RISK!
- Episodes
- 1,247
- Released
- several times a week
- Latest episode
- Oct 22, 2026
About the podcast
If you like The Moth, This American Life or Snap Judgment, take a walk on the wilder side with RISK! Your colorful host Kevin Allison (of the legendary comedy group The State) helms this surprisingly uncensored show where people tell jaw-dropping true stories they never thought they'd dare to share in public. RISK! is hilarious, heart-wrenching and remarkably real. Think you've heard it all? Fasten your seatbelt.
Episodes 1,247
Make It Stop!
A classic RISK! episode from July 2014 built around three situations that everyone involved would happily have ended earlier. Sam Mullins is in his final year at the University of Victoria acting program when a …
Show notes
A classic RISK! episode from July 2014 built around three situations that everyone involved would happily have ended earlier.
Sam Mullins is in his final year at the University of Victoria acting program when a midnight phone call reassigns him to a role in a doomed play he was never supposed to have. Winter Tashlin, a BDSM educator, brings home a tube of capsaicin cream from the pharmacy and ignores every safety protocol he teaches in his own class.
Anne Thomas is eighteen, six months after the accident that paralyzed her from the chest down, when the pool instructor sets her up on a drive-in date with a fellow patient.
You can leave comments and find episode details at risk-show.com/podcast/make-it-stop-cre541
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on Tuesday, December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bangkok Stories 1
Ploy Anderson is rushing out of her Bangkok house for a lunch date, a hair roller still clipped under her helmet, when a 10-wheeler drifts into her lane. Abel Athi Kumar is easing into a slow Sunday when his …
Show notes
Ploy Anderson is rushing out of her Bangkok house for a lunch date, a hair roller still clipped under her helmet, when a 10-wheeler drifts into her lane. Abel Athi Kumar is easing into a slow Sunday when his housemate starts screaming by the pond, where a python has his cat Whiskey in its coils. And Art Attaphon, reading alone in a tiny Silom library, checks Grindr, and winds up signing a consent form in a stranger’s hotel room.
Three residents of a city where the most ordinary afternoon of the week can turn on you fast. Thanks to the Bangkok Stories Show and workshops, both regularly held at The Garage Burger and Grill in Thong Lo, where all three of these stories were shared. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/bangkok-stories-1
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live on December 8, 2026 in New York City
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Live From London!
This week we're revisiting the first RISK! episode ever recorded outside the United States. In July 2014, the show traveled to London for a live event co-produced with Spark. (Content note: suicidal ideation) …
Show notes
This week we're revisiting the first RISK! episode ever recorded outside the United States. In July 2014, the show traveled to London for a live event co-produced with Spark.
(Content note: suicidal ideation)
Dave Pickering heads to a swingers club to test whether the ugliness he's carried since childhood really lines up with reality. Suraya Sidhu Singh steps out of a shower on her first American visit to hear her friend confess that he thinks the neighbor across the hall is dead. Simon Sarginson grows up with a free-spirited mother whose response to cancer is as defiant as her response to everything else. And Radcliffe Royds falls from a fully loaded Audi Quattro to a Soho builder's skip in the space of a fortnight.
And thanks to Spark London for co-producing the show that brought us across the Atlantic for the first time.
Leave comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-london-1-cre540
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Best of Hispanic Lives #5
Two RISK! favorites come back for Latine Heritage Month, handed to guests who know the territory. Brenda González & Delsy Sandoval, Latina co-hosts of Tamarindo podcast, join us to talk both stories through and …
Show notes
Two RISK! favorites come back for Latine Heritage Month, handed to guests who know the territory. Brenda González & Delsy Sandoval, Latina co-hosts of Tamarindo podcast, join us to talk both stories through and celebrate Latine lives that rarely get to be this light.
Javier Morillo spent his twenties shutting down white men who reduced him to a fantasy. Then country music got its hooks in him, and a conference in Austin put a real cowboy in front of him.
Ximena Ospina is seven when her family leaves Colombia inside a month. She starts first grade in Marina, California, able to count to ten and ask for orange juice, and little else. Then story time runs long and she really needs the bathroom. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell & Capital Storytelling, who produced the Sacramento live show where Ximena first told this one!
