Former monk turned spiritual influencer to the stars, Jay Shetty, has amassed 15 million followers on Instagram. He’s interviewed Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, and Kobe Bryant on his popular podcast. Shetty has received accolades from Gwenyth Paltrow and Ellen Degeneres. He even officiated J Lo and Ben Affleck’s wedding.
Yet when LA-based writer John McDermott was assigned to cover Shetty for Esquire, something seemed…off. When he started pulling at some threads, Esquire pulled out of the feature. Fortunately, The Guardian agreed to publish McDermott’s investigative reporting, in which he found little of Shetty’s origin story holds up to scrutiny.
John joins Derek and Matthew to discuss.
Show Notes
Uncovering the higher truth of Jay Shetty
‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve
Jay Shetty Is Full Of SH*T!
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today we can add to that tagline where sometimes when we unmask a guru, we find a run-of-the-mill online marketing bro from North London.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm John McDermott.
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Today we're talking about the former Hindu monk turned spiritual influencer to the stars, Jay Shetty.
Here to discuss Shetty is LA-based writer John McDermott, who's a regular contributor to Esquire, and he's also written for GQ and The Guardian, among others.
Thanks for joining us today, John.
Thank you so much for having me.
Looking forward to this one, because Jay Shetty has been on my radar for years.
I've never covered him.
In your article, you called him the Tom Cruise of the Hare Krishna movement, or the Guardian did.
I don't know where that came from, but it's just perfect.
His public profile is tremendous.
So for listeners who aren't aware of him, he's got 15 million followers on Instagram, 2.5 million on YouTube.
On his podcast via YouTube, he's interviewed Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, Kobe Bryant shortly before his tragic death.
Shetty has received accolades from Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres.
He even officiated the wedding of J.Lo and Ben Affleck, which is where you started the article.
Yet Shetty's origin story and rise has always sat off my radar, and John, I'm so glad you tracked it for The Guardian.
This idea of a monk forgoing a business career to a life of impoverished asceticism in Mumbai where he supposedly spent years in an ashram before re-emerging to teach the world the secrets makes for a compelling story, but it kind of falls apart when you start to tug on it.
And yet it still speaks to a sort of Orientalism that has pervaded the Western consciousness for at least a century and a half.
And you noted that you first met Shetty on assignment for Esquire in March of 2023.
So how did that story begin and what did you think of him after you met?
This story began as an assignment I got from Esquire.
The irony in all of this is now that we have gotten a response from Shetty's legal team.
Throughout the process, Shetty's people, both his attorneys and his publicists, have tried to portray me as this obsessed hater who has a preoccupation with Jay.
I've been after him for years and conducting a one-man smear campaign trying to take down a good man's reputation.
That's what they're trying to portray me as, right?
Aside from that being flat wrong, the irony is that I did not know who Jay Shetty was until his own publicity team pitched Esquire, asking for me specifically to cover Jay Shetty.
They pitched themselves into this mess.
So if anyone is to blame for me being on Jay Shetty's trail, it is his own PR agency.
I had previously written about another influencer in LA.
Her name is Tinks.
She's a lifestyle influencer, quickly rising.
She's chummy with Gwyneth Paltrow as well.
She doesn't really dabble in spiritualism at all.
It's kind of like someone's cool older cousin giving advice to younger women about everything from where to shop to how to deal with relationships, that kind of thing.
So I wrote a story about her, and that was just kind of a day in the life of this rising LA influencer, because I'm very interested in the current state of celebrity.
We're living in this time now where media is so fractured.
Someone can be so intensely famous within this one pocket of the culture, but then completely unknown to everyone else.
You know, the average person can be oblivious to them, which is not how it was when I was growing up.
When I was growing up, there were a handful of famous people, and everyone knew who they were.
That's when we had a monoculture. That doesn't really exist now. So this concept of fame is
really interesting. And that same dynamic applies to Shetty as well. One interesting reaction I've
gotten to this article is I knew nothing about this guy, but he was so intensely popular.
And I think that's why he was able to skate by on this backstory for so long is that a lot of
people were like, well, he's not that big of a deal.
what's the use of actually looking at what he claims.
So I get this assignment from Esquire, I meet with Jay, we do an interview over lunch, pretty
standard stuff.
My initial impulse was that writing about Jay was just going to be an entry point into
a larger trend piece, which is about how Western capitalism is subsuming these Eastern traditions
And I find it fascinating because Western civilization has never been more atheist.
We've never been more religious, less religious than we've ever been.
And yet at the same time, people still want answers to the big questions, right?
They want to know why we're here.
What is our purpose?
How to live a good life?
What does a good life even look like?
What does that mean?
But they're not turning to religion anymore.
Now they're turning to spiritualism, which is this squishy idea.
And it's kind of being blended with mental health in such a way that no one ever has to answer for anything.
The interesting part about that is that when you take Spiritualism and blend it with psychology.
And sometimes you can say, oh, well, this is legitimate because it refers to published psychological literature, right?
There's some scientific rigor here.
That can be a response whenever somebody is like, oh, well, this is just some spiritual mumbo jumbo.
But whenever you try to subject the spiritual side to scientific rigor, you could say, well, this isn't about science.
This is about something greater.
This is about spirit.
And how could we ever explain something as esoteric as spiritualism with science?
And I thought Jay was kind of the perfect encapsulation of that trend.
So I go do the interview.
He didn't really have too many great answers to my questions.
And I started to notice that he kind of just talks in circles a lot.
A lot of what he says are just kind of hollow platitudes.
And that was also reflected in the book that he had coming out, which was why he was doing all this press.
It was actually his second book.
And so I read his second book first.
And then I started to get a funny feeling about this guy.
And I was like, well, what do we actually know about him?
And that's where things kicked off.
I think it's really great how you described the shifting goalposts of the person who is doing spiritualism on one side, but then, you know, maybe legitimate psychology on the other.
So that's a really great observation.
I kind of think that aspiration is one of his central products, but I wonder if he's also selling a kind of redemption through Or redemption from capitalism through a kind of Hindu prosperity gospel that tells people that they can be in the world but not of it.
Is that fair?
Is that why he's so popular amongst the celebrity set?
I don't know if that's what attracts him to celebrities.
I think what attracts him to celebrities is that he's really well-connected in Hollywood and represented by William Morris Endeavor, which is the single most high-powered talent agency in all of show business.
And you know, I got a great comment in the piece from Ronald Purser, if you're familiar with his work.
Yes.
Yeah.
I've talked to Ron many times over the years.
Yeah.
He wrote the book, McMindfulness, which is this great kind of meditation on everything we're talking about, right?
And you know, Western capitalism subsuming these Eastern traditions and watering them down.
And I think why Jay appeals to both lay people and celebrities alike is that he gives them spiritualism without The hard work of being a spiritual person, you know, he gives them the sense of that they are living this kind of higher spiritual life, but without engaging in hard meditation.
And, you know, if anyone knew about the reality of Jay's religious background and his religious upbringing, they would know that to be a monk in that tradition is no easy feat whatsoever.
I mean, it's some hard, austere living.
Jay has managed to obscure that and instead give people this very easily digestible version of spiritualism.
Well, you're referring to his spiritual background, which comes through ISKCON.
Correct.
In the piece, this is where he claims his spiritual learning and... He doesn't claim it.
Oh, he doesn't claim it.
That's tricky though, isn't it?
Yes, exactly.
That's exactly the tension that exists.
Right.
Is that he always describes himself in these incredibly vague terms.
Yeah.
He was like, I was a monk.
As if there's just one generalized... Type of monk.
Right.
Monkdom that is practiced.
You know, there's Catholic monks, there are Christian monks, there are Buddhist monks, there are Taoist monks, etc, etc, etc.
To even say you're a Hindu monk is incredibly vague.
There are thousands of different Hindu traditions.
He would never specify in interviews that he came from ISKCON.
Which I know is an organization you have a lot of familiarity with, Matthew.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, his subterfuge there really comes from the fact that ISKCON is a terrible organization with, you know, this mile-long rap sheet of, you know, sexual abuse, child neglect, wage theft, fraud, a lot of heinous stories coming out of the 70s and 80s that you touched on in the piece.
It looks like Jay got snagged by this group's rebranding campaign, where they've concentrated on DayZ communities in the UK and beyond, and now it seems he really has to disclaim this organization.
Even if it does provide his kind of spiritual authenticity in some hidden way, because it was this thing that just rolled through town at the time that he got in touch with somehow, but it's smart for him to downplay his connections to the group.
And I'm wondering if you think he'll ever resolve this particular PR ball and chain.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, because thus far he hasn't commented publicly on anything we've reported.
