Pentagon Pizza Index
50 comments
·July 30, 2025lelandfe
maxbond
Don't historians already contend with a bunch of lies and misunderstandings people wrote down in the past? Eg, it's my understanding that the Salem Witch Trials were driven by property disputes and petty grievances, but presumably that's a product of historians reading critically and between the lines, and no one wrote down "it would be really convenient if Goody So-and-So died, because I want a bigger farm?"
treetalker
Don't worry: I just saw a list claiming that historians are among the top 40 jobs that "AI" is ready to take over.
ElevenLathe
The History profession was already on the outs well before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. Continued education inflation and the US assault on the academy generally aren't going to make it better.
rocky_raccoon
The AI-generated images don't do anything to help the case either...
xorbax
There will now be a CEO (Chief Executive Orderer) who will statistically balance fastfood orders during times requiring late nights to maintain normal public-facing order activity.
Or their boss will tell them to order "anything but a pizza . . . You all saw the website!", so it becomes an inverse indicator.
Jimmc414
Interesting thought experiment: Would it be considered market manipulation to order and pay for 1000 pizzas to be delivered to the Pentagon while holding crude oil futures expiring the next day?
bawolff
Maybe if this was the 70s. In modern times the oil market isn't quite as twitchy, and you can't tell just from the pizza index which country is about to be blowed up
jojobas
Oil futures swing by 15% in a day easily. Not knowing which country only adds to the uncertainty.
bawolff
I mean, you dont know if the country about to be blown up is an oil exporter.
anon191928
oil went negative few years ago, lol
LorenDB
This is a great website, but it'd be better without the AI-generated images (notice one of them mentions "Irak" instead of Iraq) and the Polymarket cards at the bottom. I don't understand why we've suddenly decided to normalize betting on anything and everything under the guise of "prediction markets."
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general1726
So Pizza Index is up because that 8.8 earthquake in Kamchatka has been right next to strategic Russian naval base, where nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads are stationed?
Earthquake to tsunami hitting that base is around 10 minutes, so essentially Russians would have no time to get out.
I don't think that tsunami would destroy that base, but let's say if submarine or some lighter ship has been moored on a pier it could very well damage it, maybe beyond repair considering current Russian situation.
https://www.twz.com/sea/questions-swirl-around-status-of-rus...
xorbax
Lame that you can't obviously choose to show the last two weeks of the total.
ashoeafoot
The only strategic nuclear submarine base of russia. Which already lost most of their ts strategic bomber fleet.
eurleif
Has anyone actually done the work of checking how well this correlates with world events? It gets attention when it has an apparent hit, which makes it appear predictive; but you could make a random noise generator appear predictive in the same manner.
kjellsbells
Fun site, but the Defense apparatus isn't centered solely on the Pentagon, so the pizza signal is muddy at best. Now, if the pizzerias of Arlington suddenly get busy at the same time as the ones in Langley and Chantilly, well, maybe...
stygiansonic
Wonder why they haven’t gotten an in house pizzeria yet to reduce the signal on this side channel leak
theturtle
I have actually had pizza at the Pentagon. True, it was almost 30 years ago, and it tasted like federal-cafeteria pizza, but it was edible and I'm still alive.
dylan604
I had that pizza every Friday throughout elementary school
raincole
I think the signal itself is pretty much just noise. If you're scheming against Pentagon you'd assume they're always working hard anyway.
rl3
Because with their budget they can afford to induce artificial demand and thus exert control over the signal, fooling adversaries in the process.
AlotOfReading
I doubt that's it. Artificial demand just adds noise to the signal, it doesn't eliminate it. It seems more likely that they've just decided that knowing the Pentagon is working on something without additional details isn't a very useful signal for adversaries.
VoidWhisperer
I was about to make this same comment - this data might've been more useful for say, the soviets, when they were the only major threat that the US was actively dealing with, so they could have some guarantee that if they spotted a ton of pizzas being ordered to the pentagon, they could be fairly sure it would be something to relevant to them.
yardstick
Sounds about right.
Plus when it’s time to go Mutually Assured Destruction, ie to those capable of attacking the US mainland, I’m going to assume they would be doing all this from whatever the successor to Mt Weather is.
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MangoToupe
You have an awful lot of faith in an institution that seems to put its ass out in the wind on a regular basis
beeflet
why not both
metaphor
They do[1], but only open on weekdays and closes at 1600.
password4321
Sbarro closed
noworld
just fyi, Your RSS.app Trial has Expired.
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j_timberlake
Would they be ordering pizzas during a real emergency though? Sounds like a code-yellow kind of thing.
addandsubtract
The idea is, that they're spending overtime at the Pentagon and need fast food (pizza) delivered to keep working.
vivzkestrel
stupid question: what happens if they all switch to eating tacos instead overnight because of a new policy at pentagon following this website s launch
BaseBaal
Stupid answer: methane levels would suddenly spike inside the pentagon early the next morning, perhaps giving the GasInt division just enough warning.
johnthuss
There was an excellent podcast covering this on Endless Thread!
Sites like this are proof of why future research is going to be so damn hard. This site presents as unvarnished truth that PIZZINT was a thing in the Cold War – even giving fake quotes and a date range – but there's no evidence to support it[0]. It's just a story. I'm guessing some AI hit a few sources like Fast Company, read words like "allegedly," and decided that was just semantics.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/07/01/pentagon-pizz...