It’s Like a Child With Nine Parents
The Nashta Team — Kiarash, Saina, Seyed, Chakavak, Mahdi, Sara, Reza, Farinaz & Rasoul — on Turning a Friend Group Into a Daily News Podcast — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP08
The idea started with buying land up north. A group of nine friends who had been traveling together since 2019 — close enough that disagreements dissolved quickly, different enough that the combination produced something — were looking for a shared project. Land was impractical. A podcast was not.
In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — all nine members of Nashta (Breakfast) come to the studio together: Kiarash, Saina, Seyed, Chakavak, Mahdi, Sara, Reza, Farinaz, and Rasoul. What follows is a conversation about what it actually takes to produce six episodes a week with nine non-professional hosts, no formal media background, and four microphones circulating across Tehran. The answer involves a written agreement, a process designed by engineers, collective news selection by like and dislike, rotating editors-in-chief, and friendship treated as infrastructure rather than risk.
The Agreement Signed in Nine Copies
Before Nashta recorded its first practice episode, before anyone had a microphone, Kiarash wrote a formal agreement. Not a handshake understanding — a document, drafted and sent to eight people, specifying ownership percentages, intellectual property rights, and what happens to someone’s stake if they ever choose to leave.
Mahdi called him about one clause that felt too strict. They negotiated. The clause was softened. The agreement was resent. All nine signed. By the time the first real episode went out, the group had something most friend-group collaborations never build: a written structure that meant everyone already knew the answers to the questions that usually end projects.
“We’re a bunch of engineers,” Mahdi says, “and so we approached content production the same way. We wrote a process. Once you’re inside the process, you stop thinking about whether you feel like it today. You know what the next step is.”
Why News, and Why Cool News
The original concept wasn’t specifically news. It was a daily morning podcast — a format Kiarash felt was conspicuously absent in the Persian podcasting landscape. Once he’d identified the slot, news was the content that filled it most naturally: the things you’d hear anyway from a colleague or friend during the day, delivered with a tone their generation actually wanted to consume.
The key word is “cool.” Their explicit goal was to take the news format — which most of their generation associated with dry official media, heavy with formality and distrust — and make it the way a smart, irreverent friend would tell you what happened. Not instead of the serious news, but parallel to it, without the weight. The fact that there are no radio anchors among the nine members turned out to be part of the point: everyone sounds like themselves, which is exactly what they wanted.
Saturday episodes are the exception — a longer, open-format episode with no news obligation, where each team member can do whatever they want. It functions as a creative pressure valve for people otherwise operating inside a tightly constrained daily format, and it tends to produce the episodes the team points to when they want to show what Nashta can do.
The Process That Runs Whether You’re Ready or Not
Mahdi describes the production structure with the precision of someone who designs industrial processes professionally — which is, in fact, what he does for his primary job. Each weekday episode requires four distinct tasks: news gathering, selection, editorial integration, and recording plus editing.
News gathering is collective: every member of the team finds stories and sends them to the group. Selection is democratic and asynchronous — a like/dislike system in Telegram, where any story can be voted in or out by the group. Mahdi himself has disliked a story he submitted, because he judged it important but not right for Nashta’s tone. The story went in anyway because the rest of the team voted for it.
Once a story set is chosen, an editor-in-chief for that day’s episode pulls it all together — not rewriting from scratch, but harmonizing. Each team member writes their stories in their own voice. The editor adds connective tissue and a unifying register at the end. Then two hosts record the episode, sometimes together in person, sometimes remotely. Someone edits the audio. The episode goes out.
“When you’re in the process,” Kiarash says, “you don’t decide whether you feel like working that day. You know what your task is. You become an operator. That clarity is what makes it work.”
The Editor-in-Chief Who Rotates Every Day
One of Nashta’s more unusual design decisions is that the editor-in-chief role changes every day. Everyone serves in it. No one is permanently in charge of the final voice of the podcast.
The team points to Seyed and Sara as the two members who do it best. Seyed describes his approach: he doesn’t try to erase the individual voices in the submitted copy. He reads the stories and hears each person’s rhythm already in the text. His job is to add the final layer of salt — a closing phrase, a tonal adjustment, a way of making the whole episode feel like it came from one source without removing the fingerprints that make it human.
Sara’s advantage, her teammates argue, is reading volume. She reads widely enough that she arrives at editorial sessions with a larger vocabulary of tonal options, and that breadth shows in the fluency of the final copy. When she’s the editor, the team says, the text is simply smoother.
Four Microphones, Nine People, All of Tehran
The team owns four microphones. They share them across a city. The logistics of this are handled entirely through Telegram: a weekly schedule is assembled every Thursday, people flag their availability for the following week, and the microphones are routed accordingly.
Kiarash goes to the gym with Rasoul sometimes. The microphone travels with them. Someone has it Monday; it moves Tuesday. The flexibility of being fully portable — no studio, no fixed recording space — is something they’ve consciously maintained against the temptation to establish a proper setup. They’ve experimented with recording together in person, especially for Saturday episodes. The synergy is noticeably better. But they can’t live together and they can’t always coordinate travel time in a city with Tehran’s traffic, so the distributed model is still the default.
In ten months, they have missed zero scheduled episodes. During the twelve-day war, when internet was largely cut, they uploaded using methods that would have been inconceivable as a long-term strategy — but they uploaded. By the time of this recording, they have published 216 episodes. Not one gap.
