Introducing How We Made Your Mother

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Hello, everybody.

Hi there.

So you've opened your podcast app, and here in your Office Ladies feed, you have found how we made your mother.

What is going on here?

Have we been hacked by another rewatch podcast?

Angela, are the machines finally rising up against us?

No, not yet, anyway.

Sit tight, survivalist lady.

All is right in the world for now.

And we have some big news.

If you checked out our episode from October 15th, you can hear the whole story.

But in short, you probably know that we have launched the Office Ladies Network.

And I'm sure you already have been listening to Lazy Genius.

Thank you very much with the amazing Kendra Adachi.

Yes, well, we have now added our first rewatch podcast to the network and it is How We Made Your Mother, looking back at nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother.

The podcast is hosted by Josh Radner, who of course played Ted on the show, along with Craig Thomas, who is one of the co-creators of How I Met Your Mother.

I love it when Josh says, I am the I in How I Met Your Mother.

The I.

Well, Josh and Craig do a deep dive not only into the characters and plots of each episode, but they are also taking a close look at the issues the show confronted.

Love and loss, commitment, rejection, friendship, careers, everything.

That is honestly my favorite part of this podcast is when they take a storyline about one of these topics and then they discuss it.

They discuss that theme and why they made the choices they made to have the characters do the things they did.

Oh, it's amazing.

But they also talk about what it felt like to be in an early to mid-2000s long-running network sitcom, which is a topic, of course, very close to our office ladies' hearts.

And also close to our office ladies' hearts is the community that they have built for their podcast.

Everyone, it is going to feel familiar to you.

The warmth, the kindness, the encouragement that their community has is absolutely Office Ladies' community.

It so is.

And I love hearing from their fans.

You really hear them in each episode.

So you guys, they have just finished the first season of the podcast, covering the first season of the show.

Yes.

And now we are bringing you the very first episode of their second season.

We love it.

We think you'll love it.

If you want to binge season one, you can go subscribe to How We Made Your Mother, but you can also start right here.

Honestly, this episode is terrific.

And you can listen wherever you get your podcast, or you can head to their website, howwemadeyourmother.com.

And of course, you can find them on socials at How We Made Your Mother.

And here we go.

We are proud to present the newest member.

of the Office Ladies Network, How We Made Your Mother, with Josh Radner and Craig Thomas.

Hello, this is Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey from the Office Ladies podcast in Los Angeles.

And something we love about How We Made Your Mother is the amazing community of this show.

The fans and people that write in, we think you guys are awesome.

And I love when Josh and Craig get philosophical.

I mean, I love all the behind the scenes stories, but my favorite is when Josh suddenly starts quoting Einstein or some ancient ancient philosopher, and then he and Craig basically break down the meaning of love or the power of friendship or forgiveness or you name it.

But I often find myself feeling a little lighter, a little more hopeful after listening.

And that's a pretty special thing to be able to do.

And that's why we're thrilled to be adding the show to our Office Ladies Network.

Welcome, guys.

Welcome.

Oh, and you better have us as guests real soon.

Uh-huh.

Get on it.

I'm alone.

What a pity

I won't be soon in New York City.

When I see you,

please permit me to tell you everything

in New York City.

Well, here we are.

Welcome to the first episode of season two of How We Made Your Mother.

I am Josh Radner.

I played Ted Mosby on the TV show called How I Met Your Mother, which ran on CBS from 2005 to 2014.

I am here with the co-creator of that show, Craig Thomas.

Hello, Craig.

It's great to see you.

Hello, Josh.

Very excited to be back here with you and the fans and our new wonderful friends over at the Office Ladies Network.

OLN, we sometimes call it, which is just to save us the energy of saying all those syllables.

We don't have that kind of time.

We're very busy people.

Yeah,

we got to get on with it.

Tell this story.

Yeah, tell the story.

How did this happen?

Yeah, Yeah, we're delighted to be working with Jenna and Angela and their team.

So the way this came about was, you know, we were a kind of lean and mean operation first season, me, Craig, Alec, Doug, Alex, just this very small team.

And we were just doing this all on our own.

And I called Jenna Fisher, my old pal from back in the days, because we were on big hit TV shows around the same time.

So we got to know each other.

And I was reaching out, one, to ask her her advice as a trailblazer in the rewatch podcast space.

Oh, yes.

If she had any advice for us, but also,

more specifically, I wanted to see if she would come on our podcast and to talk about the strangeness of being, you know, a decade or so of your life, being thought of as someone you're not, being, you know, the whirlwind of being on a hit show, like all these things.

And before we even got into it, she said,

are you guys working with a podcast company?

And I said, no.

And she said, well Angela and I have started our own podcast company called Office Ladies Network

and we would probably be delighted to have you on she actually said we would be sight unheard podcast unseen podcast like how do you say that

sounds unheard yeah sounds unheard she she just and then um Her and Angela gave a couple episodes a spin and immediately called us and said, we love this.

We'd love to

pull you under the umbrella of the Office Ladies Network.

We'd love to cross-pollinate in any ways that we could.

And we're so delighted.

We're so thrilled.

Craig, what do you have to add?

We're so honored they would ask us.

They're so good at it.

They're so good.

Their show is so good.

Jenna and Angela, they are trailblazers.

They launched, you know, they kind of paved the way for like a comedy rewatch podcast like ourselves to come along too.

And so we're grateful that they kind of took us under their wing and we're their partners now.

Yeah, thank you guys.

Thank you to Jenna.

Thank you, Angela.

We're huge fans of the office.

You will hear them on here and us on there.

We really will kind of cross-pollinate.

It's going to be great.

We're very grateful.

I mean, it's kind of cool that it's a, when we were growing up, like crossover episodes were, you know, like Laverne and Shirley would show up on Happy Days, right?

It's like, dude, I missed a time honored

tradition.

And we didn't do that in our era.

So we're doing it now with our rewatch podcasts.

We're doing it now.

I love it.

I love retroactively.

We're doing it in this other medium since TV is too hard now.

It's too hard to make TV shows now.

So now we'll just do it on a podcast.

Yeah.

So thank you.

Thank you to Jenna and Angela and their team over at Office Ladies Network.

We're thrilled to be part of the family.

And we are putting a pause on the YouTube

segment.

Craig, I'll just say this up front.

Craig and I are aging aggressively.

Just very

aggressively each day.

We've had a lot of work done over the summer.

I don't know if you're doing it.

It has not settled yet.

It didn't take.

We cannot.

In good conscience, we cannot show you Craig Thomas' face right now until his work settles.

If you were watching the show over on YouTube,

thank you.

We loved having you go over there.

And we're still going to have some video components to the show, but we're not going to be on YouTube every week.

Yep.

You'll see fun videos on our socials, but it won't be the full episode on YouTube.

And you can monitor Craig's healing, which we're all

seeing.

The bandages will come off about episode 11 or 12 that we're discussing.

It's pretty hard to look at right now, I got to be honest.

It's kind of, there's like a drainage pipe going from each eye.

Josh, I haven't had the work done yet.

What is going on?

It's coming up.

It's next week.

This is horrible.

Why don't we get to it, Craig?

Why don't we launch this season two?

Turning now to our trusty producer, Alec Lev.

Alec, tell us the name of this episode and when it originally aired.

Absolutely.

And hi, guys.

Welcome back.

Hi, Alec.

Exciting.

And I'm very excited also about this Office Ladies Network.

Jen and Angela have already been amazing to work with, Thanks to them from me also and Colin, who is part of their team as well.

The episode is called Where Were We?

It originally aired on September 18th, 2006, written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

Where were we?

It's a great question to ask.

We got a title.

We wrapped up season one and

I haven't seen you for years.

And by years, I mean like six weeks.

Maybe

six weeks.

It's been the smallest summer hiatus I've ever had.

It is a brief hiatus.

It's not like the real, the real hemium hiatus several months.

I would not see you for a while.

You would go off on crazy adventures.

The writers would come back way before the actors.

We worked for like six, eight weeks before you got there.

All the actors would come in looking tan and beautiful and be like, how is your guy's summer?

We'd be like, we're haggard and gray.

We haven't seen the sun.

Don't ask us how our summer was.

But yeah, no,

this was a quicker turnaround.

So it's fun to jump right back in.

I love the meta title of Where Were We.

That was the feeling in trying to break this episode in the writer's room of like, how do we pick this up?

And here's, here's my first thought, Josh, when I started watching this one, which I did last night and I loved it.

I hadn't seen this in years and years and years and years.

And the pressure coming into this episode was immense.

We had been

advised slash scolded to be less serialized

in between the two seasons, season one and season two.

We did not agree with that advice and we didn't really take it.

But we really wanted to come in and kill it to show that we could do this kind of serialized emotional comedy show on CBS and have it find an audience, but we weren't there yet.

So we really felt like we're singing for our supper.

The thing, the first thought I had was, it's so funny that we had to speak to the summer passing to still stay in season for when the TV show was airing.

You were just talking about crossover episodes and like 70s and 80s TV.

Another seemingly now vestigial thing is this idea that you have to be in the season where you're airing, right?

On streaming, who cares?

Who cares?

Like, ooh, Andor, why is it winter in Andor?

It's like, it's summer while I'm watching it here in the real world.

I'm turning this off.

Yeah, but we,

this is implausible now.

But we, there was this kind of common understanding, and we definitely didn't feel ready to buck that conventional wisdom.

You've got to come in basically in the season so you can catch up to your Thanksgiving episode and your Halloween episode and your Christmas episode, all that stuff.

And you can be sort of in sync with where the viewer is watching it in time.

And that was why, that was what dictated the storytelling in this episode, showing the whole summer passing and kind of catching up to ourselves.

Here we are again in September in New York City.

I was just, I was laughing at the idea that shows just don't have to do that anymore.

Well, let's just bring the listener up to speed.

So, where we last left our heroes, right?

Yes.

So

Ted makes this bold move to Robin in the rain.

He shows up.

They have this grand

romantic cinematic kiss.

He returns home to his Upper West Side apartment from Brooklyn, which is a longer trip than people realize.

We've already established the geography.

It's implausible that a woman in Brooklyn would hang out that much on the Upper West Side.

But he gets back to the Upper West Side.

He's delighted.

He can't wait to get home and tell Marshall and Lily.

And Marshall is sitting out on the stoop holding the engagement ring.

Lily is gone and devastated.

Ted has to pivot and sit down and sit with his best friend as they get pelted with rain.

One of my favorite moments in the whole series is that you putting your arm around him on those stuffs.

And that was the Block Party song, right?

Yep.

This Modern Love by Block Party, one of my favorite needle drops, as they say,

in the whole show.

So that's where we end season one, which I'm sure CBS was delighted by that happy waltzing of the sunset ending.

Tune in for more sadness in September.

And I wrote you

this little day

to sing to you

in New York City.

We'll be right back.

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And now, back to the show.

So then, where were we?

We pop back into

this episode.

And I think it's one thing that I told Jordana that was really funny as I was watching.

I was like, so we're filming presumably an hour or two after they get inside.

Robin has come over.

Or maybe it's later that morning, right?

No, yes, that's definitely.

We're still wet from the rain, right?

You can see that we've dried off a little, but there's four months between the end of that scene.

And I just remember, you know, the

props, or I think it was really wardrobe, they come through with spray bottles.

Yeah.

And they're trying to get you wet, you know, and keep you kind of looking plausibly wet.

And, but it's, it's, it's, it's such a funny time jump, especially because most TV and film is shot out of order.

Yeah.

So you have to really know the script well enough to keep that order in your head as you're going and know where your character is emotionally because, you know, you, you could shoot the

most emotionally impactful scene.

in the first couple of days and then you're shooting the previous you know stuff so it's wild but anyway uh just give us a quick armchair summary, Craig, of what happens in season two, episode one.

Where were we?

Yeah, I really, I remember in the writer's room, like feeling all this pressure until we realized two things.

One, we're going to track the entire summer and show like Marshall's descent into madness through the summer and catch up to catch up to where we are.

That was the idea one that unlocked it.

And idea two was this credit card idea where Marshall gets a hold of in midway through the episode of Lily's credit card bill that's sent to him and the idea idea of just these pieces of evidence of what she's been up to.

And that's going to sort of steer the second half of that episode.

So that's basically this is showing the summer of these two these two roommates, one of whom is the happiest he's ever been.

He got Robin, and one of whom is the absolute saddest that he's ever been.

And that was just a compelling idea to us.

You guys had so much fun.

I could feel how much fun you had in playing with that idea that Ted is kind of euphoric.

But it's a funny thing when your friend is down, you almost have to like put on your sad face with that.

Like, I mean, it's a, it's a kind thing to be empathetic and be like, buddy, I know, you know, and also it's hard to not be able to share your joy with your best friend of, of what's happening with you.

Oh, yes.

You know, oh, yes.

I mean, the universe or whatever, the narrative storyteller who's writing this story, it's like, it never kind of,

there's always this kind of, I've noticed, like a kind of friction between where you are and where your friends might be or even your partners, you know, not, and everyone's not always on the same page.

And that's something you have to negotiate with friendship and with

just living in the world.

I loved what a good friend Ted was in that initial moment where Robin comes in and she's going to say something about her and Ted getting together.

And he's like, no, there's only one thing that happened in the news last night.

There's no other news stories here.

And I loved Ted for that.

And I think it really earned Ted's later moment.

You see Ted really tending to Marshall's well-being the whole summer.

And it felt very earned later in the episode when Ted does kind of say, enough, stop acting this way.

This isn't you.

You'll never get her back or move on like this.

And that's such a, we'll get there, but that I love that arc.

That was Ted's arc in the episode to start off as the caretaker and then becomes the one who kind of.

really tries to shake him out of it in the end in a way that is almost a little too much, but it's great.

And that idea, we've all been on, I think, both ends of that equation.

We've been the miserable guy that's being scraped off the floor by our friends.

And we've been the super happy guy who's like, I can't be this happy around this person I love right now.

I have to hide this happiness.

You know, there's an interesting thing that is like a real friendship dilemma that you guys were mining, I think, in this episode, which is one is like, I'm going to sign off on my friend's version of reality.

Like, I'm going to say, yes, he did you wrong or she did you wrong or this is horrible or you're the victim here.

Like whatever their idea is for a long time as your friend, you're like, yes, you, you have a right to be feeling what you're feeling and I am with you and I hate them for you and with you.

But then at a certain point, the better friend act is to say enough.

You've got like, I have a very dear friend who was really stuck around some stuff.

I don't want to go too into it, but one of our other very dear friends, these are longtime friends, he really risked their friendship by saying, you got to stop this.

Like, you've got to forgive this person.

You've got to move on.

Yeah.

And I really salute this other friend for

risking that.

It can be very hard sometimes to speak capital T truth to a friend who's who's really got their story

set.

Yeah.

And to say, like, this is only hurting you.

Yeah, I think Ted was the best friendship Ted exhibited in that episode was when he yelled at Marshall.

Yeah.

I think that was, it was time.

Yeah, that was the power of that structure of seeing the whole summer past, day 56, day 67, blah, blah, blah.

It's a long fucking time.

Yeah, it's the whole summer.

It's September now, and it's like, it's almost like Ted is saying in this meta way, like, we've still got to be characters in this show.

We've still got to,

we've got this show to do.

People are watching it.

Also, it's like, it's like

narrative is about action.

You're just being a big baby on the floor.

We've got to do something.

We've got to take some action.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just realized there's a very meta

at the beginning where

Marshall's going to reach the phone to call Lily and doesn't Ted say, I will punch you in the face.

Yeah.

And he says, you're a good friend, Ted.

Yeah.

And like he ends up actually kind of punching him in the face.

And it's him being a good friend, like later.

Yeah.

You know, that's kind of like the

synopsis of what happens in the episode, right?

Yeah, it is.

That's right.

He needs, he needed, he needs that punch in the end.

He needed that.

He needed to be shaken out of this.

Yeah.

I remember the writer's room, everyone had their breakup story, right?

In the writer's room, everyone, like that, that sort of summer passing, that like blur of being in a months-long post-breakup, like depression, everyone in the writer's room had stuff on that.

And I hope this isn't being like sharing too much, but like, you know, Jason Siegel had had a serious relationship when we met him and shot the pilot.

He wrote a quite a big movie about it.

So I don't think we're spoiling anything.

But just to talk about like he was very, that was fresher for him then.

It was before he wrote that movie, or maybe he was writing that movie as we were shooting shooting this but he he he knew how to lean into that feeling right he had been he had been in that feeling not too long before we shot this you didn't get the feeling like jason was like would not draw like jason knew how to be how to uh suffer over a relationship ending like he was yeah that was available to him yes you know when barney comes in and one of neil's great things is like his ability to like pivot yeah like just pivot like he can go one place it almost is like slaloming down a hill you make like a sharp yeah turn to clear a gate like he's so good at that.

And his like real genuine concern for Marshall and then his realization that they're all three single.

So he thinks at the same time.

And something Neil does in this, but I don't know if he did it in season one.

I think he did a little bit, but he's really leaning into it when he looks off into the middle distance for these monologues.

Yes, he really does have that.

And to him, in his head, it's like they're swelling strings.

Like, like, this is like a big monologue in a movie that he is delivering.

And you always get the feeling like on the tab over,

he thought up some of these lines.

Like, he's so performant.

Yeah, Barney's writing his own dialogue for sure.

In Barney World, Barney's definitely crafting a dialogue.

I have a fun fact about that speech.

First of all, I mean, Neil fucking crushed that amazing.

And that turn at the end where he realized

his magical ability to know that Ted and Robin hooked up is great.

Neil Neil killed that.

And

a fun fact about that speech is it is kind of cribbed from the grapes of wrath.

I'll explain.

So

we had Fitzgerald in season one,

sign back in season two.

And it was not, I will not take credit for that at all.

And I don't think it was Carter either.

Greg Malins, who was joining the show at that point, Greg Malins, a very funny writer, executive producer,

wrote for Friend, great dude, wrote for Friends for many years and moved it up the ranks to the point where he was running Friends for at least a couple of seasons, I think.

And then we learned he was this huge amateur mother fan and we were a huge friends fan.

We hired him to come be kind of like our number two guy on the show in season two.

He wasn't on season one, and he came into season two and right away had this great pitch for this Barney speech.

We knew we wanted a big Barney speech that ended with Barney that was celebrating them all being single.

Thank God we're all single for the first time together.

And then realizing Robin, like Ted and Robin hooked up and deflating.

We knew that shape, but we didn't know what the speech was.

And we're like, it's the opening of this season two, the first sequence.

It needs to fucking kill.

And Greg said, well, there's that speech in the grapes of wrath.

I'm trying to look it up as we're talking where it's like, I'm just like, one line from it is like, in the dark, wherever there's a fight for hungry people, a cop eating up a guy, or kids laughing while hungry, I'll be there.

And we, so Greg, Greg Malin somehow had that speech in his head.

And he's like, what about that?

Except it's Barney fucking people.

And I was like, yes.

And like, we looked up the speech from Grapes of Wrath and like we sort of modeled it on that.

I hadn't thought of that for so many years until I watched this left side.

I was like, that was Greg.

That was Grapes of Wrath.

Yeah.

You know, this is a little name-droppy, but it's a fun, it's a fun little thing.

I'm friendly-ish with Jason Ras.

I've known him for a long time.

And he has this great song.

I love that.

I don't even know if he's released it called Rescue.

And his manager told him, like, you should steal from the greats.

Like, steal from like the greatest melodies and composers of all time.

And so he showed me that this song Rescue is the chord progressions of Pachabelle's canon.

Oh, yeah.

But you'd never know it.

It's just like he used this kind of map.

He's not the only one that did that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he used the map, right?

And I think, like, you guys, you can graft something on to

a form that really works.

I mean, it's a rhetorical form.

It's almost like a political speech that really is like, yes, we can.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, yes, we can.

It's, it's the repeated, it's like a pattern poem.

And it's like, if we take that kind of pattern poem and we kind of do our own version of it, it's there it is.

It's like weird out.

You know, it's just like, let's take something good and make it our own.

And

you're weird outing it.

You know what, you know what struck me at the end of Barney's speech when he figured, and then he looks at Ted and Robin and it takes him a second and a half.

And he says, so quick.

Oh, you guys, you guys did it.

Like he knows.

And I realize there's one other thing that I'll point out in this episode.

I think it's with

Ted and Marshall.

They do have telepathy.

They do.

It's not just in the telepathic moments.

Like they're getting to know each other so well that they get it.

They understand unspoken.

They can read each other's body language.

They can read,

you know, stuff between them.

And I thought that was fascinating.

It's a real

gesture of the intimacy that is developing between all of these characters.

They just know things.

I really like, because Robin says it's like we have a baby.

We had a baby all summer.

We just got together.

We have a baby.

His name's Marshall.

And like, and I love, I love that metaphor because Ted is being parental to Marshall.

We're seeing like like young Ted, who will someday grow up to have these two children, parenting Marshall through the summer.

And in the end, giving him tough love and being kind of firm and challenging him and using that parenting speed after this summer of comfort.

I mean, it's like when couples get together and they accidentally get pregnant so fast and they barely, like, that's what Ted and Robin are like.

They're like, we just got together and now we have a baby, a screaming, crying baby on our hands.

This is teeny tiny, but one joke that I was disappointed, every now and again, someone will ask me, like, do you have regrets?

Would you go back and like change a joke?

I did have one of those because I misremembered a joke in this, and I think my misremembering was funnier.

And maybe we tried to write it this way and we were told to change it or got a note or something.

But you know, the joke where Marshall comes out and he's talking about how he has Lily's shampoo.

He's talking about how it smells like lavender and seashells and hope.

And it's, it's both comforting and erotic at the same time.

And then Robin goes, that's mine.

I thought we wrote it that Ted goes, that's mine,

which is so much funnier.

It is.

And I'm like, I was heartbroken watching this last night because I've misremembered this for 20 years as the better version of that joke.

And I can't remember if we had it that way and were like told to change.

I don't know what the hell was happening there, but it's still kind of a funny joke, but it would have been so much funnier if it was Ted's.

It's also like,

I don't know, certainly now.

I mean, maybe it wasn't true then, but like, who can tell the difference between a female and male shampoo at this point?

Totally.

No.

Absolutely.

I was thinking there must be things in writers' rooms where I thought you guys probably had a really fun time with similarities between the early months of dating and breakups.

Like, just like getting an idea and kind of and crowdsourcing it and running around, you know, the dry erase board, like getting up all the day and then picking the best ones, right?

Yep.

Absolutely.

That's what that whole form was where you're going through the summer and here are the similarities kids.

And I love that it's future Ted kind of giving, giving the kids this bit of wisdom, how there's overlaps of these things.

That was so much fun to pitch on.

yeah we found a lot of we found a bunch of good structures in this one like even that even like mini structures like that like that's that's a minute of the show right there you know that's 45 seconds of the show is like that concept and then that concept you know not too much long past that you're you're getting into the credit card mystery of it all and again

another mystery episode right this episode becomes a mystery episode like so many of the great how much of mother episodes proving my theory that the mini mysteries within this larger series mystery are so many of our best episodes are that.

And I think that's why this episode works because this is, there's a mystery to solve.

And Lily is this completely off-screen presence in imaginary land.

And this mystery needs to be solved.

And I did love that about this one.

You know, there's those memes that go around like,

kids, I'm going to tell you a nine-year story that could have taken 15 minutes, right?

Yep.

And I

understand that, but it's almost like saying, well, you're going to die anyway.

So you should just get on with it and kill yourself.

Like,

there's so much pleasure to be had in the ride and in the storytelling and in the little mini mysteries along the way.

Yeah.

As opposed to all of those other sitcoms that never wasted any time or took any word side trips.

They were all business all the time.

All just forward action, romantic momentum.

Who was the boss?

You know?

Yeah.

So I think there's

each each little episode that has its own kind of self-contained little mystery to solve i mean there's a reason i think people keep watching it over and over and that's part of what we're interrogating here um

i uh

i loved barney's suicide mimes

they're so disturbing i can't believe we got them on like the first one is a gun the second one is he's hanging himself the third one is what's it called when you do the the samurai's seppuku seppuku right right

seppuku yeah he's yeah oh my god it's so specific he's really thought out every beat of how he would yeah, how he would disembowel himself.

And you probably, this is another thing that Greg Malins used to say to me is he's like, it's really important for the writers to get to know the actors because you learn more about what you can give them, like what you can, what they, you know.

And one of the things I think that you guys started to notice about Neil was he was a physical comedian, like extraordinary.

Like a cartoon, a genius.

Yeah.

Like his precision and his ability to kind of like mime things and turn on a dime and do these little, I mean, just incredibly specific, specific,

virtuosic things.

Like you could feel that, like, and I don't even remember how much direction was in the script.

Like they were probably pretty specific, right?

I mean, I,

what he did with the sort of disemboweling himself with a samurai sword was was a work of art.

We couldn't, we, we did not script it that way.

Like, I don't know that we, I, I would love to, maybe we wrote that in, but again, if we did, it was better than we could have hoped for.

Their writing is really sharp in this episode.

Like, Jordana, we noticed she was laughing so hard.

This is my wife, Jordana, for those of us just joining us.

First time viewer.

First time viewer.

Yeah, first time viewer.

And she said, she leaned over to me and she's like, wow, we're laughing like a lot.

Oh, that's so good to hear.

I was so nervous about this episode at the time.

I so wanted it to work.

So did Carter.

I think that you're starting to see that the

kind of land, comedic landmines and character quirks and stuff that you planted in the first first season start to really pay off.

Like when you come back to, you know, and even,

you know, Robin as a gun nut.

We learned that in this one.

He calls her a gun nut and she says, no, I'm a gun enthusiast.

Enthusiast.

Enthusiast is such a good word.

So good.

Yeah, that was, that was us finding those other speeds and finding how Kobe can, Kobe, when she warns him not to debt, and Ted's not going to find out and she's holding the gun.

Like finding the speed that Robin is a little bit terrifying terrifying at times was amazing.

And, and also, like, the, of course, Ted is not a gun fan.

Like, of course, like, that's a great moment of conflict.

Like, you, like, like, that's gonna, you know, their different kind of worldviews and their different political takes.

Like, it's it's very smart how that starts to reveal itself.

But there was something about this episode, like, I found myself laughing really hard at this episode.

Oh, that's so great to hear.

I really did.

You know what?

I thought was a great line is

when Marshall says, Why eat food?

It's just going to leave me.

And then Ted says, You know, he kind of makes the joke explicitly.

At least in this scenario, you get to do the dumping.

Like, it's such a dumb throwaway joke, but so smart.

That was one of my hardest laughs.

It was one of my hardest hours.

I forgot about that joke completely.

That was one of my hardest laughs of the whole episode.

And also, Ted's face, like, hey, like, like trying to lighten the mood, you know, I thought there was a great, almost like a pretty iconic Barney line in this episode when he said, when I get sad, I I stop being sad and just be awesome instead.

True story.

Like, that's like a Barney t-shirt line.

Like, like, it gets quoted all the time.

It's one of the most quoted lines I see.

And it's just sort of a throwaway in the middle of this episode.

It's so like thrown away, but it caught on.

It's, it's also, it's a, it's a kind of monument to repression.

Like, it's like this weird, it's like not quite a healthy thing, but like growing up in the Midwest, like, I get it.

I get it.

It's not a self-help book, but it also kind of can work for a while.

But it was also uh uh you know we know from season one that he's got this reservoir of emotion that he's sitting on top of that he's put a tie and a suit on top of so it's it's it's both a throwaway funny line that is character revealing but will also come back that can't that can't last that does not last

that doesn't last forever and we we go on to show that but of course we didn't know exactly how and when we would show all of those things and that's what was fun about getting to robin as a gunnet i'm like right we found that there we found that there and we started to know her a little more.

And this old man,

he must admit he fell in love with you,

New York City.

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You know what's a fun runner in this episode?

Is uh-oh, already?

I know.

A premature ejaculation runner, just for the

folks watching at 8:30 on CBS with our kids.

But that's another way where Ted has telepathy.

He's calling her, like, he can feel it on his side.

I love that.

I love that.

It's kind of like a parent knows that the kid is in danger downstairs, you know?

Like, I need to get, I need to go save them.

And he's right.

That it really is telepathy.

He knew from 50 feet away in a closed door, Marshall's doing it.

It really is parental.

Cause as a parent, you do have that.

You're like, it's too quiet out there.

Some shit's going on.

It's not even the noise that calls you.

It's the quiet.

It's too quiet out there.

What was the line Ted says he watched a scary movie?

Was that to Robin?

Yeah, because, yeah, yeah.

No, he said that to Robin was being like Marshall's.

He was sleeping on our floor.

He was sleeping on the floor.

He watched a scary movie.

It's so parental.

Yeah, he watched a scary movie.

It's like the tough mom and then the pushover.

Ted's the pushover dad.

Yeah, he's the good cop.

She's the bad cop.

Yeah.

Marshall getting ejected from the baseball game and throwing the chili dog.

Holy shit.

I forgot about that.

I forgot about that.

There's so many like

viral clips of shit like that really happening at baseball games and

sporting events now these days that I'm like, oh,

that feels oddly prophetic.

People stealing balls from kids.

And also, Jumbotron's never more in the news than the last couple months, you know?

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

They have a little cold play, retroactive shout out.

It felt weirdly topical.

Oh, this is a little backstage thing that I remembered.

So

Barney has a line about, what do you guys watch love actually until your periods sync up?

Was that the line?

And then we laugh and Carter came in and gave a note to, I think, me and Neil.

And he said, I want it to be Ray Liota's laugh from Goodfellas.

Because remember when we got

yeah like there's that like insane it's a great like cackle and he was like he was very specific like i just want it to be ray leota's laugh from good fellas

like a little too big and a little too crazy yeah that's a great note and it made he was absolutely right carter because it made for a great hard cut to that gun firing cutting off that laughter yeah that was hilarious that's hilarious

we just have to talk about funk legend george clinton he's so good in this he's so hilarious he's like low-key he's like low-key, a genius actor, in addition to being like a toweringly great musician.

Yeah.

And breaking the fourth wall and turning the camera.

Now I'm going to let her play with my hair.

I'm going to let her play with my hair.

Oh my God.

It's so funny.

I think the funny thing is, here is, I think we were told

maybe in some sense of panic to boost the ratings again, to give context, we were starting, we had started by the end of season one to lose to that show where Howie Mandel was opening briefcases full of money with models.

We were losing to that.

And I think we were trying to cast some huge, like, not that George Clinton is not huge, but like some, I don't know, some rock legend that was like beyond what we could get.

They wanted Paul McCartney, you know what it was.

And the sort of, and George, to be clear, George Clinton is very, is, is an incredible get and an enduring legend in his own right, but so specific and strange.

And it's not like where we started.

I'm sure the network pitched us all these huge names that were like current, like popular people that are 30, you know what I mean?

And to get like grizzled old, wonderful George Killing Dan Lily

with eight different colors in his hair.

He's the eight different colors in his hair.

He has been through some shit, and now he's taken Lily away from Marshall.

He's added to his amazing resume.

But much like everything with the show, it's like where we landed was actually funnier and cooler than anything else.

It's where we needed to be.

He's so funny.

He was so great.

And it's whatever the 10 names we didn't get before we got to him.

And I mean this in the best way.

It was so right.

I'm so thrilled it was him.

He was amazing.

And we had a personal connection.

I will say we had a personal connection to get him.

Erica,

the casting assistant, Erica Pennington, I think her mom was part of George Clinton's management team.

It was almost because we were not a hit show.

That's what I'm trying to say.

We couldn't have gotten Mick Jagger to do that.

No one really knew who the fuck we were still.

So we needed to call in a favor through like directs of contacts to George Clinton because we struck out on all the other names.

But we had a personal line to George Clinton, and that's how we got it.

I think I'm remembering that correctly.

And also, just a quick thing to tie it to you: he played at Wesleyan.

He did.

P-Funk played Wesleyan when Alec and I were in college.

P-Funk played a huge show at Wesleyan that was like the spring fling.

It was, it was to this day, a legendary show.

They're amazing.

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm anywhere down playing George Clinton.

He's fucking great.

It was so great we got him.

And I was in a...

I was in a movie with Catherine Hawn and Juno Temple called Afternoon Delight that had a very

uncomfortable strip tee scene scene to biological speculation, which remains one of my favorite songs.

I'm just trying to get in on the George Clinton conversation.

I didn't meet him that day.

I loved, oh, funk legend, George Clinton.

I'm so glad you spotted me at your concert and dragged me up on stage to dance with you, Courtney Cox style.

And I wonder

for our beloved Gen Z fans out there, do you guys know what that is a reference to?

Because this is like, that's such a Gen X deep cut.

This is a pre-friend's courtney cox yeah getting called on stage by bruce springstein in the video for dancing in the dark right correct yeah i think it's her first big thing courtney cox it's her first big thing she did yeah she's she's like literally plucked out of the audience and dances adorably with bruce springsteen in this um in this very iconic famous video but i i there are a couple of like real deep cultural cuts that i'm like almost like shakespeare like the full, like you need like, this is what this meant in 1587 or whatever, you know?

This podcast episode will is airing in October, right?

It's October as you're listening to this mid-October.

That means we have passed the 20-year anniversary of the Himyum premiere, which as we record this is not here yet here.

That's next week, like a week from this Friday is the 20 years since it aired.

underscoring the need to maybe give a few cliff notes here and there 20 years later for what was at the time also a reference to something 20 years prior to that that was an 80s music video with Courtney Cox.

So yes, we'll try to remember that as we go to name check some of those.

And it's just such a funny thing that like that whole sequence is just opening up the cranium of a person who's going insane and making insane connections based on a credit card.

statement.

So he's convinced that there's this ferret involved.

And it's the ferret is to mock Marshall, who hates ferrets.

So she's doing everything

to wound and hurt him.

It's accurate, right?

When you're imagining that other person you broke up with and the incredible happiness they are experiencing now that you're out of their life, it's, it's, it comes, even though it's completely insane and there's ferrets and George Clinton, it's from a real place.

That's why I think it lands because it is like your brain spins those things.

That person and the unknownness, like it's like Jaws, how you just don't see the shark for so much of that movie.

Like, where's Lily?

What is Lily doing in the real world?

She's somewhere.

She's probably in San Francisco.

I mean, we all do it when someone hasn't texted or emailed back we we we run through it and we're like oh they must be furious about this yes

you know they're angry about this i think we we spin out it's real um i love when uh i mean the whole notion of like her identity had been stolen and these are not her charges like such a great reveal of the mystery and that Marshall punches the guy at the hotel room thinking it's her boyfriend.

But I really love the scene.

I mean, so obviously Ted explodes at Marshall in that great thing where he kind of loses it.

He can't take it anymore.

He has to give him this tough love talking to that came out much harsher, I imagine, than he wanted it to.

You had some great stuff in this episode.

You had great stuff to play and you leaned into it.

Just the protection of Marshall, the arc of protecting Marshall to then running out of the patience to protect Marshall was so, there's like, it's like a little bit of a ticking time bomb, right?

Like Ted is this fuse.

We're going to get to the point where Ted can't even take it anymore.

And he's going to feel guilty, but he was also kind of right.

And Marshall thanks him for it.

He does snap out of it at the end, sort of.

I loved also the reality of the sweet music starts, Ted and Marshall have it out in the bar.

The sweet music starts playing and you hardcut out and you go, he wasn't better.

He still woke up the next morning and was fucking miserable because that's how it is.

That's how breakups are.

There was another thing that you guys did that

this started to happen a lot.

And you can give me more specifics about this, but when

he describes, Ted walks in and he describes seeing Marshall for the first time in their dorm room and how that confident guy, that absolutely feet up on the wall, you know, and then Marshall says, I was so high, I was high that day.

I was so high, I thought you were the dean, right?

Yeah.

I don't remember what season it is, but we play that.

We went back and shot that scene.

I love when we do that.

We did that with the bunk bed joke in season one, where it's the top, the bottom buck moves, the top bunk's going to move too.

And these jokes that we just had stayed with us, we said, why don't we see that someday?

That is the gift of being on for long enough that you can, you can find a way back to show that joke that you said happened.

And we did.

We did later.

I'm blanking on what season at the moment.

When you re-watch the series, people probably remember, people probably remember the scene where he says, oh, I thought you were the dean.

You're not the dean, right?

And Ted is giggling because he's eating a sandwich.

Yeah.

They probably remember that.

Then they go back and watch it.

And first episode of season two, he says, oh, I was so high.

I thought you were the dean.

And they're like, oh, yeah.

We end up seeing that later.

Like

you can watch this show almost backwards and have delight in it the way, you know.

But they have this great scene at the hotel that I thought was just, every once in a while, you would write a scene for me or Jason that I was like, this is a real fun gift.

And I think Jason and I really appreciated those scenes where we could just like

be

best friends in a way, not under the harsh glare of Barney,

but to be the friends that had been best friends since they were 18.

You know, I love the line, you can't let Lily steal your identity the way that guy stole hers.

Yeah.

It's so wonderful.

That's my favorite line of the whole episode, I think.

The way it ended, I mean, it was kind of like a beautiful, heartbreaking cliffhanger.

You know, Marshall's on the road to healing his busted heart.

The gang is together.

They're having like a great laugh in McLaren's.

And then we spot Lily through that window wanting to come in, but also something keeping her and probably seeing Marshall, you know, not in doubled over in agony.

But maybe

the gang moved on without me.

Like we never want people to move on, you know, We don't want life to go on without us.

That's a tough thought.

So much of How I Met Your Mother was a kind of withholding of information until it was time to learn it.

And in the most satisfying way to learn it, when Lily sees like Marshall, he's having a good night.

He's at fun with his friends in the bar and he's laughing and she sees him laughing and she sees him okay.

And she has no idea the months of agony he's been in.

You know, really smart, really smart storytelling.

Yeah, he seems okay.

And maybe that means he doesn't need me to to walk through this door.

What does it mean that he seems okay?

And she can't quite do it.

The end of that episode is one of my favorite moments in season two when you see Lily and you have that great, talking about needle drops, you talk about the music there, that amazing cover of Boys Don't Cry by Grant Lee Phillips, which was pitched to us by Andy Gowan, our music supervisor.

Sometimes Carter and I or Josh or somebody would have the idea for a great song.

This was very much Andy Gowan's pitch.

Boys Don't Cry, pushing in on that table, pushing past that table of our gang to find Lily in that window.

She almost comes in.

She's not ready.

She turns away.

I just remember in the edit room getting chills when we were putting that together and feeling like, this is going to work.

We have a season two.

There's stuff here.

Like, right, you're, you've done one season of TV.

You don't know what else is going to happen past that.

We're first time showrunners.

That we knew we had stuff there.

We knew we had a condition that would give us six, eight, 10 episodes of that season two.

And it just felt like rocket fuel there.

I want to see episode at the end of that episode.

It had that cliffhangery thing of like, oh shit,

how do they get back together here?

How does the gang get back together?

Well, let me explain another slight change that's happening in season two.

We had a bunch of bonus episodes for season one.

We're going to still do a few, perhaps, but in an effort for Craig and I to be able to spend more time with our families, we're going to be doing less bonus episodes, but we're going to

try to retain the spirit of those bonus episodes, which were, of course, called general questions.

General questions.

All right.

Still sucking bath, but here we are.

Let's move through it.

Before we're going to have this, the inability to sync this up is not, it's not human error.

It's technological.

There's just a little.

Anyway,

we are going to do our general questions.

General questions.

It's Alec.

I feel like you're probably.

I was laying.

I hate that it leads to finger pointing and divisiveness within the group.

That's my regret about it.

We're going to be doing that right now.

So, Alec, take it away.

What do you have for us?

Absolutely.

So you can find us at how wemadeyourmother.com.

Hit contact.

You could send in a voice message.

You could send in an email.

You could fill out a form.

Yes.

And also, by the way, these can be questions.

These can be observations.

And what we really like to hear, especially in the voice notes, is tell us what How I Met Your Mother means to you, how you discovered it, how it changed your life,

why you keep watching it, who you've

turned on to the show.

We want to hear all those stories.

We love them.

And, you know, on Instagram, I mean, I mean, there have been so many years of people posting so many.

clips and memes and things that sort of kept him young alive and and and thank you to everyone there and we are of course on uh the social media at uh at how we made your mother and on our instagram is where we um solicit your questions uh also Also on the How We Made Your Mother fan club page on Facebook.

So from the internet, Spencer Mattson says, asks,

what were some of the lessons you learned while filming or writing season one that you knew you wanted to implement in season two?

Did you have to do any major pivoting?

Major pivoting?

This early in the series based on how something in the first season was received?

Well, I touched upon this a little bit.

We were given a bit of a warning not to be too serialized, and i i think we just didn't do it we just we we sort of said yes okay we'll take a look at that but we didn't we knew what we knew the show's power was was serialization and the fact that the emotional through line kind of kept going and if you look at this episode we take you all the way through to summer we take you all the way through the emotional journey of the characters i don't think i think the biggest lesson wasn't was not to was not to cave in and and worry too much about that was to think the fans will find this this will find people who get it thank god thank you to the fans thank you to everyone who's listening to this and who watched the show because we we did find you if the show did find you and i i'm proud to say i think we kept

we we stayed true to we stayed true to the spirit of what we wanted to do with this show i i think if we learned anything it was like Let's dig deeper into these characters.

Like we find this other weird trait of Robin in this episode, like along the way.

And we find other,

we just kept digging deeper into these characters and these actors, what these actors could do and these relationships and keeping digging deeper into their history and connection i think that was like that was definitely something we we did more of and wanted to do more of in season two but we didn't want to mess with kind of the the heart and soul of the show which it is serialized it just is josh was there anything as an actor who now okay you're in season two there's a little little maybe a little more of a you could breathe out you're actually doing this this is staying on tv for a while and with that aside you can lean in a little more.

Was there a pressure valve released a little bit for you?

Or was it the opposite?

It was, oh, we're doing this now.

Is it more pressure?

No,

I think it was less in as much as

I knew they were not going to replace me with another guy to play the role.

I felt like some measure of job security.

I mean, we were still...

uh you know uh we were still season to season we weren't we weren't getting two season pickups we were very dependent we didn't even know know if we'd get a back nine in season two at this point, right?

Like we, we knew we had 13.

Correct.

Are they going to air all 13?

You got to, you know, you got to stay in the zone where they're still feeling good about it.

I think that I felt really good about where Ted was.

I mean, it's certainly like, even though it's an, you know, you're, you're an actor, like it's more fun to play the, the, the wiser, you know, steadier character in terms of, um, I mean, it can be fun to play Despair and all that stuff, but I liked that Ted didn't have to be, at least in this episode, the person who was punched in the face or left at the altar.

Like he got to really get the girl.

He got to be the good friend.

Like, I thought, I thought Ted's virtues were really on display in this episode.

And I think that's why I liked it so much was because I didn't have to open up a vein, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I think, and that's another thing we learned.

We, we put the focus on Marshall.

Marshall is the focus of the romantic quandary in this episode and in this opening arc of season two.

And that was something we we wanted to do.

We said it was the spotlight was on Ted all through season one.

Let's get Ted with Robin and let's take a look at the pain and struggles of somebody else here for a minute.

And that was that was exciting.

It was exciting because it was a new move.

And we couldn't do that when Marshall and Lily were just super couple.

We needed to shake them up a bit there.

At Sprat T asks, Josh looks more tan in the season premiere.

How'd you spend your time away?

You know, it's so funny.

I have very vivid memories of my second season hiatus,

but the first season hiatus in between one and two.

Oh, I know what I was.

I did a, I believe I did a play in Poughkeepsie at the New York Stage and Film up at Vassar, which is a theater that I have worked with since I was like in college.

I'm almost sure I did a play there that summer.

So I was just, you know, I was in upstate New York doing theater

and going to the tan and going to the tanning bed many, many, many times throughout the summer.

What's funny is you're tan, you got very tan in the half hour after you came in from the rain and on the stoop.

That's the weird thing about needing to sort of play that continuity.

It's like everyone looks a little different.

The apartment looks a little different.

I have people often say that I look tan.

I think that if I get a little bit of sun, I kind of brown up, you know, I don't burn very easily.

And it's always a little shocking to people.

Boy, are we different.

Yes, this is, this is, this just shows that two different species can be friends craig

the iris and the jews don't share the overlap there

at ryan schwartz tv says it's supposed to be the same day but the brown couch from season one has been swapped for the red couch in the season two premiere why the change

okay i'll tell you one we we got a bunch of notes at the end of season one and a bunch some of them we agreed with we didn't want to un-serialize the show we wanted to keep it that way but we we did get i think we got a note from the network it may have even been from Pam Freiman too, where everybody just sort of agreed.

Season one, visually, that apartment looks a little dark.

And I think we, Carter and I wanted it to be like not the fancy, shiny, like the friend's apartment, huge and this sort of weird, like that purpley kind of like lots of like almost neon colored things.

We, we wanted it to be more like, this is a New York apartment.

It's still too big, but we wanted it to be a plausible New York apartment.

I think we probably steered our set designer and his team towards like, let's grid it up a little bit.

It doesn't need to look shiny.

It doesn't need to look neon.

And I think we might have gone a few clicks too far.

Season one does look a little dark.

The couch is a little dark.

The wall is a little dark.

We decided to just brighten everything up.

And we did it, hoping no one would notice.

But of course, in the interim, people are like, why the fuck is there a different couch from when they left the apartment the night before?

It's also like you were depending on four months of amnesia for people.

Right.

It wasn't on streaming.

You hadn't seen how much a mother since May.

And now it's September.

People literally go from episode episode 22 of season one right into episode, and you're like,

Why is the couch different?

Why is the couch different, bitch?

Yeah.

We've heard this a lot, and we will continue to hear it.

It's a great question.

It is a great question.

I never knew that, though.

It was my goddamn fake apartment, and I didn't know it was a new couch.

All right, here's a little BSL.

BSL.

Where does that word come from?

I think that's BTS mixed with ASL, which I'm always thinking about.

Sorry.

Here's a little BTS.

Behind sign language.

My goodness.

A little behind-the-scenes question from at Keenan99.

Okay.

Do the actors in the background of bar and restaurant scenes actually have conversations?

It seems like they mouthrill words, but have silent conversations.

How does that work?

Literally what you just said.

That's what it is.

That's what it is.

Your question answered itself.

And yes, it's weird.

It's generally the second AD who kind of is in charge of the background.

Are you the second AD?

Generally, the second AD.

Extra points.

generally

and uh it was chris right who was our our second uh or maybe it was the second second i can't remember there was a second second assistant director but but they're ordered sometimes quite harshly like we can hear you whispering like they really have to mouth conversations they really have to mime it it must be the most awkward job in the world to show up and sit with a stranger you were just paired with pretending to talk silently to each other but there were a couple people that um some of them were like ucla students or like people that would show up like through the years that were like bar regulars.

I'm thinking of a couple.

There were a couple of women that were just like really cool and they were always kind of in the bar like like maybe half, three quarters of the seasons.

And we got to know them because you're sitting around eating checks, mix and drinking fake beer and they were lovely.

So shout out to the background actors.

I always thought this job is actually harder than my job.

Like this is a very difficult job.

It's not an easy job.

And at one point, Conan O'Brien did that job on our show.

Yeah, we'll get to that.

But yeah.

And finally, a bigger question to end with here is at Camore,

At Camore says, how much of season two was planned when you ended season one as you did?

Was it a vague outline or was it more we've set ourselves up, let's see what comes next?

It was more than that.

It wasn't let's set ourselves up and see what comes next, but it certainly wasn't meticulously plotted out.

I think you're looking for conditions to play.

What can give us some rocket fuel for a bunch of episodes?

Marshall and Millie break up, Ted and Robin get together.

That's a condition we can play.

We can get, and then how do we have fun and be really interesting within that?

How do we find the twists and turns of that?

But if you set up that condition, you're just kind of getting the raw material, kind of like the fuel and the rocket, and then navigating where that fuel takes you is the next step.

And we probably, you know, over the summer, as we were starting to break and write those scripts, we got more like plotting the navigation points on that, on that journey.

But we knew, I think we gave ourselves a gift at the end of season one.

Even though season one ends sad and bittersweet, it was a gift to our future selves because we had a story to tell.

We had to dig our way out of that problem.

Can I ask you, Craig?

So by the time we come back, like August, I don't remember, mid-August, let's say, early August, mid-August, you guys were handed episode one.

How many episodes deep are you into the writing?

How many episodes have you broken?

Like, where are you at that point?

When you show up to that first, when the actors show up to that first table read in whatever was late august or whatever it would be if i'm remembering i think it was a little earlier it was always like mid mid-august maybe yeah mid a little earlier early august you we would hope to be at like six scripts maybe five or six scripts written or degrees of written and then the outline and the shape for a few past that and then it just slowly i always thought of it as like the season of a tv is like pac-man eating these pellets okay that episode got written and shot that's a pellet and it's just coming coming coming there's this thing kind of bite eating them up and you're trying to stay as far ahead of that as you can.

I realize I'm making us the ghosts in Pac-Man or something.

I don't know, the metaphor is falling apart.

But, but yeah,

we would always, you'd want to have six scripts and a couple outlines, or else you'd feel really screwed.

But by the time we show up, that's the most comfortable you as the showrunner is going to feel because you're the most ahead of it you'll ever be.

Like, you're never going to be six episodes ahead the rest of the season.

No, you're going to just watch that catch up to you, watch watch the devouring Pac-Man monster catch up and eat up those episodes.

And yeah,

it's invigorating, shall we say?

It is a marathon run at a sprint's pace.

Yeah, awesome.

24 episodes.

I think we did 22 in season two.

And like when we became more successful, we started getting 24, but 22 is plenty.

So we

like to end a lot of these episodes with a letter that's been sent in to how we made your mother.com to contact.

And we got a delightful, wonderful letter letter from Sophie in Germany.

And again, if you want to send one in,

even if it doesn't make it on the air, which it might,

please let us know what the show means to you and anything else you want to share with us today.

We love it.

It's so nice.

It's so great to hear from you.

So this one says, hi, my name is Sophie.

I am 15 years old and I live in Germany.

I discovered how I met your mother pretty precisely a year ago.

I was alone on a nine-hour train ride back home from Berlin.

I logged into the train Wi-Fi and a website popped up with hundreds of movies and series.

For some reason, I decided to click on how I met your mother, not knowing how much I would fall in love with this show and how it would change me.

I am someone who worries a lot about their future.

I feel like I am missing out on all my teenage experiences, not having kissed anyone yet, or feeling like anyone will ever fall in love with me.

Every day I think about where I will be in 10 years, what job will I be doing, who I will still be with, and who I am going to lose and if anyone is ever going to love me the way Ted loves.

Saying that makes me feel guilty of thinking so much about myself, knowing what is happening to the world in politics, climate change, AI, social media.

The list goes on.

I often feel like the whole world is just going under and that's just what my future will be like.

All of these thoughts have taken up a lot of space the last four years, but since I met Ted, Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Barney, the hope of everything eventually working out has been fighting the darker thoughts.

How I met your mother comforts me in a way nothing else does.

It taught me how important friendships are, that I have to let things change, and that every phase of your life is important and will lead you to something.

So thank you, Josh and Craig.

Thank you so much for creating something that brings me hope, that makes me laugh and cry, and that will always have a special place in my heart.

That's beautiful.

My God, Sophie.

You are the wisest 15-year-old I think I ever met.

Yeah.

We're really honored the show has meant that to you.

And yeah, thank you for sharing that with us.

Yeah, Sophie, I just want to say, I mean,

you sound like you have an enormous heart.

And

I often find that about people that love How I Met Your Mother.

They're just

very deeply feeling people.

And I think that as you demonstrate in your letter,

you can hold many things in your awareness at one given, any given time.

You can hold the pain and uncertainty of the world, the collective, the,

you know, what's going on in the larger kind of landscape, as well as your own thoughts and feelings and hurts and yearnings.

And

we can hold all of that.

I'm reminded of

something that I think it's in one of Elizabeth Gilbert's books or talks, she talks about

in a refugee camp in some war-torn country, and it was just a terrible situation.

And this person had gotten to know some of the young kids in this refugee camp.

And they were all talking about who has a crush on who.

And they were still, you know, even in this dire humanitarian situation, they were still wanted love and they still wanted to know who liked them and did they like, you know,

who they liked.

And that was still of interest to me, them.

So I don't think that worrying about the world and being concerned about your own future and will you find someone to love and someone to love, love you.

And I don't think those are mutually exclusive.

I think that humans, we can hold all of that.

And even though

How I Met Your Mother was not a directly political show, I think there is something political about being a good friend and being showing up for people and being loyal.

And those things are needed in our society.

You know, Ted says love is the best thing we do.

You know, it's a somewhat a political statement on some level, if you want to get granular about it.

So

I think we can do all those things.

I don't think you have to feel bad about any of that.

I am guilty.

Please acquit me.

All sins are forgiven.

In New York City.

How We Made Your Mother is hosted and executive produced by Josh Radner and Craig Thomas and is presented and distributed by the Office Ladies Network and Odyssey.

This episode is also executive produced by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey.

The show is produced and edited by me, Alec Lev, and our co-producer is Doug Matica.

Our audio producer and mixer is Alex Reeves at Point of Blue Studios.

Our digital content producer, aka Gen Z Master, is Emily Blumberg.

Artwork by John Morrow.

Please follow, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts or your podcast player of choice.

It really does help the show.

Our theme song is New York City by our own Josh Radner with additional music by Craig Thomas and Andrew Majewski.

Special thanks to Lola Kennedy and Elliot Connors.

Visit howadeyourmother.com to learn more and click on the contact page to send us an email or a voice message.

Your stories and questions are an important part of the show.

Subscribe to Josh Radner's newsletters on Substack and check out his music and everything else at joshradner.com.

Order Craig Thomas' debut novel, That's Not How It Happened, wherever books are sold, and check out his other published writings at CraigThasWriter.com.

And you can subscribe to my own Dead Fathers Society, also on Substack.

To learn more about how you make a difference, this show's ongoing campaign to raise money for congenital pediatric heart disease research, check out the Make a Difference tab at the top of our website.

People will, in fact, dance.

The real question,

it just hit me.

Am I in love with you?

Or just New York City?

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