Revisiting: First, Tell Them an Anecdote
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One of my favorite interviews for Sound School was with Misha Youssef. I was just listening to that episode, which I made back in 2019. I was trying to figure out why I liked my chat with Misha so much. She's clear. She's engaging. She's insightful about audio storytelling. So check, check and check. But then I remembered we talked in person. We were in the studio together at KISL on Catalina Island. That's where Misha was helping me teach a workshop.

The vast majority of the time, I talk to guests on Sound School over the phone or video chat. And while I think the interviews typically go well, I think my conversation with Misha was especially good because we were in the same room together. So I'm revisiting this archive episode of Sound School today, back when we called the show Howe Sound, and I ask you to listen to the quality of the interview. See if you're hearing what I'm hearing. Here's the show. What's an anecdote that we could use to start this episode of Howe Sound? You want me to tell you?

I wonder if you can come up with one. Oh, you want me to just come up with one right now?

This is Misha, Misha Youssef. She's the host of a podcast called Tell Them I Am. The voices on Tell Them I Am are all Muslim, but the stories are universal. Small, defining moments in the lives of the guests. People like Tan France from Queer Eye, writer Najma Sharif, Rami Youssef, who's a comedian, artist Dina Haghag has been featured on the show too, and a slew of other prominent and not so prominent Muslims. Well, what's the central question?

And the central question I had for Misha is this. As host, why do you start each episode of Tell Them I Am with an anecdote about you? You have these incredible guests. Why talk about yourself? Okay, I have an anecdote. From PRX and Transom, this is Howe Sound, the backstory to great radio storytelling. I'm Rob Rosenthal.

Let me tell you a little bit about Misha. Some years ago, she earned a master's in journalism from Northwestern. She took a transom workshop with me in Interlochen, Michigan, and she produced a very successful podcast called Beginner. It was about learning to belong as an immigrant in the U.S.,

She eventually got a gig at KPCC, where she helped produce The Big One. It was a podcast about earthquakes in Los Angeles. And recently, she helped me teach a workshop on Catalina Island. That's where our interview took place, in the studio at KISL, the tiny radio station on Catalina.

And before she riffs a personal story on the spot, I want you to hear a clip from Tell Them I Am. Now, as I mentioned, she opens each episode with a short personal anecdote. Here's the story she told at the top of the episode featuring Tan France. And I'll play the whole anecdote, followed by a little bit from Tan, so you can hear how Misha pivots from one section of the show to the other. Hey guys, it's me, Misha Youssef. This is Tell Them I Am.

A few years ago, I was walking out of Dos Toros in the West Village and it was freezing. My nose was like super sniffly. So before I pushed the door open, I turned, I grabbed 10 napkins and I stuffed them into my pocket. And my boyfriend looks at me and he's like, "I do that too." And it hit me. Oh my God. My mom's car is full of napkins from restaurants. Her purse is too. They're everywhere.

I was 24 years old and I was already turning into my mother. I'm not going to lie, it was a little bit of a nightmare. But I'm pretty sure that's the natural reaction, right? Who wants to be their mom? Unless your mom is... I was going to say Madonna, but no. If your mom is Victoria Beckham or like J-Law, those women who were super cool, who else would want to be their mom? Not me.

I would argue that even Victoria Beckham's kids probably resent the idea of turning into her. But either way, I'm not alone in this. Will you tell me who you are and what you're best known for? My name is Tan France. I am from Netflix's Queer Eye, and I am best known as the style guy. However, I'm probably best known for my hair. He does have incredible hair.

But back to the point. What I'm trying to say is that if Tan, the style guy of France, is pissed about turning into his mom, then I'm allowed to be pissed about it too. If anyone were to ask me if I've become my mother, the answer is an absolute no. I have not become my mother. I will tell everyone I'm not.

But I know I am. I tell people I'm not because I refuse to accept the fact that I am my mother. But I know that I am. Unlike me, the behavior that Tan's mom taught him is a lot bigger than hoarding napkins in your car. It's basically like fundamental to who he is. I would love to be a better person.

but I'm not. And my worst habit, which I don't plan on changing anytime soon, is that I do love And I Told You So. First of all, that's right. Tan loves And I Told You So.

