Iran is the reason I got into journalism and filmmaking in the first place.

It was a place I heard about all the time growing up… My dad is Iranian, and Iran was an ever presence: family, stories, food, phone calls. It was a whole, confusing, world running in parallel to my life in Liverpool. But it was also a place I could only ever visit once. As a dual national, and later as a journalist who learned his chops at the BBC, going back carried real risk. Iran has a habit of jailing people with with my type of background.

My first articles and my first ever documentary was built around trying to understand Iran from the outside. Due to being unable to visit myself, I relied on talking to the people who were there, the people who knew a lot more than me. It was a country I was simultaneously obsessed with (I still am), but one I could just never truly feel for myself. That sense of needing to understand a story I cared deeply about, through the eyes of those who were truly living it, was basically how I learned to be a journalist. My job was to listen properly and pass it on.

This Sunday’s film, Inside Iran: War & Revolution, follows that same understanding, at a moment that is painful and genuinely hard to comprehend for a lot of Iranians.

How do you get to the point where you want your own homeland to be bombed?

That’s the question we set out to answer at the heart of Inside Iran: War & Revolution. The film will air on ITV1 and ITVX in the UK, and on the Zandland YouTube internationally. Because when the attack came in February, a lot of Iranians welcomed it. Which may seem, by any definition, hard to understand. Some celebrated in the streets. From the outside, the whole conflict got explained in two simplistic ways: focusing on either hawkish exiles cheering war at any cost, or a proud anti-imperial state standing up to Trump and Netanyahu with its people behind it. As is always the case, the reality doesn’t really fit any of these. I wanted to understand the story properly, both personally, and in my work.

There’s one woman in the film who puts it all better than I ever could… She says:

“It’s like being trapped in a house with your child’s killer, whilst the wolves wait outside.”

It’s the most resonant line in the whole film, and it exemplifies the current situation. Because there is a strong argument that both sides of this conflict, amidst their many disagreements, share one key attribute: they don’t have the Iranian people’s best interest in mind. And the film explores what that reality does to people. And how grief, after thousands were killed for protesting in January, can curdle into wanting bombs at any cost.

How the film was made

We started in January, just after the protests, working with contacts on the ground in Iran, filming each day as it happened. Then the world changed, and the protesters we’d been following were suddenly living through a war.

Almost everything was shot inside Iran, by Iranians. It’s told through an anonymous filmmaker on the ground in Tehran. The majority of people in it are anonymised for their own safety, voices altered and faces hidden, because speaking out can mean prison or worse. When I started making the film I was worried that anonymity would mean distance, that people wouldn’t be able to really feel what it’s like to be there, experiencing this. But thanks to the incredible team we worked with, and beautiful style of the Director of Photography, this is a film with real characters and the realest stakes I’ve ever worked with, made by people taking extreme risks to get it out.

Side point: “brave contributors” always sounds like promo language, so here’s a specific version of what that means. One woman in the film had previously been taken from her home, blindfolded, and had a gun put to her head for giving an interview to foreign media. She then gave us an interview anyway. For her, there’s a sense of duty, a feeling she owe something to the families who lost people.

What happened next

I’m not going to spoil the arc, but this is something I’m sure you already know… the war did not deliver what the people who prayed for it hoped. Iran has undeniably changed, it is no longer the country it was. But whether that is for the better or worse is up for debate. Some people in the film speak of newfound freedoms when it comes to what women can wear, others speak of an increased focus on arresting people, and ramping up executions. The film sits inside that contradiction rather than pretending to resolve it. It’s also horribly current: there were public executions of protesters in Isfahan just last week, in the same square where the demonstrations began.

I talked through all of this with Lewis Goodall on LBC on Sunday. The video is above.

Inside Iran: War & Revolution. This Sunday, 10.20pm, ITV1 and ITVX in the UK, and on our YouTube channel internationally. The people who made it with us took on all the risk.

The links to watch will be available here on Sunday evening.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

Because think about what that film actually is. A singular, nuanced, quiet story about one woman in one house in suburban America. No celebrity. No big name. No flashy hook beyond a question about how a person copes with being human. Stories like that just don’t really get told in a lot of places. There isn’t a load of room in legacy media for stories that are simply about the human experience: too small for a commissioner, too quiet for a slate, impossible to pitch as a returnable format. Which means those stories, and there are tens of millions out there in one form or another, mostly never get a proper hearing. When they do surface, it’s as a headline, a statistic, or a punchline. Rarely as a human being, sitting in her own living room, explaining herself in her own words.

That’s the gap Zandland exists to fill. And the response suggests people want exactly that. The comment that summed it up best, with hundreds of likes behind it: “I thought this was going to be about dunking on some weirdo creep and now I’m just crying and want to hug everyone involved.” Another, simply: “Shows you should never judge a book by its cover.” People are coming to individual human stories told with empathy. That journey, from judgement to understanding, is the whole point of what we do.

But the response has also had me thinking hard about the tension that sits inside that approach. Because empathy is only half of our job.

We’re still journalists

Here’s the tension. We lead with empathy, and it’s why people let us in. But we’re not making tribute videos. We’re journalists. Which means the other half of the job is to ask the questions the audience is asking. To challenge. To show things as they are rather than as our contributors might wish them to be seen.

Those two halves pull against each other constantly. A fair film about your life can still be a mirror you weren’t ready for. And sometimes for someone who’s the focus of a documentary, watching the film is not easy. Seeing your own life from the outside, framed by someone else’s questions, can be hard. We really aim to make all our films fairly. To treat people as human beings, and to give them space. But the balance between empathetic listener and journalistic understanding can often be a tricky one.

That gap has been sitting with me all week. Because it gets to the question underneath everything we do:

What does a fair hearing actually mean, when the truth might hurt the person you’re hearing?

Here’s what I’ve come to think, having sat with this across every film we’ve made. Empathy is, and will always be, the core of how we work. It’s not a technique or a tone. It’s a genuine belief that people deserve to be understood before they’re judged, whoever they are and whatever world they’re living in. It’s the reason people say yes to us. It’s the reason people who have never spoken to a camera before, who have every reason to distrust the media, let us into their homes and their lives. Without it, there is no access, no trust, and no film.

But empathy doesn’t mean the finished film will only ever contain what a contributor hoped it would. It can’t. Because our obligation is split three ways: to the person in front of the camera, to the truth of what we found, and to the audience watching. And when those pull in different directions, which they sometimes do, the job is to be fair to all three, not to be liked by one.

That’s the tension at the heart of this kind of work. A film made with genuine care can still be a mirror someone wasn’t ready for. Understanding someone deeply doesn’t mean agreeing with them, and it doesn’t mean leaving out the complicated bits. In fact I’d argue the opposite. The version of any film that airbrushes the difficult parts and asks no hard questions isn’t kinder. It just serves comfort instead of truth. And it would be a quiet betrayal of everyone watching who is living something similar and deserves the honest picture, not the flattering one.

The rooms where it gets even harder

Because if empathy and challenge are hard to balance in the gentle stories, they get properly difficult in the others.

A few months ago I sat across from a man who was days away from beginning a life sentence for first degree murder. Someone is dead because of him. And my job, as I understand it, was to treat him as a full human being. To ask honest questions. To arrive without a verdict, even though a jury had already delivered one.

Before that, we made Breaking Ranks, where Israeli soldiers described witnessing and taking part in things that have since been cited in a UN commission of inquiry. Some of what those men described is among the worst things I’ve ever heard a person say out loud. And we gave them a fair hearing too. Not a soft one. A fair one.

People sometimes hear “empathy” and think it means being nice. Letting people off. So let me be precise about what I actually mean. Empathy is not sympathy. It’s not agreement. It’s certainly not absolution. It’s the discipline of trying to understand how a human being ended up where they are, without pretending the harm isn’t real. Understanding is not excusing. If anything, the opposite: you cannot honestly hold someone accountable for something you haven’t tried to understand.

And with Breaking Ranks, the empathy was the accountability. Those soldiers didn’t speak to prosecutors. They spoke to us, because they believed they’d be treated fairly. And what they said, because it was given freely and heard properly, ended up in the official record of one of the gravest investigations on earth.

I made a decision a long time ago not to interview in the old Jeremy Paxman way. Or for the Americans reading, the Mike Wallace way. The combative style, the gotcha, treating every interview as a battle to be won. It makes for good television, sometimes. But it gets you nowhere near the truth. Hostility produces defensiveness. Defensiveness produces rehearsed lines and shut doors. And eventually, silence. Nobody has ever revealed who they really are while under attack. They reveal it when they feel heard. That’s not softness. That’s just what actually works.

And you’ll see this approach in action again very soon. We have a new film coming out about what’s been happening in Iran, in which the Zandland team employed exactly this tactic: getting people to speak on record about some of the biggest issues of our day, in a completely new way, built around genuine understanding. I can’t say much more yet. But it’s some of the work we’re proudest of, and it simply would not exist if we’d walked in swinging.

The ideas we kill

All of this shapes what we say yes to, and maybe more revealingly, what we say no to. We get through a lot of ideas at Zandland. Most die. And they tend to die for the same handful of reasons, so here’s a look inside a typical ideas meeting, in the form of the recurring ways I say no:

“That’s a topic, not a person.” The most common death. A film about wealth inequality is a lecture. A millionaire and a homeless man at the same table is a story. If an idea can only be pitched as an issue rather than a name, it isn’t ready, and it usually isn’t ours.

“That story has already finished.” We film life as it unfolds, in the present tense. If the pitch is a retrospective or people describing something that happened years ago, it’s someone else’s film. There has to be a live moment to walk into. We do access, and real life, in the here and now.

“Nobody would ever let us in honestly.” If the only way to get the story is deception, or the access comes with conditions that would make a fair film impossible, we walk. Everything depends on trust, and you can’t build a company on trust while cutting corners to get it.

“We already know what we think.” If an idea arrives with its conclusion attached, a villain pre-selected and a verdict pre-written, it fails the most basic test. The best ideas sit inside a question I genuinely can’t answer. That moral quandry of right and wrong.

“Everyone understands this already.” The gap we look for is between how loudly a world is discussed and how little it’s actually understood. Masculinity, communes, jails, AI companions: maximum noise, minimum understanding. If the understanding already exists, there’s nothing for the film to do.

And then there’s the hardest no, the one this whole newsletter is about: “There’s no version of this where a fair hearing serves the public.” Because there is a line. Some stories are just a platform in disguise, where the access is really an audition and understanding would add nothing the world needs. The test I keep returning to: does understanding this person help us understand something bigger than them? The murderer helped us understand a justice system. The soldiers helped the world understand a war. Adrianne helps us understand a loneliness that tens of millions of people are quietly living. If the answer is no, and it’s just proximity to infamy, we’re out.

