I NEED TO BE ALONE | Backcountry Living Inside a Cargo Van | ANSWERING THE DREADED QUESTION

I've been in the shop so much over the last week that I need a little bit of fresh air, nature and maybe a few campfires and some sunrises and sunsets out here in the mountains. So that's what we're going to do this week and at the end of this video I'm going to answer a question that a lot of van lifers really don't talk about. Today is just a nice calm easy video. It's a little too dark outside to be backing down some long windy steep road. Trying to find a little camp spot out here tonight. My light bar just went out and it's actually the switch. So the switch here, can you guys see it on the top there? That one. It works but the spring's not holding it on. Oh man. Okay we're gonna go with the side ones here. Hope this road's okay. It's been a long time since I've been up here. This is definitely one I do not want to back down. Really? The only thing on the ground is one pair of shoes. I'm rather impressed. Here's the big test. Look what stayed there. All those rough roads and that little strap on my DJ controller works. If you missed that video the other day, Jay, the guy who was over at the shop doing the electrical work in the Ambo, did this little snap system. So you put a snap on one side and this one's actually secured to the top. Pulls over, snaps in and this one here just snaps around the corner and that totally stayed there. Jay thank you. Let's turn on that star link and see if we can get a connection out here. Okay says we're connected. That means we're just connected to that box. So let's see if we're actually connected. All right you guys, I'm gonna see all of you in the morning. Ready for bed buddy? You ready? Go up, up, up. Come on. Let's go. Here we go. Atta boy. Okay I'll see you guys in the morning. I'm gonna shut some lights out here. All this mud across my pants is from the very bottom of my door. From all the mud from the road. As soon as you lean against the door, you lean against the side of the frame, the van body and you get all that stuff on you. Everything I did here to reduce the noise fully worked. And thanks to uh thanks to our subscriber, you're not gonna get attacked by the table or the DJ controller anymore. You say thank you to Jay. He thinks Jay you saved me. You saved me from the great attack. I really love it that I have all of you in front of me to watch my life unfold and that goes with every aspect of my van life. Because there's some times I get lazy on not wanting to find a better way to fix things. I'm like I just throw it back and then I got caught up with other things and I forget about these things coming out until they come out again. I'm like I gotta fix that. I shove them back in and then when I get a moment of a day, I do a band-aid on that and then I just. I love it that you guys are here giving me suggestions is what I'm trying to say. You're always helping me out with everything along the way and I know some of these suggestions that I see in the comments and stuff or I get in emails from you guys are from people that don't live in van life. They're just like they're just creative people at home saying chrome. I know exactly what's going to fix that for you and so I want to thank you guys for all your constant input and also to Jay for coming over to my to my shop to work on the ambulance the other day and and brought all the stuff with you to fix my thing because you're tired of watching that thing fall out. He's like I'm tired of it dude. I'm tired of it. We're gonna fix that today and I love that. Believe it or not this suggestion here was actually brought up by quite a few people. I've been reading through emails recently and some people have drawn up some diagrams and stuff on how to fix that. I want to thank you guys for all taking the time. It was totally totally cool to see you guys trying to take care of me and I absolutely love that. Anyway making coffee here this morning. We could probably turn that heater off. It's a little warm in here. What are we at? 20 degrees 20.6. My battery on the outside one's dead but uh 20 degrees nice and cozy. Did I make the bed around you? How are we gonna do this? Yeah we're gonna do this. I'd like to make the bed. Can we come over here? Can we come over here? That's not what I meant bro. Come on buddy. There you go. It's hard enough to make the bed in here as it is. Hey you're a bump on a log in here. I just don't want to move for nobody. Hey there you undo the snap. It's got a little pulley thing on here too and that's it. Now my desk is unleashed. I really am glad I did do the foam idea first though. Putting that layer of foam because now the desk fits a lot tighter. Putting that little strip of foam in there made my desk sit tighter which is perfect and I'm also glad that I did the foam underneath here too because that actually holds my DJ controller quite well. This just keeps it from ever coming out which is pretty darn epic. Okay I have a great big pile of questions on my laptop like a lot of them. I went through a couple of videos last week and I started to pull a bunch of questions out from you guys and I haven't really done a proper Q&A in quite a while so today let's dive in. There are some really really really good questions in here. I'm going to start off with a really important one. Anyway I got to edit this morning too so let me at least get that set up but maybe we'll do this through a voiceover. Hey get two things done at once. My voiceover gear this is an Apollo Twin X. I use this for doing all my voiceovers. Two hands for this. Apollo Twin X amazing device. My microphone that I use for doing all of my voiceovers is one of my favorite studio mics of all time. This is the Shure SM7B. This was actually Michael Jackson's uh the mic he used I think was on the Thriller album. I think he recorded fully on this mic. It is an incredibly beautiful microphone. I used to have this in my recording studio when I did my old radio show. So there is a lot of questions in here. I just went through and I screenshot a pile of them so I don't know if we're going to get through them all today but we're definitely going to get through a chunk of them for sure. I was just going through this list of questions and there is an amazing amount of them so I think we may only be able to touch on a few of them here today or this video will be extra extra extra long. So a question that I've seen a lot over the years is in van life can you dispose of your poop in an actual garbage can? Is it legal? Are you allowed to? And I always refer to the classic thing as well. Parents throw baby diapers in there don't they? That's human poop that goes in every garbage can everywhere. They'll go to a restaurant and just throw it in that garbage can. They don't care they just throw that baby diaper all over the place. So I've always used that as a reference. So because this question came up I decided to go online and just google it and you wouldn't believe what you found out there for information. So I'm going to read you some of the things that came up. I'm not going to like mark down what everywhere was but it seems to be generally the same across the board in most places. Obviously do your own research. A quick google search will help you help you figure out if you're allowed to. But anyway it says each country has its own ordinance on whether or not human poop can be dumped into a garbage bin designated for a landfill. Generally most permit human poop to be disposed of in a landfill. However almost all countries require it to be contained in a plastic bag and tied off. Meaning don't go out there in public squat over the dumpster and poop in the dumpster itself. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Tie it off in a bag and then dispose of it that way. So these are some of the ones that I found in some of the provinces across Canada here. Use disposable human waste containers that go into a regular garbage without emptying. Place into a plastic bag first to contain the contents and odors. And this seems to be the general thing across everywhere that I read. As long as it's contained in a plastic bag preferably with some kind of a breakdown chemical on the inside. So like some of the RV chemicals that they throw into the RV tanks to help kind of break down that stuff. You can buy powdered ones or packaged ones that you can throw into those bags to help speed up the breakdown process. But that seems to be something general I see everywhere. This one here is another one. Use of human waste liners or bags with an integrated solidifier. That's what I was just talking about. To contain the waste and reduce the overall contamination. So a lot of the stuff I found when researching this was talking about seniors homes and disposing of bed pans. And in those areas it says to put them into a bag with a solidifier, tie it off, then you can throw it into the standard garbage bag and then throw it out. Some of the other ones was human waste should not be disposed of with regular trash. This is where it comes back to the same thing. However a heavy duty trash bag can be used to line a trash can and waste bags can be placed inside of a larger bag. Or one bin can be designated for human waste and can be... anyway whatever. It says the same thing. Tie it off in a bag and you're okay to throw it out completely. And then I found one for Vancouver. Human waste is not considered hazardous waste. And this seems to be the norm across every place that I read is that human waste is considered solid waste. And if it was illegal out here to dispose of it, you wouldn't be able to buy those bags in Cabela's, Canadian Tire, Walmart, stuff like that. Where they actually make bags that are made for the lugable loose. It's called they're called duty bags or some double duty funny name. But that you can buy them. Like I can go to Canadian Tire here or the local Cabela's right beside the poop buckets and buy the bags. That would not be allowed to be sold if you weren't allowed to dispose of them. So hopefully that answers that great big longing question people have had forever on this channel. All right let's knock through a few of these. So how do you make money? YouTubers