Interviewer: Undoubtedly, you are creating in a marketplace that doesn't exist, and there are very few winners in that kind of environment. Most people are losers, and it's upon their bodies that success happens, right?

Jon Sanborn: And it's questioning the nature of content in the interactive world right now, and the business is challenging the nature of content. It's not the quality of the content, it's not the relationship between the viewer and the experience, because there are very, very, very successful sites that all you do is read. There are very successful environments where you buy things or sell things. And then there are search engines and portals and new information. Well, that's not what I want to do, and it's not the future of story telling.

Or maybe it is. Maybe story telling, after a while, is more purely about choice and connectivity than it is anything else, because there is a story element to reading the newspaper, and there is a story element to reading the news on the Internet. Each is a different kind of experience.

Interviewer: I don't know whether this is relevant to that discussion, but a lot of what we are thinking about is the idea of conversational media. That one of the roles will be people connecting to each other, and kind of in real time going, "Oh, and let me show you, either this thing I did, or this thing that somebody else did." So that there's a kind of extension of the narratives that are in telephony-

Jon Sanborn: We did the Dyson last year as an experiment, and you know about that, right?

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about it.

Jon Sanborn: Michael and I had wondered why somebody hadn't used email to do a fiction, because email is a very powerful tool, and, to a certain extent, we had planned to put it into Paul Is Dead, but we had an idea to do a conspiracy piece purely through email. And it came out of the fact that Michael's wife had gotten an errant piece of email from a company addressed to her, and the person on the other end refused to believe that he was not talking to the right person, even though she kept sending him emails back saying, "I don't work for your company. You've got the wrong person."

So we, for a two week period, with forty or so hand-selected candidates, did this thing called Dyson. The first day, you get what looks like an errant piece of email from a guy named Denny Reichert at Dyson.org. If you look up Dyson.org on the web, you'll find the domain Dyson.org that looks like a fairly vanilla corporate web site. And Denny gives a list of figures which are very cryptic. He writes, "Can you please check these. I need these for the meeting tomorrow, and everyone is breathing down my neck." And, most people, let's say more than half the people, wrote back and said, "Sorry guy, you've got the wrong address. I have no idea what you are talking about." Some people just ignored it.

The next day you get an email from Denny, from his AOL account, saying, "I've been locked out of my computer at work. Can you print out the figures I sent you and hold on to them? Make a hard copy because... I'll contact you." Then--again, 50% said, "I'm sorry. I have no idea what you are talking about." Some people said, "Oh sure, I'll print it out. Glad to be of help."

You are then told the next day by Vic DeBeese from Dyson.org that Denny Reichert has been found dead, an apparent suicide, and you are one of the last people he contacted. What was he asking you about? Did he ask you, what did he ask you to do? In no way were you contacted through a mailing list of any kind, this was obviously some kind of mistake, but we need to track this down.

You get another email the next day from somebody else at Dyson saying, "Denny was not a suicide. This is murder and a cover up. Be careful."

Well, at that point, some people called the cops, some people called their lawyers. Some people got really involved in it. And one of the people we had put on our mailing list was Eric Idle from Monty Python, because we thought he'd like it, because he did The Ruggles, and was a funny guy. And ultimately, perhaps this was something creepy, but with a sense of humor. We did not realize how powerful these emails were going to be. And Eric seemed to be playing along with us when you look at the responses to the emails that he sent us.

And at the end of two weeks, after a lot of very cryptic, fun stuff goes back and forth, we revealed to these 40 people that this was a pitch, and that Dyson was the ultimate global office politics piece, and we were looking for money. Well, Eric Idle hit the ceiling, and he put up a huge diatribe against us on the Pythonline site and threatened to sue us. And I'd say, 50% down the middle, half the people loved it and were completely thrilled by it, and the other half hated it. They felt like we had invaded their space. Denise Caruso from the New York Times just said we had crossed the line.

But other people, like Michael Krantz from Time Magazine had thought we had done something really radical, and perhaps invented a new art form, because the emails are very simple. They're not complex. They're a paragraph each, the way emails really are, and it clearly wasn't spam because it spun itself out, and, to a certain extent, Michael and I had moderated the responses. And, if some people said, "Look, I don't want to do this," we took them off the mailing list.

But, I'd say 80% of the people, 32 of the 40, followed all the way through the end, and some people got real creative. Two people hacked into our DNS addresses to find out who we were. Of course it resulted in some very weird publicity for us, which we hadn't expected or wanted, where Denise blasted us in the Times, we got written up in the Washington Post, and there was a full page article in Time Magazine. But it showed how powerful this kind of communication actually is, and how intimate most people take it, which we hadn't thought of.

Interviewer: Well, the issues there have a lot to do with public and private, you know.

Jon Sanborn: But that was very interesting to us, because, I think the whole nature of the Internet is that it breaks down a lot of the boundaries between public and private.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Jon Sanborn: This is still something that we want to pursue, and, as much as I'm sort of ragging on the business models and the industry not being as mature as we all thought it was, Michael and I are very interesting in where it may go. But, frankly, our work with Comedy Central is more satisfying. It is more satisfying to know that you write the script, people laugh.

Interviewer: Yes, well, you know, arguably, you're now settling into forms where people kind of know what they are doing around you, you know?

Jon Sanborn: If you look at the game world right now, there's a handful of hit games, and there's a tremendous number of failures. Which is exactly like the movie or TV business, except that the stakes are higher, the payoffs are better, and, to a certain extent, the ability for the creative person to navigate through the traditional world is a lot more defined.

I would rather be playing in that arena right now, because if we had spent 800,000 dollars of somebody's money to make a movie, and that movie company had either gone out of business or had given the property back to us, it would be very easy for us to find a distributor, to get it into festivals, to get it up on to screens, to get it into home video, and to sell it overseas. And at 800,000 dollars, we would make a profit, because the world is hungry for movies.

We've made an 800,000 dollar interactive piece. MSN, our funder, bailed. MGM Interactive, which was a very strong partner for us, crippled itself, and we were left, essentially, self publishing something. It's an ironic tale, because the property is really, really good.

Interviewer: One of the questions is what will be Paul Is Dead's time value, because I just can't help but thinking it's likely to reappear and reappear and reappear--