For centuries, if you wanted to know why bad things happen to good people, or what happens after you die, or whether eating jackfruit makes you a war criminal, you needed a middleman. A sage. A Sufi. A long-bearded Brahmin with a very long waitlist. Interpretation was a scarce resource, and scarcity is the business model of every guru who’s ever lived. Enter AI, and the middleman’s biggest competitive advantage (”I have read things you have not read”) rapidly disappears like social media trends.

The Pope, a few months ago, warned that AI will take our jobs. Respectfully, Your Holiness, that’s the small print. The real headline is AI will take the interpreter jobs. Decades of study. A lineage. Robes. And a personality vague enough to be projected onto by millions of followers. Turns out you can ask a chatbot to cross-reference the Rig Veda, the Quran, the Bible and a Reddit thread about Stoicism, at 2 AM, in your pyjamas, and it won’t even ask for a donation.

Let’s be real here. Traditionally, what did a guru sell? Not information. What was sold was filtered information. In order to understand it fully, you’d need access to the source information yourself. Well, the source information was Sanskrit, or Arabic Exegesis, or Aramaic. So, what does all of this mean? You needed an expert. Now, there is an expert that doesn’t gate-keep, ask you to renounce your worldly possessions first, and most definitely doesn’t have a Rolls-Royce collection to fund.

But I think this is where things get interesting. What happens when the half of your brand is “trust me, I know the secret to life?” What happens when people can fact check you? What happens when I can check the fact, and in milliseconds? What happens when I get to decide which guru is best? And I can do all of that without having to take a vow of poverty? I think it’s fair to say that the appearance of Google, or other such search engines, has altered the mystical guru scene for good. No one can deny that something like Google exists. No one can deny that mystical interpretations can be checked. The odds are, people can and will find a better “guru” than you. So, make sure you are the best “guru” before you get checked.

Google has a critical flaw that gurus never had: they have no interest in their followers. They don’t ask for your devotion. They won’t vouch for you to your parents. They can’t tell you that you’re part of a secret society. AIs give you truths; they deliver them in voice messages. You have to trust a truth if it comes from a source that seems to love you and feels human. You have to trust a truth if it comes from a source that you can feel disgusted by. You wouldn’t feel trust in a truth if it comes from something lifeless like a machine. The printing press, radio, and the first version of the internet were all different ways to gain easy access to truths. People are rational to think a truth has no value if it’s delivered by something that has zero emotions.

The conflict is not truth versus truth. It’s who gets to be in charge versus who gets to make the rules. Gurus have the monopoly over who gets to make the rules. They understand that truths aren’t enough. People want to feel validated spiritually by someone, not something. You can’t be spiritually validated by a truth if it comes from something that has no emotions and feels soulless and lifeless. Google is extremely knowledgeable but has zero emotions. No one will feel disgusted or disappointed by it. This is why gurus will always have a moat over Google.

That probably explains the calm of the ‘smart’ gurus. It’s not ‘trust my interpretation’ anymore. Now it’s ‘let me be your curator of interpretation’. The old job is back, just with more work. You’ll still pay for the retreats. You’ll still buy the branded merch. The information is free, but belonging is still scarce, and scarcity is the foundation of the business.

AI probably won’t kill the guru economy, it will just force them to be truthful about what they were really selling. It wasn’t information. It was a feeling. A false sense of security that Google can’t replicate. Yet. With a few more updates, the AI could get even better. The gurus will find a way to profit from that, too.