Alright Jesse, the fans have been asking, I'm going to load up the website here, they've been asking about my experience with my Remarkable 2 tablet. I'm going to load it up. Yes they have. Now let's see here, I'm loading up the website here. So for those who are watching, again this is youtube.com/calnewportmedia, this is episode 258 or at thedeeplife.com, episode 258.

Let's load up this homepage for those who are watching so we can remember. Alright, meet Remarkable, the paper tablet. And as we watched this video before, we see a very well-dressed contemplative woman holding her Remarkable. Here's some pictures of it, as close to paper as it gets. So as you can see in this image here, the Remarkable, for those who don't know, is an electronic notebook.

It's a one page that you can write on. It's a Kindle style e-ink, so you write on this page and you see what you're writing like handwriting. I'm showing some of this on the screen right now. And you can have endless pages, essentially, and endless notebooks, all in this one thing you hold, all of it being backed up to the cloud as well.

Alright, so what has my experience been with the Remarkable? The headline is, "I really like it." I'm really liking my Remarkable 2, and here's why. I had a lot of notebooks in my life. Because I have so many different things I do, these each had their own notebook. So I had a notebook, for example, for my moleskin, for keeping track of just my general life thoughts, the pursuit to have a deeper life.

I would have notebooks for theory. I'm working on computer science papers, I need notebooks to work on ideas, mathematical equations, this or that. I would have multiple notebooks like this. I would have notebooks for planning around the business, the media company we run here. Thinking through what's our strategy, what's happening, what's our vision for the future.

I'd have notebooks to keep track of my specific, what's the specific strategic plan I'm working on for a particular part of my life, and I want to keep notes on it. I'll have a notebook for that as well. I'd have notebooks for book ideas, and then a notebook for each particular book I was working on.

And then just a scratch notebook, because I need to just keep track of ideas. I'm at a meeting, I'm sketching out a plan. A lot of different notebooks were in my life, and I was constantly grabbing different notebooks and using some for other purposes. The remarkable solved that problem.

I just have a lot of notebooks. I counted, there's nine I've started so far. They're all on the same device. So I can use a stylus, go over, select any notebook I want, start taking notes. And it's just there. And then if I want to do something else, I can switch over to that notebook, and it's right there.

So I've really been enjoying that. It really has been solving the problem. Basically the only paper notebook that this has not replaced is time block planning. And I tried this. I was like, "Hey, I wonder if I could just build time block plans for a market." Well, I didn't like it.

So that was the one place where I wanted spiral binding, like the new time block planner has. I wanted something tactile that I could write in and see next to me and lie flat next to me and work on throughout the day as I was working on other things.

That's the only real paper notebook that's left in my life right now is my time block planner. I really do need that to be analog and with me in all places, but I've had no problem moving my work notebooks, my planning notebooks, even my Moleskine notebooks. All that's worked well, moving to the remarkable.

Now let me talk a little bit about how I function with it. The writing I think is great. It took me a little while to get used to it. Like what's the right pressure? I used the fine liner at narrow, but once I got used to it, it really, for me, feels very much like a notebook writing on paper.

My handwriting is the same as writing on paper. It's really identical. I really like that. I really like that experience. I've learned to use the highlighter a lot as well. So I like that I can highlight to emphasize things. I can highlight text. So just from an operational point, that's been great.

It has endless scrolling. So you can make your page, you can scroll it down as long as you need, and then you can add pages. So you can scroll. If a particular page you want to put more on it, you can just keep writing longer and longer and then it's very easy just to jump to a new page.

One thing I found myself doing is editing notebooks, which I can't do with paper notebooks, but I do like to do this here. So for example, I have a notebook where I'm working on the deep life stack, the ideas around the deep life stack, and my particular iteration through the deep life stack right now.

And one of the things I did was I had an early version of it on a new page, a better version of it than a couple of pages with a lot of notes on it. In that case, I actually went back and deleted some of the older pages and consolidated and rewrote like, okay, here's the right way to do the stack right now.

I've tried a bunch of versions. I deleted those and added a page and rewrote it right. So I find myself doing that sometimes with planning notebooks is going back and deleting pages and re-summarizing them as I get better ideas around it. So that's an interesting twist I didn't expect myself to do.

The backing up features work great. So the way it works is you have an app on your computer that if you open it, it mimics exactly the navigation of your Remarkable. And if you go to any of the notebooks in that navigation, all your pages, you can just read it all on your computer and you can export any of those pages to PDF.

I've done that sometimes to print some things. So can you, when you go on the desktop, can you go in there and type in there? No. So all you can do is see backups and you can read what you wrote in the notebook. So you can't type in Remarkable either, right?

Or is it all just right? Well, I'll get to that in a second because you can, and I'll tell you my experience with that. But the way that app works, the desktop app works, it just shows you it's a backup of all of your notes. And so the main useful thing for that is, A, if you lose your Remarkable, you have all your notes.

If you buy a new Remarkable, I'm sure you can transfer it over, but you can print those things. Now, if there is something else you, so I haven't used these features yet, though, it's activated. It does now have integration with Google Drive and with Dropbox because you can bring files.