His relationship with ISKCON is through his father, who is the accountant at ISKCON Soho Street Temple in London.
And Jay had been going to ISKCON events and going to ISKCON venues since as early as 14, which is, again, what we found in documented evidence that we were trying to dig up and that refutes his story that he was not involved with this organization or not involved with spiritualism whatsoever until he was 18 and he met a monk for the first time.
He's on the record in ISKCON publications giving interviews to them saying that he had been going around since he was 14.
Right.
I mean, one thing that I wanted to point out was that he does refer to his mentor or does he openly or not?
Now I'm confused.
To Garangadas?
He does.
Okay.
But he's very slippery with the language.
He also refers to Garangadas in general terms.
He refers to Garangadas as a monk or a Hindu monk.
Right.
In his book, the word ISKCON never appears.
His book, Think Like a Monk, which is the definitive telling of Jay's spiritual life, does not make any mention to the exact spiritual tradition he practiced or the spiritual organization which he came from, which is curious that he would leave that out.
Whether he covers up the ISKCON connection or not, it seems that Das is kind of a perfect model for Shetty because, you know, he too is business-oriented, he's an IT guy, he worked for this ginormous Indian engineering firm, and then he went all devotional.
So, Das isn't exactly like a 1970s Bohemian Hare Krishna tambourine player.
And then there's this key moment where Das allegedly tells Shetty that Shetty can't keep his light under a barrel, that he should go back into the world and become wealthy on behalf of God.
And I just wanted to point out that I think this is becoming a bit of a cultural pattern.
The leader of one of the groups I was in, the guy's name was Michael Roach, would tell us that his Tibetan Lama told him to go back into the world and make millions of dollars for the cause.
So, I think this is a super attractive story for, you know, wealthy men yearning to find meaning in life.
It had never dawned on me.
number of parallels between Garanga Dasa's and Jay Shetty's journeys. But yes, they do follow
a very similar pattern, and as you point out, it's something that's replicated with other groups as well.
You get into some of the details of where he is, let's say, a little slippery, and one of them
has been around for a while.
It's been pointed out before, which is his plagiarism.
What happened when you started to dig into his, let's say, liberal use of other people's material?
Liberal use is soft peddling.
I mean, plagiarism, straight up.
Yeah.
And this is one area where I am confident to speak in no uncertain terms.
The man plagiarized serially for years.
And one of the strangest things about reporting this story is that so much of this was just out in the open.
This had been reported on YouTube by a YouTube comedian years prior.
And yet none of the journalists who gave all of these fawning profiles of Jay over the years bothered to report on this.
It didn't take hard, you know, it didn't take a lot to find.
So when I start to look into Jay and I'm looking with a little bit more of a skeptical lens, the plagiarism was the first thing that indicated to me that there was a lot more here.
Because the type of person who plagiarizes is typically the type of person who is going to be less than truthful about other things in their life.
There's no way not to get caught for plagiarizing online.
I mean, it's just so easy for someone to point out, here's this post, here's the other post, here are the timestamps of the two posts.
One obviously came before.
And it becomes a very clear act that you're using someone else's content.
You guys are professional or creative professionals.
You know, it's tough to make a living creating any type of content professionally.
The idea that someone would just lift someone else's content is just...
bizarre to me to say the least.
Well, you came upon it first, and I think if you go on and do similar profiles
on other guru types, you can expect that there is often a parallel relationship
between follower numbers and plagiarism rates.
It's not an uncommon thing.
The thing about charismatics is that they have far less content than they have Riz,
and so they're always...
When he started his podcast, that's what really elevated him to a new level.
So that part of the story was just not surprising to me at all.
It is surprising that journalists have soft-pedaled him for what, like five, six, ten years?
He really kind of exploded onto the scene in 2020.
When he started his podcast, that's what really elevated him to a new level.
And I think, you know, a lot...
Most of the reactions I've gotten have been positive towards me,
but there have been some people defending Jay, which I anticipated.
And I think a lot of the people who defend Jay did not know about him until his podcast and don't know the extent of the backstory that he's sold over the years.
And they just know him as a good interviewer, which he is.
I'm not going to take away from that.
To your point, he's a charismatic guy.
He's well-spoken, handsome.
It's all very neatly packaged and done well.
So his podcast is good, but if you read his books, there is so little original content in there.
And that is what initially kind of Ding to my radar is that here was this guy selling this story about all this wisdom he accumulated as a monk, but then you read his books and it's just a generalized pop psychology, just kind of a grab bag of all these different ideas and, you know, quotes from tech CEOs and kind of businessy at times and, uh, kind of spiritual at times, kind of pop psychology at times, but so little of something that you would expect from
We're going to get to his coaching school in a moment, but you just mentioned a YouTube comedian who pointed it out years ago.
And this weekend, Max Tanney over at Semaphore published a piece about how so many media organizations are unwilling to go after people right now.
And you are mentioned at the very top of that interview.
So Esquire wanted me to write this profile on this guy.
It was just a pretty basic, 2000-word, straightforward kind of profile.
published in The Guardian.
What happened there?
So Esquire wanted me to write this profile on this guy.
It was just a pretty basic, like, 2000-word, straightforward kind of profile.
But as the author, you're given license to take it in whatever direction you want, within
So my initial spin was this idea of East meets West and the commodification of spirituality and combining it with, you know, the mainstreaming of mental health.
Right.
So I come back to him and I was like, Hey, I think we might have an even bigger story on our hands.
You know, I know we were going to try to do this fluffy profile, but I referenced in the Nicole Arbor video, which lays out Jay's plagiarism.
And by that time, I had found all of these different Reddit and Quora posts from people claiming to be from Jay's religious organization, ISKCON, talking about how he had been untruthful about certain details of his life.
And I go to ask where and I was like, I would like to pursue this as an investigation.
They shut it down then and there.
As to their motivations, a publication like Esquire thrives off access, right?
They need access to celebrities so they can get the big celebrity interview.
They can put the celebrity on the cover of the magazine.
And that is what their game is.
Now, Esquire also has an incredibly rich journalistic and literary tradition,
which is why I loved Esquire so much growing up.
I mean F Scott Fitzgerald has written for Esquire, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Nora Ephron, so many of my favorite writers.
And at times they publish incredibly hard-hitting, tough journalism.
So for them to come back and be like, yeah, we're not interested in this story.
About a guy who they were perfectly happy, again, running a fluffy profile on them.
Yeah, it was disappointing.
But I work with them on a project basis.
I don't have any exclusivity.
So I said, I'm going to take this elsewhere.
I'm going to pursue it on my own, which I am free to do.
And I did.
Well, I'm glad you did.
I'll just say that it does seem, the Semaphore piece, that it is increasing.
20 years ago, I used to write for Yellow Rat Bastard, which was a Vice-type magazine in New York.
And I wrote a negative music review of one of the artists they wanted me to cover.
And they said, hey, we want to keep getting free stuff from the record label.
Can you make it more positive?
So it's definitely not a new phenomenon, unfortunately.
Totally.
But with the economics of the journalism industry being what they are at the moment, And with, as Max lays out very well in his piece, with celebrities now being able to own their own story more than ever, producing podcasts about themselves, documentaries about themselves, you know, a place like the Players' Tribune for athletes, where athletes can publish stories about themselves.
They're not as reliant on news media to build their profile and to get their stories out.
And because they aren't, there's just less adversarial coverage.
And you know, the number of publications that are willing to do tough adversarial coverage is dwindling.
And it's also a matter of resources.
I mean, this took me months of reporting, editing, fact checking, legal reviews.
I mean, it was a lot of work and a lot of back and forth between the Guardian and it requires a lot
of editorial resources.
And I think a lot of publications now that they're, you know, again, struggling financially,
are like, it's not worth the headache.
So the aspect of your story that really got me was the coaching school.
Shetty charges $7,400 for a postgraduate diploma, which he says is equivalent to a master's degree.
And this is for life coaching, which we've covered extensively on the podcast, entire unregulated industry.
But the most fascinating, mind-blowing part was They claim to have affiliations with a number of universities, and then you went to the universities and asked, and they're like, no, we don't have any sort of affiliation with Jay Shetty.
Yeah.
It was, for as big of a scoop as that was, it was so easy to get.
Because all I did was email the comms departments at the four different universities listed in Shetty's marketing materials, just very simply asking, What is your relationship with the school?
Can you tell me more about your affiliation with the Jay Shetty Certification School?
And every single university said they have nothing to do with it and they wanted their names taken off the marketing materials.
Sure enough, after publication, all the names have been removed from Shetty's website and from his brochure.
When I was pitching the story around after it first got killed, and I'm so, I want to say that I'm so profoundly grateful to The Guardian.
They ended up being the perfect partner for this.
They're fearless.
Jay's from the UK.
They have a readership there.
It just worked out great.
But when I was talking to other editors, a lot of the response I got was, so what?
You know, who cares?
Self-help guy, his backstory might not check out.
You know, what's the big deal?
He's just hosting a podcast.
To which, you know, I can now respond is like, well, he was charging people $7,000 for a life coaching certification that he was using his own supposed wisdom to market.
And it turns out that life coaching certification is not nearly as legitimate as Advertise.
The last piece that you kind of point out, there's a lot in here again, but you know that I wanted to hit on was he includes instructions around mental health.
We talk about ableism a lot on this podcast and not being qualified to speak on things.
Now you do write that a number of people had positive experiences with his school.
Yeah.
Yet his former girlfriend Lila told you that cosplaying as a mental health professional potentially exploits vulnerable people, which we see a lot here.
Did you talk to anyone else to discuss this issue, and what did you find when you started digging into his mental health content?
I didn't make it into the article, but which I think is important for people to know, is that on Shetty's website, for years, he claimed that his degree was in behavioral science.
So I went to Cass Business School and I asked them, I was like, Hey, I did not find a class for behavioral science in your course listing.
Do you offer this as a degree?
They don't offer it as a degree and they didn't offer it as a degree when Jay Shetty was there.
So did Jay Shetty for years claim that he was a master in behavioral science because it would make him appear to be an expert in mental health?
I don't know.
Only Jay can answer that.
But what is clear is that he has zero qualifications as a mental health professional.
So why does somebody who has no credentials get to go to the White House and interview President Biden about the Biden administration's mental health initiatives?
Zero qualification.
This was an amazing turn in the reporting because your source, Chaitanya Leela, dated Shetty in university.
So she, you know, spills the tea on his exaggerated claims about the length of time that he spent in India.
And then his lawyers, according to the article, downplayed her knowledge of him.
You know, they didn't really go out for that long.
But I love her role in the reporting because she really illuminates a kind of non-bullshit road that Shetty could have taken.
You know, they share a certain amount of heritage, maybe some of the same spiritual interests in their youth, but then she actually gets a real job helping real people, and he seems to create a fake job pretending to help celebrities.
So, I'm wondering if you heard from other, like, Indian diaspora sources who just kind of You know, hear Jay's name and shake their heads.
I've heard from so many desis.
And, you know, in reporting this, one thing I was worried about was the identity politics of the day kind of distracting from the reporting.
You know, people being like, oh, just another white guy trying to take down a successful brown man.
Right.
Maybe some people have said that, but no one has directed it at me.
I haven't seen hardly any of that.
Instead, all the people of Indian heritage who have reached out to me have told me, great job.
They are happy that this piece got published.
They see Jay and people like him as trading on their religious and cultural histories for material gain and they don't like it.
And they see them as kind of bastardizing their culture in a way.
So that was, it was refreshing to kind of get that.
And regarding Chaitanya Leela's comments, one thing I want to be very clear on is because
a bunch of people have attacked my reporting and attacked her as just being the comments
of a jealous ex and therefore you can dismiss them.
She has said nothing about their relationship, about the inner workings of what it was like to date Jay.
We simply stuck to the facts.
This is not some scuzzy tabloid gossip.
She dated Jay for a period where he claims to have spent a lot of time in India.
She says he was there once and for two weeks.
Jay claims he didn't, he had never met a monk until he was 18 and he attended this supposed lecture with Gaurang Das.
Chaitanya says that doesn't make sense because, again, he grew up in the faith to some extent.
And just to confirm that, when you go to Chaitanya Lila's Instagram page, her actual reel related to the article is really just about what he says about his qualifications versus, you know, what the actual facts are.
She, it's really, there's no personal animosity.
There are no personal comments at all.
It's very direct and straightly played.
Yeah.
And we purposely avoided that.
Again, we're just sticking to the facts.
We're not making wild accusations about Jay.
There are no allegations.
We've just found hard documentary evidence That shows the narrative he has told about himself over the years.
John, great reporting.
Thank you so much for bringing it to light.
And I know I look forward to any future projects that you're going to get involved with.
