Chris Hare
speaker
922 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Chris Hare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I explored, as any person does, regardless of their age, I explored lots of different philosophies that I thought may provide the answers with this tension, what I want to be, what I need to be. And ultimately, what's given me the most fulfillment has been a sort of vitalist Nietzschean sort of approach. Nietzsche, in my opinion, is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he accrues almost religious-like deference in the next century or two. And one of Nietzsche's most important tenets is to live life with vitality
which means, contrary to a lot of different religions, to live it with energy in the moment, to think about what gives you pleasure and what gives you joy in the present right now, and to use the past and the future only as guiding posts, but mainly to think of what maximizes your human experience today.
And this is a philosophy, I think, in today's world, which is so full of challenges, I can't even begin to talk about them, a very helpful philosophy. So I think aspire toward values that are important, but accept that you're not perfect and you'll never be able to embody those values. Just aspire towards them and try and do things that will make you happy, even if you fail at them.
And I want to end with one analogy, which I think summarizes this philosophy in some way. When I was really young, at the start of the 24 Hour Race, the types of people I looked up to were like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, people who had transcended the hierarchy of impact to the point where everybody knew who they were and everybody had experienced some benefit from these people.
And I thought, okay, if there's a hierarchy of giving back, it starts with family and friends, it elevates to a community. And then finally it's maybe something global. I think today I realized I had it the wrong way round. You know, the easiest thing, even though it's not easy at all. And people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have my utmost respect.
is to create this kind of incredible but kind of minute change to people's lives versus the hardest thing is to look at the people around you today, your family, your friends, and to help them in meaningful ways, like beyond just a phone call, which I think is important, don't get me wrong, but to actually invest in them and invest in their future. And I can think of people who...
said small things or did small or big things for me that will be forever more important in my life than any Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These are just people I met and encountered briefly or have known for a long time who made huge and lasting impacts. And all of us have that opportunity today.
All of us have that opportunity today to look at the people that we know and make a difference in their lives in a positive way. And I think that's the paragon of the human experience. The paragon is being someone who's not always a nice guy, right? Sometimes it involves giving tough love, but who can provide that value, provide that feedback to the people closest to you.
And I think you can live a very satisfied life just by doing that.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thank you, Vince. They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice. But in this case, I think we can both agree that's a good thing. And I'm very excited to be chatting with you again for a second time with a decade that doesn't really feel like it should have been a decade later.
Sure. So I'm a third generation Hong Konger. My grandparents moved here in 1960. My grandmother's family had been in Indonesia as Dutch colonists for something like 300 years. Her father and her uncles were all in government in the last colonial government of Indonesia. And of course, after World War II, they moved back to the Netherlands.
And my grandmother was half Indonesian and she never quite felt like she fit in. So when she met my grandfather and he proposed, she agreed on the condition that they would find their way back to Asia. And sure enough, a few years later, they moved to Hong Kong and got married in Hong Kong just a few days after moving in.
And less than a few years later, less than a year later, my mother was born here. And I was actually a similar product. So my mother, who grew up in Hong Kong and went to school here, went to the Netherlands, found herself a hub and basically said, if you want to marry me, you've got to find your way back to Hong Kong. And that was my father, who was studying medicine at the time.
For him to get qualified as a doctor, he had to go spend a year of training in London. And I have been there. Be Catholic accident, I think is the way to put it. But within a few months of my birth, we were all back in Hong Kong. And the rest of my siblings, I'm one of four, were all born in Hong Kong. So I grew up really at the tail end of Hong Kong's colonial era.
And I had, for all intents and purposes, a really happy childhood and upbringing. I got to the age of about 13 or 14, and then I went to school in the UK. I went to a small boarding school with a military background.
While there, one of the more defining events in my life happened, and that was the passing away of a childhood friend of mine who had a rare congenital illness. At the age of 14, I didn't have money. I didn't have resources.
I didn't have any talents to contribute to his legacy, but I figured what's something I could do that would encourage people with resources, with money to maybe join that fight. And so on a typically cold, rainy English day, me and a few friends were sitting together talking about, of course, our summer plans.
And it was a joke and kind of in a serious way, I suggested, why don't we walk across England? And I remember all of my friends laughing lightheartedly, except for one who looked at me dead straight and said, let's do it.
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