No One Owes You an Audience
Abbas Seyedein on Storytelling, Persian Podcasting, and the Art of Making Something You Actually Want to Make — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP01
Nobody is indebted to you. Just because you believe in what you’re making, just because you think the topic matters — that doesn’t mean anyone else has to care. The listener is not a captive. They owe you nothing. You owe them something worth their time.
This is the principle Abbas Seyedein returns to throughout this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, and it is, in miniature, the philosophy behind everything he does: as a writer for the podcast Bi Plus, as the creator of Perse, and as a translator of books that he simply needed to exist in Persian. The episode is the first in Cozy Corner’s special series on Persian-language podcasting, and Abbas is exactly the right person to open it — not because he has the largest audience, but because he has thought harder and more honestly than almost anyone about what the work actually is.
How It Started — An Email About a Shared List of Books
Abbas’s entry into podcasting began the way most good collaborations do: accidentally, through a small act of honesty. He had been reading books that nobody around him seemed to be reading — not because they’d been recommended, but because he’d found them himself — and he noticed that a Persian podcast called Channel B was producing book summaries, a format he’d been thinking about for himself. He sent an email to Channel B’s founder, Ali Bandari, not to pitch a collaboration but simply to say: I wanted to do this too. If you ever need help, I read.
Bandari replied. They exchanged book lists. Two people who had independently arrived at the same unusual, off-the-beaten-track books — Gulag Archipelago being the one that sealed it — recognized something in each other. By the second season of Bi Plus, Abbas was writing every summary. By the third, he was the primary architect of the content. The working relationship eventually became one of the most sustained and respectful creative collaborations he describes having experienced.
What a Summary Actually Is
The word “summary” undersells what Abbas does. He is precise about this. A summary in the sense of a newspaper column would be: this book was published in this year, the author argues this, the main chapters cover this. Useful, perhaps, but dead on arrival as audio. What he learned — partly from reading widely, partly from working on TED talks, partly from the books themselves — is that a summary done well is a form of narrative. And narrative is not the same thing as argument.
“I imagined I’d caught you at a party,” he says. “I wanted to tell you about this book in a way that made you stay in the conversation rather than drifting off to talk to someone else. I needed to hold your attention. That meant I needed to care — genuinely care — and find a way to make you feel what I felt when I read it.”
The structural insight he kept returning to was the difference between a lecture and a story. A lecture moves from premise to argument to conclusion, and this works in a classroom — or at least he says he’s not entirely sure it works there either. In audio, it fails. You have to pull the listener with you. You have to earn each next moment. The only way to do that is to be genuinely gripped yourself.
Zoom In, Zoom Out
One of the most detailed passages in the episode is Abbas’s description of how he learned to read books as a writer, not just as a reader. He was working through a history of the modern Arab world — spanning North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, from the Ottoman period forward — and he noticed that the author would periodically shift registers: pulling back to describe a long arc of Ottoman reform policy in broad strokes, then suddenly cutting to a specific street in Damascus, a specific confrontation between a Maronite community and a Muslim one, a specific moment of violence with a named victim and named perpetrators.
Why? The obvious answer is that more information was available for the specific event. But Abbas found that explanation unsatisfying. What the author was actually doing, he came to understand, was providing two things simultaneously: the altitude of abstraction — this is what changed in the structure of inter-communal relations — and the ground-level evidence that makes abstraction concrete. Without the close-up, the general claim floats. Without the general claim, the close-up is just an anecdote. The combination is what lodges the idea somewhere durable in the listener’s mind.
“If I say ‘inter-communal dynamics shifted’ in the abstract,” he explains, “you understand the words but maybe not the weight. If I then tell you what happened in a specific city, what it actually meant when that shift occurred — then the abstraction becomes something you can feel.”
A Character Who Never Leaves a Good Clue Behind
The craft extends into smaller things as well — techniques Abbas describes almost sheepishly, as if they are too simple to mention, but which he’s found to matter consistently. When introducing a character whose name will appear multiple times in a story, he gives them a label that sticks: the man who couldn’t get through a sentence without swearing. The Italian with a broken heart. A small, slightly strange detail that makes this person distinct from every other name in the episode, so that when the name reappears fifteen minutes later, the listener hasn’t lost the thread.
He traces this back to his experience working on TED talks — close to forty different TEDx events, where his role was partly helping speakers find and tell their narrative, not just their argument. He learned there that the moment you can name what you’re doing, you’ve usually already been doing it for a while. The skill precedes the vocabulary. You catch yourself thinking “no, this sentence doesn’t sound right” long before you can articulate the difference between written prose and spoken rhythm.
The Hieroglyphics Episode — Following People, Not Facts
One of the examples Abbas uses to illustrate how he thinks about a project from the inside is a Perse series on the decipherment of hieroglyphics. He was drawn to it initially not by the intellectual puzzle — how do you decode a language no living person has spoken for centuries? — but by a stranger question: what kind of person dedicates their entire life to something like this? What obsession does it require? What strange private relationship with the problem must you carry in order not to give up?
As he read, the story he found was not primarily about linguistics. It was about a chain of accidental human decisions — an Italian traveler who bought some old manuscripts in Syria and carried them to the Vatican, Napoleon’s troops who moved those manuscripts to France, a scholar who needed precisely those texts to make the breakthrough that finally unlocked the script. None of these people knew they were part of the same story. Each was simply living their life, making decisions that seemed locally reasonable, and leaving behind something whose significance they would never know.
“People living their lives, having their adventures, leaving a mark they don’t understand — and somewhere else, history breaks open. That’s what I wanted to tell. Not the decipherment. That.”
The Difference Between Someone Who Has the Right Answer and Someone Who Is Looking for It
Partway through the conversation, Abbas draws a distinction that gives the entire episode its shape. There are people, he says, who build their public identity on being the ones who know — the authority, the wise person dispensing wisdom to an audience that comes to receive it. And there are people who are constitutionally oriented toward searching. The difference isn’t in the quality of their thinking. It’s in what they’re fundamentally trying to do.
“I read this once in a book and felt like I finally understood something about myself: I’m not the kind of person who will spend my life understanding two or three things no one has ever understood before. I want to discover things every day — but discoveries for me. Other people might already know. I didn’t. Today I found out.”
This, he says, is what Perse is: his own ongoing discovery process, narrated outward. Not a lecture from someone who has already arrived, but a journey taken in real time and shared. The consequence is that he sometimes covers books that contradict each other, reads things in sequence without worrying about whether they fit a unified worldview, changes his mind. This isn’t intellectual inconsistency. It’s honesty about what the process actually looks like.
The Industrial Logic of Persian Podcasting
The episode’s most practical section concerns the economics and structure of Persian podcasting — not just Perse, but the broader landscape. The Persian-speaking audience is, by Hossein’s estimate, around 140 million people globally. The active podcast listener base is currently around 8 million. The gap between those numbers represents both opportunity and a persistent structural challenge: most Persian podcasts are one-person operations, built on personal passion, with no team, no financial sustainability plan, and no design for growth.
Abbas is frank about what this means in practice. Passion is not a production model. He cites his own trajectory: he was able to build Perse because he had income from writing for Bi Plus, which gave him enough financial floor to stop taking scattered freelance work and focus. Without that, the podcast either wouldn’t exist or would have faded. He describes the younger creators he encounters who expect that making something important will naturally attract an audience — and the specific mistake embedded in that expectation.
“You believe the topic matters. You’re right. But that doesn’t mean it matters to anyone else yet. You are the one who is in debt to the audience — not the other way around. You have to go earn their attention, person by person, and make the case that what you’ve made is worth their time.”
Designing a Project That Can Survive You
The distinction Abbas draws between Perse and every other project he is thinking about is essentially a design distinction. Perse is constitutionally personal — the narrative is so specifically his own, built from his particular angle of curiosity and his particular way of following a thread, that it cannot be delegated. He has tried to bring collaborators in; it hasn’t worked, not because the collaborators were lacking but because the thing that makes Perse Perse cannot be outsourced.
Bi Plus, by contrast, was designed from the beginning by Ali Bandari with scalability in mind — a format that could be written by a researcher and executed by a host, with enough separation between those roles that neither depended entirely on the other. That design decision, made before the first episode was recorded, is what allowed the project to still be running years later. For anything Abbas wants to build that goes beyond a personal project, he says he now thinks about this from day one: is this designed to be one person’s irreplaceable voice, or is this designed to be a thing that a team can collectively build and sustain?
Music, Painting, and the Question of What a Creative Medium Gives You
Abbas holds a master’s degree in Iranian classical music performance — a fact that sits somewhat unexpectedly alongside his current work in writing, podcasting, and translation. He describes himself as retired from music now, and painting as the thing that has taken its place. He uses both to illuminate something about the podcast that he finds difficult to articulate directly.
Music and painting, for him, happen in compressed time: a piece, a sketch, complete in hours or minutes. The emotional release — the thing he calls brounrizi-ye hesi, an outpouring of feeling — is concentrated and immediate. A podcast episode takes weeks or months. The emotional experience is distributed across the entire process: the reading, the research, the moment of figuring out a structure, the writing, the recording, listening back, revising. He describes these as different kinds of pleasure, not a lesser and greater — more like different instruments producing different sounds.
“The best creative work I’ve ever done,” he says, referencing artists he admires, “tends to come from the moment I wasn’t trying. I was playing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I want that in the podcast too — and sometimes, in some episodes, I think I’ve gotten close.”
The Two Episodes He Thinks Might Have Actually Worked
When Hossein asks which episodes of Perse Abbas feels closest to — where he thinks he may have achieved something genuinely distinct from just good content — the answer is specific and careful. He names two. The first is a series on cells and cell biology, where he says the challenge was carrying a technically complex subject through to an audience that hadn’t signed up for a science lecture, and where he tried, step by step, to build the conceptual ground so that the listener arrived at something alongside him rather than being handed a conclusion.
The second is a single episode on a cholera epidemic in London in the mid-nineteenth century — one week, one neighborhood, one crisis, and the chain of consequences that eventually changed how cities were built. He describes trying to thread the scientific discovery of how cholera actually spread, the specific people involved, and the larger structural change that followed, into something where a listener at the end wouldn’t be sure whether they’d just heard a science podcast, a history podcast, or something that felt more like a story. He wanted the uncertainty to be the sign that something had worked.
Reaction Versus Accompaniment, and Why He Doesn’t Post About Politics
Hossein asks the question directly: given everything that has happened in Iran in recent years, given what audiences sometimes expect of people with platforms, where does Abbas draw his line? His answer makes a distinction between two things that can look similar from the outside but are, he says, categorically different: reaction and accompaniment.
Reaction, as he defines it, is when external events take control of your output — when what you make is determined by what just happened rather than by what you have been building toward. He refuses this. It isn’t that he has no views on current events; he does, and he discusses them with friends, and he votes, and he participates in his community. But he does not turn his platform into a reaction machine. “If I have something to say that is genuinely connected to what I’m making,” he says, “I’ll say it. But I’m not going to become something that responds to whatever happened last.”
Accompaniment is something else — being present with, being willing to discuss, engaging from within the domain of what you’re actually building. His friend who promotes science, he says, has views on social and political events. But his platform is defined as a space for science promotion, and within that definition, events enter only when they genuinely connect to that work. Knowing what your platform is for, and staying inside it rather than letting it be shaped by the ambient pressure of the moment, is both an integrity choice and a practical one.
The Cozy Corner — Morning, Before Anyone Else Gets to Him
Asked where his own cozy corner is, Abbas’s answer is specific and rooted in practice. Sleep, he says, matters more than almost anything else to the quality of his working day. If he sleeps well, he has a good day. If he doesn’t, the day is compromised before it starts. From that, he’s built backward: late-night events are limited, because he knows he needs the first hours of morning, and he needs to know the night before what he is going to do with them.
The best work happens in those first hours — when he hasn’t yet been reached by email or social media or the ordinary demands of the day. He describes this not as a preference but as something he learned through trial and error over years, and then sharpened through reading books about creative routines. What he found in those books was confirmation of something he already half-knew: that the specific ritual matters less than having one. Every person he admires in that catalog of creative routines had some version of the same thing — a particular environment, a particular time, a particular sequence — and the consistency of the container, whatever its shape, was what allowed the work inside it to happen.
A Dedication
Asked who he would like to dedicate this conversation to, Abbas names two people without hesitating. The first is Ali Bandari — not only because of the collaboration that made Perse possible financially, but because of the model of working that he encountered there: a genuine win-win orientation, a willingness to share credit, a way of treating a creative partner as a collaborator rather than an executor. He says he has rarely seen it done as consistently or as thoroughly as Ali does it. And working inside it raised his own standards permanently. The second is his wife — who has accompanied him through all of this: the uncertainty, the mid-career restlessness, the ongoing reconfiguration of what he is and what he is building. He describes himself in his forties still genuinely unsettled about some of these questions, still playing with ideas he doesn’t know where they lead, and says that living alongside someone in that state is not easy, and that she has chosen it, and that he is trying to be worth that choice.
