Oomph Inc: Rethinking the Internet

Oomph Inc.

by JOHN HUDDLES

Rethinking the Internet in Ojai: A Conversation with CEO Cristiano Bettler

When tech entrepreneur Cristiano Bettler needed to pick a headquarters location for Oomph Inc., a media start-up with no less revolutionary a mandate than reimagining the way the internet works, a pin dropped in the map of his mind: the Ojai valley Son of a Swiss father and Mexican mother, Bettler was raised between what he calls “the beautiful chaos of Mexico City” and “the extreme calm of the Swiss Alps.” He eventually made his way to Malibu for an undergraduate degree in international business at Pepperdine before finding early success developing marketing strategies for Air France, Puma, Hurley, and Mezcal Unión. Next came a decade producing such documentaries as The End Of Poverty (an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival), Shadow Of Afghanistan, and Down To Earth (one of Europe’s highest grossing documentaries), as well as distributing the environmental films of Sundance Film Festival-award-winning directors Josh and Rebecca Tickell. After connecting dozens of social-impact films with their audiences around the world, crisscrossing the globe for production and sales and attending media markets from Venice to Berlin to Park City, Bettler became an industry expert in the distribution of filmed content and the calculus of which stories work where. But for his new company, a labor of love that would turbocharge his professional ambition with his personal philosophy, the “where” had to match the “why”. And the “why” of Oomph Inc. is that it’s a disruptive streaming platform built to align content with consciousness and make the online media landscape a psychologically sustainable environment. In short: Bettler needed to base Oomph in a place where “consciousness” was not a dirty word, not even in the context of a for-profit entertainment service. Ojai, the Shangri-La of California, fit the bill. Long a destination for the splendor of its mountains, the charm of its farmers’ markets, and its one-of-a-kind open-air bookstore, the town named after the local Chumash people’s word for “moon” is perhaps best known for a nurturing spirit of place that Bettler believed would infuse the day-to-day work on his mighty project to rethink the internet. Bettler’s creative partner and wife, environmentalist and acclaimed mantra singer Erin Breech, seconded the sentiment. So they packed up and left Los Angeles with their 4-year-old son, Lucan, moving in 2019 to Ojai’s East End. It’s proven the perfect location to incubate a business that’s equal parts commerce and community, science and spirituality, technology and entertainment. And the ideal new home for the now 6-year-old Lucan to do his birding before breakfast and take his Taekwondo class after school. “There’s nothing wrong with living in paradise as a base of operations” Bettler says, “as long as you’re mindful of how lucky you are and that it’s not the norm in this world.” From the gorgeous ranch they’ve rented in the East End—featuring the airy modernism of a main house bracketed by a pine-paneled bungalow home office and an 1890s stone cottage used as a recording studio—Bettler and Breech have created a magical blend of family and work life. It doesn’t hurt that Ojai has neatly situated Bettler for ease of travel to L.A., where he drives twice a week to negotiate licensing deals for the movies, series, concerts, and video art pieces that will stream on Oomph, as well as for quick access to the Santa Barbara Airport’s flights to Mexico City, where he travels once a month for old-school face time with Oomph’s team of coders. Not to mention that Oomph’s CTO, the legendary technologist and NASA Technology Of The Year Award Winner (1994), John Schewel, loves to visit the Bettlers in their new locale. Schewel’s clients include the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, MIT, and NASA itself … but a trip to Ojai, he’s known to quip, is “more perk than work.” About Schewel as a hire, Bettler confides: “I heard more than once that it was insane bringing in a 65-year-old Chief Technology Officer, that age 50 is already over-the-hill in the tech space. But that attitude is exactly why we’re so mentally upside-down right now in the digital world. Is it any wonder we’re all trapped in a gimmicky, childish online experience when the consciousness that built it is literally childish — and gimmicky for lack of life experience? With our CTO, Oomph has a systems architect who brings a depth and breadth of experiential tools to the job of reflecting humanity back at our users. He’s not a kid playing with his own toys while failing to understand anyone else’s deeper needs. Which, I’m sorry to say, reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra: ‘Move fast and break things. If you’re not breaking stuff , you’re not moving fast enough.’ But I think in the year 2022 we now have all the proof we need that speed for its own sake — let alone breaking things along the way, like a user’s spirit, or a previously balanced state of mind — is not a path forward.” Hearing Bettler expound on his mission with both passion and clarity, it’s no surprise that Oomph is aiming to replace the toxic success of the internet as it’s currently constituted with a new digital architecture, one that succeeds because it improves the user experience without numbing the user’s senses. Bettler even mentions the digital pandemic that coexists with the physical pandemic but that’s much less discussed: doomscrolling, the increasingly common act of spending too much time consuming negative news online, and the resulting psychophysiological damage it causes. (Doomscrolling being the corollary, he says, to clicking on empty headlines and fragmented content designed to hijack our attention and override our intuition.) The cure, he argues, is to deliver content tailored to nourish rather than distract each individual user content aligned with each user’s moods and intentions, content that resonates with and empowers the user every step of the way, whether with pure entertainment like the right movie, or relevant snippets from a documentary, or even a musical moodscape if that’s what’s needed at the moment. This, he explains, is what Oomph’s next-gen “harmonic resonance technology” has been designed to do: to counteract what Bettler calls the “system-wide failure in the digital space to strengthen human beings

