The Dave and Buster's Anomaly

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) searchengine.show Comment on this episode! https://pjvogt.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Quick note before we begin this week. I wanted to thank everybody because we keep getting emails from people who love the show and are proactively asking how they can help us, which is just a very unusual gesture to get from an audience of listeners out there. Two things. If you can, please sign up for our ad-free version in Cognito mode. You can find it at searchengine.show. Or if you're not in a financial position to do that, it's funny, but writing a review of the show on Apple Podcasts helps us put the show in front of many more people because of the strange logic of the algorithm. Why is that? A question for a different question answering show. I don't make these rules. But if you've got a minute, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:43PJ Vogt?

  Ideally, a positive one. Thank you. After these ads, we've got a great show for you. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square. You probably recognize Square as the sleek reader you tap your card on at your favorite local spot. But for business owners, it's so much more. Every Friday, when I grab pizza at my local spot frenzy, checkout is so quick and smooth. My receipt pops right onto my phone, and I'm earning loyalty rewards without even thinking about it. It just works. Square brings your payments, inventory, scheduling, and customer marketing into one intuitive system. You can accept every major card, use Tap to Pay, and with Square Checking, your sales funds are generally available immediately. Everything is straightforward, beautifully designed, and simple to set up.

• 1:27PJ Vogt?

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• 2:35PJ Vogt?

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• 3:21PJ Vogt?

  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 he'd skip the others if he 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?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I'm good. Big fan of your work.

• 4:03PJ Vogt?

  Oh, thank you. I appreciate your Costco hoodie, Kirkland Signature.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 4:11PJ Vogt?

  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 set it into your iPhone, the message would refuse to go through. And the phrase in question was a surprising one.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  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 gotta try this. Record a voice memo message and mention Dave and Buster's and it will not be delivered."

• 4:58PJ Vogt?

  Dave and Buster's. As in the American restaurant that's Chuck E. Cheese for adults? Ski ball and a rum and coke? Dave and Buster's.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  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."

• 5:15PJ Vogt?

  Can I try it with you right now?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:18PJ Vogt?

  Do you mind? We'll bleep it out, but can you give me your phone number?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Sorry, all the fours.

• 5:23PJ Vogt?

  That's OK. And audio. Wait, is it audio? I never leave voice memos. I'm like, I record my voice and monologue for a living.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:39PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 5:42PJ Vogt?

  Wait, why do you think famous people are more likely to send voice memos?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:52PJ Vogt?

  Interesting. OK, 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? They're sending a check out. We should go."

• 6:12PJ Vogt?

  All right, send.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  I've got the three bubbles. Yep.

• 6:16PJ Vogt?

  Says delivered. Have you heard about the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese? There's something to check out. We should go.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  All right, that one worked.

• 6:25PJ Vogt?

  Okay, now let me try to send you Dave and Buster's.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:28PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 6:41PJ Vogt?

  Okay, transcribes, it says more, but it doesn't say delivered on my end. Do you get it?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Nope, I just got three, three dots.

• 6:48PJ Vogt?

  And it just stays on the three dots?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  It just stays on the three dots.

• 6:52PJ Vogt?

  It looks like we're breaking up with each other and I'm like really sending you a novella.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:02PJ Vogt?

  We waited, but the message never went through. Just three dots floating forever in the air like stray balloons. For weeks after this call, the search engine team became enchanted by the anomaly. We kept trying to send each other voice notes, convinced there had to be some other combination of words that would also refuse to transmit. It couldn't just be the phrase Dave and Buster's, right? Except it was. This testing itself was addictive. In fact, I want to give you permission to pause this podcast right now and just try it yourself. Go ahead, make a voice note and in it, tell your crush you love them. Tell your boss you hate them. Tell a secret that you have kept close to your chest. As long as it's iPhone to iPhone and you include the phrase Dave and Buster's.

• 7:48PJ Vogt?

  The message, it will not send. At least as of the day we're publishing this, May 9th, 2025.

• 7:57PJ Vogt?

  Eric's group chat had found out about this anomaly, basically through internet word of mouth. Eric's friend's girlfriend's friend had discovered it herself, then posted about it on her personal Facebook page. Can you read me the original Facebook post that you made?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Okay, friends, help me solve a mystery. Audio messages sent between iPhones will not send if you say Dave and Buster's in the audio. Don't believe me? Try it. I sent an audio text to an Android user and it went through. Is there beef between Apple and Dave and Buster's? Does that name sound like something inappropriate and is being blocked? I don't know, but y'all try and comment below your results. And please share this, so maybe it will find the right person to answer me. Hopefully, that's you, right?

• 8:45PJ Vogt?

  This is Nicole Williams, pageant zero for the Dave and Buster's anomaly. So when you post that, I'm curious, like, how had you discovered this anomaly?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  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...

• 9:07PJ Vogt?

  Dave and Buster's was?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  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 and 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 like, there's monetary damages done, too, because I paid way more than I needed to, but then we started testing it.

• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:09PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  What if it's like the word "busters" is something derogatory? I don't know. If they flagged that word, like, "I'm gonna 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.

• 10:34PJ Vogt?

  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 the search engine. And when we received the call, we accepted the mission. I asked Eric, "What did you think when you first encountered this?"

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Uh, what's the conspiracy about Dave and Buster's and Apple? Does Tim not like Dave and Buster's?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Is Buster a weird word?

• 11:02PJ Vogt?

  Like, is Buster an obscure slur that you've never heard of?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Is it something in a different country? England? Do they think Dave and Buster's is weird? I don't know.

• 11:12PJ Vogt?

  And then what's your second order of theories?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Uh, this is just a weird bug that Apple doesn't know about.

• 11:18PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it's so weird.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I know. I'm hoping you guys can figure this out.

• 11:24PJ Vogt?

  OK, I'm gonna look into it. But I also want to say the other thing that's kind of cool about this. Right now, you and I are in this glorious window in which if you've forgotten to write someone back and you've offended them, all you have to say is, "I'm so sorry. I left you a voice memo. I happened to mention Dave and Buster's." And you're never gonna believe this. There's this little-known error.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Hey, I was just letting you know you were fired, but I wanted us to meet at Dave and Buster's to kind of talk through the severance plan. And that didn't go through. I'm sorry.

• 12:03PJ Vogt?

  We're gonna 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 and Buster's itself. All that, after these ads.

• 12:49PJ Vogt?

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• 13:34PJ Vogt?

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• 13:55PJ Vogt?

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• 15:07PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 15:11PJ Vogt?

  Before I tell you anything else, I want you to know that this week, we found an explanation. We've solved the Dave and 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's 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 DNB and Apple. I need answers."

• 15:53PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 16:24PJ Vogt?

  The idea that there was something in the phrase "Dave and Buster's" that the iPhone software was blocking.

• 16:30PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 16:40PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 17:10PJ Vogt?

  Wesley's call to follow him, silenced, into the void.

• 17:16PJ Vogt?

  So I looked to the 22,000-member Dave and Buster's community on Reddit. Something you need to understand about this community is that Dave and 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 hit in 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. None of these people had noticed they weren't

• 18:00PJ Vogt?

  allowed to whisper into their iPhones the name of the place they most loved. I was not yet making progress, but at least I now carried the question with me, because socially, it was the most powerful search engine query I've discovered.

• 18:18PJ Vogt?

  At dinner, at drinks, if conversation lulled, if I wanted to steer things in another direction, I'd pull my phone out. It was a superpower. Want to see a secret almost nobody else on Earth knows? The anomaly would provoke a flurry of voice noting, and then feelings of wonder, which would melt into feelings of paranoia, a one-two you often encounter in America. So many conspiracy theories about Apple, Tim Cook, Dave Buster, phones listening in on you, which, again, I just was not ready to buy any of these. But I had no counter-story to offer in return. The first clue, which I would not understand until much later, was hidden inside a story.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  OK, we now welcome on a very, very special guest.

• 19:00PJ Vogt?

  Which I heard on a Barstool Sports podcast called Pardon My Take.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  It is James Buster Corley, one of the co-founders of Dave and Buster's, the most famous place... In the world. In the world.

• 19:17PJ Vogt?

  It's video, so you see the hosts dressed like pretty standard in telly bros. Casually, comfortably, one is wearing indoor Ray-Bans. And then there's the titular Buster, Buster Corley.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  First, let me say I'm jazzed to be on your program. I'm now, I'm now, I gotta be a fan forever, right? That's it, so.

• 19:36PJ Vogt?

  Buster connecting on video from his home, a man in his late 60s, looking a bit like a fitter offseason Santa Claus.

• 19:44PJ Vogt?

  Charmingly, there's a large pinball machine in his home, just behind him in the frame. The man likes the game.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to, always happy, to talk about Dave Buster's, whatever you want to talk about.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Okay, all right, so let's start from the beginning. Let's just, can you just give us the beginning? Like how it all started and how it all evolved into being the coolest place for games and fun and eats of all time?

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, Dave and I started out as business partners and along the way became best friends and I'm godfather to his children. He's godfather to mine.

• 20:19PJ Vogt?

  Buster tells the origin story of his and Dave's powerful partnership. Back in the early 80s, these two men, Dave and Buster, were running establishments in Little Rock, Arkansas. Their businesses were separate but side by side. One called Buster's, the other, confusingly, called Slick Willie's.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Slick Willie's was a big ass, really fine pool hall, early on electronic games, shuffleboard, the whole thing, right? So.

• 20:48PJ Vogt?

  Customers loved Slick Willie's games and they loved drinking next door at Buster's. But the rules in Arkansas said that the two places could not be combined. Back then, you could not have pool tables and a liquor license under one roof.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  So Slick Willie's and Buster's had to be separate, no common door. But there was a walkway between the two. And in our infinite wisdom, we sat at the bar and watched our guests go from one place to the other. They go over to Slick Willie's for intense games, then come to Buster's to eat, drink, and back and forth, etc. So we thought, hey, you know, what we need to do is we need to put these two places together.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 21:33PJ Vogt?

  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 ambrosan: 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 and Buster's corporate was not responding to my emails. But I had another idea, something I wanted to test out at the local franchise.

• 22:16PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so we're walking in to Dave and 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 and Buster's with my colleague Hazel just as the doors opened.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  It's huge. There's so many. It's huge. It's like a cop line.

• 22:34PJ Vogt?

  They've got Minecraft, Aliens: Armageddon, Pac-Man Battle Royale. They've got axe-throwing. They've got Connect Four. Dave and 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.

• 23:17PJ Vogt?

  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 and 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 and Buster's this morning?

• 23:36Speaker 05

  My name is Alex. I'm here to play DDR.

• 23:40PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 23:52Speaker 05

  Uh, so I've been coming here pretty frequently over the last year, probably a couple of times a week. It's a workout for me. So like I'm doing-

• 24:00PJ Vogt?

  You're sweating.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm doing it to burn calories, so.

• 24:03PJ Vogt?

  Alex and his wife, two very athletic people, use Dave and Buster's as their gym. I wanted to just make a podcast about that. Instead, I asked about the anomaly. Okay, so the actual question that we're trying to figure out, are you, do you, this is gonna seem like a left turn, but do you use an iPhone or an Android?

• 24:22Speaker 05

  iPhone.

• 24:23PJ Vogt?

  Do you ever send voice notes on iPhone?

• 24:26Speaker 05

  Very rarely. I receive them sometimes, yeah.

• 24:29PJ Vogt?

  Have you ever noticed that if someone, so we discovered that if you try to send or receive a voice message on an iPhone and it includes the phrase "Dave and Buster's", and as far as you can tell, only Dave and Buster's, the message will not send?

• 24:46Speaker 05

  Had no idea.

• 24:48PJ Vogt?

  Do you want me to show you the, how this works?

• 24:51Speaker 05

  Um, I'll take your word for it. It's okay.

• 24:54PJ Vogt?

  The first one was like, "No, I'm good."

• 24:57PJ Vogt?

