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.

That is something we think about every single day at Zandland. And it is the reason I want to talk about what the BBC announced this week, because I think it gets to the heart of something bigger than any single channel launch.

I spent nearly a decade at the BBC early in my career. Since then, my team and I have built Zandland, we’ve made entertaining and successful films with broadcasters across the world, reported from war zones and made Zandland into a studio with multiple BAFTA noms that is going all in on original content, and a genuine daily bet on the idea that truthful, ambitious content can find an audience on the internet. We work with YouTube on these questions. We talk to Ofcom about them. This is not abstract for us. It is the thing we have staked a significant part of our professional lives on.

So when the BBC released the specifics of their new YouTube channel this week, aimed at 16 to 24 year olds, I had a lot of feelings about it.

What we are actually up against

We are living through a period where the incentives of the internet have quietly rewired what content gets made and what gets rewarded. Confidence gets more views than nuance. A video that tells you exactly who is to blame for something, in eighteen minutes, with a dramatic thumbnail, will almost always outperform a documentary that tries to show you why the answer is genuinely complicated.

That is not because audiences are stupid. It is because the system has been optimised, very effectively, for engagement rather than truth. And engagement and truth are not the same thing.

The people losing out in that system are the ones trying to make work that is honest. That does not oversimplify. That treats its audience as adults. Whether that is a serious investigation into wrongdoing, a documentary that actually takes you inside a world you do not know, or just entertainment that is crafted and real and does not talk down to you. All of it is harder to make, harder to fund, and harder to sustain in a media environment built around the performance of truth rather than the pursuit of it.

That is the battle. And it affects everyone, not just people who made content for a living.

So I was glad when the BBC made its move

The BBC announced a new YouTube-first documentary channel aimed at 16 to 24 year olds. Twenty films that are presenter-led, fast turnaround and YouTube-native.

My first reaction was positive. Because the BBC, whatever its flaws, is one of the few institutions left with a genuine structural commitment to truth. Not just as a value it talks about, but as something baked into its editorial process. Fact checking. Legal scrutiny. A duty of care to the people it films. A corrections policy. These things sound boring until you spend time in a media environment where almost nobody else is doing them.

We have written before in this newsletter about the rise of performative certainty online, about creators who present themselves as journalists but treat confidence as a substitute for investigation. The BBC is almost the exact opposite of that instinct. And that matters.

So yes, I personally want this to work. As a company, we are genuinely rooting for it.

But there is a structural problem at the heart of how they are trying to do it.

The problem

The BBC has to commission from a wide range of independent production companies. That is partly how the UK industry works and partly a genuine public service commitment to supporting a diverse market. These are not arbitrary rules. They exist for real reasons.

But those constraints create a real tension on YouTube. Because YouTube does not care about the structure of the British production industry. It rewards something completely different.

What YouTube rewards is consistency. Identity. The sense that a channel has a voice, a rhythm, a genuine point of view. It rewards the slow, compounding build of trust between a creator and an audience, the kind that takes a long time to establish and is worth an enormous amount once it exists.

What it does not reward is twenty well-intentioned films from twenty different production companies, each with a slightly different tone and a slightly different sense of what they are trying to be.

That might make for a rich programme of work. But it won’t necessarily make for a strong channel. And without a strong channel, you do not build an audience. And without an audience, the whole thing is just content that exists rather than content that lands.

The best YouTube channels are not just collections of good videos. They have an identity that runs through everything, a reason the audience keeps coming back. A slate of films looks impressive on paper. A channel has to feel coherent when you actually land on it. That gap is where a lot of well-funded institutional YouTube strategies quietly fall apart.

The economics are broken for the best people

The biggest problem is one that a lot of people will likely be thinking, but not saying.

The deal on offer has changed dramatically. In the traditional TV world, if you made a film for a broadcaster like the BBC or Channel 4, you would get a meaningful commission and keep the international rights. Rights meant you actually own what you made and can benefit from it long term. There was real upside to taking the risk.

That has largely gone in the digital space. Now, the proposition for talent and producers is to get less money, no rights, more pressure and a faster turnaround. And at the end of it you have not built an audience of your own, you have not built a brand, and you do not own anything that compounds in your favour over time.

So why would the best people in the creator economy take that deal?

The answer is, they increasingly will not. Not because they do not care about truth or public service. But because the numbers do not add up. You are taking on real risk to make low budget work for a platform you do not own, for an audience you are not building, with no meaningful reward if it goes well.

The people winning on these platforms are doing so by building their own things. Their own channels, their own audiences, their own long term value. And the gap between what that feels like and what a traditional broadcaster deal offers has never been wider.

The talent is already there

This is the thing is most exciting and most frustrating in equal measure.

There is a generation of British creators doing genuinely brilliant work on YouTube right now. Investigations that have actually changed things. Documentaries that take you somewhere real. Entertainment that is honest and crafted and does not treat its audience like idiots. They are doing it on tiny budgets, with no institutional backing, building real audiences through sheer commitment to quality and consistency.

The infrastructure to support them barely exists. The funding models were not initially built for them. And the irony is that they are doing exactly the kind of work that public money is supposed to exist to support.

So what if there was a different lane entirely?

Here is an idea I keep coming back to, but also haven’t fully formed yet so don’t judge me too hard.

What if there was a public fund, something like the BFI Film Fund but built specifically for YouTube, that creators and studios could apply to directly? Not to make content for the BBC’s channel. To make content for their own channel, under their own brand, building their own audience.

The public return would not be ownership of the work. It would be something more valuable in the long run: a healthier, more truthful content ecosystem. More honest work reaching more people. A genuine alternative to the confidence merchants and the algorithm feeders.

This is not a radical concept. The BFI funds independent films without owning them. Arts Council England backs theatre and music without controlling it. The principle of public money supporting honest creative work without the funder needing to own the result is completely established. The gap is that nobody has applied it to YouTube yet, even though that is where a generation of people now actually live.

A tiered system could work well. Smaller grants for emerging creators. Larger ones for studios with a track record. The criteria should not be about size or institutional prestige. It should be about a genuine commitment to truth, a real audience relationship, and the ability to make work that serves people rather than just flatters them.

Standards would need to be part of the deal. Not a commissioner sitting in every edit, but a clear framework around verification, fairness, corrections and public interest value. Accountability after the fact rather than editorial control from the outset. The BFI could be a natural home for something like this, sitting at arm’s length from any single broadcaster’s agenda. Ofcom could have a role in setting the public value criteria.

The key point is simple: public money for truthful content should not all have to flow through one institutional channel. There needs to be another lane.

What this means for us

At Zandland we are actively trying to be another lane.

We make documentaries. We run investigations. We make entertainment. What runs through all of it is the same thing: a genuine attempt to show people something real. Not to perform truth. To pursue it.

We are doing what the BBC is now planning to do, but building it as something we own, with a direct relationship with our audience, on our own terms. Some of our most ambitious work exists because of partnerships with traditional broadcasters and we value those relationships. But we are very conscious that the long term bet has to be on building something of our own.

Because once you have felt the difference between renting access to an audience and actually building a relationship with one, it is hard to focus the business in any other direction.

The battle for a more truthful media environment is not going to be won by any single institution. It is going to be won slowly and imperfectly by everyone who keeps choosing to make honest work in a system that does not always reward them for it. Creators, studios, journalists and filmmakers who believe that truth is worth the extra effort, even when the algorithm disagrees.

That is the battle we are in.

If this resonated, please forward it to someone who cares about what the media we consume is doing to us.

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

— Ben

PS - the next episode of The Zandland Show will be coming this Thursday.

The Hermit in the Swamp

One of the most unexpected people we met was Mark. He’s 66, American, has been travelling since his twenties, and now lives completely alone in the middle of a swamp in the Costa Rican jungle. To get to his place, we had to wade through bog up to our knees.

When I asked him what he thinks about when he’s by himself, he told me his main focus is to think as little as possible. That the world is too busy, that most people’s minds never stop chattering, and that the quiet out here is the point. He plays Yahtzee by himself. He watches spiders trap ants in holes in the ground. He told me that for the first time in practically forever, he feels truly comfortable.

I believed him.

The line that stayed with me.

Another member of the Pura Fruta commune called Tamsin that we spoke with during our stay said something else that I haven’t been able to shake:

“The challenges here are the bugs and the mould. The challenges in the UK are the government.”

It got a laugh. But she meant it. And honestly, it’s hard to argue with the logic.

Then there are the kids.

This is where the film gets complicated — and it’s the part I think people will find hardest to watch.

Tom grew up at the commune. He’s smart, self-aware, and remarkably candid. He told me, without prompting, that his upbringing was “a little too free,” that there was a big gap in his education, and that it was now impacting him. He’s having to work harder to catch up. He wants to move to a city, get a job, save for a house. The things that commune life was built to escape are exactly what he’s now aiming for.

What struck me most while filming was a question I kept coming back to: how do you best prepare a child for a life where they might choose to rejoin the system, when you’re raising them completely outside of it? I don’t think there’s an easy answer. But it’s one the film sits with rather than tries to resolve.

What Happened Next

We spoke with Tamsin again a few months after filming. Things had been difficult. The electricity had gone down. She and her son had both contracted cutaneous leishmaniasis — a flesh-eating parasite that leaves wounds that grow bigger and bigger. She’d had four at once.

But rather than a story of defeat, what came through was someone thinking carefully and evolving. She spoke about exploring a more 50/50 existence — perhaps spending time in Kuala Lumpur, or a world-schooling hub in the Dominican Republic, somewhere that might offer her son more social connection and educational structure while keeping the spirit of what she’d built. It felt less like giving up and more like someone figuring out what the next version of this looks like.

So is it Worth it?

I still don’t have a clean answer. What I do think is this: you can never truly escape the system. You can trade one set of problems for another. And for adults, maybe that trade makes sense. But children don’t choose it. They’re just brought along. And that, more than anything else, is what this film is really about.

Watch it and let me know what you think.

Exclusive for Zandland Members — The Deleted Scene

One person whose story didn’t make the final cut was Carl. Before arriving in Costa Rica, Carl was a motion animator working for some of the biggest companies in the world. He walked away from all of it to live in the jungle. His account of why is one of the most honest and unexpected things we filmed.

The deleted scene is available exclusively for Zandland members.

Not yet a member? Join here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2NR63vgSVfZ_D4Csd61XQ/join

If this resonated, forward it to one person who you think would connect with it.

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

See you next week.

We travel deep into the Costa Rican jungle to spend time with a remote commune of people who have walked away from conventional Western life entirely. Off-grid, in nature, at serious distance from the outside world.

Underneath that: it’s about whether escape is even possible, and what it costs you if you try.

Subscribe now

Why this film, why now

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about escape. Not in the abstract or romantic sense, but in a much more literal and increasingly understandable one: the desire to get away from modern Western life entirely, to step outside the grind of work, bills, screens, deadlines, social pressure, dating apps, overstimulation, institutional decline and the low-level but persistent feeling that, for many people, the system isn’t really delivering what it promised.

And if I’m honest, I think that feeling is becoming more and more widespread. It’s not just that life feels expensive, exhausting and unstable, though it does. It’s also that the horizon feels darker than it has in a long time. You have a cost of living crisis, collapsing trust in institutions, political dysfunction, endless online noise, the rise of AI, social fragmentation, and on top of all that, a constant background sense that the world is becoming more volatile and more dangerous. We are living in a time where the phrase “World War Three” no longer feels like the title of some distant dystopian film, but something that could see us suited, booted and conscripted by next Wednesday. When you put all of that together, it’s not hard to see why more people are starting to ask whether the answer is not to fix the system, but to leave it.

