RISK!

A classic RISK! episode from July 2014 built around three situations that everyone involved would happily have ended earlier.

Sam Mullins is in his final year at the University of Victoria acting program when a midnight phone call reassigns him to a role in a doomed play he was never supposed to have. Winter Tashlin, a BDSM educator, brings home a tube of capsaicin cream from the pharmacy and ignores every safety protocol he teaches in his own class.

Anne Thomas is eighteen, six months after the accident that paralyzed her from the chest down, when the pool instructor sets her up on a drive-in date with a fellow patient.

You can leave comments and find episode details at risk-show.com/podcast/make-it-stop-cre541

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Ploy Anderson is rushing out of her Bangkok house for a lunch date, a hair roller still clipped under her helmet, when a 10-wheeler drifts into her lane. Abel Athi Kumar is easing into a slow Sunday when his housemate starts screaming by the pond, where a python has his cat Whiskey in its coils. And Art Attaphon, reading alone in a tiny Silom library, checks Grindr, and winds up signing a consent form in a stranger’s hotel room.

Three residents of a city where the most ordinary afternoon of the week can turn on you fast. Thanks to the Bangkok Stories Show and workshops, both regularly held at The Garage Burger and Grill in Thong Lo, where all three of these stories were shared.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/bangkok-stories-1

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

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This week we're revisiting the first RISK! episode ever recorded outside the United States. In July 2014, the show traveled to London for a live event co-produced with Spark.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Dave Pickering heads to a swingers club to test whether the ugliness he's carried since childhood really lines up with reality. Suraya Sidhu Singh steps out of a shower on her first American visit to hear her friend confess that he thinks the neighbor across the hall is dead. Simon Sarginson grows up with a free-spirited mother whose response to cancer is as defiant as her response to everything else. And Radcliffe Royds falls from a fully loaded Audi Quattro to a Soho builder's skip in the space of a fortnight.

And thanks to Spark London for co-producing the show that brought us across the Atlantic for the first time.

Leave comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-london-1-cre540

Be Part of RISK!

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

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

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Two RISK! favorites come back for Latine Heritage Month, handed to guests who know the territory. Brenda González & Delsy Sandoval, Latina co-hosts of Tamarindo podcast, join us to talk both stories through and celebrate Latine lives that rarely get to be this light.

Javier Morillo spent his twenties shutting down white men who reduced him to a fantasy. Then country music got its hooks in him, and a conference in Austin put a real cowboy in front of him.

Ximena Ospina is seven when her family leaves Colombia inside a month. She starts first grade in Marina, California, able to count to ten and ask for orange juice, and little else. Then story time runs long and she really needs the bathroom. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell & Capital Storytelling, who produced the Sacramento live show where Ximena first told this one!

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-hispanic-lives-5

You can find all of our Hispanic Lives episodes at risk-show.com/hispaniclives 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 kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

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Three of the most memorable stories from the last six months of RISK!, back in one place.

(Content note: gun violence)

Jon Rappoport is on a work call outside Chicago when his wife kicks the door open: their twelve-year-old twins are texting from a mall on lockdown for an active shooter. Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in Los Angeles with a long record of choosing unavailable men, meets someone on a dating app who is funny and spectacular in bed, right up until he asks her not to look him up.

(Content note: child sexual abuse, incestuous family dynamics)

LeCount Holmes was eleven when his father promised to introduce him one day to a grown woman who could teach him how to make love. At sixteen, his father came to collect him from school.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-37

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

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in N.Y.C. (December 8)

✍️ 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