Episode: 38 — "How to Make a Successful Podcast" · Full Episode #38
Date: 24 November 2020 (Season 4)
Language: English
Hiba Fisher is an Egyptian-American media entrepreneur. She is the CEO and founder of Kerning Cultures Network, which became the first venture-backed podcast company in the Middle East. The network produces narrative non-fiction audio — long-form, deeply reported stories from the Arab world and its diaspora.
See also: Alex Atack (EP 15), who was Managing Producer at Kerning Cultures and discussed the network's editorial approach.
In 2008, a friend emailed Hiba an episode of Radiolab, the WNYC science and philosophy podcast. She ignored the email for months. Eventually, while driving, she played the episode. She became obsessed. For the next seven years, she consumed narrative audio — studying its structure, its emotional mechanics, its capacity for intimacy. This single email became the inciting incident for everything that followed.
Before Kerning Cultures, Hiba was in a career that was making her miserable. She described crying on her commute to work every morning — a quarter-life crisis in which the gap between what she was doing and what she wanted to do became physically unbearable. The tears were not dramatic. They were routine. That routine quality — grief as a daily commute — was what eventually forced the change.
See: Crying on the Way to Work
Jad Abumrad, the creator of Radiolab and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, reached out to Hiba after hearing a Kerning Cultures episode about Lebanon. He told her he loved it. She visited New York to meet him. He then surprised her by showing up on her school run — an unannounced gesture that collapsed the distance between the podcast she had admired for years and the one she had built.
See: Meeting Jad Abumrad
Hiba articulated what she called the insider-outsider lens: the perspective that comes from being connected to a place — Egypt, in her case — without being entirely of it. She is Egyptian and American, which means she is neither fully either. This dual position, she argued, is not a deficit. It is the exact vantage point from which the best stories about the Middle East can be told — close enough to understand, distant enough to see.
She ignored the email for months. Then she drove, and she listened. Seven years of obsession followed. (EP 38)