  Alex was keen to get back to his workout, so I moved on. What's your name? Ty Ray. And what do you do at Dave and Buster's? I'm a janitor. Here we go, an actual employee. Do you have an iPhone or Android? I have iPhone. Do you ever send voice notes, like to message people? Yes, I do. All the time. Have you ever mentioned Dave and Buster's when you send a voice note? Like if you're like, "I'm at Dave and Buster's right now." Well, I just say I'm at work.

• 25:29PJ Vogt?

  Ah. And it wasn't just Tyree. Another employee I spoke to said pretty much the same thing. It was work. It was the NBS. Of course, I do not tell people on my way out in the morning, "I'm on my way to Search Engine." The anomaly then had gone unnoticed by the folks at this Brooklyn branch of Dave and Buster's. I, however, was noticed. I was soon asked with polite directness by the manager to hit the road. So we hit the road.

• 26:01PJ Vogt?

  We'd first talked to our listener Eric in February. And now, a few months passed. In that time, the American economy shuttered. The president picked a fight with Nauru, a country of 12,000 people. Citizens everywhere planned for their uncertain futures. And meanwhile, I kept showing people the Dave and Buster's anomaly. And despite everything, they kept being arrested in wonder by it. And then finally, we showed it to the right person. Two of them, actually. Two people who would help us solve this riddle. Our big break after this short break.

• 27:01PJ Vogt?

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• 28:05PJ Vogt?

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• 29:06PJ Vogt?

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• 30:24PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 30:29PJ Vogt?

  Our big break came from someone at the office. Shruthi had mentioned the anomaly to a film editor here, Andy Greve. And like everybody, Andy had found himself repeating Dave and Buster's into his phone, trying to find out if there was some trick that would force Apple to transmit a Dave and Buster's voice note. But unlike everybody else, Andy was successful. Late that night, Andy wrote to Shruthi that he'd made a discovery. If you said Dave and Buster's into a voice note very slowly, like spreading out the words, Dave and Buster's, the voice note would sail through. Andy wrote, quote, "I've been doing some tests over here, and my theory is that it's not Dave and Buster's, it's Dave and Buster's."

• 31:14PJ Vogt?

  I know that sounds the same to you as a listener, because you're not reading my script right now, but the first time Andy wrote Dave and Buster's, he wrote it A-N-D. The second time, he wrote it with an ampersand. And he's right. The official way to spell Dave and Buster's is with an ampersand. All those years ago, when Dave and his business partner Buster had conjoined their restaurants into one concept, they'd put an ampersand in between their names. Not knowing that this one fancy flourish, made years before the invention of the iPhone, would cause an anomaly in space and time decades later. Stunning. Andy continued, quote, "I tried saying and, and, and, and ampersand, and the message didn't send."

• 31:58PJ Vogt?

  So Andy had deduced that ampersand was the likely culprit. Maybe Andy should be hosting a podcast. Computers, particularly in the past, have had all sorts of problems with special characters like ampersands. Andy, as a film editor, knew that his film editing software, for instance, would sometimes reject a special character in the file name. If it was a problem there, maybe it was a problem here.

• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  But what didn't make sense to any of us was why. You could easily send Dave and Busters over text. What was it about saying Dave and Busters over audio message that would cause the anomaly? It was confusing. I knew that we needed to talk to an expert. And Bussand, a fellow tech reporter, connected me to the right one.

• 32:42Speaker 06

  Hi, my name's Alex Thomas. I'm the Chief Information Security Officer of Sentinel One and a lecturer in computer science at Stanford University.

• 32:49PJ Vogt?

  And what does it mean to be the Chief Information Security Officer?

• 32:54Speaker 06

  It means I used to be a hacker and now I'm a corporate sellout. That's what it means.

• 33:03PJ Vogt?

  Alex grew up in the 90s doing all sorts of youthful computer crimes. But as an adult, his life flipped. Now companies hire him to legitimately test or protect their security. He ran security for Yahoo. After that, he ran security at Facebook, actually during the height of Russian hacker paranoia. Very big jobs. He may have been overqualified for the case of the Dave and Busters anomaly. In fact, when I told a journalist friend I'd reached out to the Alex Thomas, his face made this wobbly expression before he said, "You asked Alex Thomas about the Dave and Busters thing?" So I reached out to you because I'm trying to answer this question. And I just want to say, like, before I explain the question, I understand there's a lot going on in the world right now.

