jay shetty got exposed

welcome back to the void today we're doing something a little different we're interviewing the author of an expose on Jay Shetty he's the host of the world's number one mental health podcast you might not know about him but he's pretty important he's interviewed the president about mental health uh the White House has mentioned him multiple times and this author in the guardian wrote an article called uncovering the higher truth of Jay Shetty by John mcder it's a quite captivating expose well researched and today we talk to the author about who this guy is and what he's selling John let's start off Jay's a big figure I don't know if a lot of people in my audience necessarily are aware of who he is he's kind of a a self-proclaimed Guru he says he went to go live as a monk you know for a while can you explain his rise to fame his appeal and how he's using it now to sell products his rise to fame really came initially from Facebook uh there was that period in kind of the mid 2010s when Facebook was really trying to position itself as a competitor to YouTube and I don't know I imagine you and you know your contemporaries might be aware of this but Facebook was forging these really lucrative ad Revenue Partnerships with video creators to try to get them to create exclusively on the Facebook platform and that Jay was one of those people he was featured very heavily within the news feed the algorithm was bumping his videos and that's where he initially kind of garnered his uh his Fame with a general audience um as for his story uh he lived as a monk for three years supposedly in India for a large amount of that time which is covered in the article um and then afterwards he leaves he takes a job at Accenture Center he starts doing kind of corporate mindfulness kind of bringing in eastern spiritualism and meditation into the workplace and from there he catches the eye of Ariana Huffington he goes to work for the Huffington Post he hosts a live streaming show there realizes he doesn't really need the huffing and post he can do it on his own and then he goes to Facebook and then things really start blowing up through him now he really is one of the number one podcasts in the world I don't know if you'd call him totally mental health but he attracts the likes of Michelle Obama Tom Holland uh Jennifer Lopez I think you wrote in your piece is a huge fan of his yeah there's so he's got this celebrity draw he's also got sort of an more an independent audience as well he's very big on YouTube I think two over two million subscribers there um can you break down what you found in your report which challenges really I think the core of why he's so attractive to a lot of um kind of this mainstream audience which is he brings this sort of Eastern spirituality and kind of like self-help to the world can you break down what you found out about that well I was initially interested in Jay much like you say is that he's kind of fusing Eastern spiritualism with mental health pop psychology and kind of putting them together in a way that's very compelling because it kind of say Ates both someone's spiritual desires and also their uh you know and also speaks to kind of this more empirical scientific approach to mental well-being but the thing about combining those two things is that when you take the science of psychology you combine it with spiritualism you never really have to answer for anything because at times you could say hey this is empirical this is you know uh peer reviewed psychological research that I'm basing these findings on or you could say you know and that could be your response whenever someone's like oh that's just a bunch of new age mumbo jumbo but if someone is ever like well this doesn't seem very scientific it seems kind of squishy you can be like well these are matters of the spirit These Are Spiritual things and therefore are not subjects to Scientific scrutiny so jhett in so many different ways is kind of a case study and having it both ways right like he gets to be this mental health expert but he has no qualifications as in mental health he gets to be this does he have a degree does he have a degree in mental health so it's interesting you say that uh on his website he listed his degree as being in Behavioral Science I called up the university and they said they don't even offer that as a degree wait what what is his degree in that is kind of unclear at this moment because the university he claims now that it's in management science the business school that where he supposedly went to school offers a management degree they don't offer a management science degree but they do offer a degree Che his university for what he got a degree in you know and the university due to UK privacy laws can't tell me specifically and they can't tell about any of their students what their academic credentials are sure uh so that remains unverified as far as I'm concerned but to answer this problem of his backstory is very key to sort of um what the thrust of your article is about right so for me I'll tell you my concern is not with okay I present myself as this like Guru figure independently of selling products my problem always comes because it's never just I'm a guru it's always now I have something to sell you um so he's got this backstory of being a monk maybe you were about to get to that what did you find there that was interesting right so so he doesn't have any mental health qualifications even though talking about these subjects uh with an air of authority but no credentials no qualifications in that realm whatsoever which is pretty wild that he was able to interview the president of the United States about the administration's mental health initiatives uh considering he has no qualifications whatsoever oh yeah he interviewed Biden in the White House exclusive one-on-one interview yes does does the White House White House not chat for uh credentials I