Om Malik, Curiosity and the Art of Being Seen.

On Professor Om & the Malik School for Gifted Omies, Derek Jeter and Truth in Legacy.

I keep starting this and stopping. There is no version of these words big enough for you, and every one I write makes you smaller than you were. So let me just start where our story began.

Cafe Mogador, the East Village, brunch, more than fifteen years ago. My friend Maggie, in from LA, had invited me. Across the table sat Matt Mullenweg, one of the most brilliant minds in tech, a rockstar I had only known about, and whom I had met once before at a party I threw for Maggie back when I was SVP of The Huffington Post.

I took the last open seat, since I was late, a small corner of the table made room for. Beside me was a warm, curious man who introduced himself only as Om.

Sometimes, New York City hands you important things by accident, and I did not know what this accident was yet to yield. And even whether it was an accident at all.

And I was about to find out.

Before I had even settled in, the realest of real, most curious of questions were already being volleyed, the kind most people never think to ask. And they all began before the first cup of dark French roast was even served.

“Wow, how the fuck did this guy think to ask me these deep, personal questions?” I thought to myself. Maybe it was the irritability around waiting on that first cup of coffee.

“Are you a journalist or something?” I hesitantly asked.

And the moment we landed on how I knew that, that I was the SVP of The Huffington Post, your eyes lit up like you had found a new toy. So began two strangers following a rare thread of curiosity about another human, one that would continue until the last time I got to hear from you just a few weeks ago.

As we kept talking, you knew that particular ache of trying to build something that does not exist yet, in a place that will love you for it and break you for it in the same afternoon.

That was the whole thing about you, Om. You recognized people.

Soon came the talks, the Yankees, and life, until the talking became its own kind of home and you became my best friend without either of us deciding it.

You loved that team in a way I felt in my bones, even though you came to it sideways. We both loved what that team came to mean and how it connected us to New York City. Your home away from home. You may have moved to San Francisco, but your heart and spirit were 100% New York, and the Yankees were your consistent connection to the Om that landed here in the states, just looking to get his teeth cut on being a journalist; something you knew you wanted to do since you were young. You just kept opening doors, doing what you do until you had a sense of excellence.

Where the human dissolved and your art was all that was left

You always told me I took it all too seriously, the building, the wanting, the proving. New York and San Francisco were just a game, you would say, and I was killing myself over a game.

You were right. I am still learning to believe you.

You knew when I was going under before I did, and you would just show up, no need to ask. I do not let people in. I never have. Some part of me decided long ago that if I let someone really know me, they would leave, or they would die. You found the door anyway. That was the journalist’s gift, to ask the right question at the right moment until the walls came down. You did it with your subjects. You did it with all of us. You did it with me.

And then there were the Omies, the smartest and kindest group of humans anyone ever assembled, and you were the one who assembled them. Your real genius was taste in people. You were a curator of humans. I was the only New Yorker, the newbie, the one who did not quite belong, and your brothers took me in like a little brother and loved me the way you loved me, completely, without making me earn it. Soon came the invitations, the Omie dinners, pizza at Piccino in a corner of San Francisco I never knew existed called Dogpatch.

Omies during lockdown – 2020

Pizza @ Piccino

Omie Gathering Dogpatch – 2022

Everyone knows what you did for that city, the culture of tech, or how about just culture in general. You saw where things were headed before the rest of us had the words. I think you related to and loved the people brave enough to say the dream out loud. Like you. The men and women in the arena, and all the bullshit that came with it. Getting misunderstood, getting the shit kicked out of you each and every day, that was catnip to you. And when one of us was coming apart, every rejection and every dead idea and every piece of advice that only made the noise louder, you would just say, “Bro.” One word, and the whole storm went quiet. It was a kind of superpower. You were Professor X and this was the Malik School for the Gifted, the dreamers nobody else knew what to do with. Professor Om.

Calls, emails, texts, then a day of silence, then a long and beautiful piece in my inbox with a casual ask for a “quick edit.”

“When do you need this by?” I would ask.

Hoping for an answer like “Next week,” he would just casually say,

“Now, bro.” And you could hear the smirk he said it with, this “Keep up, little buddy” tone.

Weird choice for an editor. You, this larger than life cultural icon, asking me of all people to put my hands on your words, but like, drop what I am doing, it needs to be done now, his hand already on the PUBLISH button on his WordPress powered Om.co.

Om was always in flow, so much so that his most ferocious and clearest journalism came in his last weeks.

Which makes sense, since photography was your real gift. Whaaaat? The writing was extraordinary, and where you ran, but the camera is where your soul actually flew. You did not just capture images, you revealed things, the truth and the love hiding within everyday ordinary moments, the whole tapestry of pain and pleasure, love and loss. You held the beautiful thing up so the rest of us could finally see it. You reminded me it was okay to be me, and that I could be loved for exactly that. And when I struggled, you sensed it, and the calls would come. I would dodge, not call back, but you were relentless. Hat tip, Mr. Journalist. I was the car, and you were the dog that caught it. And unlike the dog, you knew exactly what to do. You held on. You did not let me disappear.

