Getting Advice from Psychics

Half a world away from Silicon Valley, tucked into a quiet neighborhood near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov spends his nights chasing stability. While Odessa fades into a hush and the port sees its usual shuffle of nighttime activity, Yegor settles in for a FaceTime call with a woman who’s become a surprising anchor in his life. Her name is Sally Faubion. She’s 70, lives in San Francisco, and five months ago, she found Yegor on UpWork and hired him to build her mobile apps. She says fate brought them together. For Yegor, it was more likely the steady $20-an-hour rate and the chance at consistent work in an unpredictable economy.

Before anything got started, Sally asked for his birth date. That’s because she doesn’t hire anyone without checking their numerology chart first.

That’s how Yegor learned that his new client isn’t just any entrepreneur, but she’s a numerologist. Sally spends her days offering insights over the phone, helping people decode the meaning behind their birth numbers. She doesn’t call herself a psychic, but she believes numbers can tell the truth about anyone’s life path. Her website presents her as a cheerful, straight-talking spiritual guide who built a thriving business one reading at a time. Her client list includes professionals from Apple, Genentech, and more, all of them curious to know what the future might reveal.

Now Sally is turning her life’s work into tech. She hired Yegor to bring her ideas to life in app form, hoping to carve out a piece of the booming mobile mysticism market. And she’s not wrong, a quick glance through the App Store turns up hundreds of astrology and numerology apps. Sally’s own projects include Forecast Wheel, which spins short daily fortunes like, “Your status will improve when you get married”; Meaning of House Numbers, designed to help buyers understand a home's energetic value; and Cosmic Mates, a compatibility app that promises to unlock your soul’s potential match, all for under four bucks.

“I always say I’m the Dr. Phil of numerology,” Sally laughs, leaning into her usual bluntness. “I tell people what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear. If I didn’t feel like I was helping people, I wouldn’t keep doing this. The pay isn’t amazing. And honestly? I’m not a fan of the hustle.”

But for Yegor, hustle is survival. Living in a region shaped by unrest and uncertainty, he doesn’t have the luxury of easing up. There’s an old Ukrainian saying he knows well: “The devil always takes back his gifts.” It’s a reminder that nothing good lasts forever, so you’d better make the most of it while you can.

In a strange way, that phrase could apply to San Francisco, too. The city’s been riding waves of rise and fall since the days of the Gold Rush. From tech surges to market crashes, it’s a place that never stays still for long. The dot-com bust in the early 2000s left scars that haven’t quite faded, and even today, warnings linger. Just recently, the chief economist at Wells Fargo urged locals to save while they can. Venture capital leader David Sze echoed the concern, saying on Bloomberg, “There’s a lot of belief, but not a lot of fear, and that imbalance can be dangerous.”

With that backdrop, it makes sense that so many people in tech are turning to something, anything, that promises a little clarity. The future feels uncertain. Traditional advice feels stale. And suddenly, a psychic reading doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

That’s why psychics in San Francisco are taking on new titles: spiritual advisors, executive guides, intuitive coaches. HBO’s Silicon Valley even poked fun at the trend, with a fictional CEO seeking wisdom from a guru. But in real life? The trend is only growing. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff swears by yoga. LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner promotes mindfulness. And the late Steve Jobs credited a Zen teacher with shaping his worldview.

Flip through a San Francisco phone directory and you’ll find more than 120 psychics listed, plus 140 astrologers, though plenty do both. For many in the Bay Area, spiritual support has become a sidekick to professional ambition.

Nicki Bonfilio is one of the intuitives tapping into this movement. “I work with people from all the big tech companies like Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, you name it,” she says. Her office, tucked away in the Mission District, feels like a soft-lit sanctuary. Everything’s white like the furniture, the carpet, even the natural light, and there’s a global, mystical vibe to the decor. Think Buddha statues, Egyptian deities, framed art that nods to the East. Shoes stay at the door.

At 45, Nicki carries the calm presence of someone who’s let go of needing to impress. She’s poised, yoga-toned, and dressed in light cotton that matches the space. While others might use the word “psychic,” she prefers “intuitive.” “Psychic makes people picture neon signs and fortune-tellers in storefront windows,” she says. “That’s not what I do.”

Nicki describes herself as a seer, someone who sees beyond the obvious, and also clairaudient, meaning she picks up on things that aren’t said out loud. “I hear on a different level,” she explains.

Put another way, she reads between the lines and sometimes, between thoughts.

