Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives, and my next guest is a comedian or writer at

Esquire, the co-host of the homophilia podcast, but we all met him back in 1998 when he

was the runner-up for MTV's want to be a VJ contest. Hi, Dave Holmes. Hi. Thank you so much. Now, I

want to like really get into your journey, like how you landed this gig as a VJ on MTV during

like prime MTV. So you're from St. Louis, right? I am. You initially moved to New York to get a job

in advertising, but you were a true pop culture savant. I was that was my that was kind of my

secret shame, honestly. I grew up loving music and TV and movies and popular culture, and I grew

up in a place where it was nice if you like that kind of thing, but there's no way for you to make

a career in it. Those sorts of jobs are for other people there for people with skill sets that

you don't have and whatever. I mean, it's never explicitly said, but that's kind of the subtext of

everything is like this is cute, but then you know, at some point you're going to have to go up and

get a job job. So yeah, yeah. So I went off to college in Massachusetts and kind of you know,

like I worked in college radio and all that kind of thing, and I saw every show that I could and

and all that, but I tried to be a normal person, and it really didn't take. Ultimately, like when

I moved to New York and I got a job in advertising, I thought that would be my thing, because it was sort

of creative-ish, although my end of it really wasn't. I was like a media planner. I was hoping I

could eventually move laterally into copywriting, but that itself is very tough. And so like my

my secret shame was that I was obsessed with with music and pop culture. That was like when I

had too much to drink, that's what I would get real into. And I wake up in the next morning and

I'm like, oh, what did I do? Well, I talked about Jagged Little Pill for an hour and everyone

got bored would be like that would be my bad behavior. And so it was all like in my bones to like

talk about this stuff and to perform and to write and all that kind of thing. So I had a moment in

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