The most unintentionally brilliant ad
Five years after Peloton Wife
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading out into the freezing cold for my son’s 8 a.m. (!?!?!?!) basketball game in McCordsville, Indiana. There are fewer funnier things on earth than watching 5-year-olds attempt to play basketball as a cohesive five-person unit.
1. “Let’s do this.”
It’s been five years since The Ad.
Peloton entered our collective consciousness before Christmas 2019 by dropping a commercial intended to inspire consumers but which actually horrified us.
Alex Abad-Santos summed it up for Vox:
The commercial features an unnamed woman, who is given the gift of a Peloton by an unnamed man, most likely her partner. Stunned by his generosity, each day she films herself riding the Peloton in her home with quippy narration.
“Okay, first ride,” she says to her smartphone. “A little nervous, but let’s do this.”
Who is she talking to? The man? Was this a quid pro quo situation? Does she have other people tuning in every day to watch her do virtual spin classes? What do these viewers think?
These questions are never fully answered, but they seem to be the kind of videos one takes for their Instagram Stories or for their friends on social media. It is unclear if this woman has friends beyond her partner, her child, and her Peloton.
That last line is prescient. The New York Times picked up on the theme, too, with the headline: Peloton Ad Is Criticized as Sexist and Dystopian.
There was something dystopian about watching a woman exercise in unsettling isolation during a season defined by togetherness. The ad deserved to be a disaster. Even the actress who played Peloton Wife pivoted to a gin commercial to bury her viral character.
Instead, the widely mocked Peloton commercial turned out to be the most unintentionally brilliant and perfectly timed marketing package of our age. Just a few weeks later, COVID-19 hit the U.S. and, all of a sudden, we were all living in Peloton’s dystopia.
In the Planet of the Peloton Wife, a black-and-red stationary bike with a mounted touchscreen tablet rocketed up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and people bought the absolute hell out of it. Not just Peloton bikes, but also company stock.
That includes my family. We bought a Peloton bike in 2020 along with hundreds of thousands of other people. The thing is, it really was great.
It’s not an exaggeration to say Peloton was as transformational for me as it was for fictional Peloton Wife. After we bought the bike, I not only reversed my early-pandemic weight gain; I got in the best shape of my life. I learned to enjoy exercise, becoming a regular runner for the first time with Peloton instructors telling dumb jokes in my ears (and, oddly, laughing at them??). I’ve maintained that level of fitness (I just hit a new personal record on a 45-minute ride!), which I consider no small feat as I settle into middle age.
I’ve been thinking about my fitness journey this week because, while many people are sharing their Spotify Wrapped, I’ve been looking at my Peloton stats. As of this writing, I’ve spent about 59 hours doing Peloton workouts this year, down from 132 hours in 2021, my most active year on the platform.
I’m far from the only person whose Peloton activity waned. The company is in relative shambles compared to its pandemic peak. I often see predictions of worse things to come, including warnings of total collapse, with our expensive workout machines turning into technological bricks.
I would miss Peloton if it ceased to exist in its current form. Yet, I must confess, I struggle to define for you what exactly the Peloton product is even as I’ve spent four years using it and enjoying improved health.
There is something cultish about giving your full attention to charismatic influencer-workout instructors for regular sessions in which they offer encouragement, inspiration and self-help. Sample inspiration from Alex Toussaint: “You don’t have to, you get to.” (My wife/editor notes she’s heard multiple other instructors say this exact thing, which speaks to the generic life-coach nature of it all.)
It’s an experience much like attending a nondenominational megachurch in which you’re an anonymous face among the masses listening to a charismatic speaker who makes you feel like family, but with whom you have no realistic chance of knowing on any deep, meaningful level. If you make the mistake of thinking you have a relationship with that person and approach them for one-on-one guidance, you’re going to be referred elsewhere.