That question sits right at the centre of this film.

What we found in the jungle

The thing that struck me very quickly while making it is that the people living there didn’t feel ridiculous or cartoonish or like they were living some fantasy that only makes sense from the outside. Their disillusionment with the world we live in was often very coherent. They were reacting to a society that they see as spiritually empty, financially brutal, environmentally destructive, socially alienating and psychologically unhealthy. They had looked at the standard route: school, job, mortgage, pressure, burnout, debt, endless striving, and decided that it was not leading somewhere they wanted to go. In that sense, they weren’t escaping reality at all. They were responding to it.

Share Zandland

What made the story more complicated, though, was the fact that trying to leave one system does not mean you suddenly become free of problems. It just means you inherit a different set of them. That became the real shape of the film. The deeper I got into the commune, the more it stopped being a simple question of “is this better?” and became a much more interesting one about trade-offs, consequences and what happens when adults choose an alternative life not just for themselves, but for their children too. Because as an adult, moving into the jungle, living off-grid, washing in the river and rejecting conventional structures is something you can actively opt into. But if you’re a child, you don’t choose that. You’re simply brought along. And one of the questions I found hardest to shake while filming was: how do you prepare a child for a world they may eventually want to rejoin, if you raise them largely outside of it?

On one level, it’s about an off-grid jungle commune and the fantasy of opting out. But on another, it’s really about something much more universal: the sense that modern life is making a lot of people feel trapped, and that more and more of them are at least fantasising about some form of exit. That might mean leaving the city, leaving the country, leaving the internet, leaving conventional work, or just trying to build a smaller, slower and more tangible life. But however it manifests, the impulse is the same. It comes from a sense that the current arrangement isn’t working particularly well, and that the people running the system don’t seem especially capable of fixing it.

The deleted scene — exclusively for Zandland members

One of the people I met in the jungle was Carl. Before he arrived in Costa Rica, Carl was a motion designer working for some of the biggest companies in the world. High-flying career, serious industry, real status. He walked away from all of it to live in the jungle.

His story didn’t make the final cut of the documentary, but it was also too good to lose. So we’re making the deleted scene featuring Carl available exclusively on our YouTube for Zandland members at the same time the film releases. If you want to understand what actually drives someone to make a decision like that, his account is one of the most honest and unexpected things we filmed.

Not yet a member? Join here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2NR63vgSVfZ_D4Csd61XQ/join

BAFTA nominated — and what that means to us

Our documentary Breaking Ranks was nominated for a BAFTA last week. If you haven’t seen it yet, this is the moment: it’s free on our YouTube, and I think it’s some of the best work we’ve made.

The nomination matters to us not just as a milestone, but as a reminder that serious, difficult reporting still has a place, even in a media environment that increasingly rewards noise over substance. That’s the standard we’re trying to hold ourselves to with everything we make.

The Zandland Show — over 950,000 listens and views in a month

In the latest episode of The Zandland Show, we go into the world of cartels: access, danger and the strange moral and practical realities of reporting around organised crime. At the time of writing the show has 963, 314 listens and views in it’s first month, which still feels fairly surreal. If you haven’t found it yet, it’s a good place to start.

On truth, YouTube and the battle worth fighting

I’ve also spent time this week in conversations with people at YouTube and with other creators about a question that sits underneath all of this: how do you make work that is genuinely in the public interest, without simply adding to the conspiratorial sludge, outrage-bait and low-trust noise that fills so much of the internet?

That tension feels especially alive right now, as the old boundaries around who gets to speak, who gets believed, and who gets to define truth have become much blurrier. Our own answer at Zandland, imperfect as it is, is to bring as much reporting discipline as we can into a creator-led world. Depth, access, fairness, honesty about uncertainty, and a willingness to sit in complexity. If you’re going to reach a lot of people, you should at least be trying to show them something real.

This Thursday, 1pm ET (6pm London)

Why Are People Running Away From The West? drops this Thursday on our YouTube.

If this newsletter resonated with you, the single most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who you think would connect with it. Substack grows word by word, and your share genuinely makes a difference.

If someone forwarded this to you and you want to read more, you can subscribe here: newsletter.zand.land

See you Thursday.

Watch our BAFTA-nominated documentary Breaking Ranks, free on YouTube. Become a Zandland member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2NR63vgSVfZ_D4Csd61XQ/join

Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary has made a major splash. The press is now talking about it more seriously. Online male loneliness, dating nihilism, looksmaxxing, rented intimacy, porn-addled subcultures and algorithmically accelerated misogyny are no longer fringe internet oddities. They are increasingly part of mainstream culture.

But the obvious reality is that this has been building for years. And at Zandland, we’ve been inside it for a long time. Our work has focused on spending time with the men inside these worlds. The influenced, as opposed to the influencers. Hearing how they think, what they fear, what they want, and what kind of story they have been sold about themselves and the world.

And as a consequence, we’ve got a unique perspective on this world. The manosphere is misogynistic. It is warped. It is often manipulative, self-pitying and at times dangerous.

But if you stop there, you miss something important. Underneath a lot of it is not just hatred.

It is a hope crisis.

What I’ve seen inside it

A few years ago, while making The Secret World of Incels, I met young men who had become convinced they were too ugly to ever be loved, that women were fundamentally dangerous, and that life was effectively over unless they won some brutal genetic lottery. In my Guardian piece at the time, I described a world of loneliness, isolation and extreme misogyny, where some men had become so radicalised they were frightened even to be in the same room as a woman.

That world has not disappeared. If anything, it has evolved.

Now the language is slicker, the aesthetics are better, the communities are bigger, and the pipelines into them are more efficient. Looksmaxxing gives men the fantasy that attraction is an equation. Another topic we explored in our documentary, The Secret World of Looksmaxxing.

Red-pill culture tells them relationships are power games. Certain corners of podcast culture teach them that empathy is weakness. And increasingly, the internet offers not just ideology, but simulation.

That is where our recent film Inside the Incels Who Rent Girlfriends came from.

The man at the centre of it, “T”, had spent £50,000 renting girlfriends. On the face of it, that sounds absurd. Maybe even funny. But the deeper we went, the darker it became. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian’s recent feature on our film, what emerged was not just loneliness, but a desire for a partner with no autonomy at all - someone who would never say no.

That, to me, is where this stops being a quirky internet story. Because what these spaces often produce is not simply men who feel rejected. It is men who have been taught that if they hit the right metrics, height, jawline, money, status, then intimacy is something they should be able to unlock. That they are entitled to.

And when real life refuses to behave like an app, a game or a fantasy, they don’t question the script.

They retreat further into it.

The simulation problem

The manosphere is not just a set of bad opinions.

It is a system for turning pain into ideology and then packaging that ideology as identity. It gives disoriented men a rulebook. A bad one, but a rulebook nonetheless. It tells them why they feel alienated. It tells them who to blame. It tells them how to interpret every rejection, every humiliation, every social failure.

And in a world where a lot of people feel adrift, that kind of structure is powerful. Even if it is poison. The internet is very good at this. It is very good at giving people a fake sense of mastery over things that are actually messy and human. Dating becomes “sexual market value”. Connection becomes “status”. Personality becomes “game”. Women become abstractions. And eventually even intimacy itself becomes transactional.

That is why renting a girlfriend, or building a relationship with an AI companion, is not some weird side-story. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that increasingly encourages people to replace the real with the manageable.

The girlfriend who never argues. The relationship that can be paused. The woman who only exists inside your preferred terms. The fantasy that never pushes back. And the more time people spend in those simulations, the less able they become to deal with real human complexity.

It’s also why our films on YouTube and across social platforms are reaching millions — and why more people are choosing to join the Zandland membership we’ve recently launched. Identifying these stories early, and engaging with the ideas behind them before they become mainstream, has real value.

Why we brought T back

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that documentaries are often quite good at diagnosing a problem, but much worse at staying with it long enough to ask what happens next.

So with our latest episode of The Zandland Show, we tried to do something slightly different.

After people watched the Rent a Girlfriend documentary, we brought T back to answer the audience’s questions directly. Not because I think one episode can solve something this big.

But because I wanted to see what happens when someone who has been shaped by these online worlds is forced into a more honest, uncomfortable, public conversation. And I think that matters.

Because if the manosphere is partly built on echo chambers, performance, and rehearsed scripts, then one possible way out is dialogue that breaks the script. Not all of it, magically. But enough to create friction.

Enough to make someone hear themselves differently. Enough to remind them that the internet is not the whole world. I’ve said this before, but I genuinely think very few people are irredeemable.

Some are dangerous. Some are deeply unpleasant. Some are too far gone. But a lot are adrift, ashamed, isolated, radicalised by repetition, and desperate for a story that explains their pain.

If better stories don’t reach them, worse ones will.

Why this is now massive news

Part of the reason this subject feels more urgent now is that the manosphere no longer sits neatly in one corner of the internet. Its ideas leak. They move from private forums into podcasts, group chats, dating culture, school playgrounds, everyday jokes and mainstream political language.

What was once fringe now shapes how a lot of young men think about women, power, masculinity and themselves. That is part of why our recent film has resonated so strongly.

It was covered by The Guardian this month, and it seems to have hit a nerve because people can feel that this is no longer some niche subculture for internet obsessives. It is part of the emotional weather now.

And at the same time, our Gooning documentary was unexpectedly picked up by The Daily Show, with the segment drawing millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes across social platforms. Strange as that is, it also proves something useful: what once looked niche is now plainly mainstream.

The internet’s strangest corners do not stay in the corners anymore. They become culture.

Meanwhile, the physical world is still on fire

One thing I’m very conscious of at Zandland is not letting internet culture coverage become the whole picture. Yes, we are interested in the digital underground.

But we are also interested in the physical world, the places where politics, violence and power are felt in brutally concrete ways.

That is why I’m proud that Zandland has recently partnered with ITV News on a piece from inside Tehran, built around the testimony and footage of an Iranian filmmaker documenting life during the war at enormous personal risk. It’s a first-person account from the first ten days of the conflict, the filmmaker’s identity is protected and voice altered using AI because, if caught, there would be serious consequences.

To me, these things are not unrelated. Whether we are talking to a man who has disappeared into synthetic intimacy, or working with people documenting life under bombardment and repression, the underlying question is often the same:

what happens to human beings when the systems around them become distorted, violent, alienating or unreal?

That question is broad enough to include the manosphere.

And it is also broad enough to include war.

This report was a first for us, a news collaboration that lives on the Zandland YouTube internationally, and on the ITV channel in the UK.

A quick note on this newsletter

You may have noticed there was a gap last week.

We’re currently rethinking the strategy behind this newsletter a bit, because I want it to become sharper, more useful and more distinctive, less of a recap machine, and more of a place where I can properly unpack ideas, patterns and the thinking behind what we’re making.

So consider this issue a bit of a bridge.

A dispatch from the middle of that rethink.

And also a reminder of what Zandland’s role is:

not just making documentaries, but trying to map the strange overlap between the internet, power, culture, conflict and the stories people are using to survive.

—

Ben Zand

A Zandland documentary about a strange internet subculture suddenly ended up on The Daily Show, with the clip racking up millions of views online and more than 600,000 likes across social media.

At almost the exact same time, we were finishing an episode of our new weekly show, The Zandland Show, about one of the most devastating (Oscar-nominated) war stories I’ve encountered in years.

Two completely different worlds.

One exploding across the internet.

The other asking a much heavier question about journalism, war and whether storytelling can actually change anything.

