Foundation Leadership Forum 3 — Multimedia (Part 1)#

Date: 2026-04-26 Duration: approximately 2 hours Chair: David Kantor Opening prayer: Susan Myers Opening remarks: Mo Siegel

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Overview#

The third forum of the Leadership Roundtable opened the second day. After Mo Siegel's framing remarks and Susan Myers's prayer, Gabriel Rymberg presented the Center for Unity's projects and a new initiative on AI-assisted translation of secondary works. David Kantor then chaired a session on multimedia outreach, with presentations from himself, Brad Gardner, and Jim Zigarelli, followed by audience discussion.

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Presenters#

• Gabriel Rymberg — Center for Unity executive team
• David Kantor — chair of the multimedia segment; presenting on the YouTube Urantia ecosystem and the AI transformation of dissemination
• Brad Gardner — Urantia Foundation; presenting on website aesthetics and "sanctuary versus marketplace" framing
• Jim Zigarelli — operates Truth Book; presenting on analytics, social media, and AI-mediated search

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Topics Presented#

Center for Unity programmes (Gabriel Rymberg)#

Rymberg presented the Center for Unity's executive team and current programmes. He framed the team's working method as the use of AI to multiply the output of a small focused group rather than to replace people.

He summarised the Center's track record over recent years: approximately one million dollars raised from approximately three hundred donors; nine digital properties built; a Google Ads grant providing $10,000 per month in advertising. He shared analytics figures from the grant period (since October 2023): 405,000 page views, 248,000 sessions, and 186,000 users, with the Discover Jesus property as the flagship.

He named team members: Rick Lyon, Margie, Santiago, Deborah (financial manager). He described "The Divine Within," a one-year-old podcast hosted by Santiago Nillan, with figures including 183,600 cross-platform impressions, over 1,000 pieces of content produced, 330 YouTube videos, 625 Instagram followers, followers in ten-plus countries, 77,000 TikTok views, and a stated demographic reach of 18–30.

He then described several projects in development:

• Magdala — a feature-length film on Mary Magdalene, written with award-winning filmmaker Kurt Kuwait, with a global crowdfunding campaign planned later in 2026, modelled on The Chosen.
• The First Choice — a part-three feature film on Andon and Fonta, intended to be produced using AI-based filmmaking technology.
• An immersive five-room experience — a physical-space project addressing existential questions through light, sound, story, and presence. The creative director is Julie Parkinson, formerly general manager of Beyond Van Gogh (Sarasota), of The Nazarene (Dallas), and previously of Cirque du Soleil. Rymberg noted discussions with Lighthouse Immersive as a potential partner.

Spiritual Translations (Gabriel Rymberg)#

Rymberg presented Spiritual Translations (referred to as "SPT"), an AI-assisted translation engine for secondary works related to the revelation. He stated explicitly and repeatedly that the project does not translate the Urantia papers themselves: "This project does not touch the Urantia papers. That's not for scripture. Translating the Urantia papers is the Foundation's work, and it's sacred."

He framed the problem in two numbers: approximately 27 to 28 languages with translations of the Urantia Book, against thousands of human languages; and within those 27 languages, the secondary works (study aids, commentaries) exist almost entirely in English. He cited research scraping of CFU and other sites, cataloguing approximately 25,000 secondary-work items, of which the vast majority are in English.

He described the technical architecture as a "cartridge model" — for each language and faith tradition, a dedicated translation module incorporating domain-specific glossaries, terminology, tone, and theological constraints, before the translation step. He framed the goal as "90-90-90": 90 percent less cost, 90 percent less time, at 90 percent of the quality of fully human translation, compared with industry rates of 12 to 35 cents per word for theological translation.

He outlined three phases:

1. Phase 1: Translate all CFU digital properties (approximately 2 million words of secondary work content) into 10 languages — five Eastern, five Western — beginning with Portuguese (Carlos translator), then Spanish (Lourdes), then French.
2. Phase 2: Identify 10–20 secondary works to translate — to be selected in consultation with the broader community.
3. Phase 3: Extend the platform beyond the Urantia community to other faith traditions: Buddhist texts, Bible publishers, Islamic scholarship, Christian publishers. He cited the global religious publishing market as approximately $900 million growing at 19 percent annually, and the broader language-services market at $76 billion.

He described the financial structure: SPT and the angelic story of Jesus operate as programmes within the CFU 501(c)(3); a separate LLC, Seven Circles Creative, conducts for-profit work, with revenue flowing back into mission projects.

Multimedia outreach analysis (David Kantor)#

Kantor presented a multi-part analysis of the Urantia community's multimedia presence, divided into three sub-sections.

Part 1 — The YouTube Urantia ecosystem. He cited YouTube revenue figures ($62.3 billion in 2025) and described five layers of Urantia-themed videos:

1. Institutional / organisational core (Foundation, UAI, Fellowship)
2. Public-facing mediation (Truth Book, Center for Unity, podcasts, UBN)
3. Full-text presence (text and audiobooks online)
4. Short-form discovery (1–4 minute videos and quote shares)
5. Long-form film and interpretive bridge

He estimated total cumulative views of Urantia-themed YouTube content at approximately 120 million, distributed across these layers with the short-form discovery layer accounting for an estimated 88 to 95 percent of total views. He stated that approximately 95 percent of online dissemination media is produced by independent readers rather than institutional bodies.

He divided this content into "internal diffusion" (serving the existing reader community) and "public exposure" (reaching people who do not know the book). His estimate: 85 to 94 percent of content is internal diffusion; 6 to 15 percent is public exposure. He framed this as the central problem to address.

Part 2 — The AI transformation of dissemination. He described how AI agents read metadata rather than content, and how AI-mediated search differs from traditional keyword search. He framed the strategic implication as building a coherent, well-described, well-attributed set of resources that AI agents can recognise and reference. He flagged "AI-generated answers to questions" as becoming the primary points of discovery for the revelation.

He named several emerging requirements: stable terminology (for example, consistent attribution of authorship of the Urantia Book across sites); cleaning up inconsistent metadata; building a "trust architecture" against deepfakes and disinformation; presenting authors with names, photos, and biographies rather than anonymous publication.

Part 3 — Print media (briefly). He framed the role of print as fostering "focused engagement and concept expansion" and offered the contrasting framing: "Video stirs imagination. Books steady thought."

He closed with what he described as the central challenge: "More spiritually mature… been a lot of silliness going on between the organisations that needs to stop, and it needs to stop now, because it's undermining the mission and will undermine it further when we get more into AI."

Sanctuary versus marketplace (Brad Gardner)#

Gardner presented a philosophical framing on the design of Urantia-related websites. He contrasted two models: the marketplace — characterised by busy visuals, sentimental appeals, treatment of visitors as conversion metrics, and unholy confusion of inner spiritual life with outer Caesar's-world concerns — versus the sanctuary — characterised by careful aesthetic choices, reverent ideas, and saving messages.

He cited Bradbury and the gospel comparison of the 5,000 fed by Jesus and the 500 who persisted. He referenced the recent redesign of the Urantia Foundation website as an example of the sanctuary direction.

Truth Book analytics and AI-mediated search (Jim Zigarelli)#

Zigarelli presented Truth Book's three-year-old website redesign and current operating practices: a slider on the homepage rotated monthly; a "trending now" section refreshed every two weeks tying current cultural topics to Urantia Book passages; consistent freshness as a goal.

He described the role of social media: the hiring of Jacqueline approximately 2.5 years ago has driven views of single videos from a typical 1,000–1,500 to tens of thousands and (in a recent example) 296,000 views over two months.

He described diligent analytics auditing, including identifying that approximately 55 percent of his IT host's sites are now hit by automated bot traffic from Yang Zhu and Singapore (per Wired magazine, February 2026). Truth Book has filtered this traffic from its analytics.

He then described an attempt to be added as a recognised source on Wikipedia. The attempt was rejected because Wikipedia's editorial standards require independent third-party sources, and Truth Book's submission did not meet the threshold. He shared a parallel finding from SEMrush research: AI engines (chat-GPT, Perplexity, Claude) consistently characterise the Urantia Book as "not accepted as credible within mainstream scientific, academic, or traditional religious communities," in four categories — scientific and cosmological credibility, historical and academic credibility, religious and theological credibility, and perspective of adherents.

He stated that since Truth Book began this work, its "GE [generative engine] visibility" has increased from 4 percent to 28 percent, with a target of 40 percent by year-end 2026. He emphasised that reaching higher AI visibility will require independent third-party sources — articles, podcasts, academic citations — not produced by people within the Urantia community.

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Questions and Discussion#

• Tamara Strumfeld asked David Kantor where he sourced his viewership percentages. He answered that they came from analysis with chat-GPT, with Lisa Crawford adding context that AI can distinguish subscribed from non-subscribed viewers and infer audience composition.
• André Radatus asked David Kantor about the basis of his 6-to-15-percent uncertainty range. Kantor said the range reflects videos that do not list view counts.
• Geoff Theiss told David Kantor he had attempted to verify the 120 million views figure independently on YouTube and could not find numbers anywhere close to it. Kantor confirmed the figure was AI-derived through iterative chat-based analysis.
• Douglas Burns asked about image quality in AI-generated graphics. Kantor said the medium is the message and that quality matters; he and Gabriel Rymberg discussed prompt engineering and workflow as more important than single prompts.
• Brad Gardner asked about the risks of prioritising quantity over quality with AI-assisted production. Kantor framed the risk as overload and audience disengagement.
• Lisa Crawford suggested compiling community resources on AI prompts and creating a stash of Urantia Book images for community AI use.
• Gabriel Rymberg offered to convene a knowledge group on AI tools and workflows, naming Brad Gardner, Marcel Peereboom, Jeff Theiss, and Douglas Burns as potential collaborators.
• Sue Seccombe asked Jim Zigarelli why the work of certain critics (Martin Gardner, Matthew Block) appears to be weighted heavily by AI engines, and why books like David Kantor's, Byron Belitsos's, and JJ Johnson's are not counterbalancing the weight. Zigarelli replied that AI engines are looking for independent third-party sources, and the available sources skew toward critics.
• Brad Gardner added context on Wikipedia editorial culture, citing co-founder critique and a culture among approximately 100 senior editors that disfavours what they consider unreliable sources, and stated that this dynamic disadvantages the kinds of sources the Urantia community would consider credible.
• Douglas Burns described his own practice of pre-conditioning AI prompts ("the Urantia Book does not equal Christianity… use only the text of the book as a source") to avoid wandering responses.
• Geoff Theiss asked Jim Zigarelli about Truth Book's engagement goals (time on site). Zigarelli answered approximately 1 minute 37 seconds as a current average, which he characterised as good engagement.

A discussion arose about strategic high-visibility platforms. Gabriel Rymberg proposed (described as "throwing a little bomb") that someone in the community appear on a large-audience podcast such as Joe Rogan's, conditional on careful preparation and prayer. Jim Zigarelli urged caution, citing the case of his daughter's research programme, which received intense backlash and required substantial legal response after appearing on Steve Bannon's podcast through a third party.

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Notable Quotes (verbatim)#

• Gabriel Rymberg on the architecture of his approach: "The question is not, is AI sacred enough to handle this material. The question is, what becomes possible if we can dramatically lower the cost of high-quality translation? I think a lot becomes possible."
• Gabriel Rymberg on the choice facing language communities: "It's between good-enough translation and nothing. Waiting for years and years and years and maybe forever until someone actually invests that money."
• David Kantor on the central problem of public-facing content: "This is not good. This should shock you. We're way, way off here. We need to be getting more material out for the public. The pressing need is not for more content, it's for publicly related."
• David Kantor on the family of UB-related media: "This is our family. And you don't get to choose the people who live in your family."
• David Kantor on the AI transition: "AI-generated answers to questions are becoming the primary points of discovery and entry to the revelation. That's really important to appreciate and to plan for."
• David Kantor, paraphrasing the relationship between media types: "Video stirs imagination. Books steady thought."
• David Kantor on inter-organisational dynamics: "Been a lot of silliness going on between the organisations that needs to stop, and it needs to stop now, because it's undermining the mission."
• Brad Gardner on the design choice: "We have control over our atmosphere. We don't have to be a marketplace of flattery, amusement, and addiction. We can offer a sanctuary to seekers."
• Brad Gardner on the seekers: "That lost spiritually thirsty youth bombarded day and night with noise and slop, doom-scrolling desperately at 3am, wordlessly uttering a prayer for something to look up to… they'll find the sanctuary."
• Jim Zigarelli on AI search results: "It says that the Urantia Book is not accepted as a credible source of scientific or historical fact, but remains an influential, albeit controversial work of spiritual literature for its adherents."
• Mo Siegel at Gabriel Rymberg's close: "Better to be 90 percent accurate on some of these secondary works than 100 percent and never get it done. That's a big thought."