Jordan Schwarzenberger Part Two: A Radical Religious Conversion

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:43BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, it's Amol here with a slightly different sounding introduction to this episode. And that's because I am deep in Nappy Valley. Sorry, on holiday with my lovely children. I'll tell you all about it next week. I hope you've had a good August so far, whether working or away. You may have noticed this is a second episode with Jordan Schwarzenberger. Episode one was a masterclass on how to win in the attention and creator economy. That's something he knows rather a lot about as the manager of The Sidemen, probably Europe's biggest internet collective or phenomenon, with tens of millions of subscribers and multiple lucrative spin-off businesses.

1:27if you're someone trying to understand this new economy or even make a living from it I really hope you got a lot of value out of that conversation but you know when Jordan came into the radical studio our chat went into a well it went into a very unexpected place I have to say I didn't know that he had discovered Catholicism and in a big way and for him modern secular society has a very big hole and the radical and best way to fill that has been written down. In fact, it was written down a long time ago in the Bible. I really want this podcast, which is reaching a lot of people, to be a place where our guests can speak openly about a limitless range of ideas and explore what matters to them.

2:11Jordan did that and I very much hope you enjoy our conversation about his journey to God and meaning and morality.

2:31Do you know something? I spent, so when the team said that they'd been in touch and approached you, which actually they did because they knew you to be an extraordinarily interesting person before, I'd suggested your name. I knew quite a lot about you and about the Sidemen. And I thought one of the things that would be a focus or feature of this conversation was the collapse of mainstream culture. The idea of this united sort of space and where, you know, this village pump where we all come together to share a common understanding of what it is to be alive. And I think actually one of the things that would be nice to talk to you about is the idea of the decadent society.

3:03Decadence is a word I'm really interested in. why do you think we're heading towards potentially a decadent society which i think means uh an excessive interest in doing the easy thing being lazy uh not being prepared to do difficult things or make sacrifices why do you think we're heading there well i think it comes down to the loss of religion and the loss of uh purpose in life and meaning in any depth and also it comes down to materialism that we're in a post-french revolution society that's what we're really in if you go back to the point of liberalism, the roots of liberalism really were in the French Revolution, getting to sort of a whole world there.

3:39But those principles of equality, equality, fraternity, right? That falling into a world that loses any sense of higher spiritual meaning and depth is a recipe for disaster because you end up with peak materialism and no substance underneath. And people not connecting with any or not even believing in any sense of God or any spiritual reality or any understanding of those things. It's not even part of any mainstream conversation. It's not even a part of anyone's lives, right? I mean, people don't understand that stuff. So that's a fundamental part of being alive. And that's a fundamental part of what it means to be human is to understand spirituality, which is why everyone's now seeking it in all these different traditions and all these different ideals.

4:17And that's because people are craving something deeper than materialism. So we live in like the ultra materialist society. And it's not necessarily the fault of the companies that serve and sell products. Again, that's not the problem. The problem is individuals who've lost any grip on a world beyond the material and a world beyond what they can see and feel and touch. And that, of course, leads to people falling into, you know, deep, I guess, holes of pleasure and over, you know, over satisfaction of pleasure and so on, which are crippling society and making people really unhappy. So I think decadence in culture and society is a fruit of liberalism, a fruit of French Revolution principles that basically bled their way through Europe in the 19th century and then through into the 20th century after the World Wars, etc.

5:03So you've got that. That's what you're dealing with today. And I would put it down also to, you know, as a traditional Catholic specifically, to Vatican II, Second Vatican Catholic. We can get into all these details. But what happened in the 1960s and the loss of the church as the light of the world, which was done. And this is a whole nother podcast, one for another day. But done, you know, was really destroyed, I would argue, revolutionized at the Second Vatican Council, which when that stripped out of society, you can see almost social collapse on a global level from 1960 onwards, which is why people say the 60s was, you know, a totally revolutionary decade.

5:37People point to the wrong things. the real thing that destroyed, I guess, traditional culture, if you will, and the values and the stability and all those things. And it wasn't perfect, but there was so much more in it that people upheld as deep and rich and meaningful in traditional Western culture. That was all upended in the 1960s and really upended at the Second Vatican Council. That's a whole other thing. But it's fundamental, I think, to this conversation. The 1960s are held up as to be kind of an era in which radicalism and the cult of the self and the pursuit of hedonism. Like 1960s are blamed for an awful lot of stuff.