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-hispanic-lives-5
You can find all of our Hispanic Lives episodes at risk-show.com/hispaniclives
Be Part of RISK!🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Best of RISK! #37
Three of the most memorable stories from the last six months of RISK!, back in one place. (Content note: gun violence) Jon Rappoport is on a work call outside Chicago when his wife kicks the door open: their …
Show notes
Three of the most memorable stories from the last six months of RISK!, back in one place.
(Content note: gun violence)
Jon Rappoport is on a work call outside Chicago when his wife kicks the door open: their twelve-year-old twins are texting from a mall on lockdown for an active shooter. Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in Los Angeles with a long record of choosing unavailable men, meets someone on a dating app who is funny and spectacular in bed, right up until he asks her not to look him up.
(Content note: child sexual abuse, incestuous family dynamics)
LeCount Holmes was eleven when his father promised to introduce him one day to a grown woman who could teach him how to make love. At sixteen, his father came to collect him from school.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-37
You can find all of our Best of RISK! episodes at risk-show.com/bestofrisk
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in N.Y.C. (December 8)
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seedy
Dug out from the RISK! archives, this June 2014 episode goes straight for the seedier side of growing up, getting by, and getting out alive. Brian Cirmo spends his last night in downtown Utica the way he and …
Show notes
Dug out from the RISK! archives, this June 2014 episode goes straight for the seedier side of growing up, getting by, and getting out alive.
Brian Cirmo spends his last night in downtown Utica the way he and his heavyset childhood crew always did, at the strip clubs, before his friends pull one prank too many and leave him stranded on a corner. Jake Hart lands in New York with a head full of Bukowski, no plan, and no money, and turns a month and a half of homelessness into a running experiment in how low he'll let himself go.
(Content note: attempted abduction)
Cathy Smith drops acid, sticks out her thumb across early-1970s Pittsburgh, and climbs into a windowless van that turned around a little too eagerly to pick her up.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/seedy-cre537
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live New York City on Tuesday, December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gettin' Off Scot-Free
Three people do something small and stupid, then meet the full weight of the law. Kona Morris spends a four-hour Beijing layover in a customs line that will not move, with a backpack full of rocks and a Tokyo …
Show notes
Three people do something small and stupid, then meet the full weight of the law.
Kona Morris spends a four-hour Beijing layover in a customs line that will not move, with a backpack full of rocks and a Tokyo souvenir that reads as an explosive on the X-ray.
Victor Ramirez was 17 in the Poconos when a shoplifting friend told him which Walmart aisle nobody watches, and he built a summer business on it, until his Hells Angel mentor set a tire iron on the table.
Frank Traynor, 14 and in love, agrees to sneak into a mall movie theater, then hears a janitor's voice on the staircase and leaves everyone behind.
And thanks to Frank Traynor’s It's Funny Now, the show where he and Kona Morris both told their stories from this episode.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/gettin-off-scot-free
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in December 8, 2026, in New York City
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Live From Chapel Hill!
Recorded live at DSI Comedy Theater in Chapel Hill in 2014, this classic RISK! episode brings together three storytellers on the wilder edges of youth. (Content note: emotional abuse) Lauren Patton grows up on …
Show notes
Recorded live at DSI Comedy Theater in Chapel Hill in 2014, this classic RISK! episode brings together three storytellers on the wilder edges of youth.
(Content note: emotional abuse)
Lauren Patton grows up on a Georgia estate where her father runs a criminal law firm out of the house, cycling young mistresses past her mother. At fourteen, she's ordered to take one of them out horseback riding.
Andrew Aghapour arrives at his first teaching gig in three Target polos and fast-food napkins in his armpits, hoping to be the cool philosophy professor. His seventy-student auditorium has other plans, and his salvation may hinge on a Socrates Café at Whole Foods.
(Content note: child sexual abuse)
Ray Christian grows up in Richmond's Churchill neighborhood and finds an unlikely community among older boys who raise pigeons across the river in Fulton. Their ringleader brags openly about sexual assaults he's committed, and one afternoon Ray is invited fishing.
Leave your comments to these stories plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-chapel-hill-cre536
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live New York City on December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Best of RISK! #36
Twice a year we gather the best of the best from the last six months. This round holds three. (Content note: suicide) At fifteen, Richard Velazquez steps onto a 1986 Lower East Side corner for his first crack …
Show notes
Twice a year we gather the best of the best from the last six months. This round holds three.
(Content note: suicide)
At fifteen, Richard Velazquez steps onto a 1986 Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale, carrying the demon-fear of a Jehovah's Witness childhood and a father who has started smoking his own supply. His first customer changes everything in a heartbeat.
Cassidy Krug dives nine years for Frank, a coach who throws his aviators and screams until the vein in his forehead pops, all while swearing he can put her on an Olympic team. She still wonders whether it was abuse or the only road to greatness.
(Content note: sexual assault, homicide, suicidal ideation)
Annie Carnrike and her cousin Michael are close as siblings, and when Annie comes out as trans, he is the one who loves her with no "but." Then one drunken Thanksgiving night, Michael breaks down her door, and Annie fights for her life.
Support Annie in overcoming her ongoing struggles with the justice system and in her campaigning for the legal rights of trans people by leveraging her story at https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-and-dignity-for-annie-g
Leave your thoughts on the stories, and find full episode details and music credits, at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-36
You can find all of our Best of RISK! episodes at risk-show.com/bestofrisk
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City (Tuesday, December 8)
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stung
"Stung" is a set of four live stories from June 2014 back in the feed, each about someone caught off guard. Matt Kirshen, 18 and backpacking through France with two sisters from Berkeley, plans to sleep in a …
Show notes
"Stung" is a set of four live stories from June 2014 back in the feed, each about someone caught off guard.
Matt Kirshen, 18 and backpacking through France with two sisters from Berkeley, plans to sleep in a Bordeaux park until a priest and a local drug dealer both warn him off. The dealer's alternative invitation lands him somewhere stranger. Jen Kirkman dissects why she never wanted to take care of anyone, working through an elderly woman feeding her wheelchair-bound husband, a husband who fell in the shower while she stayed in bed, and a grandmother's wake full of relatives she could never picture creating herself.
Eli Olsberg signs up for a blood drive offering two free movie tickets and ends up with three nurses semicircled around him. Janine Brito, raised religious by her Cuban father, is four days into her freshman year of college when a voicemail changes everything.
Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/stung-cre534
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in N.Y.C. on Tuesday, December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Almost
Three people come within reach of what they want and are nearly undone grabbing for it. Karen Ibarra brings a self-described nerd's devotion to a heated Los Angeles delegate election, where bad blood between …
Show notes
Three people come within reach of what they want and are nearly undone grabbing for it.
Karen Ibarra brings a self-described nerd's devotion to a heated Los Angeles delegate election, where bad blood between two party factions turns personal.
David Zellnik spends his childhood worshipping the stage, then auditions for the bad-boy role he wants most in his high school's production of Oliver!, only for the director to pull him aside with a wounding notion about which part he should play. And thanks to EST's "Truth Be Told", the New York show and podcast where this story first appeared.
Amy Sohn hits bottom and pins everything on an elderly Manhattan analyst for one ridiculous reason, a rumor that he is Woody Allen's therapist, then sinks into his Freudian world without admitting why she came.
Leave your thoughts on the stories, and find details and music credits, at risk-show.com/podcast/almost
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Second Wind
This episode first surfaced back in June 2014, presenting two people who’d run out of road and somehow had to find more. Joe Mulligan, a stand-up whose marriage and career have both come apart, flies to Boulder …
Show notes
This episode first surfaced back in June 2014, presenting two people who’d run out of road and somehow had to find more.
Joe Mulligan, a stand-up whose marriage and career have both come apart, flies to Boulder for a peyote ceremony and finds his spirit guide is the last thing he would have chosen. And Olga Schmutz, gutted by a breakup, walks into a Philadelphia shop at 3 a.m. and walks out with a strap-on named Carlitos and a brand-new sense of purpose.
Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/second-wind-cre533
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live on December 8, 2026 in N.Y.C.
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Giggles
Three stories about laughing at exactly the wrong moment, and finding out it was the right one all along. Three ways of getting through it sideways. Be Part of RISK! 🎟 See RISK! live in NYC - Tuesday, December …
Show notes
Three stories about laughing at exactly the wrong moment, and finding out it was the right one all along. Three ways of getting through it sideways.
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in NYC - Tuesday, December 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Live from Boston!
