Michael Lynton on the infamous Sony hack and learning from his mistakes

17:29Michael Lynton:And 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. 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, 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.

18:05I 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 that's the case? Do you think that other people have learned from your mistake in that way, Michael?

18:17Michael Lynton: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.

18:50Max:Yeah, I'm still on some crazy email chains. I'm sure you are. In terms of the, please forward me more if you got them. In terms of consequences of the hack, I mean, I think these things are often unpredictable, basically. And it had kind of consequences on the creative side. It sounds like Spider-Man basically got revived in part because of fan pressure that came out of the hack. But then, if I have that right, and then I just saw the writer of the film Sinister Six, which was never made, he also just made Project Hail Mary. He was complaining in some interviews that the hack had killed his film at Sony.

19:26Max:How did that play out? Because it sounds like you had to make a bunch of green light decisions based on things that came out of the hack.

19:32Michael Lynton:No, I don't think that's right. I think the world of Drew Goddard and he was very involved with the studio at the time and obviously he's had an enormous success with Project Hail Mary. No, I think those projects were evaluated on their own and they were found not to be good enough to make. I don't think that the hack had anything to do with it, quite candidly.

19:56Max:But there was a sense, at least it was written at the time, that you cut a deal with Universal over reviving Spider-Man in part because of fan pressure out of the hack.

20:04Michael Lynton:No, that's not accurate. So what my recollection, it wasn't with Universal, it was with Disney, which owned Marvel. I'm sorry, with Disney, yeah. And what happened over the course of the sort of years between the previous Spider-Man and the one we were trying to make was that the importance of the Marvel Universe had grown. You had these huge Marvel movies that were showing up, Avengers and others. And we thought, and we had to keep retelling, you know, the origin story of Spider-Man every three episodes. And it was getting, it was complicated how to make that fresh. And there was a feeling that you needed to introduce Spider-Man into the Marvel Universe to get some of that audience back in.

20:48Michael Lynton:And that's really ultimately why the deal was made for them to co-produce it. And that's why Tony Stark showed up in the next Spider-Man was because of that deal.

20:57Max:Well, Kim Jong-un's got to stop taking credit for the revival of Spider-Man. He probably does. Well, we have to take a short break, but we'll be back with more from Michael right after this.

21:17Max:In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about YouTube's huge place in the media ecosystem. So Josh, we are just coming out of awards season in Hollywood, but awards season is really changing. Starting in 2029, the Oscars are going to stream on YouTube, ending a 70-year broadcast run. What does this say about YouTube and the changing shape of media more broadly? I love movies, Ben. And I personally haven't loved the Oscars for a while. And I'm not the only one. It's had declining telecast ratings for a decade and more. So I'm actually really excited for YouTube to help reinvent the Oscars telecast.

21:56The irony of all this is the actual conversation about Hollywood, the conversation about the makeup, the dresses, the glamour, the glitz, the watches, all aspects of Hollywood has actually only increased. It's just moved online and moved to YouTube. You just have to look at the bars surrounding the new Dune 3 trailer to see how this is all happening online. So, Scene Creators Unleashed on the Oscars is actually going to be really, really exciting. At a larger view, I also think it's reflective of the fact that these conversations are happening every day of the year at a scale which is simply gargantuan.

22:29There is a Hollywood conversation happening on YouTube, larger than the Oscars, larger than the Grammys, larger than the Super Bowl, every day of the year. It's a great opportunity for brands to participate, lean in, and just be part of all that. Oh, one other thing which I think is kind of fun. Google's arts and culture team, who have digitized over 2 ,000 museums and galleries around the world using high-resolution imaging over the last couple of years, are also going to be working with the Academy to digitize a huge proportion of their own catalog of movie props, movie scripts, and classic memorabilia from the movie business.

23:03That's going to be really fun for everyone as well.

23:05Max:And where can people go to find out more about this? Head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com. We just published a really interesting article looking back at three years of streaming success and leadership on YouTube and how you as a brand can participate and learn from it.