6:11What's the specific thing? Sorry? It was the Second Vatican Council that was there. What was the Second Vatican Council and how did that lead to the creation of a decadence? Okay, so going back, right, you've got French Revolution, you've got the 19th century Napoleon, you've got the spreading of revolutionary principles. We have a very troubled Catholic church at global level because of those principles breaking Europe. So obviously you go back really to the 16th century, to Henry VIII. You can go right the way back to that point, to Martin Luther, 1517, etc. So you have this decline, what you call, I guess, the rise of the church as being the light of the world and the light of morality and the values that we espouse today, the values that have created this country that we live in right now.

6:51I mean, England was Catholic for 900 years. So you've got this kind of rise of the church up through the Middle Ages. And then you have this decline from 1517 all the way down to today. And when you look at that decline, it's a decline of its power, of its kind of grip on society in relation to not through any force, but in relation to morality and what was considered normal and good and true. Because the church has always held itself as the light of truth in the world coming from God himself, as I would say, our Lord Jesus Christ. So you kind of come from that time all the way through to today.

7:22And then you see what happened in the 18th, 19th centuries, this growth of what we call modernism. And this idea that, you know, the church was not objectively true, but was subjectively believed in by Catholics, but wasn't objectively true and right and good. And this idea of kind of unhooking the church from the notion of objective truth, which it always represented and always was, if you follow it down to being coming from God himself, which always was understood to have come down from. and you have Protestantism come out and you have this kind of revolutionary mindset that comes through the church through what one may call infiltration, which took place over the sort of late 19th century.

7:59But really it was centuries long, coming really out of, if you look at the philosophical side, the sort of the cant of the world, the Descartes, et cetera, this idea of subjectivism. And also the Enlightenment, which is a sort of... And the quote-unquote Enlightenment, right? But this idea of subjectivism, ultimately, this idea that there's no such thing as objective truth. and this is the fundamental point of our society today, why everything's a mess, there's no such thing as objective truth, was held up by these philosophers who are now the philosophers that run the schools, run the universities, Kant, etc.

8:28It's an idea of imminence, this idea of we bring ourselves to reality, reality doesn't impose itself on us. That's, by the way, that's immanence, isn't it? Imminence, immanence. Yeah, which is immanence, which is I-I-M-M-A-N-E-N-C, different to imminence, which is kind of things that are about to happen. The idea of imminence, which is this notion of objective truth doesn't exist we bring ourselves to reality so if i think you would say that that chair is a chair we would anyone with common sense and reason would say that's objectively a chair can't and the school of philosophy says no we impose the chair on the chair that's not actually a chair could be a cat and we cannot know for sure that that's a chair but a minute ago you said quote unquote the enlightenment and i'm just thinking if i were to channel the spirit of uh anti-theists or atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris to take the four horsemen of the anti-theist moment.

9:21They were my heroes growing up. And then you rejected them. They would say that what you call the kind of infiltration of the Catholic Church or the demise of the grip that the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church still has billions of followers, they would say that it was specifically the demise or rather the questioning of theological power that gave us the great advances of an understanding of knowledge, which led to the Enlightenment, which in turn led to the Industrial Revolution and created the world that gives us the sidemen and the chance that you and I could go for coffee in a nice place and communicate on iPhones.

9:58And they would say there was a direct link between the weakening of theological, well, theocracy. There was a direct link between the weakening of theocracy and the rise of the industrial revolution that gave us the modern world. Do you not accept that? No, it's nonsense. I mean, if you look at the monasteries, look at the Middle Ages, look at the advanced, look where did the universities come from? They came from Catholics. I mean, these things were, this goes back way beyond the sort of atheistic thinkers of the 20th century. I mean, as I said, what they're looking at is they're placing this notion of materialistic success, materialistic growth, money, industrial change, and these sort of ideals of the modern era, of being our markers of success.

10:39Technology is God. Science is God. This notion that progression in technology is the definition of human accomplishment. Because ultimately, that's all that man can do. All that man can do is progress with the intellect that God gave him, ultimately, to develop and uncover new things. And that's, of course, great. And that's never been in any way at odds with Catholicism. But it's missing out on the entire immaterial. It's missing out on the spiritual reality that exists. is missing out on any depth. And that's why this stuff can continue. You can have your new iPhone. You can have your new VW multivan.

11:10You can have whatever it might be. It doesn't make you happy. It doesn't make you in any way enriched at a deeper level. Do you think it's possible for people who are agnostic or atheist or who are basically possessed of the secular imagination, do you think it's possible for them to have spiritual deeper fulfillment without God? No, because the reality is, and I was an atheist for most of my life, I despised religion for most of my life, right? So I, interestingly, talk about kids. I had, when me and my wife had our first baby, I converted in that year, 2020. I was baptised in the end of 2020.