Three wildly different stories from a night RISK! recorded live in Boston at the Nameless Coffeehouse back in May of 2014, pulled from the archive and dropped back into the feed. (Content note: attempted …
Show notes
Three wildly different stories from a night RISK! recorded live in Boston at the Nameless Coffeehouse back in May of 2014, pulled from the archive and dropped back into the feed.
(Content note: attempted suicide)
Josh Poirier grew up as the kid every bully found, singled out for years by an older boy named Paul. At his lowest, broke and checking himself into an inpatient psychiatric ward, the nurse who comes to wake him is the one person he spent his whole childhood running from.
Lillian DeVane lands the dream job: managing a plush vintage store with her three closest friends. The catch is the owner, a wealthy heiress whose generosity comes wrapped in cruelty, and whose promise to sign the store over to Lillian sits just out of reach.
Will Luera adored a father who kept disappearing for years at a stretch. The reasons turn out to run through prison, cocaine, and a charming, determined man who keeps rebuilding the exact life that took him away,, and Will can feel it all starting again.
Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-boston-cre532
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live on September 8, 2026 in New York City
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
No Harm, No Foul
At twenty-four, Allen Fetters is blindsided by the worst gallstone attack of his life. Too stubborn to call 911 or even a friend, he decides to drive himself to the ER, floors it down an empty road of green …
Show notes
At twenty-four, Allen Fetters is blindsided by the worst gallstone attack of his life. Too stubborn to call 911 or even a friend, he decides to drive himself to the ER, floors it down an empty road of green lights, on a collision course with a man on a bicycle crossing the intersection ahead of him.
Then Richard Velazquez rewinds to Christmas Eve, 1989, eighteen and riding shotgun in his mentor's prized 1964 Mercedes after a night of cocaine, rum, and reggaeton on repeat. On the snowy New Jersey Turnpike, with three other people in the car, he hears a whooshing sound and a tremendous bang.
Thanks to So Say We All in San Diego, whose live show is where Richard first brought this story to an audience.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/no-harm-no-foul
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live tonight (September 8, 2026) in New York City!
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Best of RISK! Inanity
Back from November 2021, this episode is just bonkers: original songs, sound collages, audio easter eggs, and other inanities stacked one on top of another. We’ve got stamps.com jingles, a goth lament about …
Show notes
Back from November 2021, this episode is just bonkers: original songs, sound collages, audio easter eggs, and other inanities stacked one on top of another.
We’ve got stamps.com jingles, a goth lament about needing a public toilet, TS Madison hollering about a good dick, a Cinderella scene that curdles into filth, and a thank-you number built entirely out of Kevin’s orgasm noises. Bits by and from Jeff Barr, Soce the Elemental Wizard, Brian Babylon, David Crabb, John LaSala, Detox, Alaska, and a stray Tom Brady sample wander through too.
For nearly an hour, RISK! sets the stories aside and just plays.
Leave your reactions and find the exhaustive list of credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-inanity-cre1304
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in 09/08/2026 in New York City
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Best of School Stories #2
Two classic RISK! stories about walking into a room that codes you as wrong from the second you open your mouth. Tara Clancy commuted from working-class Queens to a Manhattan college, where a classmate mocked …
Show notes
Two classic RISK! stories about walking into a room that codes you as wrong from the second you open your mouth.
Tara Clancy commuted from working-class Queens to a Manhattan college, where a classmate mocked how she said "huge" and a writing professor slipped her a bag of third-grade grammar workbooks.
Susan Kent moved to segregated Fitzgerald, Georgia at age six. By high school her closest friend Walt was Black, and when Jen played a Bobby Brown dedication for her from Walt over the local radio, Susan understood he was about to ask her to prom. Fitzgerald had two proms: a whites-only one and a Black one.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-school-stories-2
And you can find all of our School Stories episodes at risk-show.com/schoolstories
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on September 8, 2026
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
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So Long, And Thanks For All The Jeff: The Jeffisode
Kevin Allison sits down with Jeff Barr, RISK!'s longtime editor, for a farewell conversation almost two decades in the making. At its center is a story they've never told on the show: the mushroom trip Kevin …
Show notes
Kevin Allison sits down with Jeff Barr, RISK!'s longtime editor, for a farewell conversation almost two decades in the making. At its center is a story they've never told on the show: the mushroom trip Kevin took at Jeff's home in Colorado, when what began as a pleasant walk turned into hours of screaming panic, Kevin convinced he was dying and pacing with 911 half-dialed while Jeff pleaded with him not to call and phoned a nurse friend to talk him down.
Around that centerpiece, Kevin and Jeff cover Jeff's earliest audio experiments, the invention of the RISK! poo flags, the scat play scene that broke Jeff for a while, and the fan email that led Jeff to an ADHD diagnosis decades into adulthood. Peppered throughout is a highlight reel of the audio silliness Jeff has made over the years.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-jeffisode
You can find all of our conversation story episodes at risk-show.com/conversationstories
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City (September 8th)
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Live From Pittsburgh!
Back in May of 2014, RISK! hit Pittsburgh for the first time, and this classic episode brings the whole strange, sharp-edged night home. (Content note: sexual assault) As a counselor at a Pittsburgh women's …
Show notes
Back in May of 2014, RISK! hit Pittsburgh for the first time, and this classic episode brings the whole strange, sharp-edged night home.
(Content note: sexual assault)
As a counselor at a Pittsburgh women's clinic, Stacy Keene believes she's found her calling, until a frightened teenage patient and an openly hostile doctor put her in the middle of a confrontation she hadn’t expected.
Then Matt Bower answers a late-night Kmart call from a man who just needs one doorknob delivered to a dark house in the woods, and drives out to meet him.
(Content note: child sexual abuse)
And Jordan Sargent spends a summer under the spell of a friend's churchgoing father, until the man's stepdaughter’s accusation sends Jordan reaching for a jar of coins and a plan he can barely admit to.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-pittsburgh-cre530
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City (September 8 2026)
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Is It Her?
Two New York men take the long way through heartbreak. Brad Lawrence arrives in the city to become an actor while his girlfriend starts Columbia Law School, and their seven-year relationship goes cold almost on …
Show notes
Two New York men take the long way through heartbreak.
Brad Lawrence arrives in the city to become an actor while his girlfriend starts Columbia Law School, and their seven-year relationship goes cold almost on contact. Working two jobs and desperately lonely, he builds a nightly ritual of drinking far across town and riding the subway home drunk in the small hours, until one 3 a.m. ride lands him across the car from a woman he's sure he recognizes.
Christopher Moncayo-Torres cannot stop walking past his ex's Bushwick duplex after a broken engagement. When he finds a stranger's wallet holding four hundred dollars, returning it becomes a project, and the restaurant where the owner works becomes the setting for a fresh-start fantasy that a pushy stranger at the bar keeps complicating.
Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/is-it-her
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City (September 8, 2026)
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Death Defying
An episode from May 2014 with more comedy than the alliterative title would suggest. Dave Hill wanted to frighten himself on purpose, so he flew to northern Mexico to stay with an old college friend who had …
Show notes
An episode from May 2014 with more comedy than the alliterative title would suggest.
Dave Hill wanted to frighten himself on purpose, so he flew to northern Mexico to stay with an old college friend who had become the chaplain of a prison the cartels were running themselves. There is a pizza party, a borrowed guitar, and a man with a machete.
(Content note: suicidal ideation, suicide)
CJ Hostetter graduated into the 2009 economy, moved back in with their divorcing parents, and stopped feeling anything at all. Then a gunshot went off across the street.
Tyler Phillips took a pizza order from a caller who volunteered his full name and street address. The street turned out to be real.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/death-defying-cre529
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on September 8th, 2026.
💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
🎓 Take storytelling classes with us
🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Exposure Therapy
Two comedians with two very different things to stop hiding, expose themselves in turn: Calvin S. Cato is queer, twenty pounds lighter than he used to be, and willing to do almost anything to perform for more …
Show notes
Two comedians with two very different things to stop hiding, expose themselves in turn:
Calvin S. Cato is queer, twenty pounds lighter than he used to be, and willing to do almost anything to perform for more than three people and a sad disco ball. When a friend suggests the Naked Comedy Show, Calvin signs up on the strength of two words: "sells out." He does not ask a follow-up question. By the time he learns what "naked" actually means, he has already invited his entire art gallery.
Uriah Wesman moves to LA to be a one-liner comedian and bottoms out performing in the back of an ice cream shop, where his jokes are so bad they ruin the ice cream. A comedy club GM asks him one simple question about himself, and Uriah casually mentions his parents were in a doomsday cult. Then corrects himself: three cults. Then mentions the kidnapping. Then the sword. Uriah spent years hiding behind a character on stage because if the audience rejected the character, it wouldn't hurt. Putting the real childhood on stage is the risk that actually connects.
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Live From Reno 2!
This one comes back from April of 2014, the second night of a RISK! live run in Reno, Nevada, and it swings hard between the filthy and the tender. Josie Spadoni is working an afternoon at her Los Angeles …
Show notes
This one comes back from April of 2014, the second night of a RISK! live run in Reno, Nevada, and it swings hard between the filthy and the tender.
Josie Spadoni is working an afternoon at her Los Angeles dungeon when a client walks in with a request most people would refuse on the spot. She says yes.
(Content note: suicidal ideation)
Emily Reese grew up dreaming of a picket-fence Christian marriage and the submissive-wife role she thought came with it. When the money starts vanishing and her intuition won't quiet, she finally checks the family bank account herself. We lost Emily not long ago, and we're so glad her voice lives on here.
Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-reno-2-cre528
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The Best of Sex Stories #5
Let's dig into two people’s lives where physical desire set off completely unplanned-for chain reactions. Ceara Lynch is a teenager when a stranger online suggests she bottle and sell her urine. She does it on …
Show notes
Let's dig into two people’s lives where physical desire set off completely unplanned-for chain reactions.
Ceara Lynch is a teenager when a stranger online suggests she bottle and sell her urine. She does it on a dare to herself, he pays $250, and what starts as a joke becomes a career in fetish work and verbal humiliation—one she has to hide from the people who raised her. (Shout out to The Mystery Box Show where this story was originally recorded!)
Then Baruch Porras-Hernandez gives a fake name at a San Francisco bathhouse and immediately regrets it when the man he meets turns out to be the romantic partner he's spent years searching for. The lie compounds through months of dates, a surprise birthday party, and a run-in with his own mother. (And thanks to Dixie De La Tour who co-produced the RISK/Bawdy Storytelling crossover show this story was originally told at!)
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-sex-stories-5
You can find all of our Best of Sex Stories episodes at risk-show.com/sexstories
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Non-Ethical Non-Monogamy
Fox Emerson moves to Milan with his husband for a fresh start, then lets a charismatic man he met in Atlanta follow him there. The man settles into the apartment, grows colder and stranger by the day, and one …
Show notes
Fox Emerson moves to Milan with his husband for a fresh start, then lets a charismatic man he met in Atlanta follow him there. The man settles into the apartment, grows colder and stranger by the day, and one late-night argument escalates until Fox is the one in handcuffs, alone in an Italian jail cell with no idea why.
Patrick Holbert convinces himself his marriage is quietly open, books an appointment with a dominatrix in Queens, and spends the next six weeks deciding whether to tell his wife. His confession lands nothing like he pictured. Funny, filthy, and more honest about marriage than he probably planned.
Both men skipped the conversation that might have changed everything.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live On September 8, 2026 in New York City
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Live From Reno 1!
Live from Reno in April 2014, three first-time RISK! storytellers turn a single night into a run of proposition, prophecy, and psychedelic reckoning. Virginia Munsterman is a 20-year-old college student …
Show notes
Live from Reno in April 2014, three first-time RISK! storytellers turn a single night into a run of proposition, prophecy, and psychedelic reckoning.
Virginia Munsterman is a 20-year-old college student scraping by as a barista when a new job as a chiropractor's assistant lands her at a business conference in Clearwater, Florida. The company's multimillionaire CEO zeroes in on her immediately, and over two days his attention escalates from flattery and magic tricks to a yacht tour and a dinner where he asks her to give him the next 15 to 20 years of her life in exchange for his fortune.
Jessica Levity is driving cross-country to Reno with her brother when a detour to the clearest lake in Kansas turns into a three-day stay with a self-proclaimed shaman named Lone Wolf. He shows up at their campsite with a bottle of ketchup Jessica had forgotten to buy, claiming the Great Spirit told him to bring it, and offers to reveal the hidden history of the Earth. His teachings turn out to include an antisemitic alien-hybrid origin theory for Jewish people, and Jessica and Teddy have to figure out how much of any of it to believe.
