The Sony Hack | From Revisionist History

Summary

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WHAT WENT WRONG: "The Sony Hack" | From Revisionist History

Host: Sad Boom Media featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Michael Lynton
Original Airdate: April 22, 2026
Guest: Michael Lynton (Former Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO)
Summary prepared for listeners who missed the episode.

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Overview

This episode takes a deep dive into the infamous 2014 Sony Pictures hack, tracing the origin of the cyberattack back to the decision to greenlight the controversial film The Interview. Host Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Michael Lynton, former Sony CEO, who openly discusses his leadership during the crisis, the personal nature of his mistake, and how the entire disaster unraveled from a single moment of wanting to "fit in." The episode, adapted from Gladwell’s acclaimed Revisionist History, explores not just the technicalities but also the psychology of decisions, cultural misunderstandings, and the lingering costs of corporate catastrophe.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Day of the Hack

• Setting the Scene ([02:14])
  • Michael Lynton recalls the morning of November 24, 2014: everything at Sony Pictures was going well, with hit TV shows and a healthy music division.
  • Upon driving to work, he receives a call: nothing works, computers are down, and chaos is already brewing outside the studio ([02:52], [03:14], [03:43]).
  • The studio, described as "like a college campus with 5,000–7,000 people," became a scene of confusion and panic.

The Fallout: Information Flooded Online

• Leaks and Impact ([03:49]–[05:13])
  • Every Sony employee’s emails, from star gossip to deeply personal correspondence, were dumped online.
  • Scripts and unreleased movie material (e.g., James Bond, Karate Kid) also leaked.
  • Estimated cost to Sony: $100+ million.

The Pain and Personal Toll

• Lynton’s Ordeal ([06:41])
  • Gladwell and Lynton describe the intense shame and stress; Lynton remembers vividly being "in a chair, the corner of the room by yourself, head in your hands."
    • Memorable Quote:

      "It was a low moment. Those weeks were terrible. I remember I lost all that weight." — Michael Lynton ([06:52])

• Lynton didn’t discuss the hack publicly for years — not even with Gladwell, one of his closest friends.

Hollywood Executive Decisions: A Cultural Divide

• The Greenlight Process ([08:12]–[09:52])
  • Lynton, as CEO, was cast as "the suit" — surrounded by creatives, but culturally apart.
  • Decisions to produce films involved rigorous, cold evaluation: “My job oftentimes was to make sure that we were dispassionate about things and objective in the way we look at.” ([09:43])
  • There was a record of steady, responsible oversight—no “Waterworlds” or “Heaven’s Gates” that tanked the studio.

The Turning Point: "The Interview"

• How the Film Got Made ([10:13]–[13:24])
  • Seth Rogen pitches The Interview: a comedy about journalists tasked to assassinate Kim Jong Un.
  • The table read is electric; everyone laughs. Lynton, swept up in the camaraderie, gives an immediate greenlight—an uncharacteristic break from protocol.
  • Critical Mistake Identified:

    "I just got completely caught up in the moment and I said, yeah, let's go do this. Which is not something I ever would have done..." — Michael Lynton ([13:13])

Reflecting on Mistakes: Psychology and Reparation

• Why Did He Say Yes? ([16:08]–[21:22])

  • Lynton avoided analyzing the mistake for years, later exploring it in the book From Mistakes to Meaning with psychologist Alison Papadakis.
  • He traces his error back to childhood feelings of exclusion after moving to Holland, realizing his lifelong "schema" was a desire to belong to the "cool group."
    • Quote:

      "That schema, that thing traveled with me for most of my life... in that moment... I want to be part of that group. I don't want to be Mr. No, I don't want to be the suit." — Michael Lynton ([20:19])

• What If He Had Stuck to Process? ([21:22])

  • A regular greenlight meeting (with legal and public policy input) would have flagged the risks, particularly Sony’s connection to Japan and simmering tensions with North Korea.
  • Tokyo (Sony parent) almost certainly would have nixed the project due to ongoing negotiations with North Korea tied to historical abductions of Japanese citizens ([22:41]–[23:50]).

Business, Blame, and Re-evaluating the Decision

• Limited Upside, Massive Risks ([24:03]–[25:07])
  • R-rated comedies like "The Interview" have constrained markets (mainly US, no global upside).
  • Had Sony passed, another studio (e.g., Universal) could have made it, and Rogen's career would have been unaffected.

North Korea’s Reaction and Underestimating Cyber Capabilities

• Threats and Escalation ([28:42]–[31:52])
  • The first trailer spells out the assassination plot; North Korea responds with clear threats, which experts at RAND and the State Department dismiss as empty.
  • The actual hack was masterminded by Park Jin Hyuk of the Lazarus Group—"one of the greatest hackers in the history of hacking" ([30:38]).
  • Attempts at appeasement (editing the ending) were "silly," given the premise was unchanged.

Aftermath: Hollywood’s Silence, Tech Steps Up

• Release and Fallout ([33:35]–[34:52])

  • Theater chains boycott the film post-hack, fearing more attacks.
  • Lynton finds support in Silicon Valley—Eric Schmidt (Google) and Patrick Collison (Stripe), not Hollywood, help get the movie out online.
  • Quote:

    "The only person who stood up for us that I recollect was George Clooney... nobody else did. And by the way, neither did the mayor of LA, never picked up the phone and called." — Michael Lynton ([34:20])

• Seth Rogen’s Perspective ([34:52]–[35:54])

  • Rogen is frustrated with edits and the limited theatrical release, never expressing thanks or apology for the consequences.
  • In his memoir, Rogen caricatures Lynton as a literal "demon."

Lessons and Reflections

• Gladwell’s Verdict ([35:54]–End)

  • Those who make mistakes—and are willing to understand and own them—deserve better.
  • Michael Lynton’s open reckoning serves as a model of accountability.

  "Those who make mistakes, mistakes that they are willing to understand and own up to, deserve better from the rest of us." — Malcolm Gladwell ([35:54])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the personal toll:

  "It was a low moment. Those weeks were terrible. I remember I lost all that weight." — Michael Lynton ([06:52])

• On executive culture:

  "I'm the non-creative person. I'm the person who's supposed to mind the store..." — Michael Lynton ([08:12])

• The fateful decision:

  "I just got completely caught up in the moment and I said, yeah, let's go do this." — Michael Lynton ([13:13])

• Schema & childhood roots:

  "I developed this desire always to be part of the gang, and particularly part of the cool gang... That schema... traveled with me..." — Michael Lynton ([20:19])

• Industry’s response post-hack:

  "Never heard from any of our competitors... only George Clooney... The mayor of LA never picked up the phone..." — Michael Lynton ([34:20])

• On lessons:

  "The question is not whether you're going to fail... The question is how do you handle it. When you do fail, do you take ownership?" — Malcolm Gladwell ([37:49])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |----------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 02:14 | Michael Lynton discovers the hack | | 03:49 | Fallout from emails and business materials leaked | | 06:41 | Personal memory: Michael at his lowest | | 10:13 | The greenlighting of "The Interview" | | 13:24 | Lynton’s instant, uncharacteristic approval | | 16:08 | Psychology of mistakes, schemas, and avoidance | | 20:19 | Lynton’s childhood “schema” explained | | 21:22 | What should have happened in a regular greenlight | | 22:41 | Why the Japan–North Korea context mattered | | 24:03 | The Interview’s limited commercial potential | | 28:42 | North Korea’s threats and warnings | | 30:38 | The hack’s architect: Park Jin Hyuk and the Lazarus Group| | 33:35 | Aftermath: release struggles, Hollywood’s silence | | 35:54 | Lessons, apologies, and Lynton’s legacy |

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Conclusion

This episode artfully combines the blow-by-blow of a Hollywood disaster with a thoughtful meditation on decision-making, leadership, and the enduring pull of childhood psychology. Lynton’s willingness to revisit and dissect his own mistake gives listeners a rare, unvarnished look at how a single moment can change an industry—and a life. Malcolm Gladwell’s trademark narrative flair and empathy for human frailty elevate this exploration, making it essential listening (or reading) for anyone interested in movies, leadership, or what it means to reckon honestly with the past.