I haven't done this yet, but I want to do more of this. You can bring PDFs onto the Remarkable, read them on the Remarkable, mark them up on the Remarkable. And so this is a place where you can be more interactive, is you can hook up a particular folder on the Remarkable with, let's say, a Dropbox folder.

And now if you just put a document, like a PDF file into that Dropbox folder, it will automatically appear on your Remarkable. And if on your Remarkable, you write it, you annotate it, an annotated version of that document shows up in your Dropbox folder. So that's kind of cool.

Same with Google Drive as well. So that's kind of cool if you're, for example, need to edit some papers or something, you can just throw papers or articles into a Dropbox and then you're on a train somewhere. They've all synced up onto your Remarkable, so you can read them and mark them up.

And then later, all that annotation is resynchronized back up with your Dropbox. So at home on your computer, you can print things out with the marks and stuff like that. So I think that's a nice feature. But really the thing is, you can't -- so we're going to talk about shortcomings.

I have three things to mention. This really is about using the notebook. So you can see the stuff you did on your computer, but you can't -- you're not really supposed to be -- it doesn't go back and forth. You can't update things on your computer and have that show up on your Remarkable.

If you annotate a PDF file that syncs back to your Dropbox, it's going to be a new version of the file with the annotations. Because it's its own proprietary world of marking and drawing and stuff like that, that the computer doesn't speak. I got the fancy folio that has this really cool built-in keyboard.

So you can type on it. So it's actually the case can become like a Surface thing where a keyboard comes out and it's up like a screen. You can type on it. I'm not been using it. I used it a little bit, but the typing experience is not great because you don't have a lot of control over where the text is going to go.

You can't do much with the text once it's on there. Now, any time you want on a Remarkable page, you can put in a text cursor and type either on an on-screen keyboard or with the built-in keyboard. I don't like doing it because I don't really know how -- I don't know how to move the text around.

There's weird things about deleting the text. What I've been doing is really dealing with just handwriting. This is my paper notebook. I just have 20 paper notebooks in one form. That's how I've been personally using it. I have not been using the typing because, you know, it's not a word processor.

It's like the text is going right over here and you can't do anything with it once you type it. It kind of makes me nervous. So I don't know if I would pay for the keyboard folio, or if you do, you would have to have a better use case for it.

So that's the second downside. The third downside is it's just really expensive. Once you buy the Remarkable, you buy the fancy folio, you buy the nicer stylus for it, I was in $500 plus, which is a lot of money. Now I could kind of justify it because, well, I talk about it on the show and it fits the type of things we do.

It is really expensive. So that would be the other downside. But in the end, so far, I've been doing this for a couple months now, as a replacement for my stack of random notebooks, it has been successful. And I think I'm probably capturing more notes than I otherwise would.

And I love the experience of using it. And as long as I think of it as just these are notebooks that I write in with a pen, and that's it. And I don't care too much about the computer integration. And I don't try to do writing on it. I just think of it as notebooks.

I've been very happy with the experience. I love single purpose application gadgets, things to do one thing, and they do that one thing really well. There's no distraction when you're on there. There's no internet when you're on there. There's just, this is me writing in a notebook. And so I'll count myself as a remarkable two fan.

But with those caveats that it's just for writing, and it's expensive. It's expensive as all get out. Can you carry it around in your pocket? No, it's the size of like a normal eight, eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. So I guess my only question is before when you had kind of that life notebook for the moleskins that you carry around your pocket, how do you capture those thoughts if you're I didn't.

I mean, you could, you could put a moleskin in your pocket, but I want it right because then you would have a big thing in your pocket. So I was a bigger one for some reason. I thought it was a little one. It was a little one, but I don't, the little ones I don't like having in my pocket still like it fits in your pocket, but it's weird to have, you know, it's like having a big wallet in your pocket still.

I wouldn't walk around with that in my pocket. I don't like having things in my pocket. So I, my, my moleskin was small, but I kept it in my bag. Okay. So it'd be in the, it would be in the front pocket of my backpack. So this thing's just, yeah, this is the size of like a composition notebook.

So it's the size of a normal piece of paper and maybe like a half inch thick. It's heavy, which I actually kind of like about it. It's actually kind of heavy. It's very substantial. But so that hasn't been a problem because I, I, I want it, I want it moleskin in my pocket.

I would always moleskin in my, my bag anyway. So now I just throw this thing, throw this thing into my bag. That's the other downside. These are small things. The stylus like magnets onto the side, which is cool. So it just sticks onto it, but you can't put in your bag that way because it'll get knocked off, maybe injured.

So like you, you keep the stylus separate, like in my backpack, it'll be with my, my pins and the thing will be in the back. These are, these are minor points, but I'm a big fan. I think it's a beautifully engineered product for notebook heads. If you keep a lot of notebooks, you know, worth considering.

We messed up the, we should have asked him to be a sponsor, Jesse, because I had to give it a really, really good endorsement. We should do more of that. Find things I love and then work backwards and ask the people to be like, you really need a sponsor.

I've discovered a lot of things I love from sponsors approaches in us, but that'd be cool. We should, we should, we should tell remarkable, like, look, I love your thing. So you should be our sponsor. And also we need 20 remarkables. I want to just give them out like candy.

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