Dan McClellan

The conversation starts with how odd it is to meet someone whose content you already know well. McClellan calls it a parasocial relationship that can be off-putting at first. He tells a story about Joel McHale. McHale followed him on Instagram, then messaged him to say he was a fan and suggested they meet. When McHale came to Salt Lake City for FanX, which McClellan describes as the local version of Comic Con, they arranged dinner. McHale insisted on choosing the restaurant, calling himself an arrogant foodie. On the phone McHale said talking to McClellan felt weird, and McClellan answered that it was a lot weirder for him. McClellan describes McHale as a really nice guy with a lovely family.

Rogan says he understands the feeling from the other side. He tries to give people grace when they meet him, because he has probably been in their heads through headphones for a long time. He adds that he doesn't watch his own material back and forgets a lot of what he has said. He also forgets past guests: about once every six months he suggests booking someone, and Jamie reminds him that the person was on the show three years earlier.

McClellan agrees that this is a problem for him too, given how specific his material on texts is. He also says repetition is part of why his channel helps people. His audience keeps growing, so new viewers have not seen older explanations. He says that, though not as a fixed program, he revisits a handful of topics about every six months, and when he can't think of something new he may recycle a video from six months earlier that thousands of people haven't seen. He estimates his total output at around 4,000 videos. Rogan's count is almost 2,900 episodes, or almost 3,000 once the fight companions and MMA podcasts are included.

McClellan says he loses names "like crazy." At his kids' urging he tried out for Jeopardy and passed the first phase. In the next stage, which was live and online rather than in person, he froze: he could picture faces but couldn't recall names. When Rogan asks whether he takes anything for memory, McClellan cites research he says suggests creatine "might be a little more helpful for brain function." He takes 10 grams a day, a figure he hesitates over before confirming the unit. He says he tries to keep down the number of things he puts in his body, but he still takes a range of vitamins plus fiber, because he is "of a certain age."

Rogan pushes back gently on fiber, saying "That's debatable," and then says he doesn't know where he stands. He gets his own fiber mostly from fermented vegetables, especially kimchi. He says he knows quite a few very healthy people who eat no fiber at all on a carnivore diet of eggs, chicken, meat and fish. He suggests many of them have autoimmune issues and react badly to chemicals found in plants. He also names glyphosate, other herbicides and industrial fertilizer chemicals as a problem in the American diet. Some people may be extremely sensitive to these, "perhaps due to prolonged exposure," but he says the causes are very difficult to parse out and that different experts disagree.

McClellan answers with his own experience: when he took fiber, mornings were easier, and so he kept taking it. Rogan describes his carnivore experiment. He says he did it strictly once for 60 days but then refers to "30 days when I did it," so the transcript is inconsistent on the length. He describes severe diarrhea in the first four or five days, which his friend Tom Segura called "remarkable," followed by bowel movements that were less frequent and very easy.

I'm not an expert in health and nutrition.

Both speakers qualify what they have said. After Rogan's disclaimer, McClellan replies that he isn't an expert either. Rogan says the information he has absorbed often contradicts itself, and that responses to diet vary with biology, genetics and ancestry. As examples he gives friends who have real problems with red meat, vegan friends who stay healthy, and other friends whose health "fell apart" when they went vegan for ethical reasons.

It's very hard to know who's right and who's wrong.

McClellan says he pays attention to FODMAPs, though he can't remember what the acronym stands for. He associates them with breads and other carbohydrate-heavy foods. Jamie looks it up and reads a description of a short-term, three-step eating plan that temporarily restricts specific poorly absorbed sugars to help manage bloating, gas and abdominal pain. He then expands the acronym: fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, which are short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols that the small intestine absorbs poorly.

The list Jamie reads includes high-FODMAP items such as excess fructose, lactose, fructans, galactans and legumes, including baked beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils and soybeans. Rogan is surprised that beans are on it. McClellan clarifies that the restriction applies to particular members of each food category, not whole categories. His evidence is personal. He had noticed he was more bloated by evening on certain days, and he felt better when he avoided high-FODMAP foods. One day he ate about half a watermelon, became very gassy and bloated within a couple of hours, and blamed the watermelon because he had eaten nothing else unusual. He presents this as his own biological makeup and says other people are "genetically gifted in other ways."

