8/11/26: China Shuts Down Billionaire, FP Defends Flock, Hidden AI Bailout

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2:08Turning now to China, this story absolutely captivated me and is really making me think a lot about their system versus ours. Let's put it up here on the screen, C1. So in China, the headline that The Wall Street Journal writes is, This billionaire becomes China's Charles Schwab. Quote, then Beijing cracked down. Leaf Li Futu brokerage has become a central target in the government's campaign to control the flow of Chinese money offshore. So Leaf Li said his inspiration came from Charles Schwab. Within a decade, he built a company that spanned all of China, Hong Kong, Asian markets, and the U.S.

2:43Like his American idol, Li pivoted from simple trading to managing clients' wealth through mutual funds and advisory services. Now, Li's ambition is colliding with Chinese authority. His company, Futu Holdings, has become a central target in the state's crackdown on the flow of Chinese money offshore. Authorities in May handed the NASDAQ-listed FUTU a$271 million penalty for offering brokerage services and mutual funds to customers in mainland China without a license, and that action included a personal fine for Li. The news obviously sent their share price down 30 % in a single day and now has a market cap of less than$15 billion.

3:24But the quote, the fall in the share prices knocked hundreds of millions of dollars off of Li's net worth, which is now at roughly 5.7. What they point to, though, generally, is that this regulatory action against this company is a way for the previously China's tech elite, as they explained, were able to list their companies in Hong Kong and then mint fortunes offshore beyond the reach of Chinese authorities. What this does is they have completely shut that down, any foreign flight of capital. And they said that they will continue to tax offshore trusts previously, which is a very popular tool for a lot of these Chinese investors.

4:01But the reason why that they went after this company specifically and like kind of the story of this entire takedown is that Chinese authorities at the end of the day are like, no, you do not get to offer securities and tax advantages to a bunch of our rich people without suffering the consequences and operating under a license. And so, you know, before that, this guy was like a global celebrity. And the Wall Street Journal takedown really of this is like this is the story of there's a lot of Chinese billionaires which basically were inspired to recreate many of the rapacious capitalist industries of the United States.

4:39Literally, the guy says Charles Schwab was my idol, right? They did the same with Google. They did the same with Uber. I think it's called Didi over there. Like, you know, basically because China would ban our services, they would just recreate them. But what the Chinese state saw is that those fundamentally were threats to the power of the state. And so while they let them grow and initially they were happy with a lot of their wealth accumulation, they eventually come to see the Jack Ma's and Alibaba's and this Futu and all of these other billionaires as tools of like a globalist class, which are fundamentally loyal to capital and to the rest of the world than to the state.

5:19And so what they've done is they've come in and cracked down dramatically and sent a message to their entire billionaire class. It's like, you work for us. And whatever we tell you to do, when we tell you to jump, you're going to say, how high? I mean, you know, it's complicated. Like, you know, we want freedom, et cetera. But like, how can you not admire? Like the system where you've got these filthy rich people. All they're doing is just helping, you know, like this company, it seems like a big part of their sell was just like, hey, if you're rich, let me get your money off into a tax haven.

5:51And they came, they're like, oh, that's not happening at all. And they just shut it down completely. Yeah. And they all snap into line. Like, that's about preserving the primacy of the state. Now, obviously, there's an undemocratic state. But the tool and the mechanism of that is something which you can't help but admire the seriousness which they take their endeavor of sovereignty. They're like, we run shit. The government is a person ultimately that you will be accountable to. You do not get to create these private nexies of wealth, which ultimately will challenge our authority. And like, that's how it should be, in my opinion.

6:24You can't help but admire the lack of corruption that this indicates. Because you could not imagine a service that not only was run by a powerful, very wealthy person, but then is servicing all of the powerful, wealthy Americans that our government would come in and say, oh, no, you can't do that. We're shutting this all down. Sorry. Entire billionaire class would never happen here because of our own democratic failures and the way that oligarchy, the oligarchy has been allowed to buy our political system and money has been equated with speech. So you look at that, you're like, wow, that's possible for you.

