Josh Radnor on the Search for God—and the Self
(or: How I Met Your Maker)
Greetings, seekers, skeptics, and recovering cynics,
This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with Josh Radnor—actor, writer-director, musician, and quiet cartographer of the inner life.
Most people know Josh from his nine seasons as Ted Mosby on the Emmy-nominated How I Met Your Mother—a hopeless romantic with a blueprint for love and a tendency to overthink everything (relatable). But Josh Radnor’s creative life has always extended far beyond that role. He’s written, directed, and starred in two feature films, Liberal Arts and Happythankyoumoreplease—both premiering at Sundance, with the latter winning the 2010 Audience Award for Favorite U.S. Drama. He appeared in the PBS Civil War drama Mercy Street, and took the stage on Broadway in Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, as well as The Babylon Line at Lincoln Center.
In the years since HIMYM, along with stepping behind the camera, Josh has explored music through Radnor & Lee—all orbiting a shared question: what does it mean to live a meaningful life? These days, that question isn’t just artistic—it’s personal, shaped by marriage, fatherhood, and the daily, grounding realities of showing up for another human being.
In other words, he’s pivoted from telling stories about finding ‘the one’ to asking deeper questions about who we are—and what happens when the scripts we inherit no longer serve us.
Listening to Josh, you quickly realize—this is a deeply thoughtful human with a restless curiosity. Not just an actor who found success on a beloved sitcom, but someone actively exploring the inner life and the role spirituality plays in it. As he puts it, “all great spiritual traditions warn of getting tricked by the senses, that they can narcotize us and lead us away from the truth of who we are.”
As he tells Rainn, there’s a parallel between the work of a dramatist and the spiritual seeker. “There’s a layer beneath the layer beneath the layer… you look at the text and plumb the depths to see what’s really going on… It’s a depth exploration underneath the surface… I can’t get enough of these brilliant quotes from philosophy, psychology, theology. I really like having these conversations because I feel like there’s so much in the world that’s dragging us to the surface of things—and only having us look at the surface of things, the surface of who we are…”
In a culture obsessed with the superficial, this former sitcom star is choosing to go deeper. It doesn’t get more Soul Boom than that.