Hiba Fisher spent seven years listening to Radiolab before its creator reached out to her (EP 38).
Jad Abumrad — the Lebanese-American creator of Radiolab and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship — contacted Hiba after hearing a Kerning Cultures episode about Lebanon. He told her he loved it. The message came from the person whose work had, more than any other single influence, set Hiba on the path to narrative audio.
The distance between admirer and admired collapsed in a single email.
Hiba visited New York to meet Abumrad. The meeting was professional — two podcast makers comparing notes. But it carried the weight of seven years of one-directional influence: she had studied his work, internalised his methods, and built her own company partly in response to what Radiolab had shown her was possible.
Abumrad then surprised her by showing up on her school run — an unannounced, informal gesture that moved the relationship from professional courtesy to something closer to mentorship.
The story illustrates a pattern common in creative careers: years of admiration from a distance, then a sudden compression of that distance into direct contact. Hiba did not engineer the meeting. She built something good enough that the person she admired came to her.
It also demonstrates the global reach of narrative audio. A podcast made in the Middle East about Lebanon reached a studio in New York and resonated with the person who had, arguably, done more to define the form than anyone else.
See also: Alex Atack (EP 15), who worked at Kerning Cultures as Managing Producer.