Pizzagate: We Investigate the (Real) Government Plot to Stuff You with Cheese

A very popular theory alleges that the U. S. government spent billions of taxpayer dollars to buy cheese ... then stored millions upon millions of pounds of that cheese in underground caves ... and then planted scientists inside fast-food chains ... where they invented new products, such as stuffed-crust pizza ... in order to get Americans to eat said government cheese. Correspondent David Gardner gets to the gooey center of the truth — including, but not limited to: farmers, shadow agencies, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Supreme Court, MrBeast, James Harden's beard and Pete Rose. So, yeah. You should probably listen to this, before joining the rest of America in ordering 12.5 million pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 0:42Pablo Torre?

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• 1:54Pablo Torre?

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• 2:36Pablo Torre?

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• 3:10Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

• 3:29Pablo Torre?

  Looks like I got a haircut.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yep, I did. Just for the show, Pablo.

• 3:33Pablo Torre?

  That's the level of professionalism I would expect.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I think I should wear a tinfoil hat next time I'm on, considering my subject matter expertise here.

• 3:42Pablo Torre?

  I do want to try and summarize for people not familiar with your work, David Gardner. Thank you for being here, by the way.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  I want to summarize the beat that you have carved out for us here, because, without being derogatory in any way, I would say that your beat is strangely irresistible and extremely popular crackpot internet theories.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  I mean, the last time I was here, you had me investigating this viral conspiracy about whether there was a movie called Shazam starring Sinbad, not to be confused with the movie Kazam starring Shaquille O'Neal.

• 4:13Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  And we asked him about it, because that's how seriously I take these internet conspiracy theories.

• 4:18Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, we brought Big J journalism to the Big Aristotle.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:23Pablo Torre?

  And now, the strangely irresistible and extraordinarily insane internet theory you brought us, that you've spent a disturbingly long time investigating, just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, by the way, originates where?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this month's long journey that I've been on for you, it started with a 48-second TikTok video that went viral, and you're gonna love the username here, Pablo, CupcakeTheDestroyer21.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  And here's what she had to say.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  One point in time in the United States, the dairy industry was struggling so heavily that they reached out to lobbyists who went to the government, who encouraged them to buy an excess of cheese to make sure the stock market didn't crash surrounding the dairy industry, resulting in what we now know as the cheese caves, but also something else. While the government stores the cheese in the cheese caves, they also send out plenty of excess cheese to modern pizza chains in the United States, such as Papa John's and Domino's and Jets. And pretty much every pizza chain you know of uses government cheese. Because they had such an excess of cheese and because they were looking for a way to get rid of it to justify the cost of buying so much, the government encouraged a lot of these chain pizza places to use more and more cheese in various products.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

• 5:41Pablo Torre?

  So this video by the aforementioned CupcakeTheDestroyer21 has been viewed more than 10.5 million times, David Gardner. And she's saying a lot here, right? So just to run through the beats of her case, lobbyists begged the US government to save the dairy industry.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  And prevent a stock market crash by buying, with taxpayer money, an insane surplus of cheese.

• 6:06Pablo Torre?

  Which the government has stored in underground cheese caves.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And what the government ends up doing to justify their purchase of all this cheese is to tell Domino's and various pizza chains to figure out ways to put more of this cheese inside their products.

• 6:21Pablo Torre?

  Right, which means, as CupcakeTheDestroyer21 says,

• 6:25Speaker 04

  The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Cupcake the Destroyer 21, although she's a crusader, she's not alone. There are Reddit threads about this, there are posts across social media about this, there are news articles in reputable newspapers and magazines that keep citing this, and it stems back from this front page story in 2010 in the New York Times. This investigative reporter uncovered a memo in which two Pizza Hut officials, they call themselves the Lord of the Cheese and the Lady of the Cheese.

• 6:56Pablo Torre?

  Because of course they do.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Thank their government partners and agree to begin putting more cheese in the pizza, including in the crust, as the Lord and the Lady wrote, quote, "Let's sell more pizza and more cheese!" exclamation mark.

• 7:09Pablo Torre?

  Right. I mean, there was a Netflix documentary series in which this was rather dramatically, I dare say, reenacted.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  We need to put more cheese here. Here? Dammit, soldier, we need to put more cheese here!

• 7:24Speaker 06

  But ma'am, it's already covered in cheese!

• 7:29Speaker 05

  There's no more room! I don't give a crap!

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Put it in the goddamn crust if you have to.

• 7:37Pablo Torre?

  So I just need people to understand, if they're wondering why it is that we here, Public Torre Finds Out, which is obviously a sports show, are taking on this story now. The Super Bowl happens to be the holiday, I think, that is most associated with cheese. There is no cheesier day in America than Super Bowl Sunday, David. And there is this statistic that I want to cite here as well, from the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, who recently estimated that we Americans eat more than 20 million pounds of cheese during our Super Bowl parties.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Even more than that, the Super Bowl is the biggest pizza delivery day of the year, according to the American Pizza Community, which is a real organization. They estimate that there are 12.5 million pizzas ordered in America on Super Bowl Sunday, including 11 million slices from Domino's alone.

