Bob Treemore has done some fascinating date-mining on the boutique and just how much merch they’re moving.

Is Bradley Rose our next instructor?

John Mills joins us to discuss how Apple’s Fitness+ is (or isn’t) affecting Peloton’s stock price.

Peloton cosmetics?

Peloton posted a holiday ad on Facebook and the comments got ugly.

Dr. Jenn Mann – When your workouts aren’t working out.

Matt Wilpers had to stop a class prematurely.

Class stacking is almost here and why it matters.

The “Taken/Not Taken” filter is rolling out on the bike.

Tread weights are back in stock!

Peloton has new job openings. What do they tell us about the future?

Tonal introduces dance cardio.

Tunde was featured on Yahoo and the Ali On The Run podcast.

There’s a December challenge and a new bike boot camp challenge.

A new artist series feature Nicki Minaj.

John Foley is featured 2020’s Bloomberg 50.

All this plus our interview with Eli Winfrey!

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here

New Data On Just How Well The Boutique Is Doing plus our interview with Eli Winfrey

We were getting ready to start in, and my mic just came off the mic stand, off the little hanger guy. It’s just a simple thing, you screw it back on it. I was sitting here ticking with it and it wouldn’t screw back on. I was getting so mad and then you come over and you’re like, “It’s good.”

When you handed it to me, it was already done.

Here’s what you don’t know, this is why I’m so mad.

This is why Tom doesn’t exercise.

This is why I don’t fix things, I don’t change my own oil. I was screwing at the wrong goddamn direction. I’m an idiot.

You are the smartest man I know. If you can’t screw on a stupid thing, if that’s the worst thing that you got going on, I’m going to take it.

You go, “It’s good,” and I could see like, “I should have tried turning it the other direction. I had 50/50 chance.”

I don’t know how to top that.

We should top it by telling people about who we will be interviewing next week. It’s going to be an exciting one.

It’s been a year in the making year.

You might remember, a year ago this time, Peloton had a commercial that went viral, and the infamous Peloton Wife commercial, where everybody was all up in arms, and she wouldn’t talk to anybody. She didn’t want to interview on the Today Show. She hasn’t spoken to anybody since, and we got her. She’s going to come on the show and she’s going to sit down for a very lengthy interview about what transpired, what it was like for her, and also some information about her and her life. She’s a Peloton user now, so she’ll talk about her love of Peloton. Maybe she’ll even reveal her leaderboard name. You’ll have to check back next week. If you wondered what that was like from her perspective, check back next week. It should be a good one.

It will be fun. All of our interviews are fun. We’re very lucky. We have good guests.

We are very fortunate in that regard. What do you have in store for people this week?

We’re going to talk about Apple Fitness because we need to talk about that. We have a visit from Dr. Jenn Mann. We’re going to talk about a new patent that Peloton filed, then we’re going to talk about how their holiday ad is going over. We’re going to talk about some things found on their website in the secret places that I don’t even know how people find this stuff. It will all makes sense when you hear it. There are things back in stock, then there are new positions that you need to hear about. There are all kinds of things.

Before we get to all that, shameless plugs, don’t forget we’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, wherever you find your podcast, you can find us. While you’re there, be sure and subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you would be so kind to leave a review, so people that come along after you, they’ll know whether or not we’re worth a listen. We have a new review. This is from Badger_Mom. “Love all things Peloton. I love this podcast. My only complaint is my drive into work isn’t quite long enough, so I never get to finish it. Thanks for including the recent interview with John Mills, another one of my favorites. Keep up the great work.” Leaderboard name is #Badger_Mom, real name is Sara Girard.

Thank you, Sarah, for the very kind review.

Also don’t forget, you can find us on the social medias, Facebook.com/TheClipOut. While you’re there, like the page, join the group. Check us out on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/TheClipOut, where you can watch these shows in their entirety in HD glory and you can see the pictures that we share or interview of the week. That’s always cool to check out. There’s all of that, let’s dig in, shall we?

—

Everybody is fascinated with the boutique.

Except for those people who say things like, “I just want my Century shirt. I don’t care about the rest.”

Even people that don’t necessarily want to buy the things from the boutique are fascinated by how fast things sell and what a huge part of the Peloton-verse it has become. We came across some interesting information about the boutique.

There is a gentleman out on Twitter, Bob Treemore, you might want to give him a follow because he posts lots of interesting little tidbits about Peloton. This week whenever it dropped, the thing that I noticed right away, and I started getting feedback right away, it was not just me that noticed, the Peloton did not sell out immediately. My theory has been they needed to get caught up because of COVID and because of this huge influx of people that joined. Once they did, they would finally be able to have enough forethought to be able to get ahead of that curve, stock it up enough so that everything didn’t sell out in 30 seconds. This appeared to be the collection in which that was the case. They had tons of items, and they still have tons of items, and that’s almost a week later, which has been a long time since I could say that. Bob posted this little tidbit of inventory numbers. I don’t know enough about data mining and cracking into people’s information. According to Bob, because I asked him directly, he said that everything he gained or garnered from Peloton was easily accessible if you knew where to look. In his words, he wasn’t doing anything nefarious. I want to point that out because I don’t understand it, so I can’t even try to explain it.

He wasn’t hacking.

He posted updates for the first several days. At first he was like, “They dropped 73 women’s and men’s apparel items.” He checked across everything, all of the items, he looked at the inventory items. Part three, he said there were top-line figures, across all sizes men and women, they had sold, I believe this was the next day, 196,000 units. Retail value was 13.5 million. That does not take into consideration everyone using codes, so we have no idea what the real number is. That was actually later that day after it went on sale. Then the next day after less than 24 hours, sales have been his following. I have trouble following Twitter. It says part four, but then it says less than 24 hours and then the units are actually less. I’m really confused.

Maybe that’s like he puts some benchmark and this gets tacked on?

I don’t know, but he could see how many items remained, and it was 120,000 items that remained. So far, that was only 4.96 million in retail, so somehow those are out of order. I’m sorry, I don’t understand Twitter because it says part four, but it says 21 minutes ago and then it’s different numbers. I don’t know, I suck at Twitter. You can look at the photograph that we have out on our page, in the group and on the YouTube channel video. Two days later on December 6th, he posts that Peloton has taken steps to close down this gap. They became aware of what he was doing, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. I think he even tagged Peloton in that post, and then he deleted the thread. You can no longer go out to his Twitter and see the thread. Somebody, I believe it was Mike Kyle just happened to post it in our groups so we could all see it. We’re all data nerds, we love to see that kind of stuff. The end result is that everything were huge numbers, but we don’t know what numbers those look like before. I find the whole thing interesting. I find it interesting that this is not the first time, nor as you’ll see in a moment, the last time that they have abilities for people to get to their information.

As one of the people who constantly strives to support Peloton, I find that frustrating. Come on, guys, I want you to lock shit down because I don’t want people to use this information for ill. I use it for fun when people give it to me. I don’t want people to use this against Peloton, and it worries me when I see stuff like this. Their competitors should not be able to get that information. They should not know how many items they’re ordering. They should not know how many are left at the end of a sale. I think it’s bad mojo.

It’s fascinating how important the boutique must be at this point, if it’s generating that kind of revenue in a day, that’s insane.

I know at one point, somebody posted that between their orders, because they went back and got something else, they were hemming and hawing, and they went back, 2000 orders had passed in a blink of an eye. It’s crazy. Also in case anybody wanted to know if you didn’t see it yet the Beyond Yoga stuff, there were outfits that were over on the European site. They didn’t make it to the US site. They’re there today, so by the time this is posted, it will be two days later. I don’t know if they’ll still be there. They’re there at this moment.

If that’s what they made in a day, what must they make in a year? Obviously they’re not making that every day and there are coupon codes. I don’t think they’re as prevalent as you might think. They are in for the real diehards that are going there all the time, but I think most people don’t interact at quite the same level as you do.

The other interesting thing is they’re not making 100% off of that bcause they have to pay for some kind of deal. I don’t know but it is fascinating.

They do how many drops a year? About one month-ish?

The last time we talked to Jill Foley, she said fourteen drops a year.

That means that in the boutique, if you can extrapolate these numbers, they’re probably making about equivalent to the gross of a Marvel movie a year, just off the boutique. Not a top tier one, not an Avengers Endgame, but maybe a nice solid Antman.

I don’t want to beat this horse to death, but let’s say they were only ordering half of that before, because this is the first time they’ve had stuff left over, so maybe not. Maybe they were actually shooting themselves in the foot.

Maybe it’s more like a DC movie. It’s still a lot of money and there’s a huge revenue stream that I’m sure they never anticipated.

We’ve talked to Jill, we’ve talked to John, they did not anticipate it. They thought it was going to be a little thing and it just keeps growing. While we’re talking about Bob, he also posted this. This picture is a picture of Bradley Rose. Apparently in this tweet, whenever Bob started digging around doing whatever he does, he found a new addition to the roster. I don’t exactly know how this works, I’ve already said that a million times. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know where he’s looking to see this information, but it was a person who had never been there before. This guy is an instructor. You can find him out on Instagram, a fitness instructor. It appears that this could be a new Peloton instructor. The other interesting thing, do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we talked about the flower making class? There was a flower and other stickers over a well-placed picture of what everybody assumed was a new instructor.

At some point, they would have announced the instructor and then would be deflowered.

I assumed it was a woman based on that they were thinner. I don’t know why, maybe because they were holding flowers in one of the pictures.

Your cultural bias towards flowers for females.

I’m sure that’s playing a role here, but this gentleman is on the thinner side. He is the same color skin as the person in the photograph. Maybe it’s him, we don’t know. This guy is British, but from everything that I can tell, he’s based in the United States. Whoever was in that picture we assume was a United States instructor because of the time difference. We shall see.

Watch this space, we might have a new instructor and it might be Bradley Rose.

—

Joining us once again from the Run, Lift and Live group is John Mills. John, how is it going?

I’m doing well. How’s it going?

There was some interesting stuff happening with Apple Fitness+, because everything has to have a plus at the end of it. Apple Fitness announced their official date, December 14th.

When they announced it, I hadn’t heard about the announcement. I just saw articles because Peloton had been dropping that morning. It was 10:00 in the morning. These articles kept coming out from Business Insider and a bunch of other places, “Peloton is dropping because of Apple.” I’m like, “What?” Then I went and looked and saw, “They had their release.” I don’t think the two had anything to do with each other.

You think it was just a random coincidence?

 

Yeah. The rest of the day, Peloton went up. I don’t think it had anything to do with it. They jumped really quick. There are articles all over the place at 10:00 in the morning.

Apple is really good about having everything like on an embargo and at a certain time, you flip a switch and it’s everywhere. I think that the issue press releases to key places in there that they are professional enough that they trust, but they say this is embargoed until May 1st at 10:00 AM Central, then they flip the switch and all of a sudden everybody is pushing it out everywhere.

Are you going to try it, John?

Probably, out of curiosity, I want to check it out.

I feel like it’s our job to research for real.

I thought I could tease you more about that, but I’m going to try it out too.

If we’re going to talk crap about it, which I expect you will, then I need to be as accurate as possible.

I have to do some serious talk shit research.

If next week The Clip Out is no longer available through Apple Podcasts, you’ll know why.

Honestly, I expect it to be fine. I don’t expect to have any real issues with it. I’m curious how it stacks up. I want to do my own deep dive. I’m curious about your perspective too, John. I want to see.

I posted in my group about it, and 80%-plus of the people that responded were like, “We’re going to check it out too.” Mainly because some of them are at three months free. They already have Apple products.

It sounds like it will be bundled in with a lot of the different packages that Apple has too, so a lot of people will have it perceptually without paying for it.

What was the feature that stood out to you that you were like, “Interesting, I would not have expected that,” that they talked about?

The only feature, and I think we talked about this before, was how they manage to have a leaderboard based on metrics from the watch. To me, that’s interesting. Not that I have a watch, so I’m not going to be able to test that piece of it, but I’m going to be asking around, “Tell me how that all plays.” That’s the most interesting piece to me. They listed to that article a bunch of stuff, but it was a bunch of stuff that every one of these platforms have.

That was my take on it too. You can filter a lot. There’s a whole bunch of different options and they have a bunch of playlists, pretty much everybody. We’ll follow back up next week and see if we managed to get a workout or two in. How about that?

I’m going to try it. We’ll see.

This was not a story that you came across, but I was interested for your take on it because you’re very business minded and appreciate that aspect of the Peloton world. We saw that Peloton filed a patent on cosmetics.

Take on that. What’s your feel? What’s your reaction?

You shared that with me, Crystal. When I saw that, I thought, “Okay.” We saw Tunde talk about her partnership with Revlon I think.

It’s a lipstick line.

I saw her partnership, and it made me think of Lululemon. Lulu is selling fabletic-type clothing, athletic clothes. They acquire Mirror because during the pandemic, all these brick and mortars are closed and they figure this fitness platform would give them another mechanism to advertise their product. That’s so people start following all these instructors and they’ll say, “I like those magic pants. I’ve got to get those.” When I saw this, I thought, “Is this something we’re going to start seeing where these companies have a platform already and already got tons of people following these instructors, they’ll just start offering products that every class is an advertisement for that product?”

Here’s another interesting thing. First of all, yes, I think that’s true. I think everything you just said is exactly what we’re going to see.

Especially when they see how we’re talking earlier, before you joined us, about how much product they move through the boutique. Peloton, at least at the moment, has a pretty female SKU. Imagine if they have their own line of cosmetics.

Add to the fact that almost every female instructor does makeup tutorials online, almost every single one. I feel like that’s not a coincidence. Let’s not forget, Tunde is a freaking makeup artist.

That’s something she knows well.

My mind went, “Has this been in the works for two years?”

That makes you think. Yeah, it could be, I don’t know. Ultimately, the concept to me made me go, “What other products might they all of a sudden start?”

The question I have if they start going down that road and have more and more ancillary products or parallel products is it’s a pretty good side hustle for the instructors with various endorsement deals. If all of a sudden they’re like, “You can’t do a makeup line and you can’t do a clothes line because we’ve got our own stuff,” if they want to get that aggressive about it, all of a sudden they start pulling those things off the table. The instructors are going to be like, “I want to make more money or I want to get grandfathered in.” It raises some other complications potentially down the road.

Right now, what they do with the Peloton clothing is they say one item has to be Peloton, everything else can be something else. Maybe they would even do something like that for the makeup.

What I meant though is if they made their clothing a brand line, like Peloton is the brand.

I was saying they may decide not to go that route. They might do with what they’re currently doing with the makeup and that is like, “As long as you have eye shadow on by Peloton, then you can wear whatever else you want to wear.” I have no idea what they will do, but you can’t help it to go down all these rabbit holes of curiosity of what’s going to happen.

As a guy, I don’t know. As a guy, I’m going to assume you don’t know, John. I’m going to direct this to you, the non-guy in the room. Do women have brand loyalty with makeup?

Yes.

I get that there might be brand loyalty in terms of like, “I only like Revlon’s lipstick or I only like Avon’s eyeshadow.” Are there women who are like, “No matter what type of makeup I need, lipstick, eyeliner, blush, it will only ever be this one particular brand?”

Absolutely. I think that it depends on what works for you. There are always going to be things to take into consideration, like your skin type. If they don’t have something that’s for your skin type, then you could care less. They may only have eyeshadow that works for everybody, but maybe they don’t have a foundation that works across the board. That’s going to impact your loyalty. A lot of makeup lines don’t have something for everyone because you need all skin colors, you need all skin types, then you need things that attract all different kinds of people. You need the glam sparkly stuff, but you also need the more matted things for during the day. That’s a lot, that’s a huge amount. If I know Peloton, they’re going to start small. They’re going to start with like, “We’re only going to do lipsticks,” I go back to that because Tunde has lipsticks, and then they’ll expand from there. That’s what I think will happen.

Cancel your gym membership. If you’ve got Peloton, that’s all you need. Share on X

I know very little, if nothing, about this topic, but I know this and this happens occasionally over the last years. Erica will find some eyeliner or some lipstick and it’ll be only sold at this one particular place. It won’t be just be her. It will all kinds of people are looking for that one thing that’s out there in the social world as the greatest lipstick for this skin color or whatever.

It’s the Air Jordans of lipstick.

Everybody’s looking for that. I’m assuming if they got into this, they look like like they are.

I can’t even tell you how many posts I see, like one of the instructors will post about anything and the response is, “What color are you wearing? What brand is that?” That is the response.

Thousands of people are buying that one thing.

Peloton is like, “Why are we not doing that?”

I get that about my hoodies all the time, that’s why I stopped sharing it on Instagram.

You don’t want to share your hoodies.

You had found some interesting stuff about the Peloton holiday ad video.

I don’t know why or what prompted me to go there. I just went to the Peloton page and I saw the holiday ad. It’s a nice, heartwarming, comfortable ad about a brother and sister who are competing on the bike and sending other each other messages. It was so holiday season appropriate. I felt good in my heart, then I read the comments and I was in terror. In the comments, I figured it was going to be people like, “This is nice and lovely.” No, people are going, “I’ve been waiting twelve weeks for my bike and nobody can call me. What’s going on?” They were all pissed off. The contrast got me, so I took an image and then blurred out all the faces and names and then put it in my group like, “They’re going in over here.”

We talked about how Peloton had scaled back on their marketing this Christmas time because they felt like people are going to get mad. If they’re doing this big ad campaign while other people are sitting home still waiting on the bike that they bought two months ago.

It turns out that was a yes. They weren’t even trying that hard. Also your comment about the digital offering and how Peloton was pointing out that people could take the yoga and the stretching and the meditation.

It sounds like it’s helpful. These people are all upset and then Peloton comes back to, “We’re going to give you a complementary. You can take digital, make some meditation and some outdoor walks.” I thought, “That sounds like you just told me to calm down.”

That’s some passive-aggressive shade. As somebody who has a day job to respond to shitty comments on the internet, I’m like, “Well done.”

It makes me start offering some yoga and meditation when people post things like, “I don’t like that.” “You didn’t like the way I said that? Here’s a meditation class for you.”

I wish I could afford to hire whoever wrote that.

I’m kidding but I do feel for these people. It doesn’t sound like they’re really upset about the delay. They’re upset because they’re not getting the appropriate level of communication. All the little things in this, I found humor in how it was playing. It reminds me of years ago, I played some prank on Erica. I don’t even remember what the prank was. I played some prank on her, which I’ve done a lot. The next morning, I’m getting out of bed and I’m all comfy, I get into a warm shower and I’m in there and I look up, she has a bucket of cold water pouring on me, and then I’m in chaos. That’s what that post looked like. It was all warm and lovely, then somebody poured cold water.

That’s some insight as to why your marriage has lasted so long. I don’t even know if he really connected the dots, but all this time years later, you don’t remember the prank but you remembered the consequence.

It was absolutely painful.

That says Erica chose well, she knows your currency.

John was like, “Duly noted.” Piggybacking on that post really quick because I think it applies, but Bloomberg talked to John Foley about the supply chain issues. He had some interesting comments about that.

He said, “For a long time, we’re going to be scrambling to increase our capacity. We hope to resolve some outstanding supply issues. For now, we have cut ad spending to avoid inflating expectations.” Your reaction cracked me up. It would have never even occurred to me to have the reaction of they put a governor on growth.

I got some pushback on that too. I understand why, I wasn’t trying to say I didn’t understand why.

I totally get it.

Think if you’re an investor, you put a whole bunch of money behind a company, which so happened, I did. Then all of a sudden the CEO goes, “By the way, we’re going to slow this ship down.”

You’re like, “Wait.”

I do think long-term, it’s the right decision to make though as someone who also puts some money into it. I think it is the right decision to make because you also don’t want to piss people off. You certainly want to grow, and to steal a metaphor, throw cold water on growth. Also it doesn’t behoove them to keep pushing bikes that they can’t get into people’s hands and get those delay times. If it’s twelve weeks now for some people, if they kept pushing, they’re going to see those delay times creep up to 14, 15, 18 weeks. That gets even uglier. I think as much as it sucks, it’s the right call but it doesn’t make it not suck.

I’ve invested in stocks before and then it didn’t turn out well, I’ll be all upset about it. Erica will be like, “That’s done. Let it go. That’s over.” That’s the way she sees it, why I’m still in pain like with what could have been. She doesn’t deal with what could have been, she deals with what is or isn’t. That’s the way I thought about this thing with Foley saying, “We’re going to have to slow down.” I was thinking what could have been. I know they could have never been prepared for a pandemic happening. Your mind goes, “What if they had the facilities to produce enough for the demand?”

On the flipside though, if they had that capacity, you would have spent the last year thinking, “What are they doing? They’re not going to have that kind of demand.” That’s true. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us again. Until next week, where can people find you?

They can find me on Facebook in my Run, Lift and Live group or Run, Lift and Live page. They can find me on Instagram, @RunLiftAndLive or at RunLiftAndLive.com.

—

Joining us is Dr. Jenn Mann, a licensed marriage, family and child therapist, sports psychology consultant. You may know her from VH1’s Couples Therapy with Dr. Jenn or VH1’s Family Therapy with Dr. Jenn or her long-running radio show, The Dr. Jenn Show. She’s written four best-selling books, including The Relationship Fix: Dr. Jenn’s Six-Step Guide to Improving Communication, Connection and Intimacy. Dr. Jenn, hi.

Hi.

Last time, we had reached out to the audience to get some suggested questions, so we’ll go into that well once again. This person said, “You exercise all the time, you feel like you’re stronger, but you don’t have definition. You don’t feel like you’re seeing it physically. What do you do now?” I would say stop.

 

First of all, I think that the fact that you are exercising consistently and you’re getting stronger as ever. What it means is you’re going to, providing all in the world goes as it’s supposed to, you’re going to live longer. You’re going to be healthier. You’re doing things that are going to help fight cancer, diabetes, heart disease. You’re doing all the right things and you’re getting stronger, which means that your body is responding to the exercise. What we have to keep in mind is that we can control the process, but we can’t control the outcome. We can control how often we workout. We can control what we do, but we can’t really control how our body responds to the exercise.

You are getting the health benefits. To me, where you want to focus on is the body acceptance aspect. We’re not all Olivia Amato body types. We’re not all super cut, super muscular, fitness models. It doesn’t mean that you’re not healthy. It doesn’t mean that your body is not beautiful. The workforce someone who’s struggling with this is to be able to look at his or her body and be able to say, “Look at how beautiful my body is. Look at all this incredible stuff my body does. How cool is it that I can get through a 30-minute spin class? How amazing is it that I’m lifting heavier weights?” To be able to appreciate that process and that you’re getting results, it just may not be the results that you have chosen to prioritize. It may be a good idea to change your priorities and let your priority be your health instead of this idealized body image, that may not be what your body is meant to do. Different people have different body types. You can be someone who is super healthy and super fit, but it’s just not as muscular and defined as someone else.

Maybe the definition they should be working on is how they define success.

It’s like the thing that inspired me to workout initially and has continued to is I want to live a long time to see my children’s children. I want to dance at their wedding. I do yoga at least once a week. I used to hate yoga before Peloton, but it was the Billy Joel yoga class that got me. I’m a hardcore Billy Joel fan and that struck me. I was like, “I can do this.” I think about the studies I’ve read about as we get older, our balance is not as good. I always think I want for my kids not to worry. I’m going to fall over and I want to be able to go up and down the steps. I don’t want to break a hip. It’s about redefining what success is. Success is good health. Success is being able to live a long time, being stronger or having bones that are less brittle, having lungs that are working well. I think it’s important to work on self-acceptance and appreciating the beauty of our bodies, even when they don’t look like some supermodel that we expect them to or want them to.

Somebody’s always jealous of a feature someone else has that they don’t. No matter what, there’s somebody that wishes they could have that aspect of what you have.

Often, I talk to people who have struggled with their weight or eating disorders who have said to me, “If I just appreciated how good I look then when I thought that I was fat or I was critical of my thighs or I hated ass, if I look like I did then, now I would really appreciate it.” It speaks to we need to work on appreciating ourselves. One of the things that I have found as a therapist and also as someone who’s recovered from an eating disorder is that we don’t change by hating ourselves. We don’t change by not liking what we see in the mirror. I had to accept my body 50 pounds heavier than it is now in order to treat it with kindness and love, which allowed me to get to my healthy, natural way, which was ultimately a lot less. Only because I was able to not use food as punishment or withholding and have a negative relationship with it because when you don’t like yourself and when you look in the mirror and you’re critical, you’re more likely to overeat. You’re more likely to be like, “Take that.” We can be so mean to ourselves and that does not make us make healthy choices. On the contrary, it tends to make us overeat and tends to make us not honor our bodies and our hunger and our satiation, and eat the foods that we love because there’s always got to be a balance.

