A small group of Americans becomes convinced they’ve discovered something strange about their iPhones: a forbidden phrase the phone will refuse to transmit. A crack podcasting team searches for answers, wherever they may lead. Support the show (and get the ad-free version) Comment on this episode! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Dave and Buster's anomaly?
A friend recently pointed out to me this small, interesting fact he'd observed. A podcaster he listened to had a habit of signaling to his listeners which episodes of his show were the really good ones, so you'd skip the others if you wanted. I admire the hell out of this gesture. It's like when a waiter nudges you away from the so-so dish towards the excellent one.
They're actually on your side, not just selling you something. And in that spirit, I want to say that this week's question, for us, it's been one of our favorites. I'm always looking for question of the year. It's my Oscars. And in February, when I heard this one, I thought, this might be it. Hi, Eric. How are you? I'm good. Big fan of your work. Oh, thank you. I appreciate your Costco hoodie.
Kirkland Signature. Well, thank you. The question came from this listener, Eric, a man with impeccable taste. And his question had to do with one particular feature on the iPhone, the audio message. Some people call these voice messages or voice notes. I switch in between all three. But it's where you can send someone a recording of your voice rather than a text message. Well, normally you can.
But Eric had learned of an anomaly. One specific phrase, which if you said it into your iPhone, the message would refuse to go through. And the phrase in question was a surprising one.
So I'm in a group chat per usual with just some buddies of mine. We've been friends since college. And so Thursday, my friend Alex said, you got to try this. Record a voice memo message and mention Dave and Buster's and it will not be delivered.
Dave and Buster's. As in the American restaurant that's Chuck E. Cheese for adults. Skee-Ball and Rum and Coke.
Dave and Buster's. So of course he sent us a bunch and everyone says, negative, did not get that. Nope, didn't get that. So everyone's like, what the fuck? That's wild.
Can I try it with you right now?
Yes.
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Chapter 2: How did the anomaly come to light?
Sure. Sorry, all the fours.
That's okay. And audio. Wait, is it audio? I never leave voice memos. I'm like, I record my voice in monologue for a living.
Oh, I know. Me neither. I think famous people do it because my wife has like a famous friend. That's the only way she messages. Really? I don't know. Yeah.
Wait, why do you think famous people are more likely to send voice memos?
I don't think they want to spend time actually typing out their thoughts. It's like a phone call without actually having the commitment of a phone call.
Interesting. Okay, all right, I'm sending you one. I found the audio message feature on my phone and decided first as a test, I'd send a message without the trigger phrase. Hey, have you heard about the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese? There's something to check out. We should go. All right. Send.
I've got the three bubbles. Yep. It says delivered.
Have you heard about the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese? There's something to check out. We should go. All right. That one worked. Okay, now let me try to send you Dave and Buster's. Yeah. You know, the place I really want to spend time is Dave and Buster's. I want to be intoxicated and gambling. That sounds cool. Let's go to Dave and Buster's. All right. Send. Send.
Okay, transcribes, but it doesn't say delivered on my end. Do you get it? Nope.
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Chapter 3: What experiments demonstrate the anomaly?
This is Nicole Williams, patient zero for the Dave and Buster's anomaly. So when you post that, I'm curious, how had you discovered this anomaly?
So my best friend, she and I audio text all day, every day. And when they were running a winter pass special and it was- Dave and Buster's was? Yes, Dave and Buster's. And she and I love arcades and all that stuff. So she continued to send me these audio messages about this Dave and Buster's winter pass. And I wouldn't respond. And so she just would continue to ask me.
And it went on for probably a month or so. And then I was at Dave & Buster's. And I sent her a message. And somehow through that exchange, we discovered that none of those messages were coming through. And it kept me from the winter pass. So I think there's monetary damages done, too, because I paid way more than I needed to. But then we started testing it.
Nicole and her friend were doing what everybody does when they learn about this anomaly, experimenting, sending each other and other people different versions of these Dave and Buster's messages.
My husband is an Android user, unfortunately, and the audio would go through to him. So it was just between iPhones and not between an iPhone and an Android.
So maybe this was an Apple issue. Could there be something about the phrase Dave and Buster's that Apple specifically would want to censor?
What if it's like the word busters is something derogatory? I don't know. If they flagged that word, like, I'm going to bust you in the face or, you know, something. And so they were like, maybe there's violence happening. So then we would just try sending busters. But no, busters can go through.
