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The Sony Hack | The Mistakes Series · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. On the morning of November twenty fourth, twenty fourteen,
0:23
Speaker 1: just a few days before Thanksgiving, Michael Linton drove from
0:27
Speaker 1: his house in West Los Angeles to Culver City, the
0:31
Speaker 1: home of the sprawling complex that houses Sony Pictures Entertainment.
0:35
Speaker 1: He was the CEO. He had been at Sony nearly
0:39
Speaker 1: eleven years.
0:41
Speaker 2: The films were all going well. We had a bunch
0:43
Speaker 2: of stuff going really well on television, Breaking Bad and
0:46
Speaker 2: Blacklist and things like that. The music company also was
0:50
Speaker 2: having a very good year, so everything seemed to be
0:52
Speaker 2: on a steady pace.
0:54
Speaker 1: He turned onto Bundy from Samvasindi Boulevard.
0:58
Speaker 2: I was driving to work, and I get a phone
1:00
Speaker 2: call from our CFO, Dave Hendler, and he said, Mike,
1:04
Speaker 2: all of our systems are down. Nothing is working here
1:08
Speaker 2: at the studio. Appears like a bunch of our laptops
1:11
Speaker 2: have been fried and are unusable. They're actually broken, and
1:15
Speaker 2: we do not, for the life of us, understand what's happened.
1:18
Speaker 1: He arrived a few minutes later.
1:20
Speaker 2: The studio was a lot like a college campus. It's
1:23
Speaker 2: like five or seven thousand people, half of them are employees.
1:27
Speaker 2: But as a result of you all sitting in that
1:30
Speaker 2: one space. Word travels very fast and when I By
1:34
Speaker 2: the time I drove up, there were crowds already in
1:37
Speaker 2: front of the building, like, what's going on, what's happening,
1:40
Speaker 2: what's happening.
1:42
Speaker 1: The entire Sony Pictures operation had been hacked, and whoever
1:46
Speaker 1: had done it had clearly gotten deep inside.
1:49
Speaker 2: Nobody knew for sure what was going on. It was
1:52
Speaker 2: just pandemonium. Frankly.
1:54
Speaker 1: A few days later came the first blow. The hackers
1:58
Speaker 1: released the company's emails, all of them onto a website
2:02
Speaker 1: called Pastebin, the password de E spe one two three
2:09
Speaker 1: die Sony Pictures Entertainment. The press had a field day.
2:15
Speaker 2: Those emails were sallacious because they involved movie stars and
2:19
Speaker 2: people saying things about people they shouldn't have been saying.
2:22
Speaker 2: And you know, you were seeing the internal ten years
2:25
Speaker 2: of internal correspondence at a big Hollywood studio, which by
2:29
Speaker 2: definition has a lot of juicy stuff in it.
2:32
Speaker 1: Not just things involving stars, everyone's emails, emails to your
2:37
Speaker 1: wife or husband, to your kids, emails about people's medical problems, relationships,
2:43
Speaker 1: and not because, as in the case of the Jeffrey
2:45
Speaker 1: Epstein files, the people involved had been associating with a
2:48
Speaker 1: known predator. These were just people who happened to work
2:52
Speaker 1: for a movie studio.
2:55
Speaker 2: And in addition to that, over time, you know, and
2:58
Speaker 2: we had all this stuff up on our system, you know,
3:01
Speaker 2: the Karate Kid which was about to be coming out,
3:05
Speaker 2: The new script for James Bond, which nobody had seen
3:09
Speaker 2: up until that point, was being released. So there was
3:11
Speaker 2: you know, it was a lot of juicy material that
3:14
Speaker 2: was being released into the public.
3:19
Speaker 1: It was one of the most damaging business hacks in
3:21
Speaker 1: US history. Some estimates put the cost to Sony at
3:24
Speaker 1: over one hundred million dollars, and when Linton looked back
3:28
Speaker 1: on what happened, he came to an uncomfortable conclusion that,
3:32
Speaker 1: in some significant sense, it was all his fault. My
3:41
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
3:45
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the first
3:49
Speaker 1: episode in a mini series about mistakes, inspired by a
3:53
Speaker 1: book that Linton and Josh Steiner have published called From
3:57
Speaker 1: Mistakes to Meaning, in which they investigate the origin and
4:01
Speaker 1: consequences of mistakes. Starting with the story of what happened
4:04
Speaker 1: on the Sony lot that November morning. We're going to
4:08
Speaker 1: start there as well well, because I remember it all firsthand.
4:12
Speaker 1: Michael Linton is one of my closest friends in those days.
