Spotting Stories with Hidden Poison | (Ep. 195)
Stories Are Soul Food
Canon Press
4.8 • 787 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you identify stories with poison in them? They never say "TAKE THIS POISON." They always coat it in chocolate first...
- "Make Me Famous" pitch reviews segment continues with "The Ghost Train". Maybe this is the episode wherein Nate finally likes a pitch.
- Then the guys turn to stories that start out sweet but conceal poison in the end.
- Harry Potter and The Hunger Games both start a story with something admirable (the underdog, self-sacrifice). That's the chocolate.
- But once you like the chocolate, an author *can make you eat anything after that... even poison (self-pity, dissatisfaction, ungratefulness, victimhood mentality).
- To demonstrate how a true underdog story works, Nate reframes the story of Joseph and the coat of many colors (not what that is).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're talking to an athlete at the starting line as they're warming up before they're doing |
| 0:03.5 | something, you're telling them, like, you can do this. Their reliance is not like, you're amazing. |
| 0:09.1 | You're fantastic. You deserve everything. But you do need confidence. And so this is that Scrutatian |
| 0:14.7 | warp where there's confidence, like godly, faithful confidence is right next to believe in yourself, follow your heart. |
| 0:22.4 | Those things are so slippery. |
| 0:25.2 | And it's like chocolate covering on a poison because they're right next to something true. |
| 0:30.0 | They're just so adjacent to truth. |
| 0:32.1 | Met a ghost of a king on the road when I first fell. |
| 0:36.2 | Fire burning to my knees to my knees. I fell. Matt a ghost of a king on the road when I first fell. Fire burning to my knees to my knees. I fell. Sask. Sasp. Are we going to start doing our pitches? We're going to start doing our pitches and we can adjust. We'll just start with the first one and see how it lasts. So this is like, we're going to start doing like pitch of the day? Are we going to try to do a whole pitch episode this is just pitch of the day okay yeah so we'll figure out if we like doing like broken up |
| 0:58.9 | if we like doing two pitches per podcast or if we want to just do one at the beginning of every podcast |
| 1:03.6 | i kind of like the idea of yeah one at the beginning of every podcast yep and we've got a food |
| 1:09.6 | for quite a while as far as the pitches that you've been |
| 1:12.3 | sent. So make me famous episode. Make me famous. This is a segment now. Segment. And then this is too |
| 1:19.2 | many, but there's a couple here. Pitch one is the ghost train. I like the title. Brought to their |
| 1:26.6 | grandmother's house where familial strife is threatening to destroy a legacy, |
| 1:30.7 | a brother and sister escape the turmoil to explore an old depot nearby and board a ghostly |
| 1:36.4 | passenger train, but as they travel with phantom passengers on the run from their own |
| 1:40.5 | problems, the kids are faced with the choice of starting over somewhere new or staying put and fixing what's broken in themselves and their family. |
| 1:51.2 | So we got to remember the rules that Nate gave. |
| 1:56.7 | Specificity. |
| 1:57.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:59.3 | Welcoming us into it, less about what's going to happen further on and more about just |
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