We Haven’t Been Late by a Single Minute

Marzieh Sadeghi & Amin Ardani on Fikshon, Ghessehgu, and Building Two Podcasts From a Wedding Loan — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP05

It started with a tweet. In the spring of 2019, Marzieh Sadeghi — who had studied Persian narrative literature and was running a small literary criticism session at a cultural center — posted the flyer for the event on Twitter. Amin Ardani, a software engineer going through a stretch of routine he describes as simply: every morning, work. Every night, home. Nothing interesting happening. He saw the post, went.

He sat beside Marzieh at the roundtable. People discussed stream of consciousness. He didn’t know what stream of consciousness meant, and Googled it discreetly on his phone. When the session ended, he left without saying anything. The next day, Marzieh put out a tweet: who was that person sitting next to me? Why did you leave without a word?

He replied. They found out they’d both been drawn to podcasting through the same gateway — Channel B’s book summaries — and that they had complementary gaps: she had the narrative sense, the literary training, the instinct for how a story should be shaped; he had the technical knowledge and the energy to figure out how to build something. By June of that year, they recorded their first episode. By the time this conversation with Hossein Nasiri was recorded, they had produced more than three hundred episodes across two podcasts, left their day jobs, married each other, and never been late to a publishing deadline by a single minute.

The First Episode Was About a Doll

The initial concept for Fikshon was not true crime. It was stranger than that: events that don’t fit inside human logic. Cases where cause and effect seems to break down. Events that, as Amin describes it, you can think through carefully and still not find any explanation that makes sense. The name Fikshon came from this premise — it was supposed to be about things that seemed fictional but were real, things where the rules appeared not to apply.

Their first episode was about Annabelle — the cursed doll, the Warren case, the series of accidents and deaths the museum exhibit has been associated with. They found a recording studio in Seyyed Khandan, spent two or three takes getting the delivery right, went home, and waited. Amin’s benchmark was a hundred listens. If it gets a thousand, he told Marzieh, we’ll have done something remarkable. Within twenty-four hours the episode had been listened to three thousand times. Within a few days, five thousand.

“I said: can you believe this is happening? Can you believe we actually started doing this?”

The second episode was about a man who connected with a stranger online, agreed to be eaten by him, and participated willingly in his own killing. They’d had that episode half-written the same long weekend they wrote Annabelle. It was the one they could never publish on YouTube — only the audio version survived, because the subject matter didn’t allow for any visual format.

The Ethical Line That Changed Everything

The pivot away from unexplained events and toward true crime was driven not by audience numbers — though the numbers were encouraging — but by a pair of uncomfortable incidents that arrived at roughly the same time.

The first: a comment from a middle school student saying their class had been listening to Fikshon together. Marzieh and Amin had labelled every episode explicitly as unsuitable for listeners under fifteen. But there it was.

The second: a message from someone who said that an event from the episode they’d been listening to — one of the unexplained, possibly supernatural stories sent in by a listener — had also happened to them personally. And they were thinking about consulting a دعانویس. A faith healer. A person who writes amulets.

“We hadn’t promoted faith healing,” Amin says. “We’d told the story. But the story had led someone there anyway. And if we can’t guarantee what a story does once it leaves our hands, what are we responsible for?”

Both of them describe the decision to stop the supernatural content less as a strategic pivot and more as a genuine ethical reckoning. Marzieh traces it back to the difference between literary fiction — where she’d been trained to believe the author has no moral obligation, that a novel isn’t supposed to teach — and content production, where the scale of distribution and the nature of the medium forced a different kind of accountability. When you are reaching audiences of thousands and the content moves people toward dعانویسی, you are part of that chain even if you didn’t intend to be.

The category of stories they settled into — real criminal cases, sourced from documented events, with verifiable outcomes — offered something the supernatural format didn’t: they could guarantee the accuracy of what they were saying. The case had already been adjudicated. The evidence existed. There was no risk of having reproduced someone’s unverifiable ghost story as though it were established fact.

The Ethical Code — Written and Unwritten

Both Marzieh and Amin articulate a detailed and genuinely thought-through code of content ethics, pieced together over years of production. Marzieh’s code includes: no pseudoscience, no pseudoscientific claims, no superstition, no content that is sexist or racist, no content that offers detailed instructions for harm. On the last point, she describes choosing not to name specific drugs or describe specific combinations even when the source material included that information. The international journalistic code for reporting on self-harm broadly is her reference: don’t name the method. If the method is already widely available online, the journalism standard still says: don’t add another source.

