Meet the psychics advising your boss's boss

The corporate mystic is a well-established archetype. Diane von Furstenberg and Sony co-founder Akio Morita used psychics, as have executives at Euro-Disney and CAA. Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann was enthralled with Jewish mysticism. John Donovan, former CEO of AT&T Communications, and Craig Kallman, CEO of Atlantic Records, use the same intuitive. Even Steve Jobs had a spiritual advisor. And while the presence of these corporate psychics is often mocked — see Gavin Belson’s spiritual advisor, Denpok Singh, in Silicon Valley — the executives who consult them consider them a crucial part of their businesses.

“Myth: Business is suspicious of intuition. Fact: Businesses are in for anything that works,” Laura Day, a psychic to CEOs and celebrities, tells Mic.

“I was working with a water company, and I saw their tech be a complete bust,” she says. “Even though they’d made beautiful packaging, they hadn't ever shipped it in full.” Day says she foresaw her client’s product breaking apart once sent out, and after a test-run, she was right. “The whole company would have fallen just on shipping, but they fixed their container,” she notes. “So you could say I was wrong because I predicted [the bust] that never happened.”

An exceedingly affable woman, Day isn’t your stereotypical psychic. There are no gypsy headdresses, crystal balls, or beaded door curtains. Instead, there’s a tea tower, Tribeca loft, Prada, and photos with Demi Moore shot by Annie Leibowitz. The author of multiple best-selling books, Day’s fans include Deepak Chopra, Brad Pitt, Chris Rock, and Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA James Watson, to name a few. In a 2020 New York Magazine profile on Day, Moore gushed, “I’ve met people with varying degrees of gifts in this area, but she was very different. The depths of insights she brought forward just resonate on such a profound level.” When assessing her own capacity, Day loathes that her abilities are deemed “spiritual,” preferring to be categorized as “exceptional at non-local perception.” And, over the last three decades consulting Fortune 500 CEOs, she says she’s rarely lost a client and maintains a waiting list that hasn’t been tapped in ten years. She charges her clients $15,000 for one hour per month.

A superstar in her industry, Day is rare but not a one-off. A growing number of psychics have packaged their skills as B2B services — consulting for tech titans, financial powerhouses, big-pharma, and media conglomerates. And business is booming.

According to 2011 and 2021 IBISWorld reports, the largest global industry research firm, the psychic market has grown 2.6% annually since 2011, caps $2.2 billion in the US alone, and was one of the few industries unaffected by the economic downturn during coronavirus. “The landscape is changing, and these kinds of abilities are being accepted more and more,” Jessica Utts, a California based professor and expert in psychic phenomena, tells Mic.

The results are so strong statistically, that were this a less contentious industry, it’d be accepted as undeniable proof. - Jessica Utts

In 1995, Utts, then a statistics professor at the University of California Davis, got a pitch from the Senate Appropriations Committee. They wanted her to examine secret CIA-backed research documenting the existence of psychic abilities using intuitives and psychics who had passed introductory testing. Code named Stargate, the $20 million project originated at The Stanford Research Institute and compiled hundreds of thermo-dynamic miracles, defined as “inexplicable statistical departures from chance.” Utts’s review tapped outside laboratories, poured over statistical forecasting, and normalized results to debunk fraud. In the end, she contended: "It would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof." She tells Mic, “the results are so strong statistically, that were this a less contentious industry, it’d be accepted as undeniable proof.”

The CIA wasn’t alone in studying parapsychological phenomena. Yale School of Medicine has been using psychics as consultants in psychological studies since 2014. Cornell University’s Daryl Bem, professor of psychology and physicist, ran an eight-year study which found that humans have some psychic powers, and Princeton’s PEAR lab, run by physicist and electrical engineer Robert G. Jahn exclusively studied ESP for 20 years. Yet, no matter how sound the experiments, research journals declined to publish positive ESP results. Jahn was told by one editor he’d be happy to publish a paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me,” according to the New York Times.

Despite the academic superciliousness, some researchers have been forced to concede. After a thorough examination of Stargate, Utt’s partner, Ray Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and “noted debunker of psychic phenomena,” wrote in his official review, “The case for psychic functioning seems better than it ever has been.” Nevertheless, he still wasn’t completely sold.