Peloton professes to sell membership in a community. But the company exploded at the precise moment when we were sealed off from actual communities. Our physical activity is incidental to the video content (a word the instructors frequently use) on the Peloton platform (another popular word). The instructors’ collective appeal, their ability to simulate relationship, is the approximate product.
No one has written about Peloton better than Anne Helen Petersen of Culture Study, who described the importance of the instructors in this post:
I want to talk about the stars. Without them, there is no Peloton. They are tremendously valuable and, at least within the Peloton universal, meticulously individualized. Jess King is a rave kid. Alex Toussaint is the drill sergeant. Robin Arzón gives you type-A tough love. Ben Alldis is a Ken Doll. Emma Lovewell just wants to chill. Ally Love is giving the youth sermon. Sam Yo is the buff ex-Buddhist monk. Christine D’Ercole is the Gen-Xer who wants to release you from your own bullshit. Cody is the gay friend. Denis is the Silver Fox. Jenn Sherman is Mom.
If those sound reductive, they’re meant to be. They’re not full-fledged personalities, they’re image foundations, carefully cultivated by Peloton and the instructor themselves. As with all stars, whether or not they’re reflections of the “real” person is inconsequential. Their image is their vibe, their style of teaching, their self-presentation, and, ultimately, the way they mean.
When someone says “I really need a Cody ride” or “I really need an Alex ride,” they are communicating a craving for a mode of address. Do you want someone with a very normy vibe to give you vaguely Dad-ish platitudes about endurance fitness? Take a Matt class. Do you want to curse at your tiny instructor? Choose Olivia. Do you want to want just broadly feel good about your life choices? Take Jess Sims. Some of what Mandy Harris Williams calls “athletic blackface”? You’ve got, well, options.
That’s exactly right! I know which instructor to pick when I want to vibe out. And I know that, when I want to push the bounds of my physical limitations, I can pull up a workout with yellow-clad Arzón, who once screamed during an intense HIIT push, “It’s time for you to remember who the fuck you are!”
Hell, yeah!
This is all incredibly silly, of course, and you can see why Peloton was more of a fad than an enduring model for physical fitness. Yet, like Petersen, I still love Peloton.
Nondenominational megachurches, after all, are contrived to appeal to shallow senses — but, once you get in the door, they also speak to our cravings to be part of something universal. Their artificiality doesn’t necessarily mean they are devoid of value. You can go to one, with its coffee shop and books store and pastor who looks like an L.L.Bean catalogue model, and you can feel authentic spiritual connection.
Peloton is every bit as absurd as megachurches and as absurd the company’s 2019 ad led us to believe. But, as Peloton showed with that ad, it knows how to make us feel something.
For four years now, Peloton has made me feel pretty damn good about working out.
2. A hopeful view of a second Trump term
I’ve been encouraging optimism despite election results that I did not care for last month. Noah Smith warns about one big thing that can go wrong, but also includes a broader, hopeful outlook with which I agree:
All in all, I’m not too worried about the state of the United States right now. Our economy is robust; even if Trump re-accelerates inflation by running big deficits and messing with the Fed, it probably won’t be catastrophic. Our society is slowly calming down from a decade of unrest. Climate change is a threat, but it’s mostly being caused by other countries, so even if Trump cancels green energy subsidies it’ll have only a marginal effect on the planet. A lot of long-term chronic concerns, like inequality, are certainly worth addressing but not as immediately urgent as we made them out to be in the 2010s. Trump may throw Ukraine under the bus, and though this would be a terribly immoral and reprehensible thing to do, it also won’t result in a direct threat to the U.S.
3. What I wrote
I published one column this week for IndyStar:
4. What I read
Rogé Karma on why Democrats are losing Latinos
Elizabeth Bruenig on progressive women renouncing men
Paul Krugman on his 25 years at The New York Times
Paul Krugman on taking his talents to Substack
Thank you for the wonderful responses to last week’s email, and thank you for subscribing and reading!
Enjoyed, like always.