While there’s no doubt about Shetty’s success, I had some skepticism about him and his ideas that I wanted to explore. They were partly to do with a 2024 article in The Guardian that included allegations of plagiarism on Shetty’s social media platforms earlier in his career, pointed to allegedly misleading certification information put out by his online life-coaching school and even challenged the extent of Shetty’s training as a monk. (His lawyers defended his training and his school when that article was published, and they reiterated that defense to The Times. Shetty and I also discussed it.) But perhaps a greater part of my skepticism came from the seeming contradiction of a man who espouses monastic thinking while living a glamorous life in Los Angeles as a superstar influencer. But if there is a tension there, it’s one that, apparently, Shetty has been grappling with too.