Amin’s code overlaps and extends. He adds his personal definition of what he actually considers yellow journalism — not sensational content about famous people or crime, as it’s often characterized in the Persian content sphere, but something more specific: trend-chasing. Producing content whose subject is determined entirely by what happened in the last forty-eight hours rather than by what you actually have something to offer. Surfing audience emotion rather than developing a subject.

“I find it unethical to exploit the fact that an audience’s emotions are running high,” he says. “Even if they want it. Even if they’re asking for it. That’s not a service I want to provide.”

He points out that this position has cost them measurable growth. When major events have happened in Iran in recent years, audiences have looked to the platforms they follow for reaction, commentary, commentary-adjacent commentary. Fikshon and Ghessehgu don’t provide it. Some of what gets labeled as yellow journalism in the Persian-language content world, Marzieh argues, is simply popular content — and popular content is not inherently the same as harmful content. Virginia Woolf’s point: without mass market art, there is no meaning to elite art. The issue is not whether content is widely liked; the issue is whether it causes harm. Those are separate questions.

The Wooden Box and the Wedding Loan

The production history of Fikshon is, in Amin’s telling, a comedy of improvisation. The first episodes were recorded in a studio in Seyyed Khandan — a religious recording studio, full of the equipment and atmosphere of devotional music production. Then a second studio, across Tehran from where Marzieh lived at the time, with multiple takes and coordination costs. Then: they got married, moved in together, and it no longer made sense to pay for and travel to a studio when the two of them lived in the same apartment.

Amin built an acoustic box from wood — thick acoustic foam on the outside, egg-carton foam on the inside, just large enough to fit a microphone stand and a chair. When there were two of them, they both squeezed in. There was no ventilation. They put a lamp inside to see. The sound, he says, was excellent. He wouldn’t recommend it.

The equipment that replaced the box — camera, microphone, everything needed for video and audio production — was purchased with money from their marriage loan. They still use it. When the production became stable enough that they were generating income, they began discussing whether to hire people. They didn’t. Marzieh produces the text and records; Amin handles editing, post-production, and distribution. Her brother Muhammad Javad handles some translation. The three of them have been doing over three hundred episodes without a formal team.

“I get body pains when we don’t have work,” Amin says. “We had a week once where we were ahead of schedule. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

The Distribution Question — and What Fikshon Got Wrong

The clearest strategic error they identify, looking back, is having built Fikshon’s promotional presence almost entirely on Twitter. In the early years, that worked — Twitter was the platform where early Persian podcasting happened, and the format rewards exactly the kind of short, shareable engagement that Fikshon’s subject matter produces. But Twitter’s concentration also meant Fikshon missed years of multi-platform presence.

Amin describes their content distribution rate in detail: from each episode, approximately forty pieces of content — video clips, audio clips, text posts, graphics — are produced for distribution across platforms. This is, by any measure, a substantial output. And yet a number of Persian content creators have criticized them publicly for this approach, even on YouTube, calling it excessive. His response is direct: without explanation, without multi-format presence, a podcast in 2024 does not get found. The era when quality content simply found its own audience is over, if it ever really existed.

Ghessehgu, the newer project, was launched with a different distribution philosophy from day one. Multiple platforms simultaneously, from the start. The results have been different: Reels from Ghessehgu reaching a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand views in formats that Fikshon — with its older, more single-platform architecture — has never achieved. The audiences are different on different platforms, he notes: Instagram audiences expect different content from YouTube audiences, who expect different content from podcast listeners. The content must be adapted for each, not simply cross-posted.

Ghessehgu — What the Degree Was For

The second project, Ghessehgu, emerged from a specific frustration Marzieh had been carrying for years. She had studied Persian narrative literature as an undergraduate and classical Persian literature for her master’s degree. Fikshon had given her a professional creative life, but almost none of it touched her formal training. Six years of education that had, for practical purposes, remained unused.

Amin proposed a podcast built around the classical Persian literary canon — summaries and narrations of the major epic and lyric poems, from the Shahnameh to Leili and Majnun, from Vis and Ramin to the lesser-known narrative poems of Nezami that most people have heard of without ever reading. He was also motivated by a practical observation: the potential audience for classical Persian literary content is, he believes, significantly larger than the audience for true crime. The sponsorship environment is friendlier. And the self-disclosure problem that affects true crime audiences — not everyone wants to publicly say they listen to murder cases — doesn’t exist in the same way for classical poetry.

Ghessehgu began with stories Marzieh’s grandmother had told her — folk tales, family oral tradition, the versions that vary from household to household. The visual format involves illustrated narration, with a collaborator named Shadi doing the illustration live while Marzieh tells the story. It is, she says, significantly harder to produce than Fikshon. Reading a full classical text, summarizing it, selecting the beautiful couplets, translating the emotional substance into a narration that works as audio — each episode takes one to two weeks of her time.