Second of all, let's just take a minute to appreciate the fact that he uses it in noun form. Do you remember, like, where you learned this from? My mom was always, just like any good Asian mom, she was constantly scolding us for something. And she would always say, well, don't do that because this is going to happen. And don't do this because this is going to happen. And it would inevitably happen. And then she would very calmly look at us and say,

Told you it was going to happen. Tan goes on to talk about the good and the bad and the ugly of being a told-you-so kind of guy. Actually, I think it might be helpful to hear one more anecdote from Misha, since that's largely what she and I are going to talk about. Hey there. You know what I'm going to say? It's Misha. Have you ever had that thing happen when you're on total autopilot? Like there's a cup of coffee sitting in front of you one morning, but you have no memory of making it?

Or you're in the middle of driving and you think, wait, I have like no recollection of the last 10 minutes. How am I almost home? It happens to me so much that a couple years ago, I decided to go to a silent meditation retreat and snap myself back to the present. I came back from the retreat and that feeling of presence, it lasted for a bit. I noticed every itch on my body. I wasn't thinking about Instagram when talking to my best friend. I wasn't just going crazy.

through the motions. But I didn't really meditate every day after the retreat like I was supposed to. And like all things, the feeling present thing faded with time. Like a year later, I come home from work, open my fridge to make myself some dinner, and I find my laundry on one of my shelves.

No matter how hard we try to be present, sometimes it's the things that we can't control that actually snap us back into the moment. You start each episode with an anecdote from your personal life. Why? So we have 23 different guests on the show. No, we have 22 different guests on the show. And we were really worried as a team that people would not have anything to come back to.

I don't know what you mean by that. Have something to come back to. So, okay, so...

Initially, when we were conceiving of the show, it was going to be non-narrated, derived from the idea that Muslims have never gotten to tell their own story. And so if we create a non-narrated show, they're truly telling their own story in a way that they haven't had the opportunity to. But Misha and the production team for the podcast realized that approach led to what they felt was a problem. There's no dramatic arc from episode to episode, no cliffhanger, no thematic tie.

So they wondered, what will be the common thread from show to show if it's non-narrated? Well, Misha was their answer. She should host. And as they brainstormed what her role as host might be, Arwen Nix, the executive producer and editor, asked... What if you do a Sex and the City type monologue? So Sex and the City was our model. And we kind of applied the This American Life approach to it, where...

the goal of that anecdote is to arrive at a universal question that relates to the story in some way or that maybe preps you or whets your appetite for the story from the guest in some way.

But it also allows you to build a connection with this person who's going to come back every single episode and introduce you to a new person. We wanted to give the listener something to, someone to cling to. I just want to parse out this idea that you're the continuity and you're the primary focus at the start of each episode.

Isn't there continuity in subject matter, tiny moments that define someone and who they are? Why do we need you up front in order to be our guide to that? And I just, I'm going to keep piling on the question here. We don't need to hear from Ira Glass and his personal life at the beginning of This American Life. We don't need to hear from Phoebe Judge's personal life at the start of a criminal podcast. So what makes this podcast different?

I think this is a much more personal podcast than This American Life or Criminal. This is not a podcast that is supposed to make you feel like you're learning something necessarily. You might learn something, but this is for us an opportunity for you to get intimately acquainted with the personal life of a guest. I want people to come out of this feeling like they have 22 new Muslim best friends. And

Me sharing my story is just as much a part of that. I think it just serves the same mission. The best friend tone is kind of interesting. How so? Well, what you're saying is that one of the goals of the podcast is that listeners will leave with a new friend. It's as though they've gotten to hang out with someone.

And by having you as a friend up front telling an anecdote, you're sort of setting the tone for that to happen, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's just, it's like, it's a little bit more...

It's a more intimate version of what hosts already do. They're already serving as a guide to the listener. They're holding your hand through difficult questions. They're holding your hand through information that is maybe hard to process or understand. And sometimes on your behalf, they're holding truth to power. And I think in this instance, for people who might have a difficult time

I don't know how PC this is to say, but for people who might have a difficult time listening to a black man tell his story, I think it's a little bit easier to hear a palatable American sounding Muslim girl lead the way into that story. And I think, you know, the same with some of our other guests. If you don't like Muslims and if you don't have Muslim friends and if you don't come from a coastal city,

You might not want to hang out with some of these people if you meet them in person, even though they're incredibly lovely people. So my role was not only to elicit a story from them that makes it impossible not to see the humanity in them, but also kind of lead into those stories, right? And I think I feel very privileged to be in a position where

I am more palatable or I have – like I have spent my middle school years whitewashing myself. And so somehow I have an easier time connecting with people who otherwise are very skeptical about Muslims or have implicit or explicit biases against them. So I wanted to use –

that to my advantage in the podcast to some extent. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. No, you know what? It makes complete sense. And I'm just going to speak personally. It truly disappoints me that you feel like you need to have to do that, that you feel like in order to soften the entrance into a world of people that listeners may be disconnected from or have no connection to whatsoever, you feel like you need to

be the uber party host in a manner of speaking to help people feel welcome into, I'm trying to come up with metaphors, into the house where all these new best friends are sitting. Yeah, but that's the world we live in.

I'm sure this was the case for you in eighth grade too, but in my eighth grade, there was a recipe to being popular. A neon bra, a see-through tank top, Frankie B low-rise jeans, Kiss FM, and Uggs. Oh, and you had to be really loud when you said hi. Like, you should also be skinny, blonde, and named Caroline. But me, I had buck teeth, and I was still trying to perfect my American accent.

And I was like, I can't be blonde and I can't be named Caroline. But then I found a loophole. This group of popular girls who were not blonde, who were not named Caroline, and they were more like me. Asian girls who had somehow made it. The thing is that they just dressed right. They knew the recipe and they followed it. They were my hope. So I got the neon bra. I got the Ugg boots.

And I got the Frankie B's. I didn't want to be popular because I actually wanted to be a Caroline. I just wanted to be liked. That's all. I knew if people didn't notice me, they wouldn't know me or want to know me. And if they didn't know me, they couldn't possibly like me. By 10th grade, my uniform starts to pay off. I'm not popular, but people at least know my name.

What I now know is that I was trying to claw back control. When I moved to the U.S. and started middle school, I was one thing and one thing only, brown, which at that time meant loser. And I didn't come to America to be only brown. I didn't come to America to be only anything. And the funny thing about this whole situation is that for me and the other Asian girls, to not just be this one thing, we all had to be this one thing.

Where do the ideas for the anecdotes come from? We go through the episode. We write out the whole episode. Sometimes we even go as far as sound designing it and producing the whole thing. And then Arwen and I will sit down. Sometimes Mary and I will sit down and we'll just think, okay, what's the central premise of the story?

Once they figure out the central premise, Misha comes up with a story that relates to it. But sometimes the stories weren't vulnerable enough. They didn't hit the same chord as the story in the episode. And we realized that I just needed help. And I needed a little bit of therapy to get to that like really important moment. And if I tried to do it on my own, I would come up with like the more surface level stories. Yeah.

And even if I came up with the vulnerable ones, I had a hard time getting to the vulnerable point all alone. So sometimes we even sat in circles and just talked through our issues. And then by the end, I would have some sort of understanding of what the story really was and what did it say about me. And there were certain stories I really didn't want to talk about, but they pushed me. They really pushed me.

So those anecdotes aren't just a matter of you recalling some moment of your life. Like there's someone in the room with you, Arwen, one of the producers, and perhaps some of the other staff too, pushing and interviewing you and asking for the meaning and just really trying to milk it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there were times where I got so frustrated that I was like, I can't talk about this anymore. Like, I need to leave the room. And I do not consider myself a diva host at all. I have worked with them, not one of them. But it just got too intense. And I didn't want to sit at work talking about, you know, all the things that I have struggled with. So I guess there are a few examples. The alcohol story that I share in Ahmed Weinberg's episode,

Alcohol is a really fraught subject. Nobody talks about it, honestly. I really felt uncomfortable talking about drinking. Just felt like, what am I doing? I remember the first time I drank alcohol. My college best friends, Daniel and Michael, threw me a Misha Gets Drunk party. I was 18 years old, never had a drink before. And I was the kind of person who swore she never would.