And it got me thinking about something that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while:

Does journalism even matter anymore?

A strange moment for journalism

We’re living through a huge shift in media.

Independent creators now have audiences that once belonged to broadcasters.

AI is transforming how information is produced and distributed.

Anyone with a phone can publish and call themselves a journalist.

And yet at the same time, trust in journalism is collapsing.

In the UK, only 27% of people say they trust journalists to tell the truth, according to the Office for Statistics Regulation. Trust in media organisations themselves is even lower.

So we’ve reached a strange moment:

• There is more information than ever before.

• More commentary.

• More voices.

• More “news”.

• But often less trust, less clarity and less sense that any of it leads to real accountability.

If you’re someone trying to build a journalistic documentary company inside that environment, which I am - it raises a tricky question:

Is any of this actually worth anything? At Zandland we’ve spent years doing investigative work. We’ve taken on some of the world’s biggest companies, we’ve gone inside places powerful institutions didn’t want journalists entering.

We’ve made films like Breaking Ranks, where Israeli soldiers speak publicly about what they did in Gaza.

But even after doing all that, I still very often find myself wondering:

Does journalism genuinely change anything?

Or are we just documenting the world burning in increasingly polished formats?

When journalism does change things

Ok, let’s establish early on that journalism can make a difference.

Sometimes a huge one.

Take the Panama Papers investigation in 2016.

Journalists analysed more than 11 million leaked documents showing how political leaders and wealthy elites were hiding money in offshore tax havens.

The fallout was enormous.

The Prime Minister of Iceland resigned.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan resigned.

Governments across the world launched investigations.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and back taxes were recovered.

Or take the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Investigative reporting revealed how data from 87 million Facebook users had been harvested without their consent.

Within days:

• Facebook lost over $100 billion in market value.

• Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to testify before Congress.

• The company was eventually hit with a $5 billion FTC fine.

• Cambridge Analytica collapsed.

Then there’s the reporting on Jeffrey Epstein.

The Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown spent a year digging through court records and tracking down victims for a series called Perversion of Justice.

Seven months later Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges, and the US Secretary of Labour resigned over his role in Epstein’s earlier plea deal.

It’s worth saying the Epstein story is both a positive and a negative example for journalism.

On one hand, it’s proof that journalism can work. Persistent reporting eventually forced a case that had been quietly buried back into the public eye.

But it’s also a huge reason for the distrust we see today.

Because the story revealed that many of the people connected to Epstein were sitting right at the heart of our political, financial and technological systems. The case was effectively swept under the rug for years, and the same kinds of powerful figures who appeared in those files are often the ones leading the institutions, and even the platforms, where information and public debate now happen.

For a lot of people, that doesn’t just look like a scandal. It looks like the system protecting itself.

So the idea that journalism never changes anything obviously isn’t true.

But when it works, it tends to work for a few specific reasons.

It’s deeply researched.

It lands at the right cultural moment.

And crucially, it has narrative power.

Because facts matter.

But stories are what make people care.

Side note: one worrying signal right now is that the kind of journalism required to produce those stories is becoming harder to sustain. Institutions that historically funded long, forensic investigations are weakening. Newsrooms like The Washington Post have been heavily gutted, and local news outlets across the US and Europe continue to shut down. Those were often the places where slow, patient reporting began. At the same time, funding for investigative journalism and serious documentary work is becoming more complex and fragile. If the economic foundations for that work continue to erode, the kinds of investigations that expose corruption, crime and abuse of power may simply become rarer, which is not a good signal for truth in the world.

The power of storytelling

So onto this week’s upcoming episode of The Zandland Show.

The film is called The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania (and executive produced by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix).

It tells the story of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped inside a car in Gaza after her family had been killed.

The film is built around the real emergency phone call Hind made to the Red Crescent while hiding in the car.

Listening to that audio is almost unbearable.

But it also makes the story impossible to ignore.

The film received a 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival and has since been screened at the United Nations, the European Parliament and the UK Parliament.

When I interviewed Kaouther for The Zandland Show, she said something that stuck with me.

She explained that she made the film as a call to action.

But she also said something else that I think gets closer to the truth of how storytelling works:

Maybe storytelling doesn’t change the world directly.

But it can change the way people see the world.

And that distinction matters.

Because journalism rarely flips a switch overnight.

What it does instead is slowly shift the way people understand reality.

And once enough people see the world differently, politics and culture eventually follow.

Meanwhile… the internet is doing its thing

Earlier I mentioned that something slightly strange happened this week.

Our Gooning documentary was picked up by The Daily Show, and the clip has now been viewed millions of times across social media with more than 600,000 likes.

Which is a very odd sentence to write in the same newsletter where we’re discussing investigative journalism, war crimes and documentary storytelling.

But it also says something real about the media environment now.

@thedailyshowMen are sinking into a pit of podcasts, synthetic girlfriends, and masturbation marathons, and @Leslie Jones can’t take it anymore #DailyShow #Podcasts #MaleLoneliness

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

A documentary about an obscure and unsettling online subculture can suddenly explode into mainstream culture.

A serious conversation about journalism can sit alongside that.

A film like The Voice of Hind Rajab can be screened at the United Nations.

All of these things now exist in the same ecosystem.

That ecosystem is chaotic.

But it also creates opportunity.

Because independent studios and journalists no longer need permission from traditional gatekeepers to reach people.

What we’re trying to build

That’s really the thinking behind The Zandland Show.

It’s a weekly space where we can talk directly to the audience about the stories shaping the world, and the deeper questions behind them.

Not just one-off documentaries. Not just reacting to headlines.

But building an ongoing conversation about journalism, power and culture.

More broadly, it’s also what we’re trying to build at Zandland.

A company that takes people somewhere they wouldn’t otherwise get to go. Shows them something they wouldn’t otherwise see. And does it in a way that is fair, accurate and emotionally honest. Sometimes that means investigating powerful companies. Sometimes it means speaking to soldiers about the realities of war.

Sometimes it means exploring strange corners of internet culture before they spill into the mainstream.

But the goal underneath all of it is the same.

To help people understand the world a little more clearly.

Thursday

This Thursday we’ll release the latest episode of The Zandland Show, featuring my interview with Kaouther Ben Hania, director of The Voice of Hind Rajab.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering whether journalism still has any real power, I think you’ll find it an interesting conversation.

And if you want to support the kind of work we’re trying to do at Zandland, the simplest thing you can do is subscribe, share the work, and help us keep building an audience that actually cares about understanding the world.

—

Ben Zand

Iran’s Supreme Leader is dead.

That sentence alone would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Now it’s reality, and the consequences are already rippling across the region.

I’m British-Iranian. I’m also a journalist. And I’ve been looking at this moment through two very different lenses.

On a personal level, I won’t pretend I felt grief.

This was a regime that, only weeks ago, oversaw the killing of thousands of Iranians protesting for freedom and economic reform. For decades it imprisoned critics, crushed dissent, and built a system where basic freedoms carried real risk.

So the sense that now Iranians may be able to breathe freely and have a prospect of a life unshackled is exciting.

And regardless of what happens next, Iran has changed. Even if the Islamic Republic survives, it will not be the same structure it was.

But the journalist in me is cautious.

Because history is not kind to regime change delivered by foreign force.

Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.

Those interventions began with certainty and ended in fragmentation, instability, and enormous human cost. Hundreds of thousands killed. Millions displaced. Political systems that remain fragile or broken.

It’s difficult to look at American and Israeli strikes and assume that this leads to a stable democracy.

That contradiction, hope and scepticism at the same time, is where I predict many Iranians are sitting.

For years, people inside Iran tried to push change themselves.

The Green Movement.

Women, Life, Freedom.

Mass protests that felt historic… and were crushed.

People were arrested, beaten, executed. The security apparatus held.

So when foreign powers strike at the very top of the regime, many welcome it, because internal revolt alone didn’t succeed.

But the idea that Iranians can now simply “rise up” misunderstands how power works inside the country. The regime is deeply embedded. There is no unified opposition waiting in the wings. And contingency plans for leadership assassinations have existed for years.

Within hours, positions were replaced. A three-man interim leadership council, the president, the head of the judiciary, and a senior cleric overseeing succession, assumed control. Their priority is not reform. It is survival. Projecting stability. Preventing unrest. Keeping the security forces aligned.

From contacts I’ve spoken to on the ground, checkpoints are widespread. Messages are being sent warning against gatherings. The state is moving quickly to prevent a tipping point.

The real question is not whether people are angry. The question is whether cracks appear inside the regime itself.

If members of the Basij, the regime’s volunteer militia used to suppress protests on the streets start refusing orders, that changes everything.

If figures inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the powerful parallel military force that protects the regime, controls large parts of the economy, and oversees much of Iran’s regional military activity, begin to fracture or defect, that changes everything.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

Which brings us to the possible futures.

One scenario is restoration, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, returning. He hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly five decades. His father ruled a one-party state backed by the SAVAK secret police. For some Iranians, that era represents stability. For others, repression.

Pahlavi speaks about democracy and referendums. But does he have the internal machinery? The loyalty of the security forces? A coherent political coalition inside Iran?

Those questions remain unanswered.

Another possibility is a democratic transition emerging organically from civil society.

It’s the most hopeful path. But democracy requires more than popular will. It requires control of institutions, security guarantees, bureaucratic continuity, and leadership capable of preventing fragmentation.

Right now, there is no organised structure visibly prepared to assume that role.

And then there are darker, more worrying, possibilities…

The regime survives, but harder, more militarised, more paranoid.

Or it collapses, leaving a vacuum in a country that is ethnically and politically complex. Persians, Kurds, Balochis, Azeris, Arabs. Secular populations. Religious loyalists. A vacuum in that environment does not stay empty for long.

There is also a pragmatic scenario: a “reformed” Islamic Republic. A more presentable figure negotiates concessions on nuclear and missile programmes. Foreign leaders claim success. The underlying power structure remains.

But after this level of violence, that will feel like betrayal to a lot of Iranians. Why bomb the country and cause global chaos for more of the same?

None of these paths are simple.

And this is unfolding during a broader regional escalation that already includes Ukraine, Gaza, and multiple proxy conflicts. The risk isn’t just about Iran’s future, it’s about how far this all spreads.

For Iranians in the diaspora, there is now hope. The idea of returning to Iran for the first time in years. Of living without fear of detention. Of reconnecting with family without the risk of being detained or else.

And at the same time, there is realism. Removing a ruler does not automatically produce stability. It produces uncertainty.

At Zandland, we are very interested in hearing your thoughts, and are speaking to people inside Iran living through it in real time.

If you believe in reporting that sits with complexity rather than slogans, you can subscribe to this newsletter. And if you have footage, information, or perspectives to share securely, contact us at:

contact@zand.land

This is not just an Iranian story.

It is a test of whether history is about to repeat itself… or finally break pattern.

And we are watching it unfold in real time.

I spoke at MIP London about documentary funding and sustainability.

I spoke at Netflix in London about how streamers have changed documentary.

And inside Zandland, we’ve been restructuring how we actually operate day-to-day.

All three conversations are pointing to the same reality:

we are now fully in a hybrid era.

Not TV. Not streaming. Not digital. Not brand-funded. Not even YouTube.

Instead it’s everything, everywhere, all at once.

And if you want to build something that lasts, you have to design for that complexity, not pretend one lane will save you.

MIP London — how documentaries actually get made now

At MIP, the conversation was about one practical question:

How do you make documentary funding work in this environment?

Zandland’s conclusion is that sustainability now depends on operating across multiple scales at the same time.