"Where parapsychologists see consistency, I see inconsistency," Hyman wrote in his Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena in 1995. "Although I cannot point to any obvious flaws in the experiments, the experimental program is too recent and insufficiently evaluated to be sure that flaws and biases have been eliminated." Concerned by the closed-door parameters of the experiment, Hyman wrote "From the scientific standpoint, the program was hampered by its secrecy, which kept the program from benefiting from the checks and balances that come from doing research in a public forum."

In general, it’s hard to blame Hyman’s trepidation. The Long Island Medium Theresa Caputo, Miss Cleo, and Midtown Manhattan “Psychic Zoe,” who scammed a cool million off her clients by pretending demons possessed their children, don’t give the psychic industry a great name. Fraud has been well documented, often leading to opaque legal proceedings when victims fall prey to schemes. It’s an industry that is neither heavily regulated nor standardized, with even the nomenclature of intuitive, psychic, and shaman muddled, leaving fraudsters deploying woo-woo mechanisms largely off the hook.

Day, however, says she uses techniques that were studied rigorously under the Stargate project. “I never had problems getting clients,” she says. “Medicine, politics, technology, all industry: they do what works. They're not biased. They're agnostic. If it works, they do it.”

Day tells Mic that her work has included pharmacologists hoping to get insight on future side effects, film producers wondering whether a movie should be a summer or Christmas release, and investors curious about whether a financial portfolio is allocated correctly. (Due to client confidentiality, Mic is unable to confirm Day’s claims about specific businesses.) And although she admits she’s made a few mistakes, Day, her clients, and her contemporaries believe having a good intuitive is good business.

When you become a client of Day’s (which you won’t; she’s not accepting new ones), she abides by rules and practices, employing strict prediction methodology often used within Stargate experiments on premonition. She works with a single company member (ideally CEO) and signs exclusivity contracts within her client’s industry to avoid any conflicts of interest. Her clients give Day specific target questions (“Will this director mesh with this actor? Will this drug cause side effects in diabetic patients?”), and she refuses additional information because, as she says, “intuition works best in the absence of information.” A notion seconded by Utts.

Then, the predictions begin to populate. “Most of the things I predict are beyond the sphere of influence of the people I'm predicting them for,” says Day. “They can adapt their product to the market, or their timing to the market, or their investment to the market — they can't, most of them, control the market.”

Hae Jun “HeyJune” Jeon, a Seoul-born Berlin-raised psychic, operates a little differently. “I usually walk away if someone wants to know if [they] should invest.” She clarifies, “ I don't do that. I could; I just don't want to.”

With 916k followers on TikTok, Jeon is part of a new generation of digital intuitives. A former Wall Street data analyst, Jeon made waves in Summer 2020 as “The Wall Street Tarot Reader”—a designation she seems unfavorable towards in her videos. In-person, she’s petite, well-spoken, and grounded.

Unlike Day, Jeon utilizes a breadth of spiritual doctrine in her practice. Privy to tarot, astrology, and human design, her TikTok @pheydrus is a guiding light for those hoping to see the future in the cards. With her corporate clients it “ends up looking a lot like HR,” she says. “The only difference is that I actually check energetically whether or not [synergy] is viable or feasible.”

Preferring to work with venture capital and founders, Jeon identifies potential pathways that companies are blind to — especially when it comes to personnel issues. Say a company is merging, trying to expand, or an employee is trying to make a jump to a different team. “I first assess whether or not a person is truly a good fit for what they're asking for. And second, I figure out what's the corporate dynamic?”

She says founders and VCs often come to her blind, searching for an unblocking of corporate energy — some unknown force keeping them from reaching their potential. “Sometimes they don't even know what they want. They just know that I'll do something.”

Echoing Day and Utts, Jeon also believes that corporate psychics will see tremendous growth, but for slightly different reasons. Her forecasts conclude a greater openness to self-manifestation. A ripple effect of transitioning from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, shucking our dependency on idols like Buddha or Jesus, and onto ourselves. When asked if internal Godly appreciation may turn into ego, especially in the corporate stratosphere, the answer is, well, yes, but that’s okay. If you perform the correct soul work, Jeon believes, you can align yourself and process your ego healthily: A healthy ego or an unhealthy ego are the difference between success and failure.

Intuitives, like all independent consultants, pick and choose their clients carefully. For both Jeon and Day, if a person seems untrustworthy, it's a no-go. Clients are selected for, as Jeon notes, “empathy, compassion, kindness, truth, and [the desire] to want to lift everybody up,” and, most importantly, openness.