For Someone to Tell You What They’ve Never Told Anyone, You Have to First
Arash Kaviani on Ravi, the 200-Hour Episode, and the Cost of Listening Too Well — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP13
He wanted to be a singer. He spent three or four years in voice lessons and then went to the music companies. They told him they wanted a different kind of voice, or they wanted money he didn’t have. So he went to his military service instead. At night in the barracks, he would read books aloud so the other soldiers could listen. Someone asked him: why don’t you make an audiobook? He recorded his brother’s book using a wired microphone inside a cardboard box. He taught himself to edit. It got published.
And then his brother handed him a USB drive filled with Channel B episodes, and everything changed again. In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — Arash Kaviani, the creator of Ravi and co-creator of Chahrahe Computer, traces the full arc: from a blind man standing up at the end of Ali Bandari’s live show to thank him for giving the visually impaired community something to listen to, to a podcast that Arash estimates costs roughly two hundred hours of work per episode and currently doesn’t come close to generating enough revenue to justify it.
The Live Show He Got Into on a Cancelled Registration
The specific moment that tipped Arash from passive listener to active builder is one of the most vivid origin stories in the whole series. He had registered for Ali Bandari’s live event, received a confirmation message, and then an email arrived saying the registration had been cancelled due to a technical problem. Arash had already printed the confirmation form. He went anyway.
At the door he showed the printout and said: I received no cancellation. I don’t have anything. And since the registration had been free and some confirmed attendees hadn’t shown up, he got in. He sat through the event thinking about what he might be able to make. Then the panel discussion began, and a visually impaired man in the front row stood up and thanked Bandari for giving his community something to listen to. Arash describes watching Bandari look down, then look back up with red eyes. He cried. Arash cried.
“That moment,” he says, “pushed me toward making a podcast.”
In that same panel he met Omid Sedighfar, connected with Bandari himself afterward, and left with a plan: first build something simple with his brother to learn the mechanics of publishing — that became Chahrahe Computer — and then build the thing he actually wanted to make.
Why Ordinary, Unknown People
Ravi’s premise is deliberately and specifically not biography in the traditional sense. Arash is not interested in reconstructing the public record of famous people. He is interested in lived experience — in the private texture of an ordinary life that contains, somewhere in it, something that once made the hair on his arms stand up.
The story that seeded the concept was one he had heard in a class two or three years before Ravi existed: the story of a person whose act of forgiveness — forgiving a family member — redirected the entire course of their life and untangled patterns that had seemed fixed. He sat with that story for years, thought about it often, and when he was ready to build something, that was the story he started with.
“Oh my God — can forgiving someone really affect a person’s life that much? I’d heard that story years before. It made the hair on my arms stand up. I thought: if it did that to me, maybe it could do that to someone else too.”
Three Voice Notes and a Decision
After the first two episodes — both about people Arash knew personally — the audience began submitting stories. He built a process: anyone who wants to propose their story sends three short voice messages with specific prompts. No written text. Voice only, because Arash needs to hear how a person speaks, not how they write. He needs to sense whether a connection is possible.
Out of those three messages, if something moves him, he arranges a conversation. If the initial contact doesn’t open something for him, the story doesn’t proceed — however remarkable it might be by other measures. He is explicit that not every story belongs in Ravi specifically, and that the filter is not the quality of the story but whether it’s the kind of story he can carry.
He has tried more than once to bring someone else in to find and write stories. It has never worked. The process is not transferable. He says this with mild frustration about himself, understanding exactly what it costs him in scale and sustainability — and still unable to change it.
Four Hours to Forty Hours
For stories that pass the initial filter, the interview phase begins. Arash estimates that the shortest interviews he’s conducted for a single episode have run roughly four to five hours. The longest: thirty to forty hours, spread across multiple sessions.
He describes what those extended sessions require from the subject. Their lives get disrupted. He asks them to go back to places that are genuinely painful — not to perform pain, but because he has learned that the emotional depth of a story can only be reached by going into the difficult material directly. Many subjects have told him afterward that they said things to him they had never told their therapists. He tells them beforehand, every time: I am doing this purely to make the story better. I have no other agenda. But the conversations still go where they go.
“The reason someone tells you what they’ve never told anyone,” he says, “is that you first tell them what you’ve never told anyone.”
This is his method for creating the conditions for deep disclosure: he brings his own pain into the conversation. Not as performance, but because he has genuinely been through difficult things, and because the only way to open someone’s guard is to lower your own first. He describes this as the single most important thing he has learned across seven or eight years of conducting these interviews.
Two Hundred Hours Per Episode
Arash has calculated the total production time per episode. From first contact through final edit, he estimates approximately two hundred hours. That figure includes the initial research and outreach, the full interview sessions, the timeline construction (laying out every year of a person’s life chronologically, attaching the fragments of the story to each point), the writing of the actual script, recording, and editing.
The writing phase is where the process gets most intensive. He builds a detailed timeline in a Google Doc or Word file — from roughly age one forward, year by year, with everything from the interviews placed in sequence. From that timeline he begins writing, which is not simply assembling the information but rewriting it in his own voice, in the register his listeners know, in a way that will hold attention all the way through an episode that may run anywhere from one hour to several.