You need something you can realistically release every week, building brand, audience, and leverage.

And a version of that thing should be able to go to the level of Netflix, Hulu, or a major streamer when the opportunity is right.

Both are necessary.

If you only chase premium commissions, you’re permanently dependent on gatekeepers.

If you only make digital content, you cap your scale.

So the structure has to hold both.

This doesn’t mean you need to be huge, it means you need to figure out a form of content that can live in these different levels of scale. For us, every bit of content, from our digital originals to big budget series, have the same Zandland sauce. Our conclusion is that documentary companies now need to think less like traditional TV producers… and more like tech start-ups.

Which means asking questions most production companies still avoid:

• Who is our audience, actually?

• What’s our total addressable market?

• Where is product–market fit?

• How much capital do we need to test long enough to find it?

• And how quickly can we pivot if something isn’t working?

That mindset is still rare in television.

Too many companies are still optimising for commissioning cycles instead of audience behaviour.

Too many are still scared to test in public.

Too many are still building projects, not repeatable systems.

Netflix London — how streamers changed documentary (and what happens next)

At Netflix this week I spoke with leaders in the documentary space about how streamers have transformed the industry .

Fun fact, if you’re an eager beaver and you immediately read this newsletter, I am actually due to speak at Netflix in about 2 hours - so you have travelled into the future and entered a future version of my brain… so, hello?

The shift is obviously profound.

Streamers didn’t just add money.

They changed scale. They changed expectations. They changed ambition. They changed visibility.

Documentaries moved from niche broadcast slots to global cultural events.

Series structures became dominant. Production values rose… but competition also intensified. Access became harder. Stakes became higher.

For a period, that expansion felt like the defining transformation.

But my reading of the moment now is different.

The golden era of streamer-led documentary expansion is dead. We are in the next phase.

A phase where:

• YouTube dominates attention.

• Streamers take fewer risks.

• Audience ownership becomes leverage.

• Studios become story brands.

• Distribution fragments again.

Premium commissions still matter, hugely, but they no longer define the entire ecosystem.

The structure of documentary is evolving again.

And the central strategic question is no longer:

“Who funds this project?”

It’s:

“Who owns the audience?”

How that translates into what we’re doing at Zandland

Inside Zandland we’ve been reorganising around that reality.

Building an audience is not just a creative challenge.

It’s an operational system.

It’s about designing a structure where everything feeds everything else — instead of scattering effort across platforms.

That’s why we’ve clarified our model around two core content pillars.

The two pillars

1) Investigative documentaries

Deep access. Real-world immersion. Original reporting.

This is the work designed to scale — culturally, editorially, and commercially.

Last night we released the newest one (it’s currently the best performing yet):

👉

These films are built around a simple proposition:

we go somewhere you can’t go, and show you something you wouldn’t otherwise see.

2) The weekly explainer / podcast / interview format

This is the second lane.

Part explainer.

Part podcast.

Part editorial thinking.

A place where we unpack what we’re seeing, connect patterns between stories, and share how we understand the world.

👉

This format builds continuity and a direct relationship with the audience.

Trust is not built from occasional big releases.

It’s built from regular presence.

The operational change that made this possible

We’ve made a physical change that sounds small but has changed everything.

Part of the office is now a permanent studio.

Rigged. Lit. Ready. Always on.

No set-up. No friction. No delay.

The conclusion from this is simple: production velocity is often an infrastructure problem, not a creative one.

Removing barriers to filming has dramatically increased consistency. It’s a bit like saying you want to go to the gym, but not going because it’s a bus ride away and it’s cold outside. Lose the bus ride and the cold, put the gym equipment in your house!

One virtuous content loop

The goal is not just more content.

The goal is a system.

The two video pillars now feed everything:

• short clips

• social cut-downs

• live conversations

• this newsletter

• membership content

• premium development

Everything flows from the same core material.

That creates clarity.

The team knows what to prioritise.

The audience knows what to expect.

The brand compounds instead of diffusing.

Efficiency through focus.

Where memberships and platforms fit

In practical terms, our platform structure now looks like this:

YouTube → reach, discovery, and membership community

Substack → thinking, context, and deeper relationship

Premium commissions → scale, impact, and major storytelling

Different layers of the same ecosystem.

Substack’s own growth guidance reinforces this… consistency, clarity of value, and strong community interaction are what drive conversion and retention.

So each platform has a defined role.

Nothing duplicated.

Nothing competing internally.

The bigger picture

If I step back from this week, from MIP, Netflix, and our internal changes — the pattern is clear.

Documentary companies are no longer just producers.

They are multi-platform operators.

Audience builders.

Brand systems.

Content engines.

Zandland’s conclusion is that success now depends less on any individual film…

and more on whether your structure allows you to keep making them, learning, adapting, and scaling.

That’s the phase we’re in now.

Thanks for reading (also let me know if you agree or disagree, happy to discuss).

— Ben Zand

Next Monday we’re releasing a new film on YouTube looking at the world of renting girlfriends. The timing, as you may have guessed from the fact it was just Valentine’s day, isn’t accidental. This is a time of year when the cultural pressure to be loved, partnered, desired, chosen, feels especially loud.

In the film we spend time with a man called T who wants what he describes as a “subservient” partner. Someone who doesn’t challenge him. Someone who doesn’t say no. Someone who exists entirely on his terms.

He’s not sure if they’re traits he can find in a real relationship. So instead, he rents it.

This film sits alongside our previous work exploring incels, gooners and looksmaxxers. These films are available on Hulu in the US, Channel 4 in the UK, and our YouTube. They also are increasingly mainstream, with the growing popularity of the chad-lite influencer, Clavicular, in the US, putting Looksmaxxing on the map. These are all different subcultures, with different languages, different ideologies. But often with the same emotional gravity pulling people inward.

Isolation. Rejection. Shame. Confusion.

And beneath it all is often a powerful and dangerous belief:

That the world has withheld something they were owed.

The power of listening

One of the most fascinating parts of making these films is that when you listen, many of the men involved can give you what feels like a coherent explanation of how they got there.

It rarely begins with ideology.

It begins with loneliness.

Often severe loneliness.

Repeated rejection. Romantic failure. Social exclusion. A sense of being invisible, or worse, fundamentally undesirable. Over time, that emotional pain looks for structure. For explanation. For somewhere to go.

And increasingly, the internet provides it.

Forums become community centres where identity and worldview is hardened.

A lot of the men we’ve met spend most of their waking lives inside these spaces, moderating Reddit communities, running Discord servers, producing content, analysing themselves and others through increasingly rigid frameworks of value and hierarchy.

The outside world becomes abstract and the online world becomes the only thing that’s real.

Eventually, relationships stop being something lived — and become something theorised, optimised, categorised or simulated.

And at that point, renting a partner isn’t strange.

It’s logical.

Control feels safer than connection

Real relationships are unpredictable. They involve negotiation, vulnerability, disagreement, compromise. They require being seen fully, and risking rejection again.

A rented relationship offers something else entirely. Predictability. Structure. And control.

It allows a young man that’s spent his life facing rejection and pain to experience closeness without uncertainty. To get the affection without the compromise that real relations involve, and the presence of someone without the fear they’ll leave you.

For someone who feels chronically powerless, that can feel stabilising.

But it also removes the very things that make intimacy human.

Across incel communities, looksmaxxing spaces, gooning forums and now rental companionship cultures, we keep encountering the same structural pattern:

1. Personal pain

2. Online immersion

3. Explanatory ideology

4. Behavioural adaptation

5. Further isolation

Each step feels rational from the inside.

Each step makes returning harder.

And often, the deeper someone goes, the more they feel the world outside simply wouldn’t understand them anymore. A combination of shame and a sense that you know something the rest of the world doesn’t makes leaving even less likely.

A new format

This week we’re trying a new part podcast part explainer format on our YouTube, that’ll hopefully be a weekly proposition. A piece where I (Ben Zand) talk to camera and do an explainer to accompany the release of Monday’s film.

The mission is to create a space that allows us to talk more informally, and more quickly, about some of the worlds we’re encountering. And this week, we’re trying to map the conditions that make these pathways increasingly common.

Like why is this happening? Why are so many young men, across different countries and cultures, gravitating toward systems that harbour deep hostility toward women and rigid, hierarchical views of masculinity.

There is no single answer.

But if you listen carefully, you hear recurring themes:

• A collapse of traditional social pathways

• Increasing romantic competition in digital environments

• Economic and status insecurity

• The algorithmic reinforcement of grievance

• The psychological comfort of simple explanations

• The seduction of communities that promise belonging without challenge

And perhaps most fundamentally:

A profound hunger to feel wanted, combined with a growing belief that wanting and being wanted are governed by rigid, unforgiving rules.

The question that stays with us

After filming, editing and rewatching, the question we keep returning to isn’t about these men alone.

It’s about the environment that produces them.

What kind of social landscape makes simulated intimacy feel more achievable than real connection?

And what happens when increasing numbers of men stop trying to treat women as equals, and instead seek relationships defined by control, certainty or hierarchy?

We don’t have neat answers.

But we do think we are witnessing a shift that is bigger than any one subculture.

In other news — a different kind of shift

Last week we were in Washington D.C. with a select group of prominent documentary and news creators for an Independent Media Summit hosted by YouTube.

What became clear very quickly is that we’re living through a structural transition between old and new media that isn’t just technological. It’s psychological.

Legacy media distributes (often disputed) information.

New media builds relationships.

On platforms like YouTube, people don’t just watch content. They form attachments to perspectives. They return to voices they trust when something confusing or significant happens. They want context, interpretation, emotional orientation, not just facts.

In other words, they want meaning, not just reporting.

That realisation connects directly back to the work we’re doing this week.

The same forces reshaping media, fragmentation, individualisation, algorithmic reinforcement, the search for belonging, are also reshaping identity, relationships and the way people understand themselves.

Media environments don’t just describe reality.

They help build it.

Where this leaves us

This coming Monday’s film sits inside all of that.

A story about rented intimacy.

A story about loneliness.

A story about control.

A story about how people construct meaning when the world feels overwhelming or unfair.

And perhaps also a story about what happens when connection, in every sense, becomes harder to access, harder to trust, and easier to simulate.

We don’t see these films as isolated investigations. They feel more like fragments of a larger map we’re slowly trying to draw.

A map of how people are adapting, sometimes in ways that are deeply unsettling, to a world that is changing faster than many of us can emotionally process.

That’s what we’re thinking about this week.

— Ben Zand

• Who the hell am I?

• What am I trying to build?

• What value do I actually offer the world?

I don’t think these are questions you ever fully “solve”. They just change shape as you get older. But they do become harder to ignore.

I turned 35 last week. I’m a dad now. I have 6 grey hairs in my beard. I run a company that employs people and ships work into the world whether I feel ready or not. And I’ve realised that a lot of adulthood isn’t about becoming more confident, it’s about becoming more honest with yourself.

About what you want, what you’re good at and what you’re willing to tolerate in order to keep doing the work.

I was reminded of this recently at a seminar, where someone explained, very confidently, that a key ingredient of success is confidence. That the people who make it are the ones who project certainty, belief, self-assurance — even when they don’t fully know what they’re doing.

I get why that idea sticks. Certainty is comforting. It reassures other people. Sometimes it reassures us too.

But the longer I’ve been doing this, the less convinced I am that confidence is the thing that actually sustains you.

I don’t think confidence is overrated. It’s incredibly useful. You need it to act. To put work into the world. To back a decision long enough to test it. Without it, nothing starts.

