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Travel Like It’s 1999
MATLANA MEDIA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reviving the human skills that travel once required: common sense, improvisation, adaptability, curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to greet a stranger.
MATLANA MEDIA celebrates the spirit and practice of navigating uncertainty without a digital safety net by creating and distributing entertainment that models and inspires those skills.
Our Looney Planet presents video podcasts, Hello Again Globe Trekker and Hello Stranger, hosted by Ian Wright and Justine Shapiro. Additionally, we are producing a YouTube-exclusive series Personal Geographies, hosted by locals. In our outreach program, Participate, we invite you to channel your inner Globe Trekker and share your stories with us along the way.
As we increasingly turn to our devices before turning to each other, essential human skills are atrophying. These aren't exotic skills—rather, these are the skills behind every conversation, apology, collaboration, friendship, and flirtation.
Human contact is essential to mental well-being, and loneliness and social disconnection are serious and growing concerns.
WHAT WE HOPE TO SPARK
An international conversation about the concept and practice of “analog travel.”
A growing collection of stories from people who have tried “analog travel” themselves.
Analog Travel: a vital social skill
Analog travel means engaging directly with your environment and the people in it, without a digital device. Before smartphones, getting somewhere meant relying on maps, phrase books, observation, common sense—and other people. Those weren't quaint inconveniences. They were opportunities for human connection.
Why now? Human connection is vital to our mental health
Our Looney Planet believes that practicing analog travel skills can help bring us back to a more connected, and saner existence: The World Health Organization’s commission estimates that social disconnection contributes to roughly 871,000 deaths a year, and reports that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.
The Globe Trekker archive is a rare and valuable time capsule.
Globe Trekker, which also aired as Lonely Planet and Pilot Guides, reached an estimated global audience of 40 million.
MATLANA MEDIA is bringing the Globe Trekker archive back to life. This archive shows how dramatically human behavior has changed in a single generation. The Globe Trekker series is no longer available for streaming, but MATLANA MEDIA has access to the archive: hundreds of hours filmed during the pre-digital era. Through this footage and in the telling of our stories MATLANA MEDIA takes us back just 20 years ago when humans had to figure out how to engage with other humans: asking for help, and often figuring out how to communicate across language barriers.
The audience is finding us
When we launched Our Looney Planet in August 2025, neither Ian nor Justine had a social media profile—they had zero followers.
Our stats since launch (August 2025–August 30, 2026):
Our YouTube channel has reached 68 countries.
Our podcast channels have reached 66 countries.
Instagram engagement by reach: 19.59% (average is 4–6%).
YouTube engagement by views: 5.96% (average is 1–3%).
TikTok engagement by views: 9.55% (average is 5–10%).
Every day we receive remarkably warm, enthusiastic comments from longtime Globe Trekker fans and from a whole new generation discovering us for the first time.
Without spending a dollar on advertising, we went from zero followers to a global audience in one year. Now imagine what we could do with your support.
We're not anti-technology
The technologies that distract us are also our distribution channels. We don’t scold the audience for holding a phone. We hold one too. We just don’t want it to become a third appendage. Our Looney Planet offers a joyful reminder that an unmediated world still exists—and celebrates our place in it.
Independence matters
MATLANA MEDIA is a nonprofit funded primarily by foundations and individual donors, not advertisers. That gives us the freedom to make entertainment that invites people to look up and engage with one another. We want people to watch and listen to our work. We don’t need them to be glued to it.
Our expectation is that, beginning in 2027, our funding model will include sponsorships and revenue from partnerships.
Our Looney Planet Season 2
Season 2 brings you 3 strands:
Hello Stranger Fancy being a stranger on Hello Stranger? Click PARTICIPATE.
Hello Stranger pairs Ian or Justine, the original hosts of Globe Trekker, with someone they’ve never met for a conversation. Our producer, Kris, plays matchmaker, then steps back. Ian or Justine knows nothing about their guest beforehand. No briefing. No bio. What will they talk about? It’s the kind of spontaneous conversation you might strike up with the stranger next to you on a bus, a plane, in a pub, on a train.
Hello Again Globe Trekker
Ian & Justine reunite with members of the intrepid team behind Globe Trekker. Intercut with footage from the Globe Trekker archives, these behind-the-scenes conversations tell the real story of how these one-hour episodes got made: a tiny crew, a shoestring budget, four-week shoots, massive camera equipment, and barely a way to call home. Success depended on teamwork, ingenuity, and the kindness of strangers.
Personal Geographies (video - exclusive to YouTube)
We hand the camera to a local who takes us through their city in their own voice —steering us to favorite spots no guide book knows about. Our guide meets with friends and chats with strangers, and together they offer a multiplicity of perspectives on a single city.
Season 2 is up to YOU!
To complete Season 2, MATLANA MEDIA must raise an additional $195,000.
Season 1 – funded by the Khosravi Family Foundation and contributions from individual donors.
Season 2 – funded in part by 188 Kickstarter backers who raised $25,000.
If you’ve ever gotten lost and a stranger helped you out, then you already understand what we are trying to protect.
Your support allows an experienced team of producers, researchers, editors and creatives to complete Season 2:
8 video podcasts
2 social media clips each day
2 episodes of Personal Geographies
What Your Gift Can Fund:
$50 covers coffee for the team for 1 month.
$200 covers software subscription fees for 1 month.
$450 funds the sound mix on one video podcast episode.
$500 covers bookkeeping services for 1 month.
$1,000 covers our rent.
$3,000 funds production and editing of 1 episode of Personal Geographies.
$4,500 funds the edit of one month’s worth of social media clips.
$5,000 covers legal fees for 1 year.
$5,000 funds production and editing of 1 episode of Hello Stranger.
$6,000 funds production and editing of 1 episode of Hello Again Globe Trekker.
DONATE TODAY. We’re grateful for your support.
BECOME AN EPISODE SPONSOR FOR $6,000!
If you would like more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us: hello@ourlooneyplanet.com
Justine reads every email.
Donate online or mail a check to:
MATLANA MEDIA
1442A Walnut Street, #202
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States of America
For grants, major gifts, donor-advised funds, stock, or wire transfers, please contact us at hello@ourlooneyplanet.com.
MATLANA MEDIA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. EIN: 39-4114517.
Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Board Members
Justine Shapiro, President and CEO
Jena Resner, Secretary
Jocelyn Leroux, Treasurer
Deirdre English, Director
Justine’s grannies, Mathilda and Lana, inspired MATLANA MEDIA.