Nicole ran a few more tests herself, but she couldn't figure it out, so she posted on Facebook. The post reached Eric, who just one day later had sent it to Search Engine. And when we received the call, we accepted the mission. I asked Eric, what did you think when you first encountered this?
Uh, what's the conspiracy about Dave & Buster's and Apple? Does Tim not like Dave & Buster's?
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Chapter 4: What theories exist about the anomaly?
Hey, I was just letting you know you were fired, but I wanted us to meet at Dave & Buster's to kind of talk through the severance plan, and that didn't go through. I'm sorry.
We're going to take a short break, and then an investigation that will take us to some strange places, some dark places, and of course, through the gates of Dave & Buster's itself. All that, after these ads. Welcome back to the show. Before I tell you anything else, I want you to know that this week we found an explanation. We've solved the Dave & Buster's anomaly.
I'm going to tell you the path we followed. There were clues along the way, although I didn't always recognize them when I encountered them. Maybe you will. Our journey began online, where there was surprisingly, a little thrillingly, almost nothing. There was that original Facebook post, which Nicole had written January 29th, that had garnered 13 comments.
And right there in those comments, I saw theory number one. Theory number one is that this was a corporate feud. Here's the Facebook comment, quote, I'm cracking up thinking about this beef between D&B and Apple. I need answers. The theory that this was a feud seemed like it imagined a pretty petty world, but we are living in a pretty petty world. Tech CEOs do all sorts of strange things.
Still, why would a multi-trillion dollar company be feuding with Dave and Buster's? I shelved this idea for a moment. Even in our timeline, it seemed too absurd. I moved on to theory number two, which both Nicole and Eric had considered, tech company censorship. The idea that there was something in the phrase Dave and Busters that the iPhone software was blocking. To me, this also seemed unlikely.
You can say whatever you ducking want in a text message, any vile thing. Why would an audio message be any different? I needed more probable theories. So I went looking for them. First stop, the forums on Apple's website. There, I found one person posting about this issue, a man named Wesley, writing on December 30th, 2024, says, quote, Craziest thing.
Try to send a voice text, not dictated text, with the phrase Dave and Buster's in it, and the recipient will not receive it. It's the craziest thing I've seen. Let me know what you get. Apple moderators closed down the thread. No replies. Wesley's call to follow him, silenced, into the void. So I looked to the 22,000-member Dave & Buster's community on Reddit.
Something you need to understand about this community is that Dave & Buster's offers its customers a sort of soft gambling experience. You compete there for tickets that you can exchange for valuable prizes, like a Nintendo Switch. And in the subreddit, people mainly obsess over ticket-maximizing strategies and brag about the valuable prizes they've won.
One typical thread I saw, quote, cashed in five emoji barcode balls for 20,000 tickets and got the foot massager. Another, first time hitting the super bonus. A third, my favorite, plaintive. How long does it take to get the birthday reward? No mention here, not one, of the anomaly.
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Chapter 5: What is the origin story of Dave and Buster's?
So they did. They moved to Dallas, where the rules were different, where their forbidden desire to mate restaurants would be allowed by local regulators. The new spot, this one carried both their names, conjoined now by a fancy ampersand, Dave and Buster's. From there, the rest was restaurant history. That was Buster's story.
And if its obvious pertinence to the solution to this mystery is not clear to you... It wasn't clear to me at the time either. I didn't know what I'd just learned. I couldn't talk to either Dave or Buster directly. Both founders in 2025 have sadly died. And Dave & Buster's corporate was not responding to my emails. But I had another idea, something I wanted to test out at the local franchise.
Okay, so we're walking in to Dave & Buster's at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. It has more arcades than I've ever seen in any single place in my life. This is actually kind of awesome, I have to say. I visited my local Dave & Buster's with my colleague Hazel just as the doors opened. It's huge. There's so many prizes. It's huge. It's like a cobweb.
They've got Minecraft, Aliens of Armageddon, Pac-Man Battle Royale. They've got axe throwing. Dave & Buster's at casino-esque entertainment prison. No clocks, no windows, engineered to make time disappear while you chase your tickets. I mean, this does seem legitimately fun in a slightly tawdry way.
