On 20 August 2022, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got married at Affleck’s 87-acre countryside estate in Savannah, Georgia. The nuptials were the closest thing the US had to a royal wedding: two A-list actors reunited after years apart. It was the kind of storybook ending you might see in a J.Lo romcom.
Presiding over it all was Jay Shetty, the former Hindu monk who’s become a one-man self-help empire. Shetty and Lopez connected in January 2021 on the YouTube show Coach Conversations, a sponsored series produced by the handbag brand. Lopez grew so enamored of Shetty she invited him to officiate the ceremony.
The wedding was a coronation for Shetty, who loved reading celebrity autobiographies growing up as a British Indian in north London. He was now accepted into Hollywood’s innermost circles as a celebrity in his own right. His On Purpose podcast, among the top 10 most-subscribed-to in the US last year, has featured a litany of high-profile guests including Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon, as well as Kobe Bryant, who gave one of his last interviews before his tragic death. Shetty has written two bestsellers: Think Like a Monk, a 2020 memoir/self-help guidebook based on his time studying Hinduism, and 2023’s 8 Rules of Love, for helping people better maneuver their romantic relationships. Calm, the meditation startup worth a reported $2bn, has given Shetty the title of chief inspiration officer. Shetty also has a life-coaching business, the Jay Shetty Certification School, where students pay thousands of dollars to learn the Jay Shetty discipline. He has 14 million followers on Instagram and 6 million across his two YouTube channels.
Shetty has been widely celebrated for these achievements. In June 2023, he attended a White House state dinner for the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. Two months later, he sat down with Joe Biden for an exclusive interview about the administration’s mental health initiatives. This past holiday season, he and his wife, Radhi Devlukia-Shetty, were featured in a Gap campaign. This month, he made his acting debut in Lopez’s semi-autobiographical musical film This Is Me … Now.
Recently, the ultimate mark of Hollywood influencer success was bestowed on Shetty: a menu item named after him at Erewhon, the ultra-high-end grocery chain in Los Angeles. (The Jay Shetty Love Potion smoothie contains rose water, banana, raspberries and strawberries.)
Delivering pop-psychology wisdom culled from sources as varied as Carl Jung, Bruce Lee and St Francis of Assisi, Shetty has earned near universal acceptance. It’s a remarkable rise to fame for a man who says that just 13 years ago, he was living as a penniless monk in India.
In his origin story, which he tells in his books and countless podcast and talkshow appearances, Shetty is a business student, preparing himself for a life of corporate ladder-climbing, until one day he attends a guest talk by a monk. Shetty is so in awe that he seeks the holy man’s tutelage. “It changed my life,” Shetty said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “It was the most captivating presentation I’ve ever been to. He spoke about selflessness, service and kindness, and it just got me hooked.”
After graduating, Shetty forgoes a life of material success to live as a monk himself. Three years later, he has another revelation: his purpose in life is not to live the humble life of a monk, but to use his preternatural oratory skills to share wisdom with the world. Thus begins his transformation into a public self-help personality and his swift rise to fame.
Shetty’s success is largely predicated on this riches-to-rags-to-riches backstory. His qualifications for being the world’s most prominent mental and spiritual wellness guru are, according to him, this spiritual awakening and the time he spent in solitude in an ashram “in a village near Mumbai”.
But people close to Shetty have questioned whether his conversion to a life of monkhood was quite so dramatic.
Much of Shetty’s spiritual education took place not in India but in Watford, an orbital town outside north-west London, they say. He was there not because of a spiritual discovery in college but because he grew up in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (also known as Iskcon or the Hare Krishna movement). Shetty says he spent his time as a monk in meditation and religious study, but he also spent a lot of time making proselytizing videos for social media and hosting lectures at universities in London. Shetty almost never discloses his association with Iskcon, perhaps concerned with the organization’s problematic history, which includes allegations that in the 1970s and 1980s members engaged in corporal punishment, child sexual abuse and, on two occasions, conspiracy to commit murder. Instead, he presents his spirituality in vague terms.
I first met Shetty last March, when I was assigned to write a profile of him for Esquire magazine.
After attending his stage show, I became skeptical. One segment involved Shetty inviting a volunteer on stage and putting her in a de facto sensory deprivation chamber to illustrate how difficult it is for people to put down their phones. The crowd then watched her fidget via a live video feed. Later, he invited a different woman on stage and had her call her estranged brother, whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. When the call went to voicemail, Shetty instructed her to leave her brother a message while we all listened. A woman sitting two seats to my right audibly remarked: “This is mortifying.”