When Nicki Bonfilio was just five, something happened that she never forgot. She says St. Francis appeared to her while she played in her family’s backyard in Mill Valley. That single moment opened the door to a childhood full of strange sights: colors floating in midair, shapes that had depth and movement, things no one else could see. But it wasn’t until she was thirteen that everything really changed. She remembers it as a sudden inner explosion, like fireworks going off in her mind, which seemed to unlock something powerful inside her.

“It was like I had been seeing the world in blurry color,” she says. “And suddenly, everything snapped into focus. Everything got sharp.”

Still, Nicki kept her abilities quiet. She finished school, got a psychology degree, and went into accounting. She worked for restaurants and even served as a corporate controller. But the visions never stopped. And after she warned a close friend about a serious health issue, a warning that turned out to be true, she took it as a sign. It was time to stop ignoring what she knew. So, she left accounting behind and committed fully to intuitive work.

That was 15 years ago. These days, Nicki sees about 25 clients each week, and her schedule stays booked out two months ahead. “The tech boom definitely helped,” she says. “It brought in a wave of people searching for meaning differently.”

Her clients now include young startup founders who want guidance on what to build, when to pitch, or whether a project is even worth launching. Nicki says she sees things light up like signs, like names, paths, decisions. “It’s like I’m tuned into something running underneath all the noise,” she says.

The questions she hears aren’t that different from what you’d find in any high-stress career. But in tech, they’re sprinkled with VC jargon: “What’s the energy around this potential Series A investor?” “Do I shift toward the platform side, or stick with product?” People want to know their direction, but also the bigger picture behind it.

Caroline Cross, one of her longtime clients, says working with Nicki feels a lot like having a therapist, just one who speaks in layers. “She can tell you so much about what’s going on with other people and how it’s all connected,” Caroline says. “You give her one sentence, and she gives you a whole story.”

Caroline, who’s been in tech since 2010, first met Nicki through a group of female coworkers. Once a year, they’d all go for a session and share notes afterward. At the time, they kept it low-key, and no one talked about it much at work. But over the years, Caroline says, more people from across departments started seeing Nicki too. “She started the wave,” she says.

But while tech clients have helped her grow, Nicki admits the energy of San Francisco doesn’t feel quite right anymore. “There’s something different humming through this city now,” she says. “The construction, the traffic, the way everyone’s glued to their phones, but it’s like a pulse that won’t calm down. It’s not a peaceful energy.”

To protect herself during sessions, Nicki holds a piece of black obsidian, a dark crystal she bought online. She says it shields her from unwanted energy. Aside from that and a deck of oracle cards, she doesn’t rely on much. “I believe people are drawn together by something deeper,” she says. “I don’t think souls are bound by time the way our bodies are. We go on.”

And just like that, she turns back to the window, watching light ripple across the rooftops of the Mission. Her tone softens. “We’re all still connected, even in this crazy world.”

Meanwhile, across town in Lower Pac Heights, another woman is helping people reconnect with something even more mysterious, their past selves. Joyce Van Horn sits in a deep blue room that feels like the inside of a dream. Shelves of books line the walls, with titles like Owning Your Own Shadow and Exploring the Tarot. A framed photo of her with astrologer Steven Forrest sits beside them. “He’s one of the greats,” she says, “and a dear friend of Laurene Powell Jobs.”

Joyce talks about death like someone who’s learned to live better because of it. “Everyone’s afraid of it,” she says, “but death is trending right now. And you know what? When you face it, you start to feel more alive. You laugh more. You love harder. You play. That’s what I’m about, playing before it’s too late.”

She’s 63, but there’s a youthful spark in her voice. Joyce used to be a DJ and an actress. She calls herself a wild child turned wild woman, someone who once believed in fairies, moved objects with her mind, and still wears feather earrings to readings. “My life’s been messy,” she says, “but it’s been real.”

She grew up in a haunted house in the Bay Area and started doing professional readings back in the '80s, when she charged just $10 a session. Now her rates are $150 an hour, which she says is more than fair for what she offers. Unlike some modern readers, she doesn’t just dabble; she’s trained in evolutionary astrology, which focuses on understanding the soul’s journey across lifetimes. (For comparison, Sally Faubion charges $180 for her private numerology work.)

Joyce believes each person carries the essence of their past lives, even if they can’t consciously access it. “We forget when we’re born,” she says. “But the code is still there. We just have to tap into it.”

