JOB and the surfing culture in San Francisco | NO CONTEST OFF TOUR

Founded in 1776, just five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed, San Francisco has always been a city more than comfortable with radical change. Whether we're talking about the Gold Rush or World Wars, the beatniks hanging in the marina in the 50s, the hippies flocking to the hate in the 60s, or gay liberation rising out of the Castro in the 70s, the techno-utopian hackers of the 80s building the networks that would become the foundation of our 21st century internet age. Raw, rugged, fickle, frustrating. When I moved to San Francisco more than 10 years ago, these were the adjectives that I heard thrown around, trying to capture and describe the San Francisco surfing experience. And all of them are absolutely true. But that doesn't describe the surf culture and community here, which since the 1960s has been one of the most tight-knit and under-the-radar surf scenes in America. And much of that started right here at Fort Point. On the southern bank of the mile-wide Golden Gate Strait, tucked on the eastern side of the internationally recognizable suspension bridge of the same name, is one of surfing's most iconic lineups. I think this is the biggest novelty wave in the world. It's offshore, it's clean, there's a few waves. Despite having one of the most instantly recognizable backdrops of any wave in the world, the scene at Fort is as underground as they come. Ian, Jamie, and I started our SF mission, a few of the crew that have held Fort down for decades. When we first surfed here, too, it was still illegal. The MPs, it was military-based. For some reason, they didn't think you should surf here, and they'd put on all their sirens and call you out of the water, just throw the ticket away. And when the park service took over, they just said, have at it, you know, this is great, go surfing. I surfed here way less when I was a teenager, because it was pretty heavy vibes. And then when people in the lineup were like, anyone can surf here, it's like, you've been here for five minutes waiting for a wave. They've been waiting for like 50 years, through no wetsuits, MPs, just a totally different experience. So much energy moving around out there. Wild. Louis Samuels might have got the dub. Saw him get a couple little corners on the inside. It gets better, it's often worse. We surfed a lot worse. They call it the office, just like going to work out there, staying wet. Over the last two decades, the internet has ushered in the unprecedented Bay Area tech boom. The impact of Silicon Valley money, the city's skyrocketing cost of living, the displacement of the working class. It hasn't been easy to witness for locals like third generation San Franciscan, Matty Lopez. There's this thing where like now, the people that move to San Francisco rank themselves based on how long they've been here. I judge them based on like, are you going to be here? Are you going to stay? Are you going to have your kids here? Are your kids going to be here? Because this neighborhood, there's people that have lived here for generations that made the community here that you like, that you moved into. Do you want to preserve that? Are you trying to change that? Matty owns and operates two of the Sunset's favorite watering holes, Whitecap and Pits, post-surf staples for a cold beer or craft cocktail. The surf culture in San Francisco wasn't based around like the surf industry or contests. They were working class. They weren't getting paid. They weren't sponsored. That's the huge difference between San Francisco and these bigger beach towns. It's like the surf DNA is totally different. The surf industry and competitive surfing and sponsors are totally immersed in Southern California and Santa Cruz. And that's not even a part of this. You know, it's like not the deal. My dad is a native San Franciscan that started surfing here in the seventies. When he was 15, he went into Wise to buy a board and a wetsuit. He's like, I want to be a surfer. And Bob tried to talk him out of it. Bob was like, you don't want to be, are you sure you want to be a surfer? And like Bob had like just opened his business, you know, was probably like not making a lot of money. And Bob's sitting there trying to talk him out of becoming a surfer. They were old and they were bitter and, you know, all that good shit. But that's our culture, you know, it's foggy, it's cold. Yeah, it's not inviting. No, but it's kind of like San Francisco in general. You know, it's not for the faint of heart. That's why most people do their five to 10 years and they bounce. And then walk us through some of these photos. This is Kelly's. This is Kelly's Cove right here. Kelly's is just like the easiest access. It's semi-protected. So that became a spot, you know. But this is how they used to do it back in the day. Everyone hung out on the wall. What a sick scene though. Just like everyone kicking it. Yeah, like look, there's tons of surfers at Kelly's. I mean, you see all these boards. That's the epicenter of San Francisco surf culture. Most days, locals like Matty spend a lot of time driving the three and a half miles up and down the legendary Great Highway, looking for just the right sandbar. Starting at the north end of the beach at Kelly's, you check Balboa, VFWs, then behind a few hundred yards of sand dunes past Pillbox, Lincoln, Judah, all the way to Noriega Street, which begins the so-called middle of the beach and stretches all the way to Sloat Boulevard and the end of Ocean Beach at Fort Funston. Scoring perfect Ocean Beach ain't easy, but with stiff easterly winds and a healthy pulse of long-period North Pacific groundswell, a few days a year, Ocean Beach is the best beach break in North America. This is like a combination of a big wave and a Class 5 river because you've got the entire bay, which is 400 square miles, moving in and out every time the tide changes. So even if it's small, it feels big. Bianca is a radical change agent and ringleader of the Outer Bar Babes, a fierce crew of women of all ages pushing themselves in bigger and bigger surf. Demanding as it is, Ocean Beach is a perfect big wave training ground. And after relocating from Southern California a decade ago, Bianca has developed a reputation as one of the best female big wave surfers of all time. This beach, I think, has number one deaths throughout all of California. Yeah, and because of the current and the rips, this beach is no joke. 1998, we had seven drownings at this beach. That was 10% of all ocean drownings. This was the most dangerous beach in the nation in that year, 1998. It's three in one day. But the wave itself, it's not a super, super critical wave. It's not like surfing super tubos or something really, really technical. It's just navigating this ocean that is so technical. There's not like defined channels and you'll be paddling for a half hour. The most frustrated you've ever been, you know? So it's kind of like surfing Ocean Beach on a bigger day. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass. It's a nice pain in the ass. And then the community, the reason why I love living here is for the community. You gotta be pretty hardcore. You gotta be a glutton for punishment to surf this beach. And so I find that people who like that have a lot of character and can also take that skill and surf anywhere in the world. So I feel really, really lucky to be part of this community and so inspired by all the people who come through, the new people who show up. It's just like awesome people here. People with thick skin, but they've all got really big hearts and a lot of passion. Thick skin and big hearts. Yeah, thick skin, big hearts. Once it's so big that it's hard to make it back out, that's usually when we're going to surf Mavericks. A short drive 20 miles south from Ocean Beach is Half Moon Bay, the little harbor village of Pillar Point, and right out front, the most famous big wave in California and one of the heaviest waves in the world, Mavericks. When we were growing up, I always thought you had to surf Mavericks. It wasn't like, oh, it's a choice. I just thought that was what you do. Every session out there is so unique and different and scary. It's all the things. One of the Mount Everest of surfing. Like, it's just that pinnacle wave. One of the big three when I grew up. It's like Waimea, Mavericks, Jaws. The atmosphere just seems a lot heavier than Hawaii. It's sunny, it's warm, and then here it's like great white sharks, kelp, freezing water, like gnarly locals. It's not warm. I think Bianca just has it, you know? She likes it and she's athletic. She has a lot of experience. I think she's probably the best girl at Mavericks in the world. It's super inspiring. She's just such a great role model and such a good person and to see now like how she's kind of taking Zoe under her wing now that I'm kind of like flying the coop a little bit. Now for me, the most fun part is getting to mentor Zoe. Being a surfer from Half Moon Bay, you're kind of like destined to eventually surf Mavericks. So she definitely will be so gnarly in big waves and to see like the next generation of women's big wave surfing is really cool. For surfers like Mark Valenta, a writer and creative director at Adobe Studios, San Francisco is a city of endless professional opportunity for artists, writers, designers, and anyone working in creative fields. Today, most major tech companies operating out of San Francisco have a healthy population of surfer labor. I think surfing increases productivity because when you're like trying to crack some problem thinking about something you're working on, sometimes it doesn't come to you at your desk, right? Just go out into the water and it's like a bolt of lightning and you're like, boom, there it is. It is this really big contrast between like modern tech with like old San Francisco, you know, blue collar, hoodie collar. Up on market, you've got Twitter. Right here, you've got, you