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A fake climate change theory is going viral on TikTok after Joe Rogan talked about it

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A fake climate change theory is going viral on TikTok after Joe Rogan talked about it

A made-up global warming theory discussed in the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is spreading on TikTok despite the platform’s new policy against climate disinformation, a new report shared exclusively with The Verge finds.

Seven TikTok videos promoting the so-called “Adam and Eve” theory — which spuriously claims Earth’s magnetic fields will shift and cause catastrophic effects across the planet — garnered more than 20 million views between January and April, according to the report by the nonprofit organization Media Matters for America. The videos include clips from a January 18th episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, amplifying statements Rogan and his guests made that contradict mainstream science.

The videos’ popularity shows how misinformation buried in a three-hour-long podcast episode can easily be plucked out and disbursed widely on TikTok. It’s also a test of TikTok’s recent commitment to “ramp up enforcement” of its new climate change misinformation policy.

“There’s no proof and no science and no physics behind any of the claims”

“It’s just unfortunate that these things are being put out there,” says Martin Mlynczak, a senior research scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center, in an interview. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there’s no proof and no science and no physics behind any of the claims about the magnetic field change being associated with climate change.”

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The viral videos attempt to explain the so-called “Adam and Eve” theory about a reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles. A guest on Rogan’s show, YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti, says the theory is that the planet “flips” roughly every 6,500 years. “It’s a 90-degree flip, but six days later, or on the seventh day, it corrects itself,” he says. “Because of it, the Earth essentially does a standstill — the sun will basically stay in the same spot, causing heating like we’ve never experienced,” Corsetti says in a clip.

There’s no evidence that the planet has or ever will make that kind of 90-degree flip — where the Arctic would be where the Antarctic is and vice versa — Mlynczak tells The Verge. “That is total bogus. If that’s what happened every 6,500 years, we would certainly see it; it would be in all the records … The amount of energy to bring that about is tremendous. And you know, there’s nothing to initiate it,” he says.

Earth’s magnetic poles are shifting, just not in the way that’s discussed in the podcast and TikTok videos. NASA has a helpful explanation of what’s happening on its website. But in a nutshell: Earth’s magnetic field is constantly changing. Our planet’s magnetic north pole is on the move, shifting toward the Siberian Arctic from Arctic Canada. Earth’s magnetic poles (not the planet itself) have even reversed 183 times over the last 83 million years, paleomagnetic records show.

In a pole reversal, Earth’s magnetic field gradually weakens and then grows in strength in the opposite orientation. That process takes place very slowly — likely spanning over a couple thousand years, according to Brendan Reilly, an assistant research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “It’s very possible that if one was happening in our lifetime, we wouldn’t even know it because the whole process would take many, many generations,” Reilly says. “It’s not just this dramatic thing.”

But there’s plenty of drama in Rogan’s podcast and the TikTok videos it spawned. The TikTok videos feature Corsetti saying we’re “over 200,000 years overdue” for a “cataclysmic” pole shift, according to the unsupported Adam and Eve theory. On top of causing global heating, he says the theory is that equatorial winds traveling “approximately 1,000 miles an hour” will continue their momentum as the planet turns.

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“1,000-mile-an-hour winds are past supersonic. Just right there, I mean, the person has no idea what they’re talking about,” Mlynczak tells The Verge. Even the strongest hurricane winds reach only 150 to 160 miles per hour.

The world is not “overdue” for a pole reversal, according to Reilly. That would be like flipping a coin, getting two heads in a row, and saying you’re overdue for tails even though the odds haven’t changed, he says. And even though Earth’s magnetic North pole has begun to shift a little faster — a point Corsetti makes in the podcast — Reilly says that it’s not out of line for what’s typical of Earth’s magnetic field.

In an email to The Verge, Corsetti says the TikTok videos took some of his statements out of context. “Keep in mind that those various TikTok clips are edited portions of my conversation on the Joe Rogan Podcast where I am explaining the difference between ‘mainstream scientific view’ of Pole Shifts, in comparison to the ‘Adam & Eve Story’ — which is certainly not considered accepted Science,” he writes.

The Adam and Eve theory stems from a 1965 book by Chan Thomas, written before there was wide research on climate science. The book caused a stir in conspiracy theory circles after the CIA declassified it in 2013. (Among other things, the book claims that Jesus was abducted by aliens in a “space vehicle.”) The theory today is often framed to imply that climate change is caused by natural forces instead of burning fossil fuels and isn’t as big of a risk compared to other threats.

Corsetti also walked back some of his statements on climate change in his email to The Verge. In one of the viral videos that came out of the podcast, with more than 352,000 likes, Corsetti says, “I think that the true data on Earth is that the Earth is cold most of the time. That right now we should be grateful that it’s nice and cozy.”

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The mountain of evidence shows that the planet is warming as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels trap heat. The last eight years have been the eight hottest on the books, the World Meteorological Organization reported in January. The most extreme summer heatwave ever recorded in North America buckled roads and triggered a spike in emergency department visits in the Pacific Northwest US in 2021, in just one example of recent record-smashing heatwaves around the world.

“It seems to me that anyone who has eyes to see should understand that we are trashing and negatively changing our environment … Personally, I drive an electric vehicle,” Corsetti says.

The popularity of the TikTok videos Corsetti is featured in, which cherry-pick misinformation from Rogan’s podcast and package it with dramatic music and images, shows how easy it is to false information on the platform through emotive shortform videos. It’s also telling of how well the platform is enforcing its own policies.

In April, the social media platform committed to “ramp up enforcement of a new climate change misinformation policy which removes climate change misinformation that undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as content denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

And yet, the seven videos that Media Matters flagged in its report are still garnering likes and shares on TikTok. TikTok did not immediately provide a response to The Verge when it reached out for comment.

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Spotify lags behind other platforms in failing to instill a clear policy on climate misinformation in its content, says Abbie Richards, one of the authors of the Media Matters report. “Spotify has long-standing policies that help us balance creator expression and listener preferences while minimizing the risk of offline harm. We have multiple measures to ensure that content on Spotify is in keeping with our policies,” Spotify spokesperson Rosa Oh says in an email to The Verge. She declined to comment on the Joe Rogan podcast, and Joe Rogan did not respond to a request for comment.

Rogan has been called out in the past for inviting guests like Randall Carlson who reject widely accepted climate science. “What Randall Carlson said that really freaked me out, he goes, ‘Global warming’s not scary. Global cooling, that’s what’s really scary,’” Rogan says in another one of the misleading clips from his podcast that made its way into a viral TikTok video. While Rogan’s podcast already has a huge reach, the episodes are hours long, and statements like that might have been buried were it not for TikTok users editing it down into more easily shareable content.

“He’s reaching huge audiences with fringe ideas and conspiracy theories [on his podcast]. And then they’re spilling over into these other platforms,” says Media Matters climate and energy program director Allison Fisher.

And that worries scientists like Mlynczak. “I’m concerned because people are misled by these things, and they vote,” he says. “I have two kids, and all of our kids are going to have to deal with the consequences of decisions we make or don’t make about how to deal with climate change.”

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Cruise is back driving autonomously for the first time since pedestrian-dragging incident

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Cruise is back driving autonomously for the first time since pedestrian-dragging incident

Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are officially back on the road and driving autonomously for the first time since one of its driverless vehicles dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet in San Francisco.

Cruise said last month that it would resume testing with manually driven vehicles focused on mapping and gathering road information — minor tasks for a company with as many autonomous miles as Cruise. But Cruise needs to show local officials that it is suitably apologetic for the pedestrian-dragging incident by going slow and talking a lot about safety and trust. The company is deploying its vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, which has long been a hotbed for autonomous vehicle testing.

Cruise needs to show local officials that it is suitably apologetic

Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo said the company is deploying only two autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel. In addition, the company has eight manually driven vehicles in the city. Eventually, the service area will “gradually expand” to include Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler — “measured against predetermined safety benchmarks.”

Cruise’s slow return to the road is noteworthy, given the huge hurdles facing the company in the wake of the October incident. Regulators accused the company of misleading them about the nature and severity of the incident, in which a pedestrian was dragged over 20 feet by a driverless Cruise after first being struck by a hit-and-run driver.

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Several top executives have since left the company, including founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, and around a quarter of employees were laid off. GM has said it will reduce its spending on Cruise. And an outside report found evidence that a culture of antagonism toward regulators contributed to many of the failings.

With all that was going wrong, GM could have pulled the plug on Cruise. Indeed, the robotaxi company has been a huge financial drag on the automaker, losing $3.48 billion in 2023. Other car companies have pulled funding for their autonomous vehicle projects for much less. But instead, GM is sticking with it — and Cruise is gearing up to get back on the road — which is a sign that despite all its setbacks, the automaker is still intent on jockeying with Waymo, Tesla, and others for a spot in the race toward an autonomous future.