4:16
Speaker 1: I would stay at his guest house in Los Angeles
4:19
Speaker 1: for weeks at a time, like Kato Kalin. I remember,
4:30
Speaker 1: I remember correctly. You guys came to New York for Thanksgiving.
4:35
Speaker 2: We did his house, Yeah, we did.
4:37
Speaker 1: In the middle of all of this, we did.
4:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we wanted to sort of have the kids
4:40
Speaker 2: feel like everything was normal.
4:42
Speaker 1: And I was at that I was with I came
4:44
Speaker 1: to Thanksgiving. Oh yeah, yeah, y And I just remember
4:48
Speaker 1: I have a it's burned it in my memory. Is
4:51
Speaker 1: you sitting in a chair the corner of the room
4:55
Speaker 1: by yourself, with your like head in your hands.
4:58
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. It was a low moment, it was. Those
5:00
Speaker 2: weeks were terrible. I remember I lost all that weight. Yeah,
5:03
Speaker 2: so it was a rough time.
5:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.
5:05
Speaker 1: That was twelve years ago, the worst moment of his career.
5:08
Speaker 1: By and in the ensuing years, Michael never talked about
5:12
Speaker 1: any of it, none of it, not with me and
5:15
Speaker 1: not with anyone as far as I can tell. It
5:18
Speaker 1: was a memory that he decided to bury, until all
5:21
Speaker 1: of a sudden he dug it back up. This is
5:25
Speaker 1: his story. As the CEO of an entertainment company, Michael
5:31
Speaker 1: Litton was in an odd position. The CEO of, say,
5:35
Speaker 1: a software company, is almost always a software engineer. The
5:39
Speaker 1: leaders of a company like that belong culturally to the
5:42
Speaker 1: same world as the rank and file. That's true of
5:45
Speaker 1: many professions. Principles are former teachers. The person running sales
5:50
Speaker 1: at Ford used to sell Fords. But in a creative industry,
5:55
Speaker 1: the people running the business tend to belong to a
5:57
Speaker 1: different culture than the people who work for them. I
6:01
Speaker 1: would sometimes visit Michael at Sony, and as a carnut,
6:04
Speaker 1: I would get a kick out of walking through the
6:06
Speaker 1: executive parking lot and seeing the long row of BMW's
6:10
Speaker 1: and Porschas and Mercedes and Audi's, until I came to
6:13
Speaker 1: the CEO spot and there was Michael's white folks back
6:16
Speaker 1: in golf.
6:18
Speaker 2: I'm the non creative person. I'm the person who's supposed
6:20
Speaker 2: to mine the store, so to speak. I'm the person
6:23
Speaker 2: who's meant to turn the lights out before we all
6:25
Speaker 2: go home. I'm the person who's making sure that everything
6:29
Speaker 2: is sort of running properly, that we're making the numbers.
6:33
Speaker 2: And I was with the exception of maybe one other
6:36
Speaker 2: person around there, the only guy in a.
6:38
Speaker 1: Suit, and you're the only one going to Japan.
6:41
Speaker 2: I'm pretty much the only one going to Japan.
6:43
Speaker 1: Sony Pictures was and remains a subsidiary of the Sony Corporation,
6:48
Speaker 1: which is a massive electronics, insurance and media conglomerate based
6:51
Speaker 1: in Tokyo.
6:52
Speaker 2: I remember there was always the same flight. It was
6:54
Speaker 2: an Ana flight that left at one o'clock in the
6:57
Speaker 2: morning out of lax And the reason I took that
7:00
Speaker 2: flight is it got in at five o'clock in the
7:02
Speaker 2: morning into Henda, which is the Urt metropump. And I
7:05
Speaker 2: would take that same flight back at midnight the next
7:10
Speaker 2: day because I had little kids and the other thing,
7:13
Speaker 2: and I want to get home.
7:15
Speaker 1: The creatives that Sony found new ideas, developed scripts and
7:19
Speaker 1: forged relationships with actors and directors, but for a movie
7:23
Speaker 1: to be made, it had to be approved by a
7:25
Speaker 1: special green light meeting chaired by Michael. All of the
7:29
Speaker 1: department heads would be there, Television, home entertainment, marketing, legal, finance,
7:33
Speaker 1: government affairs. They would zero in on the likely audience,
7:37
Speaker 1: look at estimates of how much a movie would cost,
7:39
Speaker 1: how much movies in that particular genre or category typically
7:43
Speaker 1: made figure out how lucrative the overseas market might be.
7:47
Speaker 2: On and on, people get caught up in their passions
7:49
Speaker 2: and get caught up in their emotional interests, and my job,
7:52
Speaker 2: oftentimes was to make sure that we were dispassionate about
7:56
Speaker 2: things and objective in the way we looked at.
7:58
Speaker 1: This disciplining function that you serve is is.
8:02
Speaker 2: Look, yeah, there were no water Worlds by way of
8:05
Speaker 2: Excitants Gate, you know, Heavens Gate. Now we had, you know,
8:08
Speaker 2: we had our group of failures, but they weren't things
8:11
Speaker 2: that would sink the studio or even sink the year. Frankly,
8:15
Speaker 2: so it was pretty Yeah, it was pretty steady in
8:17
Speaker 2: its performance at that point.
8:19
Speaker 1: And then came the summer of twenty thirteen, so lead
8:23
Speaker 1: us up to so a movie comes up.
8:26
Speaker 4: For consideration, right called The Interview, called The Interview, and
8:31
Speaker 4: it's presented by Seth Rogan, And we had had a
8:35
Speaker 4: lot of success.
8:36
Speaker 2: With Seth Rogan up until that moment. He had produced
8:39
Speaker 2: a series of R rated comedies for the studio that
8:42
Speaker 2: had done really, really well. And he comes in with
8:44
Speaker 2: his movie The Interview, and the Interview is about two
8:47
Speaker 2: hapless journalists played by Seth Rogan and James Franco, who
8:51
Speaker 2: go off to North Korea ostensibly, you know, to convince
8:55
Speaker 2: Kim jungun to be in some television reportage, but in
8:58
Speaker 2: truth they were under the auspices of the CIA in
9:01
Speaker 2: the plot of the movie, and they were going to
9:03
Speaker 2: assassinate Kim Jong un. At the end of the movie
9:06
Speaker 2: and they say, this is the next thing we would
9:08
Speaker 2: like to do, and we'd like a quick response or
9:12
Speaker 2: the agent said this, because you know, if you don't
9:14
Speaker 2: want to do it, there's somebody else.
9:20
Speaker 1: Everyone, Sony and Rogan decide to do a read through
9:23
Speaker 1: on the Sony lot for Michael and his counterpart on
9:26
Speaker 1: the creative side of the studio, Amy Pascal.
9:30
Speaker 2: We had promised them that after that read through, we
9:33
Speaker 2: would give them a yay or an a decision, and
9:37
Speaker 2: that's sort of the setup for how this whole thing
9:39
Speaker 2: came to pass.
9:40
Speaker 1: So they all show up.
9:41
Speaker 2: So they all show up. And by the way, when
9:44
Speaker 2: I say we would give them a yay or an
9:46
Speaker 2: ay decision, in the normal course of things, what we
9:50
Speaker 2: would have done is you would have had the read
9:51
Speaker 2: through and you would have had that meeting, but you
9:56
Speaker 2: would have had the meeting knowing that the thing was
9:58
Speaker 2: funny and it worked with an audience or not. But
10:00
Speaker 2: in this case it did.
10:02
Speaker 1: So describe the read.
10:04
Speaker 2: So just to give a real sense of it. The
10:07
Speaker 2: studio was the Old End Studio. It's forty four acres
10:11
Speaker 2: of Art Deco buildings and beautiful sound stages that go
10:16
Speaker 2: back to the twenties and the thirties. It's the lot
10:19
Speaker 2: where they made The Wizard of Oz. And across the
10:24
Speaker 2: street from that is there's this very modern, not very
10:26
Speaker 2: nice looking building, and then in the bottom of the
10:28
Speaker 2: building there was a there was a very large room
10:31
Speaker 2: and that's where we had the read through. When I
10:33
Speaker 2: walk in the room, it's what you would imagine it
10:36
Speaker 2: to be. The actors are all standing there, very casually,
10:39
Speaker 2: ready to go. The creative folks are also, you know,
10:43
Speaker 2: they're almost indistinguishable in their dress, to be honest, from
10:47
Speaker 2: the actors. And then there's me in a dark suit
10:50
Speaker 2: and a white shirt, a pair of laced up leather shoes,
10:53
Speaker 2: and you know, I stand out like a sore thumb
10:56
Speaker 2: and the you know, and then we start to read through,
10:59
Speaker 2: and it's it's really funny. It's like you can't stop laughing. Funny.
11:04
Speaker 2: Everybody is laughing. And at the very end, you know,
11:09
Speaker 2: seth Rogen stands up and James Franco stands up, and
11:12
Speaker 2: Amy says, let's make this, and everybody's super enthusiastic about
11:15
Speaker 2: doing it. And I just got completely caught up in
11:18
Speaker 2: the moment and I said, yeah, let's go do this,
11:21
Speaker 2: which is not something I ever would have done. And
11:24
Speaker 2: I'd been in that job at that point for over
11:26
Speaker 2: a decade and I had never done that up until
11:28
Speaker 2: that moment.
11:30
Speaker 1: That was his mistake. It is understandable, I think why
11:44
Speaker 1: Michael didn't want to talk about his mistake for so long.
11:47
Speaker 1: None of us want to talk about our mistakes, not
11:50
Speaker 1: just because we're afraid of looking bad or because the
11:53
Speaker 1: memory of our mistake is too painful to revisit, but
11:56
Speaker 1: because we feel obliged to come up with a reason
11:58
Speaker 1: for our mistake. That part is really hard. For their book,
12:03
Speaker 1: From Mistakes to Meaning, Michael and his friend Josh Steiner
12:06
Speaker 1: interviewed a dozen or so people about a mistake that
12:09
Speaker 1: had made, with each story taking up a chapter, and
12:12
Speaker 1: I was one of the people they talked to. I
12:14
Speaker 1: told them about a mistake that I think changed the
12:17
Speaker 1: course of my life. And yet when the time came
12:19
Speaker 1: to try and explain why I did what I did,
12:22
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it. I drew a blank. And I
12:26
Speaker 1: found that sudden inability to account from my long ago
12:28
Speaker 1: error so bewildering that I became overwhelmed and told them
12:33
Speaker 1: I wanted to switch to another, far less consequential mistake.
12:38
Speaker 1: My sense is that this is what Michael was avoiding
12:40
Speaker 1: until he realized that by leaving something as traumatic as
12:44
Speaker 1: the hack unexamined, he was only making things worse.
12:48
Speaker 2: What happened was five years ago, which was five years
12:51
Speaker 2: after the hack. Josh Steiner and I. Josh is my
12:55
Speaker 2: partner in this, and actually the idea for the book
12:58
Speaker 2: is his. We were walking on the beach one day
13:02
Speaker 2: and we'd been good friends, and he had been around
13:07
Speaker 2: during the hacking, and I had spoken a lot in
13:08
Speaker 2: that period. It had been very helpful to me. He said,
13:11
Speaker 2: you know, Michael, you never ever want to talk about
13:14
Speaker 2: this thing, and I know it weighs heavy on you,
13:18
Speaker 2: and it's frustrating to me that you won't talk about it.
13:20
Speaker 2: And I don't think it's healthy that you're not talking
13:23
Speaker 2: about it, and I think we probably I think what
13:26
Speaker 2: might be a good idea is if we both investigated
13:29
Speaker 2: this stuff and we looked into it. So up until
13:32
Speaker 2: that time that moment, actually, Josh was one hundred percent correct.
13:37
Speaker 2: I did everything in my power to put it in
13:40
Speaker 2: a drawer and not look at it think about it.
13:43
Speaker 2: So I really didn't investigate why I had come to
13:46
Speaker 2: that decision in that moment until we sort of went
13:48
Speaker 2: through the process of writing the book or investigating the book.
13:52
Speaker 1: What they saw in the subjects they interviewed was what
13:55
Speaker 1: a good shrink would see in the course of analysis.
13:58
Speaker 1: That people very early in life develop ways of organizing
14:01
Speaker 1: the world, of seeing themselves in relation to others, schemas
14:05
Speaker 1: as they call them, and those schemas persist as a
14:09
Speaker 1: kind of silent filter for your experiences.
14:12
Speaker 2: What it really does is it gives you a shorthand
14:14
Speaker 2: for how to understand a situation. In the moment. It's
14:18
Speaker 2: just like, oh, okay, I recognize this this thing is
14:21
Speaker 2: like this thing, and so I can make this decision,
14:23
Speaker 2: which for the most part serves us well. But sometimes
14:27
Speaker 2: when you're not understanding the context you're in, those schemas
14:30
Speaker 2: can lead you to a bad decision.
14:33
Speaker 1: Michael and Josh got a psychologist from Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadoccus,
14:38
Speaker 1: to assist them, and all of them went back over
14:40
Speaker 1: the mistakes stories they collected, and then over their own
14:44
Speaker 1: stories until they began to see a pattern. How long
14:48
Speaker 1: did it take you to come to what you believed
14:50
Speaker 1: to be the best understanding of why you decided to
14:54
Speaker 1: that movie in that way?
14:55
Speaker 2: Both Josh and Allison said, because I didn't conclude as
14:59
Speaker 2: to why I had come to that decision, they started
15:01
Speaker 2: unpacking and going back back, and I would say within
15:04
Speaker 2: the first couple of months, two or three months, maybe
15:06
Speaker 2: a little longer, we got down to the base level
15:10
Speaker 2: of why I had agreed to do that in that
15:13
Speaker 2: moment and made that mistake, which was so going back
15:18
Speaker 2: to when I was eight or nine years old, my parents,
15:21
Speaker 2: we were living in America at the time. My parents
15:24
Speaker 2: moved my sister and myself to Holland out of the blue,
15:27
Speaker 2: pretty much really out of the blue, because it was
15:29
Speaker 2: in sort of the August September period, just as school
15:32
Speaker 2: was starting, and they came into the house one day
15:36
Speaker 2: and said we're moving to Holland. There was business reasons
15:39
Speaker 2: to do it, and the rest of our family was
15:40
Speaker 2: already over there. So I found myself in September stuck
15:44
Speaker 2: in a school where I didn't speak the language, didn't
15:47
Speaker 2: know anybody, and over the course of the next year
15:49
Speaker 2: or two, I led a very, very, not a very
15:52
Speaker 2: but a lonely existence relative to the one that I
15:54
Speaker 2: was experiencing in America, where I was, you know, had
15:57
Speaker 2: a group of friends, spoke the language easy time, and
16:01
Speaker 2: I developed this desire always to be part of the gang,
16:05
Speaker 2: and particularly part of the cool gang, because I was
16:08
Speaker 2: the gang. But I even once I had made friends,
16:11
Speaker 2: they weren't that they still remain friends of mine, but
16:14
Speaker 2: these were a bunch of kids who, like myself, were
16:16
Speaker 2: pretty nerdy. And that schema, that thing traveled with me
16:21
Speaker 2: for most of my life, in fact, all of my life,
16:23
Speaker 2: and it's always been this sort of a little bit
16:25
Speaker 2: nose pressed against the window and wanting to be part
16:29
Speaker 2: of it. And what we concluded was in that moment
16:33
Speaker 2: where I said, Okay, let's go and make the movie.
16:36
Speaker 2: I had been in the job for a long time.
16:38
Speaker 2: I'd been the guy who was always saying no. I
16:40
Speaker 2: was the actual suit in the Romans I described earlier,
16:43
Speaker 2: and I just said, you know what, screw it. In
16:46
Speaker 2: this moment, I want to be part of that group.
16:49
Speaker 2: I don't want to be mister no, I don't want
16:51
Speaker 2: to be the suit. I'd like to be part of it.
16:53
Speaker 2: And I said, yes, what should he have done?
16:57
Speaker 1: He should have said, we'll get back to you, so
17:05
Speaker 1: let's replay it, and only this time you don't say
17:11
Speaker 1: yes in the room and during a table read and
17:15
Speaker 1: you say, everyone's really excited, everyone's laughing really hard, and
17:21
Speaker 1: you say, this sounds great. We're going to take it
17:25
Speaker 1: to our normal meeting, right, okay, so go you have
17:28
Speaker 1: the normal meeting. What happens in the normal meeting.
17:30
Speaker 2: Well, you would have sat around the table. Everybody would
17:33
Speaker 2: have looked at the numbers and looked at what prior
17:35
Speaker 2: movies had done like it, and they would have on
17:37
Speaker 2: paper you would say, financially, this is a goer, let's
17:40
Speaker 2: do this. But presumably what would have happened would have
17:44
Speaker 2: been that the folks from public policy or our general
17:48
Speaker 2: counsel would have said, you know what, you're now trolling
17:51
Speaker 2: in waters that are not typical to a movie studio,
17:54
Speaker 2: because there is this thing going on with North Korea
17:57
Speaker 2: and Japan, and let's take a moment, let's check back
17:59
Speaker 2: with Tokyo whether this is really a good idea. They
18:01
Speaker 2: for sure would have told us not to do it,
18:05
Speaker 2: and that would have stopped the movie.
18:07
Speaker 1: Why would Tokyo have said no, Well, because of something
18:10
Speaker 1: that Michael didn't find out until much later.
18:13
Speaker 2: In this country. At that time, North Korea was sort
18:16
Speaker 2: of a you know, not well, yeah, a joke, like
18:19
Speaker 2: we laughed a little bit when we saw those images.
18:22
Speaker 2: That was not the case with respect to Japan. So
18:25
Speaker 2: for you to understand that relationship going back to the seventies,
18:29
Speaker 2: they'd had even before that, but in the seventies in particular,
18:33
Speaker 2: the relationship between North Korea and Japan was extremely contentious,
18:37
Speaker 2: to the point where a hundred school children were kidnapped
18:41
Speaker 2: off the streets and carted off to North Korea in
18:45
Speaker 2: that period, and in just as we were one hundred kids, yeah,
18:51
Speaker 2: and nobody really understood what had happened to those kids.
