I Am Not Radionist — Radionist Is Not Mine

Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh on the Economics of Cultural Projects, Selling an IP With No Formula, and the Obligation of a Transitional State — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP07

Seven years. Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand listeners who wait, twice a month, for the next episode. A team of around sixty people whose professional identity is linked to the project. Two ownership structures — one that built it for six years, one that carries it now. And in between, a person who describes his role as something like a transitional government: sitting between seller and buyer, pricing an intellectual property for which no formula exists, and delivering the handoff without a single episode delay, without the audience ever knowing anything had changed.

Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh — photographer, curator, cultural activist, and executive producer of Radionist, WikiPaz, and Radio Commerce — comes to this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri having thought harder about the economics of cultural production in Iran than almost anyone in the Persian podcasting space. The conversation moves from a Kurdish teenager in Sanandaj distributing Hollywood VHS tapes to something that may be the most structurally sophisticated cultural IP transfer the Persian podcasting world has yet seen.

From Sanandaj to the University of Tehran — Building a Mind Before a Career

Ramyar grew up in Sanandaj in a household where video was forbidden and music closely monitored — which, he notes without irony, is precisely the kind of environment that produces someone obsessed with both. He was distributing Hollywood films among friends in middle school. He was reading four newspapers simultaneously during the reform era press boom. He arrived at the Fine Arts faculty of the University of Tehran in 2000 into a context that, by his own account, barely resembles anything possible today: seventy students from the faculty taken to Italy, France, and Spain for a month, students who didn’t even have military exemption cards traveling abroad, a cultural openness in the university that he describes as formative in ways he only fully understands in retrospect.

What that environment gave him was a particular kind of intellectual appetite — the instinct to sit with a film after it ended rather than leave, to want to discuss it, to find people who shared that compulsion. In a university dormitory surrounded by students from theater, music, sculpture, and painting, he found the community that would shape the next twenty-five years of his working life.

Ali and Ramyar — Staged Photography and the Fight to Be Taken Seriously

The first phase of Ramyar’s public artistic life was a collaborative brand built with his close friend Ali Najian: Ali-o-Ramyar, which became known for staged photography — a practice that was, by his own account, treated as almost a misfit category in the Iranian visual arts world of the 2000s. They held public debates in multiple cities with people who formally opposed staged photography as a legitimate category at all. Even the respected journal Honareh Honarmand — in whose pages Ramyar had his own work — resisted the idea that staged photography belonged in serious critical conversation.

He describes this without bitterness, only as context: they were building a practice that the existing institutional vocabulary couldn’t accommodate. The staged image — constructed rather than captured, narrative-driven rather than documentary — was the form that genuinely interested him, and he pursued it regardless of reception. That stubbornness, he implies, is the same quality that later made Radionist possible.

Three Streets, Eighty People, Four Years

Before Radionist existed in any form, Ramyar had already spent years conducting a kind of urban oral history through a series of photography projects structured around three of Tehran’s most historically layered arterials: Valiasr, Shariati, and Enghelab. Over four years, approximately eighty people participated in the projects. Each street became the subject of an exhibition. Each exhibition brought together a different set of collaborators — architects, filmmakers, historians, urban researchers — who walked those streets with him and talked about what the buildings remembered.

It was in an architect’s office connected to one of these projects — a pre-revolutionary urban planner whose atelier introduced him to master plans and city structure in ways that delighted him — that Radionist’s eventual subject matter began to crystallize. Hotels, cabarets, cinemas, spaces that carried a life inside them that had since been sealed off. Not nostalgia for what was lost, but a genuine question about what had been there and why no one could now say clearly.

“I walked into those spaces,” he says, “and there was nothing in them — no furniture, nothing. But they held you. You felt something you couldn’t name. That was the question I wanted to follow.”

Radionist — The First Persian Podcast IP Owned by a Company

The Radionist origin story passes through a chain of relationships and accidents that Ramyar lays out with the methodical pleasure of someone who has told it before but still finds the sequence interesting. A close friend, Hamid Beheshti, was working as a cultural consultant for a company called Ziba — a manufacturer of kitchen appliances who had concluded that investing in cultural content was preferable to billboard advertising for their niche positioning. Beheshti brought Ramyar in. Ramyar proposed two projects: a podcast (what would become Radionist) and a long-form written platform (Neveshtar). Both were accepted.

The first episode was about Miami Cabaret — a venue that no longer exists but that an entire generation of Iranians born in the 1960s, who grew up with bootleg VHS tapes of its performers and felt the specific magnetism of something simultaneously fascinating and forbidden, carried as a kind of unresolved question. Nobody would give an interview for the episode. Radionist launched in November 2019 with twenty-eight minutes assembled from archival materials, a book by Mahmoud Ghorbani, and interviews conducted by Mahmoud Ghorbani with Ali-Reza Amir-Ghasemi — stitched together without anyone knowing the format would work.

