A good magician can ask you to pick a card, any card, and they'll tell you what you're holding in your hand. But a mentalist will ask you to picture any card from an imaginary deck and tell you which card is in your mind. Right now, the mentalist on people's minds and going viral for it is a 43-year-old father of five named Oz Pearlman. Oz insists he does not have supernatural powers. He reads people. He reads them so well that when we met him this past spring, his head games had me jumping out of the chair mid-interview and mystified celebrities, billionaires, and athletes.
The story will continue in a moment.
And now, please welcome to the stage, mentalist and mind reader Oz Pearlman. The Robin Hood Foundation Gala draws the kind of crowd that ponies up $72 million at one dinner, with athletes like NFL quarterback Russell Wilson in attendance.
Question for you is, when I was young, I had a poster on my wall of someone, and you're no way in hell you're going to get this. He said, 'No way in hell.' I didn't say those words. He said those words. There's no way. Which means there's no way it was a football player. Also notice the nerve is twitching with the hands. Hands here. Hands here. Always a female. Is it a female?
Oz Pearlman went to work on him.
I don't read minds. I read people. Here's what I want you to do, Russell. Count the number of letters in the first name just to yourself. Not out loud. Just to yourself. There's the tell, right? You call an audible. He finished counting and he looked up. Six letters, isn't it?
Russell, you're sitting there. Sixth grade. You're looking up. She's looking back at you. She was. Tell us all who was in that poster. Say it.
Shania Twain. Shania Twain.
There's no way. There's no way. You'd think a room full of millionaires, including tech titan Alexis Ohanian, might be hard to pull one over on.
Turn around, Warlock. Everybody, I mean, what? You're a wizard. Come on, man.
But Oz says this is his perfect audience.
People that are very intelligent are much easier because their mind is regimented in a certain way. Like I performed for Nobel laureates and you go, 'This is one of the most intelligent people on the planet.' I go, 'Hook, line, and sinker. Let's go. This is going to be a cakewalk.'
Yeah. Because they think a certain way. It is so much easier to fool.
Oz is the first to admit his act is based on one big lie.
The lie is that I can read your mind.
You're sitting here today telling me you're not mind reading.
That's correct. And it's funny because some people, even though I go to great extremes to tell people that I am not a psychic or supernatural, I have people that come up to me after shows who are at the highest level where I can't say names because I don't want to embarrass people. I'll say names of like CEOs of major Fortune 100 companies who have called me and say, 'Can you help me on negotiating a deal soon?'
So, you going to tell me how you do this?
Uh, I'm not going to tell you that. That doesn't do well for my job security.
But he does drop hints. Oz says he studies body language to read what's going on in someone's mind.
I can always see it when someone's eyes shift. Also, the lingering hands and pockets, always an indicator of another guy, guy-to-guy interaction. Is it a guy? Of course it is. I'm getting you to make very specific choices. Right. In my show, I guess a lot of things such as numbers, such as words, such as names, things that have seemingly an infinite amount of possibilities. But do they? No. I've figured out how to kind of take a piece of information that seems too impossible. I can build up in a big way and create a lot more of a limited subset than you think.
When I perform, I explain to people what I'm doing. I like to leave breadcrumbs along the way. If you feel like you know a little bit, then you're hooked now. You're intrigued. It keeps getting in your brain. It cycles over and over. It drives you crazy for a few weeks or months and you tell other people. And that's my goal, right? I think the first number of your code's a one, isn't it? Your real PIN code.
My ATM... ATM PIN code? Why would I tell you that on the air?
In June, Oz guessed Joe Rogan's ATM PIN code, leaving the podcaster befuddled.
How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM PIN code?
He looked like he wanted to punch you.
I'm skeptical because I got that PIN code in the mail.
He's calling his bank right now and being like, 'Yo, do you know this? Has this guy been playing the long game?' Yeah. I don't like that.
Oz says it's skepticism from the audience that is key to making his act work. I'm sure you've gone online and seen some of the community of critics out there who have accused you of wearing a fake thumb to be able to secretly write something. You're laughing. To go so far as to have someone on your team follow someone like a Joe Rogan around so that you could secretly see his ATM code before you sat down face to face.
How about you give me a yes or no?
That's actually not true or false. First of all, I can't answer every single one, but man, if you think that I followed Joe Rogan around to get his ATM PIN code, I love that answer. But no, I did not follow Joe Rogan around. If you have these theories, that means I'm in your brain. I'm taking up real estate in your mind and you're thinking about it. Name either hearts. Just say hearts or diamonds.
The real estate empire he's built up in his audience's mind is the result of thousands of hours of repetition in front of a mirror and more than 30 years of an obsession with his craft.
The Pearlman family immigrated from Israel and moved to Michigan. At 13, Oz's parents took him on a cruise ship vacation.
I had never seen a magician in person. I was brought on stage. He performed this trick with me as the person, and I was blown away.
Back on land, he checked out every magic book he could find and got a part-time job so he could buy every trick in the neighborhood magic shop.
Turn it over. That's the only card in the deck.
As his audience grew, Oz dropped the card tricks and turned to the mind games of mentalism. What you're doing is not magic.
So I would describe it as a subset of magic. I do magic of the mind. I no longer need to see how when I look there, you look there. That's the number one thing you learn in magic. Misdirection. When you make an elephant appear or disappear, the elephant was always there. The elephant didn't really vanish into thin air. We all know that. I made you look in the place I want you to look by using skills. When you take magic to a higher and higher level, you start to get rid of all the props.
You said, 'I like putting words in people's heads.' How do you do that?
How you're going to think is shockingly under my control. It's almost like the way a puppet gets moved around. Certain moments where you're right now about to change your mind and I move you in another direction. You don't realize that you're about to do something, but your mind works in a certain way.