• 33:46PJ Vogt?

  If you were to rank every single problem afflicting the world in order of importance, there's a good chance this one would go last.

• 33:53Speaker 06

  It's fine with me, man. There's plenty of podcasts about the top 100 problems.

• 33:57PJ Vogt?

  There's so many podcasts about the top.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  So if you're looking for that podcast, turn this one off now.

• 34:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, get out, get out. This is about a small and interesting and delightful quirk.

• 34:09PJ Vogt?

  So the issue is this.

• 34:12PJ Vogt?

  A listener of ours heard about this issue because a friend posted on Facebook and then the chat group tested it out.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:18PJ Vogt?

  What they realized is that if they send one another a voice memo and the voice memo contains the phrase "Dave and Busters," the voice memo will not send.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  What?

• 34:31PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  What? That's the backdoor. It's not like Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh or a sequel query or something. It's Dave and Busters. Let's do this.

• 34:47PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah, let me do it, let me do it. So I'm going to try to send you a memo. For the last time, I spoke the magic words into my phone and I hit send.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I get three dots and it's still three dots.

• 34:59PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  This is giving me anxiety, just watching.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  And it doesn't show up. That's crazy.

• 35:06PJ Vogt?

  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

• 35:21PJ Vogt?

  Buster's, in that circumstance, the message seemed to send.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Oh, well, then it's almost certainly the ampersand.

• 35:28PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 35:44PJ Vogt?

  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, it's a relatively new trick from Apple, enabled by artificial intelligence.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  They now have this feature, which is they do AI where they listen to the message and do real time transcription of it.

• 36:12PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 36:21Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:21PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 36:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 36:38PJ Vogt?

  So the AI that's on the phone is like, quote unquote, listening to my message.

• 36:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:44PJ Vogt?

  Turning it into text so that when I send people long voice memos, they can actually skip them and just read it. And that's sort of new.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  That's new.

• 36:53PJ Vogt?

  Apple started offering these auto transcriptions in their fall 2023 update, iOS 17.

• 37:00PJ Vogt?

  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 and Buster's anomaly, iOS 18.

• 37:19Speaker 06

  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? Like, you know, you get broken up over text and it gives you the series summary of like, "Sorry, they can't. Don't hate them."

• 37:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. 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."

• 37:49Speaker 06

  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?

• 38:02PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  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.

• 38:49PJ Vogt?

  This ampersand may have been unescaped. One of the most jaw-dropping scandals of 2025.

• 38:56PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 39:07Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:13PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  We can see. So you see, I've got just this test phone that's got nothing on it.

• 39:17PJ Vogt?

  And when you say a test phone, it's just like an iPhone that you're purely using for this test?

• 39:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a development phone. It's a totally clean iPhone 14 with a brand new install of 18.3.1. It's set to developer mode and so it's hooked up to a tool called Apple Instruments, which allows me now-

• 39:34PJ Vogt?

  We were screen sharing, so I could see the software. On the top of the window was a spiky graph representing activity on the iPhone, almost like a heart rate. Beneath, eligible to meet, the corresponding log entries for each action the phone had taken, the computer's notes on its own internal workings. Normally, these log entries are quickly deleted, but Alex's setup would capture them.

• 39:56PJ Vogt?

  So we're gonna make the problem happen and then we're going to like x-ray into the mind of the iPhone to understand what is going on behind the scenes.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so we're gonna see, maybe if something crashes, we might get lucky. And as it dies, it might say, oh, I'm dying.

• 40:13PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 06

  Hey PJ, let's go to Dave and Buster's.

• 40:17PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so you've recorded the message. You're gonna try to send it.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  I'm receiving nothing.

• 40:22PJ Vogt?

  At the moment that Alex had recorded his voice note, I could see the log entries cascading down the screen. Any action the iPhone took required marshaling so many of these little tasks.