23:24Max:One final question on the sort of thesis of the book. It's like a book by and for people who believe in therapy. I was just thinking about the sort of Converse case, which in some sense is the Donald Trump case. I remember there's this great line in Confidence Man, the Maggie Haberman book, where somebody says to him, you're a very shallow person. And he says, of course, that's one of my strengths. Part of me read the book and thought, you know, I don't know how much you're getting at all this reflection. I think a lot of CEOs will read this and be like, yeah, I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on my mistakes.

23:53Michael Lynton:That may be the case. You know, I know a few of them. And I would say for the most part, look, what Josh came to me with when we started this whole project with a walk on the beach, we had known each other and were close friends for a long time. The hack had happened sort of five years previously. And he said to me, Michael, every time I raise this subject with you, you avoid talking about it. And I have my own mistake I made that I don't feel comfortable talking about. And I know that that's not healthy. And I know that when I walk around, I think everybody's looking at me thinking about the mistake I made, despite the fact that it was many, many years ago, and you probably feel the same way.

24:33Michael Lynton:We got to get out from underneath that. And so the process of going through this with him, you know, and we brought on a terrific woman out of Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadakis, who's a professor of psychology there. And we started interviewing people about their mistakes, some of them well-known, not so well-known. But the process of unpacking these mistakes and trying to understand what was the emotional origin of what got you to this place, I found incredibly therapeutic. And it's true. It was a big burden on me and it was a welcome respite to get it off my chest a little bit, more than a little bit.

25:13Michael Lynton:It takes some courage. It certainly is very helpful to have a process and a partner to do it with. And, you know, I don't know, despite you could be the CEO of a big company, you could be, you know, not the CEO of a big company. And I think the process of looking at your mistakes and trying to understand why you made them and equally, if not more importantly, how to deal with the shame and the regret that you sort of carry around with you after the mistake is a very healthy and good idea. It was certainly very helpful to me. For people in leadership positions or maybe just people in general, where's the line between, you know, acknowledging and confronting your mistakes and trying to learn from them and wallowing in them, right, and overlearning the mistakes so that maybe you don't take a risk in the future for fear of repeating that same mistake?

26:03Right.

26:03Michael Lynton:And that's, you know, the not doing something because you fear the consequences of it. That's always that in and of itself is a mistake. You know, it's like the librarian who wants to keep every book on the shelf for fear that if you lend a book, you'll never get it back. Well, that sort of defeats the purpose to a library. If you're a librarian, you probably should take that risk. I think if you have somebody at the top of an organization who's willing to admit to a mistake and say, I've made a mistake, here's what it is, it does a couple of things. First of all, it's helpful to them along the lines I've just described.

26:39Michael Lynton:But it's also a message to the organization that it's okay to admit that you've made a mistake and to bring your colleagues in on that. And it's probably a helpful way to avoid making more mistakes in the future. To your point about wallowing, I'm not suggesting for a minute, despite the reference to psychoanalysis and all the rest, which there is a component of that, I suppose, to the book. But I'm not advocating wallowing in. There's no reason that you have to go on and on and on about it to an organization. It's simply acknowledging that you made the mistake, explaining how you're going to deal with the mistake, and moving on.

27:15Michael Lynton:To move back to the media business, because this is a media show.

27:18Max:You chair the boards of Snap and of Warner Music. What are the mistakes that the chairman of a board makes, particularly in the media business right now?

27:29Michael Lynton:I mean, I think a board chair is designed to do just that, is to chair the board, not run the company, not give instructions to management, nothing like that. So the mistakes would be around how the board itself behaves. I think part of the mistakes can just be down to issues of governance, meaning are you actually asking the right questions in the right moment of your management? And that oftentimes doesn't happen, particularly if you have a board who is not that familiar with the media business and doesn't know what questions should be asked, I would say. The other side of it, I would say, is the board chair is there to keep control of the board and make sure that they don't get themselves too involved with the business.

