The Sony Hack | The Mistakes Series

The former head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, tells Malcolm about a time he made a really big mistake: greenlighting a film that would lead to an international incident. You can learn more about Michael Lynton and Josh Steiner’s book, From Mistakes to Meaning, here https://apple.co/3Qq8m6S. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers at blockers.fm or wherever audiobooks are sold.

• 0:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bushkin.

• 0:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  On the morning of November 24th, 2014, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Michael Lynton 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'd been at Sony nearly 11 years.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  He turned onto Bundy from San Vicente Boulevard.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  I was driving to work and I get a phone call from our CFO, Dave Henler, 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."

• 1:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  He arrived a few minutes later.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  The studio is a lot like a college campus. It's like 5,000 or 7,000 people. Half of them are employees. But as a result of you all sitting in that one space, word travels very fast. And 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?

• 2:03Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 2:10Speaker 02

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

• 2:15Malcolm 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 E 123. Die Sony Pictures Entertainment. The press had a field day.

• 2:36Speaker 02

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

• 2:53Malcolm 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.

• 3:16Speaker 02

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

• 3:40Malcolm 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 Lynton looked back on what happened, he came to an uncomfortable conclusion: that in some significant sense, it was all his fault.

• 4:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 mini-series about mistakes, inspired by a book that Lynton 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 Lynton is one of my closest friends. In those days, I would stay at his guesthouse in Los Angeles for weeks at a time, like Cato Calan.

• 4:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  I remember, if I remember correctly, you guys came to New York for Thanksgiving.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  We did. Yeah, we did.

• 4:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the middle of all of this.

• 4:59Speaker 02

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

• 5:03Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 5:06Speaker 02

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

• 5:08Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 5:19Speaker 02

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

• 5:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  So it was a rough time.

• 5:25Malcolm 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.

• 5:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  As the CEO of an entertainment company, Michael Lynton 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

• 6:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  and Porsches and Mercedes and Audis, until I came to the CEO's spot, and there was Michael's white Volkswagen Golf.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  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. And I was, with the exception of maybe one other person around there, the only guy in a suit.

• 7:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you're the only one going to Japan?

• 7:02Speaker 02

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

• 7:03Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 7:13Speaker 02

  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 5 o'clock in the morning into Haneda, which is the Urtun Metro pump, and I would take that same flight back at midnight the next day.

• 7:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  God, it's just the most exhausting.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Because I had little kids, and the other thing, and I wanted to get home.

• 7:35Malcolm 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.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  People get caught up in their passions and got 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 looked at.

• 8:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  So this disciplining function that you serve is working.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were no Waterworlds, by way of example.

• 8:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  Heaven's Gate.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  You know, Heaven's Gate. Now, 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.

• 8:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 02

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

• 8:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then came the summer of 2013.

• 8:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  So lead us up to, so a movie comes up for consideration.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Right, called The Interview.

• 8:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Called The Interview.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 9:41Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 9:51Speaker 02

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

• 10:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, so they all show up.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  So they all show up. And by the way, when I say we would give them a yea 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.

• 10:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Or not, but in this case it did.

• 10:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, so describe, describe the read.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  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, 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, 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.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  And then there's me, in a dark suit, 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, 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 got, 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.

• 11:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  That was his mistake.

• 12:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audio-books or at Audible, Spotify or wherever audiobooks are sold.

• 12:39Malcolm 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 I did what I did, I couldn't do it. I drew a blank. And I found that sudden inability to account

• 13:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  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 been very helpful to me. He said, you know, Michael, you never ever want to talk about this thing. And I know it weighs heavy on you. And it's frustrating to me that you won't talk about it. And I don't think it's healthy that you're not talking about it. And I think what might be a good idea is if we both investigated this stuff and we looked into it.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:49Malcolm 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.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  What it really does is it gives you a shorthand for how to understand a situation in the moment. It's just like, oh, OK, 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.

