Justin McElroy

Justin Tyler McElroy (born November 8, 1980) is an American podcaster and former video game journalist. He is known for his work on podcasts (such as My Brother, My Brother and Me, The Adventure Zone, and Sawbones), his co-starring role in the Seeso television adaptation of My Brother, My Brother and Me, as well as for co-founding the video game journalism website Polygon.

Early and personal life
Justin McElroy was born in 1980 to Clint McElroy, former co-host of WTCR-FM's morning radio show in Huntington, West Virginia, and his wife Leslie. McElroy attended Marshall University. He currently lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and married a physician, Dr. Sydnee Smirl McElroy, in 2006. Justin and Sydnee have two children: Charlie "Chuck" McElroy, who was born on August 12, 2014 and Cooper Renee McElroy, who was born on February 13, 2018.

Journalism
McElroy worked at Joystiq as a journalist from 2007 to 2012. During this time, he was the producer of the Joystiq podcast.

In 2012, McElroy co-founded Polygon, a video game website, along with his brother Griffin and Christopher Grant, and was formerly an editor-at-large at said website. In 2018, Justin and Griffin both announced their departure from Polygon, in order to focus on their podcasting careers and families.

Podcasting
Since 2010, Justin McElroy has co-hosted the comedy podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me along with his brothers Griffin and Travis. The podcast began in 2010 as a form of "self-entertainment" before it was added to the Maximum Fun network. The podcast takes the form of a humorous "advice show", in which the brothers answer questions that have been directly submitted by listeners, as well as questions that listeners have found on Yahoo! Answers. In 2010, the show was consistently listed among the top 10 comedy podcasts on iTunes, and it has received positive critical reception. The podcast was later turned into a 2016 television show, which originally aired on Seeso and now streams on VRV.

Since June 21, 2013, Justin and his wife Sydnee have co-hosted the podcast Sawbones, a "marital tour of misguided medicine" and a humorous exploration of medical history, focusing on the many ways the medical community has been wrong in the past. A book based on this podcast, The Sawbones Book: The Horrifying, Hilarious Road To Modern Medicine, was published by Weldon Owen on October 9, 2018.

In 2014, the McElroy brothers launched a tabletop role-playing game podcast entitled The Adventure Zone. Initially focusing on Dungeons & Dragons, the show began to explore other game systems in later seasons. The first sub-arc of The Adventure Zone: Balance, named Here There Be Gerblins, was later adapted into a graphic novel, published by First Second Books in 2018. The book topped the New York Times' best-selling trade fiction list, becoming the first graphic novel to do so. A sequel was teased in the back of the book, which was eventually confirmed and will adapt the second story arc, The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited. It will be released in 2019 with the same creative team.

In 2018, Justin McElroy launched The Empty Bowl, a "meditative podcast about cereal".

Other programs
From 2015 to 2018, Justin and Griffin McElroy hosted a gaming comedy show for Polygon called Monster Factory. The series—in which the two use powerful character creation tools from popular video and computer games to create hideous characters—was praised by The Mary Sue as one of the "funniest series on YouTube".

Voice acting
McElroy has appeared as a voice actor in several animated TV shows. In 2017, he appeared as Billiam Milliam in the animated comedy series OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. In 2018, he appeared in the Cartoon Hangover-produced animated mini-series Slug Riot. He also provided voice commentary for the 2017 video game 100ft Robot Golf, along with Griffin and Travis. In September 2018, following a successful podcasting campaign, Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy confirmed that they would be voicing characters in the film Trolls 2.