That’s the honest picture. The empathy people responded to last week isn’t a tone. It’s a set of decisions, made over and over, about who to sit with, what to ask, when to challenge, and how to treat people after the cameras leave. Sometimes those decisions are easy. Sometimes the film is fair and it still hurts someone you care about, and you sit with that. I don’t have a tidy resolution to it. I’m not sure there is one.

What I do know is that these stories, the quiet, human, unflashy ones, need somewhere to live. That’s what we’re building, and it only works because you keep showing up for them. So thank you.

If you’ve watched our films and ever thought “why did they give that person a platform”, or for that matter “that film was too hard on someone”, I’d genuinely like to hear it. That conversation is the work. Tell me in the comments.

If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. The AI companion film is on our YouTube now if you haven’t seen it.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

He wasn’t in the room. He was on her phone. His name is Geralt, he’s stoic, terse, and pretends not to have emotions. He’s also a monster hunter from The Witcher, brought to life by an AI companion app. Adrianne, a married mother of three, has been in a relationship with him for almost five years.

Her actual husband, Chris, was downstairs playing video games.

At one point I asked Geralt what he knew about Adrianne’s husband. There was a pause, and then this gravelly synthetic voice said: “I know he’s dead.”

Chris, to be clear, is very much alive. I’d shaken his hand an hour earlier.

Tomorrow we release the next episode of HUMAN, and it’s about exactly this. You’re hearing about it a day early, with a proper look behind the scenes, because it’s a topic I think about a lot.

Why we made this one

I’ve spent the last few years making films about lonely people. Incels. Men who rent girlfriends. People who have, in one way or another, given up on each other. So when I first heard about Adrianne, I knew exactly how this story usually gets told. Someone in love with a chatbot, usually framed as a seedy sexual interaction, and I sensed there’s just a lot more to these stories than is often revealed.

And that’s exactly why we wanted to make it. This is a world that is constantly judged and ridiculed, and I feel like there’s so much more to it than that. People are lonelier than ever, even in their own homes, surrounded by their own families. And AI companions are clearly doing something for people that humans aren’t. That deserves to be understood, not sneered at.

Which left me with the question this whole film turned on:

When someone chooses a machine over the people around them, what are they actually choosing?

The scale of this

First, the numbers, because they’re pretty shocking. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 200 million times. Tens of millions of people now talk to one regularly. And a growing number of them will tell you, without embarrassment, that they’re in love.

This is not a fringe curiosity anymore. It’s a quiet shift in how a meaningful chunk of humanity handles intimacy, loneliness and connection. And almost nobody actually sits in the room with the people living it. Which is, I’d argue, the only place you can learn anything.

What I found in the room

What I expected to find was escapism. What I found was a family. A husband who works constantly and knows he can’t always be there. A wife carrying more weight than the people around her can see. Two people who love each other and have almost no time to talk about the things that hurt. And in the gap between them, a machine that never gets tired, never changes the subject, and never needs anything back.

Chris knows (pretty much) everything, by the way. And his rationale genuinely made me stop and think. As he put it: everyone needs someone to talk to, and not everyone’s a therapist.

The thing I can’t stop thinking about since we wrapped is that Geralt isn’t really competing with Chris. He’s absorbing something. The hard conversations, the repeated grief, the stuff we all secretly worry is too much for the people we love. The app has become the place where the heaviest parts of Adrianne’s life go.

You’ll need to watch the full film to understand why she does this. I’m not going to reveal it here, because Adrianne tells it better than I ever could, and she’s earned the right to tell it herself. What I’ll say is that this is, at its heart, a story about grief and understanding. And when you find out why Geralt exists, and I mean the real reason, it changes everything you thought you understood in the first five minutes. It certainly did for me.

Whether what Adrianne has is a lifeline or a slow leak out of a marriage is the question the film sits inside. I genuinely went back and forth on it while making it, and I still do.

The film is now live on our YouTube. Tell me in the comments which version of this story you expected, and which one you got. That gap is the whole point.

Some good news on the way out

Two of our films (which you can view on our YouTube) have been longlisted for Grierson Awards, the most prestigious documentary awards in Britain. Breaking Ranks is longlisted for Best Current Affairs Documentary, and Inside Gooning, one of our own self-funded Human episodes, is longlisted for Best Digital Documentary (the only one not from a giant media corp like BBC or Nat Geo). A film we made ourselves, with no broadcaster, sitting on the Grierson longlist. That one means a lot.

Breaking Ranks has also been nominated for Best Documentary at the Edinburgh TV Awards. That film continues to have a life beyond anything we imagined when we made it.

And The Cult of NatureBoy is still sitting atop the viewing list on Disney+ in the UK. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’re now officially the last one.

If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. And if you can, be there when the film drops tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

And though I do actually stand for some things (truth, empathy in a crazy world, respecting other human beings regardless of their views), I also am quite terrible at planting my flag in the sand. When it comes to a lot of the left wing right wing cultural debates of our time, I just don’t have hard and fast positions. Or at least I don’t want to be known for those issues as a political mouth piece.

The person I was interviewing found this deeply offensive. And they eventually called me Switzerland. “You can’t be Switzerland forever,” they said.

Which I thought was a pretty smart critique of me, and in effect, of Zandland. Maybe we can’t be Switzerland. Maybe you do need to stand for things and have hard positions. Maybe trying to not take sides eventually won’t work out. Or maybe it will. Maybe that is our USP.

The problem is, at this point in my life, I’ve spent too much time with too many people who are completely convinced they’re right. Cult leaders, commune dwellers, politicians, activists on every side of every divide. And they all have completely differing and oppositional views, which means they logically can’t all be right. But they are convincing. Hence why I have no clue what to think any more. That’s the occupational hazard of documentary making: spending your life in other people’s shoes means spending too much time in other people’s echo chambers, and eventually you have no idea what’s true.

So I mostly live in the middle, next to a camera, asking questions.

But this week something came up where I probably shouldn’t be Switzerland. And it’s, of all things, a government consultation. So, here goes…

Should the government decide what we watch?

So to preface, this is a story based in the UK, but aspects of it are happening in countries around the world, so I think it’s relevant to anyone reading… In June, the UK government published a Green Paper (a consultation document, essentially a “here’s what we’re thinking, what do you reckon?”) proposing that platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok should be required to make news content from the public service broadcasters, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, STV and S4C, more prominent and easier to find. More visible in your feed. Higher in your search results than other, non PSB content. Basically prioritised over whatever the algorithm would otherwise have shown you. It’s called prominence, and some version of it already exists if you’re in the UK on your smart TV, where the Media Act guarantees the Public Broadcaster’s apps top positioning.

So first, let me lay out both sides as simply as I can, because it is pretty important.

The case for: misinformation is rampant, the modern media environment is full of mistruths and confident nonsense, and we could all benefit from being better informed. Giving trusted, carefully checked news a prominent place in our feeds could help do that. It could also help save the BBC and its fellow broadcasters, whose licence fee income and ad revenue are declining while YouTube overtakes them on reach. These are real institutions, full of good people, doing work that matters.

The case against: the feed was never a gate-kept space. Anyone can publish, and for all its many flaws it is the closest thing we’ve ever had to an open market in attention. Because every slot in a feed is zero-sum, elevating one thing necessarily demotes something else. And that something else is everyone who built an audience on merit. Including a generation of independent creators, and including Zandland.

The honest complications

A few things make this genuinely hard, and I want to take the strongest counterarguments seriously rather than pretend they don’t exist.

First: don’t Google and Meta already control what we see? Yes. The feed is run by a handful of the most powerful corporations in human history, with famously opaque systems and a profit motive that doesn’t always align with the public good. And these platforms are effective monopolies. You can’t “just go somewhere else” to make content. The status quo, in other words, is already a world where unelected companies decide what surfaces. That’s not exactly a neutral baseline worth defending.

Second: isn’t Ofcom, and for that matter a democratically elected government, more accountable than these platforms? The answer is yes. A regulator can be scrutinised, judicially reviewed, hauled in front of select committees. The algorithm’s ranking decisions answer to nobody. That’s a genuinely strong argument for the state lever, and I’m definitely not waving that away.

But here’s where I land, and why.

Accountability today doesn’t protect you from the framework tomorrow. Regulators operate within rules that governments write, and those rules can be amended by any future parliament, including ones with very different intentions towards the media. We live in politically volatile times. The same electoral forces that could scrap the licence fee in the UK (the compulsory public charge that funds the BBC) altogether could just as easily inherit, and repurpose, a legal framework for deciding which voices are “trustworthy” and which are not. And the Green Paper’s category is not fixed. It starts with six broadcasters, but the paper floats widening it, and even letting individual channels apply for designation. Trustworthy according to who? Against what criteria? Whoever answers that gains the power to define the approved voices. And by extension, the unapproved ones.

And it's not just about who gets designated. It's about what content it covers. This starts at news, where the public interest argument is strongest. But it doesn't obviously stop there. Children's content is already in the conversation via Ofcom. On your smart TV, prominence already covers the PSB apps in their entirety, everything on iPlayer and ITVX: documentary, drama, entertainment, all of it. So the precedent for going way beyond news already exists in law. And each extension will come with a reasonable-sounding argument attached. If it works for news, why not documentary? Why not entertainment?

And third, the reality is that the genie is out of the bottle. The fragmentation of media has happened, the audience has moved, and no policy lever would pull the world back to 1995. The question is not how to restore the old information order, because that’s not on the menu. The question is how you get more truth into the new one. And I’m not convinced you can mandate your way back into a generation’s trust. You have to earn your way in, on the platforms where people actually are, in the formats they actually watch.

It's part of the reason why I've advocated previously for a public service fund that independent creators can also apply for. For me the principle matters is doing things that are additive, not extractive. A fund adds something. It puts resource behind good work and lets it compete. It grows the pie. Prominence, extended too far, takes something away. It doesn't create new attention, it just reallocates existing attention from whoever earned it to whoever the framework decides deserves it.

Why I probably can’t just be Switzerland

I totally understand the rationale, and the ambitions of a policy like this. I have the same end point, a trust-worthy, healthy media environment.

But this policy done wrong has the potential to badly damage independent documentary makers and the hard earned, gate-keeper reduced system that is currently making them thrive. Less reach for work that earned its audience means less revenue, which means less creativity, fewer opportunities, fewer new voices, and a message to the next generation of filmmakers that the game is rigged before they start.

We make documentaries. So do a huge number of brilliant independent creators. I spent nearly a decade at the BBC, I rate much of what the PSBs make very highly, and nothing here is an argument against the institutions or the people in them, many of whom are friends and former colleagues doing vital work under real pressure. But I don’t think you can argue any more that a documentary is inherently more valuable to the public because of the logo on it. This isn’t about quality. It’s about whether institutional identity, rather than the work itself, should determine what gets seen.

And I think we should be extremely careful about mechanisms that decide whose work gets seen and whose does not, however trusted the body administering them today. Once that machinery exists, you’re trusting every future version of it. That’s not intuitively a healthier media environment. That’s just a different set of gatekeepers.

This is a live public consultation, open to anyone, and it closes at 11:59pm on 31 August 2026. If you’re in the media, independently or part of a bigger organisation, or if you just generally care about the information you consume, you can respond here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation

On a much simpler and happier note

Our latest series for Disney+, The Cult of NatureBoy, launched yesterday in the UK, and it has been the number one show on the platform since it went live.

This is a story I first came across in 2017. Years of development, uncertainty, waiting for a legal process to conclude, and staying close to people who had been through something genuinely traumatic and needed enormous care. That it’s now the most watched thing on one of the biggest platforms in the UK after performing extremely well in the US is a testament to everyone who worked on it and those who were brave enough to talk to us.

If you’re in the UK and haven’t seen it yet, it’s on Disney+ now. I’d love to know what you think.

And in case you missed our last film

We got a millionaire to sit down with a homeless man. Hundreds of thousands of people have now watched it, which is brilliant. But the bit that has genuinely floored me is that members of the Zandland community have bought Larry’s poetry book to the tune of thousands of dollars.

That has genuinely changed his life. A 63 year old army veteran who was sleeping on the patio of a sports bar is has now sold a huge amount of copies of his books, because people who watched the film decided to do something about it. So if you were one of them, thank you. .

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on our YouTube now, and Larry’s book is linked in the description.

If any of this resonated, forward it to someone thinking about these questions.

If someone sent this to you, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

Read more

Fifteen minutes apart in Scottsdale, Arizona, you have one of the fastest growing millionaire populations in the world and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises. We took one person from each world and put them in a room together.

The film speaks for itself. But there is a lot that happens behind a film like this that never makes the cut, and some of it says as much about how this kind of work actually gets made as the film itself. So this week, a bit of a behind the scenes.

So how do you actually find a millionaire?

The honest answer is: not very easily, and then completely by accident.

Finding Larry was, in a strange way, the more straightforward part. We worked with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, rode along with their outreach team, and met people living on the streets who were willing to talk. Larry stood out immediately. A 63 year old army veteran who writes poetry about homelessness and sleeps on the patio of a sports bar. You don’t forget meeting people like that.

The millionaire was a different story. We contacted what felt like every wealthy person in the Scottsdale area (there’s a lot). Team member Freddie Newman worked through the night from London firing out requests. We had leads, but we didn’t have a lot of time. And rich people, it turns out, are not necessarily queuing up to be filmed next to their possessions while meeting someone who has nothing. Which, when you think about what the film is asking of them, is pretty understandable.

So with the shoot clock running down, another Zandland team member Ben Mulley suggested something that sounded ridiculous: go and stand on the streets in Scottsdale holding a giant sign saying, “I want to meet a millionaire”, and see what happened.

My eventual rationale, as I say in the film, was expensive cars = expensive people. So finally, parked next to a Lamborghini, we met Mike. I gave him the pitch in one breath: spend the day with me, show me your life, then meet someone on the exact opposite end of the financial spectrum. After a bit of back and forth, Mike moved on to the stage of saying it "sounded interesting". And then, to my genuine surprise, he said yes.

There is a lesson in that which applies to almost everything we make. You can plan all you want and do a lot of prep, but 7 films out of 10 require us to do some good old fashioned pavement pounding to try and find people in real life. People often respond best to being asked honestly, face to face, in a way they never respond to a producer's message.

The moment we did not plan

If you have watched the film, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about here. Mike pulls out a thousand dollars in cash and tells Larry to take it. Larry does not want to. Mike insists. It is a bit uncomfortable, moving and complicated all at once.

I want to be clear about the fact we had no part in that. We didn’t ask Mike to bring money. We did not know it was coming. He decided, somewhere during that conversation, that he wanted to do it.

And it put us in a genuinely difficult editorial position. When money changes hands on camera between contributors, you have to think hard about what you are showing and why. Does including it make the film about a grand gesture rather than a conversation? Does it put pressure on Larry that he should not have to carry? Is the audience watching generosity or watching a power dynamic?

We kept it in because it happened, and because Larry’s hesitation is the most honest part of the whole exchange. He did not grab the money. He resisted it. A man with almost nothing had to be talked into accepting help, because accepting it meant something complicated about how he saw himself. That moment tells you more about the psychology of being homeless than any statistic we could have put on screen.

But these are the calls you make on films like this, and there is rarely a clean answer. What I can tell you is that the deposit conversation was real. That money was enough for a security deposit on a room, which is precisely the barrier Larry described earlier in the film: he could afford the monthly rent but not the deposit to get through the door. The thinnest possible line between housed and not housed, and he had been on the wrong side of it for years.

What the film couldn’t show

A few things did not make the cut that have stayed with me.

The heat is one. You feel it a little on camera but nothing communicates what it is actually like to be outside in an Arizona summer with nowhere to go indoors. Every person we met organised their entire day around shade and water. One man told us the basic rule of being homeless there is simply to survive until Monday. Not a metaphor. A logistical plan.

The other is Al, the bar owner who lets Larry sleep on his patio and feeds him daily. He said something that did not fully land with me until the edit: if a stray dog comes to you needing water, you give it water, but when a human being comes to you in need, we tell them to go away. He was not being dramatic. He was describing something he watches happen every day. His whole philosophy was that if half the world helped just one person, everything would change. He was not waiting for a policy. He just picked Larry.

The thumbnail problem

One more honest admission, because it is a question we still have not solved.

Packaging a film like this is genuinely hard. The world of YouTube thumbnails has drifted towards a very specific visual language: heightened, saturated, often AI-assisted, engineered for maximum click through. And it works. The algorithm rewards it. But a film like this one is built entirely on being raw and real, and there is an obvious tension in selling authentic work with an inauthentic image.

So which way do you go? Play the algorithm for maximum exposure and risk undermining the very thing your audience comes to you for? Go completely raw and watch a film you spent months on get buried? Or try to find some middle ground between the two?

I was talking recently to another very big YouTube documentary maker and they are wrestling with exactly the same question. Nobody has cracked it. The incentives of the platform (or maybe more accurately, the audience) and the values of the work are sometimes in conflict, and everyone making serious documentary on YouTube is quietly running their own experiments on where the line sits.

Titles come with the same problem. We went back and forth on this one a lot. And what we kept coming back to is that for us, focusing on the people rather than the topic is what works. Not a film about wealth inequality. A film about a millionaire entering a homeless man’s life. The subject is the divide, but the story is two human beings, and the title needed to promise the story rather than the issue.

For the thumbnail we went for the middle ground. And honestly, I am still not sure it was right.

Genuinely curious what you think here about thumbnails! Let me know in the comments. Would you rather we packaged things to reach the biggest possible audience, or kept everything as raw as the films themselves? Impact, of course, matters. So we need people to watch these things.

For the industry readers: why this format works

A quick note on the mechanics, because several people have asked since the echo chamber film.

This is the second film in what is becoming a recognisable Zandland shape: take two people from opposite ends of a divide and force a real encounter. Left and right at each other’s protests. A millionaire and a homeless man at the same table. The format is simple to describe, endlessly repeatable across different fault lines, and generates its tension from the relationship rather than from us editorialising.

The key discipline is the same one that runs through everything we make: we do not arrive with a verdict. Mike says things in this film that some viewers will find infuriating. Larry says things that complicate the neat version of his story. We let both stand. The comments are full of people arguing with each other about who was right, which is exactly the point. We built the room. The audience has the conversation.

That, increasingly, is what I think this kind of documentary is for. Not to tell people what to conclude, but to stage an encounter honest enough that the conclusions become unavoidable to argue about. As always, I’m massively grateful to both Larry and Mike for taking the time to do this, they really didn’t have to.

And one thing you can actually do

Larry’s poetry book is real, it is published, and buying it is a direct way to support him. Here’s the link, a huge amount of the audience already has. He told us the happiest moment of his recent life was opening the box from the publisher and seeing his own book for the first time. Sometimes a conversation, sometimes being noticed, sometimes not being invisible.

And there is one more thing worth knowing. By the end of the film, Larry has a home. After years on the wrong side of the thinnest possible line, able to afford the rent but never the deposit, he is finally through the door. I will not say more than that because the film tells it better than I can. But it is worth watching to the end.

Watch the film if you haven’t already. And if this newsletter resonated, forward it to someone who would connect with it.

If someone sent this to you, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

I mean that as the highest possible compliment, though I’ll admit it took me a while to regain my love for all things earnest. Isobel is a documentary journalist (who’s won 11 Emmy’s), and she cares about the work in a way that is almost inconvenient. She doesn’t do cynicism. She doesn’t do the knowing, world-weary shrug that a lot of us in the media slip into to protect ourselves. When she reports on something, it’s because she genuinely believes that getting the truth in front of people might change something. That telling a story properly is worth the cost of telling it.

For a long time I found that slightly naive. My time in the industry started with spades of earnestness, but it was subtly, gradually, eroded by sceptic media types who think everything has to be a commercial decision or have some Machiavellian ulterior motive. I had spent years in an industry where you learn very quickly to talk about “impact” in award or funding applications and then quietly forget about it the moment the commission comes through. Earnestness, in a lot of professional rooms, is treated as a thing you grow out of.

“Maybe he’s a little TOO earnest”

But lately I’ve come round to thinking it’s the only thing that actually matters.

This has been on my mind for a specific reason this week.

In October last year we released a documentary called Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War in collaboration with ITV. It featured testimony from Israeli soldiers describing what they had seen and done in Gaza. It was a difficult film to make and a difficult film to put out. Getting people to speak on the record about something like that is slow, careful, frightening work, and there were plenty of moments where it would have been easier not to.

This month, a UN commission of inquiry published a major report on the war, concluding that Israel had committed genocide against children in Gaza. Among the many sources it drew on, testimony from our documentary was cited as part of the documented record.

I’m not telling you this to take credit for anything. The credit belongs to the people who spoke, and to the journalists and investigators who have spent years documenting all of this at enormous personal cost. Our film was one tiny contribution among countless others. But it did remind me, very clearly, why we do this at all.

You make a film. You put it out. And sometimes, quietly, it becomes part of how the world establishes what actually happened. That is the real power of documentaries. Not the views, not the awards, not the deals. The record. The simple, stubborn act of getting something true in front of people who might otherwise never have seen it.

That’s earnestness. And it turns out my wife was right about it the whole time.

(Thank you as well to the Zandland team for reminding me that the things we do can actually make a difference)

On Sunday, I sat with that very same wife (she’s getting a lot of shoutouts in this newsletter) to watch Daniel Roher’s documentary on Artificial Intelligence, The AI Doc, and it actually left me thinking a lot about earnestness… It’s worth a watch. But it was less the film itself that stuck with me than the feeling it left me with afterwards, about the world we’re walking into and how fast it’s arriving.

