What I Did Next

This week, I'm sitting down with my producer Chirag Desai to reflect on a whirlwind first half of the year—from interviewing iconic figures and taking the show international to the importance of reclaiming our narrative. 

We talk about what drives the show, the magic of the MENA region, and what it truly means to create space for our own stories.


This episode is brought to you by:

Chapters:
0:00 Coming up...
1:44 WIDN goes international
4:30 Reclaiming our narrative
13:25 An updated lightning round
18:12 What's next for Malak

Music ID: 5ROQ12DERYHSUUVQ

Creators and Guests

Host
Malak Fouad
Founder, A&T Media and Host, What I Did Next

What is What I Did Next?

Connecting the dots across the Middle East through storytelling. Join host Malak Fouad, as she brings you the most inspiring people and unpacks their life journeys — successes, failures and everything in between!

I think of our region, you know, as a mosaic. We are a multitude of different things.

And I think we need to start looking at that as a positive. I wrote a lot of

these new lightning round questions in light of the fact that I'm now firmly

middle-aged, which is something I'm embracing and I'm not ignoring.

Hi, Malak. Welcome to our 2026. Well, the first catch-up of 2026,

basically. I don't know if there are enough words to describe how this year

has gone really quite...

Well, especially that you're sitting in Dubai and you've gone through a lot of changes.

We want to take this opportunity as well to catch up on what's going on since

the start of the year for the show. Do you have any special highlights from the start of the year?

I think what for me was a real joy was, as usual, the breadth of our guests.

I mean, the variety of conversations that I was able to have this year,

the depth of the conversation.

If I just do a quick roundup, we had the icon that is Abdel Wahed El Wakil,

who is just such a star and such an important figure in our region,

reclaiming identity, reclaiming our heritage from the point of view of architecture.

And I have a personal connection to him because he's a family friend and I was

really so happy to get his story.

It was just really fun to listen to, by the way. Just listening to your grandfather

just telling you stories about his childhood and his adulthood.

I think that resonated really well.

And his body of work speaks for itself. I mean, he's a recognizable name across the region.

So I was really, really happy to do that. And to do it in his hometown,

he lives in Doha. So I recorded that with him last December.

You know, linked to that also was sort of almost this what I did next going

international theme that happened, right? So you have filmed outside of Egypt

before. We filmed in Dubai.

But this time you also filmed in Doha, which you just mentioned with Abdel Wahed.

But you also filmed in London. And so we had Nabila [Abdel Nabi],

who incidentally was our first video episode on Apple Podcasts.

So that was also fun. I mean, one of the new launches this year,

Apple adding video as a thing.

And then we've got another one coming out next month that was also filmed in London.

There's another one coming up in September that I'm going to be filming in San

Francisco in person as well. So that's very exciting.

So yeah, I mean, the show is...like

a lot of businesses around the world now, there's no geographical frame

for anything anymore. You can either be doing things online or in person anywhere.

Yeah, and I think we've always said, right, that there's sort of as much as

we will obviously still do, and we are currently doing a conversation that's remote.

Those in-person conversations just tend to be a little bit more meaty.

There's more, you know, there's just room for more chemistry,

both before and after and all of that. And so this was a nice opportunity for

you to do it with them in person.

I think it was just like a lot of the other things that happen in life.

It was just good timing. It was luck. And it just came together nicely.

I'm not sure I'll be able to do interviews in, you know, in Australia or in

more of, you know, further afield.

But these just came together nicely. And then a big revelation for me was Thuraya

Ismail, who I just really adored speaking to.

She really is such a great rep representative for our region and she's really

personifies what's amazing about women from the region who are multicultural and who

are giving back and I was very impressed by her and very inspired by her. And

then you know there are so many all the other guests were amazing but I will

highlight one more person

and it's more about the way the interview came about, which is Tim Marshall.

I've been chasing him for about two years on email to try and get him on the show.

And finally, he accepted. And I actually met him end of last year at a talk

he was giving in London. His episode came out in April. It was right in the middle of the Iran war.

And so his insights were even more pertinent and important. And that was pure serendipity. And so now

We are in the foothills of designing a new system.

And it's very uncomfortable when we're going through these formative years because

it's not what we're used to.

And I don't know how it's going to settle down. I suspect it settles down into

another bipolar world. Yeah. And I kind of also wanted to connect that to something

else, right, which is sort of this, you know, the show has always been regional oriented, right?

Absolutely. So the MENA region was a very conscious choice for me when I created the podcast.

It wasn't Egypt focused. It wasn't coming from one particular place.

But I really wanted to look at the region as a whole.

You know, I think we've had such a bad rap over the last decades from a more

further or a field, specifically after 9/11.

I mean, the entire perception of the region was very warped by that.

