Two IPs In A Pod
Brilliant inventions, fresh product designs, iconic brand names and artistic creativity are not only the building blocks of successful business - they deliver a better world for us all. But these valuable forms of intellectual property must be protected in order to flourish. We are the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys - the UK's largest intellectual property organisation. Our hosts Lee Davies and Gwilym Roberts chat with entrepreneurs, creatives, patent attorneys and the occasional judge about how patents, trade marks, designs and copyright can improve our lives and solve problems for humanity.
Two IPs In A Pod
INTA San Diego Pubcast Special with... Michael McLaughlin
Lee and Gwilym were joined by Michael McLaughlin, Patent Attorney at McLaughlin IP Pte. Ltd., for this INTA Pubcast special. Ever wonder what happens when engineering expertise meets international IP law across multiple continents? Michael's twenty-year journey from electrical engineer to Singapore patent firm founder offers a fascinating glimpse into the possibilities of a global IP career.
Massively. I remember, I still remember to this day, you know, flying into Tinging Airport and there's a driver waiting for me and I came out of the airport to like a five or a six-way junction and there's a guy standing in the middle of this traffic whizzing left, right, back forth, every which direction you can imagine and a few you couldn't imagine as well. And there's this guy. And there's this guy. Lee Davis and Gwilym Roberts are the two IPs in a pod.
Speaker 2:And you are listening to a podcast on intellectual property Brought to you by the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys. To our peace in the sea, to our peace in the sea.
Speaker 3:So, Gwilym, interesting name you've got there. I was quite impressed that we were having a conversation earlier on a different podcast and someone immediately said, oh, is that a Welsh name? No, it's good, it's a good spot. It's a good spot, but no one looked at my badge and saw Davis and said is that a Welsh name?
Speaker 4:That's true, that's true, yeah, yeah, because you are.
Speaker 2:Welsh, yeah, how do?
Speaker 3:you identify. No, I do identify more Welsh than I am. I did one of those DNA testy things Right and was quite surprised because I came back as 79% Welsh. Is there a gene for Welshness? There is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, is there a gene for Welshness? There is, yeah, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, it's more kind of that.
Speaker 3:you're of that kind of side of the country, Right oh, I see, and I've got about 10% Scottishness in me and I have no idea where it comes from, because I don't know anyone in my family who's ever Scottish at any point in time.
Speaker 4:So back to the name thing. It was quite impressive wasn't it in Wales she said she wasn't born in Wales for the microphone, so where are you from?
Speaker 3:where is your Welshness from Aberystwyth?
Speaker 4:born in Aberystwyth, my dad I think we talked about this before my dad's from Wrexham. That's been a long time ago that's from Wrexham which very topical now and everyone knows where they are which is one of the oddest things ever.
Speaker 3:I was born, in fact, until Gavin and Stacey came along, because I'm a Barry Islander, yeah that's tricky, but no, it's all very Celtic.
Speaker 4:We're in an Irish pub, of course. We are indeed yes, and, as we're about to find out, we have a guest who? Who's also not English? Who's not English? I don't think so, but I'd be very surprised if you suddenly say you're English. I'm known as Michael to many, but I'm proud, I think, to be allowed to call him Mick from old time's sakes. But I've known you, mick, for do we know? 22 years, that's very specific I mean you're looking younger now than you did then.
Speaker 1:I must have looked really rough before.
Speaker 4:We thought it would be interesting to have you on years. I mean, you're looking younger now than you did then. I must have looked really rough before. Yeah, no, we thought it'd be interesting to have you on because you've done quite an interesting career and in particular, you've done kind of a double continent career. We don't have that many people who know about Asia the way that you probably do, so we thought we'd get you along find out about your history and then hear about what's happening out east right now.
Speaker 4:Well, if you want to know about happening. I'm the wrong guy. Ah, you make it happen. That's what's going on. Yeah, so as I recall, you didn't start in patents, is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, my degree is engineering electrical engineering and like a good electrical engineer, I went off to work as one for some time. Engineering. And like a good electrical engineer, I went off to work as one for some time, after some years in the. In doing that I thought, okay, it's time for a change. I had a friend who was a patent attorney straight out of university talking to him one night and we'd had some discussions about patent attorney as a career, as a profession before and this time I really I was ready. I was ready for it this time. So, yeah, I wrote off to a few I was ready for it this time so yeah, I wrote off to a few places.
Speaker 1:It was good enough to land a trainee patent attorney ship and that was yeah, that was 25 years ago. I've been doing this 25 years and then, as you say so, I spent training and qualified in London, including time under this fine gentleman here at Kilburn Strode Really Under him, as in actually that's how we operate at Kilburn. Strode Wow.
Speaker 4:Yeah, are you in charge of people? It's a physical hierarchy.
Speaker 1:This man. I think it's fair to say this man hired me you mean he wasn't it?
Speaker 4:as I recall, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I must admit, happy at Kilburn and Strode. But a very long story very short. My wife is Chinese originally. She's been a British citizen more than 20 years. We decided for a move back to Asia and something came up in Singapore and we went for it. So, yeah, did you meet her in China? I did. I was working before I was as an engineer. I was in China working as an engineer and I met her there and, yeah, eventually she came back to the UK. By this time I was in London training as a patent attorney and we stayed there five, six, yeah, six or seven years before deciding to move out to Asia.
Speaker 4:Okay, what was it like? So that was China in the late 90s, early 2000s. It was a bit of a different story from now. I'm guessing it's very different.
Speaker 1:We were in a city called Tianjin, beijing, near Beijing, okay, and out then it was dusty and dirty and polluted and not particularly fragrant. It was a fabulous city. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. I mean it was eyes wide open, massive experience, really massive experience. Now it's relatively genteel.
Speaker 1:We were there about a year and a half ago. Right, I mean, it's unrecognizable. Okay, you know so. All that, you know it still has days where the pollution is pretty bad and other days where it's just beautifully clear. Yeah, you know so. But you know you don't have the dirt and the dust in the same way that you had. You know it's. You know it's become a very sophisticated city. I want to think about city. I must be quite a bit culture shocked, though, going back then Massively. I remember, I still remember to this day, you know, flying into Tinging Airport and there's a driver waiting for me and I came out of the airport to like a five or a six way junction and there's a guy standing in the middle of the traffic whizzing left, right, back forth, every which direction you can imagine and a few you couldn't imagine as well.
Speaker 1:And there's a guy, there's a security, our police officer standing in the middle of the road looking utterly disinterested. I'm like what's he doing there? And I realised there's some guy squatting in the middle of the junction, just hitting the road with a big hammer, and I'm thinking, oh my God, where am I? And it was just like here we go and you strap yourself in, and it was. I must admit, it was just fun, I loved it. It was fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 4:so, yeah, because I went out to Asia in the 70s to this similar kind of cultures, like actually quite interested in this bit of the story, funnily enough. So things like um, how many, how many kind of Western engineers were you in a mixed team? How did it work?
Speaker 1:so we were. So I used to work for big construction companies. They would design and build pharmaceutical plants, fine chemical plants, um, and I was out there for the. There was a construction of a big pharmaceutical plant going on in a place called sujo, which is not you know sort of in the shanghai vicinity. Yeah, yeah, it's probably about 250 kilometers, but for China that's in the hood. But the client in that big pharma company they decided to engage a design institute and they were in Tianjin. So I was the lead electrical engineer on the job and got shipped out there with the lead instrumentation engineer, the lead mechanical engineer, the lead process engineer and so on. We went out there kind of to supervise things.
Speaker 1:So there was a few. There was a big Motorola plant there, so there was quite a few Americans. There was a Spanish not Spanish, swedish pharmaceutical company out there, so you would occasionally come across a few of their guys. But yeah, I mean, westerners were few and far between and you'd be walking around the streets and, frankly, you'd attract a lot of attention. Yeah, you know, like little kids are running up to you and shout hello, hello. You shout back to them in hello in chinese. And if you thought this was the funniest thing ever it was. It was really just an amazing experience. That's cool.
Speaker 4:I guess I'll move on for a minute, but I've just said the era, Interestingly, that I guess was when China was really trying to reestablish itself as a kind of high end industrial setup rather than you know, just cheap plastic and stuff. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:So I mean, this was like the pharma plant was. So I went out there on what was supposed to be a two-year job, but the part of the project I was working on got cancelled after six months. So, in effect, I was there just long enough to get myself a wife, basically. But yeah, I mean this is really like fine pharmaceutical processing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:There was a primary plant and what they continued on with in the end was a secondary plant, a packaging plant. So they ended up they were shipping in like pharmaceutical product to be packaged, instead of manufacturing or making the pharmaceutical product there as well.
