Search icon

Movies & TV

27th Feb 2019

WATCH: Last Week Tonight takes down the entire industry of psychics

Rory Cashin

‘A vast underworld of unscrupulous vultures.’

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has become increasingly brilliant at tackling or breaking down issues that range from the hugely political (their episode last week focused on if there was a potential way out of Brexit), to something that some folk may find more personal.

Which isn’t to say that psychics is something relating just to an individual, as Last Week Tonight reveals it is actually a multi-billion dollar industry.

That being said, there is a different approach to it in the States than there is in, say, Ireland.

Over there, you’ll find multiple TV channels devoting hours of their programming to proclaimed psychics and their day-to-day lives.

Over here, psychics tend to maintain a bit more mysticism about them, inviting paying customers to book days or weeks in advance.

Either way, John Oliver breaks them down, showing that there are two different ways that psychics seem to “work”, and explaining them both in simple terms, as well as giving some incredibly, jaw-dropping examples of when their psychic readings go horribly, horribly wrong.

Check out the segment in full right here:

Clip via LastWeekTonight

LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge