That Door in the Wardrobe Had Opened for Me
Khashayar Noor on Fandom Podcasting, the Economics of Fan Communities, and the Institutional Gap Nobody Is Filling — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP09
I’ve made less money from the industrial engineering degree I got than I have from Harry Potter. Khashayar Noor says this without hesitation, and without irony, because it is simply what happened. What his family called a waste of time — comparing news headlines on Mugglenet and The Leaky Cauldron, building friendships in English-language Harry Potter forums before he could properly speak the language, spending hours on a dial-up internet connection that occupied the family phone line so relentlessly they eventually gave him his own — turned out to be the origin of his entire professional life.
In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — Khashayar traces that origin with unusual honesty: from the moment he first encountered the word “podcast” through a Harry Potter fan site in roughly 2004 or 2005, through a failed first attempt at a World Cup podcast distributed through a Telegram bot, to the moment a Channel B episode about the Menendez Brothers shook something loose and he retrieved a dream he’d set aside for ten or fifteen years.
How Harry Potter Taught Him English Without Trying
Khashayar’s entry into the online world came through fandom — and in that sense, the fandom didn’t just give him content to care about. It gave him a language. When he was a teenager, Persian-language Harry Potter coverage was sparse: a few fan sites with official news, nothing like the granular, constantly updated discussion happening on Mugglenet and The Leaky Cauldron.
So he read those instead. Not because he was studying English. Because he needed to know what was happening in the Harry Potter world faster than the official translation would deliver it, and comparison was the only tool available. He’d read the same piece of news on two different English sites and work out the meaning from the overlap. He found that it worked. The forums came next — long, patient exchanges about specific plot points and fan theories with people from around the world, some of whom became his first non-Iranian friendships. He followed them from the forums to Yahoo Messenger to Facebook to Instagram. Some of those connections are still active today.
“That door in the wardrobe had opened for me,” he says. “And I’d entered a bigger world — with interesting people I could actually talk to.”
BioKast and the Note That’s Still on His Phone
The trigger wasn’t a plan. It was a specific episode of Channel B — the one about the Menendez Brothers, two sons who killed their parents in a case that captivated American media through the 1990s. What moved Khashayar wasn’t just the content: it was the moment the actual recording of one of the brothers calling the police was played on air. The production decision, the fact that you could do this with audio, that you could put someone in the exact moment of that phone call — that was what cracked something open.
He sat down afterward and made a note on his phone: ten or fifteen topic ideas, everything he might want to build content around. The note is still there. He’s ticked off most of them. Two that appeared early: technology, and Harry Potter. BioKast — a Persian-language podcast about the lives of famous people — came from a specific logic: famous people already have fan communities who want to hear about them. Cover Elon Musk, and Elon Musk’s existing audience becomes potential Musk episode listeners who might stay for the next episode.
The first BioKast episode, about Elon Musk, performed well. The second, about J.K. Rowling, also performed well — and with the Harry Potter angle, the circle closed. He started with a World Cup podcast first, in a Telegram bot, in 2018. It didn’t satisfy him and didn’t find an audience. BioKast was the project that stayed.
Lumos — Building a Fandom Community Around a Fandom
The second project, Lumos, came from a different direction: when Khashayar first opened a podcast app and searched for Harry Potter (it was, he says, the first thing he searched), he found a rich international ecosystem — chapter-by-chapter analyses, episode-by-episode breakdowns, Fantastic Beasts coverage. That ecosystem didn’t exist in Persian. He approached the team behind the Dementor website, one of the long-established Persian Harry Potter fan communities, and proposed doing it together.
What distinguishes Lumos from BioKast in his own working life is the mode: BioKast is solitary research, one voice telling a life story from beginning to end. Lumos is a group of friends sitting around a table, going through the world of Harry Potter season by season, chapter by chapter, with the texture of people who have been in this world for twenty years and are finding new things in it. He describes the two projects as different kinds of exercise: the discipline of working alone, and the pleasure of working together.
The Economics of Fandom Content — What Actually Works
The section of the conversation Khashayar finds most underdiscussed is fandom economics — the mechanisms for making fan content financially sustainable, which he and his collaborators have tried in almost every conceivable configuration.
Merchandise: yes, they’ve done it. Exclusive subscription content: they’ve discussed it, haven’t fully implemented it. Events: yes, multiple times — and this is where something unexpected happened. They held group screenings of Harry Potter films. Films that most of their audience had already seen. Films available on streaming. Films people have watched at home many times.
“And they came anyway,” he says. “Because they’d never seen them on a proper screen. And because two hundred or three hundred people who all care about this thing don’t often get to be in the same room.”
For some films, they had to hold multiple screenings because the first was full before they could find a larger venue. The economic logic was less about selling tickets than about making a community visible to itself: listeners who had only existed as download numbers became people who could look around a theater and see how many others shared their connection to the same material. That visibility, he says, is what people paid for. He genuinely can’t understand why more fandom content creators haven’t pursued it.
A Space in Persian That Essentially Doesn’t Exist
Khashayar’s frustration — articulated directly and without defensiveness — is that Persian fandom content production is almost completely underdeveloped relative to the obvious opportunity.
He describes watching the audience for the serialized audio adaptation of a 1970s Persian novel surge to 70,000-80,000 listeners on Castbox despite poor audio quality, simply because the novel had an existing fan community and the series rekindled it. He describes how Bidad-e-Khamar, a book that circulated illegally through his generation when they were teenagers, now has an official adaptation in production — and how the content opportunities around it are almost entirely untouched. Reviews episode by episode. Character analysis with sociologists and psychologists. Archive reporting on the cultural climate when the book was first read. Interviews with people whose first encounter with the book was a formative life moment. All of it available. Almost none of it being made.