make money off the ads that are playing at the beginning of videos. And also a major part of our income is brand deals and little commercial ads that people will buy that they want us to speak about their product on our channel. That's how we earn our living. On that note, today's video is sponsored by... Next question is from Sandra. Sandra wants to know what kind of drone I have. I have the DJI Mavic Mini 3 Pro. So this is the small one. The small one doesn't require a license to fly it or anything like that. You can throw it up. And I never wanted to fuss with getting a drone license or anything. And I'm sure at some point I will when I want a better camera. But this thing does a rock star of a job. But this is the smallest one they make. And I am totally stoked with the purchase. But yeah, the DJI Mavic Mini 3. I used to have... And this one's got the fancy screen on the controller. I used to have it where I snapped my phone in the old one. So I used to have a Mavic Mini 2, the original. And I didn't like it because when you snap your phone in there, sometimes your phone disconnects from the controller. Then you just have no control of your drone. So this one here, I find, stays better connected to my drone. And I like it because the screen display is downright epic. But yeah, these things run at a fairly decent price. So if you're getting into drones, these are super, super easy to fly. This one comes up quite a bit. Sorry, squeaky door. Someone asked me, what's that, Chicken Hill? Where can you get one of these shirt folders? So I have a shirt folder. Hold on. That folds my shirts up all nice like that. Yeah. So it's just this. And it's easy to find one. Just go onto... I don't have the links to any of this stuff. Just go onto Amazon and click shirt folder. They're like 15 bucks or something like that. Downright epic. And I don't know what I would do in my life without one of those shirt folders. They're awesome. So Phillip wants to know why I don't respond to people, probably in the comments or in emails anymore. Am I just too busy? Yes, that's the answer. I wish I had the time to respond to absolutely everybody because I got everything in my life because of you guys. And I want to give all of you the time that you deserve. I just don't have the time. I would rather go out and produce more content and do more fun and awesome things. Because when you take a couple hours every single day just to go down and go through some comments, answer some questions, it takes away from a lot of the video creation. So that's why you see as channels grow, they spend less and less time in the comments. But I do go in the comments. This video is full on proof. But yeah, that's why. And emails, they just get bogged down. We get so many emails. It's impossible for me as a solitary person to respond to everybody. Because I do everything. I am a one man show over here. I do the filming, I do the editing, I do all the planning and stuff. I do all the background things. I used to have an assistant, Madison. She still does a few things for me every once in a while. It's probably been two months or so or three months and she hasn't done much. And so we've kind of slowed down on that front just to kind of save on some money. Because this ambulance build is super, super expensive. So I've cut back down on a lot of things. But yeah, doing everything all by yourself when you have 250,000 subscribers, there's some things that just get neglected and reading the comments is definitely one of them. Anyway, you guys, let's do one more. Man, you guys are already super invested into this video if you've gotten this far. So let's just do another one. Do you watch movies on the monitors for sound? So inside of my van here, I have two Yamaha HS5 powered speakers, one there and one up front there. Really cool additions and they're actually pretty power conscious. Those things pull I think around 60 or 100 watts at full volume. Otherwise they just cruise at like 30 40 watts or 50 watts. It's pretty awesome. But yeah, I do. I will plug my laptop into the little plug below my bed here and I will play movies on my speakers. The only problem I have with that is that one is farther away from my head here. So in some ways, I think when I have a chance to rethink my build in the ambulance, I may put a little home theater system in there where my laptop plugs in wherever my laptop sits. I have two speakers pointed right at me from the front where this one here I get tons of volume there because it's right beside my head and the other one well is way over there. Still pretty cool though. Can't complain. You're in a vehicle and you got this so awesome. Anyway, guys, thanks for watching. The sun just came up so I'm going to get out here and enjoy my day. So thanks for watching this little this little Q&A. I will talk to all of you guys on the next one. See ya. Okay, I have to go edit actually. Forget I just lied to you. I was like I'm gonna go have some fun. No, I got all set up because I got a video edit to edit then I can go have some fun. So I'll see you guys back there on that video. See you soon.