Thank you for all that. Until next time, where can people find you?

People can find me on social media, @DrJennMann.

—

There was an interesting series of moments this week. Poor Matt Wilpers. We don’t say this to beat him up. It’s hard to not talk about something like this occurring.

Like I said in my post, it shows you that everybody, even the people that we focus on and put on a pedestal on social media, they’re people, human.

If people have missed it, you should probably address this.

If you missed it, literally in the middle of taking a live run, all of a sudden Matt Wilpers’ with 8 minutes and 38 seconds left, with no warning whatsoever, he looks down seriously at his monitor and he says, “I’m sorry, guys. I’ve got to go, my stomach hurts,” then fade to black. It took me several seconds to be like, “They’re not going to bring it back.” I was still running up this hill and then I was like, “I need to switch gears,” then I went in to do a cool-down run. I’ve never experienced that. I don’t think anybody else has. Good for the team being so quick, shutting it down. Like you said, we’re really sorry for Matt Wilpers. He has stomach issues. He’s addressed this before. This is not a one-time thing. It must have been miserable for him to end a class. It is not something he normally would have done.

When Peloton creates as much live content as they do, something like this is bound to happen eventually. Hopefully he’s getting to feel much better.

I have not seen anything. He did not do his class later that day. It was a half-hour later, there was a live Strength class. He did show his humor and he posted a picture of an angry cartoon stomach and it said, “Sorry about that, guys. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. My stomach took a selfie and sent it to me,” and I thought that was great. It’s perfect humor. He’s okay but I don’t know if he’s like, “This is an ongoing thing, we’ll continue or not.” We’ll have to hang in there. Oddly right after that, I went to go take a yoga class, then it was another reminder of how much our instructors are so much in the focus. They are constantly on. Do you ever had one of those days where you’re like, “I do not want to be on, I want to be in my pajamas and I don’t want to deal with anybody?” Surely you’ve had those days. I went to take this yoga class with Aditi and she was a little teary and sad. Her dog had just passed away. I felt so bad for her. She told stories about him, which was adorable, sweet and heartfelt but I know it was hard for her. It was her way of processing. I thought it was a smart thing to do. You already know you’re going to be upset, you might as well just meet it head on and go that route. That’s what they would tell us to do. That’s what the instructors would tell us. They practice what they preach.

Then example number three, these all happened in one morning. I was like, “What is happening in Peloton today?” I got all these messages from people and somebody had left up on the screen, a test class that was occurring in the London studio. I believe it was 10:30 UK time. Apparently, it went live. We often see these test classes. It happens all the time. I get them all the time, people send them to me all the time. It happens. There are a lot of things they’re testing out. They don’t usually actually go live, and this one went live. It went live for five minutes. They had a hot mic, which should not have been on. I’m not going to repeat what was said. It wasn’t awful, awful. It would have been embarrassing for somebody to have been overheard. Eventually, it went to black and just all music. This woman that is up on screen, this is one of the texts in the London studio, and not an instructor. Clearly, she had probably had no idea that even occurred. All I can say is sometimes, I forget that everybody is just doing a job. Matt, Aditi, this woman in the London studio, they all got up that day and thought it was going to be a normal day, and did not expect for any of those things to occur. Reminder, it’s okay to have a bad day.

No harm, no foul.

I appreciate everybody being professional and doing what they needed to do despite all of their challenges.

—

It looks like we’re inching closer to class stacking. We broke this story weeks ago that class stacking is coming and people are very excited about that. We should probably talk about it really quick because I know some people have asked and reached out that they don’t fully get why it’s that big of a deal.

If you go back through the history of Peloton, there used to be a great emphasis on longer classes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes. Then you evolved into Steven Little doing Heart Rate Zone training. He focused on the longer classes at a lower intensity, that’s where all of your fat burning takes place. Most importantly, it wasn’t just about fat burning because I know that some people disagree with that theory. The major point was it was the endurance. If you wanted to go do 100-mile bike ride, this is how you do it, this is how you train. You don’t get on and do an hour a couple of days a week. That’s not going to do it. This is how you train. Right after that, you had Power Zone classes hit, and those are the same thought process behind it, you’re really training. You’re training for an event. You’re not just getting on the bike and getting stronger and losing weight. It becomes this whole like, “I am an athlete and now I can train for things like an IRONMAN and stuff like that.” It was a whole different way of looking at it. Why does that matter? Because all of those classes focused on a longer format. As we’ve talked about a million times, Peloton has the data apparently to show that all of these shorter classes are what people take.

That’s what people will gravitate towards.

80% of the classes are twenty minutes. I know that ticks people off, but it is what it is. Peloton has gone in that direction to meet the demand. Then you add in COVID happens even more. Now, we have another purge. A lot of the longer classes got hit. I think that there are two things happening here. I think that’s because we have the music, that’s still going to be an issue. It’s going to be a rolling case basis. Those rides happen to be older and they’re not being taken. I know people have classes, they go back and take over and over again, I hardly ever do. There are a lot more people like me. There are people that jump on and they’re taking whatever is in front of them. Why does that all matter to class stacking? Because class stacking will be good for those people who need those longer rides. They will be able to stack three twenty-minute rides, still have an hour, then they can use the Skip Intro feature, they’re still going to have a warmup that they’re going to have to deal with, but it will help make things better and smoother. I get it, I know I hear you all in my head yelling that this is not satisfying you. I know that, I’m just explaining why for a lot of people, this is why class stacking is important. It fits the bill. It’s a history thing that people who are new to Peloton, they’re not going to get the full understanding of that. I’m just providing it.

I just need to make their peace with the fact that Peloton is always going to prioritize the newer stuff, and the same way that Netflix prioritizes the newer stuff. The first original programming on Netflix was a mafia show called Lillyhammer. Try and find it, it’s on there if you search for it but it’s never going to pop up on your main screen when you log into Netflix. That’s years ago, they don’t care anymore.

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I think you made a good point about keeping people in the present too. When you and I were talking about it offline, you talked about how Peloton is pushing people to be in the present. Even if they’re not, even if that had nothing to do with it, Peloton is going to keep making changes. Whether you agree with them or not, you have the power to speak up about it. You know that the data is what does it, if you want things to change, you need to get people to take the classes. It does not matter how much you talk about it if you don’t have the numbers to back it up. I think that’s a reality. I know there are people grumbling at me, but that’s just a reality.

There’s a new filter that’s finally rolling out on the bikes.

First it hit Android, then it finally hit over on the iPhone. Now, it’s finally rolling out into the bikes. It’s the Taken/Not Taken feature. Whenever you are filtering classes, you can quickly see what you have taken and not taken, which will be important for all the things that I talked about. When you’re trying to put a playlist together, you want to be able to quickly see what you’ve already taken so you don’t throw some ride in there that you’ve already done. This will be helpful for people now and in the future.

Also Tread Weights at long last are back at stock.

December 7th, they hit. I checked today, December 9th, they are still in stock. I can’t promise how long they’re going to be there, but get them while you can.

That’s important because weights have been hard to find, not just Peloton but any weights.

They have been hard everywhere. Get them while you can, spread the word.

There were a couple of interesting new positions open at Peloton.

If you think back to the cosmetics discussion we had, you think about what we were talking about with the store, a whole lot of product growth. Peloton has not ignored that. They are hiring a VP of Product for eCommerce. They are hiring a VP of Engineering for eCommerce. I think it’s fascinating John Foley has talked many times about how they plan more global expansion beyond what they’ve already done, and now they are hiring a new position, Director of Product International. It definitely shows that there are going to be lots of things happening beyond UK, Germany and Canada. We’ve talked about the classes that we think are coming in different languages. John Foley touched on that. He talked about it during one of the most recent Earnings Calls, and we discussed that with John Mills though. There are a lot of Johns. This will be exciting because people are saying Peloton has lost their innovation. I think there are things in the works that people have no idea about. I still think there is something coming with nutrition. I still think there’s something coming with this cosmetics. I think there’s going to be something interesting with the global. Don’t count them out just yet.

Tonal has introduced Cardio Dance.

They partnered with a company called Cardio 305. They have special guest instructors that came over and they’re doing nothing but teaching cardio content. It’s another way to when you don’t necessarily want to go out on the bike, but for your cardio, on a strength, this is a great way to pair that. I love that they give you many ways, both at Peloton and Tonal, to be able to mark all those days on the calendar. If you want to have every day that you did something on Tonal, you can do strength, you can do core, meditations, barre, you can do Pilates. Now, you can do cardio dance. They keep adding to the repertoire.

