Dug out from the RISK! archives, this June 2014 episode goes straight for the seedier side of growing up, getting by, and getting out alive.

Brian Cirmo spends his last night in downtown Utica the way he and his heavyset childhood crew always did, at the strip clubs, before his friends pull one prank too many and leave him stranded on a corner. Jake Hart lands in New York with a head full of Bukowski, no plan, and no money, and turns a month and a half of homelessness into a running experiment in how low he'll let himself go.

(Content note: attempted abduction)

Cathy Smith drops acid, sticks out her thumb across early-1970s Pittsburgh, and climbs into a windowless van that turned around a little too eagerly to pick her up.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/seedy-cre537 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ New York City on Tuesday, December 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Three people do something small and stupid, then meet the full weight of the law.

Kona Morris spends a four-hour Beijing layover in a customs line that will not move, with a backpack full of rocks and a Tokyo souvenir that reads as an explosive on the X-ray.

Victor Ramirez was 17 in the Poconos when a shoplifting friend told him which Walmart aisle nobody watches, and he built a summer business on it, until his Hells Angel mentor set a tire iron on the table.

Frank Traynor, 14 and in love, agrees to sneak into a mall movie theater, then hears a janitor's voice on the staircase and leaves everyone behind.

And thanks to Frank Traynor’s It's Funny Now, the show where he and Kona Morris both told their stories from this episode.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/gettin-off-scot-free 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Recorded live at DSI Comedy Theater in Chapel Hill in 2014, this classic RISK! episode brings together three storytellers on the wilder edges of youth.

(Content note: emotional abuse)

Lauren Patton grows up on a Georgia estate where her father runs a criminal law firm out of the house, cycling young mistresses past her mother. At fourteen, she's ordered to take one of them out horseback riding.

Andrew Aghapour arrives at his first teaching gig in three Target polos and fast-food napkins in his armpits, hoping to be the cool philosophy professor. His seventy-student auditorium has other plans, and his salvation may hinge on a Socrates Café at Whole Foods.

(Content note: child sexual abuse)

Ray Christian grows up in Richmond's Churchill neighborhood and finds an unlikely community among older boys who raise pigeons across the river in Fulton. Their ringleader brags openly about sexual assaults he's committed, and one afternoon Ray is invited fishing.

Leave your comments to these stories plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-chapel-hill-cre536 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Twice a year we gather the best of the best from the last six months. This round holds three.

(Content note: suicide)

At fifteen, Richard Velazquez steps onto a 1986 Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale, carrying the demon-fear of a Jehovah's Witness childhood and a father who has started smoking his own supply. His first customer changes everything in a heartbeat.

Cassidy Krug dives nine years for Frank, a coach who throws his aviators and screams until the vein in his forehead pops, all while swearing he can put her on an Olympic team. She still wonders whether it was abuse or the only road to greatness.

(Content note: sexual assault, homicide, suicidal ideation)

Annie Carnrike and her cousin Michael are close as siblings, and when Annie comes out as trans, he is the one who loves her with no "but." Then one drunken Thanksgiving night, Michael breaks down her door, and Annie fights for her life.

Support Annie in overcoming her ongoing struggles with the justice system and in her campaigning for the legal rights of trans people by leveraging her story at https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-and-dignity-for-annie-g

Leave your thoughts on the stories, and find full episode details and music credits, at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-36 

You can find all of our Best of RISK! episodes at risk-show.com/bestofrisk 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City (Tuesday, December 8)

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

"Stung" is a set of four live stories from June 2014 back in the feed, each about someone caught off guard.

Matt Kirshen, 18 and backpacking through France with two sisters from Berkeley, plans to sleep in a Bordeaux park until a priest and a local drug dealer both warn him off. The dealer's alternative invitation lands him somewhere stranger. Jen Kirkman dissects why she never wanted to take care of anyone, working through an elderly woman feeding her wheelchair-bound husband, a husband who fell in the shower while she stayed in bed, and a grandmother's wake full of relatives she could never picture creating herself.

Eli Olsberg signs up for a blood drive offering two free movie tickets and ends up with three nurses semicircled around him. Janine Brito, raised religious by her Cuban father, is four days into her freshman year of college when a voicemail changes everything.

Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/stung-cre534 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in N.Y.C. on Tuesday, December 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Three people come within reach of what they want and are nearly undone grabbing for it.

Karen Ibarra brings a self-described nerd's devotion to a heated Los Angeles delegate election, where bad blood between two party factions turns personal.

David Zellnik spends his childhood worshipping the stage, then auditions for the bad-boy role he wants most in his high school's production of Oliver!, only for the director to pull him aside with a wounding notion about which part he should play. And thanks to EST's "Truth Be Told", the New York show and podcast where this story first appeared.

Amy Sohn hits bottom and pins everything on an elderly Manhattan analyst for one ridiculous reason, a rumor that he is Woody Allen's therapist, then sinks into his Freudian world without admitting why she came.

Leave your thoughts on the stories, and find details and music credits, at risk-show.com/podcast/almost 

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

This episode first surfaced back in June 2014, presenting two people who’d run out of road and somehow had to find more.

Joe Mulligan, a stand-up whose marriage and career have both come apart, flies to Boulder for a peyote ceremony and finds his spirit guide is the last thing he would have chosen. And Olga Schmutz, gutted by a breakup, walks into a Philadelphia shop at 3 a.m. and walks out with a strap-on named Carlitos and a brand-new sense of purpose.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/second-wind-cre533 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on December 8, 2026 in N.Y.C.

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Three stories about laughing at exactly the wrong moment, and finding out it was the right one all along. Three ways of getting through it sideways.

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC - Tuesday, December 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Three wildly different stories from a night RISK! recorded live in Boston at the Nameless Coffeehouse back in May of 2014, pulled from the archive and dropped back into the feed.

(Content note: attempted suicide)

Josh Poirier grew up as the kid every bully found, singled out for years by an older boy named Paul. At his lowest, broke and checking himself into an inpatient psychiatric ward, the nurse who comes to wake him is the one person he spent his whole childhood running from.

Lillian DeVane lands the dream job: managing a plush vintage store with her three closest friends. The catch is the owner, a wealthy heiress whose generosity comes wrapped in cruelty, and whose promise to sign the store over to Lillian sits just out of reach.

Will Luera adored a father who kept disappearing for years at a stretch. The reasons turn out to run through prison, cocaine, and a charming, determined man who keeps rebuilding the exact life that took him away,, and Will can feel it all starting again.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-boston-cre532 

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 [email protected]

📚 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

At twenty-four, Allen Fetters is blindsided by the worst gallstone attack of his life. Too stubborn to call 911 or even a friend, he decides to drive himself to the ER, floors it down an empty road of green lights, on a collision course with a man on a bicycle crossing the intersection ahead of him.

Then Richard Velazquez rewinds to Christmas Eve, 1989, eighteen and riding shotgun in his mentor's prized 1964 Mercedes after a night of cocaine, rum, and reggaeton on repeat. On the snowy New Jersey Turnpike, with three other people in the car, he hears a whooshing sound and a  tremendous bang.

Thanks to So Say We All in San Diego, whose live show is where Richard first brought this story to an audience.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/no-harm-no-foul 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ tonight (September 8, 2026) in New York City!

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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

Back from November 2021, this episode is just bonkers: original songs, sound collages, audio easter eggs, and other inanities stacked one on top of another.

We’ve got stamps.com jingles, a goth lament about needing a public toilet, TS Madison hollering about a good dick, a Cinderella scene that curdles into filth, and a thank-you number built entirely out of Kevin’s orgasm noises. Bits by and from Jeff Barr, Soce the Elemental Wizard, Brian Babylon, David Crabb, John LaSala, Detox, Alaska, and a stray Tom Brady sample wander through too.

For nearly an hour, RISK! sets the stories aside and just plays.

Leave your reactions and find the exhaustive list of credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-inanity-cre1304 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in 09/08/2026 in New York City

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to [email protected]

📚 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