11:45I was a total atheist before. It was like a miraculous conversion. But I worked kind of my way through. And then you kind of uncover, you question, you question, you question, you dig and dig and dig. And if you have an open mind and you're objective about it, you can't ignore the truth and you can't ignore reality. There's a difference between believing in the spiritual power of Catholicism and finding meaning in the Bible. And there's a moment in which religion becomes religion as opposed to just philosophical thinking, which is when it gives life meaning through reference to some transcendentally different realm.

12:18And what was the thing? Was it the advent of fatherhood that made you go from a kind of skepticism about the possibility of God's existence to think actually God does exist. Well, I mean, the existence of God is, and it's interesting now looking back to how I just couldn't see it. I just couldn't see the religious truth as being in any way true. That's because I hated the notion of being told what to do. Ultimately, I didn't want to change my life. I didn't want to be, I was, again, I grew up in peak liberalism in an area of London, which is very peak liberalism, as you well know, right? So like I grew up in a culture which totally glorified self, totally glorified the notion that you can do whatever you want.

12:55And I lived a very hedonistic life for most of my life. Like I, you know, was just, I didn't have any sense of. You worked at Vice Media. I worked at Vice Media in 2015. That was peak. I mean, we've got a spot on the Jägermaster for Christmas. Do you know what I mean? And then you worked at Ladbible and you got Lad of the Year. I mean, maybe it's worth actually, just rewind for a second for people. Because, you know, I think a lot of people listening to this will know about the Sidemen, who you are the manager of through your agency. But a lot happens in 2020. The world is spilling into a pandemic.

13:26you become a father and you discover God and then you're kind of on the journey to taking over this group of seven genuine friends who are now basically I would put for anyone who's not aware of the cyber I would say they're kind of Europe's biggest YouTube phenomenon in a way that Mr Beast who's the biggest figure, a guy called Jimmy, he's the biggest figure in America he's a YouTuber with multiple different channels huge numbers of subscribers and spin-off businesses and merchandise and so on The Sidemen is a collective of seven guys who you manage who have 23 million YouTube followers. There are 20 million on the main channel, nearly 10 million on their second channel, and then about 6 million on their third channel.

14:09With spin-off businesses in restaurants and vodka and so on and so forth. All this comes at the same time. So 2020 is a hell of a year for you, Matt. It's a hell of a year. It's a hell of a year. It's probably the wrong phrase. Oh, yeah. Could have been a hell of a year, but thankfully not. What was going on in 2020? you become a father you know what i so i've i've i think i would put 2020 well i put everything for me now and that year specifically as being one that i've been one of the best things well obviously the best thing that ever happened to me on multiple levels but really like the discovery of the faith um the kind of letting go of atheism moving away from from that whole kind of hedonism etc i think it was it was really ordering my life because there's a the quote i think it's aristotle aristotle or saint thomas said you know peace is the tranquility of order right so you have peace in your life when you have order in your life and I was totally not peaceful a lot of anxiety like straight you know voice in my head all that kind of stuff and I remember just again having rejecting this notion of the spiritual but then realizing that I was almost struggling spiritually even though I didn't know what to say I almost I called it struggling mentally maybe you're not struggling in any deep deep deep way but having issues just mentally like dealing with like obviously COVID as well everything that happened there but baby you know wife everything else and I guess I I am I went through a year of ordering my life like going away from, I guess, a life kind of falling out of my kind of teens and early 20s, again, of sort of decadence, hedonism, partying all the time, like, you know, going to festivals, like 100 festivals a year, seeing my mates at all different unis every weekend and just getting on it.

15:38Like, that was just my life. That must be what your mates are still doing. Listen, I'm 42 and some of my mates have still not left their 20s. Well, no, but this is, again, we can get into that. I mean, it's addictive, right? Hedonism and pleasure. Do you think belief in God today in our hyper-liberal or post-liberal society, peak liberal in high speed in 2015, do you think belief in God is itself a radical move? Shouldn't be, but it is. It's totally counterculture today. Why? Because we live in a world that is born out of, as I said, the French Revolution, born out of these principles. And those principles become incredibly addictive for fallen man.

16:18So when we have a fallen human nature, again, as a traditional Catholic, that's my understanding of original sin and of concupiscence and all these things. And if you understand those concupiscence, the inclination to sin, that all of us, because of original sin, we all have this inclination to do bad things, to over-exceed, to go to extremes and to basically fall into problems ourselves. And if you look at the world, it's the only way I think you can understand the world today. If you look at all the horrors of the way that man treats one another, the way that man treats himself, you see the evil going on.

16:49There's so much evil in the world. And people always say, why is there so much evil in the world? Well, it's because of this inclination to sin that we all have. We all have this desire to do bad things. How do you reconcile the presence of terrible suffering with a benevolent, omnipresent, celestial father? Original sin. The plan of God was perfection of man. The man would not die, that there would be no corruption, that he could eat off the land, that he could survive. But by eating from the fruit, we corrupted that narrative. Yeah, but that was the fall of man. That was a mistake. That was a problem.

17:24But that wasn't the plan. The original plan was for man to have total peace, no suffering, no pain in that sense, no physical pain, no cancer, no disorder of the body, no destruction, which is why you look again, again, there's dispute around this and people might have different beliefs, of course, they do but if you look at the catholic traditional proposition of of age even you look at the bible why did noah live to 800 900 years like why was the life expectancy so much more again because there was greater perfection at that time than there was following that time which is why things like life expectancy have become shorter than they were in in that period of time but some people listening to you now as we screaming saying do you really think that life expectancy was higher for most sapiens 6 ,000 years ago?

18:06Well, again, if you look at this, if you're a young earth creationist, it depends on how you view the world. I'm a Catholic, so my belief in the world, my belief in history is Catholic history. And Catholic history and scripture, sacred scripture, which is the tradition handed down from all the prophets of the Old Testament, from Moses and Elias, everyone else, that life expectancy is very well tracked. And they were 900 years old, 800 years old, 700 years old, and it decayed and decayed and decayed and decayed. decay, which again, you have to believe it. It's not that only a necessary dogma to believe that, but ultimately it lines up with the notion of original sin, the notion of decay and disorder, which then bled through into the material of man over time.

18:48I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Jordan Schwarzenberger. And if you are, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on because that way, You'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Right, back to the remarkable, the revelatory Jordan Schwarzenberger. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.

19:31It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:57listening to you it feels to me like the story that catholicism told you helped you understand which is a millennia old story which answers the big questions which helps you identify your place in the universe which gives you a sense of meaning it kind of helped you understand the purpose of your life in a way that you know the secular imagination and richard dawkins and all these atheists never could well i think it was there was a hole there because i didn't really believe in richard dawkins i just it was a good answer there was a hole what was the hole that really well the hole was truth the hole was truth the notion of objective truth of something objective and true and higher than my subjective idea of of reality because so many people are miserable and sad today as i was i think for a long time in my life because we are we become our own gods and we can never get that right so we end up i think with funny ideas about the world of you know ideas about self ideas about what's good and what's bad our own morality we try and become our own moral uh our own i guess our own moral god in reality and again morality object these objective ideas which we actually all live by have to come from an objective moral river i didn't become a catholic straight away i didn't know about catholicism i didn't know genuinely this is maybe how dumb i was i didn't even know that catholicism I didn't know what it was.

21:12I had no idea. I didn't even know what Catholic meant. But I ended up through, actually through YouTube, you know, watching a lot of, again, well, no, the first thing was actually the first thing. It was really interesting. I was at YMU. YMU is a talent agency. I think it used to be basically James Grant. So big talent agency. So most of, a lot of people in this building, a lot of people in ITV, et cetera. Not happening in this building. Not anymore. Not anymore. Times have changed. Times have changed. But no, what happened was I went to LA. and I went to LA with the music I went for a conference we were having out there and Kanye West of all people at the time was doing Jesus is King right it was that roll out and it was this weird thing where hold on a minute I'm flying into LA on the Wednesday that that album launches and he's having a launch party at the Staples Center and I've been asked if I want to go and I was like alright I'll go to that I'll go to Kanye West's launch I know people wouldn't do that anymore I wouldn't do that anymore right but at the time and it was Jesus is King and I remember being like this is really weird like he's at this point Kanye's a whole podcast for another day but at that point that album came out and I was like this is really interesting it's very uh clearly about about Christ and about and again I knew nothing I knew nothing about this stuff right I just had this instinct was okay let me go um but anyway fast forward and I'm there and I just remember coming home and like okay maybe I just maybe I just need to be a little bit more open because there was something I felt that was true a nugget of truth within that experience let me just be open to it and just at least question it and dig in and dig in and dig in and see where it lands and i did and i remember then buying a bible but i bought king james bible which i would never read now but i bought a king james bible and um read and i was like wait a minute all the questions i've been having around evil in the world around the demonic around you know all the challenges and problems in society it was all being for the first time because i never read about i was like this is mirrored perfectly this overlaps perfectly with my entire experience of the world my experience of self my experience of my own i guess experience with sort of spiritual demons or the dark sort of dark forces voices in my head all that kind of stuff this perfectly aligns with it all right my view of society my view of what's right and what's wrong everything was here and i'd been missing it the whole time it was right under my nose i remember reading it when i got home being like okay this is maybe maybe i don't know everything it was just this humility moment of i do not know everything and i need to be a bit more open then from there it was listening and it was all protestant at the beginning and you know evangel evangel you know evangelicals in America who are quite good, I think, at broadcasting themselves.