• 8:29Pablo Torre?

  Now, I'm a Pizza Hut guy, by birth, really. I remember vividly, being a kid, going to Pizza Hut when they started selling stuffed crust pizza, and I just want to disclose this journalistically, I [bleep] love stuffed crust pizza. I loved this so much that when David Gardner brought me this story, I immediately was like... Go, go to the GUI Center. Go to the cheese caves, bring us back what feels like a truth that deserves to be told.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  I just need to warn you, Pablo, that this truth, it goes beyond the crust of the earth, beyond the crust of the pizza. This is an investigation that took us from dairy farmers in the Great Depression to social media influencers with huge followings, to quasi-governmental agencies, to the highest court in the land, and all the way to the top of the United States government.

• 9:24Pablo Torre?

  The deep-dish state.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  The real pizza gate.

• 9:44Pablo Torre?

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• 13:23Pablo Torre?

  So I should tell you the first time that I remember hearing government cheese was when I was a kid, and it was obviously derogatory, right? It might have been in a TV show as an insult to like, "What is this, government cheese?"

• 13:34Speaker 08

  Oh, this ain't no Velveeta. This ain't individually wrapped. You got to put some pressure on a butcher knife to cut some government cheese.

• 13:48Pablo Torre?

  So before we just get to the cheese caves and the conspiracy, why and what is government cheese? Do we, the people, actually own this cheese? Why is the government this interested in dairy at all? Who makes it? I just, I have a zillion questions.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so to get into the theory, we need to do a little investigation. And so to start, we need to go back in time.

• 14:18Speaker 09

  An important food for the health of the nation. Pasteurized milk, a safe food, trusted by millions of people and important in every diet, of special importance to children and infants.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  For more than a century now, dating back to the Great Depression, the US government has believed that dairy was a safeguard of our national interests, a way to get high-quality calories to Americans during hard times for the health of the nation. And so federal milk marketing laws take effect in the 1930s and the 1940s. And then coming out of World War II, the government guarantees that it will always buy milk and dairy products from farmers at a certain price point, even if no one else wanted this milk.

• 15:02Speaker 09

  You have the satisfaction of knowing that you did your job well. You can send this milk from your plant with the knowledge that it is safe. Milk.

• 15:23Pablo Torre?

  So in terms of what Cupcake the Disheirer 21 was saying, though, at the start of her video, about dairy lobbyists being involved in this, begging the government to save their industry, was that part true?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  It's absolutely true that the dairy industry, like the rest of America, was struggling during the Great Depression. I mean, they called it that for a reason, right? And the really important thing here is the way that our government works with two senators in every state, it has a rural bias. So the dairy lobby is and was a real thing. And lowering dairy prices and reducing these subsidies was seen as anti-farmer.

• 15:59Pablo Torre?

  All right, so the Electoral College is involved in this. There is still the resonance that I sense today of what real America is. But who is the champion of this program?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  So Jimmy Carter actually campaigned on this in 1976 in the presidential primaries, and he was a humble peanut farmer himself.

• 16:15Speaker 10

  But the net income of the average dairy farm family in Wisconsin is less than $7,000 a year. As a farmer myself, I think that's disgraceful. And as president, I'm gonna change it.

• 16:27Speaker 09

  Vote for Jimmy Carter this coming Tuesday.

• 16:30Pablo Torre?

  And so, obviously, Jimmy Carter, rest in peace, by the way, all this converging in irrelevance today, he won. He won the election. And so the subsidies he was giving to the farmers of America, the dairy farmers specifically, how big are we talking?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Well, we're talking $2 billion in the 1970s, which is a huge amount of money today.

• 16:48Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  And it essentially created this imbalance between supply and demand in the dairy industry.

• 16:53Pablo Torre?

  Right. We, the people, did not demand this much milk, this much dairy. The government did. The government artificially propped up the milk market, is what we're learning, with our money, with public money. But also, I'm familiar, from my childhood, with milk expiring, right? So the government's buying all this [BLEEP]. And how do they store it?

• 17:14Speaker 03

  So Pablo, liquid milk famously expires quite quickly. There's a little date on the top of the bottle. What we're talking about here is converting it from milk to cheese, which can then last for a lot longer. It can be stored for many years sometimes. In fact, aged cheese is a commodity that people enjoy.

• 17:31Pablo Torre?

  Yes, I am one of those people. But we're fast-forwarding now into, what, the 1980s at this point?

• 17:37Speaker 03

  So Reagan comes into power, and he discovers that there are billions of pounds of government cheese in storage.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  By 1984, the government had a problem, which is that for every American citizen, there were five pounds of cheese in storage, our national cheesy birthright.

• 18:02Pablo Torre?

  So I was born in 85. This ad that we're playing now is from 87. And I just remember there being lots of ads like this.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  These ads were from the National Dairy Board.

• 18:18Pablo Torre?

  All of them bizarrely selling me and my family, generically, cheese? And that was confusing then? It's still kind of confusing right now. There was no actual specific company, it felt like.

• 18:36Pablo Torre?