The Double-Edged Sword of Friendship
The conversation’s most analytically honest section is about the specific ways that building a professional project with close friends cuts both ways. The advantages are real and tangible: they know each other’s thinking deeply enough that unspoken context doesn’t need to be explained, a shared reference reduces communication friction by a significant margin, and the underlying loyalty means that when someone falls behind, others cover without it becoming an injury to the relationship.
The disadvantage is also real: the social pressures that enforce professional discipline in formal employment don’t exist here. There is no manager to disappoint, no risk of termination, no formal accountability structure. What replaces those pressures in Nashta is a different kind of accountability — to the eight other people who are also voluntarily carrying this, and to the audience who has built a habit around the daily episode.
“You’re not accountable to a boss,” Chakavak says. “You’re accountable to eight people who chose to be here. If your work is bad, you’re not shortchanging one person — you’re shortchanging all of them. That weighs differently.”
Rasoul and the Months He Stepped Back
The conversation’s most candid individual account comes from Rasoul, who describes his first months with the project honestly: initial inertia, difficulty syncing his fast speaking cadence with the podcast’s rhythm, hardware incompatibility with the editing software the team uses, and the accumulated weight of external commitments that made every session harder than it needed to be.
At points, he withdrew from episode production entirely. The team covered for him. He came back. He improved. He is now someone who can say, without false modesty, that his current contribution reflects steady growth and that the team would confirm it. What kept him coming back during the periods when he could have simply stopped? Friendship, he says simply. The specific friendship of these eight people. Nothing more complicated than that.
The team’s decision to cover for him rather than pressure him reflects something Kiarash articulates as a design principle: they never wanted someone to leave because the load became unmanageable in a bad period. They wanted to be the kind of project where you could disappear for three weeks and still have a place when you came back.
Every Toman Earned Has Stayed Inside
Nashta has generated income. None of the nine members has taken any of it out. Every dirham earned goes into a reserve designated for the next phase of development — platform hosting, equipment upgrades, future investments in what they want Nashta to become.
All nine have primary jobs. All nine say, without exception, that they want Nashta to become their primary job. This is not a hedge or a polite aspiration: it’s stated as the goal that the agreement, the process, and the consistency are all serving. Kiarash puts it with characteristic directness: the plan for next year is to become the largest Persian-language podcast by audience and download count. He doesn’t call this a dream. He calls it a goal with an execution plan underneath it.
“A dream is something you don’t have a logical path to,” he says. “An aspiration has a logic behind it. A goal has an execution plan. What we have is an aspiration moving toward a goal — and the distance between them gets shorter every month.”
The Competitive Dimension Nobody Planned For
One of the more unexpected elements the team describes is internal competition — not in a damaging way, but in the precise form that produces quality. Episodes get compared. Editing is debated. The Saturday episode from two weeks ago becomes the benchmark the Saturday editor this week is quietly trying to beat. Each person wants their individual contribution recognized as among the team’s best, which means each person keeps raising their standard.
They had a recent argument about whose editing was best. The conversation at the Cozy Corner table dissolves into light, overlapping claims: Mahdi insists his is the best, Saina and Reza have their advocates, Farinaz’s improvement is acknowledged, and Sara’s narration quality is noted as a different category of excellence. Nobody agrees. The episode is better for the disagreement.
The News That Gets Disliked Into Oblivion
One structural feature Nashta has built that distinguishes their selection process from most news curation is the active rejection of obvious stories. If a major event is already everywhere — on television, trending on social media, saturating every channel the listener has access to — Nashta doesn’t cover it. The reasoning is specific: it adds no value to tell someone something they’ve already heard from five other sources before they opened their podcast app at 7 a.m.
They also avoid heavy news at morning broadcast time as a tone principle: their listener is starting their day, and the format is meant to inform without disrupting. This leaves a significant amount of legitimate news on the floor — they estimate that out of twenty or thirty stories collected for a single episode, perhaps ten will actually appear. The others are archived if they were written up, or simply abandoned to what one team member calls the dustbin of history.
The Cozy Corner — Together
When Hossein asks where the team’s collective cozy corner is, Kiarash gives the answer that crystallizes the whole conversation: it’s not a place — it’s a condition. The team’s creative output, their best ideas, their ability to take an individual notion and stress-test it against eight intelligent, trusted, opinionated people — all of it happens when they’re together. Not because the physical space matters, but because the psychological safety of this group creates a specific kind of permission: to say the half-formed idea out loud and know it will receive a real response rather than a polite one.
“Creativity has two stages,” Kiarash says. “The private spark, and the act of saying it out loud so it becomes real in the world. The second stage requires safety. We have that when we’re together.”
A Dedication — From the Team and to the Team
When asked who they’d like to dedicate the conversation to, Sara answers for the group, and the answer is both expected and precise: to the families of all nine members. From day one, when Nashta was an unknown quantity and the group was publishing practice episodes to learn the craft, their families were the first listeners, the first supporters, the ones who kept asking how it was going.
After the families: the listeners who became the tenth member. Nashta, Sara says, is nine friends who started something together — and the audience that has joined them, returned every morning, and built a habit out of what they made, are the people who turned a friend group project into something with actual stakes.