know, Zynga, which I guess is still separate or is it owned by Meta? I don't even know. I can't keep up with it. It's hard to overstate the sheer cultural, political, and economic effect that Bay Area tech has had on the world over the last three decades. Things that we take for granted today, smartphones and personal computers, digital design tools, and POV digital cameras, every variety of social media and app-based service like Uber or Airbnb, they were all dreamed up within a few miles of San Francisco. No surfer has harnessed modern tech's creative tools, disruptive power, and democratic spirit more than Jamie O'Brien. J-O-B used social media platforms like YouTube to redefine and revolutionize what it means to be a professional surfer. I think the Jamie that the public see now was completely switched on already. Pre-YouTube, pre-social media, pre-email. He's already grinding out with his own filmer and self-producing his own movies. He was doing that way before that even had a chance to live on the internet. When that was going on the DVD, he's creating his own projects and creating his own value to his sponsors outside of just doing events. I went to Rip Curl and I was like, I want to make a Jamie O'Brien movie. Right. And they're like, we're not ready for a Jamie O'Brien movie. Yeah, we're ready or not, we're going to make one. I had control of my own surfing career and I was like, boom, put out the movie. Everyone loved it. It was a huge success. The surf photographer, the surf filmmaker, the magazine editor, all these other people were these layers between whatever it is you wanted to release to the world and you. I think another thing Jamie's been able to do is connect with a lot of different surfers. I'm a huge fan, dude. Thank you. I've been watching Who Is J-O-B since 2.0, dude. Oh, you're a legend. He has an approachable personality outside of the water that makes somebody that will never come close to being able to ride a wave like that at Pipeline be able to have a conversation with him. It's like a different level of connection. I didn't realize how famous he actually is. Within five minutes, there's like 30 people coming up to him. A fire truck stops in the middle of the road. The guy's like yelling out the window like, J-O-B! He genuinely gives everybody the time of day and is so nice and he loves the fact that he can just stoke people out. It's your job to create content. It has to be something people want to watch. No one would have, in the absence of an internet, signed you up for the career path that was soft top, Pipeline, jackass specialist, right? That wasn't a career path. No, we kind of made it happen. I think that my whole goal was like try and make relatable content and being a positive role model for the next generation. You know, like no swearing and no alcohol on our show. Just like clean cut fun, but our antics kind of speak for itself. I feel like it's like the perfect platform. So you guys are doing that sober? Yeah. I just wanted to let you know there's no way that this water's 57 degrees. It's freezing. Surfers might disagree on a lot, but it's an almost universally acknowledged truth that one technological advancement has completely changed the everyday surfer's reality. The biggest thing for me personally is the surf forecasting. Probably number one impact of the internet on surfing has been cameras and that has totally changed people's relationship with surfing. Surfline, the cameras, the forecast, the utility of it has changed like everything in surfing. Surfline allowed you to kind of have the life you wanted to have and still be able to go surfing. The ability to just be able to track swells all over the planet at any time of the year and then if you have the time and the means to just drop everything and get there, you might get the day of days. Prior to Surfline, I think if you really wanted to be a course surfer, you were limited geographically and like financially, like you'd never get a good job. But with Surfline, yeah, you could live anywhere. The internet has also helped to attract and catalyze creative communities. John McCambridge opened Mullisk in 2007 and used their blog to broadcast all the radical things that were happening inside their cosmic little sunset compound with a focus on their roster of world-renowned heritage and avant-garde shapers and craftsmen and established as well as emerging painters, musicians, filmmakers and artists. So part of the reason I opened up the shop is because you couldn't get these sorts of boards. Anywhere in San Francisco or anywhere in Northern California, really. So I was like, I want to ride these boards. My friends want to ride these boards. There should be a place that sells these boards. Wide point forward, wide point back. Any sort of fish you want. Any sort of egg you want. I just love design. We also had the gallery aspect too. So we had like sort of like more of the arts thing. This was almost like a forgotten neighborhood. We used to go out in the