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

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Cheese, glorious cheese, tastes mighty inviting.

Right after this ad.

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Looks like you got a haircut.

Yep, I did.

Just for the show, Pablo.

That's the level of professionalism I think you expect.

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

I do want to try and summarize for people not familiar with your work, David Gardner.

Thank you for being here, by the way.

My pleasure.

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.

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.

Right.

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

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

That's right.

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.

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 going to love the username here, Pablo, Cupcake the Destroyer 21.

And here's what she had to say: 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 case, 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.

The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

So, uh, this video by the aforementioned Cupcake the Destroyer 21

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 U.S.

government to save the dairy industry.

And prevent a stock market crash by buying with taxpayer money an insane surplus of cheese, which the government has stored in underground cheese caves.

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

Right.

Which means, as Cupcake the Destroyer 21 says, the government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.

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 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, because of course they do, 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.

Right.

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

We need to put more cheese here.

Here?

Damn it, soldier, we need to put more cheese here.

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

There's no more room.

I don't give a crap.

Put it in the goddamn crust if you have to.

So I just need people to understand, if they're wondering why it is that we here, Pablitori 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.

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.

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 f ⁇ ing 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 cheesecaves, bring us back what feels like a truth that deserves to be told.

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.

The deep dish state, the real Pizzagate.

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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?

Oh, this ain't no Velveeta.

This ain't individually wrapped.

You got to put some pressure on the butcher knife to cut some government cheese.

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.

Yeah.

And so to get into the theory, we need to do a little investigation.

And so to start, start, we had to go back in time.

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 invalids.

For more than a century now, dating back to the Great Depression, the U.S.

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.

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.

So in terms of what Cupcake the Destroyer 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?

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.

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?

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

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 going to change it.

Vote for Jimmy Carter this coming Tuesday.

And so obviously, Jimmy Carter, rest in peace, by the way, all of this converging in a relevance 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?

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

Yes.

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

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 shit.

And how do they store it?

So Pablo, liquid milk famously expires quite quickly.

There's a little date off 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, you know, aged cheese is a commodity that people enjoy.

Yes, I'm one of those people.

But we're fast forwarding now into, what, the 1980s at this point.

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

Cheese glorious cheese

tastes mighty inviting.

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.

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.

These ads were from the National Dairy Board.

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.

Make your meals safe with real cheese.

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?

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.

Yes.

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.

You know, it's an odd business journalism, right?

Where one moment I'm traipsing around the Middle East, and then the next

moment I'm poking into

craft and how they get us to eat so much.

It's, you got to love it.

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

One of the big moments, I think, when it comes to sort of understanding how

cheese got, you know, woven into our diet so heavily actually 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 like so unbelievable, I have to see this for myself.

And, you know, it 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.

And

what he saw was just astounding and 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.

The Secretary of Agriculture found out that there was almost 2 billion fing 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 realized 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.

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.

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.

Well, Pablo, there is an NFL connection here.

Let's take a look at this place underneath Kansas City.

It's called Subtropolis.

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.

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

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 paradise.

But again, I should clarify this.

There's a lot going on here.

The U.S.

government, again, does not actually own Subtropolis.

Right.

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

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.

Presentation of the Lamar Hunt Trophy.

Yes, we're covered in confetti.

Thank you, JV.

Kansas City, congratulations.

Heading back to the Super Bowl again.

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.

There you go, Clark.

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

Yeah, always holding up the Lombardi trophy at the end.

This is that family.

Exactly.

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 cheesecave thing.

I mean, I had my harness set up and I was ready to go spelunking into these cheesecaves 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.

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.

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.

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 billions of dollars and billions of pounds of cheese that Ronald Reagan discovered when he took office that the United States had been stockpiling this entire time?

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.

That even Ronald Reagan was like, let's help poor people out here for a second.

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.

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

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

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 Dow 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.

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?

Okay.

And in fact, that stuffed crust pizza is only the tip of the udder.

All right.

If we're going to be here for this long and doing this,

I'm going to make a call of my own, David Gardner.

Look out, folks.

Pablo Torrey is reporting right now.

Yeah, that's right.

To place a new order or make changes to an existing order, press one.