It worked. Within four months, the fourth episode — on the Plasco building fire — was published, and a sponsor came forward on its own. That sponsor, Ramyar notes, was Reza Mikaeelzadeh of Ojen, who had driven past the Radionist Instagram post, been arrested by it, and sent a direct message saying: whatever I can do for you, I’m available.

Fifteen Interviews Per Episode, and What Gets Left On the Floor

The methodological choice that most distinguishes Radionist from what Ramyar calls Wikipedia-style podcasting — linear A-to-B narration built from a single account — is the commitment to plurality. For each episode, the team conducts approximately fifteen interviews. The final edit might include three minutes of one person’s voice. That person sat and spoke for three hours.

The architecture isn’t efficiency; it’s honesty about how oral history actually works. Memories contradict each other. Stories get embellished across decades. The same event appears differently depending on who was standing where. Rather than resolving those contradictions into a single authoritative account, Radionist lets them sit beside each other — and lets the listener hear that history is not a set of facts but a battlefield of narratives, each produced by a specific person standing in a specific place at a specific moment.

“One narrator can’t carry this,” he says. “The contradictions and distortions of oral history have to exist side by side. That’s what makes it real.”

The Sponsor Who Cried Twice

The most complete picture of what Ramyar means by the relationship between cultural production and business comes from the story of Ojen’s first year as Radionist’s sponsor. When Mikaeelzadeh formally came in, he didn’t buy advertising space to resell. He didn’t insert commercials for other brands. He sponsored the podcast because — as he told Ramyar directly — he had sat in a parking lot for forty-five minutes after the episode about the Qasr fortress, unable to drive home because he was crying. And then again after the episode about the International Hotel.

He wanted to be part of something that could do that. Not to extract commercial value from it, but because the work had meaning to him personally and he believed in its continuation. Four years later, Mikaeelzadeh is now the owner of Radionist — having purchased the intellectual property when Ziba, after six years of investment, honestly said it could no longer sustain the financial commitment.

The progression from emotional attachment to long-term ownership is, for Ramyar, the model of what the relationship between business and cultural production should look like. Not a company hiring a podcast for its association value, but a person who genuinely cares about the work becoming its custodian.

“A sponsor is not a cow you just milk,” he says. “You have obligations toward them. When Ziba decided to stop, I fought to make sure the transition served them — because if they ever want to do something like this again, I want them to think of this as an experience they’d repeat.”

Pricing an IP With No Formula

The ownership transfer involved a pricing problem for which, Ramyar acknowledges, no established methodology exists in the Persian market. A podcast IP has audience size, engagement metrics, social following, production history, team relationships, and brand associations — none of which map cleanly onto any existing valuation framework.

He describes the solution he arrived at: feeding all available data into an AI system (GPT), asking it to produce a valuation range, and using that range as a neutral third-party benchmark that neither Ziba nor Mikaeelzadeh could dismiss as self-serving. The AI’s number, as it turned out, was close to what Mikaeelzadeh had already been thinking — but lower than what Ziba was hoping for. Ramyar’s role was to close that gap through negotiation, working both sides until they reached a number each could accept.

The transfer happened without a single episode delay. Radionist published continuously through the entire process. The audience knew nothing had changed. That seamlessness, he says, is the point: the project is bigger than any of its owners, and the listener who has been waiting twice a month for seven years doesn’t carry any responsibility for the institutional arrangements behind what they receive.

I Am Not Radionist

The phrase Ramyar returns to most often in this conversation is one he says he applies consistently and deliberately: I am not Radionist. Radionist is not mine.

This isn’t false modesty. It’s a structural principle. The project belongs to the current owner, to the sixty people whose professional identity is attached to it, and to the hundred and fifty thousand listeners who have built a relationship with it over years. Ramyar’s job is to be the attorney for all three of those groups simultaneously — which means, at moments of conflict, finding the solution that serves the project rather than any single one of its stakeholders.

“Because of my responsibility to these hundred and fifty thousand listeners,” he says, “I am obligated to fight against anyone who would let this legacy disappear. I have no choice. I sit and negotiate. I give a little here, calculate there. But I don’t walk away from this — not for my team, not for the owners, not for the audience that has been waiting every two weeks for seven years.”

He describes what this required during the twelve-day war, when internet was cut and the Radionist contract had technically expired. He and Ziba came to an informal understanding: keep publishing. Don’t let the audience feel the gap. The institutional arrangement was unresolved; the publishing schedule was not. In that period, the project continued purely on the basis of shared commitment to its integrity.

