All History Is Contemporary History
Alireza Banijani on Paragraph, the Art of the Historical Narrative, and Growing Up in a Tradition That Didn’t Know Podcasts Existed — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP03
Alireza Banijani came to history because he didn’t like it. That sentence is the center of everything this episode is about. The history he didn’t like was the one his teachers gave him: a list of dates and names to memorize, a subject that produced grades rather than curiosity, something to pass rather than something to experience. The history he eventually found was different — it arrived in the form of a story, the same way a good novel arrives, pulling you in before you’ve decided whether you’re interested.
In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — Banijani traces the entire arc from a childhood of amateur home video filmmaking, through a stint in a university theater group, through a long detour through journalism and encyclopedia research, to the winter evening in 2017 when his wife put on a Channel B episode while snow was falling, and everything quietly clicked into place.
The Boy Who Made Films for His Nieces and Nephews
Alireza grew up in a traditional religious household where video was forbidden and music was strictly monitored. Which is, he notes with a laugh, exactly the kind of environment that produces someone obsessed with video. He borrowed family camcorders, cast his nieces and nephews in homemade productions — including, he says, fully scripted multi-scene films with proper story structure — and spent every hour of available internet connection time exploring a digital landscape that his teachers warned was a road to damnation.
The consistent thread, across all of it, was an attraction to the medium itself rather than to any specific content. Not film because he loved film, not writing because he loved writing — but the experience of taking a message and sending it through a channel, in whatever form that channel happened to take.
“I was always looking for a way to say something,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily have something specific to say yet. I just knew I wanted to say it.”
The Snowy Evening That Started Everything
The encounter with podcasting that changed his trajectory was, like most such encounters, entirely accidental. He had been married about a year. It was winter, the first snow of the season. His wife Marnoush was looking for a song by Pouran — a classic called “Snow Has Come” — found it on a Bluetooth speaker, and when the song ended, an episode of Channel B began to play from the same session. Alireza looked up and saw that the episode wasn’t five or ten minutes, the usual length of a SoundCloud track. He noted it and kept going back.
From there: weeks of following the Channel B back-catalog, the discovery that a Persian podcast ecosystem existed that he had no idea about, a growing realization that what he had been looking for — a medium that could accommodate language, story, research, and voice — was sitting right there, waiting for someone who was willing to commit to it seriously.
Why He Didn’t Build a Podcast About Iran
When Banijani eventually connected with Ali Bandari — by leaving a comment under a tweet, receiving a direct message asking about his language ability and interests, and finding himself on a half-hour phone call that changed the shape of his next several years — the first question Bandari asked was: what subject would you follow even if you weren’t building anything from it?
The answer was history. Specifically world history — because, Alireza explains, he was studying Iranian history in graduate school and felt it was too important to him to treat as podcast material. A podcast built on curiosity and structured as an exploration can do great damage to a subject that deserves sustained depth. Iranian history, he felt, needed its own dedicated podcast — not a series of episodes where the host learns and moves on, but something built by someone willing to go all the way in.
For the same reason, he argues, all of his episodes are ultimately about Iran. He quotes the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce: all history is contemporary history. When you look at the past from a specific place and time, with a specific set of concerns, you are inevitably looking for what that past says about now. The samurai episodes, the Roman republic, the Athenian city-state: all of it is Banijani looking at the world from Tehran, in 2024, trying to understand something about the conditions he is living in.
“I’m not looking for a lesson,” he says. “I’m not sure history works that way. But history, like a good story, can make you stop and ask why — and that question is worth something, regardless of whether you find the answer.”
History Is Not a Set of Facts. It Is a Battlefield of Narratives.
One of the episode’s most intellectually rich passages concerns the nature of historical truth itself. Banijani draws on E.H. Carr’s analogy from What Is History?: traditional historians imagine themselves as detectives retrieving fish from the ocean and laying them on a table — the fish are the facts, they’re there for anyone to pick up. But what Carr argues is that it’s the historian who decides which facts get illuminated at all. They are standing in front of a vast dark ocean of forgetting, pointing a flashlight at whatever they’ve decided to look at, and calling that light “history.”
Banijani takes this seriously not as a reason for relativism but as a reason for intellectual honesty. He reads multiple sources for every episode specifically to hear multiple narratives in conflict. His role isn’t to adjudicate between them and declare the winner. It’s to follow the narrative that feels most honest to him, flag the alternatives, and give his audience the friction that genuine historical disagreement produces.
“History by itself is a mess,” he says. “Just like everyday life. Daily life doesn’t have a plot. A historian comes along, points a flashlight, and what they illuminate becomes a story. The skill is knowing where to point the light — and being honest that it’s your light, not the sun.”
Ninety Hours for One Episode
The process Banijani describes for building a single Paragraph episode is, by any measure, staggering. For each episode of roughly one hour, he estimates approximately ninety to one hundred and ten hours of total production time. The Samurai series — six hours of finished audio — likely required somewhere in the range of six hundred hours of work.
The process moves in distinct phases. First, he surveys available sources and builds the rough architecture of the narrative — identifying the major stations of the story, the key figures, the moments where the history pivots. From that architecture he reads deeply across four or five books, typically in English and Persian, supplemented now with AI-assisted source summarization. He produces a first draft that might run to thirty thousand words for an episode that will ultimately be nine thousand. Then a second pass of cutting and sharpening. Then a draft that goes to two trusted readers — long-term friends with backgrounds in literary criticism — who read independently and return comments. A final revision. Then reading through the text for performance: marking where emphasis falls, where pace should slow, where a question should be held in the air rather than immediately answered.
