RISK!

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...

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...

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 Bukow...

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...

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. An...

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 ni...

"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...

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...

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...

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 ✍️ Pitch your story⁠ ❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ 💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com 📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠ 🎓 Take storytelling classes...

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 nurs...

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...

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...

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 frien...

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 h...

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 Bow...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 marria...

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 Myster...

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 appoi...

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...

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...

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 imaginar...