Speaker 4:Then you head to London. Then and again, you're not English. We've established this very clearly. Why London? Why not back up to Scotland? You're not English, we've established this very clearly why London?
Speaker 1:Why not back up to Scotland? Just really following the opportunities, the kind of work that I did at that time, I always seemed to be ending up in places that I didn't really want to be. I finally managed to go myself a job in London which I was over the moon about, and then six months later I just you know what I want to do something different, you know. So it was then about.
Speaker 4:That time was that, alan, that you'll make yes good friend Mr MacDougall now of.
Speaker 1:Matheson Squire. I know the name, hello Alan. So Alan was in my class at university. We studied electrical engineering together, so, yeah, he was the one that said why don't you give this a try? And so here I am now and your wife came.
Speaker 4:I love this like. This is your life, isn't?
Speaker 3:it by the way. Yeah, we're gonna bring you a book come on out, alan.
Speaker 4:Come on out, alan. My parents-in-law in the back, so your wife came over.
Speaker 1:She followed you eventually, yeah, um, probably, oh, a year and a half, two years later, something like that she finally came, finally came over to stay. She came over to visit once or twice. She finally came over to stay.
Speaker 2:She came over to visit once or twice.
Speaker 1:She finally came over to stay and so we eventually set up. We had an apartment in Ealing. It was all very nice little. I must admit I quite enjoyed living in Ealing, so coming into, and it was very convenient coming into Holborn on the central line so very, very convenient and.
Speaker 4:I remember, obviously you joined, we joined us and we never looked back. I mean, that was that's when it really began the pill in the throat for sure so leaving when I left.
Speaker 1:When I left, business took off.
Speaker 4:And then you, then you dropped the bombshell about heading out to Singapore and I think I remember you saying that your wife she missed Asia. Or are you missing Asia?
Speaker 1:she had. She had a good education from a good university in China and she was finding it difficult to find somewhere that would recognise that. So, yeah, that was part of the plan At that time. I mean, I must admit I was very, very happy working with these guys, possibly the happiest I'd ever been in a job. But yeah, I think to move, I think it felt I was okay, it felt like it was time to try something back out in Asia again and Singapore.
Speaker 1:What a great place to be as well, I must admit it has been good. It is a nice place to live how long? Have you been there? This year it will be 20 years, 20 years well, I've popped out.
Speaker 4:I visited you out there once or twice. I'm sure it's such a lovely place to go as well. I don't know because I don't know all this, even though I know you quite well. I don't know a lot of this. I'm interested, but obviously in Singapore you started working for a firm that was out there. It was Lloyd Wise.
Speaker 1:I went for what was Lloyd Wise at the time? Yeah, I'd never worked for them in the UK, but yeah, it was a good opportunity and went out there and yeah, they were very good to me as well, frankly. But yeah, then my wife was. We were expecting her first and, well, as it turned out, only child. So it just felt like time to do something else and in the end I needed some flexibility. I decided I made the very foolish choice of setting up on my own. First I thought I can do just a little bit of freelancing work, but in the end I made the decision. You know what? Let's try as a real patent agency, let's act for our own domestic clients and do incoming work for international clients. And still, to this day, it's a small firm but frankly, I feel like I've found my niche there.
Speaker 4:it's a nice little size. What do you like about it? I suppose in bigger firms, I mean, there's a lot of infrastructure in place in the bigger firms, so in the smaller firm, in the smaller firm.
Speaker 1:I mean having worked in massive corporations before as an engineer, massive corporations before as an engineer, I kind of had enough of these massive hierarchical structures, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of hierarchy. And that was one of the things I liked about moving into the Patna Tony profession, because at the time you're going to a firm that's a certain size and you know there's you and above you is possibly the partner directly you know, that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, there is no layer of hierarchy, so that's part of it. You know, if there's team building, you know what. We don't have to plan team building. Let's go for lunch, you know, yeah, let's go for lunch and a huge amount of autonomy.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, that's right. So I'm like chief of police, so I can do what I want, basically when I want as well, and I don't need to build a business case to come to Inter in San Diego. I don't need to convince a bunch of other partners that I should go. Or could I do a little diversion?
Speaker 3:I know you're going to come back. Yeah, that's fine, because you mentioned Inter. Why is it so?
Speaker 1:important. I had kind of forgotten how important it was. I don't do it every year. I didn't go last year, obviously, we were in Singapore and that was very good. We did everything, we had a small reception and that went fabulously well. But before that, the last time I had been to Inter was Seattle in 2018. Okay, I don't go every year, but actually, you know, I have a bunch of good meetings here. I mean mostly, almost exclusively, I'm meeting with people I already know, so it's not about new business?
Speaker 3:It's not.
Speaker 1:No, you're picking up some useful new contacts. I'm just checking my email on the way over here and there's some new LinkedIn contact requests dropping in my email inbox. You know so. Request dropping in my email inbox perfect, you know so, and interesting looking contacts as well.
Speaker 3:So but you know so it's a bit of both. So it's not hard sell, it's not promo, it's getting here networking with people and if you pick up a few contacts and stuff, exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I was at a reception earlier and bumped into someone and within two minutes they said did you does your firm file in my country? You know, know, and.
Speaker 3:Because we were only saying earlier, weren't we? We had a little walk around earlier and saying how tough it looks for people that are really trying to use it as a platform for new business.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the networking space is a bit brutal. I think, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, If I didn't make it to Inter, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Yeah, you know, but I'm reminded how good it can be and so far. So we're what halfway through here. Yeah, Actually, it's been really good so far. It's been really good so far.
Speaker 4:London next year you coming.
Speaker 1:Well, I need to think about that, right, I mean accommodation and getting around. You can crash at mine.
Speaker 4:That's the deal. Okay, all these, I'll be there. I'm in portsmouth, otherwise, it's a given. It's a given. Otherwise, yeah, yeah, I go to everybody. All the podcasters you'll come to mind, don't worry, all right well, there's another connection, then.
Speaker 1:The company I worked for when I was sent out to china was a construction company based construction contractor, based in portsmouth. Who's that? It was at the time john brown engineer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was with them for well, they were later taken over by, uh, caverna, yeah yeah yeah, I worked for them for four years. I lived in Farum for four years.
Speaker 4:There's another connection so back to to Singapore, so you started your own firm. It's really interesting. But you it sounds like you like that autonomy and the kind of the yeah, but I mean the yeah.
Speaker 1:There's some with no matter what you do. There's some give and take right. So, for example, you as the chair and a partner at Kilburn, and so you don't have to do everything, although I get the impression at times you think you have to do everything. Oh he does.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he does, he absolutely does. I've been told off my opinion for that as well.
Speaker 1:But yes, you don't have to do everything, everything and uh, so I mean now I mean everything the office is set up. I mean we use the same docketing system you use, so it's incredibly sophisticated and and when you have these kinds of systems, when you set it up and it takes very little maintenance after that. So so things just happen. You know things just happen. But there is ultimately, you know, when you're setting that up, everything relies, you know, everything lands on you.
Speaker 1:You know, and making sure things happen in the way you want them to happen, you don't just wave your hand and say something like you know what I don't like, this process flow. I have to sit down and think, okay, how do we want it and how do we make that happen? So, oh, we need to do a bit of business development work. Some of my colleagues are less excited at the prospect of doing that, so that falls to me as well. So there's a bit of that. But on the other hand, we don't have partners meetings where we spend three hours debating what colour of toaster to buy for the kitchen. So there's pros and cons.
Speaker 3:You're making partnership sound so exciting. No, no.
Speaker 4:We have a very clear-cut set of recommendations. Now it's not an open conversation. Now we've got three colors to choose from three toasters, to choose from three toasters to choose from. Yeah, but then again you've got the number of slices and how that will stay. They can get complex, you're right, but so I know that you I get that you travel around that region fairly regularly as well. On On business, I mean, you seem to kind of.
Speaker 1:A little bit, yeah, not as much as I could or maybe even should. So I went to. I did a trip to Seoul in September, again just catching up with people. I know there's no cold calling and saying can I come and see you? You don't know me, but can I come and see you? The time I had there was filled with meeting people I already know I had been thinking about doing a trip to Japan. I haven't been there for maybe six years. Yeah, yeah, I thought about doing that sort of February, march time, but the way things just fell out it didn't happen. So maybe Yokohama in September for the IPPI meeting, I don't know. So I used to go up, I used to do. When I started the firm I was doing a lot of. I was supporting a lot of litigation in Malaysia patent litigation- Really, so I was up and down there quite a lot, yeah, but not for all.
Speaker 1:But then as the firm grew and the practice took off, just you're approached to do opinion work and I'm like sorry, I mean I've got three patent drafts on my desk, I can't do an opinion now. So we haven't really been closely, deeply involved in litigation for some time and the Singapore it feels like we're a hub generally in Southeast Asia.
Speaker 4:It's a little tiger or whatever, isn't it? I mean, is that from an IP perspective as well, is Singapore a fairly significant jurisdiction?
Speaker 1:From an IP perspective as well, is Singapore a fairly significant jurisdiction. It depends on who you talk to, I think. I think many people talk about Singapore as being key. Where we find it is quite useful for some clients is if you get granted patents in Singapore, for example, you can. Then there's a PPH agreement for the rest of the ASEAN states, places like Thailand, malaysia, vietnam, they're in Indonesia. They're not particularly fast, you know, and okay, there's a bit of a backlog at the Singapore IP office just now as well, which makes that a little bit more difficult. But from a strategic perspective that can be very useful, sort of YN, yeah, or it kind of greases the wheels a little bit in other countries right, and not with any sort of negative connotations.
Speaker 1:It just makes things a little bit easier. I think lots of the patent examiners in some of the other Southeast Asian states are quite happy to look and see what happens in other jurisdictions and if you say, okay, we have a granted patent in Singapore. Okay, that's good enough for us, right? So that's one of them. What you can do is what you can do with trademarks Trademarks. It's an important jurisdiction for trademarks because it's such a big and connected shipping port.
Speaker 3:So you have custom seizures.
Speaker 1:Custom seizures. You can't do that for patents, of course, but you can have it for trademarks. I I've seen other people talking about Singapore being strategic, about, you know, because it's the big player in the region. Yeah, it gives a sort of message that we're serious about the region and so we want to file and have IP protection in Singapore.
Speaker 4:I did proto-patent litigation in Singapore, probably in the late 90s, early 2000s by aeroplane seats, but I remember at the time it's a pretty cool case. I remember at the time that the law was quite old British, it was a 49 Act. Is that still the situation?
Speaker 1:No, they modernised the Act in 95. I can't remember if it came into force in 95 or 96. Basically, they followed very closely the UK Act 77.
Speaker 1:And some sections of the Singapore Act still repeat word for word sections from the UK 77 Act, but they still had their own tweaks. They had a type of modified examination where you basically get a granted patent in the UK a bunch of jurisdictions like the UK, epo, us and a few other places as well. You file a form at IPOS and say, okay, we conform the claims to those as granted in this other jurisdiction, let's have a patent for that. They call it the self-assessment system. Yeah, yeah, and even if you used IPOS for substantive examination, if you had a negative examination report, you could still pay the grant fee on it and get a granted patent. I doubt you would. I imagine you would have some difficulty enforcing it, but that's what you could do. Okay, so they still had its little quirks and that was really down to the fact that they didn't have any patent examiners. Do you still engage with SEPA? Not so much lately. No, not so much.
Speaker 1:I remember writing a few articles some time back. I think it was so long ago I can't even remember what it was about. I said so long ago I can't even remember what it was about. I did a review of. I remember I did the previous. The previous the review of a previous edition of Terrell Terrell and the law of patents. So I did. I remember doing the book review for that, but yeah, that's uh not how much I thought about trying to like the. The main, the main. I think the main liaison SIPA does in Singapore is through the Association of Singapore Patent Attorneys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, I was on the executive committee of that for a while, but it's going back some time, okay. So the other one I'm maybe a little bit more active in the Asian Patent Attorney Association.
Speaker 4:APA.
Speaker 1:APA Right, yeah, I sat on the patents committee of that. The Patent Attorney Association has a Patents Committee, which always amused me, so I sat on that and represented Singapore at the Patents Committee meeting for about six years, I think it was. But I think most of the liaison SIPA does with Singaporean bodies is with ASPA, which I'm not so much involved with and I don't know the kind of ecosystem in Singapore at all.
Speaker 3:Is it a regulated situation? Are there restrictions in terms of?
Speaker 1:representation? Yes, there are. You have to be a registered patent attorney in.
Speaker 3:Singapore.
Speaker 1:You have to go through the examination system. They have a. There's one of the local universities does a. They used to do a course which was very similar to the Queen Mary course, but it was condensed into three or four months. They now changed that a bit. So one of the universities does that and you have to take the final exams and it's patent drafting, amendment INV. And there's a legal paper as well which is almost like a hybrid between the UK practice paper and the EQE paper D. So I went out there just after getting British qualified. I only had to do the legal paper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there was recognition. Yeah, I took it not long after moving there, um, which is probably around the time that I was yeah, I was. In fact, I was waiting on my results of the eqe as well, so I've done the eqe legal paper d as well, and so, yeah, it was it felt okay.