• 15:30Malcolm 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 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 believed to be the best understanding of why you decided to agree on that movie in that way?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  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 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 eight or nine 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.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  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 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, it was an 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 had 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.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  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'd 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.

• 17:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  What should he have done? He should have said, we'll get back to you.

• 18:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  So let's replay it. And only this time you don't say yes in the room and 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?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  And that would have stopped the movie.

• 19:04Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 19:10Speaker 02

  In this country 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 schoolchildren were kidnapped off the streets and carted off to North Korea in that period. And In, just as we were-

• 19:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hundred.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  A hundred 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 us, was he was negotiating with the North Korean government to get those, whatever was remaining of those people back to Japan. And trying to re-establish or find some normalized relationship back with North Korea. So, we were right in that moment.

• 20:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  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-

• 20:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  That equation is not a good one.

• 20:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  It wasn't like the interview was going to be one of Sony's blockbuster franchises. It was a small-budget movie. A genre movie. This genre didn't have the possibility of a massive upside. This movie was never gonna make two hundred million dollars.

• 20:48Speaker 02

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

• 20:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  So, uh, it's constricted both geographically and also by its audience. Because it's R-rated, so you can't get, you know, kids under seventeen 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.

• 21:14Malcolm 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, um, 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?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  No.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 21:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Would have been legitimate.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers at blockers.fm or wherever audiobooks are sold.

• 22:29Malcolm 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.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Mr. Rappaport, I'm Agent Lacy with Central Intelligence. You two are going to be in a room alone with Kim, and the CIA would love it if you could take him out.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Hmm?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Take him out.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  For coffee? Dinner. For kimchi?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  No, uh, take him out.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  You want us to kill the leader of North Korea?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  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. It turned, it came out, it 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.

• 23:35Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 23:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:19Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 24:25Speaker 02

  As it turns out, I was.

• 24:29Malcolm 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.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so anyway, we get those threats.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  We determine that they're not important. That being said, the threats increased and the folks back in Tokyo...

• 24:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  When you say the threats increased...

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Meaning there were more of them. 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, because 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, and...

• 25:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's no universe in which you go back to Seth Rogen and say...

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Kill the assassination?

• 25:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Or can you, 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.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  So, I have a very, I have a very strong memory of this. It 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 gonna kill. And it had to be about North Korea, and it actually had to be about...

• 26:27Speaker 02

  The dictator running North Korea. That sort of doing a version of it, the Charlie Chaplin version of it, you know, where he doesn't name Hitler by name, but you know it's Hitler.

• 26:37Malcolm 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.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  That was not the version of it that Seth and those guys were willing to do.

• 26:51Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 26:55Speaker 02

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

• 27:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  "The Great Dictator."

• 27:01Speaker 02

  It's got a few years to go. "The Great Dictator" has had many years between now and then.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Hello, who this?

• 27:07Speaker 05

  This is the Secretary of Communication for North Korea. Our Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is interested in doing an interview with Dave Skylark.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  We will meet 50 kilometers west of Dengdong, northeastern China.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Did you just say China? And did you just say dong?

• 27:22Malcolm 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.

• 28:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hollywood didn't help him. Silicon Valley did.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  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 cybercrime that had ever happened in the state.

• 28:39Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Seth was upset about the fact that we were not getting it 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, 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.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  But I don't think, and I've, you know, I've never talked to Seth Rogen about it after the fact, I, 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.

• 29:28Malcolm 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.

• 29:38Speaker 02

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

• 29:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Let me read to you, in fact, from Rogen'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.

• 30:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 30:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadav Hafrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Anjali Makado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Owen Miller, and Sarah Brugger. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 31:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tune in next week for the second episode in our mistakes series.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  We knew the truth. We knew that he had been an airman. We knew that he had been convicted of a violent crime. And we knew that we should have reported that to the FBI and we didn't.

• 31:34Speaker 07

  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? Do you step up?

• 31:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem, and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audio-books or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold.