Mission Implausible

By Jon SternComedy Society & Culture News Politics

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Typical duration
36 min
per episode

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Mission Implausible episodes

July 19 CIA's Best-Kept Secret: It Was Fun (with Paul Kolbe & Doug Wise)
Two of John & Jerry’s old friends and agency colleagues swap war stories and tall tales, starting with their training at The Farm and including their time in Moscow. Some of the characters in their anecdotes: Nazi Bob, Steven Seagal and the CIA mermaids.
Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
34 min
July 12 Trump’s Presidential Payday (with Adam Davidson)
More on Trump's $2 billion is new money in the past year -- Financial investigative journalist (and Mission Implausible producer) Adam Davidson illuminates Trump's business model: money-laundering, ass-kissing and rent-seeking. His zero-sum view of how things work doesn't just enrich himself, it damages overall world economic growth. He's more a post-Soviet oligarch than a Western capitalist. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
30 min
July 05 Did the CIA Poison the World’s Best Goalkeeper at the 1970 World Cup? (with Gabriel Gatehouse) - Part 2
- Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse returns to Mission Implausible with the strange premise behind his podcast Foul Play: the claim that the CIA poisoned England goalkeeper Gordon Banks before the 1970 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in order to help the Brazil to support Brazil’s government. It turns out that international sporting events are hotbeds of attempted subterfuge and quasi-governmental manipulation. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
32 min
June 28 Did the CIA Poison the World’s Best Goalkeeper at the 1970 World Cup? (with Gabriel Gatehouse) - Part 1
Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse returns to Mission Implausible with the strange premise behind his podcast Foul Play: the claim that the CIA poisoned England goalkeeper Gordon Banks before the 1970 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in order to help the Brazil to support Brazil’s government. It turns out that international sporting events are hotbeds of attempted subterfuge and quasi-governmental manipulation. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
36 min
June 21 Inside the Kremlin's Playbook: How Russia Really Works (with Michael Carpenter)
Former OSCE ambassador and Pentagon and NSC official Michael Carpenter argues Russia is weaker than it appears yet keeps being rescued by a West gripped by fear of escalation. And that the newly transactional, alliance-busting American foreign policy undermines the remarkable success of NATO. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
45 min
June 14 What the CIA Knows About Iran That Washington Keeps Getting Wrong (with Mark Fowler)
Former CIA Iran ops officer Mark Fowler joins Jerry and John to explain why Iran is one of the hardest targets on earth. From running agents and sources, Fowler has insight into the Iranian worldview: a persecuted Shia minority that sees walls behind every wall, craves American attention while calling us the Great Satan, and negotiates by treating signed contracts as opening bids. He separates the educated, reform-minded Iranian people from a regime led by men forged in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War and traces the IRGC's rise from teenage revolutionary militia to a corrupt, self-sufficient parallel army that controls Iran's missiles, ports, and economy. On the current conflict, Trump jumped in without preparation against an adversary that has spent a generation planning for exactly this. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
53 min
June 07 Swinging at Curveball: When You Want It Bad, You Get It Bad (with Bob Drogin)
In 2003, a single Iraqi refugee — codenamed Curveball — fabricated stories about Iraqi weapons. The U.S. intelligence community, desperate for sources after 9/11, laundered his claims into a National Intelligence Estimate produced in under three weeks. Bob Drogin, the award-winning journalist who broke the story and wrote the definitive book on it, joins John & Jerry to examine how political will, institutional groupthink, and bureaucratic cowardice allowed a con man’s tales to be treated as fact. But history repeats itself as now, in 2026, fuzzy claims about Iranian weapons undergirds another Middle East war. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
54 min
May 31 How Everyone Else Sees America (with Gabriel Gatehouse) - ENCORE
ENCORE EPISODE - Gabriel Gatehouse is a journalist and broadcaster and author of “The Coming Storm” that looks at Q Anon and the January 6th conspiracies. And he’s British! Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
42 min
May 24 The Hawaiian Cult that raised Tulsi Gabbard (with Christine Gralow) - ENCORE
In light of this week's resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, we're re-running our recent very illuminating episode about her. Also, check out John Sipher's timely piece on her in The Bullwark on May 19. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/tulsi-gabbard-office-shouldnt-exist-director-national-intelligence-9-11 Our current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was born into The Science of Identity Foundation, a secretive, authoritarian religious group led by guru Chris Butler. What are the beliefs of The SIF and how did they influence Gabbard's political career? Some believe that she's still under their direction, if not outright control. If so, the international criminal investigations of the organization, along with the local Hawaiian suspicions of it, raises serious national security questions for someone in that role. Then why does it appear that even a standard FBI background check of Gabbard was skipped? The reporting on Gabbard's origins had been sparse... until now. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
38 min
May 17 Hunting Weapons of Mass Destruction (with Andy Weber)
Nuclear weapons-usable uranium, biolabs for biological warfare, secret chemical facilities -- In Operation Sapphire, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber found and disposed of them. Where are the current threats? What does Iran still have? Biological threats may ultimately prove even more dangerous than nuclear ones. How do we control them? https://thesteadystate.org Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
43 min

About Mission Implausible

From the publisher's feed

Do you want to know the truth behind the world’s wildest conspiracy theories? Former CIA officers John Sipher & Jerry O’Shea try to determine where misinformation is coming from, when we’re being…