Steve Emmerich grows up gay and Catholic in Cincinnati, suppressing an identity that doesn't fit the blueprint he was given. At a massive Phish festival in Maine, high on several substances at once, he breaks down crying when a vision presents him with two doors and realizes he doesn't recognize himself in either one.
Comments, episode details, and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-reno-1-cre527
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Trying It On
Kenice Mobley grew up on a 1999 movie fantasy of the woman who travels the world, says yes to everything, and never flinches. As an adult she follows that ideal into a Paris sex club, a single shared baguette …
Show notes
Kenice Mobley grew up on a 1999 movie fantasy of the woman who travels the world, says yes to everything, and never flinches. As an adult she follows that ideal into a Paris sex club, a single shared baguette, and a straight-faced argument about whether taking your clothes off makes anyone free. It’s all fun and game right up until it turns into a question about who a room actually wants.
(Content note: suicide)
Richard Velazquez is fifteen in 1986, newly out of a Jehovah's Witness childhood, and living with his drug-dealing father, when he walks onto a Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale. What he is really carrying is fear: of demons, of prison, of turning into the man in front of him. When his first customer hits the pipe and collapses, every childhood terror comes back at once.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/trying-it-on
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Freedom
From April 2014, five people finding a way out. Sean Crespo signs up for a sleep deprivation study to escape the worst summer job in Boston, then spends ten days plotting one act of privacy. Kate Greathead …
Show notes
From April 2014, five people finding a way out.
Sean Crespo signs up for a sleep deprivation study to escape the worst summer job in Boston, then spends ten days plotting one act of privacy. Kate Greathead, dumped and displaced, discovers she can cry on the subway every night and nobody will stop her.
(Content note: suicidal ideation)
Jeff Simmermon loses a testicle to cancer and gains an imaginary black bird that whispers to him at night about how the loneliness will never end. John F. O'Donnell, in the middle of a manic episode in 2008, decides he alone can stop the neoconservatives from crashing the internet.
Jean Ann Le Bec, married in 1966 to a man who naps all day, goes back to college on Open Admissions and finds a women's group, a room worth occupying, and Mona.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/freedom-cre525
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Let Him Go
Two people confront what it means to stay bound to someone who keeps letting them down. Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in LA with a lifelong pull toward unavailable men, meets a charming match on a dating app …
Show notes
Two people confront what it means to stay bound to someone who keeps letting them down.
Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in LA with a lifelong pull toward unavailable men, meets a charming match on a dating app. The chemistry is undeniable, right up until he looks her in the eye and warns her not to Google him. Her response becomes a very funny, surprisingly pointed argument about honesty and what commitment is really worth.
Then David Hu comes home to the Bronx for Father's Day 2021 and finds his father, deep in dementia, suddenly and frighteningly ill. Amid COVID lockdowns and an overwhelmed nursing home, he and his mother face impossible choices about how to care for a man who is slipping away.
Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/let-him-go
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Still Dog People: Who Am I Now
Marilyn Gilchrist is a professional dog trainer, and "Who Am I Now" is her conversation with Michael Shikashio, lifted from his podcast The Bitey End of the Dog. Kevin Allison sets it up and returns at the end …
Show notes
Marilyn Gilchrist is a professional dog trainer, and "Who Am I Now" is her conversation with Michael Shikashio, lifted from his podcast The Bitey End of the Dog. Kevin Allison sets it up and returns at the end with his own thoughts. This is a companion episode to Still Dog People: Two Truths, released earlier in the week.
(Content note: graphic dog attack)
An hour into a routine welfare check on a foster dog, Marilyn stood up to leave. The dog grabbed the lead, she dropped it exactly as she had twice already that afternoon, and every muscle in the dog went tense. The weeks after taught her that the wound in her leg was the smaller problem. She had built a career and a self on being good with dogs, and now she could not be in a room with one she did not know.
Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/still-dog-people-who-am-i-now
You can find all of our Conversation Stories at risk-show.com/conversationstories
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in NYC on Tuesday, September 8, 2026
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These are the latest 100 of 1,247 episodes. You’ll find older episodes in the podcast’s feed.