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Transcript

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[Michael Linton]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Podcast Host/Narrator]

Hello, dear listeners. It's a bit odd to be talking to you on a Wednesday, but we thought we could bring you something a little bit different. It's an episode from Revisionist History from our friends at Pushkin Industries. And it's a great follow up to an episode we did earlier this year about Seth Rogen's movie the Interview, the film that went from parodying Kim Jong Un to leading to one of the most devastating corporate hacks in history. Was it worth it? Let's find out. In this episode, host Malcolm Gladwell sits down with former Sony Pictures Entertainment head Michael Linton for a firsthand account of the attack from the man who greenlit the movie. If you like this episode, Revisionist History has a new season all about mistakes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

On the morning of November 24, 2014, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Michael Linton drove from his house in West Los Angeles to Culver City, the home of the sprawling complex that houses Sony Pictures Entertainment. He was the CEO. He had been at Sony nearly 11 years.

[Michael Linton]

The films were all going well we had a bunch of stuff going really well on television. Breaking Bad and Blacklist and things like that. The music company also was having a very good year, so everything seemed to be on a steady pace.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He turned onto Bundy from San Vicente Boulevard.

[Michael Linton]

I was driving to work, and I get a phone call from our cfo, Dave Hendler. And he said, mike, all of our systems are down. Nothing is working here at the studio. It appears like a bunch of our laptops have been fried and are unusable. They're actually broken. And we do not, for the life of us, understand what's happened.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He arrived a few minutes later.

[Michael Linton]

The studio is a lot like a college campus. It's like five or seven thousand people. Half of them are employees. But as a result of you all sitting in that one space, word travels very fast. And when I. By the time I drove up, there were crowds already in front of the building, like, what's going on? What's happening? What's happening?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The entire Sony Pictures operation had been hacked. And whoever had done it had clearly gotten deep inside.

[Michael Linton]

Nobody knew for sure what was going on. It was just pandemonium, frankly.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

A few days later came the first blow. The hackers released the company's emails, all of them, onto a website called Pastebin. The password, d I e s p e123dai Sony Pictures Entertainment. The press had a field day.

[Michael Linton]

Those emails were salacious because they involved movie stars and people saying things about people that they shouldn't have been saying. And, you know, you're seeing the internal. 10 years of internal correspondence at a big Hollywood studio, which by definition has a lot of juicy stuff in it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Not just things involving stars, everyone's emails. Emails to your wife or husband, to your kids. Emails about people's medical problems, relationships. And not because, as in the case of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the people involved had been associating with a known predator. These were just people who happened to work for a movie studio.

[Michael Linton]

And in addition to that, over time, you know, and we had all this stuff up on our system. You know, the Karate Kid, which was about to be coming out, the. The new script for James Bond, which nobody had seen up until that point, was being released. So there was, you know, it was a lot of juicy material that was being released into the public.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It was one of the most damaging business hacks in US History. Some estimates put the cost to Sony at over $100 million. And when Linton looked back on what happened, he came to an uncomfortable conclusion that in some significant sense, it was all his fault. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the first episode in a miniseries about mistakes, inspired by a book that Linton and Josh Steiner have published called From Mistakes to Meaning, in which they investigate the origin and consequences of mistakes. Starting with the story of what happened on the Sony lot that November morning. We're going to start there as well, because I remember it all firsthand. Michael Linton is one of my closest friends. In those days, I would stay at his guest house in Los Angeles for weeks at a time. Like Kato Kaelin, I. I remember. If I remember correctly, you guys came to New York for Thanksgiving to Daddy's house.

[Michael Linton]

Yeah, we did.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In the middle of all of this.

[Michael Linton]

We did, yeah. Because we wanted to sort of have the kids feel like everything was normal.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I was at that. I was with. I came to Thanksgiving.

[Michael Linton]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I just remember I have a. It's burned into my memory is you sitting in a chair, the corner of the room by yourself, with your, like, head in your hands.

[Michael Linton]

Oh, yeah. It was a low moment. It was. Those weeks were terrible. I remember I lost all that weight.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Michael Linton]

So it was a rough time.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. That was 12 years ago. The worst moment of his career by far. And in the ensuing years, Michael never talked about any of it. None of it. Not with me and not with anyone. As far as I can tell, it was a memory that he decided to bury until all of a sudden, he dug it back up. This is his story. As the CEO of an entertainment company, Michael Litton was in an odd position. The CEO of, say, a software company is almost always a software engineer. The leaders of a company like that belong culturally to the same world as the rank and file. That's true of many professions. Principals are former teachers. The person running sales at Ford used to sell Fords. But in a creative industry, the people running the business tend to belong to a different culture than the people who work for them. I would sometimes visit Michael at Sony. And as a car nut, I would get a kick out of walking through the executive parking lot and seeing the long row of shiny BMWs and Porsches and Mercedes and Audis until I came to the CEO spot and there was Michael's white Volkswagen Golf.

[Michael Linton]

I'm the non creative person. I'm the person who's supposed to mind the store, so to speak. I'm the person who's meant to turn the lights out before we all go home. I'm the person who's making sure that everything is sort of running properly, that we're making the numbers that. And I was, with the exception of maybe one other person around there, the only guy in a suit.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And you're the only one going to Japan.

[Michael Linton]

I'm pretty much the only one going to Japan.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Sony Pictures was and remains a subsidiary of the Sony Corporation, which is a massive electronics, insurance and media conglomerate based in Tokyo.

[Michael Linton]

I remember there was always the same flight. It was an ANA flight that left at 1 o' clock in the morning out of LAX. And the reason I took that flight is it got in at five o' clock in the morning into Haneda, which is the Urton Metropolitan. And I would take that same flight back at midnight the next day. So it's the most exhausting because I had little kids and the other thing, and I wanted to get home.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The creatives at Sony found new ideas, developed scripts and forged relationships with actors and directors. But for a movie to be made, it had to be approved by a special green light meeting chaired by Michael. All of the department heads would be there. Television, home entertainment, marketing, legal, finance, government affairs. They would zero in on the likely audience, look at estimates of how much a movie would cost, how much movies in that particular genre or category typically made, figure out how lucrative the overseas market might be. On and on, people get caught up

[Michael Linton]

in their passions and get caught up in their emotional interests. And my job oftentimes was to make sure that we were dispassionate about things and objective in the way we look at.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So this disciplining function that you serve is working?

[Michael Linton]

Yeah, there were no water worlds. By way of example, Heaven's Gate, you know, Heaven's Gate. No, we had, you know, we had our group of failures, but they weren't things that would sink the studio or even sink the year, frankly.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Linton]

So it was pretty. Yeah, it was pretty steady in its performance at that point.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And then came the summer of 2013. So lead us up to. So a movie comes up for consideration,

[Michael Linton]

right, Called the Interview. Called the Interview, and it's presented by Seth Rogen. And we had had a lot of success with Seth Rogen up until that moment. He had produced a series of R rated comedies for the studio that had done really, really well. And he comes in with his movie, the Interview. And the Interview is about two hapless journalists played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who go off to North Korea, ostensibly, you know, to, to convince Kim Jong Un to be in some television reportage. But in truth, they were under the auspices of the CIA in the plot of the movie, and they were going to assassinate Kim Jong Un at the end of the movie. And they say, this is the next thing we would like to do and we'd like a quick response. Or the agent said this because, you know, if you don't want to do it, there's somebody else.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Everyone. Sony and Rogan decide to do a read through on the Sony lot for Michael and his counterpart on the creative side of the studio, Amy Pascal.

[Michael Linton]

We had promised them that after that read through, we would give them a yay or a nay decision. And that's sort of the setup for how this whole thing came to pass.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. So they all show up.

[Michael Linton]

So they all show up. And by the way, when I say we would give them a yay or nay decision, in the normal course of things, what we would have done is you would have had the read through and you would have had that meeting, but you would have had the meeting knowing that the thing was funny and it worked with an audience or not. But in this case, it did.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. So describe, describe the read.