am very curious about their vetting process there's a certain irony there for a guy without credentials to be asking the president questions about mental health programs in America there's a great irony there anyway go ahead but the authority that he does claim to have and he never misses an opportunity Jay never misses an opportunity to remind people that he was a monk for three years and typically when he describes this he says I was a monk in India and I traveled around a little the cross Europe but frames it as being primarily in India so I looked into it and I found ample evidence that he was actually stationed in Watford which is a city just outside of London for the vast majority of the time that he was a monk and that he had been in India for just a few months um you know Jay writes about this on his own blog he writes about participating in the What's called the sabatical program through the Rel religious organization that he conducted his conducted his monkhood from and the sabatical uh program and is kind of akin to Birthright for uh you know people who come from Jewish backgrounds the sabatical takes you to India you visit various holy sites that are relevant to the Krishna Consciousness tradition and you learn more about the faith but at which point you know after a period of several months you go back to England and you're given the option to live in the asum which is the Hindu Monastery in Watford or in London they have a one in downtown London as well and live there but the program is not stationing you in India for a prolonged period of time it's it's a trip now I find that very interesting because look some people might say ah couple what's a couple years you know off everyone sort of embellishes their background I think we're gets to be a problem is when these sort of um half-truths Lies exaggerations start start stacking up so one of the things that I found so troubling in your article that I eventually made me want to reach out is when he's selling this program right selling this and and you actually asked how much it was I believe you said it was a little over $7,000 they're going to cut you a deal for like 6,000 something that 800 bucks between friends you know yeah yeah uh that first of all there it's insane to me that a monk or ex Monk Is which where their whole shtick is like sort of the um thrusting away of financial concerns is charging thousands of dollars for an online course right but second of all they claim certain credentials that you would be given or access to credentials and access to associations with universities that turned out to be a lie or an exaggeration as well and oh it turned out to be false not an exaggeration outright false go into that go into that so what were they advertising their course and then what was the reality so the J shett certification school which is its formal name is an online life coaching training program it is not life coaching that you receive you receive training to become a life coach yourself right so it's kind of you know life coaching is this booming industry it's it's kind of like you know when people talk about the gold rush in California right the people who got the richest were not necessarily people mining for gold there were people selling pickaxes of course to everyone who is part of the gold rush and this is kind of that pickaxe type of strategy right we're GNA we're going to capitalize on again the mainstreaming of mental health and people wanting to improve themselves improve their well-being by training people to become life coaches and we're going to charge them Seven Grand to do so so as part of the marketing the jhett certification school claimed that it was affiliated with four different universities in the UK and essentially said that by completing the jete certification school it would put you on track to receive a master's degree at these universities it you know you would have to do a little bit more study there so sure I contacted all the universities very clear you know very straightforwardly ask them what is your affiliation with this program what is the nature of the relationship can you explain to me every single one of those universities to a school to an organization all of them said we have no idea what the J shett certification school is we have no idea why we are listed on their marketing materials and we want our names taken off so he was just lying about this course you pay $7,000 you think you're associated with some University you're getting some training that might be relevant to some higher education it's not relevant at all it's not relevant at all uh as opposed to what what the discrepancy there is I I mean I don't know about Jay's involvement with the day-to-day operations of the school but it is his name on it I mean it's quite clearly his it's called the J Shetty certification school and they were making these claims about these academic affiliations that turned out to just be not true I mean flat false I if you read the article we got an on the reccord comment from the communications offer from one of the school officers from one of the schools and he very clearly says we're very unhappy that we are being included on these marketing materials and we want our names taken off they did not take the name off of that specific University the University of Chichester they the school the J Shetty school didn't take its affiliation off its website initially and only took it off after the University of chechester sent a ceas and desist from its attorneys yeah we have this thing so I don't know if you've ever watched the show we had this thing especially at the beginning calling people fake gurus I can't imagine a more perfect title for somebody he's projecting himself to be a what the number one mental health podcast uh no background Health purpose coach right like oh I I'm I'm this Guru who's mixing uh these things and I'm going to get you a get you started