There Is No Algorithm — Only People

Saman Dadmandian on Adamizad, Hidden Motivations, and Building a Podcast That Breaks Every Rule — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP06

Two wars. An internet blackout lasting weeks. The events of Dey and Bahman. Three weeks of near-total shutdown. In those seven months, a podcast with no famous guests, no visible host, and no images of its participants was listened to nearly two million times across fifteen episodes, and built an audience of several hundred thousand people. Adamizad — which translates roughly as “Human Being” — is, by any conventional standard, the wrong podcast to have gone viral.

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — Saman Dadmandian explains how this happened, and what he thinks it reveals not just about podcasting, but about the consistent and predictable mechanisms underneath all of it. His central argument is simple: there is no algorithm. There are only people — and people haven’t changed.

A Podcast Born From Three Years of Feeling Bad

Adamizad did not begin as a strategy. It began, Dadmandian says, with a long personal period he describes carefully — not as clinical depression, since he has no official diagnosis, but as roughly three to three and a half years, from approximately 2019 through 2021, of simply not feeling well. He started psychoanalytic therapy during this period. He discovered that hearing other people’s life stories helped. He began to understand, concretely, how much it matters to know you are not the only one in whatever situation you’re in.

His original Instagram page, which he’d been running since around 2014 under the name Self-Made, had started in the inspirational content space. It shifted over time as his own perspective shifted. By the time he was ready to build Adamizad, the organizing idea had become: what if ordinary, anonymous people came on and spoke without censorship about the most difficult parts of their lives? Not celebrities with happy endings, not influencers with redemption arcs — just people, from childhood to now, connecting the dots.

“In real life,” he says, “you can have a difficult childhood, a harder adolescence, and a bad ending. That’s also a human life. Nobody promised a good ending here.”

The Color Gray Was Deliberate

The name the podcast almost had was Contrast — because life is not black or white. When Dadmandian eventually settled on Adamizad, the reasoning was similar: the person whose life starts badly and ends well is a human being. The person whose life starts well and ends badly is also a human being. The person whose life starts badly and continues that way — also a human being. The gray palette that dominates the show’s visual identity was a deliberate signal of this refusal to impose a moral arc on other people’s experiences.

He compares what happens in each episode to a compressed version of several years of psychoanalytic therapy: a guest who has spent five or six years in analysis, processing their history layer by layer, comes and tells the condensed version in one or two hours. The dots get connected. Not all of them — but enough to produce a picture that neither the guest nor the listener had fully seen before.

Identification, Not Voyeurism

When Hossein asks what he thinks drives the audience’s connection to the show, Dadmandian’s answer centers on identification — and is backed up by the comment sections. After episodes about controlling or perfectionist mothers, he says, you find literally hundreds of comments that begin with: my mother. After episodes about violent or suspicious fathers, the same. People recognize their own lives inside stories told by strangers who happen to share the same wound.

But he also notices a second, darker category of listener: the ones who come not to identify but to feel relief. To read about someone whose situation is worse than theirs and experience what he calls — he’s clearly thought about this carefully — a form of gratitude. They don’t comment with empathy. They comment to say: at least I have it better. He doesn’t judge this. He finds it interesting. It is also, he notes, a form of connection to the human condition — just from a different direction.

“I throw walnuts at the wall and watch how they crack,” he says. “I predicted four or five reactions. Then I get eight. Then ten. Those are the ones I’m curious about.”

The Algorithm Is the Human Being

The podcast’s growth without any of the conventional strategies — no celebrity guests, no high-production video, no famous host — leads Hossein to the obvious question: what actually drove this? Dadmandian’s answer is his central thesis, and he returns to it throughout the conversation in multiple forms.

He rejects the framework of “Instagram’s algorithm” as it’s typically discussed. There is no Instagram algorithm, he says. There is the algorithm of human beings — and that algorithm has been running for much longer than any social platform. Fifty years ago something went viral in a newspaper. Certain television programs emptied streets. Music spread. The tool has changed each time. The consumer on the other end has always been the same creature, with the same needs, the same hidden motivations, and the same patterns of attention.

He points to a specific example: a two-minute video clip from one of the podcast’s episodes reached four million views on Instagram, and directly measurable in the data, the listen count on that episode tripled and then stayed elevated for all subsequent episodes. The clip worked not because it followed a content formula but because it cut off at precisely the moment when the listener needed to know what happened next. Where you stop matters more than where you start.

“You need a hook at the beginning,” he says. “But the end is more important. Where do you release the audience? You want to leave them between earth and sky — suspended — asking: then what?”

Hidden Motivations — The Real Engine of Attention

One of the most developed ideas in the conversation is what Dadmandian calls hidden motivations — the actual reasons people consume content, which are almost never the stated reasons. He uses an example from his commercial work: a running club called Monopoly, which he worked with on content strategy. The obvious reason people join a running club is fitness. But when he looked at the actual behavior of the community, the overwhelming draw was social: people joined to make friends.