23:38Through YouTube. All through YouTube. And they were just talking about, a lot of it was about the case for Christ. I don't know if you've ever read that book, but there was a talk on the case for Christ. They basically laid out the proof points and the evidence around the resurrection, the evidence for Christ. And I was like, okay, this is again, maybe I don't know everything. Let me keep digging, digging. And then you do that and you do it with an open mind. And truth, once you hear truth, once you see truth, you can't unsee it. and I just carried that line all the way down and down and down and ended up realizing that wait a minute like I can't ignore the evidence the reason behind this which was perfect I can't ignore the overlapping with reality I can't ignore the hole that this is actually filling not just on a felt emotional level but on a reason reasonable level and then I started getting into philosophy and you know Thomas Aquinas Aristotle Saint Augustine and you go this this is the most these are the best minds that have ever lived.

24:32There's nothing deeper, nothing richer. The Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas is the greatest work arguably man has ever created. It doesn't get any higher than that. And you dig in, you read Confessions, you read City of God, you go through Aristotle and you go through this thread of truth and objectivity. And I'm like, oh my goodness, I've been living as a subjectivist my entire life when objectivism is staring me at the face and is filling the hole that subjectivism will always leave. And this is true. and once you realise it's true you can't so if anyone asked me why am I Catholic I'd say because it's true I'm really like sort of honoured that you feel you could talk about in this public space you're only 28 got twins on the way what's the future look like for Jordan Schwarzenberger day by day my friend I have no idea get a van I need a van for all these kids I thought you were going to say something profound about Catholicism you're like I'm going to get me a van look the ultimate goal the ultimate purpose of life in any catechism is to know love and self-God in this life, to be eternally happy with him in the next.

25:31That's it. There's nothing else. So ultimately it's to not get caught up in the world too much, to not fall into grave sin, to stay in a state of grace, to live a truly Catholic life and to enjoy materially and spiritually the fruits of that, which are enduring peace, happiness and kindness to others, a charitable existence that gives and that doesn't take and a sense of restraint on my inclination to sin and my concupiscence. And if I can do that each and every day, then I'm good. It sounds pretty radical to me. Maybe. Jordan, what a pleasure, man. Thank you so much. Absolutely loved it.

26:11Well, the thing that's so interesting about that conversation with Jordan, first of all, it's just a wonderful thing when you discover something about people which is really fundamental to them and deep within them that you weren't expecting. And we do a lot of research in the team, our brilliant pod squad about our guests, obviously, as you'd expect, and we tried to be rigorous and fair and accurate and impartial and wreathian and all that stuff. We had no idea that he had converted to Catholicism and that it was a very big part of his worldview. So that was kind of unexpected and surprising and really, really fun.

26:43And I think that even if you're not a Christian, and I'm not a Christian, I'm broadly speaking an atheist, I've long felt that the metaphysical and epistemological claims that most faiths, certainly the Abrahamic faiths, the claims that they make about the origins of our species and cosmos are false and demonstrably false. But I think that the challenge which Jordan Schwarzenberger sets down, a bit like James Orr, who was a previous guest on Radical a few weeks ago, that friend of J.D. Vance, that big influence on the Reform Party, Nigel Farage, the challenge that they set down for liberal secular society is what is the source of morality for people who don't believe in God?

27:22And I think there are good answers for that. You know, you might find the source of morality in a deep concern for suffering or a belief in justice or the spread of knowledge or the spread of love, whatever it might be. But the certainty and the force with which Schwarzenberger asserts his Christian worldview basically implies that liberalism is either empty of meaning or has the wrong values or puts them in the wrong order. And when I asked James Orr a few weeks ago what the issue was with liberalism, whether he thought liberals and liberalism had no values or the wrong values, he said he thinks that liberalism simply ranks the values in the wrong order.

28:00I think Schwarzenberger would go a bit further than James Orr. I think he would say that liberalism is essentially morally void. It's essentially empty of the best answers to the biggest questions in life. And he finds those answers in the Bible. Many of you listening won't do that. Some of you perhaps will. but I think the fundamental test which he sets down which I'm glad to invite him to put before us is if you don't find the source of your morality and therefore your politics from God where does it come from and that's a subject to which I certainly intend to return I've given it a lot of thought over 20 odd years and perhaps in the coming episodes of Radical I'll tell you a bit more about where I stand on it.