RISK!

Latest Episodes:

Bangkok Stories 1 Oct 20, 2026

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

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Live From London! Oct 15, 2026

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

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The Best of Hispanic Lives #5 Oct 14, 2026

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
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🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on December 8, 2026

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The Best of RISK! #37 Oct 13, 2026

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

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🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in N.Y.C. (December 8)

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Seedy Oct 08, 2026

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

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🎟 See RISK! live⁠ New York City on Tuesday, December 8, 2026

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Gettin' Off Scot-Free Oct 06, 2026

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

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🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in December 8, 2026, in New York City

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Live From Chapel Hill! Oct 01, 2026

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

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The Best of RISK! #36 Sep 29, 2026

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)

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Stung Sep 24, 2026

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

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Almost Sep 22, 2026

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

✍️ 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 with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices