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RISK!

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.

This classic RISK! episode first aired in March 2014, and the four San Diego storytellers behind it cover a remarkable range, from white-knuckle confession to gleeful filth.

Tommy Galan traces a drinking habit that began at age eleven and nearly cost him his family, until three little words from a bar owner reframe everything. Justin Hudnall grows up on the motto "you don't miss what you don't have," then goes looking for the Vietnam-veteran father he never met.

(Content note: suicide, sexual abuse, eating disorder)

Meanwhile, Joy Keller lands in Los Angeles broke and answers an ad promising pay to meditate, which pulls her toward a guru selling enlightenment by the thousands. And Lesley borrows a coworker's copy of the film Secretary and recognizes a desire she has hidden since childhood.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-san-diego-cre522 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

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💵 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

Live From San Diego!

Radio producer Jon Nelson curates and guest-hosts an episode built from three listener submissions RISK! never quite knew where to file, all circling childhood faith and the certainties grown-ups pass down.

Jana Fisher is eleven and the most devout girl in her friend group until a sleepover becomes a contest over who is truly saved. Jesse Bradley-Amore is twelve and watching cartoons when his mother appears with a police nightstick and a frank approach to sex ed. Stephen Harder, fresh out of Bible college, arrives for a youth ministry interview at a megachurch and learns the being who scheduled it may not work there.

Nelson, an avowed agnostic, threads it together with his own reckoning with faith and his late father.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/i-dont-know 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ 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

I Don't Know

Back in March 2014, RISK! tripled down on a single subject, and this classic episode was the result.

Josh Healey is 17 and smitten with his drama club co-president when she casts him, a boy, in the first ever co-ed production of The Vagina Monologues. The soccer team has questions, the college feminists have objections, and the cast is heading toward open revolt.

Amy Salloway, fresh off a massage therapist's humiliating refusal to touch her, lands at a size acceptance conference in Seattle. It turns out she's one of the only straight women in the building and starts to wonder if that's negotiable for a weekend.

And Elna Baker arrives in Hollywood for the pitch meeting of her dreams while her own body quietly sabotages the room.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/vagina-vagina-vagina-cre521 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on September 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

Vagina Vagina Vagina!

Two people who look fine on the outside, and the very different storms going on underneath.

Ande Jackson is years into rebuilding after ovarian cancer. But one afternoon mid-treatment, immune system flattened by chemo, she decides to open her door to a neighbor holding a casserole. The woman means well, and reaches for a thought about mortality that does the opposite of comfort."

(Content note: heavy drug use)

Chetter M. Galloway is in deep with crystal meth in 2005, dodging help from his HIV doctor and dragging his family through the collateral damage. His years-long cycle of relapse only screeches to a halt when an unspeakable revelation about his dealer drops a bomb on his life and leaves Chetter praying a stash of compromising photos doesn't drag him down with it.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/but-you-look-so-good 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 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

But You Look So Good

Long shots don't always pan out the way you hoped. Sometimes they catch fire. Sometimes they mug you.

Shauna McGarry, a TV writer who can't shake her mother's thrift-store instincts, talks herself into a $2,500 used hot tub from a shady Craigslist dealer named Dan. Things don’t turn out so great.

David Crabb waitered through the days after 9/11 at one of the only open restaurants in lower Manhattan, listening to strangers unburden themselves over candlelight. By the end of the week he'd saved $900 for a U-Haul, and on the walk home from his last shift, drunk and carrying a magnum of wine, he felt an arm clamp around his neck and something jab into his ribs.

Leave your reactions and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-long-shot-stories-1 

You can find all of our special series episodes at risk-show.com/specialseries 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ 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

The Best of Long Shot Stories

Brittany Ross and Sam Feirstein are both hungry for it in this episode: the moment someone finally looks your way and says, yes, you.

For Brittany, that moment arrives in the least expected form. She is in her early 20s, grinding through acting classes and princess gigs and bar shifts, desperate for anyone in Los Angeles to see her as the star she knows she could be. When a neighbor with an apparent break from reality begins accusing Brittany of following her through the apartment building, Brittany finds herself oddly reluctant to shut it down. The woman is unhinged, possibly dangerous, and giving Brittany more attention than anyone in Hollywood has managed in years.

Sam's wound runs deeper. His story begins at a dressing room in a North Hollywood strip mall in 1976, where a single word from his mother sets off a decade of relentless bullying. By the time he lands at a commercial casting in the 1990s, surrounded by quarterbacks and cheerleaders, the kid who won a writing contest nobody noticed is just trying to get one person to see him as something other than a problem.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/negative-attention 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, September 8, 2026 in NYC!

✍️ 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

Negative Attention

This one originally aired in August 2013, and the fathers in it tend toward the unexpectedly generous. And heck, this episode may as well be part of our Fathers Day Stories series!

Chesley Calloway grew up in Baton Rouge largely without his dad, a Gulf Coast redneck-hippie who was always in the woods. At 15, a familiar smell triggers a memory and opens an unlikely conversation that changes everything between them. The détente holds until college, ideology, and vegetarianism pull them apart again.

Gretchen Menter-Felice's father ran a funeral home out of the family garage, and she grew up sitting in the corner of his embalming room in a yellow chair while he worked. By her 20s, his cancer diagnosis and a new girlfriend had made him feel far away. She finds a way back.

(Content note: death of a parent)

Colleen Hindsley's father was a classically trained baritone who owned an Irish pub and could work any name into a song. He raised a household that was always singing. When lung cancer took his voice, it silenced the whole family.

(00:00:34) In September 2024, RISK! shared a story by Robin Gelfenbien all about Colleen Hidsley, who has since passed away, in an episode called What A Vision: risk-show.com/podcast/what-a-vision 

And Dan Kennedy is 16, upside down in a totaled car on a residential street in rural Northern California, sitting at a stranger's piano and dreading his father's arrival. His dad turns out to be someone different than he expected.

Comment on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/my-old-man-cre446

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 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

My Old Man

Kambri and Evan arrive on the same episode from opposite ends of the spectrum, which turns out to be exactly right.

Kambri Crews grew up poor in rural Texas with a deaf family, spending her adolescence riding horses to the corner store, smoking cigarettes, and managing a fireworks stand at age 13. When she finally gets her own horse, he goes mysteriously missing one afternoon, circling the property in a daze. Her brother tears off barefoot into the woods and comes back with an explanation.

(Content note: domestic violence)

Evan Miles drives home after a 12-hour hospital shift to find a police helicopter overhead and four cruisers closing in. Charged with attempted murder, he spends nine days in L.A.'s Twin Towers jail before learning what his partner of nine years told them.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/something-wild

And thanks to Julia Wiedeman's Top Shelf Stories show in New York, where Kambri’s story was told. Catch the next one on June 18th, 2026!

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 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

Something Wild

In San Francisco, 2014, four great storytellers took the RISK! stage at SF Sketch Fest:

Stephen Tobolowsky was directing the New York premiere of The Miss Firecracker Contest with Holly Hunter in the lead and a stalker with a ticket for opening night. The question of whether to go on becomes a different question entirely when Holly disappears into the basement holding what looks like a butcher knife.

Dana Gould spent years as pen pal and friend to Maila Nurmi, the actress who invented Vampira, destitute and barely known, living in a converted garage. He reads from the last letter he wrote her.

(Content note: child sexual abuse)

Nato Green landed a yard-work job at 16, took about fifteen years to figure out what his employer actually wanted, and has some thoughts on what actually protects kids.

Brendon Walsh got his hat ruined, his face rearranged, his brass knuckles confiscated, and his name put on a court docket, in that order.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-san-fran-2014-cre520 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on September 8, 2026 in NYC

✍️ 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

Live From San Fran 2014

Two stories from people who found themselves in situations they didn't choose and had to figure out what to do from inside them. Guest-hosted by the captivating Cyndi Freeman.

(Content note: references to torture)

Sofia Javed is a Pakistani-American interpreter hired to work in Uzbek and Russian at Guantanamo Bay, where she is ordered not to sympathize with detainees and then immediately put to the test. What starts as a potential crisis in a cellblock turns on a single, surprisingly mundane demand.

(Content note: physical abuse, domestic violence)

Heather Minter grew up in an evangelical fundamentalist family that uprooted itself for the mission field in Papua New Guinea, leaving her and her brother in a boarding school dorm run by a cruel and volatile house father. The faith that held her together through childhood eventually came apart in college, and what filled the void turned out to be its own kind of trap.

Leave your reactions and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/captives 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ tonight! (Tuesday, June 9, 2026) in NYC.

✍️ 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

Captives

Marie Cecile Anderson, Julie Polk, Mark Szlachetka and Alex Wilkie share stories about being bad fits.
Support RISK! on Patreon at Patreon.com/RISK
Make a one-time donation to RISK! at PayPal.me/RISKshow
Get tickets to RISK! live shows at RISK-show.com/tour
Get the RISK! book at TheRISKBook.com
Take our storytelling classes at TheStoryStudio.org
Hire Kevin Allison to make a personalized video at Cameo.com/TheKevinAllison
Hire Kevin Allison as a coach at KevinAllison.com

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

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