[Michael Linton]

So just to give a real sense of it, the studio is the old MGM studio. It's 44 acres of art deco buildings and beautiful sound stages that go back to the 20s and the 30s. It's the lot where they made the wizard of Oz. And across the street from that is there's this very modern, not very nice looking building. And in the bottom of the building there was a very large room, and that's where we had the read through. When I walk in the room, it's what you would imagine it to be. The actors are all standing there very casually ready to go. The creative folks are also, you know, they're almost indistinguishable in their dress, to be honest, from the, from the actors. And then there's me in a dark suit and a white shirt, pair of laced up leather shoes, and, you know, I stand out like a sore thumb. And the, you know, and then we start the read through and it's, it's really funny. It's like you can't stop laughing. Funny. Everybody is laughing. And at the very end, you know, Seth Rogen stands up and James Franco stands up and Amy says, let's make this. And everybody's super enthusiastic about doing it. And I just got completely caught up in the moment and I said, yeah, let's go do this. Which is not something I ever would have done. And I'd been in that job at that point for over a decade and I had never done that up until that moment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That was his mistake.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

It is understandable, I think, why Michael didn't Want to Talk about his mistake for so long. None of us want to talk about our mistakes. Not just because we're afraid of looking bad, or because the memory of our mistake is too painful to revisit, but because we feel obliged to come up with a reason for our mistake. And that part is really hard. For their book From Mistakes to Meaning Michael and his friend Josh Steiner interviewed a dozen or so people about a mistake they'd made, with each story taking up a chapter. And I was one of the people they talked to. I told them about a mistake that I think changed the course of my life. And yet when the time came to try and explain why, why I did what I did, I couldn't do it. I drew a blank. And I found that sudden inability to account for my long ago error so bewildering that I became overwhelmed and told them I wanted to switch to another far less consequential mistake. My sense is that this is what Michael was avoiding until he realized that by leaving something as traumatic as the hack unexamined, he was only making things worse.

[Michael Linton]

What happened was five years ago, which was five years after the hack, Josh Steiner and I, Josh is my partner in this and actually the idea for the book is his. We were walking on the beach one day and we'd been good friends and he had been around during the hack. He and I had spoken a lot in that period and he'd been very helpful to me. He said, you know Michael, you never ever want to talk about this thing. And I know it, it weighs heavy on you and it's frustrating to me that you won't talk about it. And I, and I don't think it's healthy that you're not talking about it. And I think we probably, I think what might be a good idea is if we both investigated this stuff and we looked into it. So up until that time, that moment, actually, Josh was 100% correct. I did everything in my power to put it in a drawer and not look at it, think about it. So I really didn't investigate why I had come to that decision in that moment until we sort of went through the process of writing the book or investigating the book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What they saw in the subjects they interviewed was what a good shrink would see in the course of analysis, that people very early in life develop ways of organizing the world, of seeing themselves in relation to others, schemas, as they call them. And those schemas persist as a kind of silent filter for your experiences.

[Michael Linton]

What it really does is it gives you a shorthand for how to understand a situation in the moment. It's just like, oh, okay, I recognize this. This thing is like this thing. And so I can make this decision, which for the most part, serves us well. But sometimes when you're not understanding the context you're in, those schemas can lead you to a bad decision.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Michael and Josh got a psychologist from Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadakis, to assist them. And all of them went back over the mistakes, stories they'd collected and then over their own stories until they began to see a pattern. How long did it take you to come to what you believe to be the best understanding of why you decided to greenlight that movie in that way?