  So going back to Cupcake the Destroyer 21's theory, which is about where all of this government cheese is going, which again, is absent actual demand from us Americans, whose money, public money, is purchasing all of it. It's time to turn to the cheese caves. So what about your quest to find the secret government cheese caves?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I started off by turning to the author of that 2010 New York Times article. He's a great investigative reporter named Michael Moss. He later wrote a book called Salt, Sugar, Fat: How Food Giants Hooked Us.

• 19:11Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  He's a Pulitzer Prize winner. And he's the one who uncovered that memo from the Lord and the Lady of the Cheese that said, "Let's sell more pizza and more cheese." And he turned out just to be the perfect tour guide.

• 19:24Speaker 11

  You know, it's an odd business journalism, right? Where one moment I'm traipsing around the Middle East and then the next, you know, moment I'm poking into, you know, craft and how they get us to eat so much. It's, you gotta love it.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  So Michael explained the origin of the cheese caves, which date back to the Reagan administration.

• 19:49Speaker 11

  One of the big moments, I think, when it comes to sort of understanding how... How cheese got woven into our diet so heavily. Actually, it goes back to 1981, when the new incoming Secretary of Agriculture got tipped to the most bizarre situation in the middle of the country. And he flew out there, perhaps thinking, this is so unbelievable. I have to see this for myself. And landed and went to Missouri, where they have these natural underground caverns, which was really valuable, as it turns out, because there's sort of natural cooling in the caverns.

• 20:34Speaker 11

  And what he saw was just astounding and kind of mind blowing to him. There were 1.9 billion pounds of processed cheese that was sitting in these caverns, unused, unwanted, certainly uneaten.

• 20:55Pablo Torre?

  The Secretary of Agriculture found out that there was almost 2 billion [bleep] pounds of processed cheese in these caverns. But I want to clarify what these caverns are, right? So these are non-government caverns, these caves. But what the government realizes is that they could use this space, this underground, secret space, to store the cheese that they had bought, right? So it's not government cheese caves. It's government cheese in these caves.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Right, and there are a couple of places now where government cheese was once stored. In Missouri alone, there's a place called Springfield Underground. And then there's also Kraft.

• 21:33Pablo Torre?

  And it is my disappointment, I must report, that the Kraft in question is not the same as Bob Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. As you visualize this, this is not an NFL connection.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Well, Pablo, there is an NFL connection here. Let's take a look at this place underneath Kansas City. It's called Subtropolis.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  So Subtropolis exists because limestone in Kansas City was mined for concrete. And now there's a climate-controlled space in the places where limestone was once. There's 6 million square feet down there. That's more than 100 football fields. There are almost 2,000 employees. And crucially, it's always 65 degrees down there, which makes it the ideal temperature for storing things like government records, old Hollywood film reels, and crucially, every episode of Seinfeld.

• 22:27Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that in this 65-degree cavern that is unbelievably massive, somewhere in there, there is a reel of Jorskastanza declaring, celebrating...

• 22:37Speaker 06

  I was free and clear! I was living the dream! I was stripped of the waist eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery!

• 22:44Speaker 12

  Before we go any further, I'd just like to point out how disturbing it is that you equate eating a block of cheese with some sort of Bachelor of Paradise.

• 22:54Pablo Torre?

  But again, I should clarify this. There's a lot going on here. The US government, again, does not actually own Subtropolis.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Right. Subtropolis, the NFL connection, is actually owned by the family holdings of Lamar Hunt.

• 23:09Pablo Torre?

  Yes, this is the original owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, Lamar Hunt, whose descendant now is the owner of the Chiefs, Clark Hunt. This is a royal family of football.

• 23:19Speaker 13

  Yes, we're covered in confetti. Thank you, JV. Kansas City, congratulations! Heading back to the Super Bowl again.

• 23:29Speaker 14

  On behalf of the National Football League, it is my honor to present the Lamar Hunt Trophy to the American Football Conference Champions, the Kansas City Chiefs.

• 23:43Speaker 13

  There you go, Clark.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  The same Chiefs who are in the Super Bowl this week.

• 23:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, always holding up the Lombardi Trophy at the end. This is that family.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 23:55Pablo Torre?

  All of which is why I immediately approved one of the more insane expense reports, among many, many absurd expense reports I've approved on this show, to send you to Subtropolis. Visit the Kansas City Chiefs Underground City Cheese Cave thing.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I had my harness set up and I was ready to go spelunking into these cheese caves on your behalf. But this is where Cupcake the Destroyer 21's conspiracy starts to unravel. We emailed the Chiefs. We went back and forth with an official at Hunt Midwest, which owns Subtropolis. They graciously offered to show us around the caves, but there was a catch. There's no government cheese there.

• 24:32Pablo Torre?

  Right, so this part, I want to take a beat because this is when it got startling to find all of this out. Because the email that you got from the Hunt corporate communications guy, who was very familiar with all of these viral TikTok videos, perhaps unsurprisingly now, said this, quote, "The cheese thing is not true," end quote.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in fact, it goes further than that because there's no government cheese anywhere anymore, Pablo. And even in those other caves that I mentioned, Springfield and Kraft, they were very clear about that. They do have cheese, but it's not government cheese. Springfield Underground even has a very helpful part of their website that says like, "We do not have government cheese in this facility." And then there's Kraft. So I reached out to them, they didn't respond to me. But I do have a document from 1970 from the USDA that says that Kraft was one of the holders of government cheese.