6:59That is wild, regardless of whether you think it's the right policy or not. But to your point, it's not just that they were moving their money into tax havens. It's also that they were investing their money in other global companies outside of China. So, you know, they were buying stocks in American AI companies. A lot of this was heavily invested in, you know, the AI American stock boom. And so this is also, no, you can invest. You can invest in Chinese companies here at home. That's what you are allowed to do. And we're going to actually enforce it and make sure that that is the case. They've also instituted policies, not just in this regard, but to make sure that their top graduates are not, by and large, going into Wall Street-type financial engineering, that they are much more focused on STEM and technology.

7:43And as a result, the number of engineers that they graduate every year vastly exceeds. I mean, it's not even close. It's multiples of times more than what we graduate here in the United States. And then that also has led to, OK, now you've got the best and the brightest minds not going in to create some new exotic derivative that basically crashes the economy and exploits poor people. They're going to develop technology. And that's why China, on almost every technological frontier development, is leading us. I was just saying in humanoid robotics, they have like 98 percent of the market. Like we're not even competing there.

8:17The only thing we focus on is AI, where our frontier labs are a little bit, a little bit ahead of them. But even that, you ask, how long is that going to be the case? There's nothing that says that we're going to maintain that lead forever. So it's just a completely different orientation and priorities of their political systems. The crackdown is meant to funnel Chinese individual investors into licensed platforms where the people can trade only on China's domestic stock exchanges. Citizens are also permitted to invest overseas, but mainly through government-approved methods that return any profits in yuan.

8:50So they're like, look, sure, you can invest abroad. It will be under a domestically licensed platform. The profit has to be delivered in one because we don't want currency problems. Again, like what they're focused on principally is sovereignty. At the end of the day, like that's what our biggest problem is here. Like if we have the biggest tension, and we've always had this, is between the capital billionaire globalist class, which cares much more about making money than about their own citizens. That has always been our dance with democracy and with capitalism. Part of what we've seen over the last 25 years is many of these people believe of themselves as transnational entities of which their only job is to preserve shareholder value.

9:32And they don't give two shits about the American worker. And the only person that that American worker can look to is their government to make sure that those people are kept in check and to make sure that some of this extraordinary profit will also have ancillary benefit to the median American beyond your 401k going up when 50 % of the country doesn't have 401k. Compare it then to our system, which kind of looks like the old Chinese system. Let's put C2 up here on the screen. Here's Trump. This is the latest story from Trump.

10:31Quote, two years earlier, apparently, quote, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under investigation for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small crypto startup. Out of nowhere, he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from World Liberty Financial, dropping a total of$100 million to a firm called Aqua One, kept it quiet for months other than briefly speaking as Mr. Bobby on an audio stream on X. However, as they dig into, the curious case of Zhao illustrates the ease with which buyers from unknown backgrounds' motivations can use the anonymity of crypto to shower Mr.

11:11Trump with money. The president's recent financial disclosure form shows he collected$1.4 billion from crypto businesses last year, the majority of it from anonymous sources. it is not even clear how closely they scrutinized his past and a money laundering investigation in England with publicly available information as were portions of Zhao's troubled business history were public record at the time that they decided to accept his money. Now, look, to be clear, like he did give the money. He did not respond to a request for comment. We don't know about pay for play. I'm not really sure why anybody gives somebody$100 million as the president of the United States for no reason, just my opinion, whenever it comes to businesses.

11:55I just saw today, you know how Trump's company is selling the$100 ,000 a month for first access to his true social market moving posts? They have 10 customers already. So 10 times 100 ,000 a month, that's a healthy little profit line that you've created there purely off of your own information and tool of power in the state. Like this is what China was like in the 1990s. And it's like we've seen a reverse of what that system is looking like. And this dude, no one knows where this money came from. He had left a rap sheet of failed businesses, was basically deported from the UK because his visa had expired.

12:37And then he had this sort of money laundering allegations hanging over his head. And they were like, no, you got to go. He turns back up in Dubai and suddenly out of nowhere. And we have no idea where the money comes from is flush with this hundred million dollars to give to World Liberty Financial. And of course, Trump and the sons and the Whitcoffs are also involved in this. They don't they don't ask a single question. This thank you for the money, sir. Amazing doing business with you and keeping it moving right along. And as the public, we have no idea what this man expects to get from that$100 million or whoever he is representing, whoever he is the front person for.

