Was Ted Mosby an HSP? Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas discuss the How I Met Your Mother protagonist's personality type in rewatch podcast

The first episode of the How We Made Your Mother podcast, hosted by Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas, premiered on March 10, 2025. The latest episode grabbed a lot of attention as the duo discussed the former's character, Ted Mosby, in How I Met Your Mother.

Notably, Josh Radnor was featured in all the show episodes until it ended in 2014. While speaking about Ted Mosby on How We Made Your Mother, Radnor referred to certain things about the character's personality in the series and concluded by saying that Ted was possibly an HSP.

"Ted was probably an HSP. A highly sensitive person."

For the unversed, HSP or a Highly Sensitive Person refers to those individuals who are sensitive to various physical, emotional, and social situations, as per Cleveland Clinic. HSPs might not like certain things, such as violence, but they can be creative at the same time. Apart from this, they also have a lot of empathy inside themselves.

Josh Radnor mentioned the reasons behind calling his character an HSP as he said on the podcast:

"He's a complicated character to have played because he's the eyes and ears, he's the center of the show. He's the person that kind of welcomes the audience in. But he was also his own really flawed dimensional character. And I have found the people who relate to Ted are unbelievably fascinating to me. Just as many women come up to me and say I'm like Ted as men."

Josh Radnor said that Ted Mosby had a "big heart" and that he was honored to have had the opportunity to play the character on such a popular series. Josh continued and stated that the character helped him to become vulnerable and reveal parts of himself that he was embarrassed about for a long time. Craig also said in response:

"It's funny what you said about being vulnerable because it was vulnerable to write too. Carter and I are these like super emo like sort of we are highly sensitive people, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, you know we have big dreams like Ted. The creation of the show when we were 30 years old, that was a far fetched impossible dream to create this show, that was us Ted Mos being all over the place."

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Josh Radnor spoke up on the roles he took up after How I Met Your Mother

Josh Radnor appeared for an interview with People magazine last month, saying how he started being careful while selecting his roles, considering that audiences loved his performance on the show.

Josh said that he was looking for different roles after the series ended and continued:

"My first job, my first gig outside of How I Met Your Mother was this Broadway play called Disgraced, and it was Islamophobia. And I played this pretty ethically shady character. And then, I was on this PBS Civil War show called Mercy Street, where I was a morphine-addicted Civil War surgeon."

Josh Radnor also mentioned that he was not willing to play characters from New York City that were "looking for wives" and that he could feel it "in the DNA" when his search for the perfect role was complete. He also addressed the reasons for launching the podcast with Craig as he said:

"I think that part of me doing this is just to almost call a truce with it and say like, 'All right, you've given me a lot. You've taken a lot from me. I don't want to be at odds with you, so let's just turn around and see.'"

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How We Made Your Mother was announced by Josh through Instagram last month with a poster of the podcast and the trailer was revealed on March 3, 2025.