“Look for mirrors.”
When I told some friends I would be profiling the mentalist Oz Pearlman — with the vague promise of being victimized by his mind-blowing mind-reading act — I received a list of instructions like the one above.
“When you talk to Oz, he (or others) might be trying to plant ideas in your mind right before,” read a text from one buddy. “Don’t fall for it.”
And from another: “Where are you meeting him? Make sure he doesn’t pick the place, and make sure you get there first. Don’t sit with your back toward a window. Someone with binoculars could be feeding info to Oz via earpiece.”
I explained to my friends that I was interviewing Pearlman, not hired by a competing magician to do opposition research. But their desperate fascination with this piece speaks to Pearlman’s hold on those prone to YouTube rabbit holes.
Over the past couple years, Pearlman, 43, has become Hollywood’s hottest magician, with tricks that are impossible to comprehend. He guessed a secret code word only known by Howard Stern and Valerie Harper. He deduced Joe Rogan’s ATM pin code. And he prompted “The Tonight Show” to pick a celebrity at random — and somehow compelled Jimmy Fallon and hundreds of his audience members to write down “Will Smith.” His countless celebrity-reaction videos and WTF-level tricks have made Pearlman the David Blaine of the TikTok era, without all the stomach-turning stunts.
“Some people are like, ‘I’m gonna debunk you,’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, debunk me!” Pearlman tells me at a downtown Brooklyn café over egg-and-cheese sandwiches. “That’s like going to a kid who’s sitting on Santa’s lap in a mall and going, ‘That’s not the real Santa.”
What Pearlman means to say is that of course he’s not reading your mind. (He tells me this right before reading my mind.) “A lot of very intelligent people think I am a psychic or supernatural. But mentalism is built on the same roots of magic, which are deception, misdirection, psychology, influence,” he says. “This is a learnable skill. It’s repeatable. It’s based in science.”
Sitting across from me, Pearlman is wide-eyed and motormouthed. He’s highly charismatic and media trained but doesn’t seem rehearsed or scandal shy. He has no doubt done research on me, peppering into our conversation details about recent stories I’ve written.
Pearlman has been everywhere the past few years. A former Wall Street trader who left finance to pursue magic, he broke out on “America’s Got Talent” before building a vast media presence. His recent press blitz has included appearances on CNN, “The View” and “60 Minutes.” He’s performed for NFL teams, delivered a TED Talk and landed on The New York Times bestseller list. He’s read the minds of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Tom Brady. Stern called him a “devil worshipper”; Rogan told him, “You are a witch. We’re going to have to kill you.”
While Pearlman has performed for some of the richest and most famous people on Earth and reached tens if not hundreds of millions of people online, he rarely performs in public. Unlike most entertainers, he makes nearly all of his money behind closed doors — his entire digital presence serving as a marketing campaign to drive up his fee for corporate events. “I have been more successful than almost anybody you could name with a Vegas residency besides, like, three or four names in the world,” Pearlman says, spinning a glass of orange juice. “But you may not have heard of me because I didn’t take the normal path, selling tickets. If you’re doing 140 corporate events and you’re charging more than what people make for Vegas shows, you’re actually more successful business-wise, but it’s under the radar. I’m like a B2B.”
But 2026, to continue the business terminology, is the year Pearlman goes public.
This holiday season, the magician will add another entry to his résumé with a Netflix special. He hopes the show, which will tape in July at the Brooklyn Paramount, will give audiences a better sense of who he is as a person. But Pearlman won’t just perform mentalism on the thousands of live audience members in New York. “My hope is for the special to be groundbreaking,” he says. “So I’m also going to interact with the people at home and see if I can get inside their heads through their TVs.”
And in another consumer-facing move, Pearlman has a couple dates in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He says the shows are a “test run” for a tour later this year and a potential residency at Wynn.
Pearlman is also gearing up to perform for one of the toughest crowds in America — he’s headlining the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but Trump does what Trump wants,” Pearlman says. “If I can read his mind, not one person will think that the president was in on it.”
He hopes to perform a new trick on Trump. “I believe the whole world will see it,” he says. “The right 15-second clip with him will be seen across the globe. I have to take a big swing and go for something truly impossible.”
