By now, Brent Rose is a recognized face of the #vanlife movement, and the story of a break-up that turned into residing in a vehicle for the last three years is part of his mythos. We learned all about it when we interviewed him in February. At that time, he was six months past the finish line he established when he started living on the road. Now, he’s over a year past that point, and there’s no sign that he’ll stop any time soon. Commitment remains a scary undertaking. Join the club, Brent. One of us. One of us.

We sat down with him to talk about his myriad talents and how they help with life in a van, the projects he has taken on during his time in the van, whether or not it’s really affordable (especially in the case of his van, which is like the Bat Cave), and what he has planned for the future (spoiler: it’s not a lease). There’s also a fair amount of talk about parking, but it’s really interesting and involves a story about a dive bar in Nashville that made us really think van living is the most sensible way to live.

So, you pretty much do everything. You act, you write, you’re outdoorsy, you’re sporty. Even your writing covers like 57 different topics.

Right.

Give me sort of a short bio of Brent Rose, a modern Jack of all trades.

It’s been a long history of falling ass backwards into different adventures. I was an actor from the age of like 15 or so. That’s what I was going to do, and I was on that mission. I went to grad school for acting, I moved to New York for it, and it was going alright. It was a little slow, but not too bad. I did a few films, some soap operas, a lot of web stuff, and a lot of plays, of course. Then, I was just looking for something better to do for money in-between shows than temping. Somebody posted a Facebook article or ad thing saying, “Hey, does anybody know someone that uses Android phones and can write? PC World is looking for somebody who can do app reviews for them.”

This was the early days of Androids, for example I think I had the Motorola Droid. It was the third Android phone or something. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I could probably bullshit my way through app reviews. A three-paragraph app review? No problem.” Everybody in my family is essentially either an engineer or a doctor, so I have science in my blood. It’s genetically hardwired in there. I was like, “Yeah, between like the creative writing and that, I’m sure I can figure it out.” That snowballed into this crazy journalism career that led me to being full-time at Gizmodo, which was kind of a big fork in the road for me because if I was taking a full-time job, then my agent was going to drop me. I decided to go for it and it paid off.

Gizmodo was great, and my editor at the time, Joe Brown, really encouraged people to write about the things they are most interested in, write about things they care about. I had a wide range of interests, and I got to take over part of the outdoor coverage and adventure coverage. I got to start a booze column for them and did all their action stuff. Anything that took me out of the office and got me outside, I took that beat. I started health and fitness columns.

Then when I finally did go freelance, I had this body of work that I could show different outlets. I could take it to a health and fitness magazine and show them my health and fitness stuff or take it to a lifestyle thing and show my booze stuff or any of the technology places. Then finally, I met somebody who was making videos for Wired, and I had worked for Wired already. We had coffee teamed up on a show together. Now, I am combining the two career paths that I’ve had, where I’m still doing on camera/comedy/hosting stuff and I’m also doing the geeky, gadgety, techie things.

It sounds like it also naturally sets you up for living in a van because you’re drawing from all the tech knowledge to keep the van going and you were already looking for assignments that took you out of the office.

Exactly. Very much so. I’d been freelance for a few years before the van thing happened. I was already working from wherever. I was going through a big life transition and wasn’t really anchored to any one spot. I asked myself, “What’s the logical extreme? If I can work from anywhere, how far can I push that?” I came up with this whole van idea as a way to be the ultimate in noncommittal. The idea to pick up and go somewhere else on a whim and work from wherever and park it and fly somewhere and come back to it and drive somewhere else? It was kind of exactly what I wanted at the time.

I’m desperately curious, like why the van route and not like an RV or just road tripping from like motel to motel or camping? Like why the van?

The van was the right balance point. An RV would obviously be more comfortable, have more space, but then I wouldn’t be able to park it on city streets. Then, camping is great and having a small car, but then you have you deal with figuring out where you’re going to stay, figuring out if there is space at this camp ground. Is there room at this hotel? How much is a hotel going to be? Whereas the van is the spot right in the middle, where I’ve got basically everything I could possibly need with me at all times.

It’s small enough that I can park it in a residential neighborhood or a campground or a trail or pretty much anywhere, including most metered parking spots, depending on the city. It was this perfect thing. If I do it this way, then I don’t have to choose at all. If I’m going out in some town and end up meeting random people and having some drinks at bars, then I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to get back to a campsite or hotel. I just crawl into the van and pack up for the night, as long as I park legally. That is the number one pain point of the whole van life thing: finding a safe, quiet, good place to park at night or even during the day. If you can deal with that discomfort and that uncertainty, then you’re rewarded, I think.

Oh, that’s pretty awesome. I hadn’t thought about that. I’ve got to say, the bar thing is just appealing on a personal level, not as even as a lifestyle.

When I pulled into Nashville, I didn’t know at all where I was going to go, so I asked my followers on Twitter. I’m like, “All right. I’m going to Nashville, where should I go?” The first thing somebody said was, “Oh, you’ve got to check out this place called Santa’s Pub.” It’s like, “Great. Santa’s Pub.” I navigated to there thinking it was going to be some downtown spot, and I could use it as a base. No. Santa’s Pub is this double-wide trailer out near the fairgrounds on the outskirts of town. It’s a karaoke bar.

It was filled with smoke, and, I walked in there and was like, “Oh man, well this is definitely not where I want to be, but I’ll have a drink and I’ll figure out from where I’m going to go.” Within a few minutes, I ended up striking up a conversation with these two random couples that were in town from … Nebraska I want to say.

We ended up like spending the next couple of hours buying each other beers and singing karaoke songs and hanging out. At the end of it, I was talking to the guy, Santa, who owns Santa’s Pub. His real name’s Desmond. I’m saying, “This is a great place. Hey, do you think I’m going to be okay to park somewhere on the street?” He’s like, “Just pull into the parking lot, man. I had these Swedes here, they stayed for like a week and a half. No problem, man.”

I was like, “All right,” so I spent that first night in the parking lot of Santa’s Pub in Nashville. Being open to those kinds of experiences is sort of what it’s all about.

That leads me naturally into my next question because I was going to ask about Connected States and your Santa adventure seems like it falls under that umbrella.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Connected States is like a double, triple entendre because the idea is I’m in a high-tech van, so even though I’m off the grid in all these different states, I’m staying connected to the grid because I’ve got Wi-Fi and 4G Internet and solar panels. I’m pretty well connected. The other thing was I started in 2015, and it was already such a polarized environment in the U.S. There’s a lot of dissent and a lot of mistrust and the whole right versus left thing was getting acrimonious. I was like, “I feel like the media’s leaning really heavily on our differences and I can do something here to show that we have more in common than we have differences.”

That was kind of what I wanted to do was just to drive around and have conversations with people that didn’t discuss politics or religion and see what our common ground is. That really filled me up with a lot of inspiration like, “Yeah, we’re not so different.” Then the election happened, and then, all this white supremacy stuff happened. Then, honestly, it kind of shook my faith in that a little bit. I’m reevaluating what I think. Part of me still very much believes that’s true, but we’ve also got Nazi rallies marching down the streets of some of our major cities and the Administration is not condemning them, and I find that extremely disheartening. I’m constantly reevaluating my take on Connected States. I hope it eventually continues.

For a period of time, Connected States became 27 Monuments, right?

Yeah, that’s right.

What was that about?

I started in June. I had finished a gig in Lake Tahoe, and I was on my way to Colorado for another gig. After that, I had nothing lined up for a month, and I didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do, which isn’t totally uncommon. But, it’s rare for me to have a whole month like that, so I was like, “I don’t know, maybe I’ll try east. Maybe I’ll find some land in Montana and just park it and work on a screenplay. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I’d been talking to a friend of mine, Lynsey Dyer, who’s a professional skier. We’d been talking about finding an adventure we could do that would raise awareness about something we could do to benefit the planet in some way. She got me thinking about environmental causes.

I was driving down the street having had this amazing experience in Lake Tahoe with the No Barriers Summit, which is adaptive sports for various forms of disabled people. I was feeling really inspired and I wanted to give back. I thought, “Didn’t I hear something about national monuments being under threat? Let me look that up.” I pulled over to a rest stop and Googled it, and realized that Trump had ordered Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, to reevaluate 27 of our national monuments, to possibly have them be rezoned or shrunk or eliminated altogether or have them be opened up to drilling or mining or logging or cattle raising. I’m like, “This is insane.”

I realized that the comment period had very quietly opened but nobody really knew about it because there were so many other issues happening at the same time. I’ve heard it called “protest fatigue,” which I think is a pretty accurate way of referring to it. I was like, “Somebody’s got to raise awareness about this,” because the public commentary closed July 15th. We only had about a month, and I was like, “I’m in a van, I’m in this mobile setup that’s set up for mobile reporting. I like outdoor adventure stuff. I don’t have anything planned after this event. I wonder if I can reach all of these national monuments and do like a one-minute video on each one of them just to show how special each one is and how unique they are and why they’re worthy of our protection.”

I reached out to a friend my friend Nick Furness at Esri; they’re a data mapping company. I said, “Hey, can you help me find the most mathematically efficient route between all of these monuments?” That night, he had a proposed route for me on a map all mapped out and everything. I was like, “All right, I’m doing this. This is happening.” It took me about a week just to get ready. I put all terrain tires on the van, which ultimately was maybe the smartest investment I’ve ever made because I got in some really hairy situations that I don’t think I would have gotten through without those tires, to be totally honest. So, “Thank you, BFGoodrich”… They’re not sponsoring me but that’s free advertising for them because they saved me.

