Jessica Lanyadoo: The Astrologer Who Says Astrology Won't Tell You the Future

Who Jessica Lanyadoo is

If you have listened to an astrology podcast in the last several years, you have probably run into her voice: fast, blunt, funny, and noticeably unwilling to promise you anything. Jessica Lanyadoo works as an astrologer and psychic medium, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She grew up in Montreal and relocated to California in the mid-1990s, where she built a one-on-one consulting practice long before she built an audience.

That order matters, and it is the single most useful thing to know about her. Many of the astrologers with large followings today arrived at scale through publishing, apps or social media. Lanyadoo arrived through the consulting room. By her own account, she started counseling clients in 1995 and it became her full-time job by 1999 — nearly twenty years before the podcast that made her widely known. Everything she says publicly is downstream of a job that involves sitting across from one person at a time.

From an attic classroom in Montreal to a California practice

The origin story is unusually well documented for this field, because she told it to a mainstream Canadian magazine on the record. Lanyadoo attended Dawson College in Montreal, which had an alternative branch called the New School. In 1991 she took a beginners' class in astrology there — and, the following semester, a class in mediumship. She described the setting to Chatelaine plainly: "It was literally in an attic. We had facilitators instead of teachers, and we sat in circles."

The move to California followed from a straightforward calculation. At the time, she said, it was the only place she could imagine making a living at this. That is a mundane detail, and it is worth dwelling on, because it locates her career in a labour market rather than in a calling narrative. She moved for work.

What Ghost of a Podcast actually is

Ghost of a Podcast debuted in 2018 and runs as an astrology-and-advice show. The format is a combination of a forecast segment and listener questions answered on air. The show is distributed through the major podcast platforms; its Apple Podcasts listing credits Lanyadoo directly as the host and publisher.

She has been explicit about why she started it. In a 2020 interview with Nylon, she described having had a short segment on another podcast and wanting a larger format — and said she felt "a real sense of calling to support people, in cultivating emotional intelligence, to make difficult choices, the right choices, even when no one's looking." That is a mission statement about behaviour, not about prophecy. It is a useful key to the whole body of work.

The core argument: a tool, not a belief system

Here is where she separates from most of the field, and it is worth quoting her precisely rather than paraphrasing. Asked by Chatelaine how she builds a weekly horoscope, she said: "Astrology is not a belief system — it's a tool for understanding." Asked whether astrology is an inborn gift, she was blunter still: "Astrology is 100 percent a learned skill. Nobody is born knowing it and it takes years to study the symbols, the math — like any math or science."

Both statements do real work. The first refuses the framing that you must believe in astrology for it to be of use to you — which is also, conveniently, a framing that is immune to disproof. The second refuses mystification of the practitioner. If it is a learned skill, then it can be learned badly, taught badly, and done badly, and the person doing it can be held to a standard. That is a higher bar than most of the genre sets for itself.

It is also, in fairness, not a defence of astrology's validity. Saying a practice is a learned skill says nothing about whether the skill describes anything real. Chess is a learned skill; so is palmistry. Lanyadoo's framing removes one bad argument from the table without settling the question. We think that is a point in her favour, and we think it should be stated rather than smuggled past the reader.

How she writes a horoscope

She has described the method in enough detail to be checked, which is rare. Her primary reference is an ephemeris — a printed table of planetary positions — specifically The American Ephemeris for the 21st Century. She reads where the planets sit by degree in a given window, looks at the mathematical relationships between them, and interprets from there.

Crucially, she says she does not start with an outcome question. She does not ask "will Capricorn find love." She looks for what she calls the salient theme, then applies it across domains — work, family, love — because the theme is the finding and the domain is not. She gave a live example: a Sagittarius week whose theme was "stepping into ownership of the changes already made."

Two ways of writing the same column

Question the writer starts with	What the reader gets	Where it fails
"What will happen to Libra this week?"	A forecast with events in it: a call, a cheque, a stranger.	It is checkable, and it is usually wrong.
"What is the salient theme this week?"	A frame the reader applies themselves: ownership, restraint, repair.	It is broad enough to fit almost anything — and therefore hard to test.

That second row is the honest cost of her method. Thematic horoscopes are far less likely to be flatly wrong than event horoscopes — but they buy that safety by being harder to test.

What "psychic" does and does not mean in her usage

Lanyadoo also works as a psychic medium, and she has been notably careful about the vocabulary. She told Chatelaine that she does not identify as clairvoyant — pointing out that the word means "gift of sight" — but does consider herself psychic, while objecting that people hear that as mind-reading and omniscience.

She has also drawn a hard line around fortune-telling. She does not use a crystal ball, and she has said she does not think they work. She will not tell you when to buy a lottery ticket, and she said the lottery question used to come up a lot and comes up less now. She does not read for herself or for people close to her, on the grounds that she cannot be objective — the comparison she used is that surgeons do not operate on their partners.

These are refusals, and refusals are the most informative thing a practitioner in this field publishes.