But I was in college, it was the end of my freshman year. My friends were like, "Misha, just try it before you give it up." I was already becoming less religiously Muslim and way more culturally Muslim. So I gave in to peer pressure. The first drink I had was not a glass of wine or a beer. It was a shot, a dirty Girl Scout, which means peppermint schnapps. And I got drunk that night, drunk enough to throw up. I wasn't pretty.

I woke up the next morning feeling so guilty because I grew up with the idea that in Islam, drinking is not allowed. It's wrong.

These days, I'm legally allowed to drink, and sometimes I still do. A glass of wine at dinner with my coworkers, a cocktail at a celebration. But every time I drink, I worry. I judge myself. I feel guilty. I wake up anxious the next day, probably because alcohol does that and not because I'm stressed about God. But, okay, definitely a little bit because I'm stressed about God. And I always think, if it makes me feel this way, should I just give it up?

Was my religion, my culture right all along? And then at the next birthday party, when someone offers me a drink, I face the choice. Say no, feel good, and possibly have to explain myself. Or just say, sure. So I say sure. I'm Misha Youssef. This is Tell Them I Am.

Misha says she has a zillion anecdotes. There's no chance of running out, which may explain why she was able to just pull one out of thin air when I asked her to do so. So when I was in college, I think it was my freshman year, I came back home and we went to a party at a family friend's house. And there are these girls who are about my age, roughly, and my sister's age, and they

who were going to community college at the time and living at home. But they were very much experiencing the same things that I was. Like they were starting to experiment with drinking and dating and, you know, maybe not thinking about religion as much as they should have or wearing shorts or whatever. And at this point, my sister and I had been very honest with our parents and we had like a pretty open relationship.

So I remember sitting down with these girls and we just started talking about, you know, what we were experiencing in college. And they were like, oh, but I'm so scared to tell my mom. Like, my mom gets so upset. And I remember telling them, you know, if you just push your parents a little bit, they might give more than you think they will. And it's not about pushing them, like yelling at them or getting mad or running away, but almost like giving them the respect to be honest with them and saying,

The crazy thing is that many years later, this girl and her sisters now have like a much more honest relationship with their mom. And I don't know what happened in between us having that conversation and now.

But that experience made me feel like sharing my experience with other people is valuable, that it's actually a service. And it's funny because my dad used to always say, oh, you and your sister, you always want to tell stories about yourselves. But there are all these stories about people who are suffering in the world that deserve to be told. And that's a true service. When you get to that level is when you're really doing good work.

And I thought he was always right, and I always felt guilty for writing about myself or talking about myself or making podcasts about myself. But now I'm starting to rethink that and wonder if it's actually in some ways just as great of a service to tell my own story because it gives other people permission to tell theirs or maybe gives them permission to try something out that they wouldn't have otherwise tried out, something as simple as being honest with their parents. So I think that's ultimately why –

Featuring me prominently as a host did not feel icky. That's Misha Youssef from an interview recorded in 2019. Tell Them I Am ran for two seasons, 45 episodes in all.

Misha founded Dust Light Productions with Arwen Nix, which produced shows like Mother Country Radicals and The Wilderness, as well as podcasts for the Obamas. According to her website, Misha is now writing a book to be published by Little Brown. It's a book about her, quote, understanding of Islam, one that is compatible with modern ideas around sex, politics, and everything in between. Music

This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom. And Transom has news. Their traveling workshops are back. In fact, it's the same workshop that Misha and I taught together on Catalina Island. Only this time, David Weinberg is the lead instructor. Ariella Markowitz will assist him. The workshop runs for a week in March of 2025. And the application deadline is January 17th. Find all the deets at transom.org.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jarrett, and WCAI. In the radio center of the universe, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening.