General Questions | S1E8 "The Duel"
How We Made Your Mother
Audacy & Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas
4.8 • 922 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this General Questions bonus episode of How We Made Your Mother, Josh, Craig, and Alec reflect on “The Duel” and answer fan questions about real-life apartments, the emotional weight of physical space, and how props like swords and Shockey came to represent bigger ideas in the show. They also dig into the origins of HIMYM’s many fictional websites, the legacy of Barney’s blog, and the writers assistants who used that material to launch their careers. The conversation blends nostalgia, comedy, and sincerity—covering everything from sentimental goodbyes to apartments, to what it’s like to stage a sitcom sword fight and why leaving a home can feel like losing a piece of yourself.
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What happened to all the HIMYM websites like TedMosbyIsAJerk.com and Barney’s Blog?
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Can you bring any of the old sites back?
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Who actually owns those domains now?
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Did writing Barney’s Blog help writers assistants get promoted?
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What real-life places inspired the show’s apartments and bars?
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Do you have a building from your life that will always feel like “yours”?
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What was your first apartment like, and did you have objects like Shockey or the swords?
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Did Craig and Carter have a shared object that symbolized their early years like the swords?
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What are you doing with your apartment while you’re on tour?
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Was the sword fight fully choreographed or improvised?
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Were the swords always part of the set or added for this episode?
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Why do we get so attached to physical spaces?
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How do our props and surroundings help us feel at home?
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Is there such a thing as a forever home, or is home something we carry with us?
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How did the crew design a realistic but shootable New York apartment?
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What was it like saying goodbye to the real stage where HIMYM was filmed?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of how we made your mother. |
| 0:16.5 | These are the episodes that we call general questions. |
| 0:20.7 | General questions. It's getting better. |
| 0:22.9 | It never links up. No, I think it's getting better. It's getting better. I think it's the internet that |
| 0:26.6 | messes us up. We're good. It's technology. If we were in the same room together, we would never miss |
| 0:32.4 | these. We're answering questions today about episode eight from season one of How I Met Your |
| 0:38.8 | Mother, the episode called The Dual, just a quick refresher. |
| 0:43.4 | It's when there's three plot lines. |
| 0:46.6 | It's Lily's apartment, has been turned into a Chinese restaurant in Queens. |
| 0:51.7 | Ted and Marshall have a sword fight to determine who gets the apartment |
| 0:55.9 | after Marshall and Lily get married. And Barney does his best to start a thing called the Lemon Law, |
| 1:02.4 | which is within the first five minutes of a date. If you don't want to carry on with it, |
| 1:05.9 | you just call Lemon Law and everyone's free to go. Is that right, Craig? That's right. Well done. Very succinct. So the episode aired a couple days ago or was posted a couple days ago so you could listen to that and then come back for our general questions. General questions. I think it's you, Alec, that's messing this up. Definitely not. No, no. The inventor of the game can't even... Alec invented this. Alex invented this. I stole this from Alec unabashedly. I'm going to edit it so that it seems like I'm... Then you're the... I'm not sure how you can achieve that, but okay, I can't. You'll add some other people that are doing it right with you. So what do we got, Alec? What did people want to know about this episode? |
| 1:46.0 | We got a bunch of questions here. |
| 1:47.4 | We have some audio I'm going to play for you. |
| 1:48.8 | It's very exciting, just about the duel. I think you guys are going to love this. But I'm going to read this one note here from Instagram, because Josh, early on you had talked about the idea of this show being a dialogue with us and the fans, with you and the fans. |
| 2:00.6 | And I want to make that |
| 2:03.1 | so where we got a question from a fan, we responded to it, then they responded to our response to it. |
| 2:09.1 | And I want to read that to you. And then if you like, you could just talk to them too. And you can |
| 2:12.6 | just make it for this person. All right. Our inaugural follow-up question. Yeah. So not even a question. |
| 2:17.9 | It's just really lovely. |
| 2:18.7 | Bri for you go says, |
... |
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