In the Workshop of Thought — Milad Islamizad on the Craft of Conversation

The Quiet Architect of Dialogue

In a digital world obsessed with noise, Milad Islamizad has built a workshop instead of a stage. As the creator and host of Kargah—Persian for The Workshop—he has spent the past five years forging one of Iran’s most consistent, reflective, and quietly influential podcasts. What began as a modest experiment in career storytelling has evolved into a living archive of thought, where ideas are not performed but shaped, where conversation is not a tool for fame but a method for thinking.

When he joined Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Milad looked back at this long and winding journey: from his early attempts at narration to his mature devotion to dialogue; from art history to business, literature, and finally philosophy. Together, the two hosts—both practitioners of deep talk in a culture where monologue often overshadows exchange—explored what it means to converse meaningfully in the age of metrics, algorithms, and fleeting attention.

Milad’s path, as he recounts it, is not a success story in the commercial sense. It is a document of restlessness: of moving through curiosity, fatigue, self-reinvention, and the endless pursuit of meaning. He approaches podcasting not as content creation but as craftsmanship. Each episode of Kargah, he says, “is like hammering an idea on the anvil of conversation—sometimes the metal bends imperfectly, sometimes it glows.”

From Honarestan to Kargah: The Early Experiments

Long before becoming a podcaster, Milad was a marketer and communications professional—a career that taught him how people listen, speak, and often fail to truly connect. Yet his entry into audio storytelling began elsewhere. His first show, Honarestan (“Art School”), was a narrated exploration of art history.

“I thought it would be simple,” he told Hossein. “You read, extract, write, narrate. But it turned out to be way harder than I imagined.”

He recorded two episodes during the pandemic years of 2019-2020, at the height of the Persian podcast boom. The experience revealed both his fascination with the medium and his limits within it. The subject was vast, his expertise limited, and his perfectionism exhausting. The process, he recalls, was “too demanding for what I could offer then.”

Out of that exhaustion emerged Kargah. Instead of heavily scripted narration, he turned to conversation—a lighter, more flexible format that allowed curiosity to breathe. His first concept was a podcast about career paths, one guest per profession, uncovering what daily life was like for people behind various job titles.

The first ten episodes, however, left him uneasy. “I wasn’t enjoying it anymore,” he admits. “Even though those episodes are still listened to, I stopped feeling excited about them. I realized I wasn’t chasing information—I was chasing experience.”

That realization—simple, almost mundane—was the seed of his transformation.

Four Phases of a Podcast

Milad divides Kargah into four distinct eras, each mirroring a stage of his intellectual growth.

1. The Career Era — Focused on human resources and professional life. Milad treated podcasting like a product: identifying a niche, targeting an audience, and filling a market gap.
2. The Business Era — A broader look at marketing, communication, and organizational behavior. It lasted until the Mahsa movement, when social and political unrest shifted public discourse.
3. The Literature Era — Conversations with writers and publishers, blending economic discussion with cultural reflection.
4. The Humanities Era — The current phase, where the show has become a platform for philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and social thought.

Each transition was less a strategic pivot than an act of self-preservation. “Whenever a topic stopped being fun,” Milad said, “I moved on.”

What makes this trajectory compelling is not its range but its honesty. Unlike trend-chasers who redesign their content to please algorithms, Milad’s compass remains inward. He follows curiosity, not category. “That’s the weakness of Kargah,” he once confessed. “It’s too dependent on me.” But as Hossein noted during the conversation, that dependency is not weakness—it’s identity.

The Host as Instrument

If Kargah is a workshop, Milad himself is both craftsman and tool. He resists the title of “interviewer.” “I’m not a presenter,” he says. “I’m a conversational partner.” The difference, subtle yet profound, defines the show’s tone.

Traditional media, in his view, treats interviews as arenas—places where the journalist corners the subject, exposes contradictions, and extracts quotes. Kargah does the opposite: it invites the guest to sit beside the host, not across from him. “The topic sits between us,” Milad explains. “We’re both looking at it together. I’m not interrogating the person; I’m exploring the idea.”

This approach is rooted partly in his years of corporate communication. In PR, he learned the importance of tone—how misframed questions can turn dialogue into accusation. In Kargah, he strives to create psychological safety: a space where guests feel neither judged nor cornered. “Sometimes it takes ten minutes, sometimes two hours,” he says. “You have to scan the guest, sense their mode, slow them down, let the conversation find its rhythm.”

