How It Was All Ted’s Fault | S2E15 "Lucky Penny"
How We Made Your Mother
Audacy & Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas
4.8 • 922 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Josh and Craig walk through why this episode works so well, focusing on how the reverse storytelling lets the show explore blame, fate, and Ted’s instinct to overanalyze every turn his life takes. They talk about how the chain of small choices spirals backward until Ted realizes he’s the one who started it all—and how Future Ted reframes the missed flight as something that had to happen. The conversation touches on Carter Bays’ influence, Neil Patrick Harris’s marathon storyline and physical comedy, and the early-2007 “old tech” details that ground the episode in its moment. They also reflect on how tightly everything is built—no wasted scenes, no disconnected B-stories—and wrap up with a fan letter that captures how the show continues to resonate with viewers long after it first aired.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm alone. What a pity I won't be soon in New York City when I see you. |
| 0:12.0 | Please permit me to tell you everything in New York City. |
| 0:19.0 | Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of How We Made Your Mother. I'm Josh Radner. I'm here with my friend Craig Thomas. Josh. Hey, Craig. I don't know. I want to try something else. Just your name. Josh! You know, you fall into a right. You go, I'm here as ever with my friend Craig Thomas. You're just like, damn, this is the same thing every time. So I'm glad we mixed it up. Yeah, we're mixed up. This is great. This is great. Well, this is a great episode to mix it up with because this is all, this is a, we were talking about columns two episodes ago, which was a little more straightforward and linear. And this is like, we're talking about Lucky Penny today. This is a podcast, by the way, we talk about How I Met Your Mother, which is a TV show that I starred in as Ted Mosby and Craig co-created the show with his buddy and my buddy, Carter Bays. |
| 1:04.6 | And we're making our way through. |
| 1:06.2 | We're deep into episode, sorry, season two. |
| 1:08.9 | This is an episode called Lucky Penny, which is a great episode, |
| 1:14.0 | really funny. I feel like a lot of the virtues and kind of bravora storytelling strokes |
| 1:22.0 | that how I met your mother's best at are really on display here. Yeah, I will give Carter a ton of credit. |
| 1:29.3 | This is very much a Carter Bayes, the brilliant Carter Bay is a baby of his. |
| 1:34.3 | Just this shape of going backwards in time to find out where it all started. |
| 1:39.3 | It's kind of the whole series in miniatures in this episode. |
| 1:42.3 | I love episodes like this where the whole episode, |
| 1:44.5 | it's like the mosquito and amber containing the dinosaur DNA. |
| 1:47.5 | The whole show is in episodes like this, and it's a mystery. |
| 1:51.5 | Whose fault is it that Ted is in this situation? |
| 1:53.5 | How far back can you trace it? |
| 1:55.0 | It's another mini mystery within the larger mystery of the series. |
| 1:58.0 | I really like that about this. |
| 1:59.5 | It's a good episode. |
| 2:00.5 | And also another kind of encoded thing is, I believe, Ted's daughter is named Penny. |
| 2:08.3 | Isn't that right now? |
| 2:09.2 | Yeah. |
... |
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