Risk!

Two RISK! stories pulled from the archive, and both are worth your time. "The Best of Adventure Stories #3" is funny and unsettling in equal measure, sometimes within the same story. Winter Tashlin was 16 years old, at a Jewish summer camp in New York, and desperately wanted one good day. The plan was the Empire State Building and a performance of Les Mis. He has Tourette syndrome, the city is unforgiving, and the day keeps getting worse. Meanwhile, Marshall York drove solo across the American West, pitched a tent alone in the Grand Tetons, and went to sleep. Sometime in the night, a voice started speaking to him from inside the tent, calm and close and saying something he could not explain. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-adventure-stories-3 Support RISK! & Get Involved

This episode is a love letter to people who are magnificently, irrepressibly, sometimes accidentally weird. Larry Dorsey Jr. opens with the true account of his first day teaching standup comedy at Northern California's top improv venue. He has TAs, a curriculum, a strategy. None of it survives contact with a visibly high student who, roughly fifteen minutes into class, pulls out his ding-dong and just starts going, putting Larry in an impossible position. And Tuesday Thomas moves to LA fresh from a divorce, meets Alexis Arquette within her first week, and ends up at a film premiere with Danny Elfman, where she personally escorts a legless, increasingly volatile Susan Tyrrell down Hollywood Boulevard in stiletto heels on a Friday night. She thought she had finally made it in Hollywood. And in a way, she had Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/weirdos  Support RISK! & Get Involved

Think you've heard it all? You haven't. People pull over because they're laughing too hard to drive. People cry on treadmills. People share episodes with new friends thinking: if this person loves these stories as much as I do, they're my people. That's RISK! — the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. RISK! has been the world's most surprising, most human, most unfiltered storytelling podcast for nearly 17 years. Created and hosted by Kevin Allison (The State on MTV), new stories every Tuesday, classics every Thursday. Much more at risk-show.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

JP Michael first told "A Hard Landing" on RISK! in the summer of 2016, and it became one of the most talked-about episodes in the show's history. Now, a decade later, he's back with Kevin Allison to listen to it together and reckon with everything that's happened since. (Content note: self-harm, suicidal ideation) The original story follows JP shortly after he relocated to New York City for a job that quickly fell apart, leaving him isolated and adrift. He meets Claire, a razor-sharp, deeply perceptive woman who becomes his anchor in the city, and when she develops a mysterious and terrifying illness, JP steps up as her primary caregiver. What unfolds over the following months is almost impossible to believe. In the conversation that follows, JP reflects on the three-year gap between the events and telling the story, the therapy that helped him finally make sense of it, and a stunning new development: he recently tracked down one of the story's key figures and got answers he'd been missing for thirteen yea

Bad Medicine brings together three storytellers whose bodies, doctors, and circumstances all conspire against them in very different ways. Pam Stepansky throws out her back on a spin bike, ends up bedridden at her father's apartment, and asks him to do something she never imagined asking any parent to do. What follows is a five-day hospital stay where she's dosed with narcotics she explicitly refused, and a long recovery that forces her to finally reckon with who she wants to be. Brad Lawrence walks himself to the ER after gaining 25 pounds in five days and charms an entire floor of doctors and nurses into basically hanging out with him. Then his wife shows up to get shit done. Kevin Allison takes his first trip to San Francisco in 1993 with his best friend, buys three doses of surprisingly potent acid from someone who looks a lot like Jesus, and things escalate from there. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/bad-medicine  Support RISK! & Get Involved

Two RISK! veterans deliver stories about plans that—you guessed it—backfired. As a teenager Nate Runkel built a satirical website that sexualized cartoon characters as a parody of how guys talk online. It got a million views, landed in Complex Magazine and a Maureen Dowd book, and earned him more attention than he ever wanted. The people he respected weren't laughing. (Content note: conversion therapy) And Kelli Dunham’s story is set in the sweaty, armadillo-haunted wilds of an evangelical Florida summer camp. She was there by her own choice, fundraised her own way in, and came home proud, convinced for the next 20 years that the whole adventure was entirely her idea. It wasn't. Two stories about getting exactly what you didn't ask for. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/backfire  Support RISK! & Get Involved

For the first time, we’re putting a Best of RISK! episode back on the feed. Originally released in July 2017, #12 remains one of the most epic compilations of RISK! stories ever: it’s funny, filthy, tender, and at times almost unbearably real, sometimes all at once. Richard Cardillo spent 14 years in a Catholic monastery before leaving his vows and landing in Lima, Peru, newly out and profoundly inexperienced, with a very steep learning curve ahead of him, while Michelle Buteau takes on a brain tumor, IVF, internet trolling, and multiple heartbreaks without ever losing her grip on the absurdity of it all. (Content note on these two, for physical abuse, child sexual abuse, animal abuse) Moloch Masters maps the darkness running through her family tree, from great-grandfather to father to herself, and what she found hiding in a closet she was never supposed to enter. And Tim C. spent 17 years conducting human trafficking and child sex slavery investigations. This is one case he will never forget. Pollo Cor

(Content note: sexual assault, justifiable homicide) Annie Carnrike spent years close to her cousin Michael, a man of fierce loyalty and an equally fierce temper. When he showed up at her home one Thanksgiving night, drunk and out of control, what began as a familiar crisis turned into a fight for her life. What Annie faced that night was devastating enough. What came after was its own ordeal: arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and placed in a men's maximum-security prison as a transgender woman. The case against her was built not on evidence but on bias. Her story is one of the most remarkable RISK! has ever featured. Help support Annie on Go Fund Me Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/into-the-moving-dark  Support RISK! & Get Involved

This is a classic RISK! episode from January 2014, and it holds up with a particular kind of ferocity. (Content note: sexual assault) Ellie Jackson spent 12 years convincing herself she had moved on from being raped at a college party her freshman year. She'd built a careful system for managing intimacy, or avoiding it, and mostly it held. Then a routine visit to Planned Parenthood, a persistent social worker, and an accidental encounter with a Crest commercial undid all of it at once. (Content note: physical abuse, domestic violence, child abuse) Liz Stewart grew up with a sociopathic father and a paranoid schizophrenic mother who once pinned her to the floor to perform a homemade exorcism. She had boxed for eight years and never once hit back. Until she did. Two stories. Both women fought back. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/fighting-back-cre515  Support RISK! & Get Involved

Three stories so worth your time, from darkly funny to devastating. Our 34th compilation of some of our favorite recent stories shared on the podcast. (Content note: sexual assault) Fixxy starts a summer in Pittsburgh doing sex work for quick cash before a move to New York City. One night a client seems different, with an unusually easy request and a ride out to the suburbs. Things escalate in ways Fixxy never anticipated, leading to one of the more genuinely terrifying stories we’ve ever aired. In a completely different vibe, Kevin Allison tells the family legend he’ll never live down: a Super 8 film project, a borrowed jar of jumbo pickles, and an ADHD brain running out of options with the clock ticking. (Content note: child abuse, death) Then there’s Mishelle Roberts, who grew up believing her mother was a devoted caregiver. Years later, she started finding records, asking questions, and pulling at threads that had held her family's story together her entire life. Mishelle’s story was also the focus of S

Three stories about snap decisions and what happens next: a classic RISK! episode from December 2013 that still hits hard. Lauren Cook found her date for a stranger's New Jersey wedding on Craigslist Casual Encounters. She showed up with a fake identity, a room full of people who knew nothing about her, and a night that kept escalating in directions she did not plan for. (Content note: gun violence) JJ grew up in 1980s Bushwick, Brooklyn, fought his way into Wesleyan and then Wall Street, but one afternoon a neighborhood confrontation pulled him back to a version of himself he thought he had left behind. He came very close to throwing everything away. Daniel Lobell sank $2,000 into a hairless cat as the foundation of a breeding empire. When the cat ended up at a friend's apartment and she stopped returning his calls, his plan to get it back got increasingly creative. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/impulsive-cre510 Support RISK! & Get Involved

Kevin hears Timothy Vaux's "Males of the City," a story from So Say We All, for the first time. In RISK! Reacts episodes, there's no preview, no prep, just Kevin listening along with you and sharing everything the story brings to his mind. The story: Timothy is a happily single gay man living in the heart of North Park, San Diego, where a buzzy Saturday night out ends with a casual wave to a stranger that sets off a chain of spontaneous, increasingly elaborate, and very adult events. The reaction: Kevin is instantly charmed, finding echoes of his own younger self in Timothy's freewheeling urban adventures. He shares his own surprisingly relatable stories about role play, improv, and the particular chaos of letting a night take you wherever it wants to go. For more info and music featured in this episode, visit risk-show.com/podcast/males-of-the-city-risk-reacts  Support RISK! & Get Involved

True Crime News: The Podcast is your weekly dose of real-time updates on the most gripping true crime stories, current cases, investigations, scams, and schemes. Host Ana Garcia is joined by crime experts, police officers, defense attorneys, and other leading authorities in their fields as they cover murders, scams, investigations, and unsolved crimes from across the country. Join us each week as we take you inside the biggest, most shocking, and most bizarre true crime cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First released in December 2013, this live RISK! episode from Philadelphia's First Person Arts pairs two storytellers with a lot to say about losing control and getting it back. Dawn Jewel Fraser's "Brasilado" follows a young American woman deep into an immersive year in Rio de Janeiro, learning Portuguese street by street from her chain-smoking instructor Marcy, until a late-night taxi ride home unravels spectacularly when Brazilian police find weed in her bag and mistake her for a drug trafficker. Then Katie Samson tells "The First Time Again," the story of rebuilding a romantic and sexual life after a sledding accident left her with a spinal cord injury at 20. Her homecoming weekend story is tender, funny, and genuinely triumphant. Two women, two very different roads back to freedom. Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-philly-4-cre509  Support RISK! & Get Involved

(Content note: child sexual abuse) In 2016, Ed G. got on stage at RISK! and told a story he'd never told anyone. Now, ten years later, Ophira Eisenberg sits down with him to go places that story couldn't: the FBI, the Pope, the survivors who found each other decades later, and the hard-won question of where shame really belongs. Ed's story begins in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a boy abandoned by his violent father and drowning in poverty finds an unlikely lifeline in the local Catholic church. What the bishop who runs it asks for in return will take Ed the better part of a lifetime to fully reckon with.

In this crossover episode with The Story Collider, Karen McCaffrey and Mary Cyn share stories that illustrate the importance of compassion in healthcare.

Michael McFadden and Adrianne Frost share stories about evolving feelings about their bodies over time. 

Byron Bowers and Amy Salloway share experiences from their formative years. A part of The Best of Coming of Age Stories series.

Ria Spencer, Mindy Myers and Josh Connors share stories about learning to feel at home in your body.

A Classic RISK! episode from our early years that first ran in November of 2013, when Kitty Hailey, Christine Lee and Josh Healey share stories of surprising family situations.