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

Daniel Lobell is broke enough to be applying for Medi-Cal, sitting in an LA social services office, and privately deciding his comedy career is finished, when an offhand habit turns the whole waiting room's attention on him. 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 

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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.

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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 

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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 

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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 

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Two classic RISK! stories about walking into a room that codes you as wrong from the second you open your mouth.

Tara Clancy commuted from working-class Queens to a Manhattan college, where a classmate mocked how she said "huge" and a writing professor slipped her a bag of third-grade grammar workbooks.

Susan Kent moved to segregated Fitzgerald, Georgia at age six. By high school her closest friend Walt was Black, and when Jen played a Bobby Brown dedication for her from Walt over the local radio, Susan understood he was about to ask her to prom. Fitzgerald had two proms: a whites-only one and a Black one.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-school-stories-2 

And you can find all of our School Stories episodes at risk-show.com/schoolstories 

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Kevin Allison sits down with Jeff Barr, RISK!'s longtime editor, for a farewell conversation almost two decades in the making. At its center is a story they've never told on the show: the mushroom trip Kevin took at Jeff's home in Colorado, when what began as a pleasant walk turned into hours of screaming panic, Kevin convinced he was dying and pacing with 911 half-dialed while Jeff pleaded with him not to call and phoned a nurse friend to talk him down.

Around that centerpiece, Kevin and Jeff cover Jeff's earliest audio experiments, the invention of the RISK! poo flags, the scat play scene that broke Jeff for a while, and the fan email that led Jeff to an ADHD diagnosis decades into adulthood. Peppered throughout is a highlight reel of the audio silliness Jeff has made over the years.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-jeffisode

You can find all of our conversation story episodes at risk-show.com/conversationstories

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Back in May of 2014, RISK! hit Pittsburgh for the first time, and this classic episode brings the whole strange, sharp-edged night home.

(Content note: sexual assault)

As a counselor at a Pittsburgh women's clinic, Stacy Keene believes she's found her calling, until a frightened teenage patient and an openly hostile doctor put her in the middle of a confrontation she hadn’t expected.

Then Matt Bower answers a late-night Kmart call from a man who just needs one doorknob delivered to a dark house in the woods, and drives out to meet him.

(Content note: child sexual abuse)

And Jordan Sargent spends a summer under the spell of a friend's churchgoing father, until the man's stepdaughter’s accusation sends Jordan reaching for a jar of coins and a plan he can barely admit to.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-pittsburgh-cre530

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Two New York men take the long way through heartbreak.

Brad Lawrence arrives in the city to become an actor while his girlfriend starts Columbia Law School, and their seven-year relationship goes cold almost on contact. Working two jobs and desperately lonely, he builds a nightly ritual of drinking far across town and riding the subway home drunk in the small hours, until one 3 a.m. ride lands him across the car from a woman he's sure he recognizes.

Christopher Moncayo-Torres cannot stop walking past his ex's Bushwick duplex after a broken engagement. When he finds a stranger's wallet holding four hundred dollars, returning it becomes a project, and the restaurant where the owner works becomes the setting for a fresh-start fantasy that a pushy stranger at the bar keeps complicating.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/is-it-her 

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An episode from May 2014 with more comedy than the alliterative title would suggest.

Dave Hill wanted to frighten himself on purpose, so he flew to northern Mexico to stay with an old college friend who had become the chaplain of a prison the cartels were running themselves. There is a pizza party, a borrowed guitar, and a man with a machete.

(Content note: suicidal ideation, suicide)

CJ Hostetter graduated into the 2009 economy, moved back in with their divorcing parents, and stopped feeling anything at all. Then a gunshot went off across the street.

Tyler Phillips took a pizza order from a caller who volunteered his full name and street address. The street turned out to be real.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/death-defying-cre529 

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Two comedians with two very different things to stop hiding, expose themselves in turn:

Calvin S. Cato is queer, twenty pounds lighter than he used to be, and willing to do almost anything to perform for more than three people and a sad disco ball. When a friend suggests the Naked Comedy Show, Calvin signs up on the strength of two words: "sells out." He does not ask a follow-up question. By the time he learns what "naked" actually means, he has already invited his entire art gallery.

Uriah Wesman moves to LA to be a one-liner comedian and bottoms out performing in the back of an ice cream shop, where his jokes are so bad they ruin the ice cream. A comedy club GM asks him one simple question about himself, and Uriah casually mentions his parents were in a doomsday cult. Then corrects himself: three cults. Then mentions the kidnapping. Then the sword. Uriah spent years hiding behind a character on stage because if the audience rejected the character, it wouldn't hurt. Putting the real childhood on stage is the risk that actually connects.

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

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