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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

The CIA Made a Bunch of Fake Websites, and Got People Killed

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.310.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ah, the Wild West days of the pre-bot internet! In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel return to the days of yore, when pretty much anyone could anonymously create a website for pretty much anything. As they discover, our friends at the CIA did, in fact, make a bunch of misleading websites for surreptitious communication. And this conspiracy worked until it didn't. When the web came unraveled, people died.

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events.

0:06.5

You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.

0:12.0

A production of IHeartRadie. Hello, welcome back to the show.

0:27.7

My name is Matt.

0:28.6

My name is Noel.

0:29.6

They call me Ben.

0:31.2

We're joined, as always, with our super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan.

0:36.1

Most importantly, you are you, you are here. That makes

0:40.1

this the stuff they don't want you to know coming to you live and direct and digital sometime

0:47.3

in November 2025, we hope. Guys, let's start it this way. Have you ever visited a sketchy website? Absolutely not.

0:57.9

Never. Not once. No, just dot orgs for Noel Brown. Never got a pop up. No, never got a virus.

1:05.3

Interestingly enough, guys, for this week's listener mail, I went to a dot org and it was completely fine. Then I went to a dot com of the same title, if that makes sense. Just switch out the ends. And the dot com one is supposedly the more legit site, but that's the one that I got a little message from my browser. Yeah. That's it. You sure you want to go here, pal? You sure about that, buddy?

1:28.3

You sure about that, so why?

1:29.6

And I said, no, I do not want to go to here. Oh, come on. You don't want all the dice, man. Yeah, you can click advanced. What wonder you let me go. So, this is hilarious to us, and hopefully to you as well, fellow conspiracy realists, because there has been a sea

1:46.2

change in recent years or in a recent decade back in the halcyon days of the internet, before

1:53.4

most folks began interacting with the World Wide Web through social media, which is true.

2:00.3

Most people now, when they say going online, they mean going to social media.

2:04.2

It's also where most folks get their news.

2:07.5

Before those big dogs took over everything with the dopamine casinos, the average web user found themselves in all sorts of niche,

2:18.3

unexpected rabbit holes, worldwide web, new frontier, wild west,

2:23.2

a vast horizon of all things weird.

2:26.1

Geocities, man.

...

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