Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives, and I am here with Ira Madison III.

Ira Madison is the co-host of the Keep It Podcast alongside Lewis Fertel, has written

for Buzzfeed, The Daily Beast, and just admitted the manuscript for his memoir last week.

I also have to know you spent much of the summer out on Fire Island, so we're going to

get into all of that and more, but let's start here.

I know you recently moved to New York City from LA.

Tell me what drove that decision.

Well, so I used to live here, and you know, I've always loved New York as a city.

It's sort of where I envisioned myself living when I was in high school, and I finally

got to come after undergrad in Chicago, and I started in theater before I started in

TV and film, and you know, with the strike going on right now, and obviously I moved

before the strike, but leading up to the strike, I was sort of just having this sentiment

of writing stuff for other people that wasn't fulfilling me in the way that I'd want it

to be.

And so I don't know, New York just represented a time where I'm a place where I could maybe

get back to the theater, get back into any sort of live performance that is really sort

of something that I've created, and also I've just turned in like the first draft of my

first book, Pure Innocent Fund, which comes out next year in June from Random House, and

you know, writing a book just felt much more like something I wanted to be doing in New York

than finishing it in L.A. which is very superficial, and there to me, to me, to me that's not superficial,

at all, to me that's actually very romantic, and I want to talk about a piece that you wrote

for your newsletter about sort of a pre-valentine today thing about New York, but I wanted to talk

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