Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tani. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore and with me as always is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, what's the biggest mistake that you've made in your professional life? Would you say?
It's all hiring decisions, honestly.
It's all hiring decisions. Yes. Casting. The casting of this podcast in its second iteration.
Exactly. That was a big one. So some early, I had some early much publicized errors on my blog that I won't get into back in the day.
Well, people who are interested in those mistakes unfortunately can find them on the internet, probably, though a lot of stuff on the internet disappears so maybe you won't find some of the really embarrassing stuff.
Someone helpfully added this one to my Wikipedia page, though.
Oh yeah, thank you. Yes. Thankfully though. Wow. Who edits your Wikipedia page?
I mean, you know, my many fans, apparently.
Yeah, your many fans. Exactly. Well, the reason why we ask is because our guest on the show this week is someone who has thought a lot about their own mistakes, particularly ones that have had enormous ramifications playing out in the public eye. That's Michael Lynton. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment and he's the current chairperson of Snap, that's as in Snapchat, and Warner Music. Michael has just co-authored a book with Josh Steiner called From Mistakes to Meaning, Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You. And while the name kind of sounds a little self-helpy and whatnot, Michael's mistake was actually one that was pretty interesting and that I think many people who listen to the show would be well aware of. And that was his decision to greenlight the movie The Interview, which prompted North Korea to hack and release the emails of Sony employees. North Korea decided to take this extreme measure because The Interview featured a scene in which Seth Rogen and co-star James Franco assassinated Kim Jong-un. The North Koreans were not happy about that, threatened Michael and eventually released these emails. This saga started because of one mistake that Michael said was just from his desire to seem cool in front of very popular celebrities and ended up having these major, major geopolitical consequences and changed his life and the trajectory of Hollywood forever. Ben, it was a remarkable saga that Michael actually hasn't talked a lot about before releasing this book.
Yeah. And he, you know, he led through it with this incredible kind of like optimism. And it's really interesting to sort of now see really how dark it was from the inside.
Yeah. And this hack and the release of the emails raised a lot of questions which have actually been subsequently explored afterwards in other high-profile hacks about the nature of hacked materials, how news and media organizations should handle them, whether it even really matters anymore given that everyone is their own personal media brand and private sleuth. So we wanted to ask him about that and we of course wanted to ask him about the state of Hollywood today. We wanted to ask him about Snap, the company of which he's a chairperson, and the future of music in a world where AI replication has gotten so good. Ben, did I miss anything? Anything else we want to talk to Michael about before he hops on with us?
I mean, that's a lot. Might be a mistake to ask him all those things.
That's true. We'll try to make as few mistakes as possible in this interview, but we have to take a short break and we'll be back with more from Michael right after this.
Michael, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the book.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.
I wonder if we could just start with what in your chapter of this book in some sense is the original sin, which is a table read in 2013 with Seth Rogen. Can you just tell us that story?
Yeah, of course. So at the time we were presented with a script of a movie called The Interview which is...
And you were then running Sony.
I was then running Sony Entertainment. Amy Pascal was running the movie studio side of things. So entertainment comprised movie, television, and music. And at the time we had a very strict process in place to greenlight movies which is pretty accepted in the industry. You know, at a certain point you get all the relevant important functions around a table, finance, marketing, creative, and you come to a collective point of view about whether or not you want to go forward with this. In this particular moment we had made a bunch of R-rated comedies with Seth Rogen, all of which had been successful. Universal also had made a bunch of R-rated comedies. And so we had two homes, two places to go. Every script therefore was at some point competitive. We were presented with this movie, The Interview, which is about two sort of hapless journalists, Seth Rogen and James Franco, who under the direction of the CIA go off to North Korea ostensibly to do something, but really to assassinate Kim Jong-un. And everybody on the creative side of our business in the studio wanted to make the movie. And we were under time pressure to do so because if we weren't going to say yes, Universal would probably say yes. So, we decided to have this table read and to set the scene. It was in a big room. You have all the cast around a table. You have all the creative staff who's there as well from the studio. Amy's there. Everybody's dressed very casually. And I walk in and I am not only in a suit, I am the suit. I am the last person remaining who is sort of skeptical about whether we should make this or not. That's the reason why we're having the read through. And under normal circumstances at the end of a read through we would have said okay fine that was great if it was a successful read through. Let's go back and we'll come back to you in a day or two and tell you whether we're doing this. In this case I got caught up in the moment at the end when everybody was saying and high-fiving each other like that was really funny and you know let's go do this. I for the first time in a decade, I've been in the job for about 10 years, said yeah let's go do this. Let's make this. And that was proved to be a gigantic mistake because what ensued was, you know, the North Korean government wound up hacking our entire system. There was the biggest cyber attack on a corporate I think ever at that point, certainly by a foreign power, and it brought us to our knees and destroyed many people's careers and ruined a lot of things.
I'm surprised to hear that you thought that Universal was interested in making this as well given the risks of this kind of assassination scene.
I don't know how Universal would have responded and I don't know whether we were being agented at the time or whether they were genuinely interested. I think from our vantage point, we probably would have flagged it in a meeting such as the one I described earlier because the public policy people would have been there and our general counsel would have been there and as a Japanese company, we had a specific relationship with North Korea at the time. Actually, Prime Minister Abe was negotiating with the North Korean government to try and retrieve the bodies of these hundred hostages, these children who had been abducted from the streets of Japan back in the 70s. I had no knowledge of this, but you know, it was a very tense moment between the Japanese and the North Koreans in a relationship that traditionally is tense.
Afterwards, you know, presumably you have to go and tell people that you decided to greenlight this and you do talk about having some sort of doubts and there was some debate after you greenlit it. Why did you, why do you feel like you stuck with it even though you made that mistake in the moment? Why do you think you stuck with it?
Fairness. Yeah. So, it definitely sort of gnawed me a little bit when you say we had to tell people. I didn't, we didn't regularly communicate back to Tokyo with a movie that was of this size. I think it was a 30 or 40 million dollar movie. It didn't require any approvals or anything out of Tokyo. And in truth, it first became a real problem only after we had finished the movie and we put out the first trailer and that was the moment where we started getting threatening notices from the North Koreans or people who said they were the North Koreans because we didn't have an official channel of communication. And at that point I really felt strongly that you needed to put the movie out. You know, I had had some experience with something vaguely similar because I had come into Penguin a few years after they published The Satanic Verses. And in that case, you know, if you'll remember, everybody had the Fatwa put on their head and in fact, three people died. The difference was that the publishing industry was incredibly supportive of Penguin, who was the publisher at the time. And I just felt very strongly that you don't get to pick your battles over censorship. Once you decide you're going to do something, you're under an obligation to do it, especially actually if somebody like the North Koreans are telling you you can't put this out.
You know, honestly, reading this chapter, I left thinking, you know, was this really a mistake? Like, shouldn't I kind of want my studio head to occasionally say, 'Damn the torpedoes.' And sure, there's some tail risk with everything, but this wasn't exactly a foreseeable risk. And I don't know, I almost, I left thinking like, are you sure this was a mistake? Just because there are bad consequences doesn't always mean it was a mistake, I think.
Yeah, I would still view it as a mistake a little bit for the reasons that I was describing a moment ago which is if you looked at the risks, whenever you look at something, a project like this, it's not just the financial risks it's also the other risk that can come to it. I think it would have become pretty evident pretty quickly that to kill in a movie the hostile leader of a hostile nation, which I'm not sure actually has ever been done before since, was a clever idea and was I think almost certainly a mistake. In fact, when President Obama called me, this is also in the chapter, to apologize for something, he was the first one to bring my attention to the fact that he viewed this as probably a mistake and I had to agree with him.
I sort of hadn't thought of this, but there is a tacit sort of foreign policy veto across Hollywood in a way, right? Like people are very careful with the Chinese, they're careful with the Russians. In this situation made it visible a bit, but do you think that in a way what we're seeing in the movies is a bit shaped by the studios' fear of being hacked?
No, I think that's a different question. I think that hacking is one thing and that's in the extreme. And I think what most studios look at is where they can distribute the movie. And Russia at one time no longer was a very good market for the studios. China still remains a good market. And I think they are careful about what they put in their movies to make sure they still have access to those markets.
Right. There is no North Korean market. So you weren't necessarily concerned about that. But of course Kim Jong-un was still the leader of a different...
Yes. But, you know, I remember the very first Spider-Man going all the way back to the Sam Raimi version, you probably don't remember this, I wouldn't either, had Spider-Man sort of lifting up an American flag. We never did that post that moment because that was not well-received outside the United States in that moment. And so, the whole question, and this is a separate conversation, the one we're having about the book, is about how is soft power now showing itself in American movies when you can't basically beat your chest with patriotism at the moment and have access to international markets the way you once could.
But now there's domestic pressure, I think, to bring that patriotism back. Do you think the studios will do it?
You know, I've been out of the business for a long time, Ben. I don't know is the answer. I don't know.
