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RISK!

If you like The Moth, This American Life or Snap Judgment, take a walk on the wilder side with RISK! Your colorful host Kevin Allison (of the legendary comedy group The State) helms this surprisingly uncensored show where people tell jaw-dropping true stories they never thought they'd dare to share in public. RISK! is hilarious, heart-wrenching and remarkably real. Think you've heard it all? Fasten your seatbelt.

This episode brings together two of the most gripping conversations in the show's recent run: a man who survived an extended stint in a Philippine jail on fabricated charges, and a medical student whose addiction and grief turned out to be more entangled than she had ever let herself understand.

(Content note: accusations of sexual assault, child abuse, false imprisonment)

Scott McMahon went to Manila for a construction job, ended up befriending a Belgian neighbor, and got pulled into a nightmare when that neighbor's wife turned the Philippine justice system against him. What followed was five and a half years in a maximum-security cell with 300 men, corrupt cops showing up every six weeks with a cash demand, and a family he could only see through a chain-link fence. It is one of the most staggering survival accounts this show has ever aired.

(Content note: addiction, overdose death)

Chelsea Dalsey was a medical student with a photographic memory, a habit she couldn't shake, and a lifelong partner in crime named Alex. Her conversation with Kevin Allison is part confession, part excavation, arriving at a truth she had spent 14 years burying alive.

Leave your reactions to these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-35 

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

Be Part of RISK!

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The Best of RISK! #35

From the RISK! archives, this January 2014 episode gathers three storytellers around a theme that sounds simple and turns out not to be: actually being okay with yourself.

Joel Kim Booster grew up as a gay Korean adoptee in an evangelical family, and it wasn't until he fell for a man who specifically desired him because of his race that he realized how thoroughly someone else's rejection had shaped his sense of his own worth.

Dylan Brody has been performing the postmortem on his own victories since fifth grade, and it took competing in a full-contact TaeKwondo tournament at 41, with blood running down his face, to get a piece of advice he hadn't been able to give himself.

Jolenta Greenberg built an entire adolescent identity around the belief that she was a diamond in the rough, and her high school crush Brian eventually put that idea to the test.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/im-okay-youre-okay-cre513 

Support RISK! & Get Involved

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on Tuesday, June 9th

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

I'm Okay, You're Okay

Guest-hosted this week by Taj Easton, stepping in for Kevin to present a story by LeCount Holmes Jr., now Taj’s surrogate pops.

(Content note: explicit sexual activity involving a minor)

LeCount Holmes Jr. grew up with a father who told him he loved him, hugged him, cried in front of him, and believed that teaching his son how to love a woman was one of the most sacred things a father could do. This is the story of that education, of what was passed down through three generations of loving men, and one of the most unusual love stories RISK! has ever told. 

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/pop-obies-vibrator 

Support RISK! & Get Involved

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in NYC

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

Pop Obie’s Vibrator

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

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in New York City!

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

The Best of Adventure Stories #3

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

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, June 9, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

Weirdos

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

Today's the Day. Welcome to RISK!

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 years.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/a-hard-landing-revisited 

And check out all of our Revisited Stories!

Support RISK! & Get Involved

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on Tuesday, June 9, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

A Hard Landing, Revisited

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

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, June 9th, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

Bad Medicine

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

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in New York City!

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

Backfire

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 Corral tells the story of being held hostage by a Juarez cartel for nearly 40 days, and what his father gave up to bring him home. And in the middle of it all, Kevin Allison goes to a secret all-male kink camp alone and anxious, which turns out to be exactly the wrong and right place for a lesson about fear.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-Best-of-risk-12-cre842 

Support RISK! & Get Involved

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on June 9, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠ or ⁠make a one-time PayPal donation⁠

📚 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

The Best of RISK! #12

Christine Gentry, Richard Cardillo and Dan Wilbur share stories about teaching tough kids, oral sex in Peru and a high school romance cut short by illness.
Support RISK! on Patreon at Patreon.com/RISK
Make a one-time donation to RISK! at PayPal.me/RISKshow
Get tickets to RISK! live shows at RISK-show.com/tour
Get the RISK! book at TheRISKBook.com
Take our storytelling classes at TheStoryStudio.org
Hire Kevin Allison to make a personalized video at Cameo.com/TheKevinAllison
Hire Kevin Allison as a coach at KevinAllison.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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