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.

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1,220 episodes
Updated Thursday
Explicit

Episodes1220

Newest first

Freedom
A classic RISK! episode from April 2014. Sean Crespo, Jeff Simmermon, Kate Greathead, John F. O'Donnell, and Jean Ann Le Bec each get out of something: a summer job, a diagnosis, a heartbreak, a delusion, a marriage.
Thursday · 1 hr 13 min
Let Him Go
Two very different encounters with love and loss. Tuesday Thomas turns a dating-app romance with a secretive man into a sharp reckoning with commitment, while David Hu walks through his father's last months in the Bronx.
Tuesday · 37 min
Still Dog People: Who Am I Now
In a spiritual sequel to our episode Still Dog People: Two Truths, Marilyn Gilchrist is attacked by a rescue dog on a routine welfare check. She tells her story to Michael Shikashio in a crossover with his podcast, The Bitey End of the Dog, about the injury, the fear that followed, and what she only thought she had lost.
July 23 · 1 hr 3 min
Still Dog People: Two Truths
Guest-hosts John and Kate LaSala present the first of two Still Dog People episodes. Jill Karliner's four-year-old son was attacked by a neighbor's dog. Kate, a professional dog behavior consultant, joins John afterward to discuss Jill's story through a dog professional's lens.
July 21 · 44 min
Mixed Feelings
From March 2014, a classic RISK! episode about the voices in our heads and what we do with them. Three storytellers each take the stage to face down a part of themselves they had spent years trying to ignore.
July 16 · 57 min
The Best of Disability Stories
Mary Gossett falls for a man on a dating site, and Amy Salloway starts a job at a therapeutic theater program for adults with disabilities.
July 15 · 49 min
Out of My Hands
Two people learn something about protecting and being protected, one at a mall in lockdown, one on a plane full of strangers. (Content note: gun violence) Jon Rappoport is on a Zoom call in his home office when his wife bursts in with news that their twelve-year-old twin daughters are texting from a nearby mall about an active shooter and hiding in Macy's. He drives there in flip-flops, half feral, and the girls keep texting him back, begging him not to come. Then Robin Gelfenbien takes a small plane out of St. Louis, freshly heartbroken and dreading her return to New York. She circulates a notebook around fifty strangers with an invitation to write a story together, then sets her sights on convincing a flight attendant named Valentino to let her read it aloud before they land. Leave your comments and find full episode details plus music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/out-of-my-hands 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
July 14 · 39 min
Live From San Diego!
A classic RISK! episode from March 2014, captured at a live San Diego show. Tommy Galan, Joy Keller, Lesley, and Justin Hudnall trade true stories that swing from hard-won sobriety to cult recruitment, a secret desire, and the search for an absent father.
July 9 · 1 hr 17 min
I Don't Know
Guest-host/curator Jon Nelson, a lifelong agnostic, frames an hour on childhood faith and the comfort of not knowing. Jana Fisher competes to be holiest at a sleepover, Jesse Bradley-Amore gets sex-ed from his mom and a nightstick, and Stephen Harder suspects an angel arranged his job interview.
July 7 · 42 min
Vagina Vagina Vagina!
On this classic RISK! episode from March 2014, Josh Healey, Amy Salloway, and Elna Baker go places most people would never speak of out loud: high school theater wars, a hotel full of radical self-acceptance, and a Hollywood dream undone by the body itself. And vaginas. Did we mention vaginas?
July 2 · 1 hr 1 min
But You Look So Good
Appearances rarely match what is happening underneath. Ande Jackson navigates the things people say to someone with cancer, and Chetter M. Galloway moves through addiction, a doctor's advice, and a road trip to a family reunion. Two very different reckonings with how the world reads us.
June 30 · 39 min
The Best of Long Shot Stories
Shauna McGarry and David Crabb take swings that don't go as planned, in two stories about long odds, imperfect calculations, and what you end up with anyway.
June 25 · 38 min
Negative Attention
Brittany Ross and Sam Feirstein take the RISK! LA stage tell of how they both wanted onto the screen, because the screen is where they'd learned, as kids, that the real people live: the famous, the admired, the thin, the chosen. Each came within reach of the dream, and each discovered, up close, that it had been a nightmare all along.
June 23 · 34 min
My Old Man
A classic RISK! episode from August 2013, featuring Chesley Calloway, Gretchen Menter-Felice, Colleen Hindsley, and Dan Kennedy on fathers: the absent, the unconventional, the dying, and the surprisingly forgiving.
June 18 · 1 hr 8 min
Something Wild
When Kambri Crews' dream horse develops a very unexpected habit, and Evan Miles finds his life turned upside down by a shocking accusation, two storytellers share what happened when things got a little too wild.
June 16 · 37 min
Live From San Fran 2014
Stephen Tobolowsky, Dana Gould, Nato Green, and Brendon Walsh took the stage at the San Francisco Sketch Fest in 2014 for one of RISK!'s beloved annual live shows. This classic episode ranges from Hollywood knife fights to Vampira's funeral, from a San Francisco childhood to a Philadelphia street brawl.
June 11 · 1 hr 7 min
Captives
Sofia Javed and Heather Minter were each dropped into a system with its own rules, its own demands, and very little regard for the people inside it. Two stories from RISK!'s live show in Washington, DC, guest-hosted by the captivating Cyndi Freeman.
June 9 · 45 min
Live From Seattle!
A classic from February 2014: Summer Waldron, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, Emmett Montgomery, and Dan Savage took the stage in Seattle for a night that moved from dark comedy and family heartbreak to near-death hallucinations and one of the most disarmingly frank sexual memoirs you'll ever hear.
June 4 · 1 hr 13 min
Love, Death, and Dad’s Pee
Bailey Swilley and Nick Hornedo bring their most unwieldy true stories to Taj Easton's vision for RISK! this week, from a grandmother's emergency witchcraft to a high school friendship that kept ending in groin injuries. Plus a bonus deathbed anecdote from JC Cassis.
June 2 · 43 min
Into the Mystic
A classic RISK! episode from February 2014. Christine Lee, Lulu, and Jen Kwok each brushed up against something they couldn't fully explain, in three accounts of faith, fear, and unexpected transcendence that span a church stairwell, a 1970s front porch, and a Staten Island express bus.
May 28 · 46 min

RISK!

Freedom

Let Him Go

Still Dog People: Who Am I Now

Still Dog People: Two Truths

Mixed Feelings

The Best of Disability Stories

Out of My Hands

Live From San Diego!

I Don't Know

Vagina Vagina Vagina!

But You Look So Good

The Best of Long Shot Stories

Negative Attention

My Old Man

Something Wild

Live From San Fran 2014

Captives

Live From Seattle!

Love, Death, and Dad’s Pee

Into the Mystic