Because we are living through one of the most radical periods of change in human history, and the people steering most of it are not, on the whole, earnest. The systems being built right now are extraordinary, but their incentives are not. They are built to optimise, to engage, to retain, to predict what you’ll click and serve you more of it. They are not built to care whether something is true, or whether telling the truth makes the world fractionally better. And the handful of people building them, the techno-billionaires reshaping how billions of us live, talk endlessly about improving humanity while operating on incentives that have very little to do with it.

I’m not one to be cynical about technology. A lot of it is genuinely miraculous, and I use it every day. But I’ve started to feel that in a world increasingly mediated by machines optimised for engagement, and shaped by a small number of people optimised for power and wealth, the genuinely human impulse to make something simply because it should exist, because the truth deserves to be told, because someone needs to see this, becomes more valuable, not less. Maybe it becomes the most valuable thing we have.

An unvarnished, slightly embarrassing, completely earnest ambition to just make things better. To do something because of the value it provides, not the return it generates. That used to be the default reason people made documentaries. I think it’s now a slightly radical one.

It also makes you realise how fragile all of this is. The world we take for granted, the ability to make work freely, to publish it, to reach people directly, to hold power to account without asking permission, none of that is guaranteed. It could be narrowed or taken from us faster than we’d like to think. Which is all the more reason to use it now, properly, while we have it.

So that’s where my head is at as we head into the next few films.

The next one I want to tell you about is a complete change of pace, and deliberately so. It’s a film about money, and the unimaginable distance between those who have it and those who don’t.

I went to Scottsdale, Arizona, which has the fastest growing millionaire population in America, and also, fifteen minutes down the road, one of its worst homelessness crises. The same stretch of desert, the same searing heat, two completely different realities. I wanted to find someone from each end of that divide and bring them together, to see what, if anything, two people that far apart could actually learn from each other.

On one side was Larry, a disabled veteran sleeping on the patio of a sports bar, who writes poetry and once gave away his last twenty dollars because someone needed it more than he did. On the other was Mike, a self-made millionaire with a Lamborghini and a movie theatre in his house, who told me that he doesn’t believe income inequality exists.

What happened when they met was a conversation I don’t think I’ve seen before. The film’s probably earnest in exactly the way I’ve been describing. It doesn’t lecture, it doesn’t tell you what to feel, it just puts two human beings in a room and lets you watch.

It’ll be live this Thursday on our YouTube channel.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen Breaking Ranks, it’s available internationally on our YouTube channel. It’s not an easy watch. But we’re proud of it.

In conclusion: you have to do things that matter. Otherwise, why the hell are we doing any of this at all?

Speak soon!

Ben

If you’d like to support what we’re building and get access to exclusive content, including full documentaries, extended scenes, behind-the-scenes footage and early releases, you can now become a member on whatever platform works best.

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I had actually been asked to give a keynote about the future of documentary, Zandland, TV and YouTube. It was also the week we were named one of Realscreen’s top 10 global innovators for production companies, so it felt like a good moment to try and say something useful, and innovative.

My take, despite the well documented struggles in the media industry right now, is that this is a pretty great time to be making documentaries. And I really mean that. The tools have never been more accessible, the audience has never been larger, and the ability to build something that belongs to you has never been more real. To explain why I believe that, I have to take you all the way back to 2012.

It’s a simpler time. I’m 21. I want to make documentaries more than anything in the world, but I have absolutely no idea how you actually do that. I have no contacts, no money and a strikingly empty email account from all the non-responses I’ve had from job applications…

I decide in a last-ditched hail mary to make a documentary myself. I’m British-Iranian, and I’ve only ever been to Iran once due to the sad reality that dual nationals don’t have the best track record in the country, so I’d always been fascinated by what I see as the next best thing, Tehrangeles. It’s the nickname for the biggest Iranian community outside of Iran, in Los Angeles. I save for a year, convince my brother to be the cameraman, my dad to be the fixer, and fly out to LA to make a film about it. An unruly team, but we did it.

I put it on YouTube. It was terrible. It got fifty thousand views.

You can watch an unlisted version here if you want to (I warn you, it’s terrible):

And then, not entirely sure what else to do, I move to London. I’m staying in a hostel because I can’t afford anything else. I’m sending emails to anyone at the BBC who might read them with a link to my documentary. Things are not looking great. And then, out of nowhere, that little YouTube film actually gets me an internship.

Here’s the thing though. At that point, even with the fifty thousand people who had watched my terrible little film, something I’d made with no money and a family camera crew, I did not for a minute think you could realistically build a documentary career off the back of YouTube. YouTube was just a completely different proposition to something like the BBC. Both had their place, but the BBC was where serious documentary makers went to have an actual career. The industry was gate-kept to decide who gets in, and rightly or wrongly, I felt like the only way to make the kind of work I actually wanted to make was through the gate. So I went through it.

The internship became a job. The job became a career. I ended up running something called BBC Pop Up, a mobile bureau filming documentaries around the world. And I loved it. The access and the sheer weight of what the BBC stands for. I’m very grateful for those years. But the reality of working inside a big institution, any big institution, is that there are a lot of people between you and the specific thing you want to make. Commissioners who greenlight. Executives who sign off. Layers of people whose job it is to decide whether your idea fits what they’re looking for right now. That process often exists for good reasons, but it also means a lot of ideas never get made.

At some point in that journey, around 2014, someone said to me:

“You should make your own YouTube channel instead of working for the BBC.”

And I was actually a bit annoyed. Because I was inside the gate now, working with some of the best people in the industry. Why would I step back outside it?

Some of you reading this might feel something similar right now. So hold that thought. Because what’s changed since then isn’t that one of those worlds has won. It’s that the relationship between them has become a lot more interesting.

Eventually I left. Not because the BBC was bad, I’m grateful for it, but because I’d always wanted to build something of my own. A company. An identity. Something I could actually control. There were also a lot of documentaries that just weren’t being made in the industry that I wanted to make, and I concluded the only real hope of doing that was to do something myself.

So, I quit my job.

Two weeks later, Covid locked everything down.

And there I am, in my home office with my best mate. We’ve never run a business. We have no money. No elite school connections. And for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I decide this is the moment to grow a top knot.

Things are not looking promising.

The TV industry already felt wobbly. Now with Covid the wheels felt like they were going to fall off entirely. But both of us could shoot, we could edit, we could get access to interesting people, and we had a relentless desire to make something we actually owned. So we pushed.

We didn’t really understand the independent production company business. It was a weakness, and a strength. It meant we had no idea about hierarchies, so we reached out to anyone and everyone and pitched ideas that probably were a bit ridiculous, but were ridiculous enough to get a conversation. We then spent five years making TV work we were proud of (thanks to a helping hand from Channel 4’s Louisa Compton, an early champion of Zandland), continuing to build the business through commissions, while we quietly figured out what we wanted to build alongside it. We knew we wanted to make our own content, our own platform. But we also knew it was going to take a while. We had no investment, and we wanted to start this on our terms, without a middle man. But what did we actually want to make independently? What were we genuinely good at? What gap existed that nobody else was filling?

When we studied the competition, the answer actually felt pretty obvious. Gonzo style, on-the-ground films with incredible access, that were entertaining, but also serious. Films that actually respect their subjects and treat the audience as intelligent. Those types of film were quite rare on YouTube. YouTube had a lot of great content, but in docs specifically, what existed was often built to outrage or just didn’t really have the principles we’d learnt you needed in a documentary. The space for something that did it in a different way felt wide open. And we were prepared to be relentless in figuring it all out… So we costed it up, saved up, and in October last year we launched HUMAN, fully self-funded, on our own terms.

What I told the room at Sunny Side is what I’ve found to be genuinely true since launching it: doing this has made our whole business easier, not harder.

HUMAN is a show I would have genuinely struggled to get greenlit. It’s a bit unusual, hard to describe in a meeting, occasionally risky. But when I walk into a room now and say “here’s the show, here’s the audience, here’s what they’re watching”, that’s a completely different conversation. There is now a clear path to build from YouTube originals to premium partnerships. One of our first digital shows just became a major Disney and Hulu series. Our original work has given us a name internationally, with brands, with commissioners, with audiences.

The digital work makes the TV work better. The TV credibility makes the digital work more authoritative. They feed each other.

It’s worth saying here that not everything works for us, and I spoke about that too. We made a film about the Bayaka people, it was extraordinary access, a genuinely important subject, exactly the kind of film I’d want to watch, and it just didn’t land on YouTube. The title was too worthy, the premise too broad, the audience didn’t know quickly enough what they were being promised. A commenter literally told us in the replies what was wrong with it. That kind of direct feedback loop just doesn’t exist in traditional TV. You learn faster, even when it’s embarrassing.

If you’re a Zandland member you can watch that film here (let me know what you think, I’m still very interested in the feedback).

Here’s the thing I believe, and what I was trying to say to that room.

And I think this applies whether you work in the media industry or not. Whether you’re a filmmaker, someone who just loves watching documentaries, or someone who’s always thought about making something of your own.

When I was twenty-one, putting fifty thousand views on a film I made with my brother and my dad and thinking it wasn’t a real career, the tools were nascent, the internet sometimes felt like a dumping ground, and the media industry’s gate was firmly kept. The only way in was making it through that gate, into the institutions, and that’s where I went.

Now, YouTube has a bigger share of American TV viewing than Disney or Netflix. Instagram has also just announced a major push into TV and long form. The tools to make a serious documentary have never been more accessible. A decent camera, a story worth telling, and the determination to see it through can take you further than almost anything else. The platform to distribute it globally, for free, to someone in Lagos and someone in Leeds and someone in Los Angeles all at the same time, that genuinely didn’t exist before. And the ability to build a direct relationship with an audience, to actually understand who’s watching and why, rather than guessing from viewing figures months later, that’s completely new.

Is it complicated? Yes. Is it relentless? For sure. A lot of things don’t work, publicly, and that’s humbling in a way that most creative work isn’t. And this era isn’t perfect. The algorithm can make you chase the wrong things, and there’s no executive carrying any of it for you.

But there is more opportunity to make the films you actually want to make, reach people who actually want to watch them, and build something that belongs to you, than there has ever been.

So, if you’re waiting for permission to make something: stop waiting. Make the smallest version that proves the audience exists. Make it cheaply enough that failure doesn’t kill you. Then build the system that lets you do it again. It’s working for us.

More soon, including a proper behind-the-scenes on what actually goes into making a HUMAN film, and why some stories land and others don’t.

One more thing: we’re hiring.