28:15Michael Lynton:And I've seen that happen, too, on occasion, where you get a random board member who suddenly decides they want to become very involved with the business, and the board chair should be holding them back and saying, that's not the role of the board here.

28:28Max:You've been in that role at Snap through its IPO way up and way back down. The stock's at like four or five bucks now. Was there, did that company, did Evan make a mistake or was this just, you know, a tough environment?

28:41Michael Lynton:I think it was more that it was a tough environment. I think when you look at what happened with our competitors, meta specifically in Google, they just became that much bigger. And you sort of see what's happening in the advertising landscape. A version of what's happening more generally in tech is that the big just gets even bigger. And if you look at other companies that are like size to Snap, whether it be, you know, printers and others, it's just that the pie was was was smaller. So I don't think there was any specific mistake there now. Yeah, though it is at the same time that TikTok entered into the U.S.

29:18market. Was there something that you think that they did right? Maybe that Snap missed?

29:21Michael Lynton:No. Well, I mean, they definitely had a specific format, which both Snap and Meta have a version of. They had this very powerful algorithm, which took a long time for people to understand how it works and to a degree replicate it. So those two things, one was a very technical thing that they'd figured out that others hadn't. You know, and you have to remember, if we didn't have the current administration in place, we wouldn't have TikTok. I mean, we were sort of thinking to ourselves, you know, Congress passed a law, the president ratified it, the Supreme Court by a vote for six to three came out and said this is okay.

30:00Michael Lynton:The NSA said it's important to happen. And then for some reason, we still have TikTok hanging around. So that to me is the bigger question.

30:10Max:Why is that the case? It's unusual times. You're also chairman of the Warner Music Board, and you've been broadly right in the middle of the digital transition around music for almost your whole career. And the music industry has often been the canary in the coal mine of new digital business models, again, really since the beginning. Almost always, yeah. Yeah, and I guess in particular, do you think that what Warner has sought to do to ensure that artists are compensated for AI uses of their work, is that a template for film, TV, news? Are there things you've learned there? that are more broadly applicable?

30:46Michael Lynton:Yes and no. So, sorry to keep answering yes and no. Wow, that's your favorite answer. Yeah, well, okay.

30:50Max:That's a very measured, careful, no mistakes answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

30:53Michael Lynton:There's definitely things to learn. Let's just put it that way. Music is typically first when it comes to technology stuff because the files are smaller and therefore, you know, it happens earlier in the life cycle of a technology. I think the idea that the models can train on material that is licensed subject to the artist approval is an appropriate model. And that's the model that Warner is pursuing and that artists should be compensated to the degree to which that licensed material trains the model and is then making use of their material for sure. I do think, though, that there is a greater experience or habit of consumers manipulating music, going right back to forming early playlists, than is the case in the movie or television business.

31:51So I think the audience is, by definition, more inclined to want to have another version of a song than would be the case of another version of a television episode.

32:02Michael Lynton:It's just, we all know that to be true. But the underlying model, this notion that the large language models or any model for that matter requires a license to train off of a piece of IP and that whoever created that IP should then be compensated for that, that I think is an appropriate model. Yes. You know, one of the biggest stories of the year has been, you know, this ongoing saga with Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount, Netflix. A lot of attention has been paid to the Paramount side, but I'm really curious what Netflix does after this. What do you think that they're going to do now that, you know, the Warner Brothers deal has fallen through for them?

32:39Michael Lynton:I mean, I have no idea. I think they have a very winning model, obviously. I think their technology is probably better than anybody else's, which has helped them enormously over time. and they have this global footprint with a lot of local content. The thing that they were missing, I suppose, was more volume because the capacity to consume on the platform is endless. And they needed more tentpoles, big franchises. So my suspicion is they will try and either buy more or get more in the marketplace somehow. But as they said, it's a nice to have, not a need to have. I think this was, judging from a distance, because I'm not involved, this was much more important for Paramount to have and not be stuck in a middle position than it is for Netflix to have, who is in a leading position.