I began researching and found multiple allegations of Shetty using people’s content without consent or attribution and distorting details about his past as a monk. The Esquire profile never ran – the magazine didn’t want to turn the interview into an investigation – but this article is the result of investigating those claims and interviewing dozens of people, including high-ranking members of Iskcon, people who know Shetty personally, his schoolmates, his former employees, academics who study Hinduism and graduates of Shetty’s life-coaching school.
The coaching school
Shetty is hardly the first self-help guru to embellish his spiritual credentials to amass followers, but he demands huge sums of money for his guidance. Shetty has used his spiritual authority to launch a number of subscription and education services, including the life-coaching school, which charges $7,400 a term for “Postgraduate Diploma (Level 7) qualifications” – equivalent to a master’s degree.
The Jay Shetty Certification School pays OTHM, a private exam-certification company in the UK, to evaluate and certify its accreditation. It also claims that Ofqual, the UK government’s exam watchdog, which regulates all exams for schools and universities, “approves” the qualification.
According to the school’s brochure:
As OTHM qualifications are approved and regulated by Ofqual (Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulation), Jay Shetty Certification School students are also eligible to progress to a top-up degree, master’s program, or MBA at many universities in the UK and overseas with advanced standing.
Ofqual said it does not regulate the school’s accreditations. An Ofqual spokesperson wrote that the organization would be contacting the school to have “references to Ofqual removed from their website”.
Lawyers representing Shetty told the Guardian that the Jay Shetty Certification School is not approved by Ofqual but that it is an “OTHM Approved Center”, and that OTHM is approved by Ofqual – and that, as a result, students are “eligible to progress” to certain programs “with advanced standing”, as it says on the school’s website.
But OTHM told the Guardian that “Ofqual do not recognise Jay Shetty – the Centre is not linked to any OTHM Ofqual-regulated Qualifications”. They said that although the Jay Shetty school is an OTHM “endorsed Learning Programme”, these programs “are not Ofqual regulated” and the way the arrangement is currently advertised on the Shetty’s website “might mislead”.
In October 2023, when the Guardian was reporting this piece, the school’s brochure listed “University of Derby, Anglia Ruskin University, University of Buckingham” as universities where students would be eligible to progress to a “top-up degree”, a way to gain a full undergraduate degree by combining Jay Shetty Certification School diploma with only one year of full-time study.
The coaching school’s website still states that “progression arrangements” for a Jay Shetty coaching course to lead to a “top-up MBA” have “been confirmed by the University of Chichester”.
But when the Guardian contacted these universities, all of them denied any link with Shetty’s school. “We have never worked with Jay Shetty Certification School,” the University of Chichester’s chief marketing and communications officer, Mark Barlow, said in an interview. “I’m very unhappy that we are included on the website. We are unsure why we are being mentioned. We will immediately be making contact to get our name taken off.”
The claims about Ofqual and the University of Chichester remain online, as this article goes to press.
‘Why did you become a monk?’
“Jay, you’re amazing,” Ellen DeGeneres gushed when Shetty joined her show for the first time in spring 2019. “So you were a monk in India. First of all, why did you become a monk?”
Shetty proceeded to tell the spiritual origin story he has relayed in numerous other interviews.
As Shetty tells it, he’s an 18-year-old, first-year student at Cass Business School in London when one of his friends invites him to attend a lecture at the school given by an Iskcon monk named Gauranga Das. “I wasn’t interested in hearing a monk’s perspective on life,” Shetty told DeGeneres. “My friend forced me to go. He promised me we would go to a bar afterwards.”
That lecture ends up drastically altering the trajectory of Shetty’s life. “My whole life, I’d been fascinated by people who’d gone from nothing to something – rags-to-riches stories,” Shetty writes in Think Like a Monk. “Now, for the first time, I was in the presence of someone who’d deliberately done the opposite.”
Shetty is so amazed by Gauranga Das that he follows the monk back to the ashram in India, spending his summers and holidays there studying ancient Hindu texts. After graduating from Cass, Shetty moves into the Indian ashram full-time, he says, renouncing the trappings of the material world for a devout life as a monk.
Shetty tells conflicting versions of the story. He often changes the age he says he was when the lecture occurred, telling different news outlets that he was 18, 21 or 22 years old when he attended the talk. On Shetty’s own Genius website, it says Shetty heard “a monk speak for the first time when he was twenty one years old”.
In an email, Gauranga Das, the monk in question, told the Guardian that the lecture at Cass Business School occurred in 2007, when Shetty would have been at least 19. “We met at his college and then several other events that week,” he writes. Shetty’s legal team confirmed to the Guardian that the lecture took place in 2007.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Chaitanya Lila, a member of Iskcon who was in a romantic relationship with Shetty from June 2008 to December 2009, says of Shetty’s story. “He was in Iskcon before 2007.”
The spiritual epiphany Shetty often describes seems to have happened a year earlier, in the summer of 2006, during a trip to France for members of Iskcon Pandava Sena (IPS), the organization’s youth group.
A video of that 2006 trip shows a young Shetty interacting with monks in the white or saffron robes that denote monkhood in Iskcon. In one part of the video, Shetty is seen rapping while a man wearing monk attire plays violin as accompaniment. (The Guardian is using archival links to content that is no longer accessible, including some websites made private immediately following inquiries for this article.)
Shetty spoke about how revelatory the trip was in a November 2008 newsletter published by Iskcon. “When I returned, my view on KC [Krishna consciousness, the Iskcon religion] had completely changed and I had gone through a massive transformation.”
Those who attended the trip with him agreed: “He came in and was this London rude boy,” said one Iskcon member who was also on the France retreat. “But he really immersed himself on the trip. I think he experienced Krishna consciousness and loved it.”
In 2006, shortly after the trip to France, Shetty was named chair of IPS. A grainy YouTube video taken later that year shows Shetty jumping and spinning in the center of a kirtan circle, Iskcon’s collective chanting and dancing ritual, led by Gauranga Das – the monk whom Shetty claims he met the following year.
In a letter to the Guardian, Shetty’s attorneys wrote that Shetty’s 2007 “meeting with Gauranga Das was Mr Shetty’s first meaningful meeting and engagement with a monk … Mr Shetty has been attending his local Iskcon temple since he was a child. While Mr Shetty came across monks at temple in his youth, those engagements were not memorable or meaningful in any way.”
In the 2008 Iskcon newsletter, Shetty makes no reference to a lecture by a monk awakening him spiritually. In his books and interviews published since he became famous, he makes no reference to his childhood in the faith and the trip to France.
Shetty writes in Think Like a Monk that during university, he spent “most of [his] Christmas and summer holidays living with monks” in Mumbai, which Lila, Shetty’s former girlfriend, disputes. “He went to India probably once during that year and a half that I was in a relationship with him, and that was probably for two weeks,” she said. (Representatives for Shetty said Shetty and Lila only dated for only a portion of Shetty’s college experience, so she can’t speak to the entire period, and that they have not had any contact in the 15 years since then.)
‘Why not go the Krishna route?’
Though he markets himself as a spiritual leader, Shetty’s output isn’t overtly religious. He occasionally references ancient Hindu texts, but the vast majority of his content is generalized, secular pop psychology, the likes of which you can find from any number of competing self-help personalities. He’s pulled off a seemingly impossible contradiction: branding himself as a spiritual guide without ever specifying the religious tradition he practices.
Shetty avoids mentioning Iskcon, instead describing himself as a “Vedic monk”.
Dax Shepard asked Shetty this year on his Armchair Expert podcast about the particular form of Hinduism Shetty practices. “When you then decide to become a monk, why not go the Krishna route? Why did you end up in the Vedic world?” Shepard asked.
“Vedic is a term I’ve used because Vedic is the overarching term that kind of houses all of these philosophies,” Shetty explained.
But “Vedic” is vague. The term references the Vedas, a collection of Sanskrit writings that are among the oldest religious texts in the world, and encompass thousands of distinct Hindu practices. “There’s no such thing as ‘being Vedic’. Being Vedic is being Hindu, basically,” said Tilak Parekh, a faculty member at the University of Cambridge’s divinity department, where he studies Hinduism. “Nearly all old Hindu traditions ascribe themselves to the Vedas.”
It’s not clear why Shetty would speak so much about his time as a monk but refrain from identifying where his studies took place. Perhaps he doesn’t want to alienate readers who are atheist or who practice another religion. But he might also be concerned about Iskcon’s history in the United States. The Hare Krishna movement, as it was often called, grew in the 1960s by appealing to people disillusioned with the hedonism of counterculture. Instead of free love and psychedelics, Krishnas seek enlightenment through self-denial. Drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, caffeine and meat are explicitly forbidden. To achieve transcendence, they chant the group’s signature mantra.
By the 1980s, Iskcon leaders were being described by some as abusive and cult-like. Men and women who had been raised in the Hare Krishna faith as children said they had been subject to routine beatings and sexual assaults at the hands of Iskcon teachers. Children as young as five had been separated from their parents and sent to Krishna boarding schools in India, called gurukulas, where boys were ordered to have sex with their spiritual masters. Girls were married off to men twice their age. Two Iskcon members were murdered by a fellow devotee for speaking out against the organization. Both murders were carried out by Thomas Drescher, who is serving a life sentence in prison, where he acts as a guru to other incarcerated people.
Shetty became more involved in Iskcon in 2006, long after these scandals and once the organization had already started to fade from public view. The year prior, Iskcon had been ordered to pay $9.5m to 535 former students who suffered abuse in the 70s and 80s, a settlement that forced Iskcon to file for bankruptcy in Los Angeles and close all of its US boarding schools. Seeing Krishna devotees chant in public became a rarity. A Los Angeles city ordinance banned them from soliciting at LAX airport.
But Iskcon has experienced a revival in recent years, particularly within the Indian diaspora. By 2016, the majority of Iskcon’s members in the US were, for the first time, people of Indian heritage, not the white hippies with whom the religion had been so closely associated for decades.
That resurgence was in part due to Iskcon members finding creative ways to rebrand Krishna consciousness as a secular spiritual practice, according Nicole Karapanagiotis, an associate professor of religion at Rutgers University–Camden and author of Branding Bhakti, about Iskcon’s efforts to reinvent itself. “They’ve built a lot of yoga studios, mindfulness centers, sustainability centers, etc to attract people who might not otherwise be attracted,” Karapanagiotis said.
“You would think that by now he would’ve mentioned where he was a monk,” Karapanagiotis said of Shetty. “It’s hard to imagine that leaving that out is not deliberate, but it’s not clear what the reason for that is.”
Shetty’s arm’s-length relationship with Iskcon has caused mixed feelings in the Iskcon community. Some support his work and understand he’s had to embrace a secular version of spiritualism to reach the masses, while others resent how personality cults have distorted their faith.
The Watford ashram
“I’m so happy to see you!” Gwyneth Paltrow exclaimed to Shetty from the stage of the In Goop health summit in November 2021. “I would love it if you could just give everybody a little bit of your amazing story,” Paltrow continued. “How you came through being a monk and into being this amazing life coach and motivator and all of the amazing things you are.”
Shetty’s authority as a self-help figure stems from his time as a monk. It’s the basis for Think Like a Monk, and he brings it up in nearly every interview he does. Without his monk past, Shetty would be just another influencer battling for relevance online.
Shetty has repeatedly said he lived as a monk for three years, from 2010 to 2013, in a Hindu ashram in India. “When I was 21 years old, I skipped my college graduation to join an ashram in a village near Mumbai,” Shetty writes in 8 Rules of Love. There’s a similar claim in the introduction of Think Like a Monk, where Shetty writes that he lived in Mumbai for three years before returning home to England. “Three years after I moved to Mumbai, my teacher, Gauranga Das, told me he believed I would be of greater value and service if I left the ashram and shared what I’d learned with the world.” A host of media outlets have relayed the anecdote, including WSJ Magazine, the New York Times, British GQ, GQ India and the Times of London (twice).
But some who knew Shetty at the time say he spent the majority of this period as a monk at Bhaktivedanta Manor, a sprawling Tudor estate in Watford, a town just outside London, and visited India only occasionally.
Virabhadra Dasa, a Krishna devotee who lived in Iskcon’s Soho Street temple in central London from February 2011 to September 2012, says he saw Shetty several times over this span during visits to Bhaktivedanta Manor. Lila also told the Guardian Shetty had been in Watford for the vast majority of his time as a monk.
