What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Oz Pearlman’s Magical Powers

Every few decades, the pop culture machine spits out a person claiming to possess supernatural powers. In the 1980s, it was swami Uri Geller who folded the spoon. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was “mediums” like John Edward who were believed to speak to people’s deceased loved ones. In 2025, we have Oz Pearlman. To be fair, unlike the rest of these examples, Pearlman doesn’t claim supernatural powers himself, but many people seem to take his stage explanation of his mentalist tricks as the unvarnished truth. They are wrong.

Oz (pronounced “Oh’s”) has one hell of a shot. The 43-year-old seems like an unassuming nerd, until he starts reading people’s minds. In the years following his third place in the America’s Got TalentPearlman has done things like naming NFL player AJ Brown’s first childhood crush during a performance for the Philadelphia Eagles; guess who John Cena was thinking on the Today Show; and perhaps most famously, correctly guessing Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN on an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast.

It’s entirely reasonable to assume that Oz Pearlman can’t actually read people’s minds, and “A Magician Doesn’t Actually Do Magic” doesn’t really make headlines anyway. But the real story isn’t Pearlman, it’s the reaction he receives: As more and more media sources feature him and more people become fans, it becomes clear that a lot of people who should know better are falling for his actions.

What can you tell from body language?

In his TED talk and numerous interviews, Pearlman claims to have “reverse engineered the human mind” and to be able to tell what people are thinking through their body language, micro-expressions, and other physical signals imperceptible to mortals. “I don’t read minds, I just read people,” Pearlman says. This may sound scientific, but it is not.

Although psychologists can sometimes interpret general emotions from micro-expressions and body language, there’s no evidence that these can help guess specific thoughts, including the word you’re thinking, your PINs, or your childhood crushes. At best, body language gives you a vague idea of ​​your mood, but it fails even on broader tests, like revealing whether you’re being lied to.

In other words, all his “talk about reverse engineering the mind” are just rumors from a magician, but they are often reported as fact or left unexamined by the media, as you can see in this recent article. 60 minutes puff piece on Pearlman. This has led many people to believe that it is actually possible to read minds if you know how to do it (and of course Pearlman will sell you a book that can teach you). But Oz Pearlman doesn’t read minds, people, body language, or micro-emotions. He performs magic tricks, and ancient magic tricks at that.

Oz Pearlman’s Carnival Tricks

As with any type of debunking, no one can prove otherwise, so I can’t say for sure that Pearlman isn’t it read people’s postures, but if Pearlman could read people’s minds by the way they hold hands or whatever, why would he only prove it by doing variations on carnival mentalism gags that have been around for centuries? His gestures, nods and pauses are not signs of mind reading: they are stage works. Pearlman’s tricks will work whether the subject is expressive or stiff, because the outcome is already controlled by pre-show work, audience manipulation, and clever tricks.

Pearlman often puts a high-tech spin on old stuff, and he Really good at what he does. For example, check out this tricky trick where random numbers entered into an iPhone calculator add up exactly to the serial number on a randomly chosen dollar bill.

Here’s how to do it: First, Pearlman engages in the time-honored mentalist tradition of “sneaking a glance.” Here he is quickly memorizing the serial number on the random invoice:

Credit: Bussin with the Boys-YouTube

Then he asks for a phone to use as a calculator. If you turn your iPhone’s calculator sideways, as Pearlman does here,

Credit: Bussin with the Boys-YouTube

it activates scientific mode, which allows you to store a number. (Try it with your own phone if you like) Pearlman then quickly enters the serial number he just saw, clicks “store” and returns the phone, so it can be retrieved later. That’s the whole thing. All the chatter and dates and math and everything else is just window dressing.

The rest of his tricks have similar explanations: forced draws, sneaky glances, and magician’s tricks explain almost all of his mentalism, except for his most mind-blowing tricks, like guessing Joe Rogan’s PIN. But these have an even simpler explanation.

How Pearlman (Probably) Guessed Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN

Tricks aimed at individuals, such as the PIN number or the name of a childhood crush, are performed by learning this information before the show begins. Pearlman is likely using a mentalism technique that has been around since at least the 1800s: using an advance team to gather “secret” information about prominent members of the audience well before the curtain rises.

I’m not saying Pearlman hired someone to follow Rogan or used a thermal camera pointed at a keypad to get his PIN, but it’s possible, and that’s what I would have done. All Pearlman needs to wow everyone is a single “unknowable” piece of information about an important person—the name of a childhood crush or a high school teacher, for example—and that information can be learned in advance through old-fashioned means like interviews with childhood friends, consulting a high school yearbook, or employing tech hacks. Think of it this way: hackers use social engineering and technical exploits to obtain secret passwords at any time; why wouldn’t a magician do the same sort of thing?

With these kinds of tricks, we often only see the second part of the illusion. The first part, before the show, might involve asking the mark to visit a seemingly innocent website (actually the magician’s own site) to look up the name of a childhood crush. The magician can then read the “most recent searches” from their phone and extract the answer “out of thin air”.

This doesn’t always go well; like in the clip below from “Bussin with the Boys”. Skip to 3:42, and you’ll see Mark reveals that he’s already done a web search for the person he’s thinking of and that he misspelled the person’s name. Pearlman makes the exact same spelling mistake, ruining the result:

Perhaps the most astonishing part is how smoothly Oz walks away from the botched trick and still leaves the audience amazed; guy is Really good at this shit.

The Uri Geller effect

In the 1970s and 1980s, medium Uri Geller held a similar place in popular culture as Pearlman does today. Geller was a frequent guest on daytime and late-night talk shows, and his appearances were guaranteed to increase ratings. Hosts rarely challenged his claims of supernatural power, although any magician could tell you how he performed his spoon-bending tricks. Like Geller, Pearlman doesn’t lie about bending spoons, he lies about how spoons bend.

In 2025, Pearlman couldn’t credibly claim that otherworldly forces were helping him bend spoons like Uri Geller could in the 1970s, but he can make people believe that micro-expressions and knowledge of human psychology will help you guess the PIN of someone’s vending machine. And unlike the 1970s, there seems to be no Johnny Carson willing to call his work bullshit.

I’m not picking on Oz Pearlman: he’s a very talented artist, but everyone should know that a magician cannot be trusted. They entertain by making the impossible seem real, but when so-called serious media like 60 minutes Don’t even bother with a token reaction to a magician’s specious claims, there’s a problem.