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

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Every few decades, the pop culture machine spits out a person who purports to have supernatural powers. In the 1980s, it was spoon-bending swami Uri Geller. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was “mediums” like John Edward, who supposedly talked to people’s dead relatives. In 2025, we have Oz Pearlman. To be fair, unlike the rest of these examples, Pearlman doesn’t claim supernatural powers himself, but a lot of people seem to be taking his stage patter explanation for his mentalist tricks as the unvarnished truth. They’re wrong.

Oz (pronounced “Oh’s”) has a hell of a schtick. The 43-year-old dude seems like an unassuming nerd, until he starts reading people’s minds. In the years since he took third place on America’s Got Talent, Pearlman has done things like name NFL player A.J. Brown’s first childhood crush during a performance for the Philadelphia Eagles; guess who John Cena was thinking of on the Today Show; and maybe most famously, correctly divine Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN on an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast. 

It’s only reasonable to assume that Oz Pearlman can’t actually read people’s minds, and “Magician Not Actually Doing Magic” isn’t much of a headline anyway. But the real story isn’t Pearlman, it’s the reaction he’s getting: As more media sources feature him and more people become fans, it’s becoming clear that a lot people who should know better are falling for his act.

How much can you tell from body language?

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

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

In other words, all his “reverse engineering the mind talk” is just patter from a magician, but it’s often reported as fact or left unexamined by media, as you can see in this recent 60 Minutes puff piece on Pearlman. This has led many to believe it’s actually possible to read minds if you know how (and of course Pearlman will sell you a book that can teach you). But Oz Pearlman is not reading minds, people, body language, or micro-emotions. He’s performing magic tricks—and old ones, at that.

Oz Pearlman’s carnival tricks

As with any kind of debunking, no one can prove a negative, so I can’t say for sure that Pearlman isn’t reading people’s postures, but if Pearlman could read people’s thoughts by how they hold their 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 aren’t signs of mind-reading—they’re stage work. Pearlman’s tricks will work whether the subject is expressive or stiff, because the outcome is already controlled through pre-show work, audience manipulation, and clever gimmicks.

Pearlman often puts a high tech spin on old tricks, and he’s really good at what he does. For instance, check out this involved trick where random numbers entered on an iPhone calculator add up to exactly the serial number on a randomly chosen dollar bill.

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

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

it turns on scientific mode, and that lets you store a number. (Try it with your own phone if you wanna) Pearlman then quickly enters the serial number he’s just seen, hits “store” and hands the phone back, so that it can be pulled up later. That’s the whole trick. All the patter and dates and math whatnot are window dressing.

The rest of his tricks have similar explanations: forced picks, sneaky looks, and magician’s gimmicks explain almost all of his mentalism—except his most mind-blowing tricks, like guessing Joe Rogan’s PIN number. But those have an even easier explanation.

How Pearlman (probably) guessed Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN

Tricks aimed at individuals, like the PIN number or the name of a childhood crush, are done by learning this information before the show begins. Pearlman is likely employing a mentalism technique that’s been around since at least the 1800s: using an advance team to gather “secret” information about prominent audience members long before the curtain goes up.

I’m not saying Pearlman hired someone to follow Rogan around 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 blow everyone’s mind is a single piece of “unknowable” information about a prominent person—the name of a childhood crush or a high school teacher, say—and that these can be learned in advance through old-fashioned means like interviews with childhood friends, checking out a high school yearbook, or by employing technical hacks.

With these kinds of tricks, you’re often only seeing the second part of the illusion. The first, pre-show part might involve asking the mark visit an innocent-seeming website (actually the magician’s own site) to search for the name of a childhood crush. The magician can then read the “most recent searches” from his phone and pull the answer out “thin air.” Think of it this way: hackers use social engineering and technical exploits to get secret passwords all the time; why wouldn’t a magician do the same kinds of things?

The Uri Geller effect

In the 1970s and ’80s, spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller occupied a similar place in popular culture as Pearlman does now. Geller was a frequent guest on daytime and late night talks shows, and his appearances were guaranteed to raise ratings. Hosts rarely challenged his claims of supernatural power, even though any magician could tell you how he did his signature spoon-bending tricks. Like Geller, Pearlman isn’t lying about bending spoons, he’s lying about how the spoons are getting bent.

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

I’m not knocking Oz Pearlman’s hustle—he’s a very skilled performer—but anyone should know that you can’t trust a magician. They entertain by making the impossible look real, but when supposedly serious journalistic outlets like 60 Minutes don’t even bother with a token pushback about a magician’s specious claims, there’s a problem.