Left to right: Lee Waterworth, John Schewel, Erin Breech, Cristiano Bettler - back right: Jose Antonio Ortega.

Photo by: Mark Pancis

With customized content good for one person at a time and no one else.” Which is probably why Bettler’s company is being hit up with dozens of requests for collaborations, both from young content creators and rising brands hungry for stronger, more lasting and meaningful connections to users, as well as from more established entities like the Buckminster Fuller Institute, legacy of the famed 20th-century inventor and visionary who’s best known to the general public for creating the geodesic dome. The partnership between Oomph and BFI will, per the mission statement of BFI itself, “seek to inspire and support a new generation of design science pioneers — and expose today’s leaders to the conceptual models and tools necessary to design a future that works for 100% of life, without ecological offense.” There’s a philanthropic component to Oomph that also fits with the Ojai ethos. If, as a creator, you post a piece of socially impactful content on the platform that goes viral, not only will you be rewarded with Oomph crypto tokens yourself, but a percentage will go directly to the cause that your content aligns with. For instance, if your video brilliantly captures a surfer performing an aerial, tokens will go to an organization dedicated to cleaning the oceans of plastic trash. That’s how the platform intends to build a bridge between the digital and natural worlds, giving users the tools to make a positive impact on the planet.

“ There’s nothing wrong with living in paradise as a base of operations ...”

Bettler winds up our interview in his go-to spot for coffee, The Dutchess on Ojai Avenue, by paraphrasing Steve Jobs, who predicted before his death that the winner of the digital race will be whoever cracks the code of truly effective content discovery by providing an integrated, trustworthy, immersive experience that’s deeply personalized to each user’s preferences.

Which is exactly Oomph’s mission, Bettler points out, sounding every bit the driven visionary himself.

“My team and I are motivated and guided every day by our founding philosophy,” he says, “which is to humanize while we optimize the digital-to-user connection.”

Walking to our cars, I ask Bettler if he’s headed back to the office. He shakes his head. Turns out he’s taking the afternoon off from Oomphing the internet to go hike Fox Canyon Trail with his son.

Find out more at www.oomph.tv

Story by John Huddles

A part-time Ojai resident, Huddles’s next film is set in town and will shoot in the Ojai Valley in early 2023. Filmmaker and author John Huddles’s fantasy novel of spiritual exploration, Asha Off The Air, was published on April 2nd. www.AshaOfTheAir.com.