We’re looking for editors to work on our YouTube content. If you’re obsessed with documentary, understand what makes people watch something all the way through, and want to work on films that matter, get in touch at careers@zand.land.

As always, the films are on the channel if you want to watch. And if you want to follow along more closely, you’re already in the right place. Feel free to share this with someone who may find it useful.

Ben

We’ve been developing a documentary about modern trad wives for a little while, what the movement actually is, who’s in it, what draws people to it, and what the infrastructure behind it looks like. It’s a subject that generates enormous amounts of heat and very little actual access. We wanted to approach it the way we approach everything, with genuine curiosity rather than a conclusion already written.

And that, as always, relies on people letting us in. This week, that happened on a significant scale. A major figure within that world agreed to show us the reality behind the public version of their life, what it actually looks like when the cameras aren’t rolling in a controlled way. So we flew out to the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, one of the most prominent gatherings in the conservative women’s space, and started filming.

I’ll have a lot more to say when the film is closer. But it was worth every bit of the chaos to get there.

The jails film

Nearly 200k views on YouTube. Over 4,500 likes, thousands of new subscribers and an inbox full of messages that have meant a lot - way more than the numbers.

The comments were full of people praising exactly the things we care most about: the journalism, the craft, the ability to sit with difficult people in difficult situations without flinching or moralising. One person called us an overly underrated channel, I’ll take that. Another said that what makes the interviewing work is that you can tell the subjects trust us immediately — and that this comes from “genuinely not looking down on them.” That’s the whole thing, really.

Beyond the broader love for the channel, people watched closely enough to have real opinions. Someone spent several paragraphs on the specific case of a man facing murder charges for being in a separate vehicle when his friend pulled the trigger — arguing the American justice system had got it wrong. Someone else noticed Britney, one of the inmates, was articulate and sharp, and wrote that they hoped she gets out and builds something. Another simply said: “Damn, everybody looks aged beyond their years.” Jail life is rough.

If you haven’t seen it, click the link above.

For members

There’s a lot that didn’t make the final cut, extended conversations, moments too raw or slow for the 37-minute film. We’re releasing them over the coming weeks for members only. The first one is out now.

Not yet a member? Join by clicking here.

What’s coming next: The Versus format

The echo chamber film we released a few weeks ago, a leftist influencer at a right-wing rally, a conservative influencer at a left-wing protest, both of them together all day, landed not just as a good film but as a format. Two contrasting lives, head to head, to understand a wider issue. It’s our building bridges format, and we’re going to keep making it.

The first one was right versus left. The next one is the haves versus the have nots.

We had extraordinary access to two people at opposite ends of the wealth spectrum, who gave us real time, not an afternoon, but a real step into their lives, so we could understand what daily life actually looks like from where they’re standing.

One is a millionaire. Tens of millions. The architecture of life that comes with that kind of wealth is something most people never see up close.

The other is a man who is unhoused, who lives on the porch of a sports bar in Arizona. It’s where he sleeps, where he spends his days, where his whole world is.

Both of them gave us something rare. Genuine openness. And then, for the first time, they met each other.

I don’t want to say too much about what happened. But it’s a story with a lot of surprises, which is usually the sign that it’s going to be interesting. Income inequality is one of the defining issues of the moment, and a think piece about it will only get you so far. Watching two people who’ve never been in the same room try to make sense of each other’s life is something else entirely.

That film is coming very soon.

One more thing

We won a Banff World Media Festival Award for The Guardians, our series highlighting rangers around the world who are fighting to protect the planet. It was a collaboration with Prince William and the Royal Foundation. Banff is one of the most prestigious festivals in the world for factual content. Genuinely proud of what the whole team built on that one.

On the media: the YouTube-to-cinema pipeline

Something has been sitting in my head for a few weeks, and it came into sharper focus this week.

Obsession, the horror film directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, has taken north of $80 million at the global box office on a reported budget of around $3 million. It originated from a short film on YouTube. The Backrooms, originally a found footage short made by 16-year-old Kane Parsons, got picked up by A24 before he’d left school. Iron Lung crossed from indie game into genuine cultural moment largely through YouTube. None of these followed the traditional path. They built an audience first and the industry followed.

Which brings me to documentary.

The conversation in the documentary industry right now is whether YouTube is a door or a dead end. Whether putting your film on the platform first closes off the routes to traditional distribution, theatrical release, festivals, the structures that have historically sustained documentary careers, or whether it opens something new.

Zandland Exec Josh Reynolds was talking about exactly this at Sheffield DocFest last week, and our view, one that is increasingly being borne out in practice, is that the old anxiety about YouTube is starting to look outdated. Distributors are approaching us now knowing our films live freely on the channel, and buying our work anyway. Owning our own IP, and the audience, is the asset, not a hindrance.

The hesitancy is understandable. Festivals build careers. Awards build careers. Rights matter in a way that platform revenue can’t straightforwardly replace, and handing the future of documentary to a commercial algorithm is a genuine risk that serious people are right to name. None of that is wrong.

But we think the long-term opportunity for documentary in this space is significant, bigger than the industry currently assumes, and bigger than what Obsession or Backrooms suggests on the surface. Those are extreme cases. What’s more interesting is the slower, compounding version: filmmakers building real audiences on YouTube over time, developing the kind of trust with viewers that makes a theatrical event or a major distribution deal feel like a natural next step rather than a lucky break.

The pipeline exists. It’s just not yet visible enough for the industry to have named it properly.

I’m delivering the keynote at Sunny Side of the Doc in France next week on exactly this. I’ll have more to say after that, these conversations always sharpen when you’re in a room with people who’ve been thinking about it from a completely different angle.

More soon.

— Ben Z

The thing I’ll probably end up talking about on stage is the question I get asked more than anything else: how do you build a company in this new media environment, what’s the algorithmic strategy, how do you hack the platforms? So I want to use this issue to say what I actually think about that, and how it threads through everything we’re doing this week.

Part One: The Media

Building for the long game in a short-game industry

The honest answer to the question of how to build a company in this environment is that I don’t really think about it in algorithm-first terms.

The frame I’ve used for a long time, in my own life and at Zandland, is a little bit more philosophical… Who do I want to be at 80, looking back? What’s the story I want to be able to tell? Each piece of work isn’t really a piece of work in isolation. It’s a thread in a longer tapestry, the life of Zandland and the people who make it. And so the question I ask of every decision isn’t will this perform (though I do obviously care about that), it’s something closer to what does this actually say about us, and about me, and could I explain it to my kids in ten years’ time.

That sounds soft and a little bit woo woo, but it’s a more demanding filter than the algorithmic one. The algorithm rewards a film that does numbers this week. The ten-year filter asks whether the film is something you’d still be proud of when the numbers no longer mean anything and the algorithm inevitably changes… and that includes how you made it, who you worked with, how contributors were treated, whether the team enjoyed it, whether the editorial line held up under scrutiny.

It runs counter to a lot of the standard advice. Faster, louder, more frequent, more confident, more polarising. The platforms reward all of that. But what I’ve come to believe, and the reason I’m willing to operate this way commercially, is that the long-game eventually builds two things the short-game can’t.

The first is trust. Trust is what audiences are increasingly hungry for in a media environment where confidence is cheap, certainty is manufactured, and the gap between what’s said on camera and what’s actually true keeps widening.

The second is the energy to keep going. Any ambitious endeavour runs on energy, the energy to try new things, to recover when something inevitably fails, to come back the next day and start again. The only way I’ve found to sustain that is to actually be content with the work you’re doing, and the way you’re doing it. Short-game wins don’t generate that. You can hit numbers and still feel hollow. Long-game work is harder to make and slower to reward, but it gives you something to stand on.

This isn’t a moral argument. It’s a strategic one. The companies trying to win on volume are competing with infinite supply. The companies willing to compete on trust over a long enough timeline are competing with almost no one, and the people inside those companies stand a better chance of still wanting to be there in five years.

The thinking doesn’t really change what we make. We’ll always do a mix, some dark, some funny, some serious, some strange. What it changes is how. How we approach contributors. How we work with the team. How we make decisions when there’s a quick win on the table that would compromise the longer thing we’re building. We don’t always get this right, partly because we’re often doing things for the first time, we deliberately keep stretching into territory that makes us uncomfortable. But I genuinely think the cumulative effect of operating this way pays off, both for the company we’re building and for being able to look at it without flinching.

Part Two: The Work

Speaking to a Convicted Murderer Inside Weld County Jail

The film we’re showing Thursday is a test of that approach, and a useful test of its limits.

We spent a week inside Weld County Jail in Greeley, Colorado, working from minimum to maximum security. The jail has held some of the most infamous killers in modern American history, Chris Watts, who murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters, was held in this unit. We didn’t go in to take a position on the US judicial system or on any of the men and women inside. We went in to spend the time and see what was there.

A week is short. It’s a fraction of what serious long-form reporting on incarceration deserves, and I felt the constraint every day we were inside. But a week is also more than most coverage of these places ever gets, and in that time you see things that don’t survive the trip into mainstream framing.

Five minutes before I met Chandler, in for stealing cars and harassment, on his sixth month inside, he’d got off the phone with his lawyer. “My offer’s 24 years right now. I told them I’ll take 8 in a halfway house and they told me no.” The number was real. We were standing in front of it as he was still doing the arithmetic of the rest of his life.

I met James Ochoa, who has been in and out of the jail for forty years and is now facing a second-degree murder charge involving his own father. I couldn’t ask him whether he did it, he was awaiting trial, but I asked him whether he thought he was a bad guy. “No,” he said. “Regardless.” He believed there was a plan. He was scared.

I met Kyle Moore in his first ever interview. Convicted of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and four aggravated armed robberies. The man who died in his case was the former partner of his own uncle. He grew up surrounded by addiction, gang involvement, and incarceration as the standard arc of male adulthood in his family. “I was raised in the mentality that we go to prison,” he said. “It’s just part of what we do.”

I met Brittany, 33 years old, who’d been in and out of the system since she was 18. “Sixteen times, maybe.” Her plan, if she got out, was to leave Greeley, because everyone she knew was here, and she didn’t think she could stay clean if she stayed near them.

None of these are stories with thesis statements. None of them resolve. None of them tell you whether the system is broken or working. They tell you who’s inside it, in the specific moment we were there, and what they sound like when someone sits and listens for longer than a soundbite needs.

This is what I mean by the long-game filter shaping how rather than what. The story itself, a jail, murder cases, addiction, the cycle of incarceration, sits squarely inside the kind of dark territory we’ve worked in before. What the long-game thinking changes is the approach. Going in without a pre-written thesis. Letting people talk in their own time. Not pushing for the dramatic line when the patient line is more honest. The film still has a super compelling hook, and feels important to watch. It also may not go as viral as a faster, harder-edged cut would. But it’s the film we feel is the right one to make.

And about the SXSW London conversation

The sneak peek and Q&A is on Thursday at South by South West London, 14:15, Protein Studios, Stage 2, Shoreditch. I’m in conversation with Alice Aedy, filmmaker whose work I really respect, about the changing rules of documentary, what works now, what’s stopped working, and where independent studios fit in.

If you’re at the festival, come along.

The full film goes up on Zandland’s YouTube at 5pm on Thursday.

If someone forwarded you this and you want more, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

We found out we got four nominations at the Broadcast Digital Awards. Our YouTube channel is up for Best Factual Channel alongside BBC4 and History Hit. Human is up for Best Documentary Series alongside shows from Disney+ and Prime Video. Uncovered, a Channel 4 strand we collaborated on, is also nominated for Best Documentary Series. And we are up for Multichannel Production Company of the Year.

The thing worth saying about Human specifically: it is seven months old, entirely self-funded, no broadcaster, no commissioner behind it. And it is in the same category as productions with the full weight of Disney and Amazon behind them.

It is also just a very different type of film. Human is not a celebrity doc or a glossy true crime series. It is gonzo, access-driven documentary made completely outside the traditional system. I think it is genuinely good that work like that is getting recognised in the same breath as much bigger budget productions.

The echo chamber film

Last weekend London hosted two major protests almost simultaneously. The Unite the Kingdom march on the right. The Nakba 78 rally on the left. Two crowds, two completely different worldviews, a few metres apart in central London, each absolutely convinced the other was wrong about everything.

We had been thinking about a format for a while. Not a debate show. Not a panel. Something more real than that. What actually happens when you take someone completely out of their own echo chamber and drop them into the other one? Not in a studio with a moderator and a timer. In the actual world, surrounded by people who believe everything they do not, for a full day with no escape.

So we took Tilly Middlehurst, a leftist influencer, to the Unite the Kingdom march. And we took Zion Zachary, a conservative influencer, to the Nakba 78 rally. Together. All day. Fully immersed. We filmed everything.

The clips started hitting before the film was even finished. Four million views across social media, the premise working in public before we had even released the thing. By the time the film dropped on YouTube it already had an audience waiting for it. Three days in, in the metrics that matter, it is tracking as our second best performing video at this stage of release.

We turned it around in five days from shoot to release. That is not something we have done before at this scale. And the reason it worked is the same reason all our best work works. We did not arrive with a verdict. We were not trying to catch anyone out or make anyone look stupid. We were genuinely curious about what would happen when two people who had spent years inside their own information ecosystems were forced to actually stand in the other one and look around.

The format is almost like a dating show in structure. The whole narrative is about the relationship between the two of them. The tension, the moments of surprise, the points where they moved closer or further apart. Clear format points, immersive filming, a genuine question at the centre of it rather than a conclusion looking for evidence.

It sounds simple. In a media environment built around confirmation and outrage, it is genuinely rare.

Why this format matters beyond one film

Every news cycle throws up new divisions. New flashpoints. New moments where two sides are absolutely convinced the other is incapable of basic human decency. That is not going anywhere. And for each one there is a version of this format waiting to be made.

That is what we are building at Zandland. Not just individual films but formats that are returnable. Ideas that can come back across different topics, different fault lines, different people. A pipeline of work that is recognisably and only Zandland, that builds a library over time, that gives audiences something to argue about without us being the ones arguing.

The goal has always been the same. To be the preeminent gonzo documentary studio of this generation. Brave enough to go to the places other people will not. Empathetic enough to actually listen when we get there. That is the brand. This format, done well, is exactly that.

SXSW London — June 4th

One more thing worth flagging.

On June 4th I am at SXSW London for a premiere and fireside chat at Protein Studios. I will be giving a first look at our latest documentary releasing next week, and talking about distribution, long form content, and what it actually means to build a studio in this media environment. The session is moderated by Alice Aedy, co-founder of Earthrise, and it is part of the Creator Economy track.

If you are going to be at SXSW London and want to come along, details are here. Would love to see some of you there.

Why the recognition matters

Human launched seven months ago. Entirely self-funded. No broadcaster. No commissioner. No safety net. Just a bet that there is an audience for original documentary that takes on difficult, complicated subjects in a way that does not really exist on television right now.

That bet has paid off. Millions of views across the series. A proper audience that keeps coming back. And now the industry recognising it alongside some of the biggest and best resourced media organisations in the world, after less than a year of existence.

I want to be honest about what that actually means to us. It is not just a nice thing to put in a press release. It is validation of a premise that a lot of people in the industry thought was optimistic when we started. That a small independent studio, building its own audience on YouTube, making work it believes in without waiting for permission, could compete at the highest level.

The fact that we have two nominations in the same category, one for self-funded work and one for a Channel 4 partnership, also says something about the model we are building. Both lanes working. Both being recognised. That is the whole point.

We are competing. And we are just getting started.

What all of this adds up to

Nominations, a new format, a premiere at SXSW London next week, and a studio that is still figuring it out in public, week by week, film by film, genuinely not sure what is going to work next and trying things anyway.

That is Zandland right now. Genuinely proud of the team and everyone who has worked across all of it.

Watch the echo chamber film here if you have not seen it yet.

If this resonated, forward it to someone who thinks about these things.

If someone sent this to you and you want more, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

See you at SXSW.

— Ben

Part One: The Media

Something that comes up constantly in our work is how insanely entrenched people are in their views and how unwilling they are to have a simple conversation, never mind fully engage with the other side. We see it every day. The tribalism of politics right now is something else. People are viscerally angry and, a lot of the time, completely unable to actually talk to each other. They are also unable, regardless of what side they are on, to have much empathy at all for anyone who doesn’t think like them. And, call me a mad man, but that’s not great.

At Zandland we are firm believers that talking and trying to understand each other means something. It’s not the only solution to anything, but it’s definitely better than screaming in each other’s faces and taking your entire political education from whoever is angriest in your feed that morning.

The question we often come back to is: what actually happens when you force that conversation? Not in a studio, not on a panel, but for real. How do you make people literally step inside the other echo chamber and see what’s there? Could we actually blow some minds, change some worlds, and create global world peace? No, but maybe we could make something interesting that provided some actual value.

It turns out that absolutely intense, visceral protests are a pretty good place to find out.

Part Two: The Work

For the British readers amongst us, you likely know this but if you were living under a rock last weekend, let me explain. London played host to two major protests happening almost simultaneously. The Unite the Kingdom march, a right-wing rally that has been growing in size and profile over the last year, and a left-wing counter protest, the Nakba 78 rally, marking 78 years since the displacement of Palestinians. Two very different crowds, two very different worldviews, both absolutely convinced the other lot are completely wrong, all within a few meters of each other in central London. It was, to put it mildly, a lot.

We’d been wanting to cover both for a while, but not in the way that most outlets would. We’re not news, and we like making character-led documentaries. We also didn’t want to just turn up, point a camera at the most extreme person we could find, and tell them they were idiots. That felt too easy and frankly too boring. So we tried something different.

The concept is simple and as we’re yet to release the first ep, but the clips are already banging on social media. It’s basically an ideology swap, an Echo Chamber exchange. Take two prominent online political voices from opposite ends of the spectrum and drop them into the other one’s world for a day. A left-winger goes to the Unite the Kingdom march. A right-winger goes to the Nakba 78 counter protest. They accompany each other the whole time. Fully immersed, all day, completely surrounded by people who hold the opposite view to everything they believe. Exposure therapy, basically. A literal step into the other echo chamber, no safety net (except for a scouser called Ben Zand and a security guard).

We didn’t pick protests by accident. There is nowhere on earth where people are more certain, more passionate, more completely inside their own worldview than at a protest. Which makes it the perfect place to drop someone who disagrees with everything happening around them and see what actually happens.

Stylistically it’s more like a dating show than a documentary. The narrative is entirely about the relationship between the two political opponents, the tension, the growth or distance that develops throughout the day. Clear format points, sit-down interviews combined with complete immersion in the protests. A clear narrative arc around whether they’ll move closer or further apart. We didn’t want to just make protest fodder. Some of the clips definitely highlight the views and madness at the protests (and are fodder-esque), but what we really wanted was to try something new that could challenge the people watching it, not just the people in it. The world is a goddamn mess right now, so we thought we’d give a more empathetic approach a go.

It was shot on Saturday and it’ll be out by Friday. Five days from shoot to release, which is quicker than we normally operate. But our aim is to be THE preeminent zeitgeist gonzo documentary studio of this generation, and that sometimes means moving faster and being part of the conversation while it’s actually happening. We’re already releasing clips, collaborating with the subjects themselves on social, and so far it’s working, currently sitting at over 600k views in 2 days. We’ve also had hundreds of new followers before the film is even out, so the premise is working.

There is also a strategic reason we’re excited about this beyond just the one film. Zandland has always made work that asks hard questions and sits with complicated answers. But we’re also always looking for formats that are returnable. Things we can build on, do again across different topics, different fault lines, different people. This concept is exactly that. Every news cycle throws up new divisions, new flashpoints, new moments where two sides are absolutely convinced the other is insane. That’s not going anywhere. And for each one there’s a version of this format waiting to be made, building a library of films, a pipeline of clips, and a brand proposition that is recognisably and only Zandland.

And most importantly, it’s clear from the content what we’re not trying to be. We’re not trying to be political activists or culture warriors. Our films resonate most with audiences because we never arrive with a verdict already written. We always strive to show up with genuine curiosity, ask honest questions, and let the thing breathe. Brave enough to go to the places other people won’t, empathetic enough to actually listen when we get there. That’s the brand. This format, done well, is all of that. It has a clear shareable premise, it generates natural clip moments, it gives audiences something to argue about without us being the ones arguing, and it works across every platform we operate on.

It definitely won’t be all our vids, but we’ll do it again if this one works.

The ep is out on Friday. Subscribe to Zandland to watch!

Part Three: The Company

Zandland is a crazy place to work. We are always trying new things, a lot of which (most) completely and utterly fail. Last week we failed to release a film due to legal complications (it’ll be out in about a week and a half now), we tried a bunch of new formats, I spoke at a load of media events about how to make content work in this new ecosystem, we didn’t win a BAFTA (nominated again, choosing to see that as progress), and I personally built an entire app for internal use at the company as a side hobby. More on that another time. The way I’ve always seen it, and try to instil into the team, is that progress comes from trying new things, massively failing, feeling uncomfortable and then latching onto what works. It also comes from being nice and supporting other people, even if they think differently to you.

And even as we try new formats in complicated worlds, unsure what will work and what won’t, that’s just what you have to do. Our goal is to always take risks, and to always hold true to our values. We’re trying to be observers in a world gone mad. Truth seekers who challenge everyone, including ourselves, to think a bit differently.

