📍Make sure to bookmark the post above—Zuckerberg just dropped some surprisingly out-of-character bombshells. Now, let’s dive into the clips!

It started with a strange but telling moment. One that pulled back the curtain on the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg. On This Past Weekend podcast, comedian Theo Von joked about wanting to dig a tunnel underground. What he didn’t expect was for Zuckerberg to casually admit he had already done it. “I do have an underground tunnel,” Zuckerberg said without hesitation. Theo, caught completely off guard, asked, “Do you really? In the USA?” Zuckerberg confirmed it was real and even bigger than Theo expected. “I have this ranch in Kauai,” he said. “There's this whole meme about how people are saying, I built this, like, bunker underground. It's like more of underground storage.” Theo, laughing, teased him: “Zucky got that bunky. What's under the ground? Just more water, right?” Zuckerberg brushed it off, but he didn’t deny the core of the rumor. “It's basically what you just said. It's sort of a tunnel that just goes to another building.” Not exactly a bunker, according to Zuckerberg, just an underground passage connecting parts of his remote island fortress. Well... Nothing to see here, right?

As the interview went on, Zuckerberg shifted gears and dropped a much bigger bomb. He admitted what millions of Americans are starting to feel: college isn’t preparing young people for the real world anymore, and the student debt crisis is heading straight for a reckoning. It’s a personal subject for Zuckerberg, who famously dropped out of Harvard to build Facebook, and now sees the system he left behind collapsing under its own weight. “I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs that they need to have today,” he said. “I mean, I think that that's like there's a big issue on that. And like, all the student debt issues are like really big issues.” He pointed to the crushing cost of a degree and the broken promises that come with it. “I mean, the fact that college is just so expensive for so many people and then, like, you graduate when you're in debt,” he said. “If it's not preparing you for the jobs that you need and you're kind of starting off in this big hole, then I think that's not good.” In Zuckerberg’s view, the system isn’t just broken — it’s on borrowed time. “There's going to have to be a reckoning,” he warned. “People are going to have to kind of figure out whether that makes sense.” And the taboo around questioning college? He says that’s starting to crumble too. “It's sort of been this taboo thing to say, like, maybe not everyone needs to go to college,” he said. “Because there's like a lot of jobs that don't require that.” “But I think people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like ten years ago.”

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And he wasn’t done yet. The conversation soon turned to another taboo—one that most tech CEOs wouldn't dare touch: the role of media elites in misjudging, mislabeling, and underestimating ordinary people. Strange coming from the man involved in censoring millions of Americans and the president himself, but nonetheless, Zuckerberg unleashed on the media. He slammed the entire idea that the public is too dumb to make their own decisions, a belief quietly pushed by many in the media. “Like, I've always been a person who really kind of believes that people are smarter than people think,” he said, “and, and I think in general, are able to make good decisions for their lives.” The real problem, Zuckerberg argued, isn’t the people — it’s the media’s failure to understand them. “And when they do things that like the media or whatever thinks don't make sense, it's generally because the media doesn't understand their life, not because the people are stupid.” In one of the sharpest moments of the interview, he flipped the whole “misinformation” narrative on its head. “Like if people are saying something that seems wrong, it's not usually misinformation. It's usually that you don't understand what's going on in that person's life.” And he didn’t stop there. Zuckerberg called out the deep-rooted arrogance that still runs through legacy media outlets. “I just think that there's like a certain kind of paternalism in, in some of the, like, mainstream narratives and some of the media narratives,” he said. But now, he hinted, the tide might finally be turning — because the so-called “experts” are losing their grip. “I think it's a little more receptive as maybe some of those cultural or media elite people are having a harder time predicting what's going to happen in the world. Maybe there's a little more humility of like, okay, maybe we don't understand all of this.”

Finally, Zuckerberg ended with a brutal warning for the tech world—one rooted in hard experience. The biggest mistake tech companies make? Thinking they're smarter than the people they claim to serve. Zuckerberg explained why arrogance toward everyday users almost always leads to disaster. “To me, the best predicting thing has always been like, all right, if you build something, do people actually think it's good?” he said. “Because like at some level, you know, it's like, I just believe that people are actually very smart and understand their lives very well.” He reiterated that the real test isn’t winning awards or impressing other executives. It’s whether real people actually find what you build useful. “If you're building something that is useful for them, then they will use it,” he said. “And if you're building something that is not useful for them, then they have other options. They will do something else.” Zuckerberg said trusting people’s judgment — not lecturing them — has been his greatest advantage. “I don't know, it's always served me well to generally have faith in people and believe that people are smart and can make good decisions for themselves.” But he also offered a serious warning. Whenever companies start thinking they know better than their customers, it’s the beginning of the end. “Whenever we try to, like, adopt some sort of like attitude of, oh, we must know better than them, it's like—we're like—we're the people building technology. That's when you lose, right?” And when you lose touch for long enough, the fall is brutal. “If you have that attitude for long enough, then you just become a shitty company and you lose and you lose and you lose and then you're irrelevant.” In the end, Zuckerberg said, it’s not the elites who shape the future, it’s the people. “I tend to just think that at the end of the day, yeah, I mean, I think people are smarter than a lot of people think, and I think ultimately drive the direction that society goes in.” Underestimate everyday people and you lose everything.

Watch the full conversation between @TheoVon and Mark Zuckerberg here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

@TheoVon Thanks for reading. If you appreciate this kind of reporting, follow me for more daily threads. —> @VigilantFox Shifting gears, you don't want to miss Leavitt and Homan going toe to toe with the MSM over the illegal alien crisis! https://x.com/VigilantFox/stat...