Then I took off and started doing it. There are 22 land-based national monuments and five marine national monuments I wasn’t able to reach. Most of them were in the west, so it ended up being 6,500 miles of driving in about three weeks. After eight days, I mean I was really driving myself to the ground just health-wise. I was sleeping one or two hours a night and I was really kind of falling apart. My dad had a vacation planned, and he said, “How about I cancel my vacation? I’ll just come and I’ll be your driver, and I’ll cook for you.” Suddenly, now I’m sleeping like four hours a night, which still, obviously not nearly enough sleep but it made a huge difference, ultimately.

Nice.

Yeah, it was. It went well in that I managed to reach all of the monuments. But, Secretary Zinke’s report just leaked recently, and he is recommending the reduction, re-bordering of four national monuments and also opening up 10 of them to mining, drilling, logging, commercial fishing and stuff like that, so very disappointing. We’ll see what happens.

You were supposed to be done with van life a while ago, but then you continued it. On your journal, you indicate you’re reaching some sort of a transitional stage?

I think that’s accurate. I don’t know what it is yet exactly, so I’m just trying to be open to it. Originally, this was going to be a one-year project. Then I got to the one-year mark, and I was in Massachusetts and I realized I didn’t feel like I was done. I had an existential crisis at the time because I was like, “Whoa, hold on. This isn’t a one-year project, then what is this? Am I just like a guy in a van now? What do I feel about that?” It took me a while to process all of that. Once I did, I just decided I’d keep going until it stopped being fun or until I came up with something better. That’s still the plan.

Currently, I’ve got a couple of TV projects that I’m working on, that I’m trying to pitch. LA Is where I was before I started off on this road trip, so I’ve started hanging out back in LA again. I’m kind of planning on basing myself here for the fall and maybe the winter, obviously with side trips here and there. Like I’m heading up to the Bay Area next week, and then I’ve got a quick work gig in Europe the week after that, so it’s going to be a lot of running around still.

It feels like I’m experimenting with semi-putting roots down at least. I’m at this place in LA right now, it’s some friends’ property. They’ve kind of given me carte blanche to park here for a while, so it almost feels like I have a regular place to stay. But, I’m still doing the van thing. I’m still mobile; I can still sleep wherever I want, so it’s just kind of a hybrid right now that I’m experimenting with. I’ll see how it feels and how much of an in-depth thing this is.

Is there a fear of committing to a lease or something?

To a lease? Oh yeah, sure, totally. Yeah, because it’s been so easy, as soon as I’m over something, to just pick up and go. The idea of being committed to something like that again is, it’s yeah, it gives me a little anxiety for sure. Especially, because I still really am enjoying traveling around and being mobile, so I don’t know that I would be able to do an apartment and maintain the van and all that stuff, too. It kind of feels like an either or proposition. Maybe it doesn’t have to be but right now, that’s what it feels like.

Because, honestly, one of the big, appealing parts about the van thing is that you can live a lot cheaper while you’re doing it. If you’re mostly staying in one place and you’re doing a lot of cooking in your own little van kitchen, then it’s actually a pretty cheap way to live. The idea of keeping my overhead low so I can just go on adventures when they come up is still very appealing.

Okay, so you just wrote an article for The Verge about all of the tech that’s in your van.

Yeah, pretty much.

It seems really spendy. Does it still balance out to being really affordable?

Yeah. It does, ultimately. I spent way less in the last two plus years than I have if I had to spend in an apartment paying rent, almost certainly. I mean it depends where you are. If you’re in some small-town USA, then I’m sure you’d pay a lot less. But, I’d be in LA, New York or San Francisco home bases and rent there is so expensive. So, I do think it’s actually balanced in my favor. The longer I do it, the more it continues to make financial sense as long as things aren’t breaking all over the place.

You’ve been doing it for two years, so you have a very practical understanding of it but does it still have like a patina of romance, like you’re a vagabond?

Yeah, for sure. Not always, like there are definitely some times when it’s very, very unromantic. There are times when it’s a pain in the ass, but I mean, I think that’s true just about no matter which walk of life you choose. I think that I get to have the advantages of these crazy, unpredictable experiences coming out of the middle of nowhere. It’s put me in a real “yes” mode. For a long time, I was like, “All right, well I don’t know which way this road is going to go, but I’m going to go that way.”

I think that I wouldn’t trade the experience of that for anything, Sure, sometimes there’s times when something was broken or some security guard knocks on your door and tells you to move and it’s the middle of the night and you’re exhausted and it’s the last thing you want to do. It’s not all rosy or anything like that, but in general, I wouldn’t trade it. It’s been such a unique and valuable experience. I do hope to turn it into a book at some point.