There's something you said after the hack that really stuck with me about how when you were kind of like leading through this crisis that your formula for survival was to be ridiculously optimistic. And you sort of, and you just sort of every day told people like this is going to wind up being the best thing that ever happened to us. And I remember people telling me about that and how effective you were in that moment. Did that mean it took you a while to realize it was a mistake because you sort of had to force yourself to believe in it or was it immediately obvious to you?
Well, it was certainly immediately obvious after I had that phone call with President Obama, but it was obvious to me prior to that. I think my attitude about optimism was, you know, a movie studio is very much like a small college campus. The Sony lot was about 40 acres. You have about 7,000 people there and everybody's very visible to everybody else, certainly the person running the place is. And in those moments when everybody is sort of confused and down, the folks in authority need to be present and upbeat and sometimes that optimism can be a little false, meaning you're sort of generating it. You're faking it for the moment. But no, I had a pretty clear understanding that I had made a big mistake by allowing this thing to go forward.
So, Michael, you have a family full of journalists, but I'm curious, how do you think that the journalists handled the hack? There was obviously a lot of bloggers and people at the time who were going through a lot of pretty damaging and personal stuff. I think Gawker was doing like daily updates from this thing. I remember that quite well. I'm curious what you thought about how the media handled the hack.
Poorly in my view. And Ben, I can't remember where you were at the moment. Were you at the Times at that moment?
Did you guys write about this, Ben?
I'm sure we did. I'm sure there's stuff I feel bad about, but I should have gone back and looked. We were not as aggressive as Gawker. For sure.
In general, when it comes to the media on this stuff, these emails were private emails that were disclosed illegally. And to set the scene, what the North Koreans were doing at the time was they would bring together a cache of emails. You as a journalist would have to type in 'die Sony'. When you type that in, the emails would be released to you and then you could go through them, sort of do a dumpster dive on them and you would come out with salacious material because there was a lot of emails from movie stars and other folks. And to me that was just the lowest form of journalism. And it was sort of a funny thing because I would talk to a variety of different journalists both at more established places like the Wall Street Journal and less established places like the sites you're referring to and they didn't feel good about it, but they kept saying, 'Well, our competitors are doing it, so we have to do it.' Or they would say, 'Well, it's already been published on Gawker, so we're just reprinting something that Gawker has already published.' So, and every time you would say to them, come on guys, you know, you signed up for a higher calling than this, they would sort of shrug and they'd say, yeah, but this is what our editors want and this is how we can get people to read our pieces. So, in general, I thought they behaved poorly in the whole thing.
Yeah, it was almost the first of its kind. And I remember the moment thinking, what do we do with this? I think we in the end we were pretty squeamish at BuzzFeed which I think I've not always been in that position but I feel good about.
My recollection is that that was the case. Yeah, exactly.
But it is interesting like this kind of hack has since then, obviously the DNC emails, the Epstein files, has become kind of a routine part of journalism and it does give often intelligence services a way to kind of set the agenda, decide what the story is going to be. I guess I'm sort of, you know, Epstein is the thing of the moment, how should people like us be thinking about these huge disclosures of emails that are mostly, you know, thousands of people's private emails? How should we think about them?
You know, I haven't been a student of what actually has been presented. I would say a couple of things. First of all, these are emails that are, my understanding of it, being officially provided by the Justice Department for the public to look at. That's a very different thing.
Well, it's a government releasing them for political reasons of its own. It's not that different. But go ahead.
And there you have it, Ben. I was about to say and you also have a government, I would say, that didn't really redact them very well. So, I think some people who got caught up in it, particularly people who at the time were underage who never should have been caught up in it, whether it be their likeness or... and to some respect, I think that the journalists have not been behaving great with that. They should self-redact on those type of things particularly when people are underage.
I actually think that one of the interesting consequences here, you know, because the Sony hack happened right before the DNC hack and the release of those emails as well and those two events happening in kind of quick succession. I think the other consequence has just been that fewer important people put things in email. I think that we've seen it over and over. Do you think that's the case? Do you think that other people have learned from your mistake in that way, Michael?
I would say yes and no, which is a very unsatisfying answer. So, the number of people I know now, and you probably have the same, who will say meet me on Signal, is a lot. But it sometimes feels the equivalent of somebody who's ordering an enormous meal and then a Diet Coke because by the same token, I know those same individuals are writing emails which they've told me they regret writing and they're writing them as of a month ago. So, I think both things are true at the moment.
Yeah, I'm still on some crazy email chains.
