RISK!

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

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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

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 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

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

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City (September 8th)

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 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 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

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 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

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

Be Part of RISK!

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

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 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