What I’ve learned, though, is that confidence about action is very different from confidence about outcomes.

On a day-to-day level, I almost never feel confident that a specific thing we’re doing at Zandland will work. We’re constantly trying new ideas, new formats, new ways of working. Most of them are unproven. Quite a few don’t work at all. Rejection is the unrelenting background noise of my life.

Confidence comes and goes. Often it’s not there.

What keeps me going through that turmoil isn’t certainty about results. It’s confidence that the direction is right. That even when something fails, it fails in service of the right question.

Confidence helps you take the first step. A north star is what keeps you moving when the path disappears. And just as I’ve reached 35 with the relief of finally having a sense of my own direction, it turns out companies benefit from that same kind of growing up too.

A new Zandland

Today, we quietly launched a new Zandland website and visual identity.

It is arguably as monumental a moment in time as that of the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Here it is: A New Zandland

But alas, there have been no fireworks. No launch party. No dramatic “new era” language.

Of course, no one other than us really cares, which is how you know it’s probably the right moment to do something like this.

But it does feel like Zandland is growing up.

For the record: we are no longer ZANDLAND in all caps.

We are now Zandland.

Capital Z. Lowercase everything else.

We’re no longer smoking weed at the back of the family party in baggy trousers… we’re drinking a glass of white wine, still judging the music, just doing it more quietly.

And the truth is, this isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about alignment.

My favourite word, “clarity”

Rebrands don’t magically fix anything. They don’t make better films. They don’t solve broken media economics. And they definitely don’t make deadlines easier.

But they can mark a shift.

For us, this one reflects something that’s been happening for a while now: Zandland is no longer figuring out what it might be. We’re clearer about what it actually is — and just as importantly, what it isn’t.

That clarity hasn’t come from confidence. It’s come from discomfort.

From launching things that feel awkward.

From putting work out before we’re entirely sure it’ll land.

From throwing ourselves out to the wolves for feedback, criticism, and the occasional internet pile-on.

Each day recently we’ve been doing things that feel exposing in small but meaningful ways — trying formats we don’t fully control, saying no to work that looks good on paper but feels wrong in practice, trusting our instincts more and accepting that sometimes they’ll be wrong.

That’s the growth spurt. And it’s rarely elegant.

Knowing our lane

Out of all of that, something clearer has emerged.

Zandland now operates across four distinct lanes — not as a strategy slide, but as lived reality:

• Zandland Originals — Our fully independent, self-funded work — ideas we originate, finance, and release ourselves, built first and foremost for a direct relationship with our audience.

• Zandland Narrative — premium documentaries made in partnership with streamers and broadcasters. Big ambition, long runway, proper scale.

• Zandland Digital — Digital-first content and storytelling made with broadcasters and platforms — built specifically for YouTube and social, and designed to travel natively online rather than be adapted later.

• Brandland — Our branded-content arm, where we work with organisations and brands who want impactful, editorial-led storytelling that makes noise.

That structure didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of years of trial, error, mild panic, and occasionally asking ourselves very honestly: what are we actually good at, and what should we stop pretending to be?

The new site and identity aren’t about reinvention. They’re about acceptance of who we are right now.

A week of signals

It’s also been one of those weeks where culture and media quietly underlined why this stuff matters.

Bad Bunny’s halftime performance was freaking amazing — unapologetically Puerto Rican, deeply specific, and completely uninterested in translating itself for anyone else. And precisely because of that, it felt global. A reminder that clarity beats universality every time.

At the other end of the spectrum, the continued hollowing-out of the Washington Post has been hard to ignore. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow erosion of institutional muscle — the kind that doesn’t trend, but fundamentally changes what journalism can sustain. And makes our mission to be a next-generation content company that tells important, impactful stories, all the more important.

And then there are platforms.

Coincidentally, this week I’m heading to Washington DC for a small, invitation-only YouTube summit with independent news and documentary creators — a room full of people trying to work out how to do serious, responsible storytelling on platforms optimised for attention and speed.

That conversation matters, because this isn’t a phase. This is where the audience already is. The real question is whether serious work shows up there and can make real money — or leaves the field to confidence merchants and hot-take factories.

Lowercase energy

So yes, we’ve grown up a bit.

We’re calmer. Clearer. Slightly less chaotic (emotionally, at least).

We’re not trying to be everything. We’re not chasing every trend.

And we’re definitely not pretending to have it all figured out.

But we are clearer about who we are, what we’re building, and what our work is for.

Confidence helps you act. Direction helps you endure.

Capital Z. Lowercase energy. Big-boy trousers. Same curiosity. Slightly better judgement.

As ever, thanks for being here and paying attention.

—

Ben Z

PS - if you’ve made it this far, you must reaaaaally be interested in Zandland. So I will be even more self-indulgent and say I had a nice moment in the last week when I was named on Realscreen’s 40 under 40 list for creating a “next-gen content company”. That meant a lot.

At one point, someone on the call started questioning the Zandland business model, specifically the idea of making our own content, funding original work independently, and building a direct relationship with an audience alongside our partnerships with major broadcasters and streamers.

The implication wasn’t aggressive, but it was clear enough: that this approach was unrealistic, a bit naïve, and ultimately unlikely to work in a media environment dominated by scale, platforms, and big money.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. And to be fair, it’s a very reasonable challenge (despite many notable examples of success).

What made the moment stick with me was what came after. In the same conversation, that same person spoke very confidently about some of the work they were doing - work funded to the tune of millions of dollars by a state that has been repeatedly accused of major human rights violations.

There was no sense of irony in that, no visible discomfort.

It wasn’t framed as a compromise. It was framed as a sensible business decision. As some proof that model worked.

That contrast stayed with me, not as a moral judgement, but as a sharp illustration of how ideas of sustainability, legitimacy, and “realism” are applied very differently depending on where the money comes from.

And it led me back to a broader question I’ve been wrestling with for a while now:

how do you build a media company that prioritises good information — truth, nuance, care — in a system where the easiest paths to survival often pull in the opposite direction?

A necessary caveat

Just to make very clear, I’m not judging anyone here, and I’m not pretending there’s a pure way to operate in this industry.

This is a brutally difficult business. Budgets are tight. Risk tolerance is low. Platforms change the rules constantly. Partnering with brands, institutions, public figures, and streamers, sometimes even imperfect ones, is necessary and can lead to incredible work. It’s also something we do ourselves at Zandland, carefully and deliberately, via Brandland, our branded-content wing.

Companies have to eat. Teams have to be paid. Ambition requires capital. And often, this type of funding allows you to create work that would never otherwise exist.

The question isn’t whether compromises exist, they always do.

It’s how conscious you are of them, and what direction they slowly push your work towards over time.

The incentive problem

At a basic level, most media companies face a familiar set of pressures.

You either:

• take money from whoever is willing to write the biggest cheque, often with vested interests attached, or

• optimise relentlessly for platforms whose algorithms reward certainty, speed, and emotional charge (AKA eyeballs) over accuracy.

Most organisations, understandably, end up doing a version of both.

But the incentives matter. They shape what stories get told, how they’re framed, what gets challenged, and what quietly doesn’t. They influence tone, pacing, and, crucially, how confident you’re encouraged to sound, even when the subject matter is genuinely uncertain.

Side point: I know I talk a lot about truth and nuance in this newsletter. And I’m banging on a lot, but I genuinely think it’s one of the defining problems of our time. The incoming wave of AI-generated slop, layered on top of algorithms that reward certainty and outrage, and media business models that monetise attention rather than understanding, doesn’t bode particularly well for creating a population of thoughtful, well-informed people. And I am biologically predisposed to want my son to live in a nice world full of good people. So this is where we net out with this newsletter.

Confidence as a product

You can see this clearly in the current wave of creator-led media.

Take someone like Steven Bartlett, who’s come under increasing criticism for platforming manosphere-adjacent guests, offering little challenge, and allowing confident, often dubious claims to pass largely unchecked.

I don’t think this is about bad faith. It’s about incentives.

Long, confident monologues perform well. Provocation clips cleanly. Nuance doesn’t travel as far. And once an audience starts rewarding a particular style, it becomes commercially risky to disrupt it, even when the downstream consequences are real.

Over time, the product subtly shifts. Insight gives way to confidence itself.

That pattern isn’t unique to any one creator. It’s structural.

We’ve seen this ourselves in our most recent work.

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, we’re releasing 3 explainers a week at the moment to have a more consistent relationship with the Zandland audience. One, which saw me speaking from the heart, and arguably in a very confidently, Instagram-friendly way, about Iran, has done very well. Being viewed by over 600,000 people in 2 days (more below).

One of me showing a great deal of nuance and talking about the oversimplification of political commentary, did less well.

And for reference, here’s one that did averagely well… talking about Nick Shirley and YouTube journalism - make of that what you will.

Why overconfidence is such a problem

There’s a substantial body of research showing that experts’ predictions about complex political and social outcomes are often no more accurate than random chance.

The work of Philip Tetlock, who tracked political and economic predictions over decades, is particularly interesting here. His research actually showed that, the more confident an expert was, the less accurate they tended to be and less willing they were to revise their views when new evidence appears.

And yet we’ve built an entire media economy that actively selects for exactly those traits: confidence, simplicity, narrative certainty.

Not because they’re true, but because they feel like understanding

Iran, and the cost of pretending to know

I’m feeling this especially strongly with our explainer strategy.

I’m British-Iranian. I have family in Iran. I went there once, when I was fifteen. And because I’m a journalist, I can’t safely go back now. So this story has a lot of meaning for me.

Talking about Iran has always come with a level of anxiety and self-censorship, not ideological, but practical. There are real risks for people on the ground. Words aren’t abstract.

As part of our explainer strategy at Zandland, I shared some personal thoughts about that tension, alongside the other explainer above about what I was seeing from political commentators speaking with extraordinary confidence about what would happen next, predicting collapse, timelines, outcomes, as if they were Nostradamus.

The explainer has done well, and generated a huge amount of discussion on Instagram. I’m hoping this is an example of how there is a hunger from people for content that offers some authentic analysis, but doesn’t profess to have all the answers and doesn’t pretend to know more than it did. (But perhaps I’m reading too much into a 2 minute video.)

When you speak to people inside Iran, what you hear is uncertainty, fear, fragmentation, and exhaustion. A situation that is evolving, dangerous, and deeply resistant to clean narrative arcs.

And that gap — between lived reality and confident commentary — is where bad information thrives. We’re currently making a more in-depth documentary on the Iran protests.

This week, Chicago

Last night, we released the latest episode of HUMAN on YouTube, a film about the reality of life in the “trenches” of Chicago. Not the mythologised version. Not the headline shorthand. But the lived, complicated, often contradictory reality of the people inside it.

That film exists because we’ve backed a strategy of making work we believe in, consistently, even when it doesn’t offer easy answers. It’s also part of the same bet: that audiences will stick with work th at treats them seriously, even when the conclusions aren’t tied up in a neat bow.

What this means for Zandland, the business

It’s worth me saying this explicitly, because it comes up a lot.

• How is Zandland instantly monetising its audience?

• How are we replacing traditional revenue streams?

• Why not just pick one model and commit fully to it?

And the honest answer is: trying to entirely replace business-to-business funding with audience revenue would be terrible business.

Why would we stop working with big partners and platforms who want to fund us to make ambitious work? We love doing that. Some of our most important projects only exist because of those partnerships, and we want to keep making them.

Zandland isn’t trying to exit the traditional system.

What we’re deliberately not building though is a company that exists only as a B2B service provider, turning up, delivering a project, and resetting to zero every time a commission ends.