33:31Max:In that moment when everyone was racing to build a streaming app, Sony was really the exception, your old shop. I don't remember whether these conversations were in the air when you were there. But I'm curious how that decision looks now, that Paramount builds an app, Sony doesn't, and just focuses on making movies and selling them.

33:49Michael Lynton:You know, again, I've been away for the company for a decade. What I can tell you at the time was, yes, there was a lot of conversations around turning particularly the PlayStation network into a form of streaming. And the thing that not many people know is that a third of all the Netflix subscribers for a long period came off of that PlayStation network. They paid us for almost a decade a significant bounty to bring people over to Netflix. We definitely knew that the audience playing games on PlayStation Network were movie and television watchers. Michael, sorry to interrupt. Was that just because people were using their PlayStations like they use Roku, where it was like, this is a thing that I can get the Netflix app on here and it's going on to my TV?

34:33Is that why? Okay.

34:35Michael Lynton:So there was a lot of conversation about shouldn't we be in this business and shouldn't. And by the way, there's also a history with Sony, if you think about it, going back to the music side of things where, given the size of the music company that Sony has, we should never have allowed Spotify into the business, right? We should have had our own platform there, too, or each of the music companies should have. But I think what happened at the time was Sony was not in as strong a position as it is today financially. And it wasn't devoted to media the way it is today because it was still very much a consumer electronics company in addition to being a media company.

35:15Michael Lynton:And they were not understandably willing to devote the billions of dollars that would be required to start one of these things up. Between the financial component and the focus of the company, this is just not something that they wanted to pursue. I talked – we modeled it. We did that extensively. Zach Van Amberg and Jamie Ehrlich, who are now at Apple, they were very engaged with doing this before they left for Apple. It was the decision of the company. Whether that was the right or the wrong decision, I can't – I don't know enough to know. I know that in the current position of brokering, that's worked out well for them financially.

35:55Michael Lynton:Whether in the long term that's viable, I can't speak to it. It looks as though they're one of a very small number who don't have a streaming platform, and that may be a disadvantage over the long term.

36:08Max:One last question, Michael. Do you ever wake up and wish you were running a movie studio again?

36:12Michael Lynton:No. No, I really – I did it – I was there for about 15 years. I had a great time. I worked really closely with Amy Pascal and others. No, is the short answer. First of all, it doesn't feel as much fun as it did at the time. At the time, it was a lot of fun. And secondly, I did my time, and now I'm enjoying myself doing other things. All right, Michael. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me.

36:49Max:We talk a lot on this show about reading the mixed signals of the media landscape. But when you need a clear signal for your marketing strategy, where do you go? Think with Google is there to help. While everyone else is guessing how AI changes the game in 2026, Think with Google is publishing the actual playbook. That includes next-level consumer insights, guidance on creating, capturing, and converting demand, and data-backed strategies that move you from experimenting with AI to actually driving profitability with it. You can read all that and more at thinkwithgoogle.com.

37:25So, Ben, we were just talking during the break about how you kind of disagree with some of what Michael said around his theories about mistakes and what one should take away from them. And why do you disagree?

37:36Max:Oh, I guess, you know, I mean, this is probably just a mark of poor character, but I guess I feel like in my own career, I have benefited from not reflecting too much from, and particularly in journalism. I think often there is a kind of, you can overthink the consequences. Like the job is to publish things that you know, and you can get really tangled up if you start to wonder whether people ought to really know this thing or not. That's really interesting. I think that that's probably true. And I think as you get deeper into a subject, it becomes more true because you get to know people more and you get more obsessed with that question.

38:13Whereas when you're just starting out and you've got a scoop, you're like, who cares? This is great. Let's get this information out there.

