David Thiermann is not a psychic.
He will tell you this himself, though he will also tell you that the Greek root of the word “psychic” is a term meaning sensitivity and that everyone, by that definition, is psychic about something. He has used this information to great effect with the callers who found his name in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants.
“Are you a psychic?” they’d ask.
“Yes,” he’d say. “Everybody’s a psychic. And the reason you’re calling me is probably that you’re looking for a way to market yourself.”
“Wow,” they’d say. “You really are a psychic. How did you know that?”
He kept that listing for years. It never paid for itself. He kept it anyway, for a reason that says something essential about how David operates: he knew it would eventually produce a good story.
He was right. He just didn’t know the story would involve the Santa Cruz Police Department.
The setup, from the beginning
When David started his consulting business in 1987, his marketing strategy was the Yellow Pages, specifically, the index of the AT&T Yellow Pages, which he went through once a year from A to Z, putting a check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun to list himself under. By his count, he ended up under 37 categories. He tracked which ones produced callers and narrowed the list to the ten that were worth keeping.
Spiritual Consultants was not one of the ten. The calls were infrequent and, when they came, tended toward the unusual. There were the psychic callers, whom he handled as described above. And there were the ghost callers.
“Hey, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a ghost in my house.”
“Okay,” David would say. “You have two choices. If you want to get rid of the ghost, we’ve got to call Ghostbusters. If you want to make friends with the ghost, I want you to document every door slamming, every light going on and off, for the next two days. Then call me back and we’ll take it from there.”
He never heard from them again.
Despite the absence of billable hours, David kept the listing. He knew the patience was going somewhere. Then, one afternoon, a voicemail arrived from a sergeant at the Santa Cruz Police Department.
“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve had a complaint that you’re listed under Spiritual Consultants in the Yellow Pages, and we notice you don’t have a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.”
David listened to the message and thought: that’s the call I’ve been waiting for.
The license
He called the sergeant back, apologized for not knowing such a license existed, and asked where he could get one. The sergeant directed him to the police station.
There on the wall, among the various licenses the city of Santa Cruz offered to its residents, at the very bottom of the list: Metaphysical License. $50.
David paid the $50. He filled out the forms. They fingerprinted him, the city kept records on palm readers and card readers and people who listed themselves under Spiritual Consultants, he was told, and forwarded the prints to the FBI.
The sergeant said the review would take about six weeks.
Six months went by.
Then an official letter arrived from the city of Santa Cruz, confirming that David Thiermann had been granted a license to practice metaphysics within city limits. The permit number on the document was 002.
He has thought about that number. Somebody filed complaint 001. Whoever that was, probably a competitor, probably another practitioner who knew the licensing rules, had triggered the whole process. David was the second person in the history of Santa Cruz to hold this license.
He filed it under M for Metaphysics and started telling his friends about it. He also started asking them what metaphysics was, since he still wasn’t entirely sure.
The answer he kept getting: physics deals with things you can touch and see: gravity, tables, chairs. Meta is the Greek word for “above and beyond.” Metaphysics is everything else: the things you can’t touch or see or measure.
“Oh,” David said. “Thanks for telling me.”
He put the license back in the file and waited to find out what to do with it.
The renewal
A year passed. Nothing remarkable happened with the license. David considered letting it expire. Then he decided no, he would renew it. He called the police station.
The secretary answered. He told her he wanted to renew his metaphysical license.
“You don’t need to renew that,” she said. “It’s a lifelong license.”
He pushed back. He told her he suspected they wanted another $50.
“Trust me,” she said. “You never have to renew it. It’s lifelong.”
He hung up.
Four days later, the sergeant called.
“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve revoked your license. You failed to renew it in time.”
David told him about the conversation with the secretary. The sergeant said she didn’t know what she was talking about. And now, if David wanted to reinstate his license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, the process was somewhat more involved than it had been before.
The fee was $1,500.
Additionally, city officials would visit his office and inspect every business within 300 yards to make sure they were all up to code. Additionally, David would need to appear before the Santa Cruz City Planning Commission.
David walked over to the planning commission. An elderly woman came out from behind the counter. She recognized him, his name had appeared in the local papers a few times, human interest stories.
“Are you David Thiermann?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
She explained the process. The $1,500. The inspections. And one more item: he would then need to appear before the full Santa Cruz City Council, where the members would cross-examine him to determine whether he actually qualified as a metaphysician.
David looked at her. He did not have $1,500. He told her he had some appointments and asked if he could get back to her.
He walked out. He never went back.
The story that didn’t happen
This is the part David still thinks about.
If he had had the $1,500, he would have paid it. He knew everyone on the city council. He would have appeared before them and subjected himself to cross-examination on the subject of metaphysics in which he held a license, from the police station, permit number 002. He was certain it would have landed on the front page of every local newspaper in town.
He still has the license. It is still in the file, under M.
He mentioned, in our conversation, that he might go back to the police station now. Just to see. Just to find out if the story is still available.
The sage
Not long after David graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1971, he was back in town and ran into Chancellor Dean McHenry (the man who had built the university) in a local restaurant. McHenry stopped when he saw him. He looked at David for a moment and said: “You have become a sage.”
David felt it land. He didn’t think about it much at the time.
He has been thinking about it lately.
A sage, he’s learned, is a wise soul keen to learn, someone who never mistakes the credential for the education, who treats curiosity as an obligation rather than a personality trait. David’s website is called Santa Cruz University. He describes himself as the only student enrolled there. Every client who sits across from him is a professor.
He has been practicing metaphysics, the things above and beyond what can be touched or measured, for his entire adult life. He did not need the license.
Permit number 002 is still in the file, in case someone ever asks.
Why this matters
David kept the Spiritual Consultants listing for years. He tracked his Yellow Pages categories the way a scientist tracks data — note which ones produce a return, cut the ones that don’t. Spiritual Consultants produced no billable clients and cost money every year.
He kept it anyway. Not because he expected a return. Because he believed, on no particular evidence, that it was building toward something.
That is a specific kind of patience that encore careers require. The thing you maintain for years that doesn’t pay, the connection you hold onto, the skill you keep practicing, the listing you refuse to delete, because you sense it’s going somewhere. Some investments are measured in what they return this year. Others are measured in the story they eventually produce.
David got his story. He just didn’t pay the $1,500.
Where we go next
Two threads are still waiting: the Tanzanian woman David met in 1965 — the nurse who studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent — and the question of what curiosity looks like when it becomes a practice rather than a personality trait.
We’re going in on both.
David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He holds a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, permit number 002. The license is in a file. The file is in a storage container. The story is here.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).