13:15We have no idea what strings this money is coming with. And this is just another day under the Trump regime. This sort of story, you could literally tell this story every day of the week of some utterly shameless level, corrupt, skeezy deal. And much of it has to do with crypto. in terms of the massive amount of increase in wealth, the billions that he has been able to accumulate just since coming back into power in Trump 2.0. So very extraordinary. There's another story we wanted to highlight here, which is wild. So we covered before. Dear to our hearts. Jared Kushner and Ivanka were on the yacht.

13:57You can't even tell this story without just sounding anti-Semitic. On a Rothschild yacht and discovered, like they're Christopher Columbus, this island, Albanian island, that, oh my God, it would make Ivanka's dreams come true to develop into some sort of luxury property. And she's talking about this thing we played the video before. Well, the people of Albania were like, no, this is our island. We don't want you there. And as part of this island deal, they are also buying property on this nearby peninsula. And now we're finding out more about the incredibly sketchy, to say the least, characters who are involved in this transaction that Kushner, quote unquote, bought this land from.

14:41Put this up in the screen from the Wall Street Journal. Okay, the suspected gangster causing headaches for Kushner's Albania deal. I won't go through all of the ins and outs here, but the TLDR is this dude, Artur Shehu, is accused of not only being a money launderer, not only of having forged fake documents to claim that he owns this peninsula land that the locals say he does not actually own, and this is apparently a common problem, by the way, in Albania. He also is an accused drug trafficker and human smuggler. That's who Kushner is, quote-unquote, buying this Albanian property for. So just the sketchiest, most corrupt dealings you can possibly imagine, whether it's here, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's through crypto, whether it's through Trump and the pardon, the pardon for sale shop that he has set up in his second administration.

15:37The list goes on and on. But no surprise that you've got this kind of incredibly sketchy gangster who is deeply enmeshed in this Albanian situation. As you said, my favorite part of the story, by the way, is what you highlighted, is that one chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu's lawyers in 07 by presenting property officials with a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record while translated from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted the original owner and inserted his name instead. Court later found. That is apparently how property is disputed in Albania, which is incredible. Incredible. All right, let's get to the next one.

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18:14One of them being Barry Weiss's Free Press. Let's take a listen. Do you ever feel like you're from watch? That's the panic behind a new fear sweeping across America. People are freaked out about surveillance from our employers, our nanny cams, and our phones watching our every move. And right now, this anxiety is being taken out with electric saws and cans of spray paint on tools used by law enforcement to keep us all safe. The target? Flock safety cameras. In upstate New York, someone cut down a flock safety camera with an electric saw. In Oakland, California, another was covered in kink. And in Idaho, someone rammed one with their truck.

18:47And in good old Florida, a man just sits in his lawn chair with a cardboard held up for the lens. Since January, roughly 23 cities have canceled their contracts or shut off their block camera over a fourth amendment. There's even an open source intelligence website, D-Flock, that's finding these cameras so people know exactly where to vandalize them. Here's what's actually under attack. In 2025 alone, the system helped lowly 10 ,000 missing ways. About 27 people a day or about one every hour. Over 40 % of agencies said Flock helped recover over half of the stolen vehicles in their jurisdiction.

19:20In Indiana, an infant abducted at a shopping center was found in under two hours. In Ohio, a missing girl was located in under 30 minutes. And this is the tool that people are treating like the enemy. It is fair to have concerns about how companies use and track our data, but that's not what these cameras are for. To be blunt, they're not interested in you. Unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or someone who intends to do harm. They're not interested in you unless, what is it, you need to comply. If you've got nothing to hide, then why do you worry? This is vintage privacy arguments from the war on terror era.

19:52But this is where it actually bears investigation. It's like, okay, are these claims even true? Let's put the next one up here on the screen. And we've gone through some of this before. one in three alerts wrong. High error rates and data concerns force cities to drop flock. A 32 % LAPD false positive rate and immigration data fears have pushed 82 contracts across 28 states to collapse. They say that an LAPD audit reveals that flock safety cameras produced a 32.3 % false positive stolen vehicle alert rate, and at least 82 municipalities have canceled them. More than 5 ,000 cities now currently have Flock cameras, which are scanning license plates.

20:31Again, most residents never voted for it. 30 localities apparently just deactivated them since early 2025, and that number continues to grow. But I feel like the LAPD in particular, being one of the largest, what is the second largest city in the nation, being one of those who is going to come out and say, hey, purely based on business reasons, I'm not going to put morality in the LAPD. I don't think those two things to go together. They're not like worried about privacy or any of that. But for them, it's pure business. They're like, yeah, we used it and it got a false positive rate for stolen vehicle.

