David Freiheit

David Freiheit (born September 29, 1979), is a Canadian lawyer, and YouTuber under the pseudonym Viva Frei.
Biography.
Freiheit grew up in Montreal, Quebec, as the youngest of five siblings. He enjoyed creating videos. 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.
In 2007, Freiheit began practising law, following in the footsteps of his father and older siblings. He worked professionally for the prominent commercial litigation firm Borden Ladner Gervais for six years, but left to be a freelance litigator after his first child to have a more favorable work-life balance, starting a firm called Freiheit Legal.
For the first few years of his YouTube career, Freiheit was a practicing commercial litigator, and he struggled to find time to create his videos. In January 2018, he discontinued his litigation practice and turned full-time to YouTube.
YouTube career.
Early content and awards (2014-2019).
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. These videos were not receiving many views, so Freiheit decided to try another style; in late 2014, Freiheit started posting nature-related stunts. He gained popularity when he posted a video of a squirrel picking up his GoPro action camera and carrying it up a tree. Freiheit then started posting videos of stunts involving the use of a drone.
In 2016, Freiheit won a GoPro Award for his use of their cameras in his videos. He won a Shorty Social Good Award for Best Overall Youtube Presence in 2017.
In January 2019, Freiheit was invited by GoPro to be a featured panelist at the Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Style change (2019-present).
From 2014 to 2019, Freiheit had only 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 analyzing different current issues from a legal standpoint. He started a second channel, "Viva Family", as a place to maintain his former content style.
Freiheit classifies the political stance he takes on his channel as non-partisan, claiming that the internet, through the use of the terms right or left-wing, only succeeds in "pigeonholing, categorizing, dichotomizing, just reducing a complex individual to either right or left in all of their... beliefs.". In an interview, he described his channel's content as including a "pretty decent balance of left and right".
In 2019 attorney Robert Barnes began making weekly Sunday evening appearances on the Viva Frei law vlog YouTube channel.