Audacious with Chion Wolf

Some people savor every bite. Others eat 30 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Welcome to the world of competitive eating!

Visit Lake Compounce for a Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest qualifier, where everyone is trying to prove they’re top dog.

Then Crazy Legs Conti and Katina DeJarnett - aka Katina Eats Kilos - talk about what it takes to train, compete, recover, and keep chewing when your body is ...

Joe Stone grew up playing volleyball, skateboarding, and breakdancing. Then, in 2012, a car crash left him paralyzed. 

Doctors told him he would likely never move anything below his chest again. But five weeks after leaving the hospital, Joe found wheelchair rugby. This violent, fast, full-contact sport helped him rebuild strength, process anger, and feel alive in a changed body. 

In this conversation recorded at a live t...

Stephanie Salvilla so deeply loved - still loves - her baby boy, Gannon.

In July 2009, after a week of disrupted routines and sleepless nights, her brain went on autopilot. She dropped off her older child, drove to work, and unknowingly left 5-month-old Gannon in the car. He died.

In this deeply difficult and important conversation, Stephanie talks about grief, shame, public judgment, forgiveness, and why ...

When you hear “philanthropy,” you might think of millionaires, black-tie galas, or buildings named after donors. But what if you could be a philanthropist without being wealthy?

In this episode, you’ll meet people who donate small amounts to hundreds of places, hand out cash on city streets, and send money directly to people in poverty, no strings attached. 

Explore the power of small, consistent giving, and ...

James Tillman remembers the smell of steak and onions cooking at his mother’s house on the day police came for him. He thought he’d be back soon.

Instead, he spent a total of 18½ years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

In 2006, with the help of the Connecticut Innocence Project, DNA evidence proved his innocence, making him the first person in Connecticut exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing. Later, ...

The International Space Station was designed for science, research, and survival. But astronauts turned it into a music studio, an art studio, and a sewing room. 

Former ISS commander and musician, Chris Hadfield, astronaut-painter Nicole Stott, and astronaut-quilter Karen Nyberg take us inside the strange, beautiful reality of making music, paintings, and handmade objects while orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. 

Su...

What if the real mystery isn’t Bigfoot or Nessie, but the people who devote their lives to searching for them? 

Chion talks with Mike Wanders, who spent a year traveling through legendary Bigfoot country, and Steve Feltham, who has spent decades on the shore of Loch Ness. 

What keeps a person returning, again and again, to a mystery that refuses to resolve itself? And what if not knowing can be its own kind of joy?&...

For the past two years, at the end of interviews for Audacious, host Chion Wolf has been asking guests one question: have you ever had a dream or premonition that came true?

Twenty-three guests describe vivid dreams, sudden urges, eerie intuitions, and moments of certainty that later proved accurate in ways they can’t explain. Some sensed love before it arrived. Some saw danger coming. Some felt loss before they knew ...

Some people sign up for a 5K. Some people sign up for a race with a secret start time, no marked course, and books hidden in the woods. Or seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. 

We have questions.

Meet Jared Campbell, the only person ever to finish the Barkley Marathons four times - a secretive, nearly mythic race through the Tennessee woods with an unmarked course, brutal climbs, and pages torn from hidden books ...

What can a handwritten record reveal after someone is gone? In this episode, we follow two very different paper trails. 

Marci Pelzer shares the 109-page list her father kept of more than 3,500 books he read over six decades. After going viral, his private habit became a public window into his life. 

Dan Fogel lost his wife of 45 years to cancer, and then found diaries including writing that made him question how well he ...

Mascots: They’re furry, funny, and just a little funky. But what's actually going on in there?

Tom Burgoyne shares what it’s been like to embody the Phillie Phanatic for over three decades.

Mikaela Higgins reveals how her company became a giant in the world of mascot-makers, designing icons from Ronald McDonald to the Energizer Bunny.

And hear how one “yes“ changed the life of Conor Geary, whose turn as a ma...

Taxidermied dogs. A CIA agent's hat. A perfume that made strangers on elevators lose their composure.

This is what happens when you pull names from a vase at a brewery and say: show us something you love, and tell us why.

Our fourth live Show and Tell at Little Red Barn Brewers in Winsted, Connecticut delivered exactly what this format always delivers: stories that are intimate, hilarious, and impossible t...

Fewer than 10% of truck drivers are women, and in this episode, you’re going to meet three of them.

Spend the day with Chion and a tow truck driver, get to know a woman who runs a CDL training school, and hear about life on the road from a truck driver who happens to be a trans woman.

This episode originally aired on January 13, 2023. 

GUESTS: 

• Chantel Comerford: A driver for Meagan’s Towing &am...

Imagine feeling an unbearable itch, convinced that tiny insects are crawling under your skin. But no doctor believes you. You try to prove it, collecting samples, documenting everything. But under a microscope? Nothing is there.

That was Paula Cox’s experience with delusional infestation, a rare disorder where people are absolutely certain they’re infested with bugs, despite all evidence to the contrary. In this episode...

What kind of person looks at a Boeing 727 and thinks, yes, I should live there? Or boards a cruise ship and decides never to go back to a traditional home? 

Bruce Campbell is a 76-year-old engineer and pilot who has spent more than 25 years living in a retired jetliner in the Oregon woods. 

Angelyn and Richard Burk are a married couple who turned loss, an enthusiasm for minimalism, and a love of travel into an everyday ex...

Obituaries are meant to mark an end. But sometimes they start a whole new conversation.

First, Andy Corren, whose funny, biting, tender obituary for his mother captured so much life that it went viral and became a memoir.

Then, Sallie Hammett, whose loving obituary for her dog Charlie rippled across the internet and moved countless strangers.

And finally, we talk with professional obituary writer Jamie Pas...

What’s a sentence that invites the universe to call your bluff?

“I could do that!”

Meet three people who said it, and then had to live it.

Christopher Lamar runs Lunar Embassy, a company that sells deeds to plots on the Moon and other celestial bodies. Logan Goodspeed learns what happens when you casually claim you could run a marathon “with 24 hours’ notice,” and your s...

At 74, Karen Smith is still chasing the feeling she fell in love with as a kid: the freedom and aliveness of playing sports.

After years of sudden pain and uncertainty, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis - news that could have ended her life in athletics. Instead, adaptive equipment helped her keep skiing, and it reshaped how she carried the diagnosis. 

Through the Gaylord Sports Association, she helped expand a program...

Two Scotlands, one episode. 

Scotland One: kilts, haggis, bagpipes, and that irresistible fairground mix of music and muscle at Connecticut’s Scottish Highland Festival & Games! Plus swordplay and the oddly soothing chaos and grunts of Weight Over Bar. 

Scotland Two: centuries of witch trials, powered by rumor, rubber-stamped by law. Meet Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi of Witches of Scotland, a campaign and ...