RISK!

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 [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

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 

Be Part of RISK!

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

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.

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 [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 one comes back from April of 2014, the second night of a RISK! live run in Reno, Nevada, and it swings hard between the filthy and the tender.

Josie Spadoni is working an afternoon at her Los Angeles dungeon when a client walks in with a request most people would refuse on the spot. She says yes.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Emily Reese grew up dreaming of a picket-fence Christian marriage and the submissive-wife role she thought came with it. When the money starts vanishing and her intuition won't quiet, she finally checks the family bank account herself. We lost Emily not long ago, and we're so glad her voice lives on here.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-reno-2-cre528 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8th, 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

Let's dig into two people’s lives where physical desire set off completely unplanned-for chain reactions.

Ceara Lynch is a teenager when a stranger online suggests she bottle and sell her urine. She does it on a dare to herself, he pays $250, and what starts as a joke becomes a career in fetish work and verbal humiliation—one she has to hide from the people who raised her. (Shout out to The Mystery Box Show where this story was originally recorded!)

Then Baruch Porras-Hernandez gives a fake name at a San Francisco bathhouse and immediately regrets it when the man he meets turns out to be the romantic partner he's spent years searching for. The lie compounds through months of dates, a surprise birthday party, and a run-in with his own mother. (And thanks to Dixie De La Tour who co-produced the RISK/Bawdy Storytelling crossover show this story was originally told at!)

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

You can find all of our Best of Sex Stories episodes at risk-show.com/sexstories

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in N.Y.C on Tuesday, September 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

Fox Emerson moves to Milan with his husband for a fresh start, then lets a charismatic man he met in Atlanta follow him there. The man settles into the apartment, grows colder and stranger by the day, and one late-night argument escalates until Fox is the one in handcuffs, alone in an Italian jail cell with no idea why.

Patrick Holbert convinces himself his marriage is quietly open, books an appointment with a dominatrix in Queens, and spends the next six weeks deciding whether to tell his wife. His confession lands nothing like he pictured. Funny, filthy, and more honest about marriage than he probably planned.

Both men skipped the conversation that might have changed everything.

Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.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

Live from Reno in April 2014, three first-time RISK! storytellers turn a single night into a run of proposition, prophecy, and psychedelic reckoning.

Virginia Munsterman is a 20-year-old college student scraping by as a barista when a new job as a chiropractor's assistant lands her at a business conference in Clearwater, Florida. The company's multimillionaire CEO zeroes in on her immediately, and over two days his attention escalates from flattery and magic tricks to a yacht tour and a dinner where he asks her to give him the next 15 to 20 years of her life in exchange for his fortune.

Jessica Levity is driving cross-country to Reno with her brother when a detour to the clearest lake in Kansas turns into a three-day stay with a self-proclaimed shaman named Lone Wolf. He shows up at their campsite with a bottle of ketchup Jessica had forgotten to buy, claiming the Great Spirit told him to bring it, and offers to reveal the hidden history of the Earth. His teachings turn out to include an antisemitic alien-hybrid origin theory for Jewish people, and Jessica and Teddy have to figure out how much of any of it to believe.

Steve Emmerich grows up gay and Catholic in Cincinnati, suppressing an identity that doesn't fit the blueprint he was given. At a massive Phish festival in Maine, high on several substances at once, he breaks down crying when a vision presents him with two doors and realizes he doesn't recognize himself in either one.

Comments, episode details, and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-reno-1-cre527 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8th, 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

Kenice Mobley grew up on a 1999 movie fantasy of the woman who travels the world, says yes to everything, and never flinches. As an adult she follows that ideal into a Paris sex club, a single shared baguette, and a straight-faced argument about whether taking your clothes off makes anyone free. It’s all fun and game right up until it turns into a question about who a room actually wants.

(Content note: suicide)

Richard Velazquez is fifteen in 1986, newly out of a Jehovah's Witness childhood, and living with his drug-dealing father, when he walks onto a Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale. What he is really carrying is fear: of demons, of prison, of turning into the man in front of him. When his first customer hits the pipe and collapses, every childhood terror comes back at once.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/trying-it-on 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8th, 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

From April 2014, five people finding a way out.

Sean Crespo signs up for a sleep deprivation study to escape the worst summer job in Boston, then spends ten days plotting one act of privacy. Kate Greathead, dumped and displaced, discovers she can cry on the subway every night and nobody will stop her.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Jeff Simmermon loses a testicle to cancer and gains an imaginary black bird that whispers to him at night about how the loneliness will never end. John F. O'Donnell, in the middle of a manic episode in 2008, decides he alone can stop the neoconservatives from crashing the internet.

Jean Ann Le Bec, married in 1966 to a man who naps all day, goes back to college on Open Admissions and finds a women's group, a room worth occupying, and Mona.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/freedom-cre525

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

Two people confront what it means to stay bound to someone who keeps letting them down.

Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in LA with a lifelong pull toward unavailable men, meets a charming match on a dating app. The chemistry is undeniable, right up until he looks her in the eye and warns her not to Google him. Her response becomes a very funny, surprisingly pointed argument about honesty and what commitment is really worth.

Then David Hu comes home to the Bronx for Father's Day 2021 and finds his father, deep in dementia, suddenly and frighteningly ill. Amid COVID lockdowns and an overwhelmed nursing home, he and his mother face impossible choices about how to care for a man who is slipping away.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/let-him-go 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8th, 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