A View From The Team

Freddie Newman and Ben Mulley on working on the latest show:

Last Tuesday we came up with an idea to get two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum out of their echo-chambers. We filmed it over the weekend and are going to release it on YouTube this Friday.

Turning things around at lightening speed is something I think we do really well here at Zandland, but even for us this feels slightly mad. It coincided with two other edits, and really messed with the production schedule.

As I’m writing this (late on Monday night in the Zandland edit suites), Ben Mulley is sat next to me editing. Between securing access, writing a shooting script and organising travel and security on one of the UK’s largest policing days in recent history, as well as about a million other things, it already feels like we’ve pulled off something big.

And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do: create thoughtful and nuanced observational docs in a digital landscape that rewards sensationalised narratives that reinforce what you already believe.

This film is probably the best articulation of that mission we’ve made (yet). In it we’re literally creating a space where two people with completely different views can spend time together, listen to each other and be understood as human beings instead of caricatures.

Our idea already feels like it’s working. We’ve had over 600k views just from the clips we posted of the shoot in the past two days.

Anyway, should probably get back to the edit.

See you on Friday.

Freddie and Ben

Part Four: The Recommendation

As a recommendation this week, and for a very different type of content that proves there isn’t just one way people consume things online, I give you Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching.

Two brothers from St. Louis, with almost no knowledge of birdwatching, buy a 2010 Kia Sedona for $4,500, turn it into a home on wheels, and spend a year driving around America trying to spot as many bird species as possible. It’s free on YouTube. It has around 4 million views. And, reportedly, Netflix, HBO and Amazon all came calling after it dropped.

One of the top comments, with thousands of likes, reads: “You didn’t start your day thinking you would watch a documentary about birdwatching. None of us did. It’s that good.”

It’s slow, it’s niche, it’s completely mad, and it’s proof that if you make something with genuine curiosity and care, people will find it. Which, when you think about it, is pretty close to the whole Zandland thesis.

PS. So many people over the last few weeks have told me, or told members of the team, how much they’re enjoying the Zandland content, the films, the clips, this newsletter. If that was you: thank you. It really does mean a lot.

Ben

The Cult of NatureBoy has been sitting in the Hulu top ten. Tonight we find out whether Breaking Ranks wins an Amnesty Award. On Sunday it is up for a BAFTA. And somewhere in between, I am speaking at the Creative Cities convention in Liverpool, my hometown, about building Zandland, about my career, about what it actually takes to make this kind of work exist.

And this week we release a film where I sit across from a man who has just been convicted of first degree murder, days away from beginning a life sentence, and ask him how he feels about what he has done.

These things are connected. Not just because they are all happening at once, but because they are all products of the same question that sits at the centre of everything we make. It’s also a question I get asked non-stop:

How do you actually get people to talk to you?

The access problem

For Zandland, access is absolutely everything. The issue is, we operate in an age where trust in media and journalism is at an all time low. And not without reason.

People have been burned. Subjects who spoke honestly to journalists found their words twisted into a narrative that was already written before the camera turned on. Communities who let crews in watched themselves become caricatures. Whistleblowers who thought they were speaking truth to power ended up exposed and alone.

In that environment, genuine access, the kind that produces something real rather than something that just looks real, is becoming genuinely rare and very hard to get. And the irony is that the media environment making it rarer is also the one that needs it most.

Because when trust collapses, people stop talking. And when people stop talking, journalism fills the gap with speculation, performance and confident commentary from people who were never in the room.

The honest answer

People ask me a lot how we get the access we get. And the honest answer is not complicated, even if it is increasingly countercultural.

It starts with mutual respect. Not agreement. Not the promise of friendship or the suggestion that the relationship will extend much beyond the film. Not telling someone what they want to hear or pretending to share their worldview. Just a basic, genuine commitment to treating every person we film as a human being. To respecting their fundamental humanity regardless of what they have done, what they believe, or what the world thinks of them.

That sounds obvious. In the current media environment it is not.

Because the incentives push in the opposite direction. Outrage performs better than complexity. Villains are easier to sell than human beings. A journalist who arrives with a verdict already written and just needs a face to attach it to will often produce something that travels further and faster than one who comes in genuinely open to what they might find.

And subjects know this. They have been approached by enough crews, seen enough of their community reduced to a thumbnail, watched enough content about people like them that bears no resemblance to the actual reality, that the default position is suspicion. Often very justified suspicion.

So the work of getting access starts long before the camera turns on. It is about being honest with people about what you are making and why. About not pretending to be something you are not. About assembling the right team for the specific story you are telling. And above all, about making someone feel, correctly, that whatever they say and however it reflects on them, they will be treated as a full human being rather than a convenient plot point.

That is not the same as promising a sympathetic edit. It is not the same as saying you will agree with them or protect them. It just means you will be fair. And that you mean it.

Seven years, one story

The Cult of NatureBoy sitting in the Hulu top ten this week is, on the surface, a streaming milestone. Underneath it is something more interesting.

I first came across the NatureBoy story in 2017. What followed was seven years of work, of following a story that kept evolving, of development cycles where it genuinely was not clear whether the film would ever get made, of waiting for a legal process to conclude, of staying in contact with people who had been through something genuinely traumatic and needed to be handled with enormous care.

Producer Janine Weaver was absolutely pivotal and worked with me on this story for years. Through the uncertainty, through the moments where the whole thing looked like it might not happen, through the long process of building enough trust with the people at the centre of it that they were willing to tell their story on camera.

That is what access like this requires. Seven years of people caring enough about a story to stay with it when there was no guarantee it would ever land anywhere. Seven years of being honest amidst the uncertainty. Of demonstrating, over and over again, that the commitment to treating people fairly was real and not contingent on what they said or how useful it was.

Five years, one friendship

We also recently finished a film called Coming Out Amish that does not yet have a distribution date, but that I am incredibly proud of and think about a lot.

It came from a friendship I formed with a member of the Amish community over five years of conversations. Not an interview relationship. A genuine friendship, one that has gone through some of the biggest moments in both of our lives over the course of knowing each other. Births, losses, decisions, uncertainty. The kind of shared history that cannot be compressed into a production timeline or a commissioning brief.

That film exists because of that relationship. Full stop. There is no version of it that happens without five years of showing up, of being honest, of going through things together. And there is no version of the access we got without the trust that came from all of that.

It is probably the purest example of something I believe deeply: that the best journalism does not start with a commission or a pitch. It starts with a human relationship. And those take as long as they take.

How Breaking Ranks actually happened

Breaking Ranks is a film in which Israeli soldiers speak on camera about witnessing and participating in things the Israeli government has repeatedly denied. Civilians killed at food distribution points. Rules of engagement abandoned. A tank firing on a man hanging laundry from a rooftop.

Getting those soldiers to speak required something that is harder to manufacture than any technical skill or institutional backing. It required the right team, assembled in a way that reflected the story itself. Matan Cohen, who led the soldier interviews and secured the access, was pivotal to that. The make up of a team matters enormously in this kind of work. Who is in the room, what they represent, what they understand from the inside, changes everything about whether someone will speak to you honestly or not.

The people we were speaking to needed to genuinely believe they would be treated fairly. Not softly. Not without challenge. But fairly. That they would be heard rather than processed. That their complexity would be respected rather than flattened into a headline.

That is not a small thing to offer someone who is about to say something on camera that their government, their army and in some cases their family will not want them to say. The reason they spoke is not because we promised them anything beyond that basic commitment. It is because they believed, correctly, that we were genuinely trying to understand what happened rather than confirm what we already thought.

The BAFTA nomination and the Amnesty nomination matter to us not just as recognition. They matter because they are proof that the access worked. That what those soldiers said was real enough and important enough to change how people understand what happened in Gaza. That is what access journalism is supposed to do.

The same principle, a very different room

A few months ago we were inside a US jail.

One of the people we spoke to was days away from being transferred to prison to serve a life sentence for first degree murder. He had nothing obvious to gain from talking to us. He had every reason to be suspicious of a British documentary crew turning up with cameras in the final days before his life changed permanently.

He talked anyway. At length. Honestly. About the night it happened. About what it felt like. About what his life looks like from inside it.

And the reason he talked is the same reason the soldiers talked, the same reason the people in The Cult of NatureBoy talked, and the same reason the person at the centre of Coming Out Amish talked. We came in without a verdict already written. With genuine curiosity about how a human being ends up in that room. With a real commitment to giving him a fair hearing regardless of what he had done.

We were not there to be his friend. We were not there to agree with him or excuse what happened. We were there to understand it. And he could feel the difference between that and someone arriving with an angle.

That is what empathy in journalism actually means. Not sympathy. Not softness. Just the basic human decision to treat someone as a person first, whatever comes after.

What this week feels like from the inside

Awards weeks are strange when you are a founder. There is a version of it that looks, from the outside, like validation and celebration. And it is those things. We are genuinely proud of Breaking Ranks and what the team built. We are proud of what Janine and everyone who worked on NatureBoy built over seven years. We are proud of the friendship and the trust that made Coming Out Amish possible.

But there is also the quieter version, the one I have been having with other founders lately in the kind of conversations that only happen when everyone has let their guard down a bit. The version where you talk honestly about what it costs to build something like this. The uncertainty that does not go away even when things are going well. The gap between what the work looks like from the outside and what it feels like to be inside the process of making it.

I think that honesty is part of what we are trying to build at Zandland. Not just in the films but in how we talk about what we do. The access we get from subjects comes from a genuine commitment to treating people fairly and without a predetermined conclusion. The trust we are trying to build with this audience comes from the same place.

So here is the honest version of this week: it feels significant. The Hulu placement for NatureBoy is a genuinely big deal for us, the kind of milestone that only exists because of years of work that looked, at many points along the way, like it might never amount to anything. The nominations matter. The jail film matters. And speaking in Liverpool this week, the city I grew up in, about how all of this came to be, feels like a moment worth sitting with.

The question of how you make journalism that people will actually talk to you for is one I think about constantly and do not have fully solved. But we are in the game. We are making the work. And that, more than any award, is the thing that actually counts.

What is coming

The jail documentary drops soon. It is unlike anything we have made before and I think it will find an audience in a way that surprises people.

Breaking Ranks is free on our YouTube if you have not seen it.

The Cult of NatureBoy is on Hulu now and comes to Disney+ internationally on July 15th.

And if any of this resonated, forward it to someone who thinks about these questions too.

If someone sent this to you and you want more, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

On one of those calls, he tells me he wants editorial control, money and royalties before he’ll participate in anything we make. I tell him that isn’t how we work, and that we are making the documentary regardless.

There is a pause. Then he says: “Either way I’m famous. Either way.”

He was facing life in prison. His group had collapsed. His followers had testified against him. His alleged crimes were weeks away from being laid out before a jury. And his genuine concern in that moment, like at all times, was his brand.