[Michael Linton]

Both Josh and Alison said, because I didn't conclude as to why I had come to that decision. They started unpacking and going back. And I would say within the first couple of months, two or three months, maybe a little longer, we got down to the base level of why I had agreed to do that in that moment and made that mistake, which was so going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. My parents. We were living in America at the time. My parents moved my sister and myself to Holland out of the blue. Pretty much really out of the blue, because it was in sort of the August, September period, just as school was starting. And they came into the house one day and said, we're moving to Holland. There was business reasons to do it, and the rest of our family was already over there. So I found myself in September, stuck in a. In a school where I didn't speak the language, didn't know anybody. And over the course of the next year or two, I was. I led a very very. Not a very, but a lonely existence relative to the one that I was experiencing in America, where I was, you know, had a group of friends, spoke the language, easy time. And I developed this desire always to be part of the gang, and particularly part of the cool gang, because that was the gang that I. Even once I'd made friends, they weren't that they were. They still remain friends of mine. But these were a bunch of kids who, like myself, were pretty nerdy. And that schema, that thing traveled with me for most of my life. In fact, all of my life. And it's always been this sort of a little bit nose pressed against the window and wanting to be part of it. And what we concluded was in that moment where I said, okay, let's go and make the movie. I had been in the job for a long time. I had been the guy who was always saying, no. I was the actual suit in the room, as I described earlier. And I just said, you know what? Screw it. In this moment, I want to be part of that group. I don't want to be Mr. No, I don't want to be the suit. I'd like to be part of it. And I said, yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What should he have done? He should have said, we'll get back to you, so let's replay it. And only this time, you don't say yes in the room during the table read. And you say, everyone's really excited. Everyone's laughing really hard. And you say, this sounds great. We're going to take it to our normal meeting, right? Okay, so go. You have the normal meeting. What happens in the normal meeting?

[Michael Linton]

Well, you would have sat around the table. Everybody would have looked at the numbers and looked at what prior movies had done, like it. And they would have on paper, you would say, financially, this is a goer. Let's do this. But presumably what would have happened would have been that the folks from Public Policy or our general counsel would have said, you know what? You're now trolling in waters that are not typical to a movie studio, because there is this thing going on with North Korea and Japan. And let's take a moment, let's check back with Tokyo whether this is really a good idea. They for sure would have told us not to do it, and that would have stopped the movie.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Why would Tokyo have said no? Because of something that Michael didn't find out until much later in this country.

[Michael Linton]

At that time, North Korea was sort of a, you know, not. Well, yeah, a joke. Like, we laughed a little bit when we saw those images. That was not the case with respect to Japan. So for you to understand, that relationship going back to the 70s, they'd had even before that. But in the 70s in particular, the relationship between North Korea and Japan was extremely contentious, to the point where 100 school children were kidnapped off the streets and carted off to North Korea in that period. And in Just as we were 100 kids. Yeah. And nobody really understood what had happened to those kids. And there was ongoing friction between the two countries on a variety of different levels. But one of the things Prime Minister Abe was trying to do in the moment that we were making these decisions, which I had no knowledge of, was he was negotiating with the North Korean government to get those, whatever was remaining of those people back to Japan and trying to reestablish or find some normalized relationship back with North Korea. So we were right in that moment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Linton]

Which is relevant because now we're thinking about making this movie where you're, you know, killing the leader of North Korea, which. And you're owned by a Japanese company. So that, that equation is not a good one.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It wasn't like the Interview was going to be one of Sony's blockbuster franchises. And it was a small budget movie, a genre movie. This genre didn't have the possibility of a massive upside. This movie was never going to make $2 million.

[Michael Linton]

No, no. And, and the other thing you got to remember about R rated comedies is you only, you only release them here in America. There is no international in them.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Michael Linton]

So there it's constricted both geographically and also by its audience. Cause it's R rated, so you can't get, you know, kids under 17 in there in the first place. So no family. It's mostly guys. It's, it's, it's limited. But you know who the audience is.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Universal. Sony's counterpart across town would almost certainly have made it had Sony passed. Rogan would have been fine. Sony would have been fine. So. But your. Would it, would it have cost you reputationally within the studio to say no to this? Do you think it would have reinforced the. Michael's. The suit. He doesn't get it.

[Michael Linton]

No, no, no, I don't think so.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Would have been legitimate.

