In this episode of The Pursuit of Beauty Podcast, host Matthew Wilkinson sits down with thinker and entrepreneur Jordan Hall for a wide-ranging conversation about beauty, truth, goodness, and the challenges of modern civilization. Hall, co-founder of mp3.com and a key figure in the early internet streaming revolution, brings his unique background in technology, philosophy, and faith to a dialogue that touches everything from Christian theology to the future of urban planning. Together they explore how the transcendentals—beauty, goodness, and truth—intersect with our personal lives, our politics, and the spiritual destiny of culture.

Early in the conversation, Wilkinson frames beauty not simply as an aesthetic category but as a divine name, drawing on the writings of Dionysius and Aquinas. Hall responds by questioning how truth-based discourse can limit our apprehension of the beautiful, and whether we must learn to “presence beauty” rather than merely analyze it. This sparks a deep reflection on how different art forms can all reveal aspects of the same transcendent essence, even while each medium brings forward different facets of reality.

The dialogue turns to the difficult question of what makes something beautiful versus ugly. From abstract modern art to glass-and-concrete high-rises, Wilkinson and Hall wrestle with the criteria by which one can render judgment. Hall suggests that beauty itself is a faculty capable of defending its judgments without needing to be laundered through truth or goodness. This leads to an illuminating exploration of how propaganda often disguises itself by borrowing from truth and beauty.

Politics and propaganda naturally enter the discussion, as both men consider how mass media and later the internet shape our understanding of truth and values. Hall provides a penetrating analysis of how twentieth-century propaganda techniques optimized for television are breaking down in the digital age, creating both dangers and opportunities. They compare Soviet and Western approaches to truth distortion, asking what happens when societies abandon shared standards of reality.

From there, the conversation broadens into urbanism, architecture, and the fate of cities. Wilkinson references conversations with architects like Michael Diamant, while Hall argues provocatively that the urban itself is a category in decline. They discuss whether it is possible to have a truly beautiful city or whether the urban form is inherently tied to scarcity, opulence, and spiritual distortion. This thread leads naturally into reflections on cathedrals, new urbanism, and the tension between monumental architecture and the simplicity of monastic cells.

Hall situates these questions within a larger framework: the transition from the third industrial revolution (the digital/communication age) to the fourth industrial revolution (decentralization, bespoke production, AI, and new community forms). He argues that society is moving from scarcity to abundance, though currently abundance is often distorted into mere opulence. The key challenge is learning how to inhabit abundance spiritually, not just materially.

Abundance, in their view, will not look like endless skyscrapers or gilded palaces, but like the everyday beauty of love, family, and community—a grandmother rocking her grandchild, or the intimacy of shared worship. Wilkinson and Hall emphasize that the future of civilization may rest in our ability to unify beauty, goodness, and truth in the spirit of love, creating societies marked not by opulence but by genuine harmony.

The theological dimension remains central throughout. From Eucharistic gratitude to the New Jerusalem, from Schmemann to David Bentley Hart, the discussion roots cultural renewal in the Christian vision of creation as fundamentally beautiful and good. For Hall, the New Jerusalem is not merely a future city but the living body of Christ, distributed wherever believers gather in the spirit of God.