On the original content side, there’s also a fantasy that needs puncturing.

You don’t just start releasing work and immediately find product–market fit. You don’t instantly build a huge audience, unlock recurring revenue, and suddenly make millions a month. That pretty much never happens, and when it appears to, it’s usually the result of years of invisible groundwork.

The only way this actually works is slower and less glamorous.

• You look at the data.

• You identify where you have a genuine, defensible value proposition.

• You back formats you believe can work.

• And then you commit to them consistently, with a clear strategy, long enough for an audience to actually find you.

That’s what we’re doing.

We’re making premium work with major partners and funding originals. We’re owning our audience rather than renting it. We’re building IP, trust, and a relationship that compounds over time.

And yes, it is working. But it is never immediate.

The real challenge, and the real discipline, is staying in the game long enough to win big and make an actual dent in the culture.

Thanks for reading.

—

Ben Z

The creator, Nick Shirley, was praised by US Vice President JD Vance, who wrote on X that Shirley had done “far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes.”

Elon Musk also sent his support, tweeting:

“…fraudsters want to kill him for telling the truth”

The video racked up hundreds of millions of views across platforms. Government agencies responded. Public opinion hardened quickly.

That moment has stayed with me, not because Nick Shirley’s video appeared out of nowhere, but because of what it revealed about the media environment we’re now living in.

Nick Shirley is one of a growing number of YouTubers presenting themselves as journalists, using entertainment, simplicity and confidence as a substitute for investigation, nuance and care. A common theme of this style is the creation of clear battle-lines, positioning “the people” against “the media”, rather than an attempt to understand what’s actually happening.

Responding to criticism of his video, Shirley tweeted:

"Mainstream media is more mad at me then they are at the FACT that billions of YOUR dollars are being used for fraudulent business,"..."I am not an enemy of the people, they are. I'm with you, they are against you."

That tweet drew praise from the infamous Alex Jones — someone who has been repeatedly shown, in court and through extensive reporting, to be a serial propagator of falsehoods rather than an actual seeker of truth. That alignment matters, not because it proves Shirley’s intent, but because it reveals the ecosystem his work now circulates within.

This genre of videos often touch on real issues. Sometimes they even surface genuine wrongdoing. But the trade-off is consistent: complexity collapses, assumptions harden into conclusions, and the human consequences, particularly for people filmed or implicated — are rarely considered.

But this isn’t just about one creator. It’s a broader pattern that represents a new industry.

The age of certainty

Alongside creator-led “investigations,” we now have a shinier, more respectable industry of confidence, a parallel economy of political commentary and media analysis. Podcasts, panels, Substacks and TV hits where the primary product isn’t reporting, but interpretation — where confidence is rewarded far more than accuracy, and certainty is treated as insight.

Everyone is searching for answers from someone who sounds like they know.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: human beings cannot predict the future, so certainty is pretty much always a performance.

There’s a substantial body of research on political judgement and forecasting, most famously synthesised by Philip Tetlock and revisited repeatedly since, that shows how weak confident expertise often is in practice:

• Expert predictions about political outcomes are frequently no more accurate than chance

• The more confident an expert appears, the less accurate their predictions tend to be

• Prestige, access and experience don’t reliably improve accuracy — they mostly increase overconfidence

This research isn’t new. What is new is a media environment that actively selects for the very traits, confidence, simplicity, certainty, that make getting to the truth harder, not easier. An ecosystem that rewards speed, explanation and performance over evidence, verification and humility.

Why this matters now

What makes the Nick Shirley moment significant, and the broader rise of confidently opinionated podcasts, isn’t any single example. It’s the fact that senior politicians publicly frame this kind of content as better than institutional journalism.

That framing matters. Because it signals a shift in how journalism is being judged: not by accuracy, sourcing or duty of care, but by impact, virality and how well it aligns with what audiences already believe.

And in that world, “vibes journalism”, walk-and-talk videos, live counters, sweeping claims delivered with confidence, will almost always outperform slower, messier, evidence-led truth-seeking.

Enter the BBC

Which is why a recent announcement from the BBC feels important.

The BBC in the UK has now, very belatedly, confirmed a major push into YouTube, producing original, platform-native content aimed at younger audiences.

And first, just to be clear: I don’t think the BBC is perfect. Far from it. I also don’t think the future of trust and truth online sits solely with legacy organisations that have made serious mistakes and often move too slowly.

But the BBC’s intent matters.

Its stated commitment to impartiality, evidence and editorial process sits almost entirely at odds with the incentives of YouTube. And that tension is the point.

The risk is obvious: that this becomes a pensioner trying to look cool on a platform it doesn’t fully understand, retrofitting formats that were invented years earlier by creators operating under very different incentives.

The opportunity, though, is bigger.

If the BBC can resist simply copying what already works, and instead carve out a genuinely new lane, it could help re-establish the idea that truth, complexity and restraint still have a place online.

Doing that will require real risk-taking: patience to iterate, tolerance for early failure, and — crucially — trust in the producers and creators it chooses to back. Not micromanaging them into safety, but giving them the freedom to experiment within clear editorial principles.

That kind of trust is hard for any large institution. But without it, this risks becoming another well-intentioned attempt to fit into a platform years after the rules were written, rather than an effort to change them.

It’s worth saying: I worked for the BBC over a decade ago, specifically on an earlier and quieter push into YouTube. There was real success then, and I genuinely believe there’s still a strong role for the BBC to play, and a real chance to win, in this space.

Where this leaves us at Zandland

This isn’t an abstract debate for us. It’s the daily reality of building Zandland.

We’re competing in the same ecosystem as creators who are rewarded for oversimplification. At the same time, we’re watching large, institutionally backed organisations enter the platform with scale, prominence and protection, trying to establish their own digital lanes.

And we’re bound by the same pressures as everyone else:

• the same algorithms,

• the same viewing habits,

• the same need to make work that sustains a business.

So the questions we keep coming back to are uncomfortable ones:

• How do you make rigorous, truthful, entertaining work in a system that actively rewards confidence, simplicity and speed?

• How do you engage without misleading?

• How do you compete without collapsing complexity?

• And how do you survive commercially without becoming part of the problem?

The harder truth is that much of the internet doesn’t reward trust — it rewards the appearance of trust. Confidence, fluency and certainty often stand in for evidence, process and care. People aren’t necessarily choosing lies; they’re choosing the comfortable feeling of performative truth.

We don’t have neat answers yet.

But I’m increasingly convinced that the future of journalism and documentary storytelling, whether it comes from creators, independent production companies or institutions, won’t be decided by whoever shouts loudest, sounds most certain, or performs credibility most convincingly.

It will be decided by those who can build real trust, which is slow, imperfect, evidence-based and human, and make it feel valuable again in a world that’s learned to settle for the façade.

That’s the problem we’re trying to solve. If you’d like to support us, you can watch our work, become a paying member and follow us on socials.

So consider this my slightly late, but hopefully more considered: Happy New Year. And an opportunity to make some public resolutions on behalf of Zandland that keep us accountable.

It all started on a holiday over the Christmas period. Whilst holed up, recovering from not being very good at snowboarding, I was trying to wrestle with what feels like the most basic — and most terrifying — question any person who owns a business can ask themselves:

What the hell should we actually do this year?

Fast-forward to yesterday, and I pulled our entire team into a meeting room to answer that question together. I laid out where I think Zandland needs to go in 2026, how we’ll measure it, and how I think we could work to get there. It wasn’t just a presentation, it was me making a pitch to my own company about what we’re building, why it matters, and how we’ll hold ourselves to it.

That sounds simple, but it isn’t. Behind it sits a bigger set of questions about what kind of company we want to be, what kind of work is worth doing, and what kind of future we’re trying to build.

Ultimately, it’s a question of focus, and over the past few weeks I’ve also become obsessed with one word above all others: clarity.

Not clarity as a slogan or a vibe, but clarity as an actual reality we can create:

• knowing where we want to go,

• having real metrics to tell us whether we’re getting there, and

• empowering the people around us to make good decisions in service of that direction.

Zandland has big dreams and ambitions, and clarity is the only way to get there. So here is where we netted out…

Complete Independence

Zandland is, first and foremost, a fully independent company.

We are not an arm of another broadcaster, we don’t have big money investors, and I sadly, am not yet a billionaire. We are fully backing ourselves, creatively, financially, and strategically.

Our mission is not just to make great documentaries — but to be truth-seekers who make sense of the world with our audience alongside us.

We are uniquely good at getting access, investigating, asking questions, and having fun while we’re at it. So everything is built around putting that to use, and helping to solve a global problem.

The world feels louder, more chaotic, and more confusing than ever. There is no shortage of information, but there is a real shortage of meaning, context, and truth. So, Zandland is a filter, an interpretation of the madness and a place to belong.

A small team, doing a few things exceptionally well

We are a small team of exceptionally talented people, and that means there is a finite amount we can do.

This could be a weakness, but it needs to be our strength.

We should be doing fewer things, brilliantly, rather than many things averagely. Scale for its own sake doesn’t make better work; focus does. And focus requires saying no, protecting our capacity, and being honest about what we can — and cannot — take on.

As an overly ambitious, optimistic guy, this has been one of the hardest things to accept. But if we’re going to build something that lasts, we need to be realistic about our size, ruthless about our priorities, and disciplined about our lane.

Our goals in 2026 are twofold

1) To build a community that people actually want to pay to be part of.

That means working to provide:

• better access to our thinking,

• deeper conversations around our films,

• behind-the-scenes insight into how stories are made, and

• a physical space where curious people can talk, argue, learn, and think together.

Not a paywall for the sake of it, but something genuinely valuable, worth your time and attention.

2) To create incredible, major, premium projects with big partners.

The kind of films and series that can only exist because of the scale, reach, and resources of major streamers and brands, but that only Zandland could have made. These will be culture-defining shows that make noise.

In short:

We want to make work that reaches millions and build a community that knows exactly why that work matters.

Why clarity matters now

Over the holiday period I read a lot of books in a way authors probably hate… I jumped in and out of different things and didn’t really finish a lot of them. BUT, they were great, here are some if you want to also partially read some great books and annoy some authors (they are genuinely very useful books):

• No Rules Rules.

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

• Cultural Strategy.

• Focus on What Matters.

• Getting to Yes with Yourself.

• The A Method for Hiring.

• Shoe Dog.

• Building a StoryBrand.

• The Membership Economy.

• The Psychology of Money.

• The Great CEO Within.

They’re all different, but they kept circling the same idea: organisations (and people) don’t usually fail because they lack ambition — they fail because they lack clarity.

That thinking is what shaped the meeting I had with the team on Monday.

So for 2026, we’ve simplified our priorities around four things:

• Runway — building a financially sustainable, self-supporting company that backs itself and has editorial freedom.

• Brand clarity — being unmistakable in what Zandland stands for.

• Audience ownership — deepening our direct relationship with you.

• Operational discipline — doing fewer things, better.

Everything else is secondary.

Choosing our lane in practice

That also means everything has to feed everything else. Everything has to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Here are our content priorities:

One strong Zandland original film per month.

Not scattered output. Not volume for volume’s sake. One piece of work we genuinely believe in, released consistently.

A new Zandland podcast (launching soon).

A space for slower, deeper conversations with people living inside the worlds we cover — less hot takes, more thinking.

Zandland explainers.

Our way of interpreting the world through explainers from our films, podcasts, and reels on social media.

A clearer relationship with our audience.

If you watch, listen, or read our work, it should be obvious how you can be part of it — through subscribing to the newsletter, engaging with our content, and membership.