18:54
Speaker 2: And there was ongoing friction between the two countries on
18:59
Speaker 2: a variety of different levels. But one of the things
19:02
Speaker 2: Prime Minister Abe was trying to do in the moment
19:05
Speaker 2: that we were making these decisions which I had no
19:07
Speaker 2: knowledge of us. He was negotiating with the North Korean
19:10
Speaker 2: government to get those whatever was remaining of those people
19:15
Speaker 2: back to Japan and trying to re establish or find
19:19
Speaker 2: some normalized relationship back with North Korea. So we were
19:23
Speaker 2: right in that moment, which is relevant because now we're
19:26
Speaker 2: thinking about making this movie where you're, you know, killing
19:29
Speaker 2: the leader of North Korea, which and you're owned by
19:31
Speaker 2: a Japanese company, so that equation is not a good one.
19:36
Speaker 1: It wasn't like The Interview was going to be one
19:39
Speaker 1: of Sony's blockbuster franchises. It was a small budget movie,
19:43
Speaker 1: a genre movie. This genre didn't have the possibility of
19:49
Speaker 1: a massive upside. This movie was never going to make
19:51
Speaker 1: too No.
19:52
Speaker 2: And the other thing you got to remember about our
19:54
Speaker 2: rad of comedies is you only release them here in America.
19:57
Speaker 2: There is no international in them, so it's constricted both
20:03
Speaker 2: geographically and also by its audience because it's our rated
20:06
Speaker 2: so you can't get you know, kids under seventeen there
20:09
Speaker 2: in the first place, So no family, it's mostly guys.
20:12
Speaker 2: It's limited, but you know who, the audience is.
20:17
Speaker 1: Universal. Sony's counterpart, Acrosstown, would almost certainly have made it
20:21
Speaker 1: had Sony passed, Ruggan would have been fine. Sony would
20:25
Speaker 1: have been fine. So, but your would it have cost
20:31
Speaker 1: you reputationally within the studio to say no to this?
20:34
Speaker 1: Do you think it would have reinforced the Michael CSUITI
20:38
Speaker 1: doesn't get it. No, no, no, I don't think so
20:41
Speaker 1: would have been legitimate.
20:42
Speaker 2: I think you know I pointed that out at the time,
20:44
Speaker 2: people would have said, oh, that makes total sense, of course,
20:47
Speaker 2: and they would have moved on.
21:02
Speaker 1: The interview was scheduled to be released in theaters in
21:05
Speaker 1: the Christmas season of twenty fourteen, and a few months
21:08
Speaker 1: before the release date, Sony put out a trailer which
21:11
Speaker 1: made it abundantly clear to the North Koreans how transaggressive
21:15
Speaker 1: this movie was going to be.
21:17
Speaker 4: Mister Rupport, I'm an agent Lacy with Central Intelligence than.
21:21
Speaker 2: You too are going to be in a room alone
21:23
Speaker 2: with Kim, and the CIA would love it if you
21:26
Speaker 2: could take him out, take him out for coffee, dinner
21:31
Speaker 2: for Kim chee. No, take him out. You want us
21:35
Speaker 2: to kill the leader of North Korea. And that was
21:38
Speaker 2: really the first moment when the public knew what the
21:41
Speaker 2: movie was going to be about. And shortly thereafter we
21:45
Speaker 2: received a cryptic message and we had to do some
21:52
Speaker 2: detective work to figure out where it was coming from
21:53
Speaker 2: a term and it came out came from the North
21:56
Speaker 2: Korean envoy in New York City, and it was on
21:59
Speaker 2: an obscure website. It was brought to our attention that
22:02
Speaker 2: there was a warning from the North Korean government that
22:05
Speaker 2: there would be consequences that we put out the picture.
22:08
Speaker 1: Michael approached North Korea experts at the RAND Corporation and
22:12
Speaker 1: the State Department for advice.
22:15
Speaker 2: Because I figured they would probably know and ask them both,
22:18
Speaker 2: is this something I should be taking seriously? And in
22:21
Speaker 2: both cases they said, and I think this was all
22:25
Speaker 2: based They had such a scant knowledge of the current
22:29
Speaker 2: leader of North Korea. Keep in mind he was only
22:31
Speaker 2: there for a couple of years, and so it was
22:32
Speaker 2: all based on what they knew of his dad. And
22:35
Speaker 2: they said, you know what, it's all bark, no bite.
22:39
Speaker 2: Yes there'll be some noise, but you don't have to
22:41
Speaker 2: worry about that. They have no capabilities of hurting you. Now,
22:44
Speaker 2: they didn't mention in my head it was always about
22:47
Speaker 2: physical retribution. As it turns out, they had substantial cyber capabilities.
