I'm somewhat curious as to why he's not collecting rainwater and using that rather than getting water trucked in; especially since he mentions it rains "a LOT".

I'm somewhat curious as to why he's not collecting rainwater and using that rather than getting water trucked in; especially since he mentions it rains "a LOT". A quick Google suggests that area receives 200-300mm of rain a year, that would be enough to sustain two people. As for being off the grid; I grew up on a cropping farm which was fairly isolated, ~100km from the nearest large (>1000 people) town. Pretty similar weather conditions 45-50C max in summer and 200 - 300mm of rain per year. We had a family of 4, a few dogs and 2 workmen during seeding/harvest (4 months). We lived completely off rainwater, except for drought years, then we'd have to truck water from bores either on our farm, or somewhere nearby. Power was from the grid, except for outages (which could last a few days) or when poles caught fire and burnt down.. then we were looking for more than drinking water, as you have to fight your own fires. If the power wasn't back on after a decent chunk of time we'd get a generator running. Currently we're using solar panels, and hopefully we can start using something like a Powerwall fairly soon. We had dialup internet for quite a while. That only changed when a mobile tower was built nearby (5 years ago?). Then we had slow internet with a fairly bad cap. It used to be 10GB/month, it's 20GB/month now. The most off the grid I remember being was when we would sometimes have no power, internet, mobile or home phone. If you got into an accident/emergency during that you could be in a bit trouble.