What People Are Doing Wrong This Week: Oz Perlman’s Magical Powers
Every few decades, the pop culture machine unleashes a figure claiming 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 communicated with deceased relatives. In 2025, Oz Perlman emerged. To be fair, unlike the others in these examples, Perlman himself doesn’t claim supernatural powers, but many seem to take his stage explanations for his mentalist tricks at face value. They’re wrong.
Oz (pronounced “O’s”) has one hell of a personality. The 43-year-old seems like a shy, nerdy guy until he starts reading people’s minds. Since finishing third on “America’s Got Talent ,” Perlman has done a ton of things: name-dropping NFL player A.J. Brown’s first childhood crush while playing for the Philadelphia Eagles; guessing who John Cena was thinking of 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 perfectly reasonable to assume that Oz Perlman can’t actually read minds, and the headline “The Magician Who Doesn’t Really Perform Magic” is unlikely to attract attention. But the issue isn’t Perlman, but the reaction he provokes: the more media coverage he generates, the more people become his fans, and the more obvious it becomes that many who should be aware of what’s going on are falling for his tricks.
How much can you tell from body language?
In his TED talk and numerous interviews, Perlman claims to have “reverse-engineered the human mind” and is able to detect people’s thoughts based on their body language, microexpressions, and other physical cues invisible to mortals. “I don’t read minds, I just read people,” Perlman says. It may sound scientific, but it’s not.
While psychologists can sometimes interpret general emotions from microexpressions and body language, there’s no evidence that this can predict specific thoughts, including the word you’re thinking, your PIN numbers, or your childhood hobbies. At best, body language provides a vague indication of mood, but it’s not even effective in general tests, such as determining whether someone is lying to you .
In other words, all his talk about “reverse engineering the mind” is just magician’s chatter, but the media often presents it as fact or ignores it, as evidenced by a recent laudatory article about Perlman on “60 Minutes.” This has led many to believe that mind reading is indeed possible if you know how (and, of course, Perlman will sell you a book that teaches it ). But Oz Perlman doesn’t read minds, body language, or micro-emotions. He performs magic tricks, and old-fashioned ones at that.
Oz Perlman’s Carnival Stunts
As with any disproof, no one can prove the contrary, so I can’t say for sure that Perlman doesn’t read people’s postures. But if Perlman could read people’s thoughts by the way they hold their hands or something else, why did he only prove it with variations of carnival mentalist pranks that have been around for centuries? His gestures, nods, and pauses aren’t signs of mind reading—they’re just stagecraft. Perlman’s tricks work regardless of whether the subject is expressive or restrained, because the outcome is already controlled by the pre-show, audience manipulation, and clever tricks.
Perlman often gives old tricks a high-tech twist, and he’s truly a master of his craft. For example, check out this intricate trick where random numbers entered into an iPhone calculator add up to the serial number of a randomly selected dollar bill.
Here’s how it’s done: First, Perlman resorts to a long-standing mentalist tradition of “sneak peeking.” Here he is, quickly memorizing the serial number of a random bill:
He then asks for the phone to use as a calculator. If you turn your iPhone calculator sideways, as Perlman does,
It turns on scientific mode, which allows you to save a number. (Try it on your phone if you like.) Then Perlman quickly enters the serial number he just saw, hits “Save,” and returns the phone so it can be opened later. That’s the whole trick. All that chatter, dates, and math is just decoration.
The rest of his tricks are explained in a similar way: nudging, cunning looks, and magic tricks explain almost all of his mentalism, with the exception of the most mind-blowing feats, like guessing Joe Rogan’s PIN. But they have an even simpler explanation.
How Perlman (Probably) Guessed Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN
Tricks designed to target specific individuals, such as a PIN number or the name of a childhood sweetheart, are pulled off by learning this information before the show begins. Pearlman likely uses a mentalism technique that has been around since at least the 19th century: using an advance team to gather “secret” information on important audience members long before the show begins.
I’m not saying Perlman hired someone to spy on Rogan or used a thermal camera aimed at his keypad to learn his PIN, but it’s possible, and it’s exactly what I would do. All Perlman needs to blow everyone’s minds is one piece of “unknowable” information about a famous person—say, the name of a childhood sweetheart or a high school teacher—and that it can be learned in advance through old-fashioned means, like talking to childhood friends, reading a high school yearbook, or using technical tricks. Think of it this way: hackers use social engineering and technical vulnerabilities to obtain secret passwords all the time; why wouldn’t a magician do the same?
When using such tricks, you often only see the second part of the illusion. The first, preliminary part might involve asking the victim to visit a seemingly innocent website (actually the magician’s own website) and search for the name of a childhood sweetheart. The magician can then read the “recent search queries” on their phone and derive an answer “out of thin air.”
Things don’t always go smoothly, as in the clip from “Bussin with the Boys” below. Skip to 3:42 and you’ll see a marker indicating he’d previously searched online for the person he was looking for and misspelled their name. Perlman makes the exact same spelling error, ruining the result:
Perhaps the most amazing thing is how smoothly Oz walks away from a stunt gone wrong and still leaves the audience amazed; the dude is really good at this shit.
The Uri Geller Effect
In the 1970s and 1980s, spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller occupied a similar place in popular culture to Perlman today. Geller was a frequent guest on daytime and late-night talk shows, and his performances were guaranteed to boost ratings. Hosts rarely disputed his claims of supernatural powers, even though any magician could tell you how he performed his signature tricks. Like Geller, Perlman lies not about how he bends spoons, but about how they bend.
In 2025, Perlman couldn’t convincingly claim that otherworldly forces help him bend spoons like Uri Geller in the 1970s, but he can convince people that microexpressions and a knowledge of human psychology can help him guess someone’s ATM PIN. And, unlike in the 1970s, there doesn’t seem to be a Johnny Carson ready to call his work bullshit .
I’m not criticizing Oz Pearlman—he’s a very skilled performer—but everyone should know that magicians can’t be trusted. They entertain by making the impossible seem real, but when supposedly serious journalism outlets like 60 Minutes don’t even bother to symbolically refute a magician’s false claims, that’s a problem.