David Marchese

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From The New York Times, this is The Interview.

I'm David Marchese.

Jay Shetty is without a doubt a giant in the world of wellness and mental health influencers.

His podcast, On Purpose, is incredibly popular, and its related YouTube channel, which features interviews as well as Shetty's video essays about self-improvement, has more than 5 million subscribers.

His books, Think Like a Monk and Eight Rules of Love, were both bestsellers.

And he's also just launched a production company called Perfect Strangers.

Part of Shetty's success has to do with his message.

It's a breezy blend of pop psychology and self-help tips overlaid with some reassuring Eastern spirituality.

Another part surely has to do with his backstory.

As Shetty tells it, he was a wayward young man who went to a lecture by a monk from the ISKCON movement, better known as the Hare Krishnas, and then decided to change his life and become a monk himself.

He eventually left that life behind and became an influencer, determined to, as he's put it, make wisdom go viral.

While there's no doubt about Shetty's success, I did find myself with other doubts about him that I wanted to explore.

They were partly to do with a 2024 article in The Guardian that raised questions about many aspects of Shetty's public life, including accusations of plagiarism on his platforms early in his career, some allegedly misleading certification information put out by his online life coaching school, and even the extent of his training as a monk.

That's reporting that Shetty and his lawyers have disputed, and which we talked about at length in our conversation.

So there are those tensions, and there's also the seeming contradiction of a man who espouses monk-like thinking while now living the glamorous life in LA as a superstar influencer, which turns out to be a tension he's been thinking about too.

Here's my conversation with Jay Shetty.