\n\t\u201cWhen you talk to Oz, he (or others) might be trying to plant ideas in your mind right before,\u201d read a text from one buddy. \u201cDon\u2019t fall for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd from another: \u201cWhere are you meeting him? Make sure he doesn\u2019t pick the place, and make sure you get there first. Don\u2019t sit with your back toward a window. Someone with binoculars could be feeding info to Oz via earpiece.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tI 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\u2019s hold on those prone to YouTube rabbit holes.<\/p>\n
\n\tOver the past couple years, Pearlman, 43, has become Hollywood\u2019s 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\u2019s ATM pin code. And he prompted \u201cThe Tonight Show\u201d to pick a celebrity at random \u2014\u00a0and somehow compelled Jimmy Fallon and hundreds of his audience members to write down \u201cWill Smith.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSome people are like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna debunk you,\u2019 and I\u2019m like, \u2018Dude, debunk me!\u201d Pearlman tells me at a downtown Brooklyn caf\u00e9 over egg-and-cheese sandwiches. \u201cThat\u2019s like going to a kid who\u2019s sitting on Santa\u2019s lap in a mall and going, \u2018That\u2019s not the real Santa.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat Pearlman means to say is that of course he\u2019s not reading your mind. (He tells me this right before reading my mind.) \u201cA 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,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is a learnable skill. It\u2019s repeatable. It\u2019s based in science.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tSitting across from me, Pearlman is wide-eyed and motormouthed. He\u2019s highly charismatic and media trained but doesn\u2019t seem rehearsed or scandal shy. He has no doubt done research on me, peppering into our conversation details about recent stories I\u2019ve written.<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman has been everywhere the past few years. A former Wall Street trader who left finance to pursue magic, he broke out on \u201cAmerica\u2019s Got Talent\u201d before building a vast media presence. His recent press blitz has included appearances on CNN, \u201cThe View\u201d and \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d He\u2019s performed for NFL teams, delivered a TED Talk and landed on The New York Times bestseller list. He\u2019s read the minds of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Tom Brady. Stern called him a \u201cdevil worshipper\u201d; Rogan told him, \u201cYou are a witch. We\u2019re going to have to kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile 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 \u2014 his entire digital presence serving as a marketing campaign to drive up his fee for corporate events. \u201cI have been more successful than almost anybody you could name with a Vegas residency besides, like, three or four names in the world,\u201d Pearlman says, spinning a glass of orange juice. \u201cBut you may not have heard of me because I didn\u2019t take the normal path, selling tickets. If you\u2019re doing 140 corporate events and you\u2019re charging more than what people make for Vegas shows, you\u2019re actually more successful business-wise, but it\u2019s under the radar. I\u2019m like a B2B.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBut 2026, to continue the business terminology, is the year Pearlman goes public.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis holiday season, the magician will add another entry to his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 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\u2019t just perform mentalism on the thousands of live audience members in New York. \u201cMy hope is for the special to be groundbreaking,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I\u2019m also going to interact with the people at home and see if I can get inside their heads through their TVs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd in another consumer-facing move, Pearlman has a couple dates in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He says the shows are a \u201ctest run\u201d for a tour later this year and a potential residency at Wynn.<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman is also gearing up to perform for one of the toughest crowds in America \u2014 he\u2019s headlining the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner on April 25. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve seen the news, but Trump does what Trump wants,\u201d Pearlman says. \u201cIf I can read his mind, not one person will think that the president was in on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHe hopes to perform a new trick on Trump. \u201cI believe the whole world will see it,\u201d he says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThis year marks the first White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner that Trump will attend during either of his presidencies. Whereas the event has historically been hosted by a comedian, last year\u2019s 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. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to be able to hold truth to power at a dinner gala and change things \u2014 no offense,\u201d he says. \u201cI think what people want is to be entertained, to break bread, to celebrate the freedom of the press.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-variety-2020\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tPearlman with Kim Kardashian<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Image<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman 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, \u201cI hope you can hear me. I\u2019m doing a marathon Sunday, so I\u2019m running around Vegas right now, just warming up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman 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 \u2014 and event planner contacts \u2014 to pursue mentalism full time.<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman says his act appeals to everyone because \u201cwonder and amazement is a universal language.\u201d \u201cYou could drop me off right now on any continent not speaking any language, and I could connect with somebody in 60 seconds,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the superpower of, like, Superman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBut his style doesn\u2019t rub everyone the right way. On \u201cThe View,\u201d 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 \u201ca betrayal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI privately apologized to her, because I never want to make somebody uncomfortable,\u201d Pearlman says. But he stands by the fact that he never agreed not to guess her code. (\u201cI assure you, my memory is better than anyone\u2019s.\u201d) \u201cPlus, 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\u2019t think I ruined anyone\u2019s life. I\u2019m curious if I\u2019ll ever be back on that show.\u201d He adds that the clip got tens of millions of impressions online and was \u201ctremendous press.\u201d \u201cIf I went back in time, would I do it again? I probably wouldn\u2019t, but I think it was good for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPearlman enjoys having a sense of danger in his act, and he relates it to Alex Honnold\u2019s live skyscraper climb on Netflix. \u201cMy palms were sweating while watching that because one wrong move equals death,\u201d he says. \u201cFor my act, it\u2019s not death. But the risk is there. I want you to watch like, \u2018Is he gonna get it wrong?\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThings rarely go wrong, but when they do, Pearlman is usually able to make it seem like part of his plan. On a \u201cToday\u201d appearance, Pearlman asked Al Roker to pick a celebrity to run for president (the mentalist was prepared to reveal an undershirt that read \u201cT-Swift for Prez\u201d). Roker unexpectedly selected George Clooney, and Pearlman smoothly redirected him to his next choice: Swift.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019t spoken to in 20 years) before I quickly pivoted to a friend named Sloane, whom I\u2019d gone skiing with. I wrote down her name along with \u201cMammoth Trip\u201d on my phone. An hour later, Pearlman took a Sharpie to my notebook and wrote two things: \u201cTrip to Mammoth\u201d and \u201cShawn.\u201d While technically a misstep, the result made the trick more confounding because I never even wrote down Shawn\u2019s name. It never left my brain.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs we plan to depart from the caf\u00e9, Pearlman has one more trick he wants to try on me. He asks me to think of someone I\u2019d like to interview and then think of someone new \u2014\u00a0and then someone new again. Then he asks me to Google this person\u2019s name, stare at a photo of them and close the tab. I look up \u201cLarry David.\u201d (Reader, I was shielding the screen as Pearlman looked away, and he never so much as touched my phone \u2014\u00a0or did he?)<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cGot it?\u201d Pearlman asks, shaking my hand as he gets into the back seat of a black car. \u201cWe\u2019ll come back to this sometime in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe future came soon. An hour later, my phone buzzed with a text from Pearlman\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOz had a great time today at the interview and asked that I send over this photo!\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tPearlman with Larry David<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Image<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cLook for mirrors.\u201d When I told some friends I would be profiling the mentalist Oz Pearlman \u2014 with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69,97749],"class_list":["post-392522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-oz-pearlman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}