Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

Podcast Overload

"Free to use license. Please attribute source back to ""https://dlxmedia.hu/""========================Rode Rodecaster pro podcast setup in a podcast studio, microphone Rode podmic, Shure SM7B, audio recording, voiceover, sound panels, podcast channel"
Photo by dlxmedia.hu on Unsplash

“People are willing to do almost anything other than read at length. It requires patience: an atrophied muscle in the smartphone age. At the same time, no one relishes being ignorant or incurious. The desire for self-improvement out there is real. The podcast boom shows that we want erudition without effort: the palm without the dust.  

Financial Times.

Podcasts are seemingly a quick fix for those who don’t want to read books. That is why we have so many authors on the podcast circuit. It is a virtuous cycle of self-promotion and self-improvement. Like most pandemic trends that saw us embrace new technologies and behaviors, podcasting has entered the “digestion” phase. It is time to absorb the excessive growth of the pandemic years. And be as it might be, it seems that the go-go days for podcasting might be behind the sector, which is getting

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Technology
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Plover Ahead

If you live in San Francisco, you are often reminded of the gift that is Ocean Beach. It is one of my favorite places for a walk, where I contemplate and sometimes I take photographs.

On one of my many visits to Ocean Beach, I came across an enormous swarm of Snowy Plovers who were busy enjoying breakfast. A portion of Ocean Beach is designated as a Snowy Plover Protection Area. Snowy Plover is a small bird that needs vast swaths of open beaches to feed on kelp flies. They have been severely under threat for a while, but their numbers have recently rebounded.

I just loved the way the swarm of cute little critters looked. I had a 24-90 lens attached to my Leica SL, and I was far enough away to use the 90mm focal length to capture this photograph. Since it was very early in the morning,

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On Photography
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Does Google need a new CEO?

Whether it is botched and haphazard layoffs, anti-trust regulators baying for its blood, or opportunistic saber-rattling by long-time rival Microsoft and its outsourced AI unit, OpenAI — 2023 has been a rough year for one of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Google, the company with $200 billion in revenues, suddenly seems to be under siege. 

And if that wasn’t enough, the company had an embarrassing hiccup when showing off Bard, its ChatGPT rival. That led to about a 7.7 percent decline in its share value — about $100 billion in market capitalization wiped out. The error showed that Google has some work to do on the AI front. Ironically, the ChatGPT’s answers threw up similar ones, but not on stage with the world’s media watching. 

I am just gobsmacked that Google executives didn’t catch the errors beforehand, which showed that the Bard presentation and the launch had been stitched together in haste.

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Technology
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A landscape photography adventure with Leica M cameras

In deep winter, I experience the joy of making snowscapes by going manual with Leica.

Introduction: 

There was a time when new year’s eve was a reason to dress up and paint the town red. Those days are behind me – now I prefer to spend the time between Christmas and the new year doing nothing much, in quiet contemplation. A writer for The Atlantic described it as “nothing time.” 

At the end of 2022, I had planned to go to Alaska, but the trip got postponed.

And as luck would have it, I found a ticket to Jackson Hole, and I decided to fly out for photography. It was better than being stuck indoors as it rained buckets in San Francisco. Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana have had a higher-than-average snowfall, and as a result, it offered a lot of opportunities for my

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Photo Features
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A bit of weekend reading

man sitting on bench reading newspaper
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

…oftentimes you can see change on the horizon, assuming you’re looking for it, and there comes a day when the landscape flips. But the old entities attached to the old ways refuse to adjust, they believe in holding back the future, staying rooted in the past, to their detriment, because the public is not controlled by them. 

Bob Lefsetz

This simple insight is Silicon Valley (a proverbial proxy for post-industrial technology). Why it exists, why it eats itself, and why it finds the future. A more business version of this insight is Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. 

Top Read:

The Junkification of Amazon: Amazon might be the biggest store on the web, but it is also the shittiest place to shop on the web, says John Herrman. I couldn’t agree more — my overall experience with Amazon has deprecated, and I am always worried about

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My Reading Picks, Technology
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The Best of 2022

At the very end of 2022, I wrote about my photographic journey and how it has allowed me to look at both the world and life in new ways. It has allowed me to embrace imperfections, my own and in others. Of course, it could just be that my inner monologue influenced my photography.

Regardless, many of you wrote wanting to see more of my photos from 2022. There are quite a few favorites, so instead of creating a long string of photos, I roped in my friend Felix and had him create a video presentation of the best of my 2022 photos! Sit back, relax, and enjoy!

February 4, 2023, San Francisco.

On the road to imperfection
Musings, On Photography
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The Why of Tech Layoffs

pink arrow neon sign
Photo by Ussama Azam on Unsplash

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “tech layoffs” have been on my mind, and I wrote a column for The Spectator to explain “the why of these layoffs.” An unprecedented boom in Silicon Valley that started with the once-in-a-generation convergence of three mega trends: mobile, social, and cloud computing, has peaked. It started in 2010, and it has been bananas around here for the past decade or so. The FAANG+Microsoft companies saw their revenues go from $196 billion to over $1.5 Trillion. Let that sink in. Booming stocks helped create an environment of excess like never before. 

The companies got into the business of what Paul Kedrosky calls “people hoarding.” The pandemic and the resulting growth revved up the hiring machine even more. The over-hiring of talent has led to wage inflation, which had a ripple effect across the entire technology ecosystem. Technology insiders are happy

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Technology
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A Letter from Om. Issue #01/2023

Hi! In case you are new around here, I am Om & this is my twice-a-month letter where I share what’s on my mind, my latest writings, articles worth reading from around the web, my recommendations & some of my photography.

What I have been up to: 

It is amazing how quickly the first month of the year has passed. January went way too quickly for me. I had an excellent start to the year — I went on a year-end photography trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. With steady snow, low temperatures, and incredible minimal landscapes, it was a perfect way to ring in the new year. It put me in a great state of mind for the year ahead. However, my return to everyday life didn’t go as well — I picked up a bug. I didn’t test positive for COVID, but it felt like it. For about ten days, I

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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How Spotify is changing dance music

Spotify is changing electronic music and dance music in particular. Spotify doesn’t just eliminate the DJ as the conduit between artist and audience. Streaming music has cultivated a new breed of creators who seem to be totally in the dark about what a DJ does in the first place. As a result we have what’s almost a new format of music that broadly fits into the parameters of club music, but will almost certainly never be played in a club — or by any DJ at all.

I am not surprised that Spotify or TikTok are changing how music is made, why it is made, and how it is consumed. Streaming has shaped how we experience music, and as a result, it has lost some of that loving feeling. Medium is the message!

Good Read: How Spotify turned dance music into dance Muzak.

My Reading Picks, Technology
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