Bryan Greene

Fast forward to the 19th century, and you get the Victorian spiritualist movement.

Seances and Ouija boards, people in velvet curtains pretending to summon Aunt Edna from the afterlife.

Famous frauds like the Fox sisters made bank knocking on wood and claiming it was the spirits.

Eventually, one of them admitted, yeah, it was just us cracking our toes.

That's right, two sisters cracking their toes and claiming to speak with the dead.

In 2025, they'd either have a show on A&E or a million-dollar foot finder account.

Without belaboring the point, weird people have been saying weird shit for a long time.

And us humans, we're willing to listen.

What, I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, are we not?

When we get to the 21st century, radio and TV gave psychics a stage.

Jean Dixon in the 1960s claimed that she predicted JFK's assassination.

Spoiler alert, she also predicted World War III would start in 1958.

She was wrong, obviously, and off by about 73 years.

It's really going to start in 2025.

Not exactly batting a thousand there, Jean.

It wasn't until the rise of 1-900 numbers and infomercials in the mid-to-late 80s that young enterprising scamsters found a new way to get money out of your pocket.

While I found no evidence to give me the answer about who was the first 1-900 psychic, it was no surprise that PFN, or the Psychic Friends Network,

Founded by Baltimore businessman Mike Olasky, is one of the first and extremely successful pioneers in the psychic hotline business.

Michael Lasky was a New York ad man who basically invented psychic infomercials.

He co-founded that PFN or Psychic Friends Network in 1991 with Dionne Warwick as the celebrity face.