Rogan adds that context matters. After a long, exhausting mountain hike, he says, a high-carbohydrate, high-sugar meal can be good for you because your body needs to replenish your muscles. He mentions a three- or four-mile climbing hike at altitude as an example. McClellan says he sometimes craves those foods and tries to listen to his body. He runs at altitude near Salt Lake, and says that when he travels to lower places such as San Diego, the East Coast or where Rogan lives (which Rogan doesn't think is even 1,000 feet up), he can run "10 times as far" and enjoys it more.

Rogan describes a hypoxia chamber in the gym attached to his studio. He names the company as Exalt XP while saying he can't remember the product's name. He sets it to 14,000 feet. His VO2 max session there is four minutes of hard cardio, a roughly two-minute recovery, repeated for four cycles, and he calls it "fucking hell." He says the payoff is a large benefit when he later goes somewhere mountainous like Utah. McClellan says he does high-intensity interval training now and then but lacks the discipline to do it at 14,000 feet.

McClellan asks about training masks that restrict oxygen and guesses they are similar but probably less effective. Rogan calls them controversial and says he doesn't know about them. He separates them from devices that strengthen the diaphragm through breathing exercises. The masks were popular among MMA fighters for a while, he says, but most of the fighters he knows have abandoned them, and he isn't sure whether that was because they got tired of them or because training was already hard enough.

McClellan gives Rogan a replica of what he calls his favorite artifact from the ancient world. It was made by a friend, rendered in the transcript as Robert Algot, who runs relics3D.com. The original comes from Kuntillet Ajrud, near the Sinai Peninsula. Rogan guesses it is from Turkey and is wrong. McClellan explains that it is part of a large storage jar called a pithos, reassembled from several discovered fragments, and dated to about 800 BCE.

McClellan says the artifact has an inscription above a drawing of a male and a female deity. The inscription refers to someone asking for, or giving thanks for, blessings from the Lord of Samaria and "his Asherah." McClellan gives several versions of the divine name: "Adonai of Shomron," "Jehovah of Samaria" and "the Lord of Samaria." He presents his reading as the majority scholarly view and phrases it with a hedge.

I think the majority of scholars agree this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Asherah.

Rogan finds the figures strange-looking and almost bovine. McClellan says only the faces look somewhat bovine and the bodies are more human in form. He links the look to iconography associated with Egyptian deities, a name the transcript renders as "Besset," and says the headdresses mark the figures as deities. Rogan asks Jamie to put images on screen, McClellan spells out the site name, and Rogan only makes sense of the drawing after looking more closely.

The artifact leads Rogan to what he calls the most fascinating question about religious texts: what original event was being recorded, first through oral tradition and later in writing. He applies this to the Bible and to ancient Sumerian writings. He stresses the long gap between events and their written versions, and says McClellan's videos have pointed out parallels such as the stories of Moses and Sargon of Akkad, which he calls "almost too similar."

I don't think all of it is fiction, but I don't think all of it is literal.

Yeah, I think there's definitely some kind of genetic relationship between the two.

McClellan narrows the parallel to one motif: a baby placed in a container and set adrift on a river. Sargon the Great lived long before any historical Moses, he says. He then dates the earliest Akkadian version of the Sargon birth story found so far to "maybe 9th or 8th century" BCE. That is around when scholars think the Moses tradition and the Exodus narrative were beginning to come together. So for McClellan, what matters is when the Sargon story circulated, not when Sargon lived, and on that basis he says it makes sense that the Exodus writers drew on it.

McClellan says there are "a couple of different reasons" for the borrowing, but this section includes only one. The Sargon story already had purchase in the zeitgeist, so echoing a familiar story made the new narrative easier for people to fit into their worldview. The second reason isn't stated before the excerpt ends. The dating is also hedged ("maybe") and applies only to the earliest version found so far.