When he produced content that spoke to the making-friends motivation rather than the fitness motivation, the numbers were categorically different. The same principle runs through everything he does. When he’s working with a business owner, he asks: who is actually consuming this product, and what is the motivation they would never say out loud? Not the one on the package — the real one. Content built toward the stated motivation competes with every other piece of content about that topic. Content built toward the hidden motivation has almost no competition, because most producers never bother to find it.

The Persona Problem — Who Are You Actually Talking To?

Dadmandian is explicit about having designed Adamizad’s audience from the beginning, before recording a single episode. He knew who he was building for — and it turned out to be correct: around eighty percent of the listeners are women. His explanation is two-part: women are more comfortable talking about emotions and inner experience, which makes them more likely to be guests, and they’re more likely to engage with content about self-knowledge and psychological depth.

He describes the value of knowing your audience persona not just for production decisions but for social strategy: if you know exactly who your listener is, you know where they are on Instagram, what they stop to look at, what makes them leave a comment rather than just watching and moving on. Content strategy follows from persona clarity — not the other way around. Most podcasters, he argues, design the content first and hope to discover the audience later. The audience, he says, should come first.

Organic Is Not a Formula — It’s a Consequence

When Hossein presses on whether there’s a formula for organic growth that others can replicate, Dadmandian pushes back on the premise itself. He has watched — and produced — content for accounts with tens of millions of views. He knows what works technically. But he refuses to extract a general formula, partly because he’s watched people take technical formulas and apply them to dead content, and the result is what he calls artificial resuscitation: you can do CPR on a body that’s been dead for four days, but it won’t help.

He also makes a specific distinction between the kind of growth that produces loyal listeners and the kind that produces inflated numbers. Adamizad, he says, was possibly the only podcast that launched with an explicit social media strategy built in from day one — not relying on celebrity shares or community recommendation, but engineering the content specifically so that social clips would carry people from Instagram to podcast platforms. Many of those listeners, he estimates, had never used a podcast app before. He had to include instructions in his story posts on how to install one.

“If the content is alive,” he says, “it doesn’t need resuscitation. You just open the door and let it breathe.”

The Line He Won’t Cross — and What’s Behind It

The most ethically revealing section of the conversation is about the cases Dadmandian has actively chosen not to pursue. He knows, from working with audiences and studying human psychology for years, precisely which subjects would produce the largest emotional reactions. He has guests whose stories he believes would dramatically increase the podcast’s reach if told.

He won’t tell them. The subjects he names — domestic violence cases with ongoing legal dimensions, addiction stories with active legal exposure — aren’t off-limits because they’re uninteresting. They’re off-limits because the people involved are still living inside those situations. Publishing their stories without guaranteeing they won’t face legal consequences, or won’t have their lives disrupted in ways they can’t predict, would mean using human pain as raw material for reach. He has decided not to do that, even knowing what it costs.

“Behind that line,” he says quietly, “there are stories that would blow up the podcast. And I’m still not going there.”

The Therapeutic Side Effect He Didn’t Intend

One of the most striking moments in the conversation is Dadmandian reading a message he received from a listener: a woman who said that after listening to an episode about a mother who hit her children, she realized she needed to change — that the question the podcast had planted in her mind (why do I hit my child?) was one she could no longer ignore or escape.

He’s careful about this. He isn’t a therapist. He isn’t simulating therapy. He describes himself as someone sitting outside the therapy room: the person who hears the compressed summary of six years of analysis from someone who already knows their own story well enough to tell it. But he accepts that the effect of that telling, on both the guest and the listener, can be genuinely transformative — even when he didn’t design it to be.

“The day they ask themselves ‘why do I hit my child,’ it will be very hard to go back to how things were before.”

A Cozy Corner at the Desk, Before Anyone Else Gets to Him

Saman’s cozy corner is a specific kind of morning: a large mug of coffee, music playing, his desk, between seven and ten. He describes these hours as qualitatively different from the rest of the day in ways he can’t fully explain. His best commercial ideas, his best content decisions, and the clearest moments of understanding what a client actually needs — these tend to arrive in that window.

He doesn’t try to manufacture the state. He’s learned it comes when he protects the conditions that allow it, and disappears when he doesn’t. Protecting the morning, for him, is a professional discipline as real as any technical skill he’s developed.

A Dedication

When Hossein asks who he’d like to dedicate the conversation to, Dadmandian’s answer is immediate: the guests of Adamizad. The people who came and sat across from him — completely ordinary-looking people you’d pass on the street without a second glance — and told stories that two million people ended up listening to, often crying through. They weren’t famous before they came. They didn’t become famous afterward. They just told the truth about their lives, and that turned out to be enough.

He dedicates it to them, and to the idea that the truth of an ordinary life is, in itself, something worth the attention of strangers.