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21-year-old whose speech was impaired by tumor has voice replicated through AI smartphone app

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21-year-old whose speech was impaired by tumor has voice replicated through AI smartphone app
  • Lexi Bogan, 21, lost her voice last summer after doctors removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain.
  • In April, she regained her voice through an AI-generated clone trained on a 15-second recording of her teenage voice.
  • Bogan and her medical team believe it has valuable medical applications for those with speech impediments or losses.

The voice Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.

She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time — even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.

Then that voice was gone.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HELPS PREDICT SENIORS’ LONG-TERM CARE NEEDS: ‘CRITICAL NEXT STEPS’

Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say “hi” to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired. Friends, strangers and her own family members struggle to understand what she is trying to tell them.

Alexis Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, uses an AI-powered smartphone app to create an audible drink order at a Starbucks drive-thru on April 29, 2024, in Lincoln, Rhode Island. The app converts her typed entries into a verbal message created using her original voice. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

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In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.

She types a few words or sentences into her phone and the app instantly reads it aloud.

“Hi, can I please get a grande iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso,” said Bogan’s AI voice as she held the phone out her car’s window at a Starbucks drive-thru.

NEW AI TOOLS CAN HELP DOCTORS TAKE NOTES, MESSAGE PATIENTS, BUT THEY STILL MAKE MISTAKES

Experts have warned that rapidly improving AI voice-cloning technology can amplify phone scams, disrupt democratic elections and violate the dignity of people — living or dead — who never consented to having their voice recreated to say things they never spoke.

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It’s been used to produce deepfake robocalls to New Hampshire voters mimicking President Joe Biden. In Maryland, authorities recently charged a high school athletic director with using AI to generate a fake audio clip of the school’s principal making racist remarks.

But Bogan and a team of doctors at Rhode Island’s Lifespan hospital group believe they’ve found a use that justifies the risks. Bogan is one of the first people — the only one with her condition — who have been able to recreate a lost voice with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine. Some other AI providers, such as the startup ElevenLabs, have tested similar technology for people with speech impediments and loss — including a lawyer who now uses her voice clone in the courtroom.

“We’re hoping Lexi’s a trailblazer as the technology develops,” said Dr. Rohaid Ali, a neurosurgery resident at Brown University’s medical school and Rhode Island Hospital. Millions of people with debilitating strokes, throat cancer or neurogenerative diseases could benefit, he said.

“We should be conscious of the risks, but we can’t forget about the patient and the social good,” said Dr. Fatima Mirza, another resident working on the pilot. “We’re able to help give Lexi back her true voice and she’s able to speak in terms that are the most true to herself.”

Mirza and Ali, who are married, caught the attention of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI because of their previous research project at Lifespan using the AI chatbot to simplify medical consent forms for patients. The San Francisco company reached out while on the hunt earlier this year for promising medical applications for its new AI voice generator.

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Bogan was still slowly recovering from surgery. The illness started last summer with headaches, blurry vision and a droopy face, alarming doctors at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence. They discovered a vascular tumor the size of a golf ball pressing on her brain stem and entangled in blood vessels and cranial nerves.

“It was a battle to get control of the bleeding and get the tumor out,” said pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Konstantina Svokos.

The 10-hour length of the surgery coupled with the tumor’s location and severity damaged Bogan’s tongue muscles and vocal cords, impeding her ability to eat and talk, Svokos said.

“It’s almost like a part of my identity was taken when I lost my voice,” Bogan said.

The feeding tube came out this year. Speech therapy continues, enabling her to speak intelligibly in a quiet room but with no sign she will recover the full lucidity of her natural voice.

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“At some point, I was starting to forget what I sounded like,” Bogan said. “I’ve been getting so used to how I sound now.”

Whenever the phone rang at the family’s home in the Providence suburb of North Smithfield, she would push it over to her mother to take her calls. She felt she was burdening her friends whenever they went to a noisy restaurant. Her dad, who has hearing loss, struggled to understand her.

Back at the hospital, doctors were looking for a pilot patient to experiment with OpenAI’s technology.

“The first person that came to Dr. Svokos’ mind was Lexi,” Ali said. “We reached out to Lexi to see if she would be interested, not knowing what her response would be. She was game to try it out and see how it would work.”

Bogan had to go back a few years to find a suitable recording of her voice to “train” the AI system on how she spoke. It was a video in which she explained how to make a pasta salad.

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Her doctors intentionally fed the AI system just a 15-second clip. Cooking sounds make other parts of the video imperfect. It was also all that OpenAI needed — an improvement over previous technology requiring much lengthier samples.

