Latest / The Front / Dan Brown: mystery maker, or just ‘laughably awful’?

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Dan Brown: mystery maker, or just ‘laughably awful’? · The Front

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: From the Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm Claire Harvey. The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: latest novel, called The Secret of Secrets, hit bookstore shelves
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  Speaker 1: last month. The Economist has labeled the book a silly
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: mashup of fact and fiction. The Times in London called
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: it six hundred and eighty eight pages of cliche and
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  Speaker 1: conspiracy theories. The Australian's own Jack Marx called it laughably
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  Speaker 1: awful in both style and substance, which raises the question,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: if the experts have him down as a hack, why
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  Speaker 1: is Dan Brown so successful. The Da Vinci Code sold
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  Speaker 1: over eighty million copies, making it one of the highest
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  Speaker 1: selling novels of all time, and while the two thousand
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: and six movie adaptations starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tottoo
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  Speaker 1: created a cold true phenomenon and raked in seven hundred
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  Speaker 1: and sixty million dollars. Rotten Tomatoes, a US based review aggregator,
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  Speaker 1: has the critics score for that film at twenty five percent.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: That's an F for fail. In today's episode, I literally
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: ateor Caroline Overington speaks with Jack Marx and if you're
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: a Dan Brown fan. This episode comes with a trigger
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  Speaker 1: warning because Jack isn't going to hold back.
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  Speaker 2: This is by far the most ambitious book I've ever attempted.
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  Speaker 2: It's very intricately plotted. I also happen to think it's
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  Speaker 2: the most fun.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: This is Dan Brown during an appearance on Good Morning
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  Speaker 1: America promoting the Secret of Secrets.
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  Speaker 2: What was the most fun to write? I'm hoping it's
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  Speaker 2: the most fun to read.
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  Speaker 1: Is set in the world of human In some ways,
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  Speaker 1: the book sounds classic Dan Brown. Protagonist Robert Langdon is
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: in another beautiful European city, this time Prague. It's a
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  Speaker 1: thriller with a love story and a puzzle at the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: center of it, with all the tantalizing symbols and clues
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  Speaker 1: that Brown is famous for sprinkling throughout his novels. Only
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  Speaker 1: the inspiration for Secretive Secrets came from a deeply personal place.
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  Speaker 2: Among di you teen years ago. Yeah, right, as I've
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  Speaker 2: started in this book and got me asking the question
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: that we all ask, what happens when we die? Over
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: the past eight years, talking to physicists, noetics, scientists, philosophers,
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  Speaker 2: and reading about some of the incredible new science that's
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  Speaker 2: happening in this field of thanatology and neetics, I've come
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  Speaker 2: out the other side with a totally different point of
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  Speaker 2: view on death. I think that consciousness survives human death.
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  Speaker 1: It sounds like adul order writing one hundred and ninety
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  Speaker 1: thousand word page Turner said in the World of Human Consciousness.
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  Speaker 1: But if the comments from Brown's two hundred and fifty
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  Speaker 1: thousand plus Instagram followers are anything to go by, the
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  Speaker 1: Secretive Secrets is connecting with fans, and of course, a
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: series based on the book is coming to Netflix.
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  Speaker 3: Jack Marks. One of the biggest selling books in the
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  Speaker 3: world at the moment is Dan Brown's latest The Secret
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  Speaker 3: of Secrets. Audiences or readers seem to be loving it,
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  Speaker 3: But you did not like it at all?
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  Speaker 1: Why not?
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  Speaker 4: It's probably the silliest story I've read by an author
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  Speaker 4: of notes ever, and I'm not surprised it's popular because
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  Speaker 4: it's one of those books that I couldn't put down.
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  Speaker 4: I became so fascinated with how bad it was, I
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  Speaker 4: couldn't wait to turn the page for the next hysterically
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  Speaker 4: funny fumble.
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  Speaker 3: When you say it's hysterically funny, you don't.
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  Speaker 5: Mean not intentionally.
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  Speaker 3: No, No, you mean that the writing is very, very bad.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, the writing it's a clumsy. His metaphors really syrupy,
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  Speaker 4: and I was horrified to see he delivers online master
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  Speaker 4: classes that ought to be outlawed.
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  Speaker 3: Well, you know, it could be said that while he
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  Speaker 3: is not perhaps a wordsmith, he is a wonderful storyteller.
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  Speaker 3: People seem to like the idea that when you pick
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: up one of his books, you go on a chase
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  Speaker 3: through history and art and religion and consciousness human consciousness
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  Speaker 3: in this book with the idea of solving a puzzle,
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  Speaker 3: which of course readers so loved to do. Would you
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  Speaker 3: at least give him some points for being a good
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  Speaker 3: storyteller or mystery maker.
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  Speaker 4: Mystery maker for sure, storyteller. No, the story is terrible.
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  Speaker 4: When you say puzzle, he's very good at that, Like
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  Speaker 4: Rubric was with his cube and whoever the turkey was
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  Speaker 4: that we in rended snakes and ladders. He belongs with them,
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  Speaker 4: not next to Cormack McCarthy or even Stephen King, who
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  Speaker 4: a lot of people say is crap, but he says
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  Speaker 4: that himself. Stephen King's quite open about the fact that
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: his ideas are better than he's writing. But even Stephen
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  Speaker 4: King can write when he's in the zone.
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  Speaker 3: Well, then, what explains the appeal of Dan Brown. I
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  Speaker 3: think we can go back to the first huge success,
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  Speaker 3: which was the da Vinci Code.
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  Speaker 5: Professor Langdon, the Chief of Police, would like your assistance.
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  Speaker 5: I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be
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  Speaker 5: here to your God.
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  Speaker 3: I felt a bit nostalgic when I was reading about
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  Speaker 3: Dan Brown's new book for a time when everyone was
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  Speaker 3: reading the same book. You know, you get on a
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  Speaker 3: plane and it was almost like you've got a copy
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  Speaker 3: of the da Vinci Code with your boarding past. So
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  Speaker 3: many people had a copy of it. And I understood
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  Speaker 3: the appeal of that, because people are curious about Christianity
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  Speaker 3: and the origins and the life of Jesus of Nazareth
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  Speaker 3: and the origins of the Christian religion. And so I
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  Speaker 3: understood it.
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  Speaker 4: And you don't have to have been brought up Catholic
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  Speaker 4: like I was to find those old Da Vinci artworks creepy.
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  Speaker 4: Everyone does, and he nailed that or even beautiful, yeah,
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  Speaker 4: well beautiful for sure. But also there's the old trope
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  Speaker 4: about the eyes following you around the church. You know,
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  Speaker 4: it's that sort of thing. So he tapped into something
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  Speaker 4: great there, which was a treasure hunt. But again, even
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  Speaker 4: with the da Vinci code, there are a lot of
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  Speaker 4: reviewers who hold him out for not really being a
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  Speaker 4: writer at all, and.
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  Speaker 3: Yet it is shooting up the best seller lists, as
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  Speaker 3: all his books have done. So what explains his appeal?
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  Speaker 4: Well, I don't know, But that's a very trump thing
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  Speaker 4: to say, isn't it. You know?
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  Speaker 5: I mean, just because it's popular.
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  Speaker 3: Now, that's not fair, because people are reading it presumably
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  Speaker 3: because they are enjoying it, without arguing whether it's good
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  Speaker 3: or bad or indifferent. People are reading it because they
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  Speaker 3: are enjoying it. So what are they enjoying?
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  Speaker 4: Well, when we're kids, we loved Scooby Doo and those
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  Speaker 4: young adult sort of detective books in the Mystery of
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  Speaker 4: the Talking Skull and all of those sorts of things,
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  Speaker 4: and it's just a mature version of that. I suppose
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  Speaker 4: he's a good puzzle maker. I noticed in Secretive Secrets,
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  Speaker 4: every ten or twenty pages there was some puzzle that
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  Speaker 4: had to be sorted out, and even though the answer
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  Speaker 4: wasn't obvious, there was sort of an inner applause that
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  Speaker 4: happened when Langdon solved it a few pages later, inner
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  Speaker 4: applause in the reader.
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  Speaker 3: When I spoke to Dan Brown, because we were lucky
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  Speaker 3: enough to get an interview with him ahead of the release.
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  Speaker 5: Of the book, it must have been call my review ran.
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  Speaker 3: He said, he opens the book with Robert Langdon in love,
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  Speaker 3: and this is the first time that he's done that.
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  Speaker 3: He was joking with me and he said, I don't
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  Speaker 3: think I was very good at the sex scenes. Well,
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  Speaker 3: what did you think of the sex scenes?
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  Speaker 4: Well, when I was a really, really young boy less
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  Speaker 4: than ten, reading Playboy magazine, this mental fantasy of me
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: being a handsome debon there taking all these girls out,
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  Speaker 4: and the romantic dialogues and situations that Dan Brown described
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  Speaker 4: very much like the ones I thought of when I
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  Speaker 4: was nine.
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  Speaker 5: But as you.
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  Speaker 4: Mature a little bit, I think by the time I
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  Speaker 4: hit sixteen, I thought, Jez, that was never got offly.
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  Speaker 4: But in Dan Brown's universe, you know, the most intelligent
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  Speaker 4: man in the world, this Robert Langdon, hybrid of Stephen
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  Speaker 4: Hawking and macdiver. Even he's a romantic income book.
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  Speaker 3: One of the other things about Dan Brown's career is
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  Speaker 3: that he is credited with, well, firstly, a renaissance in
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  Speaker 3: interest in the origins of the Christian religion, but also
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  Speaker 3: with the Renaissance in tourism to both France and Italy
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  Speaker 3: back in the year two thousand and three, I think
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  Speaker 3: when the Da Vinci Code first came out. This book is,
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  Speaker 3: of course set in Prague. Did you leave the book thinking, Wow,
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  Speaker 3: I'd like to be a.
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  Speaker 5: Park, No, because I already have.
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  Speaker 4: He was talking about every shop he walked past on
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  Speaker 4: every street in Prague. You know, a simple walk down
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  Speaker 4: to the bay would take twenty pages, as he name
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  Speaker 4: checked everything in sight, and I thought, yeah, well, being
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  Speaker 4: Dan brownie would have been to Prague. But I could
• 9:19
  Speaker 4: do the same thing with Google Maps, Speaking of which
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  Speaker 4: you could do this book with chat GPT.
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  Speaker 3: Well, you tried tell me what happened.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, what I said was give me the first three
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  Speaker 4: hundred words in Dan Brown's style center the action in Prague,
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  Speaker 4: and without me prompting it, AI put Robert Langdon in there,
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  Speaker 4: referred to his jacket, the brand of his jacket, and
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  Speaker 4: the brand of his tie, and the.
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  Speaker 5: Brand of his underpants and everything.
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  Speaker 4: Else, and did exactly what the opening of the book was,
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  Speaker 4: except that, like a monkey at the keyboard, AI cost
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  Speaker 4: out one kind of graceful metapor and I thought Dan
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  Speaker 4: Brown can't do AI actually did Dan Brown better than
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  Speaker 4: Dan Brown could do Dan Brown.
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  Speaker 3: Well, I have to play the devil's advocate here because
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  Speaker 3: if chat gpt was able to punch out a paragraph
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  Speaker 3: in the style of Dan Brown, then actually we have
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  Speaker 3: to be on the side of Dan Brown, because that
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  Speaker 3: means that AI has stolen his work, scraped and stolen
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  Speaker 3: them off the Internet and is now able to produce
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  Speaker 3: a reasonable facsimile of his work, which is actually devastating
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  Speaker 3: for artists, because if they can do it to Dan Brown,
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  Speaker 3: they can probably do it to anyone.
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  Speaker 4: Now, it's devastating for artists. You said you can't have
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  Speaker 4: it both ways, see the artist or Dan Brown.
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  Speaker 3: You are very cheeky.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: There more of Caroline and Jack on Dan Brown The
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Secret of Secrets after the Break.
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  Speaker 3: His background is very interesting. I think he grew up
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  Speaker 3: with a mathematician as a father, and his mother was
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  Speaker 3: a devout Christian who also was a music composer. So
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  Speaker 3: I think that explains a lot of the themes in
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  Speaker 3: his books, you know, the maths and the puzzles and
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  Speaker 3: the music and the art. And he studied art history
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  Speaker 3: at university which again explains a lot of the themes.
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  Speaker 3: But also when he was a small boy, because his
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  Speaker 3: father was a maths teacher, he lived on the campus
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: of the boarding school, so all of his babysitters and
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: all of the people around him were international students interested
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: in art history and Christian theology and symbols, and I
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  Speaker 3: think it explains some of why he goes off down
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  Speaker 3: those rabbit holes that people love so much.
• 12:02
  Speaker 4: That's one thing I will give him is all those
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  Speaker 4: little tributaries that run away in his book.
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  Speaker 5: They never really get boring.
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  Speaker 3: Well, hang on, haven't you just admitted there then that
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  Speaker 3: he is an excellent storyteller.
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  Speaker 4: No, that's not storytelling. That's sort of like one of
• 12:19
  Speaker 4: those guys who can recite every winner of the Melbourne Cup.
• 12:24
  Speaker 4: He's a factoid, dude. You know that's kind of interesting
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  Speaker 4: at the pub if you're pretty drunk. But it ain't not.
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  Speaker 3: Well, well, tell me, honestly, did you learn nothing? Because
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: I read the book and there were things that I learned.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: For example, I did not know what the world's most
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: famous religious symbol was until I read The Secret of Secrets.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: I assumed, and he guesses himself in the book that
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: it's going to be the Crucifix, and.
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: It's not according to Dan Brown. But do remember that
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: on a leaf page at the beginning of Da Vinci
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  Speaker 4: Code he said everything in here is true and it
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: wasn't correct, but absolutely wasn't. He put the same little
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  Speaker 4: prologue at the beginning of Secret of Secrets. So I
• 13:10
  Speaker 4: don't trust a single damn thing I read in there.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: Well, I think he says that the organizations are true.
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  Speaker 4: Well that's not true either, some of them marked some
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: of them, you know, obviously the CIA and Polish secret
• 13:22
  Speaker 4: police exist, and some nefarious underworld's organizations that he mentioned. Yeah, sure,
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: but the things that he attributes to them, it's not
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  Speaker 4: true at all. It's like me saying, this is a
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: book about McDonald's, who really exists, and then write a
• 13:41
  Speaker 4: book about how McDonald's as a front for an enormous pedophile.
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  Speaker 5: Read it's not.
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: The organization I've described does not exist.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: I see your point. Well, then, as a final question,
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  Speaker 3: if the world's libraries are blown to smithereens and the
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: only book that survives because of its sheer volume of
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: sales is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, what
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: do we as humanity do do we read it or not?
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  Speaker 4: No, because you are what you consume. If you're talking
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: about some dystopian future where we grow out of Dan
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  Speaker 4: brown book, absolutely not. I'd be getting on the nearest
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: pod to one of the moons of Jupiter if that
• 14:28
  Speaker 4: was Earth's future, start all over again with grunts and
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: I want that apple and we'll go from there.
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  Speaker 3: Jack Marx, I always appreciate your point of view. Thank
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: you for joining us.
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  Speaker 5: Pleasure Carol.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Caroline Overington is The Australian's literary editor, and Jack Marks
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: is a regular contributor to the Australian. You can read
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Jack's recent peace on Dan Brown's latest novel anytime at
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: the Australian dot com dot are you. This episode of
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the Front was hosted by Fane Claire Harvey and produced
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: by Jasper League, who edited the episode and also wrote
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: our theme. Thanks for joining us on the Front this week.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: Our team also includes Kristin amiot Leat, Sammaglue, Tiffany Demack,
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Joshua Burton and Stephanie Comes