The Team That Has Never Lost Anyone

Over seven years and roughly sixty people, nobody has left the Radionist team because of a breakdown in the relationship. People have left because they emigrated; they stayed connected from abroad. The core group — narrators, researchers, editors — remains intact.

Ramyar attributes this to a principle he applies consistently: he never presents himself as the center of the project. Awards go to the team. Media opportunities go to the team. He actively avoids being the face of the podcast — noting, half-amused, that most listeners who know Radionist know the voices of narrator Negin and the other on-air contributors, not the producer. That invisibility is intentional.

He also connects the team’s stability to what he sees as the deeper obligation: the sixty people have given years of their professional lives to this project. It is on their CVs. It is how people in their fields know them. To let it collapse through carelessness or ego would be a betrayal of that investment — and that’s a weight he takes seriously enough that it shapes every major decision he makes about the project’s future.

The Documentary That Has Been Quietly Building for Four Years

Alongside the podcast operation, Ramyar and Mikaeelzadeh have been producing a documentary series — five films, on events that shaped Iran’s modern urban history — for four years without public announcement. The series is complete enough to require a distribution partner before release; he describes wanting a VOD platform that can support it properly rather than publishing it piecemeal.

One of the five is about the Plasco fire — approached not from the architectural or memorial angle (which Radionist already covered) but from the experience of the firefighters who went in: what happened inside, how colleagues died, what contradictions exist in the accounts of what was found there. Another reconstructs the 1966 Tejrish flood, using archival footage and oral testimony from survivors. The projects are, in miniature, the same methodology as the podcast — multiple sources, contradictions held rather than resolved, specificity over generalization — applied to a visual medium.

The Institutional Gap — Why Persian Podcasting Hasn’t Reached Its Natural Rights

The episode’s most politically pointed section concerns what Ramyar sees as the structural failure that prevents Persian podcasting from reaching what he calls its natural rights — the level of economic and institutional respect that its audience size would justify in any functional cultural economy.

He identifies several overlapping problems. First: most Persian podcast producers treat their work as a hobby rather than a professional operation. Without institutional seriousness, nobody can negotiate with sponsors from a position of strength, establish copyright protection, or advocate for the medium’s collective interests. Second: the dominant model of Persian podcast monetization — direct sponsored mentions — has burned out through overuse by influencer culture, and the sophisticated alternatives (deep partnership, brand integration, audience-led funding) have not been developed to replace it.

“The sponsor is a friend, a partner, a collaborator,” he says. “You have obligations toward them — not just to take their money and give them a slot. When I say the sponsor is not a cow you just milk, I mean it applies to everything: to the way we treat our audience, to the way we treat the team. There is a code of conduct here that I care about maintaining.”

Third and most urgent: the absence of any collective structure — any guild, any organized body, any shared advocacy mechanism — means that every podcaster is individually vulnerable to the same problems: copyright theft, platform dependence, sponsor extraction, audience loss during disruptions. He describes watching Radionist’s content get scraped and republished by accounts with four hundred thousand followers to Radionist’s sixty-five thousand — with no recourse, because there is no system.

His argument is not for government involvement or state-sponsored cultural infrastructure (which he addresses and largely dismisses as unlikely to produce genuine independence). It’s for a critical mass of the serious producers in the Persian podcasting space to sit together, identify their shared interests, and build the mechanisms — formal or informal — that allow collective negotiation and mutual protection.

“The problem is the thinking,” he says. “It needs support. It needs solidarity. The people who are better known in this space, or who have better connections, need to sit down together and find solutions.”

The Cozy Corner — Home, With the Best Advisor in the Next Room

Asked where his own cozy corner is, Ramyar answers without hesitation: home. His wife Simin has been his most trusted advisor throughout the Radionist years — not as a formal collaborator, though she has worked on the project’s translation and editorial operations, but as the person who knows the full picture and gives him feedback no one else is positioned to give. He describes her as the person who holds him back from decisions he would later regret, who brings his capacity for acceptance to the surface when he needs it, and who consistently advocates for the team members she has watched him build relationships with over years.

“She controls me in the best possible way,” he says. “She’s been a thread running through all of this — even the parts of the team that might not know it.”

A Dedication

Ramyar dedicates the conversation to two people: the previous owner, Ziba, and the current owner, Reza Mikaeelzadeh of Ojen. Both, he says, represent something rare in the Persian cultural landscape — organizations that stood behind a serious cultural project not for the short-term commercial return, but out of a genuine sense of responsibility to something worth protecting.

He names them not just with gratitude but with the recognition that without their willingness to stay involved — six years from Ziba, and now ongoing from Mikaeelzadeh — the archive that Radionist has produced, the voices of two hundred and fifty-plus contributors speaking about their direct experience of modern Iranian history, would simply not exist. And that archive, he believes, belongs to no one and everyone: not to him, not to the owners, but to the country whose story it carries.