“I would never have done this if Amin hadn’t proposed it,” she says, “because it’s too much work to choose on your own. But I’m glad we’re doing it. There’s a kind of spiritual value here that I can’t get from anything else.”

Never Late — Not Once

The detail that Marzieh and Amin return to with something close to pride is the consistency of their publishing record. From the first episode of Fikshon to the day of this recording, they have never missed a scheduled publication date. Not by a day. Not by a single minute.

This isn’t a small thing in the Persian podcasting landscape, where irregular publishing cadence is endemic and audiences frequently lose track of shows between releases. Amin has a view about why it matters, which he frames as a structural difference between external accountability and self-accountability: when your deadline is set by someone else — an editor, a manager, a contract — you answer to that person. When you are the person who sets your own deadline, the psychology of accountability changes. Some people thrive in that structure. Many don’t.

“It’s not that I’m judging anyone,” he says. “I’m saying: know which kind of person you are before you decide to work this way.”

He adds a harder truth: the months when income drops to zero — which happens, and has happened to them during the period of this conversation — require a different kind of tolerance than a fixed salary provides. Someone who needs to know what they’ll earn each month will struggle with this model. He and Marzieh have accepted that variability as a condition of the work. That acceptance, he says, is not something you can decide to have. You either have it or you don’t.

What the Work Gave Them

The most personally direct section of the conversation is about why they left their jobs — and what they found on the other side. For Amin, the core of it is simple: in an employment relationship, you wake up and work toward someone else’s growth. When your manager grows, your manager’s visibility grows. In this work, when the subscriber count goes up, it’s your name attached to it. That difference turns out to matter enormously.

For Marzieh, it is the absence of a particular kind of distress. She describes waking up in the morning and sitting down to work without the experience of dread. She is doing something for herself. When she makes a mistake, she is answerable to herself. When she does it right, the gain is hers. She says she would not trade this for anything. She says it without qualification.

Both of them are also careful to describe what the model actually asks of you: income that is variable and sometimes zero, no system doing the planning for you, no external structure enforcing your deadlines, every creative decision carrying full weight without institutional backup. They are not prescribing this to anyone. They are describing what it has meant for them, and flagging honestly that it requires a particular temperament — and that the temperament is not superior to other temperaments, just different.

A Conversation by a Dark Road in Qeshm

Near the end of the conversation, Amin tells a small story. They were in Qeshm, walking down a dark street in Bandar Laft at night. Marzieh was talking about something — he doesn’t remember what, something related to literature — and two women were walking just ahead of them. One of the women turned around and said: I know that voice from somewhere. And then she remembered. She was Iranian-American, visiting from California. She said: I fall asleep to your voice. I listen to you from there.

He tells this because it is one of the only times in the podcast’s history that Marzieh was recognized by her voice alone, in total darkness, on an island in the Persian Gulf, by someone who had traveled from California and happened to be walking down the same street. For him, it crystallizes what the work is: a voice, in the dark, that crosses a distance neither party can fully account for.

The Cozy Corner

Marzieh’s cozy corner is the terrace of their apartment in the morning, before work. She steps outside with tea for a few minutes, and her mind clears in a way it doesn’t anywhere else. She says she often comes back in with an idea that crystallized outside. Amin knows when it’s happened: she gets a look, comes back in, and he says: I know something occurred to you out there. He goes back to his computer. She sits down and works.

Amin’s cozy corner is the desk in the morning, between seven and ten, with a large mug of coffee. He turns on music. He says he feels more creative in those hours than at any other time of day. He cannot explain why, but he’s learned not to waste the window.

A Dedication

Marzieh dedicates the conversation to the people who have passed through her life and are no longer present — those who shaped the person she became, seen and unseen — and to the listeners of Fikshon who have kept showing up, year after year, including the person who once traveled from Karaj to a podcast event at the National Library just to see her, in the months after they’d first launched, when they had almost no audience at all. She says she still thinks about that person. She says the memory still makes her feel something she can’t name. Amin dedicates his to the people who supported him when leaving his job was a risk that had no guaranteed return. Specifically: Marzieh, who said simply, when he called her to ask if they could live on his severance and unemployment insurance, yes, come out, we’ll manage. And his father — a retired government employee, someone who spent his entire career inside an institution — who said, when Amin’s mother suggested he think it over: let him come out. If he wants to work freely, let him work freely. He says he cannot repay that. He says the magnitude of that support, given without conditions, was larger than anything he can measure.