Hossein nods in recognition. As the host of Cozy Corner, he follows a similar ethos: curiosity over control, empathy over spectacle. Their exchange becomes a mirror, each host recognizing in the other the same struggle—to protect the purity of dialogue in an attention economy that rewards the opposite.

Against the Attention Economy

Both hosts acknowledge the temptations of virality. “Sometimes,” Milad admits, “I’ve chosen the clip that gets more likes, even when it didn’t represent the whole conversation. I justified it to myself—thinking maybe people would come watch the full episode. But I try to do that less and less.”

His honesty underscores a shared ethical dilemma: how to survive in a system that monetizes distortion. They discuss the rise of commercial Persian talk shows like Ba Ziya and Rok—programs that prioritize entertainment and mass appeal. Milad refuses to condemn them; he sees them as necessary parts of the media ecosystem. “They’re shows,” he says. “They make people laugh, they fill a space. They don’t claim to do more than that.”

But his own mission lies elsewhere. Kargah, he explains, is “for people who want to think.” These are conversations that demand mental work—content you cannot play in the background. “If you miss ten minutes, you lose something,” he says. “It’s not ambience. It’s engagement.”

He worries, however, that this kind of media—the one that challenges rather than comforts—is shrinking. “Eighty percent of what we consume online doesn’t require thought,” he laments. “It just repeats what we already believe.”

That repetition, he argues, is the true danger of algorithms. They don’t just prioritize the familiar—they train us to fear doubt. In his words: “If a podcast reinforces my existing opinions, I like it more. But if it makes me question them, I resist it. Thinking is hard work. Reading is hard work. So we choose ease.”

Conversation as Craft, Not Performance

For Milad, the act of talking is both discipline and play. He compares editing to “a childish game” where he becomes “God for a moment”—deciding what the audience hears and what remains private. Yet beneath the humor lies a serious philosophy: editing is not manipulation but composition. “I’m building something in the moment,” he says. “And I’ve learned to listen—really listen. That’s been my biggest lesson from Kargah.”

Listening, for him, is a moral act. It demands humility, patience, and presence—the same virtues often missing from public discourse. “When I started,” he recalls, “I thought I knew how to talk. But podcasting taught me how to hear.”

Hossein agrees. For both of them, hosting is not about performing knowledge but pursuing it. The best episodes, they note, often begin with ignorance—with the host saying, I don’t know—let’s find out together.

That shared vulnerability transforms podcasting from media work into intellectual companionship. The host becomes a proxy for the listener—a thinking, feeling participant rather than an authority.

The Ethics of Meaning

Midway through the conversation, Hossein raises a provocative point: in societies where dialogue has historically been scarce and monologue dominant, talk shows carry civic responsibility. “We’re producing conversation in a culture that rarely practices it,” he says. Milad agrees, framing it as both privilege and burden.

He recalls how the history of conversation—stretching from Plato’s dialogues to Persian television roundtables—has always been divided between “content for the majority” and “content for the minority.” The former entertains; the latter provokes thought. “Neither cancels the other,” he explains. “They coexist, like glossy magazines and literary journals in the 2000s. But the serious ones are always marginal. That’s their nature.”

This marginality, however, is not failure—it is function. Thought-driven media may not trend, but it plants seeds. “It’s been twenty years since Shamlu’s magazine stopped publishing,” Milad says, “but its influence remains.”

That historical awareness grounds his optimism. For him, Kargah doesn’t need millions of listeners; it needs the right ones—the few who pause, think, and return. “Even a single message from someone thoughtful feels like a reward,” he admits.

The Workshop as Mirror

What gives Kargah its depth is that Milad never separates the medium from himself. The podcast evolves as he does. “It’s still really for me first of all,” he says. “Maybe if it were my main job, I’d compromise more. But right now, I can protect it.”

That self-protection is also self-exposure. He openly admits to archiving ten episodes that failed to meet his internal standard. “Sometimes it was my fault—I wasn’t in the right mindset, or I asked the wrong questions. Sometimes the guest came with a different agenda.” Rather than publish performative conversations, he keeps them locked away, reminders of the fragile line between authenticity and performance.

Even his guest-selection process reveals the same ethos. “I started with people I knew,” he says. “Maybe eighty names in a Google Sheet. Then came the second circle—friends of friends—and finally the third circle, cold invitations.” None of his cold calls, he adds with pride, have gone unanswered. “I think by now Kargah has a certain credibility. When I message someone, they check the page and see it’s serious.”