on a you know higher degree plan whatever that's a lie what else did you find that was not true or or actually maybe an exaggeration or hyperbole with Jay's career so another thing that we found also to be F about the J shett certification school is he also claims it was accredited by an accredited body accreditation body that's based in the UK of course he did I contacted that accreditation body and they said that the language Jay was using on the website in regards to their organization was completely wrong and that they also wanted their name removed of the website sure enough that's been removed too uh it's the agency is called off qual the office of qualifications they regulat uh what are the equivalent of like the Act and the act and all these different kind of accrediting courses and tests that are done and that includes you know things that are outside the traditional education realm as you know with J shed's life coaching course but they said yeah we don't accredit these courses we don't approve these courses that is incorrect uh I think to the earlier point about Jay's background as a monk the story that he always tells is that he was going to business school and he was you know on a path to just become a typical corporate middle management guy um and then he's 18 years old his first year in business school he goes to see a monk give a lecture and he's just totally blown away by this lecture it completely changes his perspective and Alters the trajectory of his life he's so inspired by this man this holy man who comes and gives a talk that he decides he's going to follow in his footsteps he's going to learn from this person and that's what inspires him to become a monk the problem with that is is We Found documentary evidence that Jay was part of the same religious organization as his monk since he was 14 years old we found YouTube videos of him hanging out with monks prior to this supposed lecture of which there is no evidence that it even ever occurred we found evidence that he was hanging out with monks and participating in this religious organization before that elure that lecture allegedly occurred so why would he lie about that what's a more I I mean only Jay knows the answer to that question but what's a more compelling narrative like oh you know my father was part of this Orthodox Hindu religious organization the har krishnas which we can get into them in a little bit a little bit because I think that's relevant here um and I was part of them since I was 14 and you know I was part of the youth group and I was chairman of the youth group and that's what inspired me to become a monk or that I had this just religious Epiphany one day because I was so moved by the words of this holy man um the second one's way better clearly it strikes me as marketing yeah let me say I find it very interesting that Jay is ultra aware of the power of narratives he's also Ultra aware of the power of credentials and that's why he constantly kind of talks about them you know I was looking at his website a lot of his language has changed they're still though trying to use credential type you know language around being regulated by offall they've kind of changed that a little bit but like the the kind of um the implication is that this is regulated you're getting some kind of real credit this isn't just some nonsense course when it seems like that's more exactly what it is they're just training you to sell this life coaching product to other people um why do you think Jay can't just let the narrative be hey I'm selling my own opinions on life coaching because I think there's a lot less to say about that I mean I can disagree with it I can think it's you know wrong but or or overpriced but I I can't say you lied about that why like basically why take the risk of lying you already have all these big interviews do you think the lies started early and they just snowballed do you think why do you think he would continue to lie my my question is about the motivation here why not just come clean about what all of this is that's a really good question and I'm kind of fascinated by J psychology and you know because everyone kind of fudges their resume to some degree right that's not news in and of itself uh but the sheer amount of information that is proven to be false is pretty staggering when taken together right especially when you get into selling a for-profit life coaching school that crams a certain level of legitimacy that is found to be false so as far as it pertains to the school I mean I think it's fairly obvious right why you would claim certain affiliations with academic you know accredited formal academic institutions or accrediting bodies it makes it appear legitimate right right and without those you're another person Hawking life coaching training uh based on what you know if you strip away all this stuff that Jay claims about itself what are you left with you're left with a guy who came from the Hari Krishna movement was a monk there for three years and is now making these claims on authorities about you know mental health not necessarily making those claims but kind of dabbling in those areas and somewhat kind of positioning himself as an authority on these subjects um his motivations early on you know it's interesting if you know anything about the Hari krishnas is that they are very aggressive in their proz uh very aggressive in their fundraising efforts and over the years have engaged in criminal activity to raise funds for the organization everything I mean they were convicted of literal fraud within the United States in 80s what they would do is they would go around the country and sell unlicensed NCAA sports merchandise at you know tailgates of football games and you're kidding they not at all just they were convicted of federal wire fraud and there were other reports of different Hari Krishna uh you know communes engaging in prostitution drug trafficking they straight up murder murdered two of their devotees who were challenging the authority of senior members and there conspiracy to commit murder yeah there's um I so I think him not being honest about the specific religious order that he came from they have a very problematic history that includes all this criminal activity child sexual abuse and everything that you might imagine would go wrong within a very kind of Orthodox Fringe religious order uh they have kind of engaged in and so not wanting to associate himself with those things I think was uh a fairly obvious explanation yeah that that part definitely makes sense I don't know even how much you can blame him for being a little um kind of quiet on the side of the side of that but he still tries to it's kind of interesting because he still he kind of wants it both ways right he wants to use the I'm from thisa like this you know vague Mystic Trad I mean he was on DX Shepard's podcast and DX Shepard asked him very clearly straight to his face he's like why weren't you why didn't you join the Hari krishnas and Jay goes well I was a vadic monk now vadic doesn't really refer to anything it refers to a collection of religious of Hindu religious texts but there are thousands of different iterations of Hinduism I he wants to position himself as a spiritual leader but he never wants to specify the the specific kind of religious order and religious practice he was engaged in which I find very interesting you know he's just basically kind of banking off of people's ignorance about Hinduism and not asking questions and not looking for details speaking of kind of hoping people don't ask um you know followup questions let's talk about or or ask too many questions let's talk about the plagiarism accusations so Jay one of his first scandals after kind of taking you know mainstream attention and I think he got a lot of criticism for this at the time was him basically stealing people's quotes and then putting hit J Shetty under like he would put their quote and he would just replace their name and just put Jaa as if he thought of it or said it and you know he grew a following because he would have all these you know pithy interesting self-help quotes of course it was all stolen um yeah he has since his lawyers I I guess spoke to you about that they said you know it was a learning experience is that right I read from your article but you found evidence that he's still doing stuff like this or his team is or whoever you know runs his socials are can you go into that yeah he plagiarized pretty rampantly pretty brazenly and that was one of the first things I found in my investigations and my thought at that point was that someone who is willing to so openly plagiarize is probably pretty UNS scrupulous in general because there's no way you're not going to get caught right but to your point about that Scandal the that Scandal was pretty much self-contained to the online Creator space it was only other people such as yourself that really gave a [ __ ] mainstream media gave Jay a pass and continued to give Jay a pass for years either you know reporters who so many reporters WR so many glowing profiles of Jay and they either didn't bother to look into his past because the plagiarism stuff publicly available for years it's not that hard it came up immediately when I when I was looking into him totally all you have to do is Google J shett controversy and Nicole Arbor's video and comes up immediately um or or they knew about it and they thought it wasn't a big deal which I find bizarre um but yeah he continues to use other people's tweets other people's Instagrams and it's not like he's taking a screenshot of these posts and then posting a screenshot he is repurposing them in his own format to make it look like it's his original right with a tiny I mean he does a tribute now but I still think it's some murky ethical area to to populate all of your Social feeds with other people's content now I contacted a lot of the people who had their content repurposed by J and some of them were you know a lot of them were perfectly time with it they were like well he he credited me and you know I I guess I'm just old school I I would find it um bizarre if someone did that in somewhat of a violation you know Jay doesn't he didn't get permission from any of these people he didn't compensate any of them for their original work you're a Creator you know this stuff is hard work it's hard to do something original and uh that kind of disregard for other people's intellectual property is fascinating I think what you said earlier was true is is is with Jay it's really about the collection of all the things that makes it kind of a such a a damning um piece like that and that's why I I'll link the piece as well and I suggest everyone go read it it's even more detailed than we're getting into here one thing I noticed though was you brought up other reporters and I think I sensed a little bit of um frustration with the the type of coverage Jay has gotten what what can you say about that I mean are you disappointed with your fellow reporters who did profiles on this guy uh what's your overall feeling do you are you disappointed that it took this long for someone to get to the bottom of it kind of disappointed I mean there's no reason that I should have been the one to break the story again all of this stuff was just kind of out there in the open ready for somebody to kind of put all of the pieces together and present it in a way that really told the true Narrative of Jay in so many Publications so many glowing profiles of him you know when I was doing my background research one thing I did is that I looked into every single interview he did and constructed a timeline of what he has said about a story and that's where I was able to find all these discrepancies and you know sometimes he says that suppose a lecture they gave him the Epiphany happened when he was 18 other times he says 19 20 21 this is the most transformative experience of his adult life he can't remember when it happens right these are all these different things that other reporters you know I'm proud of the work I did it took me a long time it was a lot of hard work this isn't exactly [ __ ] Water Gate right this was doing some pretty rudimentary factchecking into this guy's uh story and it very quickly fell apart so yeah there is an element of disappointment but I guess you know worked out well for me if someone else had done the due diligence I wouldn't have gotten to it but well to that point I think your story starts with you actually weren't originally going to write this for the guardian you wrote it for another organization they didn't want to do an investigative piece into J they wanted the the I hate to say it the puff piece profile right yeah that's pretty much true yeah uh I was a regular contributor to Esquire magazine which I grew up loving I still love today and has this incredibly rich journalistic and literary history uh on top of being a successful kind of men's lifestyle magazine and you know everyone from F Scott Fitzgerald to you know Norah Efron and David Foster wace have written for esire at some point and to be able to write for them was literally a dream come true and I was contributing for them regularly and had gotten to the point where they started approaching me with assignments that they wanted me to execute as opposed to me pitching them which was how it typically went which I was very flattered by and they asked me if I would write about Jay when I came back to them and I said hey I think we might have a bigger story here uh I'm not sure this guy's story backstory entirely checks out they shut it down right away wow um yeah which I understand and this is more a reflection of I think the economics of news publishing right now you know so many magazines are struggling an investigation like this takes a lot of time takes a lot of editorial resources potentially legal resources I was about to bring that up because one thing I noticed in your piece you're not talk to Jay you're talking to Jay's lawyers there's a certain implication there um have they gone after you have they threatened to go after you uh they have been in touch with the guardian in the UK um there's not much more I can say about it at this moment okay but I not if you're okay okay I'm personally fine I'm confident in my reporting the guardian is confident in our reporting We Stand by our reporting uh yeah stand by you're reporting too cuz he changed a lot of the langu like like you talked about his coaching program they changed the language around it I mean I can't get more of admission than that if they thought what they were saying was fine and backed up and totally truthful you don't go and change all the language on your website you don't take down certain things you don't put up new things right um he made certain YouTube videos that we discovered have mysteriously went private the moment that we sent them to Jay's lawyers and asked for comment um those weren't even YouTube videos owned by Jay right they were done by a third party the moment we present them to Shetty and shed's team suddenly they're no longer accessible to the public now we were able to save a lot of them to the web archive but I find that very peculiar very good to talk to you about all of this um thank you so much for kind of explaining Jay's past what do you think if anything should be done here I mean the guy hasn't committed some crimes but he is selling some overpriced course that's was lying about what it did for a long time um what do you hope to achieve sort of last final thoughts here with this piece I mean I think getting this uh piece published you know at with so many kind of forces like not wanting to get it out wasn't an achievement in and of itself and I'm happy about that but if there's some larger goal I would want the mainstream media to take a stronger harder look at figures like Jay who are operating in this largely unregulated space that is booming I mean the only kind of adversarial reporting that's going on is done by people such as yourself is mostly contained to YouTube and it's kind of contained within this Creator space you know uh the things that really inspired me to take on this investigation were you know Nicole Arbor's video uh this woman Kia's world who takes a skeptical look at the wellness industry uh this woman another YouTube Creator Danielle Ryan who does something similar but more focused on the coaching industry specifically this is there's just a huge blind spot within the mainstream media about what's going on here crypto schemes Wellness pseudo science yeah huge problem and it's a booming industry that does not get the skepticism it deserves at least from mainstream media so I'm appreciative people like you who are doing good journalism on oh and and likewise I mean I I do think it's a shame that often times what's viewed as the legitimate reporting is in the mainstream press so when it doesn't appear that there even if it does appear in the Independent Media space it's sort of the repercussions are limited to The Independent Media space which is um a bit of a shame because then you end up with Jay interviewing Biden about mental health exactly he's a example of this his plagiarism was covered by the Creator space very closely and not much came of it right he was able to he got nothing but more famous after that well I hope we helped shed more of a light here um again I encourage you guys to go read the guardian article follow John McDermot and thank you so much for your time I appreciate it hope to see more pieces from you thank you coffee I appreciate it see you guys

Channel: voidzilla

Views: 801,355

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Id: CCIbdh570tg

Length: 31min 56sec (1916 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024