to buy
the device, probably just to check it out. Taylor is
also now selling a competitive device, their own Internet connected
(11:06):
ice cream be seen monitors the data in a very
similar way, but it's it's still in testing. After working
on this for a very long time, a Kitch has
been out for two years, Taylor still doesn't have a
competitor truly on the market. But but anyway, they were
trying to get their hands on a Kitch device. Kitch
believes that that they used the private investigators try to
get one. Um. Ultimately, um, they did get one. It
(11:29):
sounds like through a franchise e who essentially Kitch is
accusing him of violating his contract by handing it over
to Taylor, and he will probably involved in his lawsuits.
Unfortunately for him. McDonald's, I guess, in an act of
kind of loyalty to its long time equipment supplier Taylor
in facting and sells the grills to McDonald's as well
as the ice cream machine. They took Taylor's side and
(11:52):
sent this email to every franchise that tells them that
Kitch breaches the confidential data of the ice cream machines
and can even cause like physical injury to staff in
a restaurant, which all the franchisees that I spoke to
you thought was was pretty far fetched. I mean, it's
it's possible this thing could I don't know, could hurt
someone if you turn an ice cream machine on remotely,
(12:13):
but Taylor tells you to unplug it when you're working
on it regardless, So Um, you know, if you're following
that ruled and there is no risk, I don't believe.
So this seems to me to be much more like
a heavy handed way of killing off a competitor, but
a competitor who actually was trying to make these machines work,
you know. And um, if you want, if you want
(12:34):
McDonald's ice cream, if that's your goal, if you want
to go into McDonald's and actually be able to buy
their ice cream, then it seems like a very minor
tragedy that McDonald's and Taylor teams up to destroy this
little business. Andy Greenberg, senior writer at Wired, Thank you
very much for joining us. Well, thanks you for having me.
It's been fun to talk about it sped through all
(13:02):
of the audits that have already been conducted, legitimate independent
audits of the election results that were all, you know,
clear in terms of the results that this election was
free of fraud, and this exercise is designed to to
just repute that. Joining us now is Rosalind Hilderman, reporter
at the Washington Post. Thanks for joining us, Rosalind, thanks
(13:25):
for having me. Four months into the Joe Biden presidency.
Were after the hundred days and all that we're still
counting election votes. This is coming in the form of
an audit. In Arizona, they're recounting the ballots. In Maricopa County.
We have about two point one million ballots that they're
recounting there. It's looking to be kind of a mess.
(13:45):
There was a letter sent to the president of the
Arizona Senate on behalf of the US Justice Department that
said that there's concerns that this audit could be out
of compliance with federal laws. The Arizona Secretary of State
Katie Hobbs and a letter also saying that there's problems
that her observers have been seeing there with the way
these votes are being counted. Uh, ballots left unattended, just
(14:08):
kind of, like I said, just the general mess going on.
So Rosalind tell us what we're seeing in Arizona with
this audit. Yeah, I mean it's important to remember this
is not like a real audit or a real recount.
The people who are running it would not or should
not be insulted if they heard me say that. They
have argued that exact point in court because the Arizona
(14:28):
Democratic Party tried to go to court and say they
are not following the normal rules and laws that are
in place that you have to follow that an election
office would have to follow if they were conducting the recount.
And what they said is, this isn't a recount. Joe
Biden won the election. We're not rerunning the election. This
is a legislative investigation. It's being run by the state Senate,
(14:50):
which is led by the Republicans, and the goal, they
claim is to identify problems with the election system to
help write future laws. And so for that reason, they
don't have to follow basically any rules or guidelines, which
means that they are kind of making them up as
they go along. Now they insist that they are doing
(15:12):
the most comprehensive audit ever and that they're following really
intense procedures, although they have not widely made them public.
But as you mentioned, the Secretary of State's office has
secure permissions or some experts that she brought in from
out of the state who really know how election audits
are generally run to go in and see what they saw,
(15:33):
and they identified all kinds of problems. Yeah, there's a
private contractor they're called cyber ninjas. They're the ones that
are running this audit and tell me a little bit
about how things are going some of these unorthodox practices.
One that I've been hearing a lot about is that
they're using UV lights to look at the paper. I
guess there was a claim that some of these ballots
(15:53):
were flown in from Asia, so they're looking to see
if there was bamboo in the papers. I mean, these
are what the officials are saying at it. I mean
they're doing a lot of different things, some of which
are easier to kind of understand if you turn on
there is a live stream that runs all the time
and you can go and watch it. So the biggest
thing they're doing is they're doing a hand recount, or
(16:13):
at least they're trying to of all the early two
point one million ballots. They're moving very slowly, and their
process for doing that, the experts day, is really problematic.
But they're doing all kinds of other things which are
far less clear, and that includes some variety of examination
of the paper on which the ballots are printed. I guess,
to look and see whether there is some large number
(16:36):
that were fraudulent or smuggled in in some way. So
for a time they have now stopped but for a
time they were shining a UV light at the ballot.
We know they're also taking photos of them and using
some kind of microscopic camera to study the paper fibers
or the folds in the paper. They have not been
incredibly clear about why they are doing those things. At
(16:58):
one point they said that they were looking for possible
water marks on the ballot, though county officials have said
ballots in Meracoca County do not carry water marks. And yeah,
there was this sort of volunteer official who said yesterday
that he was told by one worker that the thing
he was hunting for with signs of bamboo in the paper,
(17:19):
because that might indicate that the ballots had been smuggled
in from Asia. Which there's a lot of problems with
that theory. I probably don't have to elucidate them rear listeners,
but the notion that you could tell if paper was
from Asia because it contained bamboo seems highly problematic. I mean,
it really seems like they're looking for anything to kind
of throw a wrench in, you know, whatever the final
(17:41):
numbers were there. The other thing that's an issue is time.
Because the taling began in April. It's supposed to last
till May fourteenth, but the location where they're counting the ballots,
they have other engagements that happened days after that that
deadline is supposed to be and they're moving so slow.
I think by when day they only had about two
(18:01):
hundred thousand that were counted. They got to get two
point one million counted, so that timing is also an issue.
It's important for people to understand the reason why they
are active colosseum and the other engagement that starts on
May fourteenth is high school graduations for kids in Phoenix.
The reason they are there is because the Maricopa County
Board of Supervisors, which has four Republicans and one Democrat
(18:24):
on it, so it's a Republican led board that they
could not use county facilities. They believe that their election
was accurate and fair. They've conducted multiple sort of confirmational
processes audits of their own and so they told the
State Senate, you want to do this, you come get
the ballots. The State Senate issued a subpoenis for the ballots,
and you do it wherever you can find to do it.
(18:45):
So they rented out while the Colosseum where the Phoenix Sons,
the basketball team used to play, but they only have
that building until the fourteenth, and as you know that,
there's no way they're going to finish all two point
one million by the four keeenth. Now they're having various
conversations about trying to pack every up on the fourteenth,
store it somewhere for some period of time, a week
or more, and then come back to the Colosseum and finish.
(19:06):
I was told just this morning that there is also
another engagement for the Colosseum in early July, So even
if they did it, they would only pick up the
month of June. And they're counting so slowly right now,
it's not clear to me that they would finish even
by early July. Rosalind Helderman, reporter at the Washington Post.
Thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having
me here. That's it for today. Join us on social
(19:35):
media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter and Instagram.
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Although us and
I heard radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcast.
This episode of The Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright
and engineered by Tony Sarrentina. Hi'm Oscar Ameres and this
(19:56):
was her daily dive
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