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.
Episodes
July 14, 2026 • 39 mins
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 ...
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July 9, 2026 • 77 mins
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 Viet...
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July 7, 2026 • 42 mins
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 nightstic...
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July 2, 2026 • 61 mins
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 t...
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June 30, 2026 • 39 mins
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. Gallowa...
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June 25, 2026 • 38 mins
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 u...
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June 23, 2026 • 34 mins
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 accus...
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June 18, 2026 • 68 mins
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 ho...
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June 16, 2026 • 37 mins
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 o...
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June 11, 2026 • 67 mins
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...
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June 9, 2026 • 45 mins
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 potent...
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June 4, 2026 • 73 mins
One chilly Seattle night in February 2014, four storytellers on the RISK! stage said some things they probably wouldn’t have otherwise said out loud.
Dan Savage told the story of his early days writing Savage Love in Seattle, doing drag to hide his identity, and one late-night encounter that left him genuinely bewildered by his own desire.
(Content note: murder, sexual assault)
Kelleen Conway Blanchard grew up carrying f...
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June 2, 2026 • 43 mins
It's summer 2014, and Bailey Swilley has a boyfriend she's been trying to leave for months and a father who is about to make that the least of her problems. When her dad goes into cardiac arrest, the family descends on his hospital room in Memphis, and her Taiwanese grandmother, who has never previously mentioned being a healer, begins issuing instructions from a witch she met on a Carnival cruise. The spells escalate. So does ever...
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May 28, 2026 • 46 mins
This one goes deep. "Into the Mystic" first aired in February 2014, and it brings together three accounts of the uncanny from three storytellers who had no map for what they were experiencing.
Christine Lee, an Episcopal priest, has spent years navigating the gap between the faith she teaches and the faith she actually feels. When a parishioner with a seriously injured knee agrees to be prayed over, Christine finds herself in th...
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May 26, 2026 • 61 mins
Guest-host Taj Easton is in the chair this week, presenting these two stories on the long shadow of patriarchy with a particular attentiveness, repeatedly asking the same leading question: Are straight men okay?
Cassidy Krug arrives at Stanford a diver of moderate ambition, then spends nine years being screamed at by a coach whose legendarily ruthless style drives her to the Olympics. Fifteen years after retiring, she still isn'...
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May 21, 2026 • 67 mins
This one goes back to February 2014: a live RISK! episode built around the theme of fascination, meaning the things that get under your skin and won't let go.
Ryan Britt was a self-appointed porn expert at age 10, thanks to his father's very open magazine policy and to a darkroom box labeled "Do Not Open" that turned out to contain something far more interesting than photographic paper.
Adam Wade spent years nursing a Rick Mora...
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May 19, 2026 • 37 mins
Two storytellers, two very different ways of inheriting the past.
Shauna McGarry throws a Halloween party with her newly single roommate, hoping for a fresh start after a breakup. A drunk coworker zeroes in on the roommate, her little brother in a Charlie Brown shirt enters the mix, and the night expands into something Shauna has been watching her whole life: the strange, exhausting game of male presumption that nobody asked to ...
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May 14, 2026 • 70 mins
Originally recorded live at NYC Podfest in January 2014, this is one of those classic RISK! episodes where the theme, confession, actually delivers on its promise.
Kevin Allison opens with a story he has told for years, then stops midway to admit he has been leaving out the best part. What he adds reframes everything.
Alex Edelman turns a power strip at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport into a secret-collecting operation, until a soldier...
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May 12, 2026 • 37 mins
Two stories about what the body holds onto and what it eventually gives back.
Ali Mac took a job in crypto after two years of Nazi death threats courtesy of Fox News. At the Miami Bitcoin Conference in 2022, she finds herself escorting her boss down a hallway and comes face to face with Tucker Carlson, broadcasting live, sitting very low, blissfully unaware of what is about to happen to him.
(Content note: death of a partner)...
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May 7, 2026 • 40 mins
Two mothers' days that look nothing alike, but hit just as hard.
Jobim Santos grew up watching his mother Linda lose her battle with ALS piece by piece, from cane to wheelchair to hospice bed, all while praying at church each week that she would just live long enough to see him turn 13. She didn't quite make it. What he didn't expect was that grief would take another 13 years to fully arrive.
(Content note: domestic violence, m...
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