Politics on the air — the choice that sets her apart

She has been open that the podcast carries her politics, and equally open that her private consulting does not. In the Nylon interview she described counseling clients whose political views are "diametrically opposed" to her own, and said this is not difficult for her: "I don't need us to be the same — I need us to be our best in this moment." She contrasted that with the podcast, where, in her words, she gets to speak her values because in a one-on-one session that would not be appropriate.

Whether you share her politics or not, the distinction is a professional one: the client's hour belongs to the client. Many practitioners never articulate that boundary at all.

The book, and the columns

Astrology for Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along was published by Ten Speed Press in December 2019, co-written with the journalist T. Greenway. Lanyadoo has said she dictated it, because she loves talking and does not love the process of writing — and that she wanted to make something closer to a textbook than a novelty, on the grounds that practical tools "needed a modern update."

Alongside the book she has written horoscope columns for a range of publications, most durably for Chatelaine, where she has been the astrology columnist since 2016 and where her weekly columns still run. Earlier work included the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her own site also states that she was named the best psychic in San Francisco by Refinery29 and SF Weekly; we have not independently verified those two citations, and we flag them as her own account rather than as established fact.

Where she fits in the current astrology wave

Asked in 2020 why so many prominent astrologers of that moment were queer women, she gave a two-part answer that has aged well. First, accessibility: the math can now be done by software, so you no longer have to study computation to use a chart. Second, displacement — people who have been turned away from organised religion still look for a way to access the divine, and astrology offers a framework without a denomination. "You can bring your own value system, religion or lack of religion, to it," she said. "That has mass appeal."

Read alongside our profiles of Chani Nicholas and the CHANI app, Susan Miller and Astrology Zone and Aliza Kelly, a pattern shows up: four careers, four very different products, and four different answers to the same question about what astrology is for. Lanyadoo's answer is the most restrictive of the four, and that restriction is her selling point.

Voices from practice

We do not invent testimonials, so we will speak generally. Practitioners in the counseling tradition Lanyadoo comes from commonly report the same tension: clients arrive wanting a date and a name, and much of the session goes into redirecting that toward what the person can actually decide. These are patterns described within the field, not measured effects.

What we don't promise

We do not claim that astrology predicts events, that a birth chart determines character, or that a reading — hers or anyone's — can substitute for medical, psychological, legal or financial advice. Nothing in this article is an endorsement of accuracy. Nor is it a verdict on her personally: we have deliberately left out her health, her family, her relationships and her home, and we have left out the private clients she does not name publicly. Those are not ours to write about, and they are not relevant to her work.

Practically: how to work with this

1. Test the frame, not the forecast. If you read a horoscope this week, note the theme it names and ignore the events it implies. At the end of the week, ask whether the theme was useful language for something you were already dealing with — that is the only claim it is really making.
2. Notice the refusals. When you evaluate any astrologer, look first at what they decline to do: predict deaths, name lottery numbers, read for family, guarantee outcomes. The list of refusals is the professional standard.
3. Separate the tool from the person. Learning to read a chart is a study project with books, symbols and arithmetic. Being counseled by someone is a service relationship with boundaries. Confusing the two is how people end up paying for certainty.
4. Keep your own record. Write down what you were told and what you decided. Six months later, the record is more useful than the memory — in both directions.

Sources & further reading

• Courtney Shea, "How An Astrologer Writes Horoscopes—And Other Burning Questions About Star Signs," Chatelaine, 9 April 2019 — origin, method, refusals, direct quotations.
• Alley Hector, "Everyone's Obsessed With Astrology Right Now—And Jessica Lanyadoo Knows Why," Nylon, 28 January 2020 — podcast origin, politics, the book, the queer-astrology wave.
• Chatelaine author archive, Jessica Lanyadoo — independent confirmation of the running column.
• Apple Podcasts / iTunes catalogue listing for Ghost of a Podcast, collection ID 1422483488 — independent confirmation of the show, its host and its feed.
• Ten Speed Press / Penguin Random House catalogue entry for Astrology for Real Relationships (2019), Jessica Lanyadoo with T. Greenway.
• lovelanyadoo.com — her own site, used only for statements clearly marked as her own account.

FAQ

Who is Jessica Lanyadoo?

She is an astrologer, psychic medium and intuitive counselor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, originally from Montreal. She has been consulting professionally since the mid-1990s and hosts the astrology-and-advice show Ghost of a Podcast.

When did Ghost of a Podcast start?

It debuted in 2018. It combines astrological forecasting with listener questions answered on air, and is distributed through the major podcast platforms.

Does Jessica Lanyadoo predict the future?

She has said publicly that she does not work that way — that trying to overthink the future is "a fool's errand," that she does not use crystal balls, and that she cannot tell you when to buy a lottery ticket. Her stated approach is thematic rather than predictive.

What book did she write?

Astrology for Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along, published by Ten Speed Press in December 2019, co-written with T. Greenway.

Where can I read her horoscopes?

She has written the astrology column for the Canadian magazine Chatelaine since 2016, and her weekly horoscopes are published there and on her own site.

Is astrology proven to work?

No. Nothing in this article is evidence that astrology describes or predicts anything. It is a portrait of a working practitioner and of the arguments she makes about her own craft.