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Matlana Media is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
There was a time when asking a stranger for directions wasn’t remarkable, when the act of unfolding a paper map prompted locals to offer guidance - then you’d get to chatting, and you’d get useful travel tips or perhaps even an invitation to a family meal.
Matlana Media’s mission is to revive our ANALOG TRAVEL SKILLS: Navigating life without a digital safety net, and accepting that stepping outside our comfort zone is part of the journey. “Travel” isn’t boarding an airplane, it’s taking a small step toward the unfamiliar. Our work gives our audience reasons - and nerve - to practice taking those steps.
We are living through an epidemic of loneliness. Our social skills are eroding, and the ones we are losing aren’t exotic — they’re the skills we need for a conversation, an interview, a collaboration, an apology. Analog travel invites us to look up, greet the stranger, and meet Our Looney Planet with curiosity, common sense, humility, and respect.
Via video podcasts and locally made travelogues, Matlana Media offers proof that Our Looney Planet is home to playful, curious, idiosyncratic humans, imbued with the capacity to connect across language and culture.
There was a time when asking a stranger for directions wasn’t remarkable, when the act of unfolding a paper map prompted locals to offer guidance - then you’d get to chatting, and you’d get useful travel tips or perhaps even an invitation to a family meal.
Matlana Media is here to revive the magic of “analog travel,” when humans had to turn to their own common sense and to strangers for guidance.
Matlana Media is uniquely positioned to create media that demonstrates how to approach the stranger. To us “Travel” isn’t boarding an airplane, it’s taking a small step toward the unfamiliar. Our mission is to revive analog travel skills which allowed us to navigate our lives that brought us into contact with humans.
before the smart phone era. analog travel, which simply means taking a break from our reliance on our mediating devices and accepting that our journey will take us outside our comfort zone.
with curiosity, common sense, humility, and respect
“Travel” isn’t boarding an airplane, it’s taking a small step toward the unfamiliar. Practicing these skills build confidence in our ability to say hello to others and practicing them can improve our mental health and enliven our civic society.
We are living through an epidemic of loneliness. Our social skills are eroding, and the ones we are losing aren’t exotic — they’re the skills we need for a conversation, an interview, a collaboration, an apology.
Matlana Media’s team is composed of professional documentary filmmakers and journalists. We are uniquely positioned to create media that demonstrates how to approach the stranger with curiosity, common sense, humility, and respect. Back in the day before mediating devices lived in every pocket Ian and Justine used these skills across 100 countries for over 20 years and they captured those experiences on film.
Today, via their video podcasts and locally made travelogues, Ian & Justine encourage their audiences to experience those skills themselves and have their own adventures with playful, curious, idiosyncratic humans, across language and culture.
There was a time when asking a stranger for directions wasn’t remarkable, when the act of unfolding a paper map prompted locals to offer guidance - then you’d get to chatting, and you’d get useful travel tips or perhaps even an invitation to a family meal.
Matlana Media's mission is to revive our analog travel skills: moving through the world without a digital safety net, and accepting that stepping outside our comfort zone is part of the journey. “Travel” isn’t boarding an airplane, it’s taking a small step toward the unfamiliar. Our work gives our audience reasons - and nerve - to practice taking those steps.
We are living through an epidemic of loneliness. Our social skills are eroding, and the ones we are losing aren't exotic — they're the skills we need for a conversation, an interview, a collaboration, an apology.
We're documentary filmmakers and journalists, which is just another way of saying we have spent our careers pointing cameras at strangers and hoping they would talk to us. Ian & Justine did it in more than 100 countries over twenty years, back when the only device in your pocket was a phrasebook. Today, through their video podcasts and locally made travelogues, they invite the audience to try it themselves: greet the stranger with curiosity, common sense, humility and respect, and discover what the world is actually made of — playful, curious, idiosyncratic humans, ready to meet you halfway across language and culture.
Season 2 is up to you:
Season 1 launched in October 2025 and was funded by the Khosravi Family Foundation and contributions from individual donors.
Season 2 launches in September 2026. Matlana Media needs to raise $250,000 to make it. If you’ve ever gotten lost and a stranger helped you out then you already understand what we are trying to protect. Welcome to Our Looney Planet. We are grateful for your participation.
Donate today.
