Manitoba trucker speeds toward 50K YouTube subscribers by showing life on the road

Manitoba trucker Josh Giesbrecht is speeding toward 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts videos that show his life on the road.

Giesbrecht started making the videos in 2011, but at that time it was only to show friends what his day looked like as he travelled across the country and beyond.

"Not a lot of people get an inside look into what we do on the road because usually it's just us, by ourselves in our cab," he told CBC.

Slowly, he said he started to realize "more and more people had negative images in their minds about truck drivers."

Giesbrecht said the negative stereotypes associated with driving a truck — that [those who do it are] dirty individuals and … not very pleasant to be around in Giesbrecht's words — impacted one of his relationships.

"I was dating a girl and her parents didn't like me because I was a truck driver," he said.

"It sort of shocked me because I come from a family of truckers … This is all I know; it's what I've grown up around."

The four years' worth of videos that Giesbrecht has posted of himself and travel companions Sergeant, a German Shepherd and Diesel, a Rottweiler, contradict those stereotypes.

For Giesbrecht, that is part of the point.

"I wanted to change that and show people we're just regular people out there," he said.

"We've got families at home, we love what we do."

What Giesbrecht calls "innocent ignorance" on behalf of those who make assumptions about truck drivers is caused by people making assumptions based on what they think life on the road might be like, he said.

"They don't know that we have regular, nice, clean, sanitary showers that we can shower in every single night. A lot of them probably think that we just live in our trucks and never get out."

But regardless of what others think about it, Giesbrecht, whose work has brought him to every province in Canada and all continental states in the U.S., loves his life.

"I think it's a very exciting one, myself," he said.

"I sleep in a different city every single night, pretty much. You sort of make home wherever you park it."

There are many who share that excitement: His largest audience is in the states and then Canada. After that, the largest population of viewers are in the United Kingdom, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Giesbrecht's videos are available here.