“I write everything down first,” he says. “Every word that I say on the recording exists in a script. What changes between the script and the recording is the performance — the weight I give each sentence, the breath before a name, the decision to let something land before moving forward.”
The Samurai as a Personal Obsession
One of the most interesting revelations of the episode is how a specific episode series gets chosen. Banijani had spent several seasons working through a loose timeline of world civilizations. When he produced a series on Japan, the samurai section ended before he felt finished with the subject — he had promised more and knew he wasn’t ready to deliver it. The idea stayed with him for years. When AI tools began making his research process feasible for longer and more technically demanding topics (five specialized English-language books on samurai culture and feudal Japan, none of which had been translated into Persian), the series finally became possible.
What compelled him to the samurai wasn’t the martial spectacle. It was the strangeness of a social structure he couldn’t intuitively understand — a world in which a class of warriors gradually eclipsed the imperial institution it was meant to serve, bound by codes of conduct so complete they governed how a person died as much as how they lived. He found in that strangeness the same thing he looks for in all his subjects: something about how power works, how institutions form, how human beings make sense of their obligations to one another, that he couldn’t see directly in the present but could see in relief against the past.
The Persian Podcasting Landscape — What’s Missing and Why
The episode’s most pointed conversation concerns the broader ecosystem that Persian podcasting exists within — or fails to exist within. Banijani estimates that Paragraph has somewhere around 200,000 listeners, with four million total downloads across thirty-six episodes. Average listens per episode: approximately 110,000. By any honest international comparison, these are extraordinary numbers for a single-person operation producing long-form narrative history content in a minority global language.
But the infrastructure around those numbers is almost entirely absent. There is no reliable sponsorship marketplace. There is no talent representation. There are no live event organizers. There is no mechanism connecting podcasters who have large, loyal audiences to the companies that could benefit from reaching them. The result is a cottage industry of passionate individuals producing high-quality work in conditions that are, in almost every respect, hostile to long-term professional sustainability.
“The golden age of introducing Persian-language listeners to podcasting as a medium is probably over,” Banijani says. “What hasn’t arrived yet is the moment when podcasting becomes genuinely embedded in Persian cultural life — when someone says ‘I’m going to the Paragraph live event’ the same way they’d say ‘I’m going to the theater.’ That moment is still ahead.”
What’s currently standing in its way, he argues, is a combination of short-term thinking endemic to the culture (planning for tomorrow because the day after tomorrow is too uncertain), the absence of intermediary institutions that could connect creators with businesses at scale, and a resistance inside the podcasting community itself to the idea that what they do is something that can and should be organized into a sustainable industry rather than an artisan practice.
On Stopping — and Coming Back
One of the most candid passages in the conversation is Banijani’s account of going dark for two years, following the events of 2022. He doesn’t describe it as a decision. He describes sitting down to write and discovering that a full working day had passed and he had produced perhaps fifteen minutes of useful concentration. He gave himself permission, in retrospect, to have been unable to work. He also acknowledges, without ceremony, that two years is a long time to ask an audience to wait, and that he lost listeners in that period who had every right to go elsewhere.
“I’ve decided to stop expecting the external situation to get better,” he says, “and to start asking what I can do — with what I have, where I am, now. That doesn’t make the uncertainty easier. It just stops me waiting for a permission that isn’t coming.”
He frames this as a form of active resilience: not endurance for its own sake, but the project of building meaning inside a present that is often opaque and overwhelming. He returns to curiosity — to the list of interests and subjects that have accumulated in the background while he’s been building Paragraph, things he wants to understand not because they’ll produce content but because not understanding them is its own kind of gap. That practice of staying engaged with the unknown, he says, is what has kept him functional.
The Cozy Corner — A Co-Working Space With White Noise
Asked where his own cozy corner is, Banijani’s answer is specific and slightly surprising: a shared co-working space, not his apartment. He is, constitutionally, a night person — best working hours naturally falling between eleven in the evening and four in the morning. Marriage changed that, and the adjustment to being a morning person took time and required a sustained practice of gradually pulling his late bedtime earlier. What finally helped was white noise: a co-working space with the ambient sounds of other people — conversations, the hum of fans, the low-level energy of a room in use — that provided enough sensory background to keep his mind anchored without distracting it.
He can’t work at home. The space matters. He works when there’s motion around him, even if he’s not part of it.
A Dedication — To Parents Who Don’t Know About the Podcast
When Hossein asks who Banijani would like to dedicate the conversation to, the answer catches him slightly off-guard, and then: his parents, who still don’t know Paragraph exists.
He tells the story of coming close to telling his mother once — they were driving to a trip up north, she had been listening to a podcast episode in the car, and for a moment he thought: this is the moment. But the conversation shifted, and the moment passed, and it has stayed unclosed since. He has been doing this work — theater in university, short films on borrowed cameras, journalism, encyclopedia research, seven years of a podcast that four million people have listened to — mostly in a kind of affectionate secrecy, out of a habit of keeping his creative life separate from a family context that he wasn’t sure would know what to do with it.
“I dedicate this to them,” he says, “because they don’t know what I do. And I should tell them.”
Hossein’s response is immediate: tell them. Even if the feedback is muted, even if they don’t fully understand — the telling itself is the point. Banijani nods. He knows. It’s on the list of things he keeps meaning to do.
