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June 5, 2025 13 mins

This recap episode unpacks Oz Pearlman, a mentalist, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Pearlman discusses his ultramarathon running and the significant mental fortitude required for such events, drawing parallels to overcoming life's challenges. He also explains his work as a mentalist, highlighting how it differs from traditional magic and focuses on reading people and influencing perception. Pearlman details specific techniques and principles he employs, including crafting memorable moments for audiences and adapting his performance to various contexts like TV appearances and corporate events, often incorporating details relevant to the audience. He also shares humorous anecdotes about his experiences and offers his perspective on concepts like gratitude and the negative effects of social media comparison.


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We all love The Joe Rogan Experience and much prefer the real thing, but sometimes it's not possible to listen to an entire episode or you just want to recap an episode you've previously listened to. The Joe Rogan Recap uses Google's NotebookLM to create a conversational podcast that recaps episodes of JRE into a more manageable listen.

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Episode Transcript

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(00:00):
Welcome to the Joe Rogan recap. Hey there.
Today we're doing a bit of a different kind of deep dive.
We're pulling insights from a really fascinating Joe Rogan
Experience conversation with Oz Perlman.
Yeah, the mentalist and maybe less known, the ultra endurance
athlete. Quite the combo.
Exactly. And our mission here isn't just
to summarize. We want to, you know, distill

(00:20):
the core lessons. Find those hidden connections
between pushing your body to theabsolute limit and, well,
seemingly reading minds. And how that all translates into
real world stuff like understanding people better,
shaping how things are perceived, creating moments that
actually stick with people. Right, we're looking at that
overlap, extreme endurance, the art of mentalism, and practical

(00:42):
skills for just navigating life and perception.
It's like mental and physical cross training almost, how
digging deep in one area informsthe other, peeling back layers,
whether it's exhaustion and erase or thoughts in someone's
head. OK, let's jump into it.
First up, the physical side, which turns out to be maybe not
just physical, we're talking ultra endurance.
Oz tackled the Spart Athlon. Which is just brutal.

(01:05):
For anyone who doesn't know, that's what, 153 miles Athens to
Sparta. Yeah, 153 miles and you only got
36 hours. You have to keep moving,
running, walking fast, rugged terrain through the night.
It's immense and. His first try didn't go so well,
no. He got about halfway 75 miles
and just quit at an aid station.Said he was puking for like 8

(01:28):
hours straight. Awful, but.
Here's the key thing, he stressed.
He feels like the physical part,the puking, wasn't the actual
reason he stopped. Right, he said he wasn't
mentally tough enough that year.He basically gave up in his head
way before his body truly failedhim.
Like writing the DNF speech mentally.
And then there's that incrediblestory from the race middle.

(01:48):
He's struggling and this other runner comes by.
Oh yeah, this guy looked completely wrecked, maybe even
hallucinating a bit, but he looks at Oz and just says this
line. You're going to give up if you
can't run, you walk, can't walk,you crawl.
You never ever just raw. That stuck with him, haunted
him, he said. Totally fueled him.
He went back the next year and this time he finished, but his

(02:10):
mindset was completely different.
He went in and this is intense, saying I'm going to finish this
race ready to die. He accepted the pain was coming.
And that experience just hammered home for him how mental
these extreme races are. He saw, you know, slower
runners, older runners finish that first year when he, the
physically strong guy, quit. So it wasn't just about the legs

(02:32):
and lungs. Beyond a certain point, it's the
mind that's the decider. Absolutely.
Mental fortitude becomes primary.
OK, so most of us aren't running153 miles, right?
What's the take away for, you know, normal life?
Oz connects it directly, pushingyourself physically, even if
it's just a tough workout you really don't want to do.
It tests you when you're low mentally physical.
It's in those moments of like voluntary suffering, wanting to

(02:55):
quit but not, that's where you build resilience.
Exactly. You learn what you're capable
of. And the payoff, he argues, is
that everyday stress starts to feel less intense.
He said the volume is turned down on regular life stress,
which makes sense. If you've handled that, then a
tough day at work feels more manageable.
Your baseline for hard shifts. Plus he really emphasizes

(03:18):
exercise for mental health too. It's statistically proven
against anxiety, depression, sometimes more effective than
meds. He frames it almost like a
mandatory thing we're missing inour sedentary lives.
Doesn't have to be extreme running though.
Find something you enjoy, right?Yeah, Pickleball, jiu jitsu,
dancing, whatever. Just move consistently.
Experience that beneficial discomfort.

(03:39):
OK, let's pivot from the body tothe mind.
Or maybe the perception of mind.Mentalism.
How did he even get into that? It wasn't some mystical calling.
It was practical. He started doing magic at 17 to
pay for college working restaurants.
Which sounds like trial by fire walking up to tables of
strangers. Total strangers, people who
might be annoyed or skeptical, and you have to win them over

(04:01):
fast, he said. It's it's exactly like sales,
high stakes sales. And he's really clear on this
point. He doesn't claim to read minds.
No, not in the psychic way. He says.
He reads people. He learned from books, videos,
observation. But he stresses mentalism is way
harder to learn than, say, card tricks.
How so? Well, a magic trick like sleight

(04:22):
of hand, you can practice it alone until it's perfect.
It works mechanically. Mentalism depends on psychology,
interaction, reading cues. You can't just practice in front
of a mirror. Nope, you have to perform for
real people and you will fail. It's very blunt.
It says you have to eat shit. Basically bombing, getting it
wrong, misreading things. That's how you learn.

(04:44):
There's no other way. So the skill is like reverse
engineering how people think. Yeah, understanding common
thought patterns, being incredibly observant, using
psychological principles, misdirection, and what he calls
algorithms. Not code, but predictable
sequences in thinking and behavior.
Using this whole toolbox to create the impression of mind
reading. Right.
He compared it to Jason Bourne and The Bourne Identity.

(05:05):
That hyper awareness, noticing tiny details, body language
shifts, things most people just filter out.
But for Oz, it's a learned skill, honed by all that
practice and failure. OK, so reading people leads into
this next fascinating bit. How memory works?
Or maybe how it doesn't work like we think?

(05:26):
Yeah, this is huge. His point is, memory isn't a
perfect recording. It's malleable.
You can rework it, even engineerit.
He uses his card to ceiling trick as the prime example.
Right sign card back in the deck, shuffle.
He throws the deck at the ceiling and only the signed card
sticks. Great trick.
Visually impossible, yeah, but the real trick was what happened

(05:47):
later. Exactly, he noticed people
telling the story would consistently leave out the part
where he threw the deck. Oh wow, so they'd just say.
I picked a card, it went in the deck and then boom my signed
card was just stuck in the ceiling.
They edited their own memory. Turning a clever trick into like
a miracle in their mind. Precisely.
And he saw this happening early on around 15, and realized this

(06:09):
is a life hack. How do you get people to
remember what you want them to remember and forget the rap?
Powerful, and it applies way beyond magic tricks.
Totally. It's about shaping perception,
controlling the narrative, whether it's an event, a pitch,
or just highlighting your own strengths.
He talked about designing everything with an end insight,
focusing on the story people will tell afterwards.

(06:31):
That Joe Burrow prediction he did that wasn't spontaneous.
He spent two years thinking about that outcome, how to
structure it so the final revealwould be incredibly memorable
and seem impossible. He was engineering the memory of
that interaction. Absolutely, and he does this all
the time, adapting his stuff fordifferent audiences.
ESPN gets football examples, CNBC gets finance talk.

(06:53):
Corporate gigs get company references.
Makes it relevant. Get some leaning in.
And lets him sneak in the medicine as he calls it the key
message. The feeling the take away he
wants them to have makes it stick.
This deep understanding of perception and psychology, it
also makes him naturally skeptical, right?
Oh definitely, he's quick to call out BS, especially claims
of supernatural stuff. Like those telepathy videos you

(07:16):
sometimes see? Yeah, he explains that away as
almost always being micro communication, tiny signals,
learned rhythms between people, often unconscious, not psychic
connection. And he points out, if it were
real telepathy, it should work under controlled double-blind
conditions. Conditions which surprise
surprise, these folks usually refuse because it would block

(07:38):
those subtle cues. He connects it to older psychics
too, using similar techniques like cold reading, right?
Fishing for info, reading reactions, making it seem
intuitive. Same playbook, different era.
He also dismisses things like spoon bending as just good
misdirection, not heating metal with your hand.
So his skills aren't magic powers, they're deep applied

(07:58):
understanding of human psychology and perception.
Exactly like a casino boss, he says, knows all the cheating
methods. Not because he cheats, but
because he studied the game inside and out, recognizing
patterns, influencing focus. It's applied human behavior at a
master level. Let's bring mindset back in
gratitude. Growth.
These seem woven through everything he talks about.

(08:19):
They really are. He mentions using anger as fuel
like in that second Spart Athlonattempt, but also transforming
negative stuff like jealousy. Instead of just feeling bad or
resentful. Which he calls a dull brain
state. Not useful.
Turn it into inspiration. See someone doing well, ask, OK,
what can I learn? How did they get there?

(08:41):
How can I use that drive? Fuel your own ambition.
He also shared that advice from Jay Shetty about controlling the
first and last thought of the day.
Yeah. You can't control every random
thought, but you can intentionally focus on gratitude
when you wake up and before you sleep.
And that actually changes things.
He sees it as actively changing your reality, your perspective,
focusing on what you have every day alive is a blessing, Builds

(09:03):
resilience, contentment. It's a mental muscle.
And growth requires challenge, right?
Avoiding comfort zones. Definitely.
He used the example of comediansneeding to test new stuff at
tough clubs like the mothership,not just playing to guaranteed
laughs from fans. Getting soft happens when you
avoid situations where you mightfail.
Exactly that risk, that discomfort, whether you're an

(09:24):
athlete, comedian or just learning something new, that's
where the growth is. They also mentioned helping
others, paying it forward. The selfishly selfless idea.
Right. It feels good, builds community,
helps you appreciate others instead of, you know, secretly
hoping they fail. Which he admitted doing early in

(09:45):
his comedy days before learning better.
OK, let's talk about the actual reviews he did during the JRE
conversation. These really demonstrated all
these principles in action. Yeah, they.
Weren't just random tricks. First was the corn flip
prediction. Remember the sealed envelope?
Yeah, it was there the whole time.
Joe kept getting the flips wrong, got insistent.
And the envelope predicted exactly that.
Miss 3. Insist Miss the next two.

(10:07):
So that's not predicting random coin flips, it's predicting
Joe's reaction to perceived randomness.
Exactly. Reading behavior, ego
involvement, how people double down.
It's reading the person plus probability.
Then the fighter prediction. Joe cycles through what, 14
names in his head? Something like that and lands on
Anderson Silva, which the envelope predicted even with a

(10:30):
fight detail. OK, how does that work?
Influence priming. Likely a mix, subtly guiding
thought, knowing recent exposures, leveraging common
associations, making the predicted choice feel
spontaneous to Joe, but actuallymaking it the most probable
outcome in that context, influencing perceived
spontaneity and the. 3rd 1 Basedon the photo, Joe thought

(10:53):
Muhammad Ali first, then Miles Davis.
And the prediction was Ali. This shows understanding thought
hierarchies. The mind often goes to the icon,
the ideal Ali first, before maybe settling on the more
literal answer related to the prompt.
Davis so. He's predicting that initial top
of mind. Thought or layering
possibilities, Knowing the mind visits certain common landmarks

(11:14):
first. Again, it's crucial.
None of this is psychic. It's highly skilled application
of reading people influence, understanding thought processes.
To create these past, present and future moments that feel
impossible engineering and experience.
Exactly so. Pulling this all together,
what's the really applicable wisdom here for you listening?
Well, he mentions these same skills directly, helping

(11:36):
practical stuff like negotiation.
Says he's never sold a property at a loss because of it.
Reading the other side, understanding the dynamics.
And just the drive to create, topractice.
Even mentalist don't have open mics, right?
He rehearses complex routines just in his head, Constant
innovation. But maybe the biggest trick in
life, as he put it. Is just focusing intently on

(11:58):
other people, being genuinely curious, listening, actively
holding the mirror up to them. Like meeting Steven Spielberg,
he said. Let the other person shine.
It builds connection. You learn more.
It's fundamental to reading people, not just for show but
for real connection, making it about you, the other person.
So these insights from ultramarathons and mentalism,

(12:19):
they really do offer tools for everyday life.
Absolutely. Resilience, observation skills,
shaping perception positively, gratitude, growth mindset, it's
all there. We've covered a lot mindset from
extreme challenges, the skills behind reading people shaping
memorial, critical thinking, gratitude.
The connections are definitely there if you look.
So here's a final thought for you to take away.

(12:43):
How can you consciously apply some of this?
Can you shift jealousy to inspiration?
What subtle cues are you missingevery day on autopilot?
And what might happen if you started actively looking for
them? Observing.
With that focused curiosity, Oz demonstrates the potential
insights are all around you. Thank you for joining us for
this deep dive.
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