The process, he insists, is guided by intuition rather than strategy. “If I want to talk to an academic or a philosopher, I don’t calculate who knows whom. I just reach out when it feels right.”

The Shift from Guest to Question

Over time, Milad’s focus has shifted from guests to questions. “At first, the guest was my topic,” he explains. “Now, the question is the topic.” His upcoming episodes revolve around the theme of diversity, explored from cultural, social, and psychological angles.

This structural evolution marks a subtle philosophical change: Kargah has become question-driven rather than personality-driven. “The question leads me,” he says. “And I look for the person who can help me think through it.”

Hossein relates deeply to this approach. He shares how Cozy Corner categorizes its episodes around three axes—personality, industry, and subject—creating a rhythm and thematic flow. Milad listens intently, intrigued by the idea of dossiers or mini-series. “Maybe I should do that too,” he says. “A series of conversations tied by one question.”

Their dialogue, in essence, becomes meta-podcasting: two hosts analyzing their own craft, questioning the ethics, structure, and psychology of conversation itself.

Meaning in the Margins

The most touching moment arrives when Milad reflects on why he continues despite the fatigue. “Through Kargah I’ve learned so much,” he says softly. “I’ve met people I’d never have access to otherwise. Some of them charge more for a consultation than I could ever pay—but through the podcast, I get to sit with them for five hours and ask anything.”

That humility—seeing the podcast not as a platform for influence but as a space for learning—defines his character. Kargah is both classroom and confessional. “For me, it’s the cheapest way to satisfy my curiosity,” he laughs. “It lets me keep studying life.”

Hossein shares a parallel memory: as a child, he used to watch lecture programs on Iran’s Channel 4, not understanding a word but sensing the weight of ideas. Milad smiles—he had the same experience. Two boys, years apart, staring at adults speaking about philosophy, sensing that words could build worlds. Decades later, they meet as men still chasing that feeling.

Thought in an Age of Repetition

Toward the end of their talk, Milad delivers what might be the thesis of the episode: “The real issue with media today is repetition. We repeat our beliefs in different packaging.” He mentions Andrew Tate as an example of how ideology cloaks itself in viral form. “The message isn’t new—it’s patriarchal tradition repackaged. The danger is that algorithms push us to repeat what’s already accepted, until even creators stop noticing they’ve joined the stream.”

Hossein asks why he doesn’t follow that stream. Milad hesitates. “Maybe I already do, without realizing,” he says. “But I try not to. I try to stay awake.”

That awareness, that refusal to claim purity, is what makes his voice credible. He doesn’t pretend to be outside the system; he navigates it consciously. For him, integrity is not about isolation but about intention—about knowing why you create what you create.

Lessons from the Workshop

By the close of the conversation, Kargah no longer seems just a podcast. It is a philosophy of work, a metaphor for creative life.

1. Curiosity is a compass. Each phase of Kargah emerged from boredom, not planning. When interest faded, reinvention followed.
2. Authenticity requires disobedience. Milad resists algorithmic pressure even when it costs him reach.
3. Listening is labor. True conversation is built not on talking but on hearing—the kind of listening that transforms both host and guest.
4. Dialogue is moral work. In cultures where noise dominates, creating space for thought is an act of service.
5. Growth is cyclical. Like a craftsman returning to his bench, Milad treats every episode as another attempt—imperfect, necessary, alive.

The Workshop and the Corner

As the episode ends, the parallel between Kargah and Cozy Corner becomes clear. Both shows are sanctuaries for thought in the Persian creative landscape. One explores creativity as art; the other explores thinking as craft. Both are built on slow conversation, long attention, and an almost stubborn belief in depth.

Hossein summarizes it best: “We followed a foolish path. If we had spent these years chasing trends, we’d be richer. But we chose the hard path—the one that leads somewhere quieter but more real.”

Milad smiles. “I’m happy with the path,” he says. “It let me find better answers to my curiosities. I’ve learned more from this workshop than from any classroom.”

Their laughter fades, replaced by a long silence—the kind that only two good listeners can share.

In that silence, Kargah and Cozy Corner meet: two workshops of thought, two corners of conversation, two voices insisting that in an age of repetition, the most radical act is still to sit down, listen, and think.