And I think, you know, we need to be reclaiming our stories.

We need to be reclaiming our narratives.

We are so past the colonial era, but we're still very much influenced by that

and feeling the effects of that.

And I think enough is enough. I think it's time that we stand up,

we create our own stories, we tell our own stories.

We are unbelievably educated people across the region, speaking languages in

so many different industries.

And it's time that we celebrate that. It's time that we highlight that.

And that was a really conscious element of my show.

I wanted to cheer that on. I wanted to put a spotlight on that.

This is something that also, you know, constantly comes up on the show as well.

And we came up as recently as last month's episode with Dina, right? Dina H. Sherif.

There's a lot to say for...

I think people being fed up with histories being written for them from a Western lens.

So as someone who was, you know, born in the West and was very much influenced

by Western thought and philosophy and so on,

the Gaza war for me was a real turning point, as it was for a lot of my friends.

And I was lucky enough to get on the show last summer, Omar El Akkad,

who, as some of you might know, wrote this unbelievable book called One Day

Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

And he is really lambasting Western democracies for the hypocrisy and the two-faced

approach to the Middle East.

And although on an intellectual level, I had known that for decades, somehow emotionally

his work really really touched me and

the horrors that we were seeing in front of us on a daily basis just reinforced that

and, you know, it kind of underpinned even more

Why I'm doing this show. And at the beginning, when we started,

and we've talked about this many times, it's

not the origin story of the show.

You know, it wasn't, that wasn't the focus, but it's really become its own calling

card. And it's something I'm unbelievably proud of.

And it's attributable to the magic of MENA,

the magic of the region where we have all these stories, we have all these cultures,

these nationalities, these languages, we're all the same, but we're all different.

We're all having similar experiences, but we're all having different experiences.

And if I can just shed a small light on that through the guests we bring on, then all the better.

There's also just, in terms of just ourselves, right, we're always,

you know, we also need that sort of sense of inspiration, maybe that sense of

positivity that, look, there's so much happening here from the small to the big, right?

It's not only sort of A headline and B headline, or there's so many things that happen.

I mean, you know, through the show, we've met, heard from incredible guests

who are impacting their own little circles, right? Even if it's not entire countries and the region.

And I think that that's incredibly powerful.

Absolutely. And I think of our region, you know, as a mosaic,

we are a multitude of different things.

And I think we need to start looking at that as a positive. You know,

we've been told for decades, it's a negative, it's a negative.

Your region is nothing but problems. You're the source of so many global issues.

But I think we need to start flipping that round and looking at ourselves in the positive.

And the stories on What I Did Next attest to that.

People have surmounted a lot of challenges. And of course, the show brings that

to the fore. We talk a lot about failure.

We talk a lot about pivot points that are not on paper a positive,

but somehow they do yield in the end a positive result for the person.

And people learn from so much in their own lives.

And so I found that something that we had from the very beginning of the show,

it continues to be the bedrock of the theme.

And I think it's very valuable.

A link to this also, I mean, let's talk a little bit about language,

right? So I know this is a question that we get asked a lot.

I know this is something we spoke about actually way back in 2020 where we were

kind of just mapping things up.

Yeah. So for me, What I Did Next when we started thinking about how this show

would be, for me, it was a no-brainer that it would be in English.

English is my first language. I'm trilingual.

I'm fluent in English, fluent in French. But Arabic is my third language.

And unfortunately, it's my weakest link.

So I wasn't confident enough to do a show in Arabic. And that's very much the

reason why it's an English first show.

Of course, the show is subtitled, which we craft and add on to YouTube, for example.

Also our social media clips, right? So anything that we share from the episode

comes in both languages. I mean, it's subtitled in both languages.

So the other thing I'm very conscious of and was very conscious of when we were

formulating the show was that English as a language opens doors for the MENA

region on a global level.

And the intention was always to have a global spotlight on the show in

order to highlight the stories from the region. The other important fact

that I think subconsciously I probably thought about and then got reinforced when we were able to

look back on some of our numbers, our demographics, was that there is an absolutely

massive Arab diaspora around the world.

There is a huge Arab population in North America, whether it's the U.S.

or Canada, in Europe, as well as in Australia and elsewhere.

And a lot of this diaspora are second, third generation Arabs.

So having a show from the region that can be a link to their countries of origin,

their region of origin, highlighting positive stories is a really big benefit.

And we've received messages from people around the world saying how much they

love that and how much they feel connected to the region because of the show.

So that's an important element as well. And so English, of course, is a benefit for that.

I would also say that like when we talk about diaspora, it's not only necessarily,

Arabs who migrated or whatever, but it's just people who grew up here,

grew up in the region, may have moved out.

I mean, as in I'm not Arab, for example, and I have come back.

But a lot of my friends, a lot of obviously people that, you know,

called Dubai their home when they grew up or Saudi, as you mentioned,

and then have gone on to live in other parts of the world.

Right. So I think there is also that sort of tier of people that when we talk

about sort of this global perspective of people who have interest in the region

for many reasons, who want to hear from the people that are building in the

region, living in the region, etc.

And I think it kind of caters to all of that.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And it reflects in so many people we've spoken

to on the show who are, you know, I think of someone like Fares Akkad,

who is the head of Meta in the Middle East.

He's of Syrian origin, living in Dubai. He's just one of many people I can think of.

Thuraya, who was on our show this year, also of Syrian origin,

living in Lebanon, but grew up in Riyadh. So like, and myself,

Egyptian, grew up in Saudi, moved out of the region completely at one point, and now I'm back.

So, you know, like our stories, there are millions and millions.

And that mix of nationality, that mix of culture is what makes our region so

strong and so unique. And we're truly a melting pot.

And it's our biggest strength, I think. Absolutely.

All right. Well, so, I mean, as always, I mean, as is the tradition of the show,

we've got to do a bit of a lightning round before we leave. Let's start with,

like a little bit of a fun one is what fictional character do you most relate to?

So it's a lovely question And it's a question that I think Like with a lot of

the lightning round questions You have to think of the first one that comes

to mind Yes So one of the books I absolutely loved reading when I was a child Was Little Women

by Mary Louise Alcott. And the

fictional character from that book that I absolutely adored is Jo March.

And Jo March is the eldest daughter. And I love her because she's absolutely

doing things her own way.

She doesn't follow the crowd. This

was a time, of course, when women were expected to be in the home doing,

you know, home-related activities, not at all going out into the workplace and

get married and have children and obey your elders and all of this kind of thing.

And from a very early age, because it was in the civil war, because it was set

in the civil war, a lot of traditions had to be put aside.

And so women had to go out to work and so on. But I love her because she is

completely authentic. She is completely

following her own dream, her own path. She doesn't care who she offends.

She just goes out and does her thing. And she carves out a life for herself

that is exactly the life she wants. She becomes a writer in the book.

She lives alone for a lot of the time away from her family.

And eventually she does fall in love and she falls in love with someone completely

different to anyone that is within the pages of the book

and just love her uh her fearlessness and her ability to just go out and do

what she wants um and she just comes across as such a real character because she's very flawed um

she is uh tempestuous she's moody, she's just such a real person i mean

I just found her really captivating and she's one of my favorite fictional characters.

What matters much less than you thought it would?

I wrote a lot of these new lightning round questions in light of the fact that

I'm now firmly middle-aged, which is something I'm embracing and I'm not ignoring.

What matters much less to me now is really people's opinions and what people

think. And I'm much more concerned with what makes me happy,

what makes me peaceful and calm.

I'm much more likely to turn something down than accept it because I'm obliged to.

So in contrast, like what matters much more than you thought it would?

I think what matters much more to me, and this is something I've discussed so

many times with my close girlfriends, is my close girlfriends.

So people that I can really hang out with, be myself with, we're all,

you know, I can speak about maybe a handful of girls.

And they are girls. I don't know why they're girls, but they are girls who,

for me, I relate to completely. You know, as an only child,

my friends are really important to me.

And we're all going through the same phase of life.

And we're all relating to the same things. We're all finding the same things annoying.

But we're also finding the same things attractive and wanting to be

more peaceful, wanting to have more experiences that are fulfilling and not

be, you know, the concept of FOMO is completely foreign to us now. Let me put it that way.

What is it that calms you down?

Sports, especially swimming. For me, swimming is a real escape.

It's like a, it feels like a meditation because you're completely cocooned into another environment.

And I think the The repetitiveness of swimming allows the mind to just calm

down and wander on its own. The other thing that calms me is my dog.

So as some of you know, I used to have two dogs.

One passed away earlier this year, and it was a really big trauma for us as a family.

And it's allowed me in a way to discover my second dog, who's much younger and

was kind of hidden away or hidden behind the older dog.

But he's now coming into his own in the home and he's absolutely adorable and

he's just really cute to have around so he calms me down as well

We have a nice memory of of your older dog on one of our episodes which is great,

yeah. And then finally what's what's next for.

you? So what's next for me is something quite personal so in September my husband

and I are taking our youngest son to

He's going to be on the other side of the world. He's going to be in California for his first year.

And I'm actually having a really hard time coming to grips with that.

First, you are going to be empty nesters, which is a really a big turning point,

I think, in many families.

And just, you know, his character is just so joyful. He's filled the house with

so much laughter and his friends.

And I'm just concerned about the, you know, what's coming next for me personally

on that front. And I didn't expect for it to be this hard. When my eldest son