And that’s where she comes in.

Most of Joyce Van Horn’s clients come from the tech world. She meets with many of them in person, but she also keeps busy with Skype sessions and phone calls. Twice a year, she hosts a retreat in Calistoga where around 50 people gather for a weekend of wine, astrology, and spiritual exploration. She calls it a mix of cosmic alignment and a little chaos.

Lately, she’s been doing more private sessions for entire startups. Not long ago, she spent a Friday tucked away in the back of an office in SoMa. The room was cold, and she wrapped herself in a scarf as a line of young people, many half her age, filtered in one by one. Each of them had questions and not just about their careers or relationships, but about who they really were and where they were headed.

“What I notice in a lot of them is this deep craving to feel like they belong somewhere,” Joyce says. “They want purpose, something meaningful. But so many are searching and don’t even know what they’re looking for.” She pauses for a moment, then adds with a chuckle, “And yeah, most of them are on Tinder or OKCupid, which sort of says it all.”

Some of her long-standing clients are women in tech who’ve been coming to her for nearly two decades. Every spring, they meet up at a beautiful home in the Richmond District and spend hours diving deep into life’s bigger questions. These sessions can last up to four hours each, which means Joyce walks away with $600 per person, not including travel. But for her, it’s never been just about the money, but it’s about the connection and transformation that happens in the room.

“There’s something shifting right now,” she says, eyes bright. “It’s like there’s this gentle wave rolling in from somewhere divine, something urging people toward compassion, music, community, and healing.”

Of course, that’s not the only trend moving through her sessions. Many of her younger clients have embraced psychedelics. While nootropics and brain-boosting supplements have made headlines in Silicon Valley, the real favorite among her regulars is old-school MDMA.

One of her clients, a young man in his mid-twenties, works hard all week but makes space every month or so to unplug completely. Joyce says he and his closest friends gather in a sacred space for a weekend, not to party, but to reconnect and “clear out the noise.” They use MDMA in a ceremonial way, as a tool for emotional reset.

Michelle Jackson, another of Joyce’s clients, says those types of weekends have been life-changing for her. She works for a software startup near Union Square and remembers two full days spent at Joyce’s house, tripping on MDMA, meditating, and being gently guided through what she calls a deep emotional breakthrough.

Michelle first found her way to Joyce back in 2007. She had just left Texas and moved to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start. She was only 25, coming from a strict Baptist background where pledging allegiance to the Bible was as common as pledging to the flag. She wasn’t even sure what she believed anymore; she just knew she needed something different.

“I wasn’t looking for a tech job,” she says, “but that’s where I landed, at a startup selling ads on blogs.”

Things moved quickly. By 27, she was working long hours, constantly under pressure, and unsure if any of it made her happy. One day, a panic attack hit her out of nowhere while she was at her desk. She didn’t want to see a traditional therapist. She needed something that felt more personal. That’s when she booked a session with Joyce.

It didn’t take long for Michelle to open up. She says Joyce became more than a reader, but she was like a mentor, or even a spiritual coach. Joyce introduced her to Abraham Hicks, a channeled source of wisdom discovered by Esther and Jerry Hicks, who became known for their teachings on vibrational alignment. Oddly enough, the couple came from the same town in Texas where Michelle had grown up.

“Joyce let me borrow these Abraham Hicks CDs,” Michelle says. “And I still listen to them. I’ve got them saved on my phone so I can play them when I’m walking and need to calm my mind.”

Over the years, Michelle has come to believe something that’s hard to unsee: tech culture often rewards sameness. “It feels like a bubble,” she says. “People are always quoting the same VCs, pitching the same kind of ideas, using the same buzzwords. It’s like a cult sometimes.”

She’s still in the city, but her heart is elsewhere. Her dream is to leave San Francisco behind someday and head to Wine Country, where things move slower and the stars feel closer.

And then there’s the story of a woman in Oakland, also in tech, who woke up to something truly disturbing. It started with a single bloody handprint on her bedroom blinds. A few days later, more appeared, followed by smeared words written on the walls. Obscene messages. Frantic energy. She and her boyfriend were terrified. They didn’t know what else to do. So, they did what most people do when panic strikes: they searched Google.

That’s how they found Reverend Joey Talley, a Wiccan priestess based in Marin County. She’s been doing this kind of work for over 40 years and holds three master’s degrees. To those in the know, she’s the go-to expert for problems that don’t fall within normal bounds.

