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Stair Pits
What happens when a kid who lost the parent lottery grows up to find success — and then decides to write the whole thing down? Stair Pits is the podcast where author R.A. Thompson and co-host Max unpack the stories behind the memoir Stair Pits: a darkly comic look at a childhood gone spectacularly wrong. Expect real talk, sharp humor, hard-won wisdom, and the kind of honest conversation you only get between two people who trust each other. New episodes regularly — grab the book at unbreakableorigins.com.
Episodes
14 episodes
When A Tragic Childhood Becomes A Creative Blueprint
In this episode, Max and his guest Gino Veon discuss the struggles of being a writer and the various ways authors try to get noticed. We also share some writing tips and explore the journey of how to write a novel. It's a candid look at the wor...
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Why Big Achievements Don't Require Extraordinary Effort
This is a powerful motivational video, designed to inspire and encourage personal growth. You can spend your whole life waiting for a heroic moment, or you can change someone’s day with something small, reminding us that great things come from ...
Why Social Media Is Destroying Your Sense of Reality
Robert and Max explore the essential concept of personal development, emphasizing that acknowledging one's ability to survive rejection or refusal is a core life lesson. Building mental strength comes from understanding that setbacks are part o...
Parents Miss This Basic Truth About Parenting
In this insightful episode, we discuss effective parenting tips for raising children, emphasizing the importance of introducing values. We explore how cooperative interactions are key to good child development. This video offers practical paren...
Curiosity Is a Survival Skill (Not a Personality Trait)
In this funny episode, we dive into creative discussions, touching on everything from a 'Venus de Milo statue arm' to the narrative structures Joseph Campbell explored. It's a comedic episode with a unique blend of art funny observations and St...
Nobody Wants to Wait Anymore. Here's Why.
Nobody wants to wait anymore — and it's not laziness. It's that a lot of people have quietly stopped believing the future is real.When tomorrow feels unreliable, delayed gratification stops making sense. Instant gratification doesn't ju...
You Know the Rules. You Just Can't Explain Them.
What happens when you grow up learning every rule of survival — but nobody ever taught you how to actually connect with another person?R.A. Thompson, author of Unbreakable Origins: Stair Pits, pulls back the curtain on the stories, characte...
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What If Winning Means Refusing To Play
The funniest moments in our lives sometimes come from the same place as the hardest ones. We start out messing around with a fake cigarette and a “mercy shirt,” then end up in a real conversation about why one of us laughs easily while the othe...
Wearing Pink Salmon and Creating Wisdom from Knowledge
What if the real education you needed never happened in a classroom and the lessons that stuck came from hunger, failure, and watching adults do everything wrong? We dig into a blunt framework that cuts through self-help fluff: knowledge plus e...
If Parent Is A Verb Then Who Are You: Adoption And Identity
A birth certificate can name parents, but it can’t explain belonging. We sit down with two people who are “adopted” in very different ways and pull on the thread everyone avoids: what do you do with the hole that biology, paperwork, and silence...
Real Education Starts When You Decide To Teach Yourself
School is supposed to teach you how to think. So what do you do when it teaches you how to comply instead?Robert and Max discuss what happens when a mind is hungry for knowledge but the school system feels like a dead end. Robert tells ...
We Lost the Ability to Read and Nobody's Talking About It
Why Reading Feels Hard (And Why That's Exactly the Point)Reading a full page and absorbing nothing is a weird kind of panic — we've both been there. We call it "the scorpion in the mouth": the strange discomfort of something that demand...
Growing Up in Chaos: What I Had to Leave Behind
Have you ever sat at a table — literally or figuratively — and realized you didn't belong there anymore?In this episode, R.A. Thompson and Max trace back to a single Thanksgiving moment that cracked a teenager's world open and sent him ...
Welcome To The Stair Pits Zone
What happens when a retired investor in a suit walks onto a college football practice field?In this first episode, author R.A. Thompson and co-host Max pull back the curtain on an unlikely friendship, an even unlikelier mentorship, and ...