They also knew that getting something useful out of 15 seconds could be vital for any future patients who have no trace of their voice on the internet. A brief voicemail left for a relative might have to suffice.

When they tested it for the first time, everyone was stunned by the quality of the voice clone. Occasional glitches — a mispronounced word, a missing intonation — were mostly imperceptible. In April, doctors equipped Bogan with a custom-built phone app that only she can use.

“I get so emotional every time I hear her voice,” said her mother, Pamela Bogan, tears in her eyes.

“I think it’s awesome that I can have that sound again,” added Lexi Bogan, saying it helped “boost my confidence to somewhat where it was before all this happened.”

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She now uses the app about 40 times a day and sends feedback she hopes will help future patients. One of her first experiments was to speak to the kids at the preschool where she works as a teaching assistant. She typed in “ha ha ha ha” expecting a robotic response. To her surprise, it sounded like her old laugh.

She’s used it at Target and Marshall’s to ask where to find items. It’s helped her reconnect with her dad. And it’s made it easier for her to order fast food.

Bogan’s doctors have started cloning the voices of other willing Rhode Island patients and hope to bring the technology to hospitals around the world. OpenAI said it is treading cautiously in expanding the use of Voice Engine, which is not yet publicly available.

A number of smaller AI startups already sell voice-cloning services to entertainment studios or make them more widely available. Most voice-generation vendors say they prohibit impersonation or abuse, but they vary in how they enforce their terms of use.

“We want to make sure that everyone whose voice is used in the service is consenting on an ongoing basis,” said Jeff Harris, OpenAI’s lead on the product. “We want to make sure that it’s not used in political contexts. So we’ve taken an approach of being very limited in who we’re giving the technology to.”

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Harris said OpenAI’s next step involves developing a secure “voice authentication” tool so that users can replicate only their own voice. That might be “limiting for a patient like Lexi, who had sudden loss of her speech capabilities,” he said. “So we do think that we’ll need to have high-trust relationships, especially with medical providers, to give a little bit more unfettered access to the technology.”

Bogan has impressed her doctors with her focus on thinking about how the technology could help others with similar or more severe speech impediments.

“Part of what she has done throughout this entire process is think about ways to tweak and change this,” Mirza said. “She’s been a great inspiration for us.”

While for now she must fiddle with her phone to get the voice engine to talk, Bogan imagines an AI voice engine that improves upon older remedies for speech recovery — such as the robotic-sounding electrolarynx or a voice prosthesis — in melding with the human body or translating words in real time.

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She’s less sure about what will happen as she grows older and her AI voice continues to sound like she did as a teenager. Maybe the technology could “age” her AI voice, she said.

For now, “even though I don’t have my voice fully back, I have something that helps me find my voice again,” she said.

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The DJI Pocket 3 is almost everything I wanted my iPhone camera to be

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The DJI Pocket 3 is almost everything I wanted my iPhone camera to be

I can’t think of anything permeating mainstream camera culture as aggressively as the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. The Fujifilm X100VI has stolen some of its thunder among film simulation enthusiasts, but DJI’s still having somewhat of a cultural moment on YouTube, Instagram, and the troubled TikTok by spurring all sorts of creator glee.

Of course, the camera buffs are all over it, but serious and casual creators from other genres have paused their usual programming to rave about how it transcends amateur vlogging pursuits, whether you’re filming a wedding or self-shooting a scene for a Sundance-hopeful short film.

Some of us at The Verge are excited, too: Vjeran liked it enough to call it his favorite gadget of 2023, and Sean just bought one after using it to elevate his Today I’m Toying With videos.

I felt tingles about the $519 Osmo Pocket 3 when DJI first announced it, but it wasn’t until I purchased a Creator Combo that I fully understood the hype. The video quality often comes close to my full-frame Sony mirrorless (although I can’t get all the same shots) and is very noticeably better than my phone.

The original Osmo Pocket and Pocket 2 couldn’t make those boasts, but the Pocket 3 is a cut above. Its larger one-inch-equivalent sensor is now bigger than those in most phones, with better low-light performance and more reliable autofocusing than predecessors. It has a much bigger display, longer battery life, faster charge time, more microphones — the list goes on like that for nearly everything that makes it tick. 

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Photo: Quentyn Kennemer / The Verge

My first heavy outing with the Pocket 3 was at a WWE SmackDown show at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. Without a photographer’s pass, I couldn’t enter the venue with my Sony A7 IV or anything else bigger than pocket-sized. But the Osmo got in after I showed security that its battery grip wasn’t a selfie stick. 

I’d gone with the simple hope of capturing some good stabilized audience point-of-view footage that might look a touch better than what my iPhone 12 Pro Max produced at the last show I attended. I left with clips that look so good that I could see them appearing in WWE’s social media reels or pre-match hype promos.

The Pocket 3 was better at capturing the majesty of the heavy light rays and pyrotechnic embers that define WWE’s grand productions than my iPhone, and its microphones did a better job at taming the loud audio levels without overly dampening the sound and stripping it of acoustic character. The footage was also considerably less hazy compared to the iPhone’s, with smoother stabilization, though the iPhone’s software stabilization compared decently.

Even if I could have brought a mirrorless or DSLR, the Osmo let me live more in the moment. I had a large popcorn and a cold one occupying one hand for most of the night, so I’d have been miserable trying to adjust dials and deep-dive menus. With the Pocket 3, powering it on is just a matter of swiveling open the display. The record button’s right under your thumb, and settings are a single swipe away. 

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The Pocket 3 has its limitations. It can only manage a 2X-equivalent digital zoom, for starters. That’s enough to capture impromptu closeups — like then-WrestleMania-bound Cody Rhodes looking into the rafters after he walked right past my seat, for example. But you won’t be able to achieve the dreamy, bokeh-heavy images reserved for interchangeable lens cameras. 

Meanwhile, my iPhone’s telephoto sensor offered better reach at a Monday Night Raw show in October. I sat in the same exact seat at both shows, with a great view of the ring and decent visibility of the entrance stage from the first row of the risers. My iPhone gave me clear face shots of Becky Lynch and Damian Priest’s entrances, even if I greatly preferred the overall color, clarity, and exposure of the Osmo during the SmackDown show.  

I’ve shot a number of personal videos since SmackDown and spent a fair bit of time comparing my footage to my Sony and iPhone results. Compared to my phone, colors don’t look overly muddy and washed out in low light, and there’s far less noise. I get more leeway to push and pull colors in post-process when shooting in D-Log M. (Though, that might be a wash if I had an iPhone 15 Pro with a similarly flexible ProRes Log color profile.)

Even in well-lit scenarios, there’s still a decent gap: the bokeh on the Osmo Pocket 3, while subtle, is more noticeable and pronounced than the iPhone. It’s enough to draw the viewer’s eye to your subject while muting an otherwise distracting background. 

Sean filmed the Transformer above with iPhone 14 Pro and Pocket 3 — you can probably tell which shot is which!

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And it’s just so easy to use. Going from powered off to an effortlessly stabilized video is as simple as swiveling open the screen and hitting the record button right next to it, no separate multi-pound gimbal or balancing weights needed. Tap the screen to flip it into selfie mode, and it’ll automatically pan and tilt to keep your face in frame. 

Most phones don’t let you use the higher quality sensor to record yourself while previewing your shot; here, you can frame your own walk-and-talking headshots on the two-inch OLED screen, then spin the same sensor around to capture viral content, short films, and the world’s beauty in front of you.

You can also fire up DJI’s smartphone app to remotely preview and control the entire camera over Bluetooth — and if you spring for the $669 Creator Combo, you get a high-quality wireless lav mic with 32-bit float recording that effortlessly integrates, too. The mic automatically connects to the Osmo as soon as you power it on, can record separately to its own internal storage, has both a clip and a strong magnet to keep it attached to clothing, vibrates in specific patterns so you know when you’re rolling, and can charge and transfer recordings over USB-C. (Plus, the combo comes with a nice extended battery grip, an iffy wide-angle lens, and other accessories.)

No, you won’t find the same shooting options that enthusiasts and professionals seek out of a proper camera body. You can adjust white balance, shutter, and ISO to varying degrees, but you don’t get advanced recording codecs, LUT previews, alternative metering modes, and the like. It’s not exactly comfortable to have in your pocket despite the name, and for still photography, I’d sooner grab my phone. Did I mention you should run like hell if you see a raindrop? There’s no waterproofing at all.

But everything about the Osmo Pocket 3 makes me want to get out and record because it’s fun and easy to do. It encourages the lazy part of my brain to stop whining. It narrows the gap for people who need an ultra-portable camera that can shoot better-looking footage than their iPhone and lightens the load for those who don’t need a more complex camera for every shoot. For me, right now, it’s up there with the wallet, keys, and phone as something I’ll always consider grabbing on my way out the door.

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That’s remarkable for a camera that isn’t much larger than the average vape pen — and costs less than a new phone.

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