Hi, this is Pablo Torre.

And I would like to order a

yeah, I guess one

large, extra large, one, one large stuffed crust pizza.

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So as I wait for my

reporting to bake, the whole government cheese theory obviously has melted by now.

But the original takeaway here from Cook Cake 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?

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

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

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.

Yeah, the easiest way to think about this is essentially it's just a tax.

For every hundred 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.

Right.

And so, in the timeline here, we left Ronald Reagan in the 80s.

Where are we now?

When was DMI founded?

DMI came to be in 1995.

Right.

Okay.

So, 1995, the government, to again, the credit of Cuppy 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.

That's right.

Rush home from work, your night to cook.

Cheese to the rescue.

Make Make a quick Mexican pizza.

Tortilla, ground beef, Colby Jack, peppers, salsa, you got the knack.

They also work with influencers.

It always comes back to viral videos.

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

Beast.

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.

Now that's epic.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

And DMI has a food scientist who actually works in Taco Bell headquarters in California.

And he was embedded in Taco Bell.

Embedded inside the very building.

And he actually helped come up with the concept for this.

He helped create the quesalupa, and DMI helped to market it.

This is gonna be bigger than Mars landings.

Hey,

Jesus shell.

This is gonna be bigger than aliens.

Bigger than aliens.

Okay, Giorgio, somebody already said that.

Bigger than James Harden's beard.

This is gonna be bigger than those things.

why they call those hoverboards oh

they don't hover

again for anybody who says we're not a sports show we that was james harden i just found out that james harden was part of a government op to sell quesalupas 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 i mean really it's a big problem i mean i know

they say they fixed it 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.

I just want to clarify that DIBI and all of these cheesy experiments and these product inventions, they are classified as part of the U.S.

government formally.

Like, I want to be also just careful here.

Like, this is actually government work.

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 U.S.

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.

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.

Yeah.

And, you know, some fine minds actually came together to answer the question of whether this was the government.

The U.S.

Supreme Court took on this question in 2005.

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.

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.

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 going to take care of that.

Shame if you had all this cheese spoil in 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.

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

Which seems to answer the question of whether or not this body is part of the government.

And 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.

Cheese was delivering to us not just the luscious sensation of mouthfeel, but also heart disease.

And then to kind of 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 recently, tripling our cheese consumption to 33 pounds a year, which is basically 60,000 calories just from cheese, which is arguably one of the biggest man-made health disasters of our time.

Obesity, overweight, type 2 diabetes related to overeating.

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.

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 they had freshly baked cookies on the desk.

Right.

This is, this actually relates to another theory that I have, which is that exterminators can never be too good at exterminating.

You need, you know, repeat customers.

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 U.S.

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.

This is kind of like the Kansas City Chiefs bragging about drafting Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelsey and Chris Jones and Trent McDuffie.

And I mean, look, the front office here is strong.

And they have results like the Chiefs.

Since they started partnering with Domino's in 2008, that company has doubled its use of cheese.

How can Domino's double the amount of cheese it's?

It's a pizza company already.

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

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.

The government is why we have stuffed stuffed crust pizza.

And

how are we ruling on this?

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, 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.

My name is tom ryan i am a uh 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 tom worked for pizza hut in the 1990s and i should say he later developed the mcgriddle and mcdonald's whoa whoa whoa he later co-founded smash burger i mean that's pretty good 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.

Wait, this was the man in the lab originally.

And that lab, again, crucially, was not funded by the federal government.

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

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 is not a good business model.

But we never really thought about the architecture and so stuff 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

Actually incredible logic.

Unassailable, really.

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.

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 like lightly stoned and eating it.

We're going to drive the sh out of the value in this crust.

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.

Yes.

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 going to 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'd 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.

We started probably a year and a half to two, almost two years before April 1st of 1994, which was our launch day.

And launched it on April 1st, never looked back.

It was huge for us.

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.

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.

He is an underrated character in the history of American innovation.

But his innovation happened before the government embedded the food scientists we've been talking about with the pizza companies, with these chains.

And therefore, Cupcake the Destroyer 21's original theory that the government is why we have stuffed crust pizza cannot be true.

