His motivational videos are loved by Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey. Megan Agnew meets the multimillionaire British guru to find out what drives him.
Ten years ago Jay Shetty was a Hindu monk. Today the British 34-year-old is a brand. He is an entrepreneur, social media influencer, self-help guru, author, multimillionaire, motivational speaker and now the "chief purpose officer" at Calm, the massively popular meditation app and Silicon Valley software company that has been valued at US$2 billion (NZ$2.9b). He hangs out with celebrities and lives with his wife, Radhi, also a British social media influencer, in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills previously owned by the oil scion Balthazar Getty. Om?
According to his website, Shetty "makes wisdom go viral". He posts motivational videos to 28 million followers on Facebook, such as "Start today, win tomorrow"; he uploads slickly made fictional short films based on parables to YouTube, where he has notched up more than 204 million views; and words of advice to his 10 million followers on Instagram, such as: "You are the golden light in human form brought to earth with a higher purpose".
His 2020 book, Think Like a Monk, was a New York Times bestseller. His podcast, On Purpose, is the No 1 health and wellness podcast in the world, with more than 300 million downloads to date. In it he interviews celebrities including Jennifer Lopez, Gwyneth Paltrow and Khloe Kardashian. He runs online life-coaching courses that promise to improve your sense of purpose "by 40 per cent" (for US$39 a month), and courses for people who want to teach life-coaching courses (US$675 a month).
Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres are effusive supporters and he hangs out with Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith. "I consider [the Smiths] to be family and we feel like family to them," he says. "I feel like they've adopted me and my wife, they take such good care of us. We spend many Thanksgivings with them." Smith seems enamoured with him, too. "Jay has really been the catalyst for this next phase of my life," the actor said on one episode of the On Purpose podcast. "We have committed to one another in a brotherhood of service and support. We've been in the soul gym, working out."
Shetty grew up thousands of miles from his Californian dream, in Wood Green, north London. As a teenager he became obsessed with rags-to-riches stories and craved material success. So he went to business school: Cass (now Bayes) at City, University of London. But there something happened that set him on a different path.
At the age of 21, a friend took him to a talk by Gauranga Das, a Hare Krishna monk, leadership consultant and corporate coach. Das spoke about acting selflessly and living minimally. Shetty liked his vibe. He wanted to be like him. "I went up to him and networked. I don't know how you network with a monk, but I did," he said in a video interview posted on Facebook.
After graduating from Cass, he decided to commit the rest of his life to an ashram in India, where Das was the director. He took a vow of celibacy, donned monks' robes, shaved his head and slept on the floor in a dorm room. He lasted three years.
"My drive to spread wisdom doesn't fit perfectly into the monk framework," he admitted in Think Like a Monk. "I am compelled to share ideas and philosophy in ways that are more modern."
He emerged from monkdom at an opportune moment, hitting the zeitgeist of the mindfulness movement, which ran parallel to the rise of social media. Ironically and inevitably, solutions to the problems caused by our overconnected lives were now being offered by more tech: by apps such as Calm and online gurus such as Shetty. "Self-optimisation" became a buzzword. And it is now big business: the self-improvement industry in the US is estimated to be worth US$13.2 billion this year. Shetty is the embodiment of this modern paradox: the ex-monk who tells you to switch off by pinging you email newsletters.
"I consider myself, in my heart, to live by the intention of a monk, but I love being in media," Shetty tells me over Zoom from New York, where he is on tour promoting the Calm app. "And I love being in management. I love all three parts of those and I'm embracing those. I feel very comfortable with all three in my life. That's the life I want to lead."
As a monk, he says, he wanted to live a life of service. "Now I'm approaching service through companies and organisations. I never believed in a million years my videos would be able to touch so many people's lives. I get thousands of messages every day saying, 'this video saved me from suicide', 'this video saved my marriage', 'this video has changed my life'. I'm just sitting here making videos. If it can have that impact then I feel a sense of service to do that."
Calm was founded in 2012 by the British tech entrepreneurs Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew. Their brand of mindfulness can be yours for £28.99 for a year's subscription to the app — or for a lifetime it's £299.99. For Shetty, it's a natural fit. Each day he releases a seven-minute mindfulness session on the app, called the "Daily Jay", which might be an "uplifting monologue, short meditation or an actionable life insight". "It's seven minutes, which I think is a beautiful amount of time to start investing in yourself," he says.
So what is it about Jay Shetty that so many people worship? And what exactly is he trying to say — and sell?
"The 'chief purpose officer' title feels the most aligned with me because purpose is what I'm invested in," he says. Shetty says the word "purpose" so many times over the course of our conversation (29) that I lose track of what it means. What exactly is his purpose?
"My genuine intention and purpose is to help train people to find peace and purpose in every day. I really believe that my purpose is to help other people find their purpose. It's a journey I'm committed to, that I continue to refine and discover, it's the only journey I have wholeheartedly taken on."
OK, but a purpose needs a purpose. Is his purpose religious, I ask, or spiritual?
"The challenge with both of those words is that they carry so much baggage. I consider myself a purposeful person. I am dedicated to my purpose, my purpose is very unique. So is yours. That word is completely unique to me because I'm purposeful to my purpose. I don't want to adopt words that have symbolism that is beyond my definition."
Right. I try a different tack: why does he think he is so successful? Ultimately, he puts his popularity down to being "sincere". "As a monk, you're trained that the most admirable quality in someone is humility," he says. "That's been really beautiful for me because the people I admire and respect are very humble, beautiful people."
I suspect his success might also have something to do with his boyish good looks, dramatic grey-green eyes and his soft London charm — his accent has remained unchanged in America even if his words are distinctly Californian. He is warm and likeable, so in many ways I get it. What I don't get are his inspirational videos, which can be pretty cheesy.
One of them was the most-watched post on Facebook in 2018, with more than 360 million views — a slickly edited film called Before You Feel Pressure Watch This. In it, Shetty interrupts a headmaster who appears to be dictating the rest of his pupils' lives for them. "Everything happens at your own pace, be patient," Shetty tells the children, who nod along smiling, inspired. Even the headmaster nods — a convert to the Shetty way. It's set to uplifting music.
Shetty's own experience at Queen Elizabeth's School, a boys' grammar school in Barnet, north London, was confused. His father was a chartered accountant from Pune, near Mumbai, his mother a financial adviser born in Yemen. Both were nonpractising Hindus. He often says that he was allowed to be one of three things when he grew up: "a doctor, a lawyer or a failure".
"I was a really well-behaved, obedient kid. I was raised that way. But I was bullied about being overweight and I had racist experiences because I was one of the few Indian people in my school."
He started to rebel, experimenting with drugs, and got suspended on a number of occasions. He lost weight and grew into a handsome teenager, having a string of girlfriends almost consistently from the age of 14 until he took his vow of celibacy. In his university holidays he alternated between working at large financial institutions and visiting Das's ashram in Mumbai, until Shetty decided the monastic life was for him.
"I had extended family members who said, 'You've been brainwashed, you're never going to make money again, you've committed career suicide, you've let your parents down.' There was a lot of negativity."
There was another catch. He'd met Radhi, a nutritionist from Hertfordshire, at a local Hare Krishna temple in London, just before he went to the ashram. "The first time I saw her I just thought she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen," he says. "I was genuinely attracted to her but in my head I thought, I've decided I'm going to be a monk, I need to be focused."
In India he spent between four and eight hours meditating each day, fasting, volunteering in the community and studying Hindu texts. "I will say this — the practice of celibacy, the practice of detachment, gave me all the time and energy to focus inward. When in life do any of us ever get the time to work on ourselves and understand who we are? I lucked out. I really believe those years set me up for so much self-awareness."
However, he became ill from fasting and was hospitalised. He decided to come home, ashamed at first by his failure — but excited at the prospect of a relationship with Radhi. After months of unemployment he landed a job at Accenture, a Fortune 500 consultancy firm, as a social media adviser and began putting on mindfulness workshops for colleagues. They were so successful that he quit to focus on making mindfulness videos.
He and Radhi married in 2016. "My wife has been the only person I've been with since I left the monastery," he tells me. "That's a really strong sign, that I didn't go back to those habits [of having lots of girlfriends]." He promised Radhi they would always live within five minutes of her parents in Watford, where they bought a house. But then came his big break: he was spotted by the entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, who employed him to make videos for HuffPost in New York. The couple haven't lived in Britain since.
He left HuffPost after six months and moved to Los Angeles, "the content capital of the world", to build his own brand, working 18-hour days, he says, seven days a week, expanding his follower base. He became an influencer. He loves his life in LA, he says, and still visits the ashram in India (he tries to go twice a year), but has no desire to return full-time. "I found that was part of my journey that got me to where I am," he says. "I think I've got closer to being honest and truthful and self-aware with who I truly am today by not having a label."
Monk-like discipline remains key. Shetty says he has meditated every day for 17 years. As a teenager he woke up to Eminem songs. As an adult he has preferred Steve Jobs's Stanford commencement speech about overcoming personal hardship, or Matthew McConaughey's 2014 Oscars acceptance speech on how his hero is a version of himself ten years in the future. The actor said: "My hero is always ten years away. I'm never going to beat my hero. And that's just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing." "It's genius," Shetty says.
Shetty speaks sermons for the social media generation — and they love him. In a recent episode of the Daily Jay about online authenticity he tells his listeners to ask themselves, "Does this photo reflect who I am in an authentic way," before posting on Instagram. "If something doesn't feel like you, be empowered to press delete." His videos, podcasts and Calm meditations are solid and certain, when so much else on social media is shouty and chaotic. He is optimistic, but not sickeningly so. When people Google questions about exes and ignored texts and crashes of confidence late at night in desperation, up pops a Shetty video with an answer.
Despite all the talk of "purpose", by the end of our call I still feel no closer to what that means, or what Shetty stands for. And maybe that's the point. Like the platitudes of so many self-help gurus before him, Shetty's represent a blank canvas. You project your own meaning on to them.
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London