Premium projects that tie into the whole.

Projects that feed our aim of being a lens for an audience of young, curious, and passionate people who want to understand the world, investigate it, and be entertained.

This isn’t about being bigger. It’s actually the opposite — it’s about being clearer.

How we’re working differently

We’re now saying no more often so that our yeses mean something.

We’re also being more intentional internally about culture, encouraging honest disagreement, clearer decision-making, and shared responsibility for outcomes. That can be uncomfortable, but it produces better work.

If you follow Zandland in 2026, you’ll see:

• a clearer, more recognisable Zandland voice,

• longer, deeper conversations through the podcast,

• more direct engagement with our audience,

• bigger, bolder collaborations with streamers and brands — on projects that feel distinctly ours.

I don’t have everything figured out. But I do feel clearer about the direction — and that’s the point of this year.

Why this matters

The world is full of content and misinformation. There is a desperate need for work that is both meaningful, true and commercially viable.

If we get this right, we get to keep making ambitious documentaries that don’t normally get made — on our own terms, as an independent company, for the long term.

That is the mission for 2026.

Thanks for being here, for paying attention, and for holding us to a high standard.

Speak soon

Ben

A few nights ago, I was tucking into a succulent kebab dinner with a group of close friends. The kind of meal where plates keep arriving unannounced, the conversation drifts between politics, work, relationships, and you quietly accept that you will develop gout within 48 hours due to the volume of meat consumed.

Halfway through, one of my friends turned to me and said, bluntly:

“Why is the media always so negative? Why do Zandland’s films always show what’s broken and not what’s working?”

It wasn’t hostile, but it was direct in the way only friends can be. And it landed.

I pushed back a little. I don’t actually think everything we make is bleak. We focus on understanding human behaviour, power, culture, and that sometimes means interrogating uncomfortable truths. But, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

Not just about Zandland.

Not just about the media.

But about humans more generally.

We are very good at diagnosing what’s wrong.

We are much less comfortable, and sometimes dismissive, of what’s working.

So, in the spirit of Christmas, as I sit in an empty office surrounded by chocolate wrappers, I decided this issue of the newsletter would do something slightly different.

I want to write about what’s making me, and my team of Zandlanders, optimistic about 2026. About the industry. And about the world more generally.

THE MOOD RIGHT NOW

At the moment, people have a lot of reasons to be worried.

There’s a sense the world isn’t working properly. Like we are on the precipice of chaos. And the industry I work in, the media, is changing. Budgets are shrinking. Commissioning is slower and more cautious. AI is already reshaping workflows and, in some cases, replacing work people relied on. Long-standing career paths feel unstable, and for freelancers in particular, the future can feel uncertain.

That anxiety is real. And it’s rational.

Layered on top of that is something more basic and human.

We have a structural bias toward negativity. Not just in the media, but in how we process the world more generally. That bias isn’t ideological. It’s neurological.

Humans are threat-detecting machines. Our brains are wired to notice danger before safety, loss before gain, risk before progress. Bad news travels faster because fear holds attention.

So when industries shift, when technologies disrupt, when institutions wobble, our default response is often to assume the worst.

That doesn’t mean things aren’t hard. They are.

But it does mean our perception can tilt darker than reality.

Which is why it feels worth saying that, despite all of this, I feel more positive about the media, and the world, than I did a year ago. And I’m excited for 2026.

WHY I’M MORE HOPEFUL ABOUT MEDIA THAN I WAS A YEAR AGO

The industry is under real pressure. Budgets are tighter. Risk tolerance is low. Trust is fragile. Old models are breaking.

But cracks are also where new things form.

Audiences are actively choosing what they trust

For the first time in decades, audiences aren’t captive. They follow people, not institutions. They reward honesty, specificity, and voice.

That’s painful for legacy systems, but healthy for culture, and a genuine opportunity for creators without major overheads.

Power is redistributing. Slowly. Unevenly. But meaningfully.

Serious storytelling hasn’t disappeared, it’s migrating

The appetite for depth, nuance, and complexity is still there. What’s changed is where it lives.

YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and direct-to-audience platforms are no longer side projects. They’re primary arenas for trust-building and long-form thinking.

That isn’t the death of an industry. It’s a rebalancing.

You no longer have to wait for permission

This is the biggest and most exciting shift of all.

The barrier between idea and audience has collapsed. That’s unsettling, and incredibly liberating.

It means creators can test, build, fail, refine, and grow in public. Development no longer has to live entirely behind closed doors. Independence is no longer just philosophical; it can be practical.

At Zandland, that’s exactly what we’re building. Work that can live with broadcasters and streamers, but can also stand on its own.

WHERE I SEE THE OPPORTUNITIES IN 2026

Looking ahead, a few things feel increasingly clear.

Trust will be the most valuable currency, not scale alone

For years, success was measured almost entirely in reach. Bigger audience. Bigger platform. Bigger budget.

That logic is breaking down.

Audiences now ask: who made this, why should I believe them, and what do they stand for? In that environment, trust compounds. A smaller audience that genuinely believes in you is worth more, creatively and commercially, than a vast one that’s only half paying attention. That’s a huge opportunity.

Direct audience relationships unlock creative freedom

Creators with a real audience have more room to say no, to push back, and to take risks.

This doesn’t replace broadcasters and streamers, but it does change the power dynamic. Audience is no longer just the destination; it’s the leverage.

Hybrid models will outperform purist ones

The old binaries are fading. TV versus digital. Journalism versus entertainment. Serious versus watchable.

The work cutting through now lives in the overlap. Investigative stories that are funny. Serious reporting delivered with personality. Formats that can travel across platforms.

Audiences don’t care what box something sits in. They care whether it holds their attention and respects their intelligence.

Voice will matter more than neutrality

Audiences don’t want polemic, but they do want perspective.

They want to know who they’re listening to, what lens they’re seeing the world through, and why. Rigour still matters. Fairness still matters. But pretending to be invisible no longer builds trust.

Brands that stand for something will endure

In a chaotic media environment, people gravitate toward brands that feel coherent, human, and values-led.

• What do you care about?

• What will you not do?

• What kind of stories do you believe matter?

For Zandland, 2026 is about leaning into that more clearly. Serious but watchable. Investigative but human. Commercial without being hollow.

And yes, taking my friend’s advice too.

Alongside difficult stories, we’re deliberately making more space for humour, joy, absurdity, and warmth. Because the world is strange and funny as well as serious. And understanding it doesn’t have to feel like punishment.

ZOOMING OUT

I’ll take this opportunity to also remind myself, and maybe some readers, that the world is, statistically, safer than it used to be.

This always sounds wrong until you zoom out.

Over the past few decades, global rates of extreme poverty, child mortality, violent crime, and deaths from war have fallen dramatically. Progress hasn’t been smooth, and recent years have been volatile, but the long-term trend still matters.

That doesn’t mean suffering doesn’t exist. It does. Profoundly.

But it does mean despair isn’t the only rational response.

Medical and scientific breakthroughs are accelerating. mRNA technology. AI-assisted diagnostics. Cancer survival rates improving year on year. Breakthroughs in fertility treatment, rare disease detection, and mental health research.

These stories rarely land emotionally because they don’t arrive with spectacle. But they are quietly reshaping millions of lives.

Younger generations are also more values-driven than they’re often given credit for. Despite endless narratives about apathy or fragility, many are more ethically aware, more sceptical of power, and more engaged with questions of inequality, climate, identity, and meaning than previous generations were at the same age.

They just don’t engage through the same channels.

A NOTE ON “NEGATIVITY”

Just to defend myself against friends who may want to call me out over future Turkish meals, focusing on problems is not the same as being pessimistic.

Investigating abuse of power, misinformation, exploitation, or systemic failure isn’t negativity. It’s accountability.

But optimism doesn’t mean ignoring reality. It means believing reality can be shaped.

Good journalism and documentaries don’t just expose what’s broken. At their best, they help people understand why things are the way they are, and where agency still exists.

That’s a balance I want us to get better at.

To round things off, I don’t think hope is naïve.

And making space for it, especially now, feels like part of the job.

From all of us at Zandland, we wish you a very Merry Christmas. And I really hope 2026 brings you all the happiness, and success, you deserve!

Speak soon,

Ben Zand

Founder, ZANDLAND

It’s a place where policy, culture and media collide, and where people are trying to answer some genuinely hard questions about what television even is now, how platforms fit into that picture, and how public value survives in a system that no longer resembles the one it was built for.

I was asked to talk to their team about where I see the future heading, but I came away thinking less about regulation and more about something simpler — and more fragile: trust.

WHEN TRUTH BECOMES A BETTING MARKET

There is now more content than ever. Soon there will be infinite content.

But trust is going in the opposite direction.

This isn’t just about media. It’s about society more broadly. Trust in institutions, in shared reality, in what’s true, in what’s worth paying attention to. You can feel the erosion everywhere, in politics, in culture, in how people talk to each other online, and in how quickly bad information spreads.

This week, CNN announced a partnership with Kalshi, a prediction market that allows viewers to wager on current events, elections, cabinet reshuffles, geopolitical outcomes, even natural disasters, with those odds now appearing within coverage itself. CNBC have announced a similar deal.

Link to Announcement

On the one hand, it makes sense. Media organisations are under incredible pressure. Revenue models are breaking, attention is harder to hold, and survival increasingly demands uncomfortable decisions. But this is still a significant moment.

In an industry already struggling to retain the trust of its audiences, embedding betting markets into news coverage is unlikely to rebuild that confidence. More fundamentally, when financial speculation becomes woven into the act of reporting reality, even subtly, it raises a serious question: what happens to trust when truth and incentives begin to blur?

These decisions may make short-term commercial sense, but over time they corrode confidence, not just in individual brands, but across the media ecosystem as a whole. They also risk shifting something way more fundamental: how reality itself is understood.

//

A Black Mirror take…

As traditional media loses authority, there’s a real risk that truth starts to get replaced by expectation. Once financial expectations begin shaping coverage, they don’t just describe reality, they influence it. Markets move, reputations shift, public opinion hardens, and incentives change. At that point, journalism isn’t just reporting on the world; it’s quietly participating in systems that help shape outcomes.

The danger here isn’t one bad deal, one bad actor or one mistake. It’s an industry making increasingly desperate decisions, and a system that’s losing trust because it rewards immediacy, scale and monetisation above everything else. Alongside a politics that increasingly thinks in short-term, single-cycle terms rather than generational impact.

If those become the only metrics that matter, the logic eventually eats itself. You don’t need anyone acting in bad faith. You just need incentives that nudge everyone in the same direction.

Research consistently shows that most people still care about important stories, and understanding the world, but fewer than half now say they trust the media delivering it.

This week one of our investigative feature documentaries was listed by the British Film Institute as among the best of British TV of 2025. Not because accolades are the point, but because it’s a reminder that there is still an appetite for work that takes its time, deals honestly with complexity, and doesn’t flatten the world for easy consumption.

That appetite hasn’t gone away.

What’s missing is a system that consistently supports it.

Link to BFI article

THE FUTURE FOR INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS

This is where we need to be more honest about the state of the media, and the position producers increasingly find themselves in.

In the industry, budgets are tighter. Development timelines are longer. Risk is pushed downward. Producers are being asked to deliver more - more access, more sensitivity, more compliance - with less financial headroom and less long-term upside.

At the same time, as media companies chase their share of an increasingly fragmented attention economy, commissioning decisions skew toward what feels safest and fastest: celebrity-led formats, simplified true crime, repeatable ideas that travel easily but rarely stretch the form. The ambition narrows. Innovation slows.