38:18Max:I don't want to go too far in this. As I say it, I'm like, yikes, I'm really an executive now and I should go reread Michael's book and reflect on what in my childhood is going to lead me to make my next mistake. So I'll go off and do that after this. Let's focus on the actual substance. Here in the interesting media questions at play, Michael was very, very frustrated with the way that the news media handled the Sony hack. And, you know, this is not a question that is dead. This is an internal debate that's happening all the time. Ben, during the interview, you mentioned the Epstein files right after the Sony hack.

38:53Of course, there was the Democratic National Committee email hack and release where a lot of these same questions about what should be public and what shouldn't were out there and debated again. And meanwhile, the general public and the internet has no such qualms about how they think about this stuff. Plenty of independent creators and people in the fragmented media ecosystem are running wild with all sorts of this type of information. It seems like the only people who still care about gatekeeping any of this is those of us who are left in the legacy media or legacy media adjacent media companies.

39:24What do you think about Michael's prescriptions and where do you kind of fall, you know, providing the information that's real and that's out there and that's available versus why should we be talking about this and focusing on this?

39:35Max:Yeah, I mean, it's funny because as you say, it's just a much less consequential question now. Who cares if whether or not journalists go rooting around these files and finding embarrassing stuff, you know, random people on Twitter will. And I think everybody just needs to develop antibodies to, okay, this is a ugly private thought that someone expressed to one friend and probably shouldn't be interpreted like a public statement. And I think that's a hard thing for people to get their heads around, but it's sort of a human reality. As a journalistic matter, I've just sort of refreshed my memory.

40:04Max:Like BuzzFeed was pretty – we didn't kind of go rooting around people's personal lives in the Sony hack when I was there. And I remember more – we spent a lot more time – Catherine Miller is now at the Times and I. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to cover the DNC hack. And I remember, you know, the thing that we kind of wound up with was, look, like the fact of the hack and the motives of the hackers are actually a much bigger story than anything in the hack. That's true of the Sony hack, too. I mean, the details are all inconsequential. The fact that North Korea waged cyber war in a big Japanese company, that was the big story.

40:35Max:Similarly, nobody remembers anything that was in the DNC leaks. The hack itself was more important. Of course, how do you then deal with that? Like we dealt with it by trying to say that in the second or third paragraph of the stories we did and trying to be fairly restrained about stories. But when there is revelatory stuff in these things, like here's the secret speech that Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and has been trying to keep from everyone, and here it is. I mean that is still news, right? It's interesting. And so I think you've seen some outlets, the Times, I'd say in particular, you sort of step back and do these big conceptual stories and try to use the emails not as a little gotcha here and there but as a real – as something more satisfyingly revelatory about how the world works.

41:17Max:And I guess I do think that in an environment where whether you like it or not, these things are public and people on social media are all over them, that is a real function for the professional media. I think ultimately the lesson, and we talked about this during the interview a little bit with Michael, I think the lesson that many of us have learned from all of these series of hacks and releases, and you've been a part of some of them. My emails as a young-ish reporter in my early 20s were part of the DNC hack and I think really shaped the way that I think about this, which is that all electronic communication, everything that we put out there has a risk, has a serious risk of being released into the world.

41:57And I actually do think that a lot of people in major professional environments have internalized that, particularly ones that have been adjacent to these big moments. I think that people really, really did learn from what ended up being a mistake that Michael made to seem cool.

42:13Max:And so anyway, yes, yes, kids, set your slack retention times to two weeks if you take nothing else from this episode.

42:22Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Danny Fidel With special thanks to Josh Billidson Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino Daniel Haift, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern And Tori Kaur Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music Is by Steve Bone Our public editor is Kim Joo Ai I think the eventual Supreme leader who hopefully will not Hack us for even talking about this episode again

42:51Max:If you're listening from North Korea Or anywhere else, please follow us where you get your Podcasts and subscribe on YouTube And if you're in Pyongyang or elsewhere, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.