CHEW THE FAT with Lee Hagger · The Lee Hagger

S12:EP1 - pt1 / PRIDE OF BRITAIN Winner MANNY SINGH KANG Talks Of His Extreme Challenges To Raise Money For Charity / How Meditation And His Faith Keeps Him Humble And Focused

April 8, 2026·1 hr 24 min·7 clips

Manny discovered his five-year troll, then invited him for coffee — and the troll now runs his own fundraisers.

1. CHEW THE FAT host Lee Hagger interviews Manny Singh Kang, Pride of Britain Award winner and serial endurance fundraiser, at the London Waterloo BrewDog podcast studio. 2. Manny Singh Kang is a Wolverhampton-born railway worker and charity fundraiser who has raised money primarily for dementia causes and won the regional and overall Pride of Britain Award for the West Midlands. 3. The episode's core question is how Manny generates the sustained will to do extreme physical and social challenges and what philosophical framework makes that possible. 4. Manny's current challenge is walking from Molineux, Wolverhampton, at 6am Friday to Greenwich Park — an estimated two and a half days — then running the London Marathon as his sixth time completing it, without any sleep between the walk and race. 5. He outlines a philosophy of infinite inner energy: it starts from an immeasurable place, costs nothing, cannot be depleted, and is equally available to all humans — it is what underpins resilience, endurance, and daily generosity. 6. Manny's father arrived in Wolverhampton in 1960 as a 12-year-old from a remote village in northern India, facing severe poverty and racism, once losing a week's wages on a Friday and having no food for the remainder of the week. 7. Manny was born in Wolverhampton in 1973 and describes a lonely childhood — no specific trauma, but persistent confusion about identity and difficulty socialising — which eventually gave way to football as a social entry point via friends who took him to Wolves games in the 1980s. 8. On racism in football, Manny notes that attending Wolves games in the 1980s meant hearing regular abuse directed at players, but there was no outlet or safe way to speak up at the time. 9. Manny was trolled across multiple banned accounts for roughly five years; when a mutual contact revealed the troll's identity, Manny's response was to send a coffee invitation rather than a confrontation, eventually receiving a message in which the troll disclosed personal grief about his child and his own experiences. 10. The troll now runs his own fundraising initiatives; Manny attributes the resolution to a Sikh martial tradition of bandaging and nursing a defeated enemy after defending against oppression. 11. A six-year-old girl Manny encountered at an organisation in India — an orphan whose mother died at her birth and whose father was killed by a lorry at age three, owning two sets of clothes and eating the same food daily — produced a smile Manny could not match despite his own house, car, job, and family. 12. That encounter in India, which Manny has visited over 100 times in roughly 20 years and visits five times a year for volunteering, is the moment he identifies as reordering his relationship to material ambition. 13. Manny uses a calculator metaphor to explain net worth to a young person: breathing, smiling, listening, and working hard cannot be entered into a calculation and cannot be summed, making him already the richest person he will ever be. 14. He presented his management interview at Network Rail with a slide of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and the question "who are you" — asking the three interviewers to answer it first — and was given the role. 15. Manny connects Sikh philosophy specifically to the idea that the word "god" is a placeholder for a universal energy force present identically in every human being, and says to Lee on camera "you are my god" as a direct expression of this. 16. On King Charles III, Manny responds to a comment about royal wealth by listing the personal losses — a wife killed in a car crash, both parents in the same year, cancer, family estrangement — and says the king still had to use the same internal bravery and resilience as anyone else to continue. 17. The episode is a long-form interview, recorded in person, with a casual warm-up segment before the formal introduction, and Lee allows Manny extended monologues while offering short personal disclosures about his own football fandom and anxiety. 18. The energy is generous and unhurried, occasionally philosophical to the point of abstraction but anchored by specific autobiographical moments. 19. People drawn to stories of endurance, charity fundraising, Sikh philosophy, or immigrant family resilience would find this episode directly engaging. 20. Listeners who prefer tightly edited content or are uninterested in personal spiritual frameworks may find the pace slow.

As heard by us

Charity, faith, and a baby-name riff keep the conversation grounded.

Manny Singh Kang turns a charity challenge into something larger: a reflection on what makes life feel worth holding onto. He talks about doing the London Marathon for the sixth time, starting from Molyneux, walking to Greenwich Park for the start line, and then running it…

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Why you'd press play

For a charity marathon challenge that turns into faith talk, hard truths, and a proper human reset.

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