• 25:26Pablo Torre?

  So again, there was government cheese in at least some of these caves, but they're not there anymore. And government cheese caves were actually never quite a thing. So what happened to the billions of dollars and billions of pounds of cheese that Ronald Reagan discovered when he took office at the United States had been stockpiling this entire time?

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, they started giving away the cheese that was in the cheese caves. And at the same time, they stopped buying so much cheese from dairy farmers. So they're reducing the amount that they're taking in. They're starting to give it away. It was such a problem for Ronald Reagan to have this much cheese in these caves that he actually decided to give it to poor people. Like, that's how distasteful he found it. And even Ronald Reagan was like, "Let's help poor people out here for a second."

• 26:16Pablo Torre?

  Right. This welfare program originally for dairy farmers became, under Ronald Reagan, an actual welfare program for the poor people, the needy people in America, which is stunning on so many different levels.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  He's probably rolling over in his grave just thinking about that one part of his legacy.

• 26:33Speaker 15

  Before we even announced the giveaway of surplus cheese, the warehouse mice had hired a lobbyist.

• 26:40Pablo Torre?

  The logical conclusion here, though, seems to be that because there is no government cheese anymore, because there are no government cheese caves anymore, that the theory we started this with, Cupcake the Destroyer 21's theory, which has been viewed again and shared by millions of people by now across media, it has been pulled apart, as it were. The government, our elected officials, did not actually create stuffed crust pizza in order to justify and get rid of all of the surplus cheese because Ronald Reagan had already gotten rid of it by being forced into a weird form of charity.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Well, Pablo, I didn't say all that. What if I told you that I discovered that the government is, in fact, in the stuffed crust pizza business?

• 27:22Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  And in fact, that stuffed crust pizza is only the tip of the utter?

• 27:26Pablo Torre?

  All right. If we're gonna be here for this long and doing this, I'm going to make a call of my own, David Gardner.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Look out, folks. Pablo Torre is reporting right now.

• 27:34Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 27:45Speaker 16

  Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. All calls are recorded for quality assurance. Este llamado está siendo grabado por propósitos de calidad.

• 27:51Speaker 17

  To place a new order or make changes to an existing order, press 1. Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. This video will carry out.

• 28:00Pablo Torre?

  Hi, this is Pablo Torre, and I would like to order a, uh... Yeah, I guess one. One. Large? Yeah. Extra-large? Uh, one, one large stuffed crust pizza.

• 28:20Pablo Torre?

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• 31:14Pablo Torre?

  Plus, Cozy's free one-on-one design consultations make the whole home vision a lot less intimidating. Cozy has everything you need to make your home feel like it has a plan because Cozy makes every part of the process easy. So, visit Cozy today. That's C-O-Z-E-Y dot com and make yourself at home.

• 31:40Pablo Torre?

  So as I wait for my, uh, my reporting to bake, the whole government cheese theory obviously has melted by now. But the original takeaway here from Cook, Bake, The Destroyer 21, that the government is why we have stuffed crust pizza, you're telling me is still holding firm. So what is happening here?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  So to answer that part of the question completely, we're going to return to our friend, Michael Moss, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter.

• 32:08Speaker 11

  So coming out of that trip to the caves and that kind of very embarrassing moment for everybody, instead of asking that question, how do we get like dairy farmers to grow less cows and make less milk that gets turned into cheese? They asked the question, how do we get people to eat more cheese? And that's where they came up with the ingenious idea of creating a fund to pay for marketing schemes, which the US government would then oversee and control. That was the birth of this entity called Dairy Management,

• 32:50Speaker 11

  whose mission it is to increase the consumption of cheese in every which way they can.

• 33:00Pablo Torre?

  So just to translate our Pulitzer Prize winning friend here, what Michael Moss is telling us is that there is something known as Dairy Management Incorporated. It is a promotional organization for the dairy industry, but it is supervised by the government. And this sort of pseudo-governmental agency, Dairy Management Incorporated, was skimming, as it were, off the top of dairy sales, taking money from the dairy farmers, David, to pay for advertising that the government effectively oversaw to help sell cheese.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, the easiest way to think about this is essentially it's just a tax. For every 100 pounds of milk that dairy farmers sell, and the equivalent of that is like $20, DMI Dairy Management, Inc. gets a few cents on those purchases.

• 33:46Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so in the timeline here, we left Ronald Reagan in the 80s. Where are we now? When was DMI founded?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  DMI came to be in 1995.

• 33:53Pablo Torre?

  Right, okay. So 1995, the government, to, again, the credit of Copy the Destroyer 21 and her theory, they actually were influencing the dairy industry because they were using these ads that they were controlling to sell more cheese to us.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 34:10Speaker 18

  Rush home from work, your night to cook. Cheese took a rescue. Make a quick Mexican pizza. Tortilla, ground beef, Colby Jack, peppers, salsa, you've gotten a knack.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  They also work with influencers.

• 34:26Pablo Torre?

  It always comes back to viral videos.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  And in this case, the king of YouTube himself, Mr. Beast.

• 34:32Speaker 19

  In case you don't know, drinking dairy is linked to some health benefits like reduced inflammation and a stronger immune system. And in a really pro gamer move, Dairy Farmers of America are aiming to be carbon neutral by 2050.

• 34:43Pablo Torre?

  Now that's epic.

• 34:44Speaker 19

  Thank you again to America's dairy farmers for sponsoring this video and make sure to support your local dairy farmers.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  And it goes even further than these advertising campaigns because DMI actually embeds food scientists in America's biggest fast food and restaurant chains and pizza chains. And the goal, the explicit goal here, is put more cheese and dairy products on the menus.

• 35:05Pablo Torre?

  And so now we're getting warmer, right? We're getting closer to the center of this thing, the GUI Center. We're talking about the government helping invent in a laboratory new cheese products. And so what restaurant chains are we talking about here?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  We're talking about McDonald's. We're talking about, one of the biggest successes was in Taco Bell. 2016, they come out with this new menu item called the Quesa Lupa.

• 35:28Pablo Torre?

  Of course. I mean, this is, you know, we all know taco with cheese actually inside of the shell. It's a brilliant innovation, admittedly.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  And DMI has a food scientist who actually works in Taco Bell headquarters in California, and he was-

• 35:41Pablo Torre?

  Embedded in Taco Bell.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Embedded inside the very building. And he actually helped come up with the concept for this. He helped create the Quesa Lupa, and DMI helped to market it.

• 35:55Speaker 20

  This is gonna be bigger than Mars landings.

• 35:59Speaker 20

  Hey, cheese in a shell. This is gonna be bigger than aliens. Bigger than aliens.

• 36:07Speaker 21

  Okay, Giorgio, somebody already said that.

• 36:10Speaker 20

  Bigger than James Harden's beard. This is gonna be bigger than those things. Why they call those hoverboards? I don't know. They don't hover.

• 36:21Pablo Torre?

  Again, for anybody who says we're not a sports show.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  That was James Harden.

• 36:24Pablo Torre?

  I just found out that James Harden was part of a government op to sell queso lupus.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  And they're all over the place. DMI helped develop Domino's recent cheesy tots and cheesy breads. They even claim credit for helping McDonald's ice cream machines stop breaking down so frequently.

• 36:40Pablo Torre?

  I mean, really?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  It's a big problem.

• 36:42Pablo Torre?

  I know it's a problem, but they say they fixed it.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  I mean, if they had, wouldn't you claim credit for that? Like, that would be the government's most successful and popular operation since landing on the moon, I think.

• 36:52Pablo Torre?

  I just want to clarify that DMI and all of these cheesy experiments and these product inventions, they are classified as part of the US government formally? Like, I want to be also just careful here. Like, this is actually government work.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that is another place where the conspiracy is a little loosely held, right? It's complicated. It operates as a nonprofit and it's overseen by the US Department of Agriculture, famously part of the government and a board of farmers. But most of its money comes from those taxes that we were talking about earlier.

• 37:23Pablo Torre?

  Right. The whole relationship between DMI and the Agriculture Department and what it's technically then classified as, it makes me think that, yes, the answer is, this is the government.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, some fine minds actually came together to answer the question of whether this was the government. The US Supreme Court took on this question in 2005.

• 37:41Speaker 22

  It involves a challenge to the federal program of generic advertising for beef, popularly known as the Beef It's What's For Dinner campaign.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  A group of farmers sued another one of these promotional agencies that worked in the beef industry, and they were essentially saying that they were being forced to participate in these advertising campaigns in violation of their First Amendment rights.

• 38:04Pablo Torre?

  Right, we're talking about these taxes that are levied on, in this case, for us, dairy farmers, like, whether they want it or not, right? The pseudo-governmental agency we're describing is basically saying, "We know how to help you move all of this cheese you're trying to sell, better in fact than you do, we're gonna take care of it."

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Shame if you had all this cheese spoil and cheese caves, right? So, the Supreme Court answers this question, and they say it's not a First Amendment violation because DMI's speech was protected as government speech.

• 38:34Speaker 22

  The First Amendment analysis is not changed by the fact that this government speech is funded through a targeted assessment on cattle sales.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Which seems to answer the question of whether or not this body is part of the government. In this tension, what dairy management's relationship is with the federal government, our friend Michael Moss incorporated this into his article in 2010 in The Times, and his concern wasn't so much that the government was hiding this stuffed crust pizza conspiracy, but rather that it was promoting harmful behavior.

• 39:04Speaker 11

  Cheese was delivering to us not just the luscious sensation of mouthfeel, but also heart disease. And then to kind of realize that the federal government with US taxpayer money supporting it is in fact guiding and overseeing this effort to get us to eat more and more cheese. We went from 1970 until, you know, recently, tripling our cheese consumption to 33 pounds a year, which is basically 60,000 calories just from cheese, which is arguably one

• 39:46Speaker 11

  of the biggest man-made health disasters of our time: obesity, overweight, type 2 diabetes related to overeating.

• 39:57Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that the government is actively creating the foods. It's also telling us not to eat because it's bad for us.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it sort of reminds me of when I was a child, I went to this dentist. And after you got done with your cleaning and you walked up to pay your bill and book your next appointment, they had freshly baked cookies on the desk.

• 40:19Pablo Torre?

  Right, this is, this actually relates to another theory that I have, which is that exterminators can't be too good at exterminating. You need, you know, repeat customers.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I reached out to DMI about this and they said, and this is a quote, "These partnerships aren't just about, quote, more dairy. They're about creating something people love and showcasing the versatility of the dairy foods the US dairy farmers provide us every day. It's a win-win for innovation and consumer choice." And then they say, "In 2024 alone, we helped launch new products such as Domino's New York style pizza, Taco Bell chillers, Domino's five cheese mac and cheese, and Taco Bell's cheesy chalupa."

• 40:56Pablo Torre?

  This is kind of like the Kansas City Chiefs bragging about drafting Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelsey and Chris Jones and Trev McNally. And I mean, look, the, the front office here is strong.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  And they have results like the Chiefs. Since they started partnering with Domino's in 2008, that company has doubled its use of cheese.

• 41:14Pablo Torre?

  How can Domino's double the amount of cheese?

• 41:17Speaker 03

  It's a pizza company already. It's impressive the way that DMI is able to put cheese onto these menus.

• 41:24Pablo Torre?

  Right, okay, so now that we know that DMI is at least partially this arm of the government in this way, the Supreme Court, in fact, allowed them to do so, to get into the lab, create all of this stuff. But as we order these products on Sunday, right, on Super Bowl Sunday, we now return to the biggest allegation of them all, David.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

• 41:47Pablo Torre?

  And how, how are we ruling on this?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  So to answer that question, I had to make some calls. I reached out to Pizza Hut corporate, they didn't respond to me. But finally, after weeks, months of searching, trying to find someone who was in the room at the time that this pizza was invented.

• 42:04Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  On an old press release, I found the number of the man behind the mystery himself. He was traveling, so we were only able to talk on the phone, but allow me to introduce you to Tom Ryan.

• 42:15Speaker 23

  My name is Tom Ryan. I am a, I guess I would refer to myself now as a serial entrepreneur. Did a lot of really cool project work for some of the biggest food companies, restaurant companies in the world.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Tom worked for Pizza Hut in the 1990s, and I should say he later developed the McGriddle at McDonald's.

• 42:34Pablo Torre?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  He later co-founded Smash Burger.

• 42:37Pablo Torre?

  I mean, that's pretty good.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Critically, he did not work for DMI. But his true legacy arguably is that he and this team that he was working with, they created the original mass market stuffed crust pizza.

• 42:50Pablo Torre?

  Wait, this was the man in the lab originally? And that lab, again, crucially, was not funded by the federal government.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the way he describes it, creating stuffed crust pizza was a math equation.

• 43:05Speaker 23

  If you wanted to make a pizza more valuable, there were two ways to do it. Put more cheese on it or charge less for it. And charging less for it's not a good business model. But we never really thought about the architecture. And so stuffed crust pizza was a novel idea. Nobody had ever done it before. That was a real innovation for the marketplace. And so the simple notion was to put cheese, which is the value driver of pizza, the most iconic part of pizza value, into the least valued part of the pizza, which is the crust.

• 43:38Pablo Torre?

  Actually incredible logic.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Unassailable, really.

• 43:41Pablo Torre?

  The crust has always been the afterthought. And of course, and I did not know to say it this way, the most iconic value driver of pizza is in fact cheese. He has a great point.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  I can't say that anytime I sit down and have a pizza, that I'm thinking, where's the value in this slice? I'm just sort of lightly stoned and eating it.

• 44:00Pablo Torre?

  We're gonna drive the [BLEEP] out of the value in this crust.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so I asked Tom, I wanted to know, when they created this iconic menu item, did they know right away, like, we've done it? Like, we've advanced pizza in a way that no one has in hundreds of years?

• 44:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 44:19Speaker 23

  I'll never forget, I was sitting in the room, first focus group. Everybody's enjoying it, everybody's thinking it's really cool. Some guy, one of the panelists, looked into the mirror, he knew we were back there, and just looked right into the mirror and said, "My dog's gonna hate you." And the reason for that, back in the day, you know, people refer to that part of the pizza as the pizza bones, they eat the good stuff, you know, the sauce and the toppings, and then maybe some of the crust, and this is for everybody's pizza, and then they would toss the crust to their dog, and all of a sudden, we took that away from people because we had put so much value into the crust, and so it took us a year and a half to get it right, to get it integrated, to get it to work at store level, to get the marketing done, to get the positioning done, to get it tested.

• 45:03Speaker 23

  We started probably a year and a half to two, almost two years before April 1st of 1994, which was our launch date. And launched it on April 1st, never looked back, it was huge for us.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  And Pablo, I'd like to call your attention, right there at the end, to something that he said, "April 1st, 1994," and if you'll recall, DMI wasn't founded until 1995.

• 45:30Pablo Torre?

  So the timeline here then is clear, right? You found the inventor of stuffed crust pizza, and by the way, Tom has an amazing silver fox-like mullet mane thing going on. An underrated character in the history of American innovation, but his innovation happened before the government embedded the food scientist we've been talking about with the pizza companies, with these chains, and therefore, cupcake the destroyer 21's original theory that

• 45:57Speaker 04

  The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

• 46:00Pablo Torre?

  cannot be true, unless there were some other government officials, like in the room somewhere, David, is that possible?

• 46:07Speaker 03

  I asked Tom about this point blank on the record. There was no one from the federal government involved in the creation of this stuffed crust pizza?

• 46:17Speaker 23

  Nope, not a soul, believe me. I have no idea where that came from, but I can guarantee you this was driven by a really talented, first of all, a company that sponsored innovation, Pizza Hut, and I had a great team.

• 46:34Pablo Torre?

  You know, I was raised to believe David Gardner, that no one out pizzas the Hut. And I suppose Tom is the reason that that statement remains true today.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 46:45Pablo Torre?

  So to go back to, again, Cupcake the Destroyer 21 and her original theory, and also that quote in the New York Times from 2010 about how Pizza Hut, the lord of the cheese and the lady of the cheese, were working with the government. Like, how are we squaring this circle? Like, how does this all come together if what Tom is saying, as we now have verified, is actually the real story? What is the explanation for all of this?

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the real truth behind this conspiracy theory is that the government did not create the original stuffed crust pizza, but DMI did have a hand in creating a stuffed crust pizza. So if we're returning back to that Michael Moss article in the New York Times,

• 47:26Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  he references a later stuffed crust pizza that DMI helped to develop called the Cheesy Bites Pizza, also from Pizza Hut.

• 47:33Pablo Torre?

  But this is not the original stuffed crust. This is a Cheesy Bites sequel.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Correct, and people have taken that line out of context and mistakenly created this conspiracy theory.

• 47:44Speaker 11

  The Dairy Management folks kind of worked hand in hand with the pizza chains, especially sort of, especially Pizza Hut, to think about ways to add more pizza. And they came up with something called Pizza Bites.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was in 2007.

• 48:03Speaker 24

  Hey, guys. We'll have the new Cheesy Bites pizza.

• 48:07Speaker 21

  Are you ready, bites? Start poppin'.

• 48:11Speaker 21

  These bites were made for poppin', and that's just what they do. One of these days, these bites are gonna pop right into...

• 48:22Speaker 21

  The new Cheesy Bites Pizza from Pizza Hut. A pizza with 28 poppable bites, packed with melted cheese. $11.99 for a large. I thought I was the pop star.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  But Pablo, I do have to tell you, there is something even stranger here that most people have missed. Because we've ruled out now that the government created stuffed crust pizza. Didn't happen. We have the guy who created stuffed crust pizza.

• 48:47Pablo Torre?

  Right. We know the original comes from Tom.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  But stuffed crust pizza kind of created our current government.

• 48:54Pablo Torre?

  I am lightheaded enough to need to eat something to process this, which hopefully will happen at the top of the next segment.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Do you want to take the top of the box just off? You can just like rip that off, right? Or unless you want to...

• 49:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, maybe we open it at the end.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:24Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. We should say that this is not, I mean, maybe it's obvious. Pizza Hut did not sponsor this in any way.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  They wouldn't even answer my questions.

• 49:33Pablo Torre?

  They would not answer your calls. They barely answered my attempt to order the delivery. But before we earn the right to enjoy this, what are you talking about when you're saying that stuffed crust pizza actually invented our government, not the other way around?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so stuffed crust pizza was not a success right out of the gate. Pizza Hut's sales were down that year when it was invented. So Pizza Hut turns to a new advertising agency to come up with a new ad, and they're going to run it during the Final Four in 1995. Because Pablo, this is a sports show, let me remind you. That's our connection.

• 50:06Pablo Torre?

  No, I'm 10 years old. This is activating sensory memories. Like, when did I first discover it? I think it was during this time.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so I tracked down an advertising executive named Mike Campbell.

• 50:17Speaker 25

  I spent about 25 years producing ads.

• 50:23Speaker 25

  So I slogged pizzas for probably about 15 years in my professional life. And now I'm now I'm trying to make up for all those calories, those cholesterol and those sins of selling products that people really don't need.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  He's done a bunch of Super Bowl spots and he helped create the original stuffed crust pizza ad.

• 50:46Speaker 25

  So I had at the time, two brilliant partners. You know, a lot of times you just, it's like a writer's room. You're just sitting, you know, on sofas and procrastinate for days and days, knowing that the deadline's coming closer and closer and closer and closer.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  And he told me that his colleague, right at their deadline.

• 51:04Speaker 25

  Out of the blue says, um, look at the pizzas. Eat the pizza the wrong way, crust first. I mean, it was, it was, it was that simple.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  And Pablo, just wait till you hear the pitch for the original commercial they wrote around this concept.