“The place was new,” she says, “but there was an old parking lot across the street. I could feel it; terrible things had happened there. Children are crying out. I think there had been a murder.”

Talley’s solution wasn’t holy water or sage. She built what she calls a “psychic seawall,” a kind of spiritual barrier designed to block out unwanted energies. It’s her version of a house clearing, minus the church robes and Bible verses. Her motto says it all: “No problem is too big, too small, or too weird.”

And in San Francisco, that holds true.

Even though she doesn’t have a background in tech, Talley still finds herself summoned to help with high-tech issues. Her methods might seem unusual, but clients swear by them. She creates charms, uses herbs, and draws on natural elements to protect computers and networks. Jet, a black stone known for blocking negativity, is one of her go-to tools for fixing buggy office equipment. For larger issues, she’ll incorporate a rainbow of colored stones to help redirect energy. And when nothing else works, she casts a spell to protect the entire company, from desks to printers.

She still sometimes refers to the industry as “the techno world,” but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming a quiet staple among engineers, founders, and developers looking for something more than antivirus software. Her services range from spiritual counseling and hypnosis to moon rituals and potion-making.

But if there’s one thing Talley loves most, it’s confronting darkness.

“I like working with demons,” she says matter-of-factly.

She remembers one case vividly — a startup’s security alarm kept going off at odd hours, for no reason anyone could find. Electricians tried everything. Nothing helped. Eventually, someone called Talley. She showed up, did her work, and the problem stopped.

“I don’t know much about electronics,” she says with a shrug. “But I got the spirit out.”

Whether that’s an apology or a flex, it’s hard to tell. But either way, her phone keeps ringing.

It might sound wild that a company would trust a witch to bless their office, but it’s even more surprising to hear they’ll also call her in for legal battles. Yet Reverend Joey Talley says she’s been asked to cast spells aimed at shifting lawsuits in her clients’ favor. If a startup gets threatened with legal trouble, she might try to spiritually “divert” the opposing attorney’s focus — her favorite word for softening or steering away problems. For Talley, it’s just another day on the job, as casual as slipping on one of the wide-brimmed hats that have become part of her everyday uniform.

Her outlook is an unusual mix, part eco-feminist, part spiritual counselor, part mystic-on-call. She offers 24/7 availability, though in reality, it might take a few tries to reach her. Her conversations bounce between gentle affirmations and passionate critiques of the court system, prisons, and patriarchy. But every now and then, one of her off-the-cuff sayings sticks with you: “Witchcraft is the art of changing consciousness at will,” or “People can’t walk around with their minds open any more than they can walk around without clothes on.” And maybe the most poetic one of all: “Auras are information.”

When clients call for quick advice, especially about money, her process is simple. “Investment questions are easy,” she says. “Most of the time, one card will do.” She has the client plant their feet on the floor, breathe deeply with her over the phone, and focus on the question at hand. Then she lays out cards, one by one, until the client says “stop.” The answer is in whatever card they’ve landed on, guided by whatever divine energy they choose to believe in — whether that’s God, Gaia, or something else entirely.

Over the years, she’s become a spiritual guide to many Bay Area women interested in Wicca. Her backyard in Fairfax becomes a sacred space once a month, where she leads moon rituals under the trees. The women chant over a cauldron, fall into meditative states, and share vegetarian meals. Men aren’t invited anymore. “I used to include them,” Talley says, “but they were mostly just hoping to hook up. They weren’t really there for the goddess energy, and it’s distracting.”

The only man welcome is her husband, a musician who fronts reggae and funk bands. According to Joyce Van Horn, he might also be an angel investor. But Talley keeps quiet about his wealth. All she’ll say is, “We live in Marin, I’ve got a sports car, and life is good.”

For most in San Francisco’s metaphysical scene, that kind of life is rare. The city’s full of psychic storefronts, especially in tourist areas. You can get a palm reading or aura cleanse for thirty bucks in one of those tucked-away shops with neon signs and velvet curtains. But they’re not all what they seem.

Sally Faubion doesn’t hold back about these places. “A lot of them prey on people,” she says. “Elderly people. Lonely people. People who don’t know any better.” Harsh, maybe, but she’s not wrong.

The New York Times ran a report about scam psychics in Manhattan who took advantage of people in crisis, charging thousands for love spells or “cleansing rituals” that promised to fix heartbreak or return an ex, only to leave clients broke and broken. Some even claimed they had to “cleanse” the client's money itself and then disappeared with it.