$50 covers coffee for the team for 1 month.
$150 covers one month’s software subscription fees
$350 funds the sound mix on one video podcast episode.
$600 funds the edit on a week’s worth of social media clips.
$1200 covers one month’s rent
$2500 funds one episode of Personal Geographies
$4,000 brings one episode of Hello Stranger to life.
$6,000 brings one episode of Hello Globe Trekker to life.
If would like more information please don’t hesitate to contact us: hello@ourlooneyplanet.com
Justine reads every email.
Season 1: the audience is finding us.
Before we launched Our Looney Planet in October 2025, neither Ian, nor Justine, nor Globe Trekker had a social media profile. Since then, thousands of messages have poured in from India to Latin America to Europe to the USA, astounding us with their warmth and enthusiasm for this new project. Our Instagram engagement runs near 20% against an industry standard of 4%. Our Kickstarter raised $25,000 from nearly 200 backers.
Season 2: six video podcast episodes and a new video series
Our Looney Planet presents: Hello Stranger (3 episodes)
Ian & Justine chat with a stranger. No briefing, no bio, Ian & Justine know one thing about their guest: the city they live in. Our producer does the matchmaking, then steps back and we all find out who this person is together. The conversation starts from zero, the way it does when you find yourself sitting next to a stranger on a bus, or a train, in the bleachers, or on a plane.
Our Looney Planet presents: Hello Globe Trekker (3 episodes)
Ian & Justine reunite with the intrepid team behind the iconic 90s travel series Globe Trekker (which also aired as Lonely Planet and Pilot Guides). The series was produced before drones, memory cards, or smartphones. Thirteen one-hour episodes per year, four weeks to shoot one backpacker's journey off the beaten track on a budget. And back in the stone age it took real muscle to haul the gear: a hulking Digibeta camera with tapes the size of bricks, an astoundingly heavy tripod, socks full of coins in case we lucked onto a working pay phone, and whiskey to bribe anyone with a line on a helicopter.
Personal Geographies:
Where Globe Trekker was made by a mostly white Western production team, Personal Geographies inverts that model and hands the camera to the people the show once filmed: a local who takes us through their city in their own voice, chatting with strangers, meeting up with friends, steering us to favorite spots. One city, a multiplicity of perspectives: the local’s, their friends’, and those of the strangers they meet along the way. The pilot is in production with Ahsan Jaffri, a Toronto father of three, who shows us “his” Toronto.
The Globe Trekker archive deserves a second life:
Matlana Media enjoys privileged access to the Globe Trekker archive: hundreds of hours filmed in the era before smartphones and social media, showing humans navigating the globe with the help of strangers, maps, phrasebooks, and their own common sense. This archive is not merely a travel archive, it is also a behavioral one: The footage documents humans being together in ways that have nearly vanished in a single generation.
We are bringing the Globe Trekker archive back to life, not as nostalgia but as inspiration. If Matlana Media were not working with this treasure trove, it would be gathering dust in a storage unit.
Why now?
Social trust is fraying, screen time is soaring and loneliness is now a measurable cause of death. The WHO's Commission links social disconnection to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year, and finds that one in six people worldwide is lonely. The rates are highest among teenagers — the generation that has never known a world without a screen in it. If humans could turn to humans thirty years ago, we can do it today. For the sake of our mental health, we need to.
Chatting with a stranger takes courage. We might wobble, fumble, flounder. That’s fine. We’re only human, and with a little practice we remember how good it feels to exchange even just a few words with someone you don’t know and will likely never see again. These chats build confidence and resilience: riding the waves of disappointment and surprise, getting comfortable with discomfort, the awkward silences and yes, even the unkind word.
We're not anti-technology:
The technologies that distract and divide us are also our distribution channels. Our project is to use social media to model what social media has been quietly eroding: the unscripted human encounter. We don’t scold the audience for holding a phone. We hold one too. We just don’t want it to become a third appendage.
We are not beholden to the machine:
Nobody pays us to keep you on our channels. As a nonprofit, the majority of our funding comes from foundations and individual donors — not advertisers. Independent funding allows Matlana Media to create entertainment that inspires you and your family to put your screens away.
Donate online or mail a check to:
MATLANA
1442A Walnut Street, #202
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States of America
MATLANA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. EIN: 12-3456789.
Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
