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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Credit: Bussin with the Boys-YouTubeThen he asks for a phone to use as a calculator. If you turn your iPhone calculator to the side, as Pearlman does here,
Credit: Bussin with the Boys-YouTubeThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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