Unless there were some other government officials like in the room somewhere, David, is that possible?

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?

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.

You know, I was raised to believe, David Gardner, that no one outpizzas the hut.

And I suppose Tom is the reason that that statement remains true today.

Absolutely.

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?

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

But this is not the original stuffed crust.

This is a cheesy bites sequel.

Correct.

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

The dairy management folks kind of worked hand in hand with the pizza chains, especially sort of dairy,

especially Pizza Hut,

to

think about ways to add more pizza.

And they came up with something called pizza bites.

Yeah, it was in 2007.

Hey, guys, we'll have the new Cheesy Bites Pizza.

Are you ready, bites?

Start popping!

These bites were made for popping.

That's just what they'll

One of these days, these bites are gonna pop right into

the new cheesy bites pizza from Pizza Hut.

A pizza with 28 poppable bites packed with melted cheese.

$11.99 for large.

I thought I was the pop star.

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.

Right.

We know the original comes from Tom.

But stuffed crust pizza kind of created our current government.

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

You want to take the top of the box just off?

You can just like rip that off, right?

Or unless you want to.

Yeah, maybe we open it.

Yeah,

yeah.

We should say that this is not.

I mean, maybe it's obvious.

Pizza Hut did not sponsor this in any way.

They wouldn't even answer my question.

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 Stuff Crust Pizza actually invented our government, not the other way around?

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.

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.

Yeah.

And so I tracked down an advertising executive named Mike Campbell.

I spent about

25 years producing ads.

So I slogged pizzas for probably about 15 years

in my professional life.

And now I'm now trying to make up for all those calories, those cholesterol and those sins of selling products that people really don't need.

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

So I had at the time two brilliant partners.

You know, a lot of time 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.

And he told me that his colleague right at their deadline, out of the blue, says,

looking at the pizza, he says,

eat the pizza the wrong way, crust first.

I mean,

it was that simple.

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

A man and a seven-year-old, and 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

so 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.

And you cut to a beautiful pizza footage.

They're sitting on the front porch, you know, enjoying pizza.

And

Pete says to the kid, he says, Johnny, what do you think of the

you like that stuffed crust pizza?

And he says, you bet, Mr.

Rose, you bet.

He says, Poor choice of words, Johnny.

Poor choice of words.

It is remarkable how sports we are, this show.

I bring you sports stories, Pablo.

How dare anybody accuse us of otherwise?

But

I don't know this commercial.

Like, I don't remember this.

This is not in my otherwise very vivid memory.

Yeah, it never aired.

And to hear Michael Campbell tell this, he says that basically Pizza Hutt got upset because Pete Rose bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he was going to be in this commercial, and then they cut the commercial.

I mean, it would have been a great commercial yeah

and what happens next is what makes the u.s government a product of the stuffed crust pizza 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 Donald Trump reportedly walked out this week saying the marriage was no longer working and hoping to settle under terms of a pre-nuptial 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.

So at the time, Donald

was

hemorrhaging money, bankrupt.

He had just five years earlier 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, but

he was our.

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

But what do people think?

Let them talk.

Danielano.

Ivana Ivana Vana.

Introducing stuffed crust pizza from pizza.

With a ring of cheese baked into a totally new, thinner crust, you'll want to eat it the wrong way.

Crust first.

Did I have the last slice?

Actually, you're only entitled to half.

Large?

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.

This was the first.

Donald Trump as actual mainstream pitch man was this.

Correct.

And what follows is Trump stakes and Trump timeshares.

And this is a lot of people.

Oh, I know where it goes, David.

As a brilliant businessman through the reality TV shows on The Apprentice.

And as the creator of that ad himself said.

So, yeah,

it was the slice that launched launched a thousand groans.

You know,

what a deeply American tale that we have spun.

To me, Trump represents the best and worst of America all in one package.

And so does stuffed crust pizza.

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 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 time, David.

I think it's time for us to attack this pizza the way that you attacked your reporting.

Crust first?

Crust first.

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

I mean,

oh, this is

this is not quite the.

the oh yep, this is not quite the beautiful uh TV ready version, but here we go crust first though, Pablo.

Critically, so I'm so hungry.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.