Jamie O'Brien And The Curious Case Of Being So Bored You're Never Bored

James Duncan O’Brien is an interesting subject. He, in his own right, is a lot of things. First off, he’s his own media house. His own PR machine. He even has his own merch shop that sells JOB VLOG hats and other stuff (for the true fans). He releases Vlogs at a consistent rate and while many well-known surfer’s four-eight minute edits struggle to get upwards of 10-15-20k views, Jamie’s 10-20 minute Vlogs consistently cap the 100k mark, some making their way upwards of the 2 million mark.

To put in perspective, our 2018 opus, The Electric Acid Surfboard Test starring Dane Reynolds, has garnered 90k views in the two weeks it’s been available for free on Youtube – not counting the X amount of kind folks who paid for it on iTunes before we released it on Christmas Day.

JOB’s above Vlog, in two days, has capped 100k.

Today, Vlogs in surfing are outrunning surf media. And in JOB’s case, he doesn’t need anyone but his 153k Youtube and 954k IG followers to keep the lights on, keep his home at Pipeline, and live a very full and laissez-faire life. To our knowledge, not many of his Youtube posts make their way onto most surf media sites; while not being run on Surfer, Surfline, Stab or The Inertia might cull the reach of many professional surfers, Jamie’s reach is in the upper echelons. He’s found the perfect mix of novelty and Hellman. There’s no one in surfing quite like him. And that’s something to be celebrated.

Jamie is consistently regarded as one of the “best ever” surfers at his home break. He’s spent so much time at Pipeline, that what’s generally thought of as one of the scariest waves on earth is a literal playground to him. A place where he’s so comfortable on a standard surfboard that he’s chosen to take any craft into the water – bored to the point of never being bored.

So, as we’ve missed a good portion of Jamie’s recent posts, we’ve embedded them below. Everything from Waimea Shorebreak slams, to Kayak surfing large Sunset, oil tanker surfing in New York, riding Nine-foot foamies at sizable Pipeline, Waimea River Mouth, couch surfing, finger flips, and all the antics that have brought JOB to his current state of the leading purveyor of the surf Vlog.