It’s a sleek at-home gym, if you don’t know what we’re talking about. I don’t know how you couldn’t at this point, but it’s strength training for your home. It uses electromagnets so it replicates lifting weights. It’s a pretty nifty concept.

It’s a beautiful machine.

It’s very nice-looking. I’ll stand there and look at it.

They also have all of these new features, the form feedback, the advanced weight modes. You’ve got Spotter, Eccentric, Burnout, Chains, and they just added Smart Flex, which is amazing. You can do all of these things, keep strength training, even while you can’t go to the gym.

The form feedback is pretty impressive because it lets you know if you’re not doing a move right.

The camera is there, but it’s not even turned on yet.

The handles that you use to access the weight, it can tell if you didn’t do it right and it’ll give you a little tip and says, “Do this longer or pull this sooner,” it tells you and that’s the important thing. You can try Tonal for 30 days risk-free if you visit www.Tonal.com for $100 off the smart accessories when you use promo code, The Clip Out , at check out.

Tonal, be your strongest.

—

Yahoo had an interesting article about Tunde.

She got to share her tips about self-care and staying disciplined. She talked to us about this whenever we interviewed her, and talked about how she stays disciplined. It’s all about exercising to feel good, not to look a certain way. I love hearing Tunde talk. I could listen to her all day. She has many great pieces of advice. Definitely check out this article.

Speaking of Tunde, she’s making the rounds right now. She was on the Ali On The Run podcast.

Tons of people in the Peloton community listen to this podcast. It’s very popular with the Peloton set. One of the most recent interviews had Tunde in it. I haven’t gotten to listen to it yet, but I heard glowing reviews, so definitely check that out.

There’s a Flash challenge coming up.

It started on December 6 and goes through December 19. It’s all about the new Bike Bootcamps. You take 4 of them over 14 days. This is a perfect time. If you haven’t had a chance to take one of the new Bike Bootcamps with Tunde, because she is now an instructor, we’re on a Tunde streak here, make sure you check those out because she is an amazing instructor. Doing a bootcamp with her and getting those arms would be a bonus.

While we’re speaking of challenges, Peloton has a December challenge.

You get a gift for completing 5 workouts, 10 workouts and 15 workouts, and maybe beyond that, we don’t know. You get gifts for completing them. Somebody on the OPP, as an aside, they said that they wanted to know when Peloton was mailing them. They thought it was going to be a gift. That’s the kind of thing you find in the OPP these days. The kind of gift that Peloton had in mind was like, “Here’s a brand new badge.” One of the things that they talked about, they posted like, “This is our first gift this year.” I don’t think you don’t have to do the challenge, you can get it anywhere. It’s having all of these amazing holiday classes that have themes around music. There are tons of them, but two that I am super excited about, one is coming up tonight, so it will have already occurred on Friday, but it is going to be Matty Maggiacomo, he just announced, Mara is back. This time it’s going to be Mara the holiday edition. I can’t freaking wait. Apparently, Matty drank too much eggnog, so Mara is going to have to fill in for him. That’s going to be amazing. The other one I am looking forward to is Jenn Sherman, 60 minutes Epic Sing Along Holiday Edition. It’s going to be all the holiday classes.

That’s a lot of Christmas songs because most Christmas songs are 2.5 to 3 minutes long, so they’re pretty short.

I am stoked. There are tons of them. There are rides, runs, meditations, it’s all over the place. Take the holiday classes you will not want to miss them.

Then we have a sad update.

This is absolutely heartbreaking. Anybody that has been following Jen Grams Thorson and her family, she did the Smiles for Miles and she did the Ride for Carter. Her son, Carter, has sadly passed away. He passed away from in-stage renal failure. She posted that he didn’t have long and unfortunately, he passed away. Please send your love to this wonderful family who has been through so much. It’s the holidays. It would suck no matter what. I don’t know what they’re going through. I know that we lost my sister under tragic and surprising consequences, and it changed our family forever. I don’t know how this would be in relation to that. I just know it was terrible for us and my heart goes out to them.

An odd segue but oddly fitting, there’s a new artist series coming from Nicki Minaj, who Jen posted that was one of Carter’s favorites.

I’m glad that it happened this week because the Nicki Minaj classes were this week. It was the 9th through the 11th. Since Carter passed, that is healing timing for Jen, her husband and their whole family.

Finally, John Foley is to be honored in the 2020 edition of Bloomberg Business Week as one of 2020’s Bloomberg 50.

That’s a pretty major accomplishment. You can see all of the honorees out at the Bloomberg site. It’s crazy, it talks about people in business, science, all over the place. If you’re looking at the website, some of the other nominees include Fauci.

You go to this page and the two easiest faces to make out are John Foley and Fauci. That’s a rarefied air.

This year, it’s just Fauci, then right next to him is John Foley. That’s pretty amazing. Congrats to Peloton, congrats to John Foley. I can’t wait to hear all the details of that honoring. I’m sure there will be some celebration of that. It’s very cool.

—

Joining us is Eli Winfrey. Eli, how is it going?

Thanks for having me on the show.

Thanks for being on here. You’re the first guest who has a better mic than we do. That’s a real radio mic. That’s the kind that I always look at like, “We should get some of these.” I throw them in the Amazon cart and I’m like, “It’s fine what we’re doing.”

 

While we’re on that subject, tell us about your radio show. Tell us about what that is.

How did you come to be in such possession of a fancy microphone?

The microphone, same as you, I got on Amazon. I was looking and was like, “I like that. I want the gold one.” That’s how it came to be. The radio show, I’m an autism advocate. I do a lot of things in community. I get asked all the time to create a radio show or produce a radio show. I’ve been told, “You have a radio voice.” I don’t know what that means. In advocating, I said, “I’m going to give it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? You get laughed at, that’s fine.” It’s taken off. We talk about ways that people have given back to the community, how they’re raising awareness for autism for low-income families. It’s educational. We do have a bit of fun when we answer guest questions. We’ve done the show now for a few years.

Where do people find it?

The show originated on BlogTalkRadio.com. Now we’ve been able to get it on iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts. Wherever you download your favorite podcasts, you type in The Elijah Winfrey Show, it pops up and you go from there.

How did you originally find Peloton?

My wife found it before I did, so about this time in 2019. We always take a family vacation to a local hotel that we love and we were there. They had a Peloton bike in the fitness room. I was upstairs with our little guy and hanging out. She went down to work out. She comes back and she’s bouncing off the walls. She’s got all this energy. She’s like, “I got on the Peloton. It is so worth it.” Before that, we had made fun of that Peloton commercial that got all that bad press. We were like, “I don’t know about that. I don’t know if you’re going to get a Peloton,” but she came back and she had such energy. In January 2020, we said, “Let’s buy it.” I hadn’t ridden it yet. I’m still like, “I don’t know what the hype is.” She gets it. We get it set up. I take my first ride and I was hooked. I was all in. My workout consisted of what I used to do in the military, pushups, sit-ups, jogging, sprinting outside occasionally. Getting on the bike, I was like, “Let’s cancel the gym membership. We’ve got Peloton. This is all we need.”

The military will buy a $400 hammer, but they’re not going to buy anybody a Peloton.

It was a match made in heaven. I quickly understood what the hype was about. The instructors were fabulous and you feel like you’re in every class physically. You can reach out and touch them from the house. We became hooked. We haven’t missed a day since. Let me backtrack. Let me correct it. I had surgery in September 2020 so I missed a few days. My wife hasn’t missed a day since we bought it. Up to that point, I hadn’t missed a day. We were that hooked.

I don’t know what surgery you had. Whenever I had surgery, the doctor was like, “You can’t do any cardio because it could mess up the arteries, too much blood flow might mess up sutures. You can’t do anything. It was two weeks.

That’s exactly what they told me. I’m sitting there after surgery and I’m going, “Can I work out?” The doctor is looking at me like, “This guy is insane. You had surgery.” He goes, “No. If you do, you can only go 20%.” I’m like, “That’s good.” He’s like, “No. We’re going to call your wife and say, ‘Don’t let him get on the bike for a week.’” I was clambering to try to get back on. The surgery I had is going to take a full six months. Somewhere in March 2021, I’ll be able to go 100%. Right now, I’m able to go 80% to 90%, which is good. I can’t chase PRs. That’s what the Peloton bug has done. We won’t go anywhere if we know they don’t have a Peloton nearby. There’s a post in a hotel, it doesn’t matter.

