John Oliver really, really doesn’t like psychics. So much so, in fact, he went on a 20-minute rant about the profession during Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” in which he told viewers that the psychic industry pulls in $2.2 billion a year and that one recent poll shows four in 10 Americans believe in what he calls a scam — including, apparently, Matt Lauer.
Oliver cut to an old clip of the now-ousted “Today” show host receiving a reading from “Hollywood Medium” Tyler Henry, which Lauer seems to genuinely believe he is connecting with his dead father from beyond the grave through the psychic.
“It’s clear that Matt Lauer is touched there — and this time he didn’t even have to pressure a subordinate into doing it,” Oliver jokes.
“Look, maybe Tyler Henry genuinely accessed the after-life, an action that would fundamentally change our understanding of everything on earth,” he continued. “Or maybe he just Googled ‘Matt Lauer dad’ and hit the f–king jackpot. So to recap, hot reading: researching people beforehand, the even lazier skill than cold reading, which basically involves indiscriminately shouting the names of dead Irishmen in a hotel ballroom. And what’s surprising is, whichever technique Tyler used, Lauer fell for it. And he is smart, he’s a sophisticated manhattan sex monster. But he fell for it.”
He fell for it so much so that Oliver then showed a clip of Lauer telling his co-hosts he went home and cried over the reading.
“Wow, everything about that is a little strange, not least the fact that it is weird to envision a scenario in which something happened at the ‘Today’ show offices, and then Matt Lauer was the one who went home and cried,” Oliver added.
And then — just because Oliver really wants to take down these self-professed mindreaders — he showed a bunch of “clips of psychics f–king up.” But honestly that was just because “it’s really funny.”
Watch the video above.