The episodes are structured non-linearly only at the very beginning, where Arash places a hook — revealing something from the middle or end of the story to anchor the listener’s attention before the linear telling begins. After that hook, everything proceeds chronologically. Listeners who know Ravi well, he notes, have learned to trust the opening: it’s there so they understand why the early parts of someone’s life matter.
The Episode That Brought Ravi to Maturity
When Hossein asks which episode he considers the most significant, Arash points to the episode about a war veteran — a man who spent two days alive inside a truck carrying corpses during the Iran-Iraq war, discovered by chance when someone heard sounds from inside the vehicle. He describes what that story did to his own understanding of the war: he had been born after the war, grown up with the institutional narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice, and the story of this man — surviving, traumatized, carrying something almost impossible to articulate — broke open a completely different register of what that war had been.
“That episode brought Ravi to maturity,” he says. “It changed my image of the war. And I think it changed how some listeners who grew up with the same image understood it too.”
The Mona Episode and the Sponsor Who Left
One of the episodes Arash describes at length is Mona — the story of a woman who married a man who later realized he didn’t want to be a man, and who helped him through that transition, including navigating his family’s resistance to it.
When that episode was in production, the existing sponsor declined to support it. They weren’t comfortable with the subject matter. Arash’s response was straightforward: he dropped the sponsor, not the episode. The story went out. He doesn’t describe this as a moral gesture so much as a practical one: he believed the episode was necessary, and he wasn’t willing to let revenue considerations determine what Ravi could say.
Stories That Haven’t Ended Yet
One of Ravi’s consistent principles is that Arash won’t tell a story whose ending hasn’t yet arrived. When someone approaches him with a compelling situation that is still actively unresolved — still in the hardest stretch, with no clear landing yet — he tells them: come back when there’s somewhere to land. A story that ends mid-crisis has no resting place, and the listener has no way to find stability in it.
“A story without a good ending hasn’t finished yet,” he says. “It still needs to keep going until it arrives somewhere.”
This principle has meant turning away or delaying stories he was genuinely drawn to, because the person was still inside the worst of their situation. He waits. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes the situation resolves in a direction he couldn’t have predicted, and the story becomes something he couldn’t have written in advance.
What Listening to Two Hundred Hours of Other People’s Lives Does to a Person
Arash flags it himself with the word “unfortunately” — though clearly half-joking. His understanding of other people has increased to a level that sometimes makes ordinary social friction more complicated to navigate. He describes a neighbor who parks in front of his building’s entrance: instead of getting angry, he finds himself looking for the story behind it. When he finally called and asked the neighbor to move the car, the man sent him a message afterward saying he’d never encountered someone with that kind of manner about it. Arash had remained curious rather than accusatory, and the neighbor couldn’t quite place it.
He also describes conversations with his wife where he finds himself gently questioning assumptions about what she would or wouldn’t be able to accept in a hypothetical future situation. Having watched, in story after story, people do things they couldn’t have predicted they were capable of — including things they once said were impossible — he has become constitutionally reluctant to close off possibilities before they arrive. His wife finds this occasionally disorienting. He finds it accurate.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “my understanding of people has increased quite a bit. Sometimes it makes a simple situation into a more complicated one.”
The Economics — Still Not Covering 200 Hours
Arash is candid about where Ravi stands financially. The podcast generates income. It doesn’t come close to justifying the time it requires. He has a small team — Layli joined as a collaborator, and the two of them work together on the production — and there is a dedicated editor. But the per-hour revenue against per-hour investment is deeply out of balance.
This hasn’t changed the output. It does mean the project runs on something other than financial logic. He describes the audience responses as a significant part of what sustains it: during the recent period of war and disruption, listeners wrote to say that Ravi had given them something to hold on to — that hearing stories of people who had gotten through harder things made their own situation feel less terminal. Those messages are not abstract to him.
The Idea That Emerged During This Conversation
One of the episode’s more spontaneous moments is the emergence of a new project concept during the conversation itself. Hossein asks Arash about the potential for taking Ravi’s methodology — the deep, multi-session biographical interview, the careful construction of a narrative that reveals the human story behind an institutional history — into organizational contexts. Corporate oral history. Sound documentaries built from the lived experiences of the people inside a company, rather than its official communications.
Arash hadn’t articulated this idea before, but it clearly lands. The logic is natural: everything he has learned about drawing out the stories people don’t normally tell could be applied to the stories organizations carry but never surface. He leaves the conversation with the idea still in formation — something between a new service line for Ravi and a separate project entirely.
The Cozy Corner — After Midnight, Before Roz
Asked where his own cozy corner is, Arash’s answer has a timestamp and a caveat. The room after midnight, when everyone is asleep and no notifications come. That’s when his best work happens — when the silence is genuine and the phone has gone quiet and he is simply inside the problem of a story. He adds the caveat: these days, with a new baby daughter named Roz, he rarely reaches that moment. She calls him away from it, and he goes.
A Dedication
Arash dedicates the conversation to all of the people who have trusted him with their stories — who have sat with him for five, ten, twenty, forty hours, gone back into difficult territory, told him things they’d never told anyone, and allowed those things to become episodes that strangers listen to. He says the word “unfortunately” again here, too: the income from Ravi doesn’t compensate them for what they gave him. He wishes it did.
