Ponytail Picks #75 - Success

Oct 10, 2025

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You did it! You opened this email. Now let’s see if we can successfully investigate every angle of #winning in our picks this week.

LISTEN

Successfully riding the Beatles’ coattails

Covered, quoted, and sampled—these are the best reverberations from the Fab Four’s stamp on the world. What can I say? They nailed it.

-AK

Know of a fabulous forgery I missed? Tell me about it.

WATCH

Financial fringe films

I started making a list of films with anti-capitalist sentiments but then I realized there was a lot of crossover with a previous list I made for Ponytail Picks #48 - Anarchy. So I’m shifting focus a bit and looking at films that follow characters on the economic margins and examine the side effects and seedy underbelly of financial success and the pursuit thereof.

Nomadland (2020)

Does success require settling down?

Kajillionaire (2020)

“Once your face is in their system they got you. Fines, 401k, home equity. But maybe you want all that. I don’t know. Me, I prefer to just skim.”
“So do I.”
“Do you? Oh, that’s interesting. Because most people want to be kajillionaires. That’s the dream. That’s how they get you hooked. Hooked on sugar. Hooked on caffeine. Ha, ha, ha. Cry, cry, cry.”

Robots (2005)

Imagine fixing things instead of buying new things! Just don’t let big tech find out.

Buffaloed (2019)

A deep dive into the world of debt collection, as explained by Peg, our esteemed and eloquent protagonist:

Let’s say you owe the bank money. That bank doesn’t wanna chase your lazy-ass down because it’s not profitable enough. So they sell your debt to this Pube-stache for pennies on the dollar. Then he doubles his money by unloading it on this guy, the self-proclaimed “smartest fuck in the biz.” These guys are the ones clogging your phones every day. Every cent they collect over their purchace price is profit. Cash out the wazoo. There are barely any laws regulating debt collection and there aren’t enough resources to enforce the ones that do exist.

Parasite (2019)

“Rich people are naive. No resentments. No creases on them.”
“It all gets ironed out. Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out by money.”

-JB

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The ineffability of success in Lou Reed: The King of New York

By anyone else’s standard, Lou Reed was successful:

He cofounded one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
He significantly impacted other aspects of culture like fashion and gender.
Hits like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Sunday Morning” made him millions.

So I was shocked to read in this beautiful and thoroughly researched biography by Will Hermes that Lou didn’t seem to feel that way. There was always a level of credit, notoriety, and accomplishment he wanted but never had.

I’ve heard of other well-known and well-respected musicians that apparently felt this way, even while being lauded by their peers and reaching audiences other could only dream of1.

From the outside, something seems wrong about this—unjust, even. We feel like the people we consider icons should be able to recognize and enjoy that status. But in Lou’s case, keeping that satisfaction just out of reach seemed to also be part of what drove him to keep going. While he famously said he’d become “completely well-adjusted to being a cult figure” over 20 years before his death, Reed’s belief in his art and his aspiration for more pushed him to try new things all the way to the end.

I find that inspiring, but I also see as a check whenever I feel myself envying the success of others. You never know how other people are taking their own situation, or how you’d feel, given the chance to switch places.

-AK

Whew, we did it—albeit a week late. We’ve been even later in the past though so we’ll consider this a success. Give us