Let's go.

Welcome to Citizen.

We have a special guest today, my dear friend, Greg Hurwitz.

You've written a number of books, comic books, and articles.

Is that right? That's right. That pretty much sums it all up. That's it. There's nothing more to know about it. All right. Well, we can get out of

here then, I guess. How you doing? I'm doing good, man. I'm on book tour, which I always like

being on. I can run through on the Texas run, obviously. Houston, Austin. I got Dallas

tomorrow and things are clicking

along mm this is the 11th book 11th orphan X book it's my 27th overall but it's the

11th in the orphan X series okay what let me let's let's start with you a little

background on you what did you grow up I grew up in Northern California. Are you being KG for a reason? No, you mean you want to say what the city? Yeah, I want the address. I was born in San Francisco. I grew up in Saratoga, I went to high school in San Jose. Where's Saratoga? Saratoga. Is that Marin County? It's right right by, you know, Sunnyvale, Campbell, all that. Is that considered South Bay? Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I went to high school in San Jose, went to a Jesuit high school, which was weird because I grew up in a very not religious household, but my parents sent me off because I think there was kind of a lot of smart assery around the public

schools and they sent me off to the Jesuit high school where I didn't know anybody and that's where

I went for high school and then off I went to college to college where went to Harvard studied

English American lit and psychology my thesis advisor was Jordan Peterson. That's where we met. On the psych

side, it was under Marjorie Garb. I'm sorry, on the English side. And then I started my first

novel when I was an undergrad. It's the only thing I ever wanted to do. So I was 19, started writing

this book, wrote a pretty shitty rough draft the summer before and after my senior

year. And then I went off to England. I got a master's in Shakespearean tragedy, but I was

really furiously rewriting this book. And the Shakespearean tragedy seems kind of amusing. People

would be like, well, why would a Shakespeare scholar write thrillers? First of all, I'm not a scholar. I'm more like a Shakespeare dilettante because it was a one-year master's. But, you know, Shakespeare, everything he wrote, especially the tragedies are highly structured, narrative-driven, tales of lust, intrigue, and murder. It sort of was a perfect overlap. You know, thrillers are very structured. They're obviously action geared.

Yeah. So it was great. And I was, I was rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. And then I got pretty lucky. I sold my first book kind of right out of grad school and never had to have a real job.

Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words. That's correct.

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