The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - Pizzagate: We Investigate the (Real) Government Plot to Stuff You with Cheese

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. Where's your playlist taking you? Down the highway? To the mountains? Or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in traffic? With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, Best Western is there to help you make the most of your

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Yep, I did. Just for the show, Pablo. That's the level of professionalism I didn't 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 theories. Yeah, we brought Big J journalism to the Big Aristotle. That's right. And now, the strangely irresistible and extraordinarily insane internet theory brought us that you've spent a disturbingly long time investigating investigating just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, by the way, originates where? Yeah, so this months 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. 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 Jed's 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 So, 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 US 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 Domino's 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 red 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, 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, Publatory 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 the 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 am 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 cheese caves, 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 pizza gate. Stugaccio, I want to tell you a story. I'm serious here. My wife and my two daughters They begged me to buy a Peloton So I bought a Peloton and then I watched that Peloton sit in my office and stare at me

So, you know what I did one day? I looked at it and so I decided to get off my ass and I jumped on the Peloton because no one else was using It and I paid for it I mean so why not then I realized eventually that they bought it for me and I gotta tell you hey more Challenging than I could have ever imagined. Peloton coaches are walk in the walk. I love the coaches. I do the Grateful Dead one.

It's fantastic. They have a sub three hour marathon runner, military trained athletes, a former college basketball player and so many other well-rounded coaches on their team. All this experience really shows in their classes, which are never short of challenging, especially for me. So I jumped on it that first time, it was challenging, more challenging than I thought. Then I wanted to beat the bike and so I kept jumping on it and I absolutely love it.

I mean, I'm the only one who uses it, but again, they got it for me. I mean, I had no idea. That's a little passive aggressive, don't you think? Find your push, find your power with Peloton at OnePeloton.com. 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. 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 a 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, 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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, 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 kinda confusing right now. There was no actual specific company, it felt like. Make your meal sing with real cheese.

Whole lotta snacking going on 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, 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. 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 how cheese got you, 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, he 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. what he 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. The Secretary of Agriculture found out that there is almost two billion f***ing 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. 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 Craft, 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 a hundred 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 in the block of cheese the size of a car battery Before we go any further. I 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 there's a lot going on here. The US 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, whose descendant now is the owner of the Chiefs, Clark Hunt. This is a royal family of football. Yes, we're covered in confetti. Thank you JB. 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 Subdropolis. Visit the Kansas City Chief's Underground City Cheese Cave Thick. 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 conspiracies 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 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 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. Then 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. But 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 and in fact that stuffed crust pizza is only the tip of the utter. 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 Tori is reporting right now. Yeah that's right. Thank you for calling Pichar. All calls are recorded for quality assurance.

To place a new order or make changes to an existing order press 1 Thank you for this video carry out Hi, this is Pablo Torre and I would like to order a Yeah, I guess one one large extra large one one large stuffed crust pizza Look, this ain't the little itty bitty teeny tiny bowl. No, this is Super Bowl LIX. That's right. So get in on the action at DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of Super Bowl 59, which is what LIX stands for.

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varies by jurisdiction, Voight and Ontario. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co slash audio So as I wait for my My reporting to bake the whole government cheese theory obviously has melted by now But the original takeaway here from cupcake the destroyer, 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 gonna 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 dairy farmers to grow less cows and make less milk that gets turned into cheese, they asked the question, how 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 Maas is telling us is that there is something known as Dairy Management, Inc. 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 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. 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, OK. 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.

That's right. 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 quesalupa. 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.

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 going to be bigger than Mars landings. Hey, she's in a shell. This is going to be bigger than aliens. Bigger than aliens. Okay, Giorgio, somebody already said that. Bigger than James Harden's beard.

This is going to be big in those things. Why do they call those hover boards? I don't know. They don't hover. Again, for anybody who says we're not a sports show, we just- 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 know it's a problem, but 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 DMIBAI 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. 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 US 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 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 had freshly baked cookies on the desk. Right.

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 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. This is kind of like the Kansas City Chiefs bragging about drafting Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelsey and Chris Jones and Trent McNuffin. 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 using? 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 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 Like 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 McGrittle at McDonald's.

Whoa, whoa, 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'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. 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 gonna hate you. And the reason for that, back in the mirror, he knew we were back there and just looked right into the mirror and said, my dog is going to hate you. And the reason for that, back in the day, you know, people refer to that part of the pizza is 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. We started probably a year and a half to 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 launch date. 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 main thing going on.

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 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 out pizzas 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 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 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 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. Start popping! These bites were made for popping And that's just what they do One of these days these bites are gonna pop right into Whoa! 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 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 box just off? You can just like rip that off, right? Or unless you want to... Yeah, maybe we open it at the end. We should say that this is not... Maybe it's obvious Pizza Hut did not sponsor this in any way. They wouldn't even answer my questions.

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

So I have at the time two brilliant partners. You know, a lot of times it's like a writer's room. You just sit 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, look 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. ["The Man and the Seven-Year-Old"] A man and a seven-year-old, and you see them walking down the street, and then 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.. They 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 it? You like 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.

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 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. I mean, 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.

And then we thought, you know, who else, who else out there, you know, 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 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. 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 of those, I mean, for those who love him, fine, but for those who, I have to apologize to in my circle, you know, it's like he wasn't, he was an a**hole, but he was our, he was our a**hole. Do you really think this is the right thing

for us to be doing, Ivana? What do people think? Let them talk. Ivana. Ivana. It's wrong, isn't it? But it feels so right. Then it's a deal?

Yes, we eat our pizza the wrong way. 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. 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 three billion dollars 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. And this was the first one. Donald Trump as actual mainstream pitch man was this. Correct.

And what follows is Trump's stakes and Trump timeshares and 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, So yeah, it was the slice that launched a thousand groans. 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 Crest 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 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 Subtrapolis if you want to.

I mean, oh, this is... This is not quite the, oh yeah, this is not quite the beautiful TV ready version, but here we go. Cross first though, Pablo, critically. So I'm so hungry. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Art Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.