• 40:32Speaker 06

  Does not look like it's sending.

• 40:34PJ Vogt?

  The voice note, of course, did not make it to my phone, but now Alex could check these tasks to see which one had failed.

• 40:39Speaker 06

  And so IMTranscoter agent, this is probably a pretty good one for us to look at, right? Mobile SMS, looks like a good one. There's info, debug. So let's see.

• 40:52PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, you're like fluent in iPhone.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  I'm not a professional in this. I just want to point that out.

• 40:56PJ Vogt?

  You're, you speak enough iPhone to go on vacation in iPhone and like order some cocktails.

• 41:02Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah. Don't dea style iPhone. Yes. That's it. There are people who do this all day, every day.

• 41:11PJ Vogt?

  Alex's larger theory about what was going on here was that the unescaped ampersand had perhaps triggered one of the security systems built into the iPhone's internal code. I did not know about these security systems, and Alex started to explain to me how they worked and why Apple's developers created them in the first place.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  One of the things they've done is they've created security protections where if something bad happens, they can try to protect that if you hack one of those subsystems, that hopefully they can contain that hack and keep them from taking over the entire phone.

• 41:45PJ Vogt?

  And have there been issues in the past where because there's so many programs that are now sort of entering into iMessage, someone might find a vulnerability in like

• 41:55Speaker 06

  Oh, yes.

• 41:55PJ Vogt?

  emoji and then be able to get it and grab somebody's text messages or something?

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. No, take over the entire phone.

• 42:00PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So there's a company in Israel called NSO Group that sells these hacks and is very good at it. You know, the Russians do this, the Chinese do this. So the Chinese government's actually quite good at this.

• 42:11PJ Vogt?

  And if somebody, nobody would ever do this to me, not that type of reporter, but if it happened to me, what would happen? Like, one day I would get a text message from an unknown number with a funny emoji and that would be them breaking in?

• 42:23Speaker 06

  So there's what are called interaction and non-interaction hacks. So there have been ones that are so bad that the message is delivered and in the background, your phone parses the message, they take over your phone, and then they delete the message. You don't even know you got hacked.

• 42:37PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  And then they plant the malware on your phone. And now they can read all your messages, read your email, and even in some cases, turn on the microphone, turn on the camera, track your GPS location and such. And that's been used against democracy activists, been used against journalists and such.

• 42:51PJ Vogt?

  Wow.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  It's really bad.

• 42:56PJ Vogt?

  Let me tell you a story about what Alex means when he says "it's really bad." So one of these iPhone exploits was discovered by NSO, that Israeli hacker group Alex mentioned. And NSO sold it to the Saudi government. Here's how they used it. One day in 2018, a flight attendant gets taken into custody at the Dubai airport. While she's being interrogated, someone opens her phone and covertly installs the exploit on it. Not because they're interested in her, but because they're interested in her partner, a man named Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, a columnist at the Washington Post. He'd been critical of the royal family. Five months later, Khashoggi is murdered, quite brutally, by agents of the Saudi government.

• 43:40PJ Vogt?

  Presumably, Apple built these security systems to prevent events like this one. But Alex thought that here, perhaps one of those security systems, built for a very important reason, was behaving in an overzealous way. The rogue ampersand, the fact that it just confused the iPhone for a moment? Maybe the system saw that as a vulnerability and stopped the message from transmitting at all. That's the theory, anyway. I have one more question. If I were like a different kind of person ethically, like, is there a path by which, you know, this listener is like, hey, I saw a Facebook post, this funny thing happens on an iPhone, check it out.

• 44:21PJ Vogt?

  They send it to me and I'm like, send a message to someone in China, or Israel, or Russia? And I'm like, hey, there's this little part of the security wall that looks a little funny, like, you can use this. And like, they do a little bit more work, and then the next thing you know, someone is calling a journalist and saying like, Dave and Buster's, Dave and Buster's, Dave and Buster's, and getting into their email?