22:53
Speaker 1: In fact, one legendary hacker. You were hacked by one
22:57
Speaker 1: of the greatest hackers in the history.
22:58
Speaker 2: Of hacking, as it turns out, I was.
23:01
Speaker 1: His name is park Jin Hilk, head of the so
23:04
Speaker 1: called Lazarus Group, the team behind the wanacry hack of
23:07
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Mentioned the legendary Bangladesh bankheist where the Lazaros
23:12
Speaker 1: group tried to siphon off the entire currency reserves of
23:16
Speaker 1: the country of Bangladesh and almost got away with it.
23:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, So anyway, we get those threats, we determined that
23:23
Speaker 2: they're not important. That being said, the threats increased, and
23:29
Speaker 2: the folks back in.
23:30
Speaker 1: Two see the threats increased, meaning there were.
23:32
Speaker 2: More of them. There were more like don't do this.
23:34
Speaker 2: If you do this, there will be consequences. And it
23:37
Speaker 2: did get to the place where and I was at
23:40
Speaker 2: that point talking regularly with my boss back in Tokyo,
23:44
Speaker 2: who was great and very supportive, and at some point
23:48
Speaker 2: there was a question as to whether we should figure
23:51
Speaker 2: out how to change the ending, because that was the part,
23:53
Speaker 2: presumably although they didn't say it, that was most offensive,
23:56
Speaker 2: and we did. We went through a whole exercise where
23:59
Speaker 2: we tried to reduce you know, the violence of those scenes,
24:03
Speaker 2: and we did all these other kind of stuff. But truthfully,
24:06
Speaker 2: that was really a silly exercise because the end of
24:09
Speaker 2: the day, you were killing Kim Jong un, you know so, And.
24:12
Speaker 1: There's no universe in which you go back to Seth
24:16
Speaker 1: Rogan and say kill the assassination or can you can't
24:21
Speaker 1: you make it about a fictional country. Can you do
24:25
Speaker 1: something other than assassinating him? You don't have to. We're
24:28
Speaker 1: not talking about the movie doesn't hinge on them assassinating
24:31
Speaker 1: the North Korean So.
24:33
Speaker 2: I have a very I have a very strong memory
24:37
Speaker 2: of this in Seth and his partners, and I'm not
24:41
Speaker 2: sure he's wrong about this. In their estimation, the humor
24:46
Speaker 2: of this was all about the fact that it was
24:49
Speaker 2: actually that it was Kim Jong un or an actor
24:52
Speaker 2: playing Kim jomun, who you were going to kill, and
24:55
Speaker 2: it had to be about North Korea, and it actually
24:58
Speaker 2: had to be about the dictator running North Korea. That
25:02
Speaker 2: sort of doing a version of it, the Charlie Chaplin
25:05
Speaker 2: version of it, you know where he doesn't name Hitler
25:07
Speaker 2: by name, but you it's Hitler.
25:10
Speaker 1: At the beginning of the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin
25:13
Speaker 1: made a devastating satire called The Great Dictator. He never
25:17
Speaker 1: said who it was about. He didn't have to.
25:20
Speaker 2: That was not the version of it that Seth and
25:22
Speaker 2: those guys were.
25:24
Speaker 1: Charlie Chaplin version is a movie classic that is revered
25:28
Speaker 1: even today.
25:28
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I'm not surely the interview hasn't reached that
25:31
Speaker 2: status yet. It might, It might.
25:33
Speaker 1: It's the Great Dictator.
25:34
Speaker 2: I had a few years to go. The Great Dictator
25:36
Speaker 2: has had many years between now and then.
25:39
Speaker 5: Hello, who is This is the Secretary of Communication for
25:42
Speaker 5: North Korea. Our Supreme Leader Kim Jong un is interested
25:45
Speaker 5: in doing an interview with Dave Skylark. Oh my god.
25:48
Speaker 5: We will meet fifty kilometers west of dang Dong, northeastern China.
25:51
Speaker 2: Did you just say China? And did you just say Dong?
25:55
Speaker 1: Then the hack happened. One of the biggest studios in
26:00
Speaker 1: Hollywood was paralyzed. The press went to town on the
26:03
Speaker 1: Sony emails. President Obama weighed in. The major theater chains
26:08
Speaker 1: refused to show the movie, and Michael decided that as
26:11
Speaker 1: a matter of principle, he had to find another way
26:14
Speaker 1: to release the movie. He wasn't going to give in
26:16
Speaker 1: to an active intimidation and ultimately he figured it out.
