IfJay Shetty was going to level up his podcast, he figured he needed to upgrade the studio in which he records it. So before his seven-year-old show, On Purpose, relaunched this month on Netflix, the 38-year-old self-help guru says he spent around $500,000 to renovate the space with specific colors and custom artwork (such asincluding a piece of glass covered in bubble wrap) to evoke the kind of vulnerability and fragility he hopes to encourage from his guests.
Sitting inside his sprawling Hollywood Hills home, worth an estimated $8 million, Shetty’s digs are a far cry from the Hindu monk principles of humble detachment he once practiced and has encouraged to display. But for a star in media’s hottest category—who recently signed a new podcast deal with Spotify and Netflix that will pay him a combined $100 million over the next three years—the studio and residence are fitting.
“I mean, I’m not a monk anymore,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Today I consider myself an entrepreneur and a leader in this space, and that allows me to have the ability to use money as a resource to do good in the world and create impact in the way that we’ve chosen to do that.”
For top podcasters like Shetty, the money has also never been better. The entry of video platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Tubi into a still-frothy marketplace of audio distributors (including Spotify, SiriusXM and Amazon) have pushed paydays into territory once reserved for movie stars. Shetty earned an estimated $21 million over the past 12 months from his previous podcast distribution and ad sales agreement with iHeart Media (before paying taxes and fees to agents and managers) and he i’s in line to make far more from his new deal.
He is pouring those earnings into an expanding business portfolio, investing in the Austin-based blood testing company Function Health and founding his own sparkling tea brand, Juni. He also has a production company, Perfect Strangers, which produces the podcast Friends Keep Secrets and has a handful of TV projects in development. The goal, Shetty says, is to build a “conscious empire” of content and products promoting physical and mental health.
“The whole point of having a partnership like this is to improve what we’re creating to make it even better, to do it bigger and to expand into other areas,” he says. “It’s really exciting— and really scary.”
It’s a position Shetty says he would have never thought possible when he left behind his life as a monk in 2013 and began sending out short video blasts of affirmation-laden advice on Instagram and YouTube three years later. He built his initial audience behind bright blue eyes (some believe he wears colored contact lenses), an eloquent British lilt (he grew up in North London) and the patina of eastern spirituality (comparisons to Deepak Chopra are often racially coded, yet helpful).
The His content offerings expanded with the On Purpose podcast in 2019, a shoestring operation that recorded episodes from Shetty’s bedroom after moving his furniture to create space for rented cameras and lighting equipment. “We didn’t own anything,” he says. “There’d be one camera guy in the room, manning the three cameras.”
The show caught its first break when it landed Kobe Bryant as a guest that fall, in what would be one of the basketball legend’s last longform interviews before his death. Then came the pandemic lockdowns, which led to a massive spike in digital content consumption—and free-range anxiety—that Shetty was well-positioned to capitalize on.
His breakout culminated in the fall of 2020 with the release of his book, Think Like A Monk, which hit No. 1 on the New York Times best seller list and sold more than two million copies globally (an international fanbase that has become a major selling point for On Purpose). Over the next few years, his podcast became a reliable home for intimate interviews with A-list celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and Jennifer Lopez, landing him a megadeal with iHeart in 2023.
Shetty is one of several creators who have proven self-help to be a very lucrative genre of podcasting—others include motivational speaker Mel Robbins and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who Forbes estimate earned $35 million and $18 million from their respective shows in the past year. Listeners believe deeply in these self-improvement experts, and health-related brands (including AG1 and BetterHelp) pay millions to piggyback on that trust to advertise and sell products and services. Shetty’s list of brand partners includes the meditation app Calm and supplement makers BIOptimizers and IM8.
“There’s a lot of brands and advertisers that are looking to provide services for people that are looking to better their lives,” says Jordan Newman, head of content partnerships at Spotify. “And podcasts like Jay’s feel like a really fruitful place for them to spend their media dollars.”
This thin line between guru and salesman has led many to be suspicious of the self-help industry and its creators, especially after exposés of Huberman by New York magazine and Shetty by The Guardian uncovered some exploitations of this trust—for Huberman in his relationships with multiple women and for Shetty in accusations of plagiarism and exaggerated claims about his time as a monk and the credentials of his $7,000 certification courses. (Shetty has denied any wrongdoing and defended his actions.)
Those criticisms have done little to disrupt Shetty’s value in the marketplace. When his iHeart deal expired, four major media companies competed to license his show, each offering deals that totaled $100 million or more. Shetty took perhaps the riskiest option, leaving the world’s biggest podcasting platform in YouTube to move his video episodes behind a paywall at Netflix (it will also be available on the Spotify app). But part of Netflix’s appeal—other than a really big check—is its promise to spotlight Shetty’s show to its global audience, shepherding the stars of its other films and TV shows into his guest chair, a strategy not all that dissimilar from traditional late-night talk shows on the networks. His very first Netflix episode, for example, featured one of the streamer’s biggest stars—Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown.
“They want to be able to bring me the best, most interesting guests, and they work across music, sports, movies, film, television,” he says. “To be at the center of culture at Netflix is a really exciting moment, and an opportunity I couldn’t say no to.”
Beyond that, the Netflix deal gets Shetty closer to his apparent Hollywood aspirations. He launched his production company in February, which already has a handful of scripted and non-scripted TV projects in development at Netflix, including a forthcoming dating show.
“We weren’t even [investing] in podcasts when we first started talking with Jay,” says Netflix chief content office Bela Bajaria, who says the TV development deals were signed separately from his new podcasting deal. “I want to be in business with the most talented people in the world, period. And he’s one of them.”
It’s a promising start, but as several recently downsized celebrity production companies can attest, Hollywood is a tough town. Unlike podcasting, where talent maintain ownership of their underlying IP, producing for TV and movies is a work-for-hire hamster wheel that requires a constant stream of hits.
Shetty plans to combat this by maintaining a lean team—he currently has just 18 employees—and focusing on a small number offew projects at a time. So far, he’s one for one with the podcast Friends Keep Secrets, a breakout hit this year as much for its hidden camera production style as for its hosts, music producer Benny Blanco, rapper Dave Burd (aka Lil Dicky) and his wife, Kristin Batalucco. As long as podcasters remain red-hot, and people keep tuning in to On Purpose, Shetty’s power should continue to rise.
“I want to do this for as long as Fallon and Letterman and Oprah and Ellen did their shows—, and even longer,” he says of On Purpose. “We’ve done this for seven years. I hope I do this until I’m 70.”