[Michael Linton]

I think, you know, I pointed that out at the time. People would have said, oh, that makes total sense, of course. And they would have moved on.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

The interview was scheduled to be released in theaters in the Christmas season of 2014. And a few months before the release date, Sony put out a trailer which made it abundantly clear to the North Koreans how transgressive this movie was going to be.

[Michael Linton]

Mr. Rappaport, I'm Agent Lacy with Central Intelligence.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You two are going to be in

[Michael Linton]

a room alone with Kim, and the CIA would love it if you could take him out. Hmm.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

Take him out for coffee, dinner for kimchi.

[Michael Linton]

No, take him out. You want us to kill the leader of North Korea? And that was really the first moment when the public knew what the movie was going to be about. And shortly thereafter, we received a cryptic message and we had to do some detective work to figure out where it was coming from. A terminit came out, came from the North Korean envoy in New York City, and it was on an obscure website. It was brought to our attention that there was a warning from the North Korean government that there would be consequences if we put out the picture.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Michael approached North Korea experts at the RAND Corporation and the State Department for advice

[Michael Linton]

because I figured they would probably know and asked them both, is this something I should be taking seriously? And in both cases they said, and I think this was all based, they had such a scant knowledge of the current leader of North Korea. Keep in mind he was only there for a couple of years. And so it was all based on what they knew of his dad. And they said, you know what? It's all bark, no bite. Yes, there'll be some noise, but you don't have to worry about that. They have no capabilities of hurting you. Now, they didn't mention in my head it was always about physical retribution. And as it turns out, they had substantial cyber capabilities.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In fact, one legendary hacker. You were hacked by one of the greatest hackers in the history of hacking,

[Michael Linton]

as it turns out, I was.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

His name is Park Jin Hyuk, head of the so called Lazarus Group, the team behind the WannaCry hack of 2017. Not to mention the legendary Bangladesh bank heist where the Lazarus Group tried to siphon off the entire currency Reserves of the country of Bangladesh and almost got away with it.

[Michael Linton]

Yeah. So anyway, we get those threats, we determine that they're not important. That being said, the threats increased. And the folks back in Tokyo, you

[Malcolm Gladwell]

see the threats increased, meaning there were more of them.

[Michael Linton]

There were more like, don't do this. If you do this, there will be consequences. And it did get to the place where I. And I was at that point talking regularly with my boss back in Tokyo, who was great and very supportive. And at some point, there was a question as to whether we should figure out how to change the ending. Cause that was the part, presumably, although they didn't say it, that was most offensive. And we did. We went through a whole exercise where we tried to reduce, you know, the violence of those scenes and we did all these other kind of stuff. But truthfully, that was really a silly exercise because at the end of the day, you were killing Kim Jong Un, you know, so that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And there's no universe in which you go back to Seth Rogen and say, kill the assassination. Or can't you make it about a fictional country? Can you do something other than assassinate him? You don't have to. We're not talking about the movie. Doesn't hinge on them assassinating the North Korean.

[Michael Linton]

So I have a very. I have a very strong memory of this in Seth and his partners, and I'm not sure he's wrong about this. In their estimation, the humor of this was all about the fact that it was actually that it was Kim Jong Un or an actor playing Kim Jong Un who you were going to kill. And it had to be about North Korea, and it actually had to be about the dictator running North Korea. That sort of doing a version of it, the Charlie Chaplin version of it, you know, where he. He doesn't name Hitler by name, but, you know it's Hitler.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

At the beginning of the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin made a devastating satire called the Great Dictator. He never said who it was about. He didn't have to.

[Michael Linton]

That was not the version of it that Seth and those guys were working on.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Charlie Chaplin version is a movie classic that is revered even today.

[Michael Linton]

Yes, yes. I'm not sure the interview hasn't reached that status yet. It might. It might.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's the Great Dictator.

[Michael Linton]

A few years to go. The Great Dictators had many years between. Yeah. Now and then.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

Hello?

[Michael Linton]

Who this?

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

This is the secretary of communication for North Korea. Our supreme leader, Kim Jong Un is interested in doing an interview with Dave Skylark.

[Michael Linton]

Oh, my God.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

We will meet 50km west of Dang Dong, northeastern China. Did you just say China?

[Michael Linton]

And did you just say Dong?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Then the hack happened. One of the biggest studios in Hollywood was paralyzed. The press went to town on the Sony emails. President Obama weighed in. The major theater chains refused to show the movie. And Michael decided that as a matter of principle, he had to find another way to release the movie. He wasn't going to give in to an act of intimidation. And ultimately, he figured it out. Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, offered to release the movie online. Remember, this is 2014, long before streaming was an easy option. And Patrick Collison of Stripe had his team work overtime to figure out how to do online ticketing. Hollywood didn't help him. Silicon Valley did.

[Michael Linton]

The phone was dead. I never heard from any of our competitors. The only person who stood up for us that I recollect was George Clooney. He was the only one with the courage and the loyalty to actually step forward and say, what these people are doing is the right thing, trying to get this movie out and the community should be supporting them. But nobody else did. And by the way, neither did the mayor of la, never picked up the phone and called. Neither did the Attorney General of California, despite the fact that this was, you know, the biggest cyber crime that had ever happened in the state.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. What did Seth Rogen say throughout all of this?

[Michael Linton]

Seth was upset about the fact that we were not getting in into movie theaters. And he was. He was already upset over the summertime. And I get it, he's a filmmaker at our efforts to sort of edit the movie around the actual assassination. But then that spilled into his upset about, you know, you're not getting into movie theaters. And we tried to explain to him that the movie theaters wouldn't take it. We wound up actually getting independent movie theaters to take it, as opposed to the big chains like amc. But I don't think, and I've never talked to Seth Rogen about it after the fact, he wasn't particularly grateful for what everybody had done. He saw this as what the studio should be doing because he had made a good movie and he wanted to see it in movie theaters.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Did he apologize, though, for just even a kind of pro forma apology that, like I did, initiate a process that brought a lot of pain to a lot of people?

[Michael Linton]

No. No, he didn't. No, he didn't.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Let me read to you, in fact, from Rogan's memoir published a few years ago. This is right before he describes going to a crucial meeting at Sony as the hack was unfolding he says he had to take a taxi to the lot because he was still high from partying the night before. Here is how he describes Michael. He was a dude in his mid-50s, relatively fit, red skin, large horns, a tail, hooves, and a legion of screaming demons flanking him at all times. Michael stayed on at Sony for three more years. Then he left. He's not in the movie business anymore, and along the way I think he learned a hard lesson. Michael would never say this, or maybe even think this, but let me say this as his friend who saw him that day at Thanksgiving with his head in his hands. Those who make mistakes, mistakes that they are willing to understand and own up to, deserve better from the rest of us. Revisionist history is produced by nina bird lawrence, lucy sullivan and ben nadaff haffrey. Our editor is karen shakurji. Fact checking by anjali mercado. Our executive producer is jacob smith. Engineering by nina byrd lawrence, owen miller and sarah bruguer. Original music by luis guerra. Sound design and mastering by jake gorski. I'm malcolm gladwell. Tune in next week for the second episode in our Mistakes series.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

We knew the truth. We knew that he had been an airman. We knew that he had been convicted

[Michael Linton]

of a violent crime.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

And we knew that we should have reported that to the FBI. And we didn't.

[Michael Linton]

The question is not whether you're going to fail.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The question is how do you handle handle it. When you do fail, do you take ownership?

[Michael Linton]

Do you step up?

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[Michael Linton]

acast powers the world's best podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Here's a show that we recommend.

[Michael Linton]

I'm Dr. Judy Ho, clinical and forensic neuropsychologist, tenured professor, published author and your new host of savvy psychologists. I've built my career by putting psychology to work in private practice, the courtroom, the classroom, and in the public eye. Everything you loved about savvy psychologists is still here. An evidence based approach, a sympathetic ear and zero judgment. We're going to share everyday mental health tips and to keep you going. Dig into the cultural moments everyone is talking about and deep dive into true crime through a forensic psychology lens. Search savvy psychologists on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening and hit Follow and subscribe. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Acast.com.