Jesse Israel
Workforces are not short of information; they are short of attention. Stress, constant input and ambient noise are eroding the focus and steadiness that high-stakes work requires, and most wellbeing programmes feel too clinical or too soft to land with senior teams. Leaders need a credible way to bring stillness, recovery and mental performance into the workplace without the language of therapy or self-help.
Jesse Israel is the founder of The Big Quiet and a keynote speaker who helps organisations bring meditation, mental performance and resilience practices into the workplace at scale.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jesse Israel
- He has run mass meditations for arena-sized audiences, including stops on Oprah Winfrey’s 2020 Vision tour with WW. Few speakers can hold the attention of 15,000 people in silence; he can, and that capability translates directly into all-hands and conference settings.
- His Amplified Quiet Framework gives leaders a usable structure for cutting through external, mental and physical noise, rather than a generic “mindfulness 101” overview.
- He bridges cultural credibility and corporate utility: Audible distribution, collaborations with Deepak Chopra, and a roster of corporate clients including Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab.
- He came to meditation from inside a high-pressure commercial career (Cantora Records, MGMT), which gives him a language senior teams accept: performance, focus, recovery, output.
Biography highlights
- Founder of The Big Quiet, a mass meditation movement that has run sold-out arena gatherings and global virtual events.
- Personally invited by Oprah Winfrey to keynote her 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus arena tour with WW.
- Co-host of virtual mass meditation broadcasts with Deepak Chopra.
- Five-time Audible bestseller through a worldwide distribution deal with Audible Originals under The Big Quiet imprint.
- Co-founded Cantora Records at NYU in 2005, the independent label that signed MGMT and released Time to Pretend.
- Corporate keynote clients include Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab; work covered in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, The New York Times and AdWeek.
Biography
The hardest thing to deliver inside a high-performing organisation right now is not information. It is attention. Workforces are saturated with input, and the cost shows up as burnout, shallow thinking and meetings that leave teams more depleted than aligned.
Jesse Israel built a career around fixing exactly that. He founded The Big Quiet, a mass meditation movement that has filled arenas with thousands of people sitting in silence together, and he was personally invited by Oprah Winfrey to keynote each stop of her 2020 Vision arena tour with WW, where he led roughly 15,000 people through guided meditations per show.
His Amplified Quiet Framework is the version of that work designed for leadership teams. It treats stillness as a performance practice: a way of quieting external noise, mental noise and physical noise so that judgement, presence and recovery can return. Through a worldwide deal with Audible, five of his Big Quiet originals have become Audible top 10 bestsellers, and he has co-hosted global meditations with Deepak Chopra.
What makes him different from most wellbeing speakers is the route in. He co-founded Cantora Records out of an NYU dorm room in 2005, signing MGMT and helping launch their breakout release Time to Pretend. He built and ran that label for nine years before turning to meditation, and corporate clients including Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab now book him to bring that same operator’s lens to wellbeing inside their organisations.
Key speaking topics
- Mindfulness and meditation in the workplace
- Mental performance and resilience under pressure
- Leadership presence and attention
- Burnout, stress and recovery
- Designing large-scale shared experiences
- Career reinvention and personal change
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of wellbeing designing the next iteration of their mental health and resilience strategy
- Leadership teams and senior offsites looking for a high-credibility wellbeing intervention rather than a clinical one
- All-company conferences and town halls where a calm, focused collective moment is part of the design
- Sales and high-performance teams under sustained pressure to perform through uncertainty
Audience outcomes
- A working framework for quieting external, mental and physical noise that leaders can apply the same week
- A direct experience of guided meditation at scale, often the first time senior audiences have tried it in a work setting
- Sharper language for talking about attention, focus and recovery as performance issues, not soft topics
- Practical entry points for embedding short stillness practices into team routines, offsites and large gatherings
Talks
An interactive keynote built around the Amplified Quiet Framework, focused on navigating uncertainty and strengthening resilience.
Key takeaways:
- A three-part model for quieting external, mental and physical noise
- Tools for steadier decision-making under pressure
- A live, guided experience of the practice in the room
An immersive session on using quieting techniques to deepen team connection and lift performance.
Key takeaways:
- How attention and presence shape team output
- Practices leaders can use to open meetings, offsites and high-stakes moments
- Ways to embed short stillness routines into team culture
A keynote on building resilience and managing stress amid constant change.
Key takeaways:
- Why noise, not workload, is the dominant driver of burnout
- Simple recovery practices that work inside a working day
- A shared, in-room reset for the audience
A keynote on accessing dormant potential through the Amplified Quiet Framework.
Key takeaways:
- The link between stillness and creative output
- Practical ways to access focus on demand
- A framework for sustaining personal performance over time