Watch: Ian Crane Can “Do Whatever He Wants” On This Board

If we define “technology” as something not occurring naturally but rather created by human innovation, then the “Middle Class” has to be one of humanity’s greatest technologies.

Millions of people living comfortably with health insurance, a family trip a year, two cars, and a trip to Chilli’s every month is not a guarantee on a planet whose humans have largely lived in cycles of Ruler/Peasant relationships for the past 12,000 years.

If you ask most responsible economists, they’ll tell you that the Golden Age of the American Middle Class was somewhere in the early ’80s, after decades of post-war public investment, progressive taxation, strong labor unions, and limited global competition had yielded abundant fruit in terms of a healthy, relatively equitable, and thriving Middle Class in America.

In the surfing world, our belle epoch was the late-90s and early 2000s — when there was finally enough wealth in the industry to create a sort of “middle class” of professional surfers. You knew them: They had a single-story house 10 minutes inland, 30 surfboards in the garage, two kids, and a pre-owned white Toyota Tundra in the driveway with their sponsors’ stickers on the back. They were QS warriors; they were featured in middle-market surf mags, and they starred in B-list surf movies.

These days, there’s much valid hand-wringing about the loss of surfing’s “middle class”. There simply isn’t enough cash to allow anyone but the best surfers to do nothing else besides surf.

Is the Ruler/Peasant relationship back? Are you either on the top of the Championship Tour/YouTube rankings, or destined to be a surf instructor for thousands of San Clementines for life?

Enter Ian Crane. Crane is not “Middle Class” in ability, he’s one of the best freesurfers on Earth —Stab invites him to every conceivable project because he’s (1) incredibly good and (2) incredibly easy to work with. But Crane is Middle-Class in that he’s found a way to surf full-time for a living still at 33 in 2026 without being on the CT or being an on-the-nose “surf influencer”. In short, he’s an anomaly.

Despite Crane’s counter-positioning in the surf world, he does have a YouTube channel —Beach Head (aka Crane Brain) — where he just released the edit you see above. “Double Tap” is really two edits in one — one session at a hyper-fun beachie and another from an uber-scary-but-rippable reef. We called Crane up between nights out at EAST Fest in NYC to ask him about it:

“That big right was sick,” Ian said. “It had a point-break feel. It almost felt like you were going down the line at J-Bay for a brief second. But then it got really shallow and would close out. You’re going so fast down the line that you cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, so it looks like a long wave but feels like a short one.

“It was really shallow at the end and always finished in a closeout” The first part of the wave was so fun, and you were trying your hardest to rip into as big a turn as you could, but in the back of your mind you knew it was getting shallow and would close out at the very end. You had to kick out or you were just going to eat shit,” Ian said.

The session turned into a very productive filming day for all involved. “There was no one out. It was just me, Eithan, and Kael Walsh, and everyone was surfing well. Eithan was filming for his movie with Chapter 11, and I was filming for my Snapt part, which already has the best few clips from that trip. Kael used his for one of his edits. So all three of us were sending it, trying to get clips for the projects we were working on.”

Now, on the hyper-fun beachie:

“There was a perfect left right in front of the house we stayed at, and I travel with a round-nose fish pretty much everywhere I go,” Ian said. “It’s a must-bring board. It was perfect for the wave out front. In the afternoon we’d be chilling at the house, then hop out for a surf with a mellow crowd. I felt like I could do anything on that wave with that board, and it was so much fun. That’s where we were surfing before the swell hit that gave us the big right, so it was a pretty epic score of a trip for us only having a week there.”

At 33, Ian is not showing signs of leasing a surf instructor van any time soon. In fact, he’s got a specific project in the works. “I’m making an edit, really a film, focused on the whole coast of California. We have great waves here, but I feel like we see the same waves in every clip. The guys in Australia do a way better job of finding unique waves that look so fun and showcasing them well, I want to do that for California. So that’s really my goal this next year, highlighting home.”