Audiences notice that drift. Many respond by looking elsewhere - to platforms like YouTube - not necessarily because the work there is deeper or more rigorous, but because it feels different, less filtered, more immediate. What they often find instead is content that is even less regulated and less accountable, but novel enough to capture attention.

The result is a widening gap. Serious, complex storytelling struggles to survive commercially, while audiences splinter into parallel ecosystems, each with their own narratives, incentives and versions of reality. And the centre, where shared understanding used to live, becomes thinner and more fragile. This is a major problem for a functioning, cohesive society.

It is also why producers now have to think differently.

WE ARE ALL OUR OWN NETWORKS

Anyone making content today has to operate as a brand as well as a maker. That doesn’t mean chasing personality for its own sake, but it does mean thinking seriously about audience, community, distribution and sustainability alongside the editorial. These are no longer downstream concerns. They shape what gets made, how it’s funded, and how far it can travel.

The audience isn’t just the destination anymore, it’s the leverage. It affects independence, negotiating power, creative risk, and long-term viability. A producer with a direct relationship to viewers has more room to manoeuvre, more resilience when projects stall, and more freedom to take risks that wouldn’t survive in a purely commission-led model.

That shift demands a new level of entrepreneurialism. Creators are increasingly expected to think like operators: balancing editorial integrity with platform realities, community with scale, and long-term trust with short-term performance.

It’s also why we increasingly think of Zandland not just as a production studio, but as a network in its own right, one that can collaborate with major broadcasters and streamers, but also operate independently of them. Sometimes that means partnering with legacy media. Sometimes it means competing alongside them for attention, relevance and trust.

Our aim is to create work that is incredibly entertaining and compelling, but also revelatory, truthful and fair. We need to genuinely compete in the attention economy. But we want to also provide actual value and understanding. What we make has to be watchable. It has to be commercial. And it has to be able to stand on its own feet.

If it doesn’t, something else will take its place, and it won’t necessarily share the same values.

THE CASE FOR MAKING VALUE A METRIC

But there’s a responsibility that sits beyond individual producers.

For the people who hold power in this industry, commissioners, platform executives, funders, editors, policymakers, I think we need to broaden how success is judged.

Audience matters. Scale matters. Return matters too.

But trust and public value have to count as well.

Not as a slogan. Not as a paragraph at the end of a pitch. But as part of the actual decision-making process.

What does this project contribute to public understanding?

Does it clarify or just make things worse?

Does it build trust or strip it away?

What kind of society does it quietly help produce?

If we don’t start asking those questions seriously, we’ll keep optimising for short-term performance and long-term decay. And we’ll act surprised when the world feels more brittle, more cynical, and less liveable, even as the feeds are “performing.”

That’s not a future any of us (hopefully) want to inhabit. And it’s not one we should accept for the next generation either.

ALL IS NOT LOST

In short, I don’t think media is collapsing.

I think it’s transitioning.

But transitions are when bad habits get locked in, or better systems get built.

If we want a future where trust still means something, where audiences feel respected rather than exploited, and where serious storytelling doesn’t have to apologise for existing, then we have to be honest about how this all works, and deliberate about what we choose to reward.

That’s what I tried to articulate at DCMS. And if you’re in a position of power, you can actively shape this. Fund work not only because it performs, but because it matters - and because, over time, trust is one of the most valuable things media can still offer.

The incentives you reward don’t just shape balance sheets, they shape the information people live inside. And when that degrades, the cost isn’t abstract. It’s the world you wake up to every morning.

This is what we’re trying to build at ZANDLAND.

Speak soon,

Ben Zand

Elsewhere this week:

In the latest episode of Untangled, we look at Australia’s decision to ban social media for under-16s, and what it reveals about how governments are starting to treat digital platforms as a public health issue.

And we spoke to C21Media about Zandland’s digital-first documentary-making and our predictions for 2026, you can listen here from 41:32.

At ZANDLAND, our whole mission is to take you to places you wouldn’t normally get to go, whether you’re a media professional, an audience member or someone who just likes to understand the world. From current-affairs to popculture to the strange corners of the internet, our job is to open doors that are usually shut and tell the stories people don’t realise they need to see.

I’m Ben Zand, the founder of Zandland, and this newsletter is our way of bringing you along for the ride: taking you inside the stories we’re chasing, the worlds we’re stepping into, what we’re learning as the world shifts under our feet, and how we’re building shows across two lanes at once, the traditional world of broadcasters and streamers, and a direct relationship with audiences online.

1. Inside the Gooners — Our Latest HUMAN Film

Last week we released our latest episode of HUMAN… Inside Gooning: The Porn Addiction Taking Over the Internet, one of the strangest and most revealing HUMAN films yet. Watch the film below:

For anyone new here: a big part of what we’re building is direct-to-audience storytelling. HUMAN is our latest show in that space, a series we can make quickly, creatively, and put straight into the world. It only launched in October and has already had over 11 million views across platforms and a genuinely engaged community forming around it.

The Gooning episode sits inside one of the biggest unsolved shifts on the internet:

the industrial-scale porn ecosystem and its impact on masculinity and intimacy.

Some context:

• Porn is bigger than Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu combined in global bandwidth

• One in three of the world’s most-visited websites is porn-related

• Average age of first exposure: 11

• 70%+ of young men consume porn before age 15

• Porn sites receive more monthly visitors than Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, Spotify and Netflix combined

Gooning is the extreme edge, where novelty, dopamine and online identity replace real intimacy, connection and confidence.

The film explores:

• how overstimulation reshapes desire

• why many young men feel lost and disconnected

• the tension between emotional needs and digital habits

• loneliness, masculinity and the intimacy gap

• what a generation raised online is really searching for

The reaction has been huge — fascination, discomfort, recognition and debate.

2. HUMAN — Over 11 Million Views Since Launch

Since launching in early October, our documentary series HUMAN has now crossed 11 million views.

It’s one of the most energising things we’ve done, fast, direct, audience-first filmmaking. We’ve also very quickly built a growing number of paying subscribers (more below).

More episodes are released every 2-3 weeks.

3. Exclusive HUMAN Content on Patreon

With every HUMAN episode, we now release exclusive Patreon content — extended interviews, deeper dives and behind-the-scenes moments.

We have two membership tiers, and a very promising number of viewers have already joined. Genuinely, thank you to those who have.

Why it matters: supporting our journalism directly keeps us independent and fearless.

More perks coming:

• extended cut interviews

• early access to new episodes

• private Q&As

• live screenings

• HUMAN BTS features

Join the Patreon → https://www.patreon.com/cw/ZANDLAND

4. Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War

On Thursday we screened Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War at the Frontline Club.

This is a film built on rare testimony from Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza, testimony that exposes a breakdown in discipline, norms, oversight and rules of engagement.

Our mission with content is always impact and scale. With that in mind, we’ve made the full film available internationally here (UK viewers can watch on ITV). Here’s an article from deadline on why we did that: https://deadline.com/2025/11/itv-doc-breaking-ranks-inside-israels-war-youtube-zandland-1236627080/

A very brief snapshot of what the soldiers revealed:

• Accounts of unprovoked firing on unarmed civilians, including people running for food

• Soldiers describing that official IDF rules of engagement were not followed on the ground

• Ordinary behaviour being arbitrarily branded as “terrorist indicators”

• Buildings in civilian-safe areas destroyed on assumption rather than evidence

• Testimony alleging use of human shields (“the mosquito protocol”)

• Deep emotional and psychological fallout among some soldiers

Clips from Breaking Ranks have now passed 6 million views on social media.

It made for a powerful, challenging screening with a Q&A that was emotional, and very, very real.

5. Untangled — The Intimacy Recession

On this week’s Untangled, a new Vodcast from Channel 4 and Zandland in the UK, Stacey Dooley and I explored what many are calling the Intimacy Recession — a collapse in sex, relationships and connection among younger generations.

Key points:

• Sex is at a historic low

• Relationships are declining

• Men and women now want very different things

• Porn is reshaping emotional expectations

• Loneliness is becoming the norm

It pairs with the these explored in the Gooners film, and begs the question, why is finding love so hard? This is a topic area that generates a lot of reaction and response, and we think there’s a lot more to explore (as evidenced by our work into masculinity, our previous films on Incels (Watch on Hulu and Channel 4) and Looksmaxxers, and now Gooners!)

Listen here →

6. Behind the Scenes — The Team That Makes It Happen

A few thank yous!

BREAKING RANKS TEAM

• Tom Giles — ITV Controller of Current Affairs. His relentless pursuit of this story is the only reason the film was made.

• Maya Rostowska — producer and editorial architect

• Matan Cohen— secured access and led the soldier interviews

• Josh Reynolds — EP and compliance backbone

• Secunder Kermani — hosted the screening with calm authority

• Rhiannon Mayor & Tom Laws-Brown — editors who shaped the story inside the chaos

HUMAN TEAM

• Callum Isaac — highly-talented digital producer on the series who’s given his all to get us where we are.

• Ben Mulley — researcher and editorial backbone of the show and fought hard for the gooners episode to come to light!

• Freddie Newman — pivotal for us seeing the growth we have on socials

7. What We’re Thinking About

• How do you tell a story when even “truth” is contested?

• Why is intimacy collapsing for a whole generation?

• What makes a thumbnail succeed or fail?

• Can documentaries be both serious and wildly watchable?

• Should we show more of our behind-the-scenes chaos? (Probably yes.)

Let us know what you think of any and all these questions, the more ridiculous response the better.

8. Another Perspective — On the Media Itself

Last week I spoke at Content London about something shaping how audiences view journalism and documentary: the changing relationship between viewers and legacy media brands.

My slightly apocalyptic analysis was covered:

To give a bit more context, here are a few of the ideas I discussed:

• Big broadcasters still matter, but for younger audiences trust has shifted, and that’s a major issue that needs radical thinking.

• Broadcasters can benefit from creating sub-brands with distinct identities, tones and values that feel closer to the communities they want to reach, and less tied to a single overarching corporate identity.

• Digital factual, journalism and documentary need to feel platform-native, creator-led and audience-connected.

• Media is now democratised in a way it never has been, which is exciting, but algorithms increasingly reward extremes over accuracy. ZANDLAND’s mission is to sit at the intersection: fair, accurate documentary and journalism that’s also exciting, modern and commercially ambitious.

And all of this is happening whilst Netflix has announced a $72bn deal to acquire the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros Discovery, a reminder that the industry is reshaping itself at every level. At one end, giant players are consolidating to survive; at the other, audiences are choosing smaller, creator-led brands they trust. Both trends point to the same shift: people follow stories and voices they believe in, not the institutions that happen to own them.

Read the full C21 article here:

👉 https://www.c21media.net/news/zandlands-ben-zand-laments-nightmarish-lack-of-trust-in-mainstream-legacy-media/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin

For us, the big opportunity is to build zeitgeist documentaries that feel authentic, modern and community-driven, and to make exciting films that speak directly to people, not at them.

9. What’s Next

Next issue: on Untangled we’ll be talking about Australia’s new social media ban in schools and what that means for the rest of us, there’ll be new HUMAN content, content announcements, thoughts on development, and more battles with airline baggage allowances.

We’re also shaping The World According to ZANDLAND into a proper digital home, a space where ideas, obsessions and stories live long before they become films.

More soon.

Ben Zand

Founder, ZANDLAND

You’re on this list because at some point you’ve crossed paths with ZANDLAND, collaborating, talking, commissioning, or just being part of our world. If these updates aren’t for you, feel free to unsubscribe at the link below.