Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Decoding the Unknown. Today, how long did Big Tobacco hide the effects of smoking?

I don't know, Danny, you wrote today's script. You've either good effects, the nicotine buzz, the taste of tobacco, the smell on your clothes, the cancer.

Anyway, let's find out, shall we? The way the show works is Danny has written a script for me.

I'm going to read it.

Let's explore it together, dear audience.

Six American guys.

As a public relations expert walk into a bar.

That might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, and in a way it is, except that it was

an exceptionally poor taste.

And the joke was on about 150 million smokers who died, laughing.

Oh, God.

The year was in the 153.

The location was the New York Plaza Hotel, and the occasion was a crisis meeting in which

the presidents of the big six tobacco companies

were meeting up with a PR company to discuss a bit of a prickly problem. Word was finally beginning to trickle out that their product was killing their customers, and this was putting everyone on a bit of a downer. It must have been great to be alive in like the 1980s, right, where you don't really know that smoking's bad for you, you're just like, yeah, it's pretty nice. it suppresses my appetite, and it makes me less fat, and it gives me a buzz, and it's just really pleasant. I mean, I have this unpleasant cough, but other than that, it's brilliant. It was felt that simply denying the truth wasn't going to work in this case, and so the purveyors of coffin nails had to think a bit smarter than that. Depending on your viewpoint,

what they came up with in that hotel could be described as either genius, terrifying,

or downright balmy, but it worked. Oh, Danny, I think you could be all of the above.

Fast forward about 40 years and seven American guys walk into a congressional hearing. Oh, no,

wasn't it nine at the beginning? Did two of them die from smoking? Oh, it was 40 years later, actually, probably a lot of them died, didn't they? Because, you know, they'd be really old and shit. That might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, and in a way it is, but it's one we'd heard many times before. The year was 1994, and the seven guys were the CEOs of the seven major tobacco companies,

and the occasion was a congressional inquiry into whether executives had engineered and manipulated,

deadly and addictive products. It's like, oh, sweet, naive 1994. All seven CEOs insisted that they did not believe tobacco to be harmful.

Right, and they did so under oath.

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