Our reason for being here was that we thought that at least one group of people who must have noticed this anomaly would be the employees of the place itself. Imagine their voice notes. Honey, I'm going to my job at Dave and Buster's. What a long day I've had at Dave and Buster's. I ate some chicken wings on my break at my job, which is Dave and Buster's.
I hoped these employees might have some insider information they could share. But as I walked in, I realized there's another question that I didn't even know I had, which is, what kind of customer goes to Dave & Buster's at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday? Which of this bacchanal's many dopamine highs were these people chasing?
Okay, first of all, can I just ask you your name and what you're doing at Dave & Buster's this morning?
My name is Alex. I'm here to play DDR.
Right by the door, a couple, a man and a woman, not drinking, not gambling, just wholesomely playing Dance Dance Revolution. And you were, like, ripping it up. I've never seen anybody do that. How often do you guys come here?
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Chapter 6: What insights do Dave and Buster's employees have?
Yeah, yeah. Let me do it. Let me do it. I'm going to try to send you a memo. For the last time, I spoke the magic words into my phone. I hit send.
Yeah, I get three dots and it's still three dots. Yes. This is giving me anxiety just watching. And it doesn't show up. That's crazy.
So I told Alex about the film editor Andy's discovery around the ampersand. It's funny, I should tell you, one of the people that I've said this, he found that if he said Dave and Buster slowly enough, he said, like, Dave and Buster's, in that circumstance, the message seemed to send.
Oh, well, then it's almost certainly the ampersand.
Alex started to dissect what might be happening behind the scenes with the audio message and the troublesome ampersand. And his explanation pointed to an additional culprit that never would have crossed my mind. That culprit? AI. It turns out AI is part of the process involved in sending an audio message.
When you receive an audio message, you see the actual waveform of the audio, where you can click play and listen. But below it, you also get the transcript of what's in the audio. And Alex noted that this transcript is a relatively new trick from Apple, enabled by artificial intelligence.
They now have this feature, which is they do AI, where they listen to the message and do real-time transcription of it.
So when I do a message, and I want to be very careful with the words they listen, because I feel like it is a big part of people's theories in this that I've spoken to so far. But when you say they listen, you mean I talk into the phone, An AI that's either, I don't know, on my phone in the cloud?
I think it's supposed to be on the phone. I mean, this is one of the things that Apple advertises is that their AI is supposed to be more private because it's running on your phone.
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Chapter 7: What conclusions can we draw from the investigation?
And the fact that these transcriptions are AI-generated is important because, Alex pointed out, there have been issues with some of Apple's newly released AI features, particularly since their most recent update, which shipped one month before the first report of this Dave & Buster's anomaly, iOS 18.
A lot of people have thought this new iOS is kind of like their worst release ever. Here I am getting uninvited from any Apple event ever again. But like they demoed all this stuff, like the summaries. Have you seen all the summaries people have shown? You get broken up over text and it gives you the Siri summary of like... Sorry, they can't. Don't hate them.
Or it'll say, like, oftentimes I just get inaccurate ones where it will try to do an italicized summary of a text message or a headline, and it'll say something that sounds incredibly alarming. And then when I click through, I'm like, oh, no, the AI is just confused.
Right. So it just makes me think, like, they kind of rushed a bunch of this AI stuff. So my first thought is, is the AI model, for whatever reason, choking on the Dave and Buster's ampersand?
So this is where the ampersand comes in. The iPhone's AI model takes the audio of me saying Dave and Buster's and tries to turn it into a transcript that writes Dave and Buster's with an ampersand. But that breaks something. The iPhone perhaps thinks this ampersand represents here not human language, but a random misplaced bit of computer code.
Because ampersands mean one thing in human English and another thing in code, engineers usually indicate to the computer when an ampersand should be ignored.
We do this thing called escaping, where you basically say, hey, treat this as something that's displayed as an ampersand to a human. Don't interpret it as an ampersand. And so maybe it's just forgetting to escape this ampersand in this one particular circumstance for whatever reason, if it's Dave and Buster's.
This ampersand may have been unescaped. One of the most jaw-dropping scandals of 2025. But to understand why that unescaped ampersand could have fully crashed the audio message, that required further testing. Alex offered to try to get inside the iPhone's mind.
I've got an iPhone here that's hooked up to my computer and I could try it here. We could see whether or not we can get to throw an error that we can see. So you see, I've got just this test phone that's got nothing on it.
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