Photo Credit – Om 2022

You always said it, every single time. “I love you, bro.” And when I hung up I knew you meant it, which is the rarest thing in the world, to be loved by someone who actually means it. You gave it away like it cost you nothing.

And it never will stop. I am going to make a little sticky note for my bathroom mirror and my desktop monitor. #WWOS. “What Would Om Say?”

Yup, that’s it. My newest morning affirmation. Before my New York media anxiety and its cortisol hit my brain, before the first cup of Om approved, curated bean coffee, I will ask that first, before I remember the affirmations some spiritual influencer promised would change my life.

“What would Om say?”

Well, I seem to have found many things you DID say. And many you would say.

After you were gone, the tributes came from everywhere, and they all told the same story. The kindest person they ever met, when they were new and unsure and had not earned anyone’s attention yet. Everyone has a story of you doing them a favor. Reading them, Matt’s piece first and a hundred after, has been the thing holding me up, because in every one I find my own. Even now you are doing the only thing you ever really did. You are gathering us, turning a room full of strangers into people who were never strangers at all, making us less alone.

That is what legacy is. Not the company, nor the title. It was that tapestry you wove, out of people, and the way every thread of it wants to be more like you now.

More generous.

Quicker to hold space for someone going under. Bigger hearted than they were before you found them. Like me, each and every time. You just knew how bad I hurt, when it hurt.

You may not have had children, but you raised hundreds of us, and each of us has now been through our own version of Fight Club.

Who would have thunk Om was Tyler Durden. Now, anytime anyone, the Omies, the people touched by Om, will lower their head in acknowledgment, this secret society we are all now a part of. Even if we never wanted to sign up for it.

And you did it in the shadows, only and exactly your way.

This is why I cannot, will not say goodbye.

This party is going to suck without you.

The dinners will feel a little less full, and the news we used to take apart will feel smaller, because you are not on the other end of the line to tell me “Bro, stop taking all this shit so seriously.” I wish I had told you more, let you in just a little more. Like you and I, the last remaining single men at everyone else’s weddings and family life events.

You were my lifetime + 1.

Om, you were the older brother, and I still do not have the words for what these past years really were.

Dude. Want to let me in on the joke?

Can you please tell me what this was? All these years? I’m still waiting for you to pick up the phone, respond to the email and the text, saying “Chill out bro, I’m right here.”

Maybe you never had to say it.

I promise to help check in on your extended family, everyone who was by your side, and in their hearts, thoughts and prayers in these last moments as you shuffled off this mortal coil. Sorry I didn’t make it back in time.

At the moment, I feel like I do not know how, or even want, to do this thing called life without you around. Just because it is going to feel a little less full, a little less enjoyable and real.

And do not get mad, but I am going to use a run-on sentence 🙂 

And although I will miss our talks, and I will try not to feel like that New York Jewish Larry David neurotic guilt character you always teased me about, “You are such a Jewish New Yorker!!”, I think sometimes I even leaned into it just to make you laugh.

I am sorry I never got to say “I love you, bro” one last time. But mostly I will miss knowing you were always there. And, as one of your favorite Jewish persons ;), we have this saying. “May their memory be a blessing.”

But as your life was already a blessing, to me and to so many others, it will continue to be. Not a memory. True legacy. Our hearts are hurting right now, but I know they are fuller today and will carry on. Why? Because I know there will never be a day we don’t think about you, wondering what you would say to me, to us. Your impact and your lessons are just too strong to ever be only a memory. Thank you, Professor, for being there, and for not just inspiring millions, but for gathering all these strange, magnanimous, artistic, beautifully misunderstood people, the ones who got to know you and love you, together on this island of misfit toys.

Here is the part that would make you laugh.

This is the first thing I have ever published in over 2 decades. The first. You spent years telling me to write, hounding me, sending me your drafts like dares, asking when I was finally going to put something of my own into the world. I never did. And now here it is, and of course it is about you. You found the door all those years ago and held it open just long enough that I finally walked through, a few weeks too late for you to read here. But I know you are reading it somewhere.

AND… I am publishing it on WordPress, the platform you loved, the one you ran every word of Om.co on, built by Matt, the same Matt sitting across the table at Mogador the morning we met. Thank you for that, Matt. So now it is my hand on the PUBLISH button, hovering the way yours always did. And I can hear exactly what you would say. “Stop overthinking it, bro. Now.”

One last thought. And thanks for bearing with me.

I was curious why your passing keeps bringing me back to the moment a journalist asked what you would do now, after leaving the company you started.

You did not quote Jeter’s last hit. You quoted his goodbye.

“Now it is time for the next chapter.” Derek Jeter, and now, Om infamously said

So that is what I am choosing to believe about now. That you are not gone, just onto the next thing, or off taking a new photo, maybe it’s of all of us. already curious, already asking the realest questions before the coffee even lands in my next cup. But keep a fresh cup warm and ready for me when I see you next.

You were the best of us, brother. Thank you for seeing us all, seeing me .. and being our friend.

Love you, bro. Stay curious!

Brother Brian 

Brian on Om’s Photo Frame – Photo Credit – Om Mailk – 2024