21:02We've covered some of the stories here. Terrifying incidents of people being pulled over and finding themselves like either held at gunpoint or others being accused of false or having a stolen vehicle. We covered previously the guy who drives cars like for a living for dealership plates. He got surrounded by police on some sort of a false incident. And I think there's just like a bigger question. Like she talks about like, oh, these companies are not interested in you. But they do have all of the data. So they are interested. And also it's not the government that has the data. It's the private company themselves.

21:32They claim, you know, that they have to abide by X, Y, and Z privacy record. Is there an audit of it? Like what are the internal controls? What exactly, what, you know, recourse do I have as a citizen to make sure that that is not being improperly used? And this is everywhere. She also says DFLOC is an organization for people to vandalize. Again, by that definition, Waze is a terrorist tool because I know where every cop is on I-95. That framing was so dishonest. That's what I mean, right? So they're like, oh, by just knowing where it is, that in and of itself is a tool of vandalism. I'm sure cops hate it when we mark them on Waze.

22:09We do it because we don't want to get a speeding ticket. That doesn't make you a terrorist. Right. Right? Yeah, of course. And all of this has required obfuscation and hiding from people what is actually happening in their own towns. So they do see D-Flock as, you know, the CEO of the company who later apologized, called it a terroristic organization because it is providing people with just transparency and information about what is happening so that they can politically organize and act on it. It is so dishonest in her little, you know, vertical video to not talk about any of the instances of misuse that have been documented.

22:48I'm not even talking about the false positives where police really think they got the bad guy and then they come and we'll show you one in a minute and create very dangerous situations. By the way, not to mention this is a waste of police resources because they're going after the wrong person. Meanwhile, the person, whoever they're trying to get is getting off scot-free. I'm talking about the 50 police officers who've been charged with abuse of this system using this to stalk. Tell me that Flock is not interested in you unless you're a kidnapper or a thief, etc. Tell that to the woman who was stalked by her abusive ex, whose child was also stalked by the abusive ex, whose future partner is also stalked by.

23:22I mean, so it's such incredibly dishonest and selective framing. She also uses the stats that come directly from the company. Just this is like basically a flop camera press release that they put together for the free press. To give you another example here of, you know, a really dangerous situation because of a flock error. This is a local news story about the wrong person being aggressively pulled over on an interstate, cops jumping out, guns drawn. And it wasn't even the right person. Let's take a look at that. This is D4. Good morning. Yeah, quite the mix up. Brookfield police say they pulled over a car because a flock camera flagged it for connection to a Milwaukee homicide investigation.

24:07Well, it turns out quite the mix up, not just wrong person, but also wrong car. Take a look again at that video that you see here. You can see multiple squads on I-94 in Waukesha County. Officers with guns drawn and a passenger sticking their hands out the window. Police pulled over the car after a flat camera flagged it again for Milwaukee homicide. But when Brookfield police called Milwaukee, Milwaukee said they no longer needed the car or the people inside. So officers let them go. That's according to Brookfield police. Wow. How long until this gets someone killed? I mean, if you're a normal person, it reminds me of the ICE stops with like the, you know, unmarked vehicles where people think they're being carjacked.

24:52Like if you're a normal person, look, these are marked cars. So to be fair here, but you're not expecting to have this aggressive. You're on an interstate and they're pinning you in and coming out guns drawn. Most people don't know how to react in that situation. You make one wrong move. Next thing you know, you've got a person who's killed. and the death on the conscience of the officers too, by the way, all because of the stupid tech that got something wrong. It is a very disturbing situation. And I get that there's no doubt they're helping to solve some crimes. There's no doubt about it. You're right.

25:23But you have to ask the question, where do you draw the line? Because that logic will work forever of, okay, well, if we just put cameras on every street, if we just put cameras in every building, if we just put cameras, you know, activate your phone camera in every house, then no one could ever get away with anything. And then they'd have 100 percent compliance with the law. Is that worth it to you? So where are you going to draw the line? And I think many Americans at this point are drawing the line before we get to flat cameras. There was a man who was arrested in West Virginia for vandalizing a flat camera.