26:21
Speaker 1: Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, offered to release
26:23
Speaker 1: the movie online. Remember this is twenty fourteen, long before
26:27
Speaker 1: streaming was an easy option, and Patrick Collison of Stripe
26:31
Speaker 1: had his team work overtime to figure out how to
26:33
Speaker 1: do online ticketing. Hollywood didn't help him, Silicon Valley did.
26:40
Speaker 2: The phone was dead. I never heard from any of
26:44
Speaker 2: our competitors. The only person who stood up for us
26:47
Speaker 2: that I recollect was George Clooney. He was the only
26:50
Speaker 2: one with the courage and the loyalty to actually step
26:53
Speaker 2: forward and say, what these people are doing is the
26:55
Speaker 2: right thing, trying to get this movie out and the
26:57
Speaker 2: community should be supporting them. But nobody else did. And
27:00
Speaker 2: by the way, neither did. The mayor of la never
27:03
Speaker 2: picked up the phone and called. Neither did the Attorney
27:06
Speaker 2: General of California, despite the fact that this was, you know,
27:09
Speaker 2: the biggest cyber crime that had ever happened in the state.
27:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, what did Seth Rogan say?
27:14
Speaker 2: So all of this, Seth was upset about the fact
27:19
Speaker 2: that we were not getting in into movie theaters, and
27:21
Speaker 2: he was he was already upset over the summertime and
27:25
Speaker 2: I get it, he's a filmmaker at our efforts to
27:28
Speaker 2: sort of edit the movie around the actual assassination, but
27:32
Speaker 2: then that spilled into his upset about you know, you're
27:35
Speaker 2: not getting into movie theaters, and we tried to explain
27:38
Speaker 2: to him that the movie theaters wouldn't take it. We
27:40
Speaker 2: wound up actually getting independent movie theaters to take it
27:43
Speaker 2: as opposed to the big chains like AMC. But I
27:48
Speaker 2: don't think and you know, I've never talked to seth
27:50
Speaker 2: Rogen about it. After the fact. He wasn't particularly grateful
27:53
Speaker 2: for what everybody had done. He saw this as what
27:56
Speaker 2: the studio should be doing because he had made a
27:58
Speaker 2: good movie and he wanted to see it in movie theaters.
28:01
Speaker 1: Did he apologize though, for just even a kind of
28:05
Speaker 1: pro forma apology that, like I did, initiative process bought
28:09
Speaker 1: a lot of pain to a lot of people.
28:11
Speaker 2: Now, No, he didn't. No, he didn't let me read
28:15
Speaker 2: to you.
28:15
Speaker 1: In fact, from Rogan's memoir published a few years ago,
28:19
Speaker 1: this is right before he describes going to a crucial
28:22
Speaker 1: meeting at Sony as the hack was unfolding. He says
28:25
Speaker 1: he had to take a taxi to the lot because
28:27
Speaker 1: he was still high from partying the night before. Here
28:31
Speaker 1: is how he describes Michael. He was a dude in
28:34
Speaker 1: his mid fifties, relatively fit, red skin, large horns, a tail, hooves,
28:41
Speaker 1: and a legion of screaming demons flanking him at all times.
28:49
Speaker 1: Michael stayed on at Sony for three more years. Then
28:52
Speaker 1: he left. He's not in the movie business anymore, and
28:55
Speaker 1: along the way, I think he learned a hard lesson.
28:58
Speaker 1: Michael would never say this, or maybe even think this,
29:01
Speaker 1: but let me say this as his friend who saw
29:03
Speaker 1: him that day at Thanksgiving with his head in his hands.
29:06
Speaker 1: Those who make mistakes mistakes that they are willing to
29:09
Speaker 1: understand and own up to deserve better from the rest
29:14
Speaker 1: of us. Revision's History is produced by Nina Bird, Lawrence
29:25
Speaker 1: Lucy Sullivan, and ben Na Dafh Haffrey. Our editor is
29:29
Speaker 1: Karen Chakerji, fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer
29:34
Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird, Lawrence Owen Miller,
29:38
Speaker 1: and Sarah Bruger. Original music by Luis Gara. Sound is
29:42
Speaker 1: That am Mastering by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Gadwell. Tune
29:49
Speaker 1: in next week for the second episode in Our Mistakes series.
29:54
Speaker 3: We knew the truth. We knew that he had been
29:58
Speaker 3: an airman, we knew that he had been convicted of
30:00
Speaker 3: a violent crime, and we knew that we should have
30:04
Speaker 3: reported at to the FBI, and we didn't.
30:07
Speaker 2: The question is not whether you're going to fail. The
30:09
Speaker 2: question is how do you handle it when you do fail?
30:12
Speaker 2: Do you take ownership? Do you step up