What workouts were you doing before? Before you got the Peloton, were you working out all the time or when you felt like it, did you have a cadence of some kind?

I would do pushups, sit-ups a lot. It varied day in and day out. It wasn’t a set regimen. Because it wasn’t set, Peloton was a blessing to get me back on track. When the pandemic hit, we were sitting around saying, “I’m thankful that we got the Peloton.” Even though I was doing pushups and sit-ups, you have that lapse where you go, “I’m not working a day. I’m going to get me some cupcakes and cookies. I’m going to chill out.” I always tried to follow that strict military style of getting up at 5:00, doing sit-ups, doing pushups, eat breakfast and get back into doing pushups, sit-ups before I answer any office questions that I have through emails. It wasn’t consistent.

Since you’ve been working out since then and especially with the surgery, have you been using any of the other Peloton content or you just love the bike and that’s where you’re at?

I’m all over everything. The only thing I haven’t done are the bootcamps, the outside running and walking, the yoga. I’m not very flexible, but I’ll get in there and try. When I feel that cramping in that area that it shouldn’t be cramping, I’m like, “I should maybe scale it back a little bit.” I try to do everything, the cardio, the stretching. I know that Rebecca Kennedy is like, “You’ve taken my classes 500 times. Can you go do another instructor?”

With your military background, you started with the bootcamps?

It hit me because I was like, “I want to do that.” We have the bike in a place where it’s hard to get on, get off to the mat. It’s a lot of things we have to do.

It might be like, “I’ve done that. I don’t need to do that again.

You post a lot on the OPP. That’s where I saw your post. I’ve seen your post for a long time now, but what inspired you to do that? There is a lot of negativity in the OPP and you have very positive posts. Thank you for that.

You might be the only positive posts in the OPP.

They’re hard to find. You’ve got to dig.

When I post every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I try to post what I’m thinking at that moment. How do I motivate myself and then pass that on to people on the page? I haven’t had any negative comments in every post that I’ve had. That’s not to say that that’s not coming. Based on what you see, the trend is this isn’t going to last forever. Somebody is going to say something. I try to share my thoughts. For the most part, everybody’s taken to it. I try to respond to everybody. The page is like all my platforms. All my social media platforms are positive.

I don’t get political. I don’t talk about religion. It’s about positivity, trying to inspire and sharing funny things about what I’m doing on my family and how we’re getting along. It’s been a blessing. I’ve met a few friends who would private message me and say, “You’re like Teflon. Nobody’s ever said anything negative. You’re the most positive person on the page.” I’m like, “I’m sure there are other people positive.” They see my positivity and go, “It’s a robot. It’s not real.”

Why did you think to post there? You were like, “I would like to share this inspiration.” What struck you?

I wanted to share me. This is me. I wanted to go to a spot or a place where I didn’t know anybody. I said, “I’m going to start here.” On my Facebook page or my personal page, I know a lot of people. There are some good and some bad, but everybody is always fighting about something, whether it’s political religion, and then they go, “Eli, what do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t talk about it on social media. If you want to talk face to face, we can do that.” The Peloton pages, I don’t want to say break, but it’s like a little retreat where I get to share how I’m feeling and people get to see who I am. It’s refreshing to get that love back. That’s why I do it. It helps continue to build me up and helped me evolve into who I’m supposed to be.

That’s what struck me about your posts. I’m like, “Heard it, read it, seen it, refreshing.” It’s like another few days later, “There’s a nice post.” It stands out against all the muck and complaining over there. Thank you.

When I got on the page in the beginning, I would scroll. I’m like, “Is there anything positive in here? Everybody’s fighting. What’s going on?” or somebody has got kicked out and they’re saying they’re leaving the page. They were like, “Get out.” I’m like, “I don’t know if I should post if it’s going to be like that.” The page is intended to inspire and uplift, but you see it and you go, “I don’t know. I don’t want to get in the muck with everybody. I’ll stay out here and let them do what they do.”

What’s crazy is back when I started, which has been a few years at this point, there were 8,000 people on that page and it was positive. The negative posts were the odd ones out. Lots of people posted the way you post. It was a lovely place to be. Everybody was comparing rides and planning rides together. It was wonderful. To see what it’s turned into, it’s crazy to watch the evolution of it. That’s why I enjoy your posts because that is what Peloton is about for me. The lifting people up, the sharing the positive experiences, the motivation, all of those things are Peloton to me. I love that you exude that Peloton energy.

You also see how it’s broken off to where there’s BooCrew. There’s the Black Peloton page. There are these different pages.

It’s like little tributaries that you can go down.

I’m a member of some of them, but you still see the back and forth, whether they’re fighting over an instructor who didn’t do what they wanted them to do. You see the divisiveness. I’m trying to bring love.

It’s okay if you didn’t get a shout out. It’s okay if they’re saying what they were teaching. It’s all right. It’s going to be okay.

It reminds when I was a kid growing up. You’d call and request a song on the radio. Sometimes you’d hear your song, and sometimes you wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d play back your call and you’d hear them talking to you as the request, a phoner. It hearkens back to those days of Top 40 radio.

I remember those days. You would hear your voice on the radio and be like, “I shouldn’t have called. I knew this was going to happen.”

Especially when you’re a kid, you’re like, “It didn’t sound like a chipmunk in my head.”

My parents always used to have these parties. Every Saturday night, they would play cards and there would be drinking. Back then, everybody smoked cigarettes. There was smoke in the house. They would always have me go and request the songs. I would be calling in several times. They got the biggest kick out of me on the oldies station because like every weekend, clockwork, I was calling in.

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After I worked in radio, now I look back and go, “The guy that works on Saturday nights, he’s not the big time DJ or he wouldn’t be there on a Saturday night. He’s excited that the phone rang.” He’s like, “Somebody called me.” Talk to us about Team Winfrey.

We asked a little bit at the beginning, but tell us how all of that evolved.

I started that nonprofit to once again help the autism community. My niece and nephew have autism. My family lives in Georgia. My sister is a single mom. She didn’t have anyone to advocate. It was almost like she didn’t have a voice. I didn’t know what autism meant at the time. This is before military. I come home over to visit my mom. My sister and her son are there. I’m playing video games with a buddy. My nephew comes up to me real close. He doesn’t say anything and he flaps his hands. I didn’t know what that meant. He walked away. He didn’t say anything. He did it a couple more times and my buddy got uncomfortable and left. I thought I’d done something wrong.

I go into the kitchen and asked my mom, “Is Elijah okay? Did I do something?” She goes, “No, he has autism. Before you make any judgment or you say anything that you don’t know about autism, study it. It’s this, this and this.” I had to study and asked my sister, “Who’s helping you advocate, get services for him?” She goes, “No one. I’m having to do this on my own.” I said, “I’ll help.” I started to be her voice. In doing that, a couple of years went by. I joined the military and got out. I had noticed that people were reaching out for me and saying, “I heard you did this for your sister. Could you help me?”

I’m sitting and thinking like, “I don’t know how hard it is to start a nonprofit, but maybe I should do that.” I started to play a little bit of golf. As I was playing golf and walking in the fairway and hitting the shot and all this stuff, I’m thinking, “How can I partner golf and this nonprofit, advocate and make it about more about them and less about me?” As I’m playing and thinking this, I’m still feeling like I’m selfish. My sister is having a hard time. People who have kids on the spectrum are struggling. They’ve asked me to create something.

Mind you, I still don’t know a lot about autism at the time or I didn’t. I said to my wife, “Let’s start a nonprofit. I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to educate myself and see if we can help get services, if I can go out and lend my voice, raise awareness, and have these kids come out and play golf.” Some of these kids are non-verbal. It’s to get them to experience it. I can learn as I’m teaching and getting to know these kids. We started it in 2013. It has been such a blessing to be able to do it, not for the sake of doing it. It has been so uplifting for me as a person to learn more about what I am supposed to be doing here with this life that I have. I can go out and do things selfishly for myself at any time. I can hop on the bike at any time and not think about anything, but is that what I’m about?