Shetty’s attorneys say that his time as a monk began in May 2010, when he moved into Bhaktivedanta Manor, and that he moved to India three months later. “Mr Shetty spent most of his time in India with trips back to Bhaktivedanta Manor as Mr Shetty was encouraged by his mentors at the monasteries in India to spend time serving in the community where he was raised. He also visited elsewhere in Europe and the US as part of his service. This is consistent with what Mr Shetty writes in Think Like a Monk: ‘When I graduated from college, I traded my suits for robes and joined the ashram, where we slept on the floor and lived out of gym lockers. I lived and traveled across India, the UK and Europe.’” Gauranga Das also told the Guardian that “Jay was a monk from May 2010 to March 2013 … [T]he first 3 months were in Bhaktivedanta Manor and after that he was primarily based in India.”
But Shetty’s own writings in his blogposts conflict with this account. Shetty kept a blog, called the Essence, at this time, in which he recounted his travels around Europe and India in 2010 for his friends back home in London. (The site was made private during the reporting of this article.) In numerous blogposts, he describes Bhaktivedanta Manor as his primary ashram during his time as a monk.
He moved into Bhaktivedanta Manor in July 2010, and it wasn’t until October 2010 that he visited India, where he initially spent less than four months. In early 2011, he wrote on the blog:
Came back from India>>>went to see a few people at City University (was a good laugh)>>>then planned an action packed weekend>>>but got sick>>>stuck at home in bed for 10 days (few nice souls came and visited)>>>came back to stay at the temple where i’ve been busy going to programs, distributing flyers and books on the streets all over the UK and enjoying festivals!…
After almost four months in India, I realised that there was so much to process from my trip.
Contrary to the portrayal in his books, Shetty’s time in the Watford ashram was not just a quiet life of seclusion and travel. He spent a lot of his three years as a monk making viral YouTube videos on the streets of London. “I saw him in sweatpants more than I saw him in robes,” said a former Iskcon devotee who was a monk in London at the same time as Shetty.
Despite traveling constantly, and spending a lot of time online while he was a monk, Shetty said he had difficulty re-assimilating into society after leaving the ashram in early 2013. “That was the hardest point in my life,” Shetty told the hosts of the British daytime TV show This Morning in early 2023. “I feel like I experienced depression for the first time. I had forgotten how to do small talk. I didn’t know who the prime minister was, I didn’t know who won the World Cup. I didn’t even know how to have a conversation that wasn’t deep and meaningful.” He didn’t mention he’d spent a lot of that time a few miles from the TV studio, blogging and making videos.
The Tom Cruise of Krishna
In 2016, Shetty left his job as a consultant to pursue a new career. He rang in the new year by releasing his first video as an independent media personality, a piece about how the Bhagavad Gita can help people with their resolutions. The video was made in what would become Shetty’s signature style – delivering a non-stop stream of bumper-sticker wisdom and quotes from prominent spiritual and cultural figures (Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Ringo Starr). Shetty’s first video was more overtly religious than much of his oeuvre. The new year’s resolutions video was released on the YouTube channel Hare Krsna TV.
Shortly after it was published, Shetty told an Iskcon-affiliated news website that he was figuring out how to make his message more palatable to western audiences. The article states that Shetty “and a team of ‘urban monks’ sought to present Krishna consciousness to ‘the Apple Generation’ through blogs, social media, videos, and presentations at universities”, and that he wanted to bring people to the Krishna faith. “We can connect people across the world with Krishna consciousness, and start a revolution online!” Shetty said in the interview. (In Think Like a Monk, Shetty writes: “This book is completely nonsectarian. It’s not some sneaky conversion strategy. I swear!”)
“No, converting people to ‘Krishna consciousness’ is not Mr Shetty’s goal,” Shetty’s lawyers wrote to the Guardian. “Think Like a Monk explains Mr Shetty enjoys sharing the ancient wisdom he learned as a monk in a practical, accessible, relevant, and transformational way.”
One Iskcon member says Shetty is to the organization what Tom Cruise is to Scientology – a magnetic, media-friendly ambassador for an otherwise controversial religious institution. His sheer fame serves as a recruitment tool.
“People are hungry for spirituality, but they’re not interested in having to bow to red-robed monks, shave their heads and chant ancient, foreign mantras,” writes Ronald Purser, a professor of business at San Francisco State University, a practicing Buddhist for 40 years and the author of McMindfulness, about western capitalism co-opting and subsuming eastern religious traditions. “A savvy influencer like Shetty, with gobs of charisma, charm and entrepreneurial flair, offers exactly what the masses want – a spiritual-but-not religious, DIY, quick-fix type of ‘McSpirituality’.”
Shetty’s videos got the attention of Arianna Huffington. He moved to New York in fall 2016 to work for HuffPost, but quickly realized he didn’t need the backing of a media outlet to achieve fame as a wisdom peddler. By early 2017, he was releasing his videos on his own through Facebook and YouTube, where his growth was meteoric. Two years after striking out on his own, he had surpassed 1 million followers on YouTube and 20 million on Facebook. He told Mashable he was making “six figures per month” through Facebook’s ad revenue share program for creators.
Despite what he writes in Think Like a Monk, Shetty’s social media prowess wasn’t the result only of his singular hard work. He used his stature within Iskcon and the IPS youth group to convince dozens of young members to help him produce and promote his work in the name of serving Krishna. “You have to appreciate that Jay was like a superstar within Iskcon at that point, and he was getting people to do so much stuff for him for free,” remembers one Iskcon member. Shetty had members post his social media content to their friends and family, urging them to like, subscribe and share. “It was relentless,” recalls another Iskcon member. “Facebook and WhatsApp and texts and emails. I don’t think he’d be where he is now without them.”
“Mr Shetty did ask and encourage friends to post, share, like and subscribe to his content,” according to the letter from Shetty’s attorneys. “Some friends assisted Mr Shetty with filming and editing. Mr Shetty did not make promises or represent to individuals or organizations that they would be paid for posting, sharing, liking and subscribing to his content.”
But much of Shetty’s content was plagiarized. In 2019, a social media influencer, Nicole Arbour, published the video Jay Shetty Is Full Of SH*T!, exhibiting how Shetty built his social media presence by lifting content from other people, making inspirational quotes – many of which had been copied, oftentimes verbatim, from accounts with smaller followings – look like original content.
After posting the video, Arbour says, she was inundated with messages from writers and digital creators who said Shetty had appropriated their work and refused to give them credit, even after they asked him directly. “They sent email after email begging him to take [his posts] down or at least credit them, and he just didn’t,” Arbour said. “That was pretty upsetting to me.”
Many of Shetty’s “original” videos were based on pre-existing parables and social media posts that had gone viral years earlier. Shetty released a melodramatic YouTube video in 2018, in which a blind woman dumps her boyfriend after receiving an eye transplant and discovering that her boyfriend is, in fact, blind himself. (The twist: the boyfriend had donated his eyes to her, an act of selflessness she was emotionally blind to see.) This cautionary tale had appeared on Reddit five years earlier, and again on Facebook in 2017. Another Shetty video from that year is a theatrical re-enactment of the The Cookie Thief, a poem that had been making the viral rounds as far back as 2010. In another instance, Shetty copied an Indian man’s Facebook post about how parents shouldn’t put so much academic pressure on their children, word for word and without permission or attribution, in one of his videos.
After Arbour’s video, Shetty ordered his employees to go through all posts and include attributions to content that had been taken from elsewhere. He deleted more than 100 posts. He also hired a crisis PR firm, which launched a robust search-engine optimization campaign, according to a former employee of Shetty’s.
“It was a learning experience for Mr Shetty and his team,” Shetty’s lawyers write about his unauthorized use of people’s content. “From that point on, we are not aware of any issues of this nature arising.”
Shetty still uses other people’s content on his Instagram, now with attributions to the original creators. But he still doesn’t get permission from the source accounts. The Guardian spoke to three online creators – the TikTokker Emily Becca, and the Twitter users @BIGMEL____ and @TheOracleReadsU – whose content was reposted on Shetty’s Instagram page in the past year, and all of them said Shetty had never asked to use their content and that they received no compensation from him. “His popularity is based on just repurposing other people’s content and that’s what he seems to make money on,” Arbour said.
‘Opposite path of a spiritual person’
Shetty moved to LA – what he calls “the content capital of the world” – in early 2018 and got cozy with big stars. One of Shetty’s earliest Hollywood admirers was Russell Brand, who was refashioning himself as a post-woke social commentator. That same month, Shetty made his first of three appearances on Ellen and three on Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook talkshow. Will Smith took Shetty on as his personal spiritual adviser and the pair would end up spending so much time together that they would later joke their wives suspected they were in a romantic relationship.
“He’s an Indian man, he’s attractive, he’s charming, he’s sweet,” Fariha Róisín, the Australian Canadian author of the book Who Is Wellness For?, a critical look at the multitrillion-dollar wellness industry, wrote in an email of Shetty’s appeal. “I’ve been in the same room as him, and he’s appealing in the sense that he seems quite humble in person, almost shy. There is something compelling about that story – someone who accidentally came to fame, which I probably think, to some degree, is true. Yet it’s questionable that a monk left his life in a monastery to instead live a life … of what, making TikToks? Hanging out with celebrities? Being on YouTube? It’s almost the opposite path of what you assume a spiritual person arrives at.”
As Shetty’s circle of celebrity friends expanded, so did his lines of business. In January 2020, Shetty launched the Jay Shetty Certification School, a six-month online course that trains enrollees in Shetty’s success-coaching methodology.
To learn more about the school, I signed up for an introductory call. After 30 minutes of explaining the school’s schedule and curriculum, an enrollment adviser finally informed me about the sign-up cost, $7,400, information that’s not available on the school’s website. (The adviser was kind enough to offer me a one-time deal and cut the price to $6,800.)
Three days later, the adviser followed up with another call, and I pushed him about how graduates of the school recoup their $7,400 “investment”. The adviser had gone through the program himself, he said, and had been able to make his money back in just two months thanks to the school helping him set up his life-coaching business. He eventually built a big enough book of clients to make $10,000 a month from that business, he said.
I asked him why he had quit his life-coaching practice if he had been making so much money, and he said he made just as much now as an enrollment adviser for the certification school, a job that’s entirely commission-based. “It really aligns with my purpose,” he said. “With life coaching, I impact one person. Or I can be here and help people like you, who are going to go on and impact thousands of people.”
I mentioned that his explanation – him being certified in the Jay Shetty school, then certifying others, so they can then teach “thousands” of others – reminded me of a multilevel-marketing scheme. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he replied. “I’m just trying to help people, man.”
The Jay Shetty Certification School doesn’t meet the formal definition of a multilevel-marketing (MLM) company, in that success is not entirely dependent on recruiting others to join the school, but it does share a lot of characteristics with companies that operate as pyramid schemes, according to William Keep, a professor of marketing at the College of New Jersey and an expert in MLMs.
“There are so many similar patterns here,” Keep said. “What we’re seeing more in the MLM world, especially recently, is services instead of products … Someone builds credentials that are difficult to verify or exaggerated, and then suggests they have a secret: ‘I’ve got these wisdoms to share with you. What you do with them is up to you.’”
The Guardian spoke with several graduates of the Jay Shetty Certification School, and their experiences with the school were overwhelmingly positive. They felt the tuition, though expensive, was a good deal relative to other life-coaching courses – even though none of them were earning a full-time living from their coaching businesses, a year after graduating.
The Jay Shetty Certification School has accredited more than 1,100 students in three years, according to its brochure, which, at seven grand a student, means more than $7m in revenue.
Shetty also markets himself in his content as an authority on mental health. Last spring, Shetty wrote “7 easy ways to improve your mental health right now” in a blogpost for the meditation app Calm. A July 2022 YouTube video from Shetty instructs viewers: “Let’s Talk About Mental Health.” On his podcast, Shetty shared with his listeners “7 Things to Do This Weekend to Boost Your Mental Health” in an episode.
Shetty’s former girlfriend Lila, a practicing psychotherapist for 13 years and the head of mental health services at a university in the UK, fears Shetty and his life-coaching school provide inaccurate and potentially dangerous mental health guidance. “My issue as a mental health professional is that Shetty has misrepresented his persona, his knowledge and his credentials,” Lila said. “Misinforming others is not only unethical, it is potentially harmful to vulnerable people.”
Shetty’s wellness industry success allowed him to purchase a home in Nichols Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills, in fall 2021 for a reported $8.4m. (The house was formerly owned by Balthazar Getty, an heir to the Getty Oil fortune, whose family has been Hollywood royalty for generations.)
So far, Shetty’s rise has had few critics. When people do question Shetty, they are quickly dismissed. After he appeared on Armchair Expert this March to promote 8 Rules of Love, one of the show’s Instagram followers wrote a critical comment: “Super disappointed that you are platforming Jay Shetty. He is not an expert. What credentials does he hold to ‘help people through their current struggles’?”
Dax Shepard, the show’s main host, answered the comment from his personal Instagram account. “If you listen you will quickly hear that he is an expert in the religions from India. I found it illuminating :),” Shepard wrote. What religions those are, exactly, Shepard didn’t specify.