Behind the scenes, many of these psychics belong to extended families rooted in Romani culture. The Times described their hidden structure: turf boundaries enforced by an internal tribunal called a “kris,” with long-established, if unofficial, rules of conduct.

Back in 2003, San Francisco decided to regulate the industry. A new law required psychics to register, post their prices, pay $500 for a permit, and be fingerprinted. It was the first ordinance of its kind in a major U.S. city. Local law enforcement said they’d received about 60 complaints in just two years. Many of those accused of fraud were descendants of Romani families, and some felt the rules unfairly targeted their cultural and religious traditions.

The law itself was sweeping. “Fortunetelling” was defined so broadly that it covered everything from palmistry and tarot to tea leaves, dice, dreams, mind reading, astrology, and even just pretending to do those things. It essentially legalized the sale of spiritual services, whether or not they worked, as long as the provider followed city guidelines.

Not everyone bought in, though. Sheldon Helms, who teaches psychology at Ohlone College and is part of Bay Area Skeptics, scoffs at the psychic scene. In an email, he explained why he thinks it appeals so strongly to tech professionals: uncertainty. “Superstition and belief in the paranormal spike in areas of life where things feel random and out of control,” Helms wrote. “Baseball players used to be the classic example. Now? Investors.”

While some fortune shops feel exploitative, Jessica Lanyadoo believes others still carry the original spirit of San Francisco’s alternative past. “This used to be the place you came if you were into astrology or healing,” she says. “But not anymore.”

Lanyadoo arrived from Montreal in 1994. She was 19 and drawn to the city’s wild reputation, home of the Church of Satan, astrologer Joan Quigley, and a long line of bohemians. She rented a cheap place in the Mission, back when Dolores Park still had weekly drug busts and stabbings. But everything changed quickly. The dot-com boom brought in money, and the current tech wave dwarfs that.

As startups flourished, some brought Lanyadoo in to give readings at the office. Most had her sign NDAs. She remembers one in particular where every employee she read was secretly miserable. “They were all just waiting to vest and leave.”

She sees it as a classic trade-off: huge wealth and flexibility, but only if you give up time, privacy, and emotional grounding. Tech culture promises connection like the kind you find at work happy hours and climbing wall breaks, but in the end, it’s an echo chamber. “It’s a monoculture,” she says. “And a lot of my clients feel stuck in it.”

The need for meaning hasn’t gone away; it’s just shifted. People try to fill that gap with drugs, Burning Man, SoulCycle, or sessions with someone like Lanyadoo. Many, she says, moved to San Francisco from small towns and brought with them traditional values, only to find themselves spiritually unmoored in tech’s demanding landscape.

“They don’t want to give up their spirituality,” she says. “But tech asks them to either push it into overdrive or drop it altogether.”

The sad part, she adds, is that tech has also pushed out the very people who made the city magnetic in the first place. “We always talk about how artists are getting priced out, but we’re not talking enough about the spiritual practitioners,” she says. She knows this firsthand; she was recently forced out of her longtime Mission apartment and now lives across the bay in Oakland. And Joyce Van Horn, after 20 years in her home, is packing up, too, another no-fault eviction.

Neither woman blames tech workers directly, but they do point fingers at the bigger machine. “It’s all just corporations,” Lanyadoo says. “Startups, dot-coms, whatever, throw a few La Croix in the fridge and call it a company. But it’s still about profit.”

Still, she admits that San Francisco gave her opportunities she might not have found elsewhere. But it’s not the same city anymore.

As for Sally Faubion, she sees something bigger playing out, something almost biblical. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” she says. “And who are these tech people but nerds? Isn’t that the prophecy coming true?”

She’s noticed a pattern: many tech CEOs share birthdates that fall into what numerology calls the 1-4-7 trio, people who are builders, rebels, and relentless workers. “Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Larry Page …” she rattles off the names. “They all fit.”

Whether or not they’ve inherited the Earth, they’ve certainly inherited San Francisco. But what happens to the city’s soul, the artists, the witches, the mystics?

Lanyadoo says they’ll quietly vanish. “The people moving here now and don’t feel the loss. You can’t miss what you never knew. They came for tech. They didn’t come for the spirit.”

The soul-seekers, the mystics, the bohemians, they’ll find new cities, new landscapes, and new communities. Maybe even in Odessa, where a man named Yegor sits at his computer, far from the glittering lights of San Francisco, waiting for his next divine assignment.