Guests - Ava Chen, Robert Paylor
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Wednesday's broadcast split cleanly in two. The first hour was China Watch Wednesday, where co-host Ava Chen used a fresh New York Times report on Chinese surveillance to argue that what the mainstream press is discovering now, the whistleblower movement she belongs to documented a decade ago. The second hour set politics aside entirely for a former national-champion rugby player who broke his neck, was told he would never move his hands again, and walked out of the hospital a year later. The bridge between them was a theme Kathleen Winn returns to often: that character is revealed in the moments when everything is on the line.
Ava Chen: The Surveillance State the West Is Just Now Noticing
Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China opened on an August 2nd New York Times report, sourced to a cybersecurity researcher based in Amsterdam, exposing a CCP database used to surveil Chinese citizens. Chen's point was that the story, while striking to Western readers, is a decade behind the curve. "This was in place for more than a decade," she said. "This is not new. People are hearing it in the mainstream for the very first time."
Her larger argument was that a regime willing to do this to its own people will do it to foreigners — and already has. The Times report, she said, focused on one city where a platform tracked some 400 foreign "VIPs," roughly 300 of them journalists, following their movements from the moment they left home: which train, which seat, which hospital, which medication, what beliefs. She traced the disclosure to Miles Guo, the movement's founder, who she said described this system in an October 2017 livestream, warning that every foreigner and every returning member of the Chinese diaspora is flagged as a "VIP" and monitored by a dedicated CCP intelligence unit that collects their DNA and personal data. Guo's knowledge, Chen said, came from direct observation: his family owned the Pangu Plaza complex near the 2008 Olympic venues, and he said the Ministry of State Security operated a monitoring center in the basement, where he watched footage of foreign hotel guests captured even in their bathrooms. "These foreigners never understood how evil the CCP is," Chen said, quoting Guo. The purpose, she argued, is leverage: "They are the king of blackmail."
Winn drew the domestic parallel she makes weekly — that being a communist was a disqualifier for office until recent decades, and that the country is now electing socialists — pointing to the Michigan primary win of Abdul El-Sayed and to Zohran Mamdani's New York, where she said the promised city grocery stores are already faltering. "We have to educate people on the consequences," she said, "and no better example... than to look at China and the CCP, or Russia, or North Korea, and even Iran."
Chen laid out what she called Guo's framework for the CCP's method of political warfare, which she said precedes any kinetic conflict: a tactic abbreviated "BGY." The "B," she said, stands for surveillance in its broadest sense — not just tracking movement but mapping a target's entire social network, relationships, secrets, physical and mental profile. The "G" is money and the "Y" is sexual compromise. The regime, she argued, uses these to cultivate influential foreigners: identifying a promising figure, opening doors to wealth and career success, and — because it already holds the person's compromising information — never needing to show its teeth. "They wrap everything in friendship," she said, so the target forgets the red flags. Winn named Eric Swalwell, Hunter Biden, and Gavin Newsom as figures she considers compromised.
Chen tied it to reporting from Natalie Winters, who she said had exposed a mechanism involving retired U.S. generals engaged through a forum called the Sanya Initiative around 2008 and 2009, some of whom, per a post Chen quoted, ended up advancing positions favorable to China. Chen stressed the mechanism remains in place. She also pointed to a second Winters report alleging Chinese state media paid a long list of American outlets — she named the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, and Chicago Tribune, and agreed the New York Times belonged on it — to push Beijing's agenda. Winn's throughline was President Trump's "fake news" framing: "You don't have to like it, but he's not wrong."
The betrayal by military officers drew the sharpest reaction from both. "They've gone through the system, and the fact that they would sell out their country that way — that's treasonous," Winn said, noting the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. She offered a personal confirmation of the recruitment pattern: her husband retired from Boeing in 2010 as vice president of the Apache program, and around 2015, once his non-compete expired, began getting calls from Chinese headhunters seeking to hire him for the Chinese government. He declined, she said, out of integrity. Chen argued the same playbook hollowed out German engineering firms — luring engineers to China with above-average salaries and wired-up special housing, then using compromise to keep them, and with them their technology. "You just have to look at those German brands," she said.
Chen closed with a warning about a new CCP exit-and-entry law, announced July 31st and taking effect September 15th. Beyond the national-security screening foreign media noted, she said the law does two things her movement's intelligence considers historic: it places over a billion people inside a single centralized, AI-driven system tied to their passports, tracking all travel under one authority; and it adds an AI risk-assessment system that can bar an individual — or their immediate family — from leaving. "If your immediate family member attempts to leave China, the system will automatically trigger an alert," she said. "They become a hostage." Winn said the subject deserved a full segment the following week, and both closed on faith. "Everything is in God's hands," Chen said. "I can only do what I can do... make sure the Western audience is aware of the things they were never told."
