Pablo Torre exposes Oz the Mentalist

For years, Oz the Mentalist has been a fixture of sports fans’ lives.

The famed performer, whose real name is Oz Pearlman, has cropped up everywhere: March Madness coverage, Hard Knocks, Joe Rogan’s podcast, and most recently the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he was slated to work his magic on President Trump.

Pearlman’s tricks are dazzling, and clearly pull an audience. But the seeming impracticality of them has also led him to become quite a lightning rod among sports fans, including at Awful Announcing, who have grown tired of his omnipresence during sports programming.

And in a new episode of his podcast, Pablo Torre interviewed Stevie Baskin to get to the bottom of what Baskin believes could qualify as “fraud.”

Together, the pair walks through several of Pearlman’s most high-profile stunts to reveal the behind-the-scenes efforts going on and how Pearlman manipulates the people he is supposedly reading in real-time on air. In almost every case highlighted in the Pablo Torre Finds Out episode, the subject offers a hint that Pearlman met with them before the show.

With Rogan, Baskin suggests that in order for Pearlman to guess Rogan’s bank PIN as he did in a viral clip from the show, he likely used iPhone calculator history.

As evidence, Torre dug up a clip of The View co-host Sara Haines, another of Pearlman’s targets, revealing as much. Haynes noted in an episode of The View‘s podcast that she had “never felt so violated on air” as she did after Pearlman stated her PIN on-air, which he had promised he would not do.

Baskin believes that Pearlman told both Haynes and Rogan to come up with a fake PIN and then either add or subtract their real PIN from that number, then checked the backlogs of the phone calculator to see what they had typed.

A similar dynamic was supposedly at play when Pearlman appeared on Bussin’ With the Boys, where he nearly guessed a random NFL player conjured by host Will Compton. In this scene, Baskin revealed how the cracks start to show in Pearlman’s process.

Over the course of the segment that PTFO highlighted, Compton makes a subtle reference to a pre-show conversation around his selection of a seemingly “random” NFL player. That, Baskin speculates, is when Pearlman likely had Compton search a statistic or fact about the player that could be used as part of the guessing game. Instead, Baskin believes Pearlman used a website designed to mirror a Google search, but which actually sends the search term to Pearlman’s phone. As a result, Pearlman’s guess was one letter off — “Bryce Hall” instead of “Breece Hall.”

PTFO also ran through a classic example from CBS’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament coverage in which Pearlman guessed a college player from Charles Barkley’s mind. Baskin revealed that Pearlman’s trick in this case likely revolves around classic magician manipulation.

In the clip of the segment, Barkley also tells Pearlman “you gave me two,” suggesting they discussed the trick pre-show. Baskin believes that Pearlman likely did a card trick or some other seemingly random selection process while feeding Barkley predetermined symbols for the players he knew he would pick. Pearlman then convinces Barkley to juggle from his first guess to his second, with a seemingly longer name. As a result, Pearlman eventually gets Barkley to say the name of former Michigan State star Jase Richardson, whose photo he had brought with him in a closed envelope.

In all of these instances, Pearlman does use traditional magic and subtle analysis of his subjects’ thought processes and physical cues. However, if Baskin’s explanations are to be believed, Pearlman is spoon-feeding answers and coaxing them out in real time.

Because Pearlman has also sold books and toured under the pretense that he is determining all of these secrets solely through mentalism, Baskin alleges Pearlman could be found guilty of fraud to his customers.

Torre noted that Pearlman’s team did not respond to a request for comment.

The episode highlights a quote from Pearlman in his interview with Rogan that Torre argues is a useful way to think of Pearlman: not as a fraud but as a “con man.”

“I don’t see myself (as) a cult leader,” Pearlman told Rogan. “But a con man is very similar, in many regards, to what I do.”

In an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show discussing the episode, Torre explained that he was driven to discuss Pearlman’s tricks because of Pearlman’s prominence across media and entertainment. And he believes that the revelations from Baskin could lead Pearlman to switch up his approach or pursue new avenues to work his tricks.

“The difference between magic and mentalism … is that mentalism is seemingly a skill that you can learn if you watch Oz and listen to him closely enough,” Torre said. “And of course, what he is actually doing, spoiler alert, is a lot of stuff he does not disclose. Which has infuriated all of his competitors.”

Torre added that the public deserves to know how they are being conned, and Pearlman deserves a chance to course-correct.

“If people know how the trick is done then he can’t do the trick anymore. And he does these tricks more often and more visibly than anyone else in the business,” Torre explained. “And so I think there is the concern of, ‘I’ve gotta figure out something else,’ and that would be frustrating, I would imagine, if enough people pay attention.”

To conclude the episode, Baskin argued that his inspiration for uncovering Pearlman’s secrets comes from a broader mission to show everyday people how the world around them is working against them. And he believes Pearlman is a symbolic example.

“There is a tremendous value in recognizing the weaknesses in our own psychology, and Oz has undoubtedly done that,” Baskin said. “This is something that is not isolated to magicians and mentalists. This is something that is being deployed by people all around you, all the time.”