Share this on
Aquatic Apes, aka Leonard Logsdail, has a hell of a story. Before getting into freediving & spearfishing, Leo worked in New York for ten years, making & selling bespoke business suits, shirts & ties to wealthy businessmen & movie stars. He was that good that he even had a small cameo appearance in the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, as a tailor, after assisting with the production of many of the suits for the movie. Fast forward a few years later, he moved to Bali and started creating spearfishing & freediving videos on YouTube & TikTok, under the name “Aquatic Apes.” Over the past 9 months, his videos have garnered over 250 million views. Here's how.
After getting tired of life in NYC, I made the decision to move across the US to live in Colorado, near the Rocky Mountains, so that I could ski more. But, since I had to quit my job to move anyways, I figured that it would also be the perfect time to spend a few months backpacking around SE Asia before moving & finding a new job in Colorado. During my backpacking trip, I took a level 1 freediving course, ended up staying for my instructor course, and then never ended up moving back to the US. I know that a lot of freedivers are familiar with SE Asia, but for those that aren’t: it’s extremely cheap to live/travel here. If you want to train for freediving, practice spearfishing, get good at surfing, or spend time practicing almost anything, SE Asia is the perfect location to do these things because it’s so inexpensive to live here. Although I’m technically a certified freediving instructor, I’ve never actually taught anyone. Before YouTube, I afforded life in SE Asia by teaching online English classes to Chinese kids, working 13 hrs/day on Saturdays & Sundays, and spending the other 5 days of the week freediving, spearfishing, editing videos, and I actually ended up putting more money into my savings account each month than when I was living in New York and earning way more money. Basically, I realized that it was possible to have a much higher quality of life just by moving out of one of the most expensive places in the world and into one of the least expensive places.
I had seen videos of it & had wanted to learn for years. I liked the idea of working hard for your food, being connected to where it came from, being selective about what you catch, & doing all those things in beautiful underwater environments. And basically, it just looked like it was a ton of fun. Also the Joe Rogan Podcast.
I’m not totally sure. A lot of it is luck. But a lot of it is consistency as well. I post a lot of videos. The past few weeks I’ve been out of the water with a massive ear infection & haven’t made too many videos, but normally, I post a new video almost every single day. Although you don’t need to post that much in order to succeed, it helps a lot for 2 reasons: you get good at making videos and your audience is more familiar with you because they see/hear from you every day. They are less likely to forget who you are and why they subscribed to you in the first place. Also, I’m lucky to be in a position where I can spearfish every single day, and have the time to edit videos afterward. If I were still living in New York, it wouldn’t be possible to make nearly as many videos because I’d need to work all the time to afford to pay my $3000/month rent, and spearfishing there is seasonal and way more expensive. Having said that, it’s not an accident that I ended up in the perfect location (price-wise & fish-wise) for making spearfishing videos. I specifically chose Indonesia so that I could try to build a YouTube business here.
Yes. I have a lot of tips. But of course, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. This is what has worked for me, but I see lots of people succeeding with very different strategies than mine. Also, I’m still learning myself. But here’s what’s worked for me so far.
The story is the most important thing in your video. If your story is not interesting, your video won’t get a lot of views. The only exception to this is if you happen to spear a monster fish like a marlin or something. If you spear a marlin and post that unedited video onto YouTube with some dubstep music blaring in the background, there’s a solid chance that the video will get a lot of views. If you do that same thing with a video of spearing an average-sized snapper, you likely won’t get many views. Having said that, if you tell an interesting story about catching that average snapper, you will get way more views than that unedited dubstep video of spearing a world record marlin.
The YouTube algorithm is simple: If people watch your videos all the way to the end, & if people click on your thumbnail more than they click on other thumbnails, you’ll get a lot of views. Personally, every single time I create a video that doesn’t perform well (which is often), my first thought is to blame the algorithm, rather than myself. But in reality, either the thumbnail wasn’t interesting enough for people to click on, or the story was boring, or a combination of both those things.
Spearfishing makes for great videos because the act of catching a fish follows such a clear storyline. Think Moby Dick, or The Old Man & the Sea. Fishing stories follow the classic story format with a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a beginning: “I’m going after a fish.” There is a middle: “I’m trying to catch the fish, but something went wrong and it’s difficult to complete my mission for this reason.” And there is an end: “finally, I was able to catch the fish and I cooked it in this way” or “the fish was too smart or too strong for me to catch it, so rather than eating fresh fish for dinner, I’m eating a sad, unhealthy Big Mac at McDonalds.”
You want your viewer not to see the ending coming. Think about your favorite movies you’ve ever seen. The ending is not obvious. If the ending is obvious, the movie often sucks. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is what I have found to be true most of the time and it’s what works for me most of the time. You want a surprise ending. Or at least a non-obvious ending. You want a plot twist. You want the viewer to be wondering what is going to happen. An example of a plot twist with a non-obvious ending would be: you spear a giant tuna, but it’s not a stone shot. And now the tuna is taking your float underwater, out of sight. The viewer probably didn’t see that coming and the viewer has no idea as to whether or not the float will reappear. And if it does, will the tuna drag the float back down? Will you need to put a second spear into the fish? Will it break away? Also, don’t forget to explain these things to the viewer. Many people are not familiar with hunting tuna and might not understand the significance of what they are looking at.