• 44:47Speaker 06

  I mean, it's possible. It is possible this is the, that this is, if you pull this thread, you find a big hole in the sweater on the other side. You know, this kind of bug, it's not super likely, but it is possible. I have seen more minor things than this turn out to be a highly exploitable condition.

• 45:03PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 45:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is possible.

• 45:06PJ Vogt?

  Alex recommended that we email Apple with the details of the anomaly, which we did. Apple looked into it and actually got back to us. They told us what we'd found is a rare bug, I mean, we knew that, and said it poses no security risk to its users. They said a fix will be available and a software update soon. So, the days of the anomaly we have cherished so much, they're numbered.

• 45:28Speaker 06

  This feels like around seven seconds here.

• 45:31PJ Vogt?

  But back to Alex's tests.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  There's a bunch of errors getting thrown around the IM transcoder agent.

• 45:35PJ Vogt?

  He wasn't able to definitively find the exact process that the unescaped ampersand was breaking.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  None of the errors here, it gives us a perfect, but this is pretty good. So I think the other--

• 45:44PJ Vogt?

  But he saw enough to feel good about his theory. And he was able to connect us with some iOS experts, people more fluent in iPhone, who were able to confirm that the ampersand was causing the issue here, on the sender's side. The anomaly was essentially explained. I asked Alex Stamos what, in the end, he made of all this. When you learn about a glitch like this, what's the feeling it gives you?

• 46:08Speaker 06

  You know, there's a saying that you hear software people say, it's turtles all the way down, right? Like, you know, something I tell my Stanford students is that security is an incredible field to get into because it's the only part of computer science that gets worse every year, right? Every part of CS just magically gets better, right? Like graphics and compute and storage, but systems get more complex, less understandable, and more important every year. And so as a result, systems get less safe and there's more need for people to break them and make them safer. And I think AI has just massively multiplied that.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  I mean, this is one of the weird things about AI, just theoretically, AI systems are supposed to be, it's called deterministic, right? So a deterministic system is a piece of software where if you know the inputs, you can predict what the outputs are. In practice, to human beings, modern AI systems are non-deterministic. We have no frickin' idea why they work. Like, we just build these things and we train them on these huge training sets, and then they just kind of happen. Like, they just kind of do things. Like, we are building software systems that are beyond human comprehension, and we're throwing them in our pockets and then building our lives around them. And this is another thing I tell my students, it is the most exciting time to be in security since the late 90s because, once again, new kinds of vulnerabilities and bugs are being

• 47:33Speaker 06

  discovered every day of new entire classes of issues, right? This is what it was like when I was young. You could go to a security conference, go to a DEF CON or Black Hat, and you'd go to a talk, and somebody would get on stage and they would talk about some new research. You would leave and you'd be like, wow, I think every single product on the planet is vulnerable to that bug because nobody's ever heard of it, right? And that's what AI is like right now, is that, you know, somebody might say, we built a secure AI system, and you're like, you can't make that promise because nobody knows what the vulnerabilities are in these systems yet. Like, just the fundamental research hasn't been done yet. And so it is like both a terrifying and really fun time to be alive if you're in this field.

• 48:20PJ Vogt?

  Of all the anxieties I have about artificial intelligence and their legion, this was an underrated one: that AI might be helping us build things we ourselves don't entirely understand. Today, that had prompted a silly question about a phone that for its own reasons would not send a Dave and Buster's message. I wondered what questions it would prompt tomorrow. Alex, thank you. Thank you for being so generous with your time as well.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks, PJ.

• 48:48PJ Vogt?

  Alex Damos is the Chief Information Security Officer of Sentinel One and a lecturer in computer science at Stanford University. And thanks this week to Kashmir Hill, Nadeem Hamood, and very special thanks to Jay Little and everybody at Trail of Bits. They lent us their iPhone fluency. Jay spent his valuable time running tests to better understand this ampersand bug. Thanks so much.

• 49:49PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is presented by Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pimmineney. Our senior producer is Garrett Graham. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bezarian. Additional production support on this episode by Noah John, Hazel May Bryan, and Sean Merchant.

• 50:09PJ Vogt?

  If you would like to support this show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey: Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next week.

• 51:03Speaker 07

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