Robert Paylor: 'The One Thing You'll Always Have Control Over Is Your Mindset'
For the second hour, Winn changed gears completely, introducing Robert Paylor — a UC Berkeley graduate, former national-champion rugby player, and now a motivational speaker whose story has been told by Sports Illustrated, People, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was referred to the show by frequent guest Lisa von Geldern. "Every once in a while," Winn said, "I like to remind my listeners about stuff that's not political."
Paylor grew up near Sacramento and played at Jesuit High School, home to the nation's top-ranked rugby program. He walked on not knowing what a rugby ball was, earned MVP his first year, and won a national championship. Berkeley — with 35 national titles in the tournament's 46 years, a record he joked is bettered only by the Harlem Globetrotters — recruited him, and by his sophomore year he had earned a starting spot at lock, a tight-end body type meant, as he put it, "to do the dirty work."
On May 6, 2017, Cal was competing for its 32nd national championship against Arkansas State. Early in the match, in a formation called a maul, Paylor said opposing players made a series of illegal moves the referee didn't call — three players entering from the side, and most critically, an opponent putting his head in a headlock, pinning his chin to his chest. Normally an automatic ejection, he said; it wasn't called. When another player chopped him down at the legs, the top of his head hit the ground, his body kept moving forward, and his face slammed into his own sternum. "I snap my neck," he said, "and I immediately can't feel or move anything below my neck."
He didn't lose consciousness. Lying face-down, unable to wiggle a toe or close a hand, he could do nothing but scream — and the referee, he said, didn't stop play; the training staff sprinted out to barricade his body so no one would land on him. His parents were in the stands. "That was the saddest moment of my entire injury," he said, "knowing that they were watching their child." All he could say was that he loved them.
At the hospital in Santa Clara, after imaging, the doctor was blunt: what happened was bad, Paylor would never walk again, never move his hands, and the goal would be that one day he might bring a slice of pizza to his own face. He needed a potentially life-threatening spinal fusion surgery, and he had one hour to decide. A cradle Catholic, Paylor called his spiritual director in Berkeley and asked for a priest to administer last rites. The advice that came back, he said, has carried him ever since: "There's going to be so much that you can't control, but the one thing you'll always have control over is your mindset... and this injury can't take that away from you." He received the sacrament, his family prayed with him, and he went into eight hours of surgery.
He woke with his situation intact — able to lift his arms a couple of inches but unable to scratch his own nose. What followed, he said, was the fight for his life: unable to swallow, fed by a tube; sixty pounds lost in a month, most of it muscle; then double pneumonia, dangerous because his mostly-paralyzed diaphragm couldn't cough, requiring his mother and nurses to pound on his chest to clear his lungs. "I really felt like death was with me in the room, just waiting for me to quit."
He chose Craig Hospital outside Denver for rehab, and was struck that patients in situations as bad or worse than his greeted him with smiles. His doctor there offered no guarantees but promised everything modern medicine could give. Paylor went at it eight to nine hours a day. On April 13, 2018 — a year after arriving unable to move or feel anything below his collarbone — he rose into his walker and walked out the hospital doors. Three neurologists had told him to expect no return. He has since made a full recovery in his upper body, can walk 500 yards in his walker, ate the piece of pizza the doctor said he never would, and — by his own count — has marked 3,378 days since the injury, tracking each one.
The story became a family one on air. Von Geldern called in from the road, in tears, revealing she had known the Paylor family in Sacramento before the injury and had followed his recovery for nine years. Winn shared her own parallel: her son, at 17, was struck by a car going 55 miles an hour while running cross country, given no chance of survival, spent a month in a coma, and had to relearn to walk and talk. He is now 37, married, with children. Both she and Paylor spoke about bargaining with God in the moment of crisis — and about learning to submit to His will instead. Paylor had prayed for a complete, instantaneous physical recovery; what he received, he said, was something he now values more. "I wake up each day with joy, gratitude, and meaning," he said. "That is something so much more powerful than simply walking from point A to point B on my feet."
He does not pretend the hardship is gone. He hoists himself into a wheelchair each morning, can't walk the beach with his wife, and may never throw a football to his seven-month-old son — a goal of wheelchair independence he set on day one and, by the statistics, won't reach. But he refuses to call that failure. Meeting his wife, who chose to sign up for a life he said he wasn't sure he'd have chosen himself; becoming a father; traveling the world to speak — none of it, he said, would exist without the injury. "If I had the genie's magic lantern, one of my three wishes would not be to restart my life on May 6, 2017... I wouldn't wish it away."
His message, aimed squarely at an anxious election season, was that resilience isn't a question. "We've made it through 100 percent of our hard days," he said. "We don't make it through those hard days if we give up... As long as you have hope, and as long as you're still putting in effort toward your goals, you're still in the fight." His signature reframe for anyone tempted to dwell on a bad day: "Compared to what?" Paylor speaks mostly to corporate audiences and can be reached at robertpaylor.com. Winn promised to have him back.
She closed the show on her own anniversary of gratitude: sixteen years to the day since she became a grandmother, when Michaela Guadalupe was born — now a junior, a cheerleader, and the oldest of her nineteen grandchildren.