David Freiheit (born May 23, 1979), is a Canadian lawyer, former political candidate for the People's Party of Canada[1] and YouTuber under the pseudonym Viva Frei.[2]
Biography
Freiheit grew up in Montreal, Quebec, as the youngest of five siblings born in a Jewish family.[3][4] He enjoyed creating videos.[5] He studied Creative Arts at Dawson College and received his Bachelor of Arts at McGill University. He then received his civil law degree from Université Laval where he was the editor-in-chief of the university's law journal.[3]
In 2007, Freiheit began practising law, following in the footsteps of his father and older siblings.[6] He worked professionally for the prominent commercial litigation firm Borden Ladner Gervais for six years,[7] but left to be a freelance litigator after his first child to have a more favourable work-life balance,[2] starting a firm called Freiheit Legal.[8]
For the first few years of his YouTube career, Freiheit was a practising commercial litigator, and he struggled to find time to create his videos.[9] In January 2018, he discontinued his litigation practice and turned full-time to YouTube.[10]
Freiheit started his YouTube career in early 2014 by posting videos of him lip syncing to various pop songs while running obstacle courses dressed in a full suit.[12] These videos were not receiving many views, so Freiheit decided to try another style; in late 2014, Freiheit started posting nature-related stunts.[13][14] He gained popularity when he posted a video of a squirrel picking up his GoProaction camera and carrying it up a tree.[15][16] Freiheit then started posting videos of stunts involving the use of a drone.[17][18]
In 2016, Freiheit won a GoPro Award for his use of their cameras in his videos.[19] He won a Shorty Social Good Award for Best Overall YouTube Presence in 2017.[20]
From 2014 to 2019, Freiheit had accumulated around 60,000 subscribers. In April 2019, he decided that since law-related content was by far his channel's most popular genre, he would change the style of his channel and only post vlogs analysing different current issues from a legal standpoint.[22][23] He started a second channel, "Viva Family", as a place to maintain his former content style.[24]
Before running for the PPC, Freiheit had classified the political stance he takes on his channel as non-partisan,[25] claiming that the internet, through the use of the terms right-wing or left-wing, only succeeds in "pigeonholing, categorizing, dichotomizing, just reducing a complex individual to either right or left in all of their... beliefs".[26] In an interview, he described his channel's content as including a "pretty decent balance of left and right".[6]
In 2019 attorney Robert Barnes began making live weekly Sunday evening appearances on Freiheit's channel. The series continued on a weekly basis, often featuring a notable guest, where the two discuss recent legal and political event.[27]
In September 2022, Freiheit signed an exclusive video deal with the video platform Rumble.[28][29][30] He frequently works in person at the Rumble Miami studio,[31] and was attributed by the company as a key legal contributor to their 2022 proposal for an 'open-source content moderation policy and process'.[32]