Starting this nonprofit, I try to tie everything into what I’m doing. I try to get back and educate. The radio show was based off the nonprofit. I started to put blocks on top of blocks. I would educate myself with other advocates, who were way more advanced than I am. My cohost, she’s an expert autism advocate. She has Asperger’s. She’s terrific. She’s based in South Carolina. The nonprofit is catered towards raising awareness, helping these families get services. We also help low-income families in the community with paying bills, grocery gift cards, being there physically and letting them know it’s going to be okay. The nonprofit is centered around that. It’s been great. It’s been a way to get me to look at myself and see things a bit differently. Not having so much be all about Eli. It’s been great being a nonprofit.

I’m interested in the low-income aspect in terms of, is there difficulty in that community even being diagnosed in the first place? I would think that they wouldn’t have as many resources to even point out or spot the concerns to even address them.

It’s a huge barrier. Some don’t know and some are afraid to say my child has autism. They don’t want to say that.

I’ll say something that went through my head when you first started talking about your niece and nephew having autism and I didn’t even realize, I thought this until this moment. When I think autism, I think white kids. When you see it portrayed in the media, if it’s in a movie or something, it’s almost always a white character. My first thought was like, “I wonder how many black kids are not even getting diagnosed.” If they’re in a lower economic situation, that’s not even getting addressed.

They’re often told, “He’ll get over it. He’ll grow out of it. Be stricter or lighten up a bit.” It’s difficult because then you go back home and you go, “I don’t think he has autism.” Later on in life, when he’s 45 and he realizes, “I’ve had autism all my life, I need help,” there’s nothing out there to help him. It’s a struggle. I have a few friends who were on the spectrum who go through that daily. You’re right about the white and the black disparity. A lot of people watched Rain Man. They think, “Is it like that?” They’re different. Autism is broad.

They call it a spectrum for a reason.

It’s tough to engage a lot of times with low-income families on this issue. A lot of them will tell you that they’re embarrassed. They’ll say, “I have all the information here,” but they’re being misguided. A lot of them don’t have the money. It’s expensive to have your child treated or given these set of services whether it be in the hospital or in school. It adds up, it’s tough.

Does insurance not cover those types of services or is it one of those things where you have to have the right insurance and the right job? Not everybody has that ability either, especially right now.

That’s it right there. It varies but you’re often told, “You can get this, but because you don’t have this, insurance-wise, we can’t cover that. That’s not covered.” You have to make that decision, “Do I get these services knowing that I don’t have the money? We can’t afford it. What do I do on the backend? Who’s going to help me on the back end?” It’s tough.

Those sorts of services, it’s not like it’s a guarantee if you go through this. You’re also weighing the idea of like, “I can spend all this money and it could make no difference at all or it makes a 10% difference. Is a 10% change worth X amount?” Those calculations start going through your head. It’s a lot to contend with.

I never thought about any of that. We’ve been blessed with kids that don’t have autisms. I’ve never had to think through that process in my head.

It was before we were together, but my youngest son, the school called, they thought he might have had autism when he was in preschool. When you talked about your nephew flapping his hands, my son would do that all the time. He’s sixteen now, but we used to call it his happy hands. When he would get excited, he would do this with his hands and that can be an indicator of that. He would do other things. He was a big fan of parallel play where he would play next to a child, but not with the child. He had sensory processing issues, which can be a component of autism or Asperger’s but can also exist independent of. He ended up having that. There was a period of time when we were like, “What does all this mean?”

It comes down to educating yourself and others. It’s not passing judgment. You want to make sure that you are aware of what’s going on. You’re better able to tell the next person, “This is what I’ve learned about autism,” or whatever. It comes down to that.

There’s nothing to judge. It’s not a character flaw. Nobody did anything wrong. It’s the way they see the world. Sometimes depending on where they land on the spectrum, it opens up a whole other world of possibilities. It’s a matter of how you approach it. How old are they and how are they doing?

My nephew is 21. My niece is still in middle school. I’m getting so old now, it’s hard to remember those ages. I know she’s in middle school. They’re both doing well. My nephew had a high functioning autism. My niece is low functioning. Even sometimes when I visit, she’s very like, “I don’t know you. I would rather not come and hug you.” I understand that. They’re doing well in school from all indications and all reports that I get. I try to get check-ins periodically. Being in the Pacific Northwest, they tell you what they want to tell you and then keep out the other stuff to be like, “He’s all right, don’t worry about it. Live your life.”

 

That’s always hard. That’s families in general. They tend to tell you what they want you to know. Changing topics back to Peloton, I heard you were in one of the Peloton member commercials. Is that accurate?

Yes, I was.

How did that come to be? What was the process like?

I still don’t know how it came to be. My wife will say, “It’s because of the analytics of the Peloton Facebook page. They see those hits. They know that you’re positive and they looked that up.” I’m like, “That can’t be right.”

I don’t know if it has anything to do with analytics, but I agree with your wife. I know for a fact that they look through the community page and things that stand out to them or some of how they choose people. I don’t know that it’s necessarily numbers-driven, but how you interact with people was taken into account.

If that’s the case, it was because of that. They had reached out in February 2020 and they said, “Could you be part of this campaign that we’re going to do later in 2020?” At the time I’m like, “It’s probably a scam. This can’t be real.” I’m like, “Sure, I’ll do it.” The months go by and they reached out again and they go, “You passed this initial test. We’re going to interview you.”

What’s the test though? Do you know what the test was?

It was like, “Who’s your favorite instructor? Why? What do you like about the community?” They asked me something about outfits. They go, “We’ll process all this information and we’ll let you know if you’ve passed and moved on to the next phase.” I’m like, “Okay.” In June 2020, they reached back out again and they go, “You’ve been picked.” I’m thinking to my wife, “They want to do this, but are they going to pay me?” I’m thinking, “It’s COVID. Everybody’s going to be in the house. Is that safe?” I didn’t say anything to him. In my mind, I’m thinking that and they’d come back with these terms and things that I can’t say or can’t reveal. I’m like, “I won’t say anything because I don’t believe it’s going to happen.” That’s how I’m thinking.

The month before the shoot, because they pushed it back to August, they said, “We’re going to come out and what we want to do is take a tour of your house. First, we want to see some video on Zoom.” I showed them on Zoom. They were like, “This is great. You’ve got a good space.” I’m thinking, “When they get here, they’re going to be like, ‘We don’t know. It’s small.’” They send someone out, show up, look around and go, “We can do this and we can do that.” They’re thinking we can take this out and I’m thinking, “They’re going to give me a whole new living room. They’re going to take all this out. Am I going to keep all this stuff?” They’re like, “No, it doesn’t work like that.” They’re like, “We’re going to this, that and the other.” They come in the day before the shoot and set up everything. They put us up in a nice hotel, a great hotel down the road.

Did the hotel have a Peloton?

Yes, it did. I said, “We had two options. We could go in the city where the Peloton was at our favorite hotel or we can go down the road. I’m not going anywhere else.” At the time, I was like, “Peloton is going to put us up. Why don’t we stay at the most expensive hotel we can find?” I was thinking that, but then my wife goes, “Let’s find a hotel with a Peloton.” We’ve called around and we go, “We want this one.” We reached back out to Peloton and they go, “Sure, we can make it happen.” It was great. They put us up in the hotel. The day of the shoot, I come in. It’s raining the morning of. Seattle, it is what it is.

We get our temperature checks and everything. The apartment complex that I’m living in did not like it at all. They were like, “We don’t want them on site. They’re going to have to set up offsite at a remote location.” The neighbors did not like it. They were like, “Nope. We don’t want any cameras. We don’t want any crew here. No, none of that. Eli, this is going to be tight.” I’m thinking, “I’m going to lose the commercial because the apartment said no. They said they don’t want them here.” The director goes, “We’ll work around that. We’ll find a way. We’re going to make it to where it’s going to be only eight people inside. We’ll make sure everything’s clean, safe and healthy.” They did that. We did some shooting outside, some inside. I can’t tell you the number of donuts I had to eat during this shoot.

They were like, “We’re going to get you a spit bucket. If you don’t want to eat anymore, you can spit them here.” Silly me, I’m eating them. I’m like, “I don’t want to spit them out. I’ll eat them.” Every time I’m biting into one, I’m like, “This is not going to be good when there’s the shoot going to be.” They go, “We’ve got about another two hours.” I’m like, “I’ll keep eating.” They were like, “Are you sure? You don’t look well.” I’m like, “I’m good.”

It was hilarious. It was so much fun shooting that, interacting with the staff, the directors, the film crew and getting on the bike and having the Peloton instructor. I want to say she trained all the instructors. It seemed like she knew exactly what she was doing. I realized I was sitting on the bike. My level of my seat was wrong the entire time I’ve had a Peloton. She fixed that for me. It was a good perk. I was like, “I was sitting here and I was comfortable.” She’s like, “No, you need to be up higher.” I’m like, “I don’t know if that’s comfortable.” After a few tries, it was like, “I get it.”

You have a lot more power too?

I didn’t realize that. It was awesome to be picked. I hope to maybe do something with them in the future. Who knows? My fingers are crossed on that. They seemed happy with the product. It was great to see it on TV. After the first two commercials, I’m like, “I’m good. I don’t need to see it anymore.” My wife is like, “You’re on TV.” I go, “I’ve been on TV before.” She’s like, “Not like that.”

That’s a big deal. Peloton is the hottest thing right now, so to be in a commercial for them is huge.

I was thinking the whole time like, “I sure hope we don’t get any hate like that other commercial. I don’t want to be in the middle of another whatever.” It was received well. From everything I’ve heard, the Peloton community liked that they had real people in and not actors who don’t get on the bike. They’re just there for the commercial. It was refreshing to see those comments come through.

That’s been something that since I have been part of the community, going back for a few years, people have been asking to have a commercial that had people in it. It is a huge deal that you’ve got to be part of that. That is something people have been asking for. It’s like why do you have all these actors? It’s us. We’re the ones that make the community. We’re the ones that make Peloton go, so bring us in.

I know this is silly. This is something my wife and I laugh about. I go, “They should have someone from the Peloton community come in studio and do a fan cycle. Let them lead a class, let somebody from the community lead a ride.”

That would be cool. That’s against the studio rules now. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story. A long time ago, whenever things were a little more relaxed rule-wise in the studio, there was a Jenn Sherman ride where the Peloton had done an entire contest. Whoever won got to go up and be on stage with Jenn Sherman during the ride. We interviewed Laura Pugerude and they tied. It was Laura and somebody else and they tied for the contest. They both got to go up and ride on stage. Nothing like that happens anymore. Those days are so far behind.

A lot of time when companies are starting out, they have these contests that they’re like, “This will be fun,” and then they do it. They’re like, “Never again.” If you want to have fun, google MTV gives away a house. That contest went crazy. At the time, it was John Cougar Mellencamp, but it was for his pink houses. They gave away a pink house. John Cougar Mellencamp shows up. It’s crazy.

How long was the process between when they filmed it to when it showed up on TV? Did they tell you when it was going to be on? Were they like, “Here’s when it’s going to air?”

They did. We filmed it in August 2020. It aired October 5th. When we wrapped, the director said, “It may be a while before they put it on. You still have to go through the edits. There’s still a possibility that they won’t use this material.” I’m thinking, “We did twelve hours of work and you’re not going to use any of it. Can I have it?” I got it. They did say like, “You have to make the final edits.” Once I did, it was awesome to see it.

Game shows work like that. If they don’t air your episode, you don’t win the money. You don’t get the money until it airs.

Everybody in there I’ve had contact with and they’re all great. I ride with them a lot. It’s a blessing to be able to do it. It helped my nonprofit because more people saw me. They go, “We saw you in the commercial and you advocate for autism too. That’s awesome. Could you listen to my story?” I have to be quick to tell them like, “I’m an advocate. As an advocate, I’m still learning as well. Be patient with me if I don’t get it right away or it takes me some time.” It was a blessing to do the commercial.

Did I miss the donut stuff?

It’s not showing his leaderboard name.

It will be right at the bottom where they show. My leaderboard name is Peloton Golfers, Elijah0626. The donut video, I don’t know if that made it or if they’re holding it to do something else. A couple of days before it aired on TV, they said, “We want you to change your profile picture to this with the donuts.” I said, “Is there a reason?” She goes, “You’ll see later, but it’s got to match what we’re going to put out there.” Maybe that’s coming down the road.

For people that are reading, if you go to our YouTube channel, we’re playing the commercial in question.

I love that whole series of commercials. We were watching. It popped up. One of the women who was featured, it went into her whole life story. I’d never seen that before. I was like, “This is a five-minute commercial. I hadn’t seen any of them do that before.” That was interesting. I didn’t know that was out there.

In regard to your leaderboard name, you’re a big golfer.

I used to be. I played tournament golf for 22, 23 years. I love the game. I found my purpose toward the latter end because of the autism work that I do. It made it that much more gratifying. At that time, my body started breaking down. I had back issues. I had to make a decision. I stopped playing tournament golf in 2019. I limit my golfing now to one-on-one events that help the nonprofit in turns help the community. I host these summer events that I played with friends. We raise money. We take that money right away. We dump it back into the community, whether that be autism-related or low-income-related where we can help pay someone’s rent or someone’s cable bill or someone to have internet service for their kid doing remote learning.

It will always play a big part in my life. It will always be a platform that I can use to go back to. It’s a fun game. You can pull your hair out teaching it. I try to tell people to have fun with it. Everybody tries to perfect it. Nobody perfects it. Tiger Woods doesn’t perfect the game. I’ve thrown a bag or two. I’ll tell you this brief story. When I started playing golf, I would play with this military friend of mine. He since passed away and he was an older guy at the time. I was learning how to play the game. I would get frustrated. He was in his 70s and he would hit it. It would go straight. I would hit it and it would go into the trees or in the water. I’m getting frustrated.

My girlfriend at the time had bought me those clubs. They were about $1,100. We get to this hole and there’s this pond there, down in the fairway. I hit my ball. It hits his ball in the middle of the fairway. My ball is in the water. I’m steaming. We drive up and I get the ball out of the water. I hit it back in the water. I slowly walked to the back of the cart, took the golf bag off the cart and took the whole set of clubs and chucked them in the lake. At the time, I didn’t know that the owner of the golf course was looking directly at what I was doing. He rides out. I’m sitting there angry.

My buddy was like, “You’ve got to learn how to play golf and be patient. You’ve got to be patient.” I’m like, “I don’t want to hear it.” The guy drives up and he goes, “We’re going to have to ban you for life for doing that. A lot of people saw that. We don’t want to give off the wrong impression.” At the time, I was angry that he did it. As I got home, I understood why he did that. He was teaching me a lesson about anger, patience and not trying to perfect the game.

They were rental clubs. You’ve left that part out.

I wish they were because when I got home, it was a talking to. She was very upset. I had to wear that because she was right. We broke up not because of that, but of other things. That was a gift and when you get a gift, you treat it as a gift. You don’t get it and then throw it away. I’ll say that lesson to a lot of kids that I coach that, “You’ve got to be patient. Let it come to you. Don’t flip out. Believe me, I know. I can tell you this. I can show you this.” We laugh now, but at the time, I needed that lesson. I needed to learn that.

I’ve played golf a grand total of one time in my life. That’s when I found out that there’s a maximum number of strokes. They’re there because if there wasn’t a maximum number of strokes per hole, I would still be there to this day. Do you have any advice for people who are now entering the world of Peloton?

My advice would be to enjoy the journey and trust whatever process that you’re on. You’ll see it as long as you trust it. You are patient, have fun. We have a lot of friends who were on now who bought bikes and I try to tell them, “If you’re not competing with that person next to you, it’s fun.” Believe me, from time to time to do that, but you should be chasing your goal. That personal goal that you set that week before, you should be trying to chase that and get better and bill. Enjoy that company that you have, especially during COVID right now where we’re not able to get to the gym. You’ve got to lead a work full of people, give a high-five. They have a little video thing where you can click the video and people pop up. I’ve done that once or twice. It scared me in the beginning because I’m like, “I don’t know. Letting somebody in.” I would say embrace it and enjoy it for what it is. It’s a fun community. Everybody inspires one another. I love it because of that.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us. This was a lot of fun. Before we go, remind everybody where they can find you and all of your stuff.

If you’re on Instagram, I am @Eli0626, Facebook, type in Team Winfrey, you can find me there. On Twitter, it is @Eli_Winfrey or @TeamWinfreyCorp. You can find me there.

Thank you so much. This was fun.

I enjoyed it.

Thank you. You have a good rest of your day.

You too. Thank you so much.

—

That brings this one to a close. Until next time, where can people find you?

People can find me at Facebook.com/CrystalDOKeefe. They can find me on Instagram, Twitter on the Bike and of course the Tread, @ClipOutCrystal.

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