city and we would tell people that we live in the sunset and they wouldn't know what it was. And that's why the sunset was cool. The sunset was cool for being not cool. You know, I grew up in Solana Beach in San Diego in North County and I don't think I could quite have the same setup down there. You have a job in the creative industry in a city that's seven by seven miles and I live out on the western edge, 10 blocks from the beach. I'm not going to be living 10 blocks from the beach in San Diego probably. People don't generally move here just to go surfing. They move here because they're like creative types or they want to do something rad. There are these phenomenal surfers and tons of talent all over the place up here but they have these other passions whether they're firemen, paramedics, they own restaurants, bars. I think that's part of the heartbeat of surfing as well. Like there's a lot of blue collar guys and women that charge and surf really, really well but they have full-blown careers outside of the ocean. It's really cool to go to these restaurants and see like, oh like this guy surfs out front every day and he owns this restaurant or this guy surfs Mavs but also like owns this bar. So everything's kind of tied in. A lot of people moved out here and sort of started building stuff like Dave with Outerlands. If you went to Italy you have to have a Neapolitan pizza. In San Francisco it's sourdough pumpkin bread and so Outerlands is known for having the best sourdough bread in the neighborhood. Give me a whole loaf. Yeah. I'm happy. It lives up to the hype. It was the first restaurant that opened up where people would come from different parts of the city to go to that restaurant. And then hook fish now. Got a huge crowd outside of it all the time. The guy told me that I could eat four but I beg to differ. It might be hard. These are big. They do it right. You got the cantina. Those guys are surfers. Half the staff surfs. Dishes aren't going to clean themselves. There it is. All right, come on. When I moved to San Francisco in 2010, becoming a part of the Sunset community made a major city like SF feel like a radical small-town neighborhood. The food scene in the city is internationally renowned and the Sunset has a handful of world-class surfer-owned neighborhood staples. Can I do one? Go for it. Okay, I'm going in. I've always had a good time coming to San Francisco. We've always carved out a little block of time to go exploring and check out the city and most importantly kind of dive into the food. And all the different cuisines that they have here is on a whole other level. Absolute perfection. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you. Like the Mexican food, the Asian food, everything I've had surrounding those two cuisines specifically has been phenomenal. Everything here is delicious. Kimchi pancakes, hot stickers, dried fried wings. What's the best Korean food in Sunset? Nobody seems to be upset about it. Thank you, San Francisco. Always good nights. Always. Good food. We're gonna go to Woods for some wine and then to Matty Lopez's bars, to Pits and Whitecap. Perfect night in the Sunset. I met Matty Lopez at Mavericks. I've seen him in the water quite a few times over the years. He gets barreled on big waves. He fixed up a bar that I was scared to go into ever since I've been here. I think it's cool that he's doing it embedded in a place that he grew up and devotes a lot of time into the ocean and into the community here. The place was a little dirty and people didn't like that. And it was a little kind of heavy for some people, but there was a charm. So we tried to keep that charm. Stressing out. Get out of here. We got a high score to beat right now. Feels good like being immersed in your community, you know? Even though it's changing and like we bitch about shit, it does feel good to have an establishment that people come to and enjoy. You know, all different types of people. One of the main values that I always loved about San Francisco is hanging out with different people. Completely different, you know? You may have different views, be from different places, different races, ideas. When I come into the bar and I see all these different people in a place that I own having a good time, it feels good. And that's important for the character and the culture of the area. Like the fabric of this area are the locals. Ultimately, the way the place looks and feels comes down to the locals. And that's really important. As much as things might evolve and change, there's always going to be that backbone to it. And that's really what drives the community forward. San Francisco is my second home. And while I'll always daydream of east winds and groomed ocean beach A-frames, it's the people who are invested in the local community. Dedicated, multi-generational locals. Creative, talented transplants. And thriving, diverse culture that makes San Francisco such a remarkable scene. Thanks for watching No Contest San Francisco.