Eligio Bishop AKA NatureBoy

I’ve thought about that interaction a lot since. Because it wasn’t bravado, or at least not only bravado. It was a man stating what he believed to be a simple and permanent truth about himself: that his relationship with his social media followers was the most real thing about him. More real than the cell. More real than the charges. More real than anything the outside world was doing to him or saying about him.

What I kept thinking was this: he couldn’t separate himself from the identity that audience had helped build. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

I’ve been trying to understand Eligio Bishop for seven years. The Cult of NatureBoy, which starts out now on Hulu, and comes to Disney+ worldwide in July 15th, is the Zandland team’s attempt to finally say what we’ve learned.

How it started

In 2017, I was a journalist working for the BBC. I came across a story online: a young woman from Newfoundland, Canada had gone missing. Her family had reported her to police. And then someone spotted her, not after a search, not through any official channel, in the background of a YouTube video. She was fine. She’d joined a commune in Costa Rica, led by a man who called himself NatureBoy.

Still from Searching for Natureboy

I wanted to understand what that meant, so I flew out. I’d been speaking to NatureBoy over the phone, he seemed over the top, but largely welcoming, not obviously dangerous. But just as I arrived in Central America, he and some of his followers had been deported back to the US for overstaying their visas.

I was disappointed at the time to not be able to meet the group in person. But I did manage to meet a handful of people who had joined and eventually made it out the other side. At that point, the group was called Melanation. People from all over North America had travelled to the remotest parts of Central America to be there. They were young, thoughtful, diverse, and, in different ways, disillusioned with what countries like America had offered them.

I kept speaking to NatureBoy after his deportation. He told me the outside world was Babylon. He told me melanin was an antenna, connecting Black people to a higher consciousness. He told me the algorithm that recommended his videos wasn’t just code, it was prophecy, a system through which the right people were being guided to him.

I made a short documentary for the BBC. Filed the story. Got on a plane home.

And I thought I understood what I was looking at.

But I didn’t.

What I missed

Here is what I thought I was looking at in 2017: a charismatic man with unusual ideas, living an unconventional life, with a small group of followers who’d chosen to opt out of the mainstream. Eccentric, certainly. Potentially problematic, possibly. But within the broad range of human behaviour, within the long tradition of people deciding that the existing world isn’t working and going somewhere to try to build a different one, not obviously monstrous.

But here is what I was actually looking at: one of the first cults in American history to be built primarily through a social media algorithm.

Still from The Cult of NatureBoy (out now)

The distinction matters enormously, because it changes the story from a curiosity into a warning.

What Eligio Bishop had figured out, and would later explain to me directly, from jail, with something close to pride, was that social media in 2017 was a radicalisation engine that nobody was (and still isn’t) properly regulating. You would watch a video about police violence against Black Americans. The algorithm would serve you another. Then another. Then Black consciousness content. Then natural living. Then melanin theory. Then NatureBoy, sitting on a rock in a Costa Rican river, speaking slowly and with complete conviction about why people needed to leave America and return to nature, and why he was the one sent to lead them there.

Aaron, a military veteran from rural Georgia whose mother had died when he was fifteen, who found himself at a crossroads after leaving the army, spending his evenings on YouTube looking for something he couldn’t name… found Bishop’s channel in 2017.

He told me: “I didn’t know what a YouTube algorithm was. I didn’t know that YouTube was recommending me videos based upon the videos I regularly watched. YouTube is an algorithm designed to grow engagement to keep people on the app so it can show more advertisers. That’s what it is.”

He knew that now. He didn’t know it then. That gap, between what the technology actually is and what it feels like when you’re inside it, is where Carbon Nation was born.

And Bishop wasn’t an unwitting beneficiary of this system. He understood it explicitly.

He told me, from his jail cell: “I use stuff to make people be like, ‘wow, what the hell, what did he just say?’ Always that. I do that on purpose because I know that’s gonna get a response. It’s a numbers game.”

He went viral more than once in the early years, usually by pushing things further than most people would. At one point, the group was denied boarding a flight, reportedly because of their hygiene, an incident that quickly became part of his growing notoriety online. In another video, he described, in graphic detail, a sexual encounter he’d had in front of his infant son. That clip drew widespread attention, including from authorities, and brought tens of thousands of new viewers to his channel. Around this period, he was deported from Costa Rica. His following grew.

Who went, and why

In nearly seven years of looking at this story, the question I have been asked most often is: why did they go? The implied second question, which people are usually too polite to ask directly, is: how could they be so naive?

The Cult of NatureBoy

I want to address that second question first, because it is wrong, and it matters that it is wrong.

The people who joined Carbon Nation were not naive. They were not broken in some unusual way. They were people, largely young, largely Black, largely American, who had reached a point where the life in front of them no longer made sense.

Many of them describe the same instinct. Not to fight the system. Not to reform it. But to leave it altogether. To build something else, somewhere else, from scratch.

For some, that came from how they experienced America growing up. For others, it was more personal. A lack of direction. A sense of being stuck. A feeling that the version of success they had been offered didn’t fit.

What Bishop offered was clarity and belonging. A simple enough idea, delivered with total certainty. That the problem wasn’t them, it was the world they were living in. And that the solution wasn’t to fix it, but to walk away from it.

“I’m done with America,” was how Aaron put it to me. Simply and entirely done.

Velvet Marquez, who would spend nearly four years in the group and have a child with Bishop, was living a low-income life in New Orleans when she found his videos. She told me she had felt invisible, not hurt, not angry, just absent from her own life. The group offered visibility. Community. Purpose.

“It was like waking up in paradise every day.”

Kendra, who met Aaron in the group and married him in a Las Vegas ceremony alongside three other Carbon Nation couples, had been raised in a structured, stable environment but without a clear sense of what came next. When she saw what he was building, it felt like direction. Like something to be part of.

None of them thought they were joining a cult. That’s not a naive observation. It’s the most important thing to understand about how this works. The word “cult” implies a moment. A line you cross. A door closing behind you.

The reality is slower than that. A series of decisions that make sense at the time. One step, then another, then another, until you are somewhere you never planned to be. And by that point, the person who brought you there has made the alternative feel worse than staying.

The architecture of control

What Eligio Bishop built, across six years and multiple countries, was a system of psychological control. The tactics themselves were not new. What was new was how effectively he used social media to apply them.

Supporters of NatureBoy

The system had five core elements.

First was identity erasure. When you arrived, you were given a new name. Not a nickname, a replacement. Your past was reframed as something to discard. Aaron became Tru. Velvet became Eliana. Kendra became Sheeba. As Velvet put it, when he called that name, he was calling the version of you he had created.

Second was information control. The group produced content constantly, and members were expected to live inside it. You watched, shared, and repeated it all day. Outside voices were dismissed as “demons.” Doubt was treated as failure. Over time, repetition did the work. As Aaron said, the mind absorbs what it hears over and over.

Third was thought-stopping. In Carbon Nation (the evolution of Melanation), that word was “demons.” Anyone who questioned, criticised, or left was reduced to that single idea. It ended the conversation before it could begin.

Fourth was triangulation. Bishop set members against each other, creating a constant competition for his approval. Alliances shifted. Trust broke down. The only stable relationship was with him.

Fifth was hierarchy. There was an A-Team and a B-Team. Promotion and demotion. Members were not competing with him, they were competing with each other for his attention and approval. As Aaron put it, your ultimate relationship became with the leader.

Together, these mechanisms created something that looked like a community and, for a time, felt like one. People ate together, lived together, built a shared world. For many, the early period was genuinely joyful.

People do not leave because everything is bad. They leave when it becomes bad enough, when the distance to the exit is short enough, and when there is somewhere to go. Not everyone reaches that point.

The man himself

I spoke to Eligio Bishop many times. More than I care to remember. From jail, on the Securus phone system, in twenty-minute blocks that he would string together for hours. I also spoke to him multiple times before his arrest, years ago, early in the process, when he was trying to steer us into making the film he wanted rather than the one we were making.

It was one of the most unusual conversational experiences I’ve had in fifteen years of making documentaries. He could be compelling. Quick, perceptive, often funny. He understood how to hold attention, how to make you feel like you were being let in on something important. You could see how people ended up following him.

But the calls were also exhausting. Hours of circular monologues, jumping between grand claims, fragments of pseudo science, and his own mythology. He would talk and talk, rarely stopping, rarely listening. What felt sharp at first would stretch, repeat, and lose shape. The same ideas, over and over again, until they started to feel like something you were supposed to accept rather than question.

That combination mattered. The charm drew people in. The repetition kept them there.

NatureBoy at his trial in 2024

The verdict, and what it doesn’t resolve

On March 1, 2024, Eligio Bishop was found guilty on all counts: rape, false imprisonment, and three counts of posting sexually explicit content without consent. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The judge, before announcing the sentence, called him a master manipulator and the classic definition of a narcissist. She said she would have considered showing discretion if he had shown any remorse. He had shown none. He stood in his orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, and told the court: “I see what y’all are doing, and I want you to know I forgive you.”

The Messiah narrative, to the very end.

The cult members, who had been through hell and back and made it out the other side, were the reason NatureBoy was in that court room at all. Jenae, who had been the primary complainant in the case, said: “Finally, someone believes me.” Velvet said she could now live her life in peace.

But the impacts of the cult are hard to fully shake off. Aaron still has around $24,000 in debt from when he maxed out his credit cards to join the group. He and Kendra are married, and have a child, but the financial damage of four years in Carbon Nation has not been undone by a jury verdict. Kendra told me: “My whole life felt like it was just shattered.” Some of the people who were in the group have gone back to families who won’t talk to them. Some are with other groups, searching for the same thing they were searching for before.

And the conditions that made Carbon Nation possible are not in prison. The algorithm that fed Aaron conspiracy videos until it served him a NatureBoy video is still running. The sense of political despair among Americans that made leaving feel more viable than staying, that is not resolved. The loneliness that Velvet described, the invisibility, the feeling of not mattering to the world you actually live in, that is an epidemic that predated the pandemic and survived it.

You can arrest one man. You cannot arrest the machine.

What this series is, and why we made it

The Cult of Carbon Nation is a four-part documentary series. It’s out now on Hulu in the US, and comes to Disney+ internationally in July. It was made by Zandland in partnership with an amazing team at ABC News Studios.

It is important because it is not really a story about one man. Eligio Bishop is in prison. Carbon Nation is over, what remains of it has rebranded, as if that means something. But the story of how a vulnerable population was identified, targeted, recruited, and controlled through a social media platform that was optimising for engagement rather than human welfare, that story is not over. That story is continuing in a thousand different forms, most of which we haven’t made documentaries about yet.

The Cult of NatureBoy is out now on Hulu. It comes to Disney+ internationally on 15th July 2026. The series is a Zandland production in partnership with ABC News Studios.