How do teenage boys, in all their sloppy, rude glory, learn how to grow up into empathetic, sensible men—without getting ensnared in the many traps laid out by, say, predatory groups on the internet? It's rare to see questions like these that even obliquely deal with the topic of modern masculinity tackled in honest, healthy ways, especially with the patience needed to handle a genuine journey of maturity. But enter My Brother My Brother and Me, an "advice show for the modern era" that takes a foundation of hilarious jokes and sneaks in a core of warmth that makes it much easier for listeners to admit their own failings.
In 2010, brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy started My Brother My Brother and Me as a podcast devoted to "answering" the questions posed in Yahoo! Answers. ("An advice show for the modern era.") Seven years later, they preside over a small empire of podcasts: Each McElroy co-hosts a podcast with his wife, they've turned a game of Dungeons and Dragons with their dad into a wildly successful and engaging radio story (The Adventure Zone), Travis produces several series on the MBMBaM home network, Maximum Fun, and Griffin and Justin both produce podcasts and video series for Polygon, Vox's videogame website.
On February 23rd, the MBMBaM TV show premieres on Seeso, the NBC-owned comedy streaming service that also hosts series like Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher's Take My Wife. In the series, the McElroys use their hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, as an arena to answer questions and engage in general shenanigans, including the chaotic near-destruction of Huntington's police Safety Town, a parade to raise awareness for spiders, and visits by celebrity fans like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Weird Al.
I met the McElroys a few hours before the official premiere of the My Brother My Brother and Me show to talk about a totally-not-nebulous topic: What does being a man mean in 2017? Does it even need to mean anything?
Griffin: I feel like a lot of what's championed as modern-man-in-the-dating-world behavior is not conducive to actually being a fucking adult about things. And I think I can say that pretty comfortably, because when we started this podcast seven years ago, I was 22 and didn't know any of that shit at all, and doing this podcast put a lot of pressure on us to try to shake some of those bad tropes for dude advice.
Travis: There's also this other thing that's happened, where we'll get questions in which it's not clear what the gender of the person writing is, so we have to speak in they/them terms. And suddenly, if you remove these prescribed labels from it and you're just like, "I'm dealing with human beings interacting with human beings," and you're not worried about the gender or any role established, it's like, "Okay, I'm just looking at human-to-human interaction" and it makes you realize, I would hate this if someone did this to me.
Griffin: If there's a throughline for things that are commonly said to dudes on "how to be a man," most of it is shitty behavior. I don't think that shit should fly. So I can't think of much advice that we give that's like, "So if you want to really be a man..." We're much more concerned with just being decent and being good first.
Travis: And it's not "be decent because a real man is decent." Be decent because you're a human and there are other people around you in this world and the things you do have impact on other people.
Justin: I think the problem with trying to figure out how to be a man is that it's a very "me"-focused way of looking at the universe. How you treat other people is the defining characteristic of adulthood. Scientifically speaking, the last level of maturity is the ability to empathize with other people. So focusing on "what is my role as a man"—or a woman—misses the real things of living, which is "how do I treat other people well, and serve other people well, in a way that doesn't reinforce the gender roles society has created, but at least is a credit to my gender, and tries to tip the scales back towards decency."
Travis: If you say hold a door open for a woman and then slam it in a dude's face, it's like no, just hold the door open, because there's a human being coming behind you and maybe they're carrying packages. It's not about because they're a woman or because you're a man. It's because you're a person and they're a person.
Justin: We're all just trying to get through this fucking thing.
Travis: That's the thing! We should all just be working together huddled against the darkness.
Justin: Men, women, non-binary, we're all just trying to fucking get through it.
Travis: And that's the thing. When we're talking about romantic or dating advice, most of our advice boils down to "No, that's embarrassing." Asking people out at work? Don't do that, because it's embarrassing, and it's lame.
Justin: Our generation has gotten probably the worst messages about romance of almost any generation that didn't include human sacrifice. Because what we have is your fucking Lloyd Doblers who are still pursuing a woman in the way that society says you should be pursuing a woman, but also is not obeying any of the niceties or mores or conventions that have made that socially permissible for generations. So it's like a rogue agent, who's both pursuing women and follows no norms.
Travis: If someone actually stood outside your window with a boombox, you'd be so embarrassed. Like, I hate this. Leave. Get out of here.
Justin: I hate this!
Travis: I just did an episode of Shmanners [an etiquette podcast Travis hosts with his wife, Teresa] where we talk about first dates and the idea of the romantic comedy where you "know" the moment to kiss them. No, then you're just kissing someone without asking! You're just grabbing someone and kissing them, and that's terrible. That's horrible advice. But that's what all of the romantic comedies from the '80s and '90s are like. "You'll know"? No, you'll ask!
Griffin: I can't believe I am about to go on the record showing that I know that this person exists—but fucking Mystery from The Pickup Artist [wields too much influence]. Any advice you have to give to dudes about dating or romance that you have to do in secret? Don't listen to that advice because it sucks. Any advice that, if you told a woman, "Here's this advice I got to try to pick you up," if they go, "That sucks," then it's simply not good advice.
Travis: The best dating advice I ever got was from Justin and his wife Sydnee: When you're on a date, be interested. Ask questions, talk to them about themselves. Not, "You're gonna wanna neg them." That's terrible!
Griffin: All of this shit comes from the idea that you can lifehack your way into romance or sex or whatever.
GQ: It feels like a lot like dudes who buy into this dating advice do it until they have a child, and then they say, "I have a daughter now! And I would never want anyone to do this to my daughter!"
Travis: The idea of all of those artifice things, like, "I'm going to wait three days," or "I'm going to neg." Those are all things you do because you don't have self-confidence and you're trying to hide behind these walls of not needing to think about what to do because someone told me what to do because it's scary to just be myself. That's the thing. Now I wish I could go back in time to 20-year-old Travis and say, "Just talk to them. There's not a strategy you have to take, there's no right or wrong."
Griffin: There's a lot of strategy and gamesmanship. Like, this idea that dating is a win-loss scenario, and there are cheats and shortcuts. The idea that if you got put in the friend zone, you lost. It's so pervasive and it's just not how any of it actually works in real life.
Do you think that way of describing those tactics is why a lot of this stuff is so popular in games communities?
Justin: [laughs] I'm not touching that one.
Griffin: Nope. I think it's broadly popular just because if you're the type of person who has never been successful with women or men or whoever and someone with a stupid-ass looking hat comes up to you and says, "It's because you haven't been doing this secret technique I thought," and then you start doing that secret technique. Generally speaking, everybody's looking for shortcuts to things.
Travis: That's the thing. What people don't want to hear is "Oh yeah, it's just hard." But it's just like working. If someone says, "I hate my job," it's just like, yeah man, work sucks sometimes. Dating is hard and finding a person is hard.
So I really do on some level understand that pickup-artist shit, the idea of someone being like, "Just follow these eight steps!" But just like any diet, if that were true, everyone would actually be doing it.
Was the simplicity of that advice—that it's just hard—something you guys slowly realized over the course of doing the show?
Griffin: We used to do dating advice. We don't anymore, really.
Travis: And the reason is because there are only three forms of the question. How do I meet them? How do I talk to them? How do I know? That's it, every time. And you can change the location and the names, but it's always the same three questions.
But I also think a lot of what it comes down to is we started doing the show with very little confidence in our ability to tell people how to live their life—which I think has continued to today—but we didn't like to give concrete answers to anyone. So we were very careful about taking in all the elements and saying, "We don't know!" We didn't have hubris—well, I always did, but we didn't collectively have the hubris to say, We're gonna tell you the strategy, We're gonna tell you how to do it. I don't know, talk to them?
Griffin: In 2010 when we started, we probably gave some pretty shitty advice about this very subject. Here's how to really be guys being dudes! But I think the most transformative thing for our show and for me as an adult human being has been hearing from very patient listeners of ours who were hurt by something we said. [Most notably, an early episode in which the McElroys mocked furries before hearing from several listeners who identified as furries.] So the idea now of being like, here's the secret to get what you want, and the other person may not like it—we've heard from the other person, and it sucks. I feel like we try to stay away from any advice that has a "loser" to it.
Justin: If you go into anything and the goal is to succeed with a facet that is out of your control, that's a bad goal. Good goals should be within your ability to achieve. So if my goal is, "I'm gonna get out there and bag women," there's a very good chance—and this is why we have a hard time giving advice on that—that you do everything we say, everything Mystery says, everything anybody says, and you still fail. If the goal is, I'm going to meet people, and enjoy people's company, and try to be an enjoyable person who listens to them, that's a goal you can achieve.
Travis: We got this question a couple of times: "Why does it seem like women always go after the taken guys?" You're looking at that wrong. The right answer is that people like people who are confident, people like people who are interested in them, and they like people without an agenda. And the reason they like them is they can just sit and talk to them without worrying about, What are they trying to do? What's their game? They can just sit and talk to you, and that's nice.
Griffin: This is a double standard though, because we can say that all that other advice sucks, but it's the easy, wrong answer to that question, of how do I just talk to someone. We've been doing this for seven years, and I don't think we have an answer yet. Just be confident, we say. Don't be overconfident! Don't be underconfident! Be the right literal amount of confident.
Travis: Nail it. Every time.
That element of sincerity—in dating, but also in life in general—is a bit less present in the TV show version of My Brother My Brother and Me**. Is that something you guys thought about consciously in choosing questions?**
Griffin: We got sent something like 800 questions and pared it down to six [each of which forms the basis of one episode], and a lot of those were variations on "How do I meet people?" And that's probably the majority of the questions we get for the podcast on a weekly basis, too. It's just not a very visually interesting question to tackle for a television show.
Travis: There are so many other actual people giving actual advice on actual problems on TV, like—we don't want to be included in that genre. It's not like, "We're Dr. Phil but a little bit funny!" Our Venn diagrams don't overlap, and we want to make that clear.
Justin: I'd also say it's about the medium. When you listen to a podcast, a lot of the time you're on public transit, you're doing the dishes, you're doing other things. So those peaks and valleys are a lot more comfortable. There's a rhythm—you can't be up up up the whole time. That rhythm helps with a podcast, but when you're doing a TV show, you're asking for total attention. For me, I think what that sort of led to was us being more focused on being entertaining the entire time, and trying to do what we actually do well. I think our advice is average.
Travis: At best! We're going to teach you how not to embarrass yourself on Day One of being a human, but we can't lead you being the king of men.
Justin: If Beezbo the manners alien came to Earth and wanted to learn how to be a human—
Griffin: Enjoy your deep dive research into Beezbo to include that quote in your story! You need to Google Beezbo. Also, you're going to need an image of Beezbo.
Travis: Both human and alien form. Get both, or it's gonna be weird.
Griffin: [into the microphone] B-E-E-Z-B-O.
Travis: I also think once we decided to do just one question per episode, taking somebody's question that's a sincere request for help and making a funny episode out of it would feel terrible. It would make me feel like such a jerk if someone wrote, "I just need to make friends" and we were like, "Ha ha ha! Joke joke joke!" That person might actually be lonely and just really want to make friends, and we just make jokes the whole time? That would not feel good.