That was just an example. Of course, you always want to stone your fish when spearfishing, and of course it’s possible to make an amazing video out of a stone shot. But if I’m being totally honest, it’s more difficult to make a good video out of a stone shot, because the struggle is less obvious. For a video like that, maybe the struggle is that you are at a deeper depth than you are used to and are unsure of how long you’re going to be able to stay down there for. Or maybe the struggle is that you had to travel to a super far/remote location to even find that fish in the first place. Basically, you don’t want your video to be: “I saw a fish, then I shot it because I’m a perfect shot and I’m the man.” That video can be interesting once in a while, and I make ones like that myself sometimes, but you can’t make those videos too often because it’s basically the exact same thing over and over and over again.
Speaking of being a perfect shot, don't be afraid to show your mistakes on video. Some of my most viral videos have been of me missing or not being able to catch fish. The important thing is that there is a struggle and that you, the main character of the story, have a mission. It’s not important that you succeed in your mission. The mission just needs to exist.
YouTube, and all video platforms, care about view duration. If most of your viewers click away from your 5-minute long video by minute 2, because they know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of your video, YouTube will not promote your video. But, if the viewers genuinely have no idea how the video is going to end, and they want to know what’s going to happen, then YouTube will recognize your video as a good one and promote it more. That is, as long as you also have a thumbnail that a lot of people want to click.
I have found that if I use curse words in the thumbnail, in the video, or in the description, the videos usually get fewer views. I think that YouTube censors those videos and shows them to a smaller audience that is less likely to get offended. I have also found that if I show something relatively graphic (ie. a fish being stabbed in the head) at the very beginning of a video, it will be shown to a smaller number of people. Additionally, I’ve found that if you spear larger fish, people are more likely to be offended than if you spear smaller fish. So, if I have footage catching a larger fish, I’ll often cut out the part of the video where I stab it in the head because I know that the audience is more likely to be offended by that. These are all weird things, and they are not consistent with logic, and I wish that they were not true. But, as far as I’m aware, they are true. And if you want to succeed on YouTube, it will be easier if you follow the rules. Having said that, I still use bad words and show myself putting fish out of their mystery often, because I think that it tells a more authentic story. But if I’m not sure whether or not one of these things really benefits the story, I’ll generally cut it out of the video. We all know that spearfishing and stabbing the fish in the head is ethical, but the average person browsing YouTube probably hasn’t thought about it that hard, so it’s good to keep that in mind.
I’m still learning how to make good videos. But I know that as long as I keep practicing and focus on making the story interesting, over time, my videos will get better and better. Dealing with procrastination and fear of creating something that might not be well received is a whole other topic, but to touch on it briefly: every single day, I have to remind myself that the number of good videos I create is directly proportional to the number of bad movies I create. Basically, I need to make as many as possible. Some will be bad, and eventually, some will be good. You can’t just go from making zero movies, thinking about it a lot, and then making great ones. Making bad movies, in the beginning, is the only way to learn how to make good ones later on.
And my tips are not true for all videos. You can disregard everything that I just said to do and still make incredibly viral videos. Daan Verhoven’s YouTube videos about freediving couldn’t possibly be more different than mine. And he gets a huge amount of views. There are unlimited ways to make interesting videos and you need to find your own unique style. And the only way to find your own unique style is by making as many videos as you possibly can.
Indonesia has tons of fish. But you need to travel far away from Bali to find them. Bali has a good amount of fish as well, but not compared to the rest of Indonesia. The fish in Bali are heavily fished, and they are very used to seeing underwater hunters. This means that you have to dive deeper and longer, and have better technique than in a lot of other places around the world. These things make Bali an amazing place to train for spearfishing. But if you are looking for monsters and a wide variety of fish, you need to travel a bit farther off the beaten path than Bali, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world. Indonesia has over 17,000 islands though, and they are almost all full of fish. The best/easiest way to do it would be to organize a spearfishing liveaboard boat trip. Send me a message if you’re interested in doing one of those. But if you want to do it the old-fashioned way and travel to an island with a good fishing reputation and find a local fisherman to take you to the fishy spots, that’s also very possible. There’s a big spearfishing community in Bali and in Indonesia, and everyone here is happy to share the contact info of reliable boat drivers (ie. local fishermen) in different areas. I just got back from a trip in West Papua, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that in one single dive I would often see more spearable fish than in an entire month of spearfishing in Bali. Indonesia is an amazing place to spearfish and freedive. I think that it probably has the best combination of cool fish, good diving conditions, and low-prices in the entire world.