This year marks the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump will attend during either of his presidencies. Whereas the event has historically been hosted by a comedian, last year’s scheduled entertainer, Amber Ruffin, was fired preemptively due to concerns about her political humor. Pearlman, the first magician to headline, hopes the gig serves as an escape from politics. “You’re not going to be able to hold truth to power at a dinner gala and change things — no offense,” he says. “I think what people want is to be entertained, to break bread, to celebrate the freedom of the press.”
Pearlman with Kim Kardashian
Courtesy Image
Pearlman lives near this Brooklyn coffeehouse with his wife (and manager), Elisa Rosen, and their five children. In his free time, he casually breaks world records in running. On the phone weeks after our breakfast, he says between sharp breaths, “I hope you can hear me. I’m doing a marathon Sunday, so I’m running around Vegas right now, just warming up.”
Pearlman fell in love with magic at 13, when he was on a cruise ship with his family and a magician pulled him onstage and performed a trick on him. After that, he devoured every book on magic at his local Michigan library and became a mini master at coin and card tricks. At 14, he sharpened his craft doing magic at restaurants, which helped him pay his way through the University of Michigan, where he dove headfirst into mentalism. After college, he got a job at Merrill Lynch, and he continued to moonlight as a restaurant magician until he worked up the courage — and event planner con- tacts — to pursue mentalism full time.
Pearlman says his act appeals to everyone because “wonder and amazement is a universal language.” “You could drop me off right now on any continent not speaking any language, and I could connect with somebody in 60 seconds,” he says. “That’s the superpower of, like, Superman.”
But his style doesn’t rub everyone the right way. On “The View,” he correctly guessed the ATM code of anchor Sara Haines, whose jaw remained dropped in a prolonged moment of rage. She later claimed Pearlman had agreed not to guess her code, calling the trick “a betrayal.”
“I privately apologized to her, because I never want to make somebody uncomfortable,” Pearlman says. But he stands by the fact that he never agreed not to guess her code. (“I assure you, my memory is better than anyone’s.”) “Plus, you can change your PIN code. It literally takes 30 seconds on your phone. And they say to do it every year. So I don’t think I ruined anyone’s life. I’m curious if I’ll ever be back on that show.” He adds that the clip got tens of millions of impressions online and was “tremendous press.” “If I went back in time, would I do it again? I probably wouldn’t, but I think it was good for everyone.”
Pearlman enjoys having a sense of danger in his act, and he relates it to Alex Honnold’s live skyscraper climb on Netflix. “My palms were sweating while watching that because one wrong move equals death,” he says. “For my act, it’s not death. But the risk is there. I want you to watch like, ‘Is he gonna get it wrong?””
Things rarely go wrong, but when they do, Pearlman is usually able to make it seem like part of his plan. On a “Today” appearance, Pearlman asked Al Roker to pick a celebrity to run for president (the mentalist was prepared to reveal an undershirt that read “T-Swift for Prez”). Roker unexpectedly selected George Clooney, and Pearlman smoothly redirected him to his next choice: Swift.
The morning we met, Pearlman made one minor flub that, I promise you, made the entire trick even more impressive. At the beginning of our breakfast, Pearlman asked me to think of a random person from my past and a memory I associate with them. He told me to write the name and the memory in my Notes app. My first instinct was a boy named Shawn (whom I haven’t spoken to in 20 years) before I quickly pivoted to a friend named Sloane, whom I’d gone skiing with. I wrote down her name along with “Mammoth Trip” on my phone. An hour later, Pearlman took a Sharpie to my notebook and wrote two things: “Trip to Mammoth” and “Shawn.” While technically a misstep, the result made the trick more confounding because I never even wrote down Shawn’s name. It never left my brain.
As we plan to depart from the café, Pearlman has one more trick he wants to try on me. He asks me to think of someone I’d like to interview and then think of someone new — and then someone new again. Then he asks me to Google this person’s name, stare at a photo of them and close the tab. I look up “Larry David.” (Reader, I was shielding the screen as Pearlman looked away, and he never so much as touched my phone — or did he?)
“Got it?” Pearlman asks, shaking my hand as he gets into the back seat of a black car. “We’ll come back to this sometime in the future.”
The future came soon. An hour later, my phone buzzed with a text from Pearlman’s wife.
“Oz had a great time today at the interview and asked that I send over this photo!”
Pearlman with Larry David
Courtesy Image
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