This part of the episode includes two advertisements that are not part of the interview. One is a United Way spot about poverty, which asks for donations to fund food, shelter and crisis prevention. It cuts into McClellan's FODMAP explanation. The other is an AG1 Pro read. It describes the product as a daily supplement with creatine, cites "over 500 peer-reviewed studies" on creatine, and offers a promotion with a 90-day money-back guarantee. These are advertiser claims, not statements by the guest, and the creatine research claim was not evaluated in the conversation.

McClellan's starting point is that ancient texts were written to do something, not only to pass on information. He applies this to how the New Testament presents Jesus. Some turns of phrase, and some things Jesus does, reflect what the Greco-Roman world expected from its emperor and its godmen. In his reading, that framing works two ways at once. It speaks in the culture's own terms, and it also challenges rival traditions. He summed up the attitude this way:

you got your guy, we got ours. Our guy did it better.

He extends this to all writing, whether it is an inscription on a piece of pottery or a text that ended up in the Bible: "every author wrote it down because they wanted to achieve something." Scholars therefore try to place each composition in the historical period for which they can make the best case, and then ask how it would have worked there. On that basis, he says some texts are thought to have been intended as political propaganda, some as a way to place one person struggling for power above another, and some as a way to make people feel better about why bad things happen to good people and good things fail to happen to bad people.

Genre is his main example of how readers work out what a text is for. He defines genre as a conventionalized set of features that tell readers what kind of text they are looking at. "Once upon a time" signals a certain kind of story. A scrap of paper found in a parking lot that lists a dozen eggs and a pound of ground beef is obviously a shopping list. People recognize these conventions without realizing it, and scholars use the same markers to infer a text's purpose.

McClellan says that writing on pottery was generally more ritual. It might be a votive offering made to a deity in hope of a blessing, or a text meant to be read aloud to invoke the deity's presence in a space. A drawing of the deity could serve the same purpose. He adds that what the writers were trying to accomplish remains "the big mystery."

When the host remarked that cattle worship was common, citing Çatalhöyük and Hindu practice, McClellan widened the point. Many animals and places were worshipped or treated as sacred. He said the imagery under discussion is probably drawn from Egyptian iconography. The Sinai Peninsula sits between Syria-Palestine and Egypt, and Egypt had a strong influence on the region. As an example he cited a bulla, an impression left by a signet ring or similar seal, that bears the name Hezekiah next to an Egyptian image. He said the image is "I think" a winged scarab. He explained the influence by saying that "Israel was under Egyptian hegemony for a long, long time."

McClellan notes that the Gospels were written long after Jesus died. He gave these approximate dates: Mark around 69, 70 or 71 CE; Matthew "probably 5, 10 years after that"; Luke probably 5 to 10 years or more after Matthew; and John a little after Luke. By then a following had already formed. The authors wrote for a literary audience, but they also wanted their texts to speak to the experiences of Jesus's followers.

His example is the saying in which Jesus says he came to bring not peace but a sword, and to set father against son and mother against daughter. McClellan says some scholars suggest this was aimed at followers whose family relationships were strained. A follower might have been kicked out of the house, or might fight constantly with a spouse or brother, and might wonder whether they were doing something wrong. The saying answers that Jesus came to cause exactly this, so the conflict is a sign that things are working.

The host asked whether this amounted to putting words in Jesus's mouth so that people of the time would feel okay. McClellan said "that's probably an awful lot of what's going on." The aim was either to reassure readers, to push them toward living a certain way, or to tell them what was coming. The host connected this to the problem of reading everything literally as the word of God, and pointed to passages in which God is presented as commanding rape or the killing of women and children. McClellan did not try to explain those passages away. He said people have struggled with them for the entire history of the texts' circulation.

McClellan argued that the phrase "Word of God" is never used in the Bible to describe the texts themselves:

that phrase is never used anywhere in the Bible to refer to texts specifically as the texts that are in circulation.