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.