• 51:25Speaker 25

  A man and a, and a seven year old, and you know, you see them walking down the street and you cut and you realize, oh, it's Pete Rose and there's this little boy Johnny. And, um, uh, so the, the kid says, hey, Mr. Rose, I got a question. Why aren't you in the Hall of Fame? And Pete looks down to him and he says, Johnny, I guess it's because I eat my pizza the wrong way, crust first. And a box just comes out. Then you cut to a beautiful pizza footage. They're sitting on the front porch, you know, enjoying pizza. And, um, Pete says to the kid, he says, Johnny, what do you think of it? You like, you like that stuffed crust pizza? And he says, you bet, Mr. Rose, you bet.

• 52:09Speaker 25

  He says, poor choice of words, Johnny, poor choice of words.

• 52:16Pablo Torre?

  It is remarkable how sports we are, this show.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  I bring you sports stories, Pablo.

• 52:20Pablo Torre?

  How dare anybody accuse us of otherwise.

• 52:24Pablo Torre?

  But I don't know this commercial. Like, I don't remember this. I, this is not in my otherwise very vivid memory.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it never aired. And to hear Michael Campbell tell this, he says that basically Pizza Hut got upset because Pete Rose bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he was gonna be in this commercial, and then they cut the commercial.

• 52:44Pablo Torre?

  I mean...

• 52:44Speaker 03

  It would have been a great commercial. Yeah. And what happens next is what makes the US government a product of the stuffed crust pizza.

• 52:56Speaker 25

  And then we thought, you know, who else? Who else out there, you know, would, would, would do something wrong? Well, bring out center stage Donald Trump, right?

• 53:07Speaker 26

  Donald Trump reportedly walked out this week, saying the marriage was no longer working and hoping to settle under terms of a prenuptial contract guaranteeing Ivana the house, the kids, and more than $20 million. Ivana has rejected the deal through a lawyer calling the contract unconscionable and fraudulent.

• 53:26Speaker 25

  So, at the time, Donald, um, you know, was hemorrhaging money, bankrupt. Uh, he had just, uh, five years earlier, you know, divorced Ivana in this very public, messy, messy, messy, messy divorce. But I just want to preface this by saying, he wasn't political. For all those, you know, I mean, for those who love him, fine, but for those who, you know, I have to apologize to in my circle, you know, it's like, he wasn't, he was an [BLEEP], but he was our, he was our [BLEEP].

• 53:58Speaker 27

  Do you really think this is the right thing for us to be doing, Ivana?

• 54:02Speaker 28

  But what people think?

• 54:03Speaker 27

  Let them talk.

• 54:04Speaker 28

  Donald, Donald.

• 54:05Speaker 27

  Ivana, Ivana, Ivana. It's wrong, isn't it?

• 54:09Speaker 28

  But it feels so right.

• 54:11Speaker 27

  Then it's a deal?

• 54:12Speaker 28

  Yes, we eat our pizza the wrong way.

• 54:14Speaker 27

  Crust first. Introducing stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut. With a ring of cheese baked into a totally new, thinner crust, you'll want to eat it the wrong way. Crust first.

• 54:22Speaker 28

  I have the last slice.

• 54:24Speaker 27

  Actually, you're only entitled to half.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  As our ad man was telling us, Trump was basically bankrupt at the time. He'd been removed from Forbes' list of billionaires. He actually defaulted on over $3 billion in loans for his New Jersey casinos. And this million dollars the Pizza Hut paid him for this commercial was a lifeline. But more than that, this was Trump's first national ad campaign.

• 54:51Pablo Torre?

  Wait, this was, this was-

• 54:52Speaker 03

  This was the first one-

• 54:54Pablo Torre?

  Donald Trump as actual mainstream pitchman was this.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Correct. And what follows is Trump steaks and Trump time shares and-

• 55:02Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I know where it goes, David.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  -this image of him as a brilliant businessman through the reality TV shows, on The Apprentice. And as the creator of that ad himself said-

• 55:12Speaker 25

  So, yeah, it was the slice that launched 1,000 groans, you know?

• 55:21Pablo Torre?

  What a deeply American tale that we have spun.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  To me, Trump represents the best and worst of America all in one package. And so does stuffed crust pizza.

• 55:33Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I regret to inform you that despite my moral compunctions and otherwise ethical concerns about what we're celebrating here, my stomach is actively groaning right now. And so, as we reckon with how all roads lead to the same place all the time, the same guy being at the center, the gooey center of a story that I did not think would end up here, I think it's, I think it's time, David. I think it's time for us to attack this pizza the way that you attacked your reporting.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Crust first?

• 56:04Pablo Torre?

  Crust first.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  And we can still go to Subtropolis if you want to.

• 56:07Pablo Torre?

  I mean, oh, this is-

• 56:13Pablo Torre?

  This is not quite the, oh, yep. This is not quite the beautiful TV-ready version, but-

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Here we go. Crust first, though, Pablo. Critically.

• 56:23Pablo Torre?

  So, I'm so hungry.

• 56:34Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 56:40Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 57:01Speaker 07

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