“I’m genuinely surprised,” he says, “that more people aren’t going in this direction. The audience is there. The material is there. The production is easier than most formats, because if you’re already inside the fandom, you already have the information.”
He points to the broader horizon: international networks now routinely produce official companion podcasts for their major series, interviewing cast members, going behind the scenes, building the fan community for the show as part of the launch strategy. The Persian version of this infrastructure essentially doesn’t exist. He thinks it will, and believes any podcast creator who builds in that direction now is entering a nearly empty space with real demand waiting.
The Castbox Decision — A Cautionary Case Study
One of the most pointed moments in the conversation is Khashayar and Hossein’s shared postmortem on the Persian podcasting community’s collective embrace of Castbox several years ago. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable bet: a platform with comment functionality that other podcast apps lacked, a way to build community around content that Apple Podcasts didn’t offer. Persian podcasters promoted it. Audiences migrated to it. Numbers grew.
What those numbers produced, over time, was investment capital for Castbox — two rounds of funding that the platform could point to because of Persian-language engagement. What it did not produce was sustainable benefit for the Persian podcasting ecosystem. The audience that built up on Castbox became an audience measured in a metric that international sponsors and partners don’t recognize. Persian podcast content became associated with a platform with minimal global market share. The word “Castbox” became, for a portion of the Persian-speaking world, synonymous with “podcast” itself — meaning a generation of potential listeners understood the format through a single platform rather than the ecosystem.
“The damage,” Khashayar says, “isn’t reversible in any simple way. The label is set. The association is made.”
He uses this not as an indictment of anyone’s intentions but as evidence for his core argument about collective action in the Persian podcasting space: decisions made informally, without structured coordination, can have lasting consequences that no individual creator can correct alone.
The Disagreement That Doesn’t Resolve
The episode contains an extended, genuine, and unresolved disagreement between Khashayar and Hossein about whether the Persian podcasting community should be building institutional structures — a guild, a professional body, a shared framework with defined membership criteria.
Hossein argues for it: without some form of collective organization, Persian podcasting remains a field of isolated individual voices without leverage, without industry-standard pricing frameworks, without any mechanism for coordinated response to platform decisions or regulatory pressure. He describes reaching out to a media outlet about a problematic article as a single person and achieving a result; he suggests a coordinated body of creators could achieve more, faster, across more of the problems that affect all of them.
Khashayar’s opposition is principled and personal. He is the administrator of a Telegram group with four or five hundred Persian podcasters — and every time institutional structure has been proposed inside that group, it has been voted down. His concern is not hypothetical: any framework with defined membership criteria and institutional benefits creates, by definition, an inside and an outside. The people who benefit are those who meet the criteria. The people who don’t — including anyone who would have decided not to enter podcasting at all if the barriers had been higher — are excluded.
“When I wanted to start making content,” he says, “I’d set this aside for years because I thought the only path was through national broadcasting. The thing that made podcasting possible for me was that the door was open. I don’t want to be part of anything that makes that door harder to walk through.”
Hossein pushes back: a self-organized structure built by and for podcasters is categorically different from a regulatory body imposed from above. Khashayar remains unconvinced — not about the goal, but about the guarantee. Every institution creates friction for people outside it. He can’t be certain that friction won’t replicate the same problem at a different level. They don’t reach a resolution. Khashayar acknowledges that the conversation matters; Hossein acknowledges that Khashayar’s concerns are real. The disagreement is left standing, which is perhaps the most honest outcome available.
What He Wants Instead of More Growth
When Hossein asks how Khashayar thinks about the future of Persian podcasting, his answer centers on a distinction he’s thought carefully about: he wants more impact, not necessarily more scale. He points to the way the 2024 American election revealed podcast influence as a cultural force — a handful of long-form conversations that moved significant portions of the electorate in ways that traditional media didn’t predict and couldn’t match.
Persian podcasting hasn’t had that moment. It hasn’t yet produced a cultural event that only podcasting could have produced — a conversation, a piece of audio, a shared listening experience that changed something measurable. He believes it can. He believes the 140 million Persian speakers worldwide, most of whom have never heard a Persian podcast, are potential listeners waiting for something that’s worth their time. And he believes that the combination of improving production quality, AI-assisted distribution, and a growing base of sophisticated fandom and narrative content will produce that moment.
“I’m much more interested in impact than in growth,” he says. “If the impact is real, the growth follows. If the growth happens without impact, you have numbers and nothing else.”
The Cozy Corner — Behind the Microphone
Asked where his own cozy corner is, Khashayar’s answer is specific and a little surprising given how he started: behind a microphone. He is entirely relaxed there now. He wasn’t at the beginning — the first episode he ever tried to record, he cried and couldn’t speak. He wanted to do it and couldn’t do it. He sat in front of the equipment he’d chosen to use and nothing came out.
That version of himself no longer exists. He can sit in front of a microphone now without being aware of it, the way you stop noticing a room you’ve sat in many times. The microphone is just there. He talks to whoever is across from him. The recording happens.
A Dedication
Khashayar’s dedication goes to three things at once, and he names them without hesitating. First, his father — who listens to BioKast, who has been following the podcast from the start, and who Khashayar describes as one of the reasons he’s able to do this at all. Second, his wife. Third, J.K. Rowling — named with full awareness of the complexity around her, but named honestly, because her work was the door that opened the path to everything else: the language, the community, the podcast format, the content that became five years of work.
“There have been moments,” he says, “when things were very hard, and I went back to the world of Harry Potter. When I first opened a podcast app and didn’t know what to search for, that’s what I searched for. It gives me a sense of connection when I don’t have one anywhere else.”
