CLASSIC: Whatever happened to Julian Assange?

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.3 • 10.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few years back, Julian Assange was a household name in the West. The founder and face of Wikileaks, one of the world's most well-known destinations for leaks of classified information, Assange was hailed as a hero by some and a villain by others. And, whether you think he's a soldier in the war for transparency or some sort of super-villain, there's no denying that many people in power wanted him neutralized by any means possible. In our last episode, we left Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he'd been living, and fighting extradition charges, for several years. Then he seemed to disappear from the headlines. So what happened?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the show.
0:01.7	Fellow Conspiracy Realist, this is a classic episode while we were on the high seas.
0:06.7	We have a lot of folks that we call returning guests on stuff they don't want you to know because they come in and out of all kinds of stories.
0:16.1	And for several years over the course of this show, one guy who absolutely captivated our attention was the creator of WikiLeaks Julian Assange.
0:26.2	He was amongst one of the first dozen episodes that we ever made of this iteration of stuff they don't want you to know.
0:33.3	And he made several appearances on our video series on YouTube.
0:37.3	So do check out YouTube.com slash conspiracy stuff or at conspiracy stuff, if you will.
0:42.9	Well, and it's so funny that this just came up because I just got served a recommendation on one streaming app or another for the Alex Gibney documentary, We Steal Secrets, the story of WikiLeaks, which I had never got around to watching.
0:55.6	And it's on my list.
0:56.9	It reminded me of this.
0:58.3	And now, isn't there some kind of, like, he's in the wind a little bit right now?
1:02.0	What's going on with old boy?
1:04.1	Well, we know that he made it back to Australia after we did this episode in 2020.
1:11.9	And from statements by his brother, Gabriel Shepton, at the time, the word on the street was he was still adjusting, spending time with his family.
1:21.8	Because he went through some horrific stuff, right?
1:24.4	When he was locked up in the embassy, we know that he attended some pro-Palestinian
1:29.9	protest in the past year. He also went to some other notable events, but he's been kind of
1:36.6	keeping his head down. Yeah. Hey, do you think Julian Assange would ever talk to us? Would we want
1:43.2	to talk to him? I think I would
1:44.2	want to talk to him. Absolutely. Yeah, I can text him. Okay, Ben. Well, if you already got
1:49.0	the connect, bro, then make that call. Well, it's someone who says there, Julian Assange. I think I
1:54.1	just put up like that my phone. But, well, yeah, let's reach out because I think it'd be a fascinating
	...

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