Speaker 3:Have you been able to maintain the european side of stuff, or is that gone because of your uh jurisdiction and well, there's the, there's the jurisdictional issue there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I maintain my, my fellowship of cpa.
Speaker 3:Yeah so, and we've talked about business practice stuff previously, a few years back, yeah, yeah I remember yeah, so so I maintain my fellowship of cpa.
Speaker 1:I mean, I suppose I thought about the possibility of, you know, representing clients directly at the UK IPO or the EPO, but I don't know what it's like. Do you still have to have deposit accounts at the EPO now, or can you pay official fees with credit cards? I can still deposit accounts. I just looked at that and I thought you know what I don't want to do that? Yeah, I don't want to do that.
Speaker 3:Are you fairly unique in Singapore or are there other sort of I?
Speaker 2:like to think.
Speaker 4:I'm unique, of course, we all like to think we're unique, there are, there are other.
Speaker 1:Brits out there. There are several firms like Marks and Clark has an office there in terms of small practices? Yes, there are a few, they're everywhere. So yeah. Sorry, I thought you meant like the CPA, EPA practicing in Singapore.
Speaker 3:There's a handful, okay, yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe more than a handful. So.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a little community there.
Speaker 1:There are some smaller firms there, yes, yeah, and they all seem to be doing quite well. It's a respected qualification, I imagine. I think so. Yeah, Some of the pass rates are the examination pass rates are still very low. Well, I think one of the issues they have as well they let people take the exams too early.
Speaker 1:You know to be registered in Singapore, you have to have passed all those exams and you have to have had I think the requirement is still the same you have to have had a one-year internship under a registered patent attorney, post-qualification or during Pre-qualification, pre-qualification. So that's far too short. I mean, and I tried talking to IPOS about this and saying you know what, try to explain to them the situation where they're, even before the pre-EQE you need three years minimum at the EQE before taking the EQE, not three years to get registered, but three years to take the EQE. And I think they I don't know, I think they don't want to discourage people from trying. But what you get then is I think you get lots of candidates taking exams far too early.
Speaker 4:That's a perennial discussion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, possibly everywhere, everywhere, possibly everywhere, yeah, anywhere where you can electively take qualifications when you feel you're ready for them. Yeah, yeah, so I'm going to round off with a life question.
Speaker 1:How are you, I've got a closer. Oh, you've got a closer. I've got a closer.
Speaker 3:I've got. No, you do no, you go first Always prefer to you?
Speaker 4:Life question. Life question yeah, are you going to be there forever? Singapore.
Speaker 1:Probably not. Probably not. I doubt I'll retire there. I doubt I will. I've got some ideas, but nothing confirmed. It's tricky, isn't it? It's a very, very expensive place to live. Yeah, I guess A very expensive place to live.
Speaker 4:It's kicked off completely in the last few years as well, hasn't it?
Speaker 1:it's got one of the most expensive in the world now, or something yeah, I mean when we moved there, three things were expensive property, cars and alcohol and now everything's expensive. Actually it wasn't even before. Covid in the late can we call them the noughties in the late nought?
Speaker 2:we call them the naughties. Are we still, yeah, in the late?
Speaker 1:naughties. Suddenly you see prices, just everything. Everything is imported, you know, and everything. So but yeah, it's been a very, very good place to be Sort of sort of nicked the closure.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's well, it's related. So the way this works is I normally ask him a question, then I'll ask it of you and then he'll ask me the same question. I've not actually thought about my answer to this one in advance. Oh good, I like these because I feel that's pressure, so I was quite taken by the move to Singapore and sort of how that's worked out. So, Gwilym, if you weren't where, you were now and I know you love where you live.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when would be your next destination? Where would you choose to live? Oh, I'd be back in Hong.
Speaker 4:Kong? Yeah for sure. Absolutely Not dissimilar to me. I don't know if you got a taste for Asia the first. Every time I go there I think I want to live here, but again, for not the similar reasons but some extra reasons that it's just just not feasible, which is a real shame actually.
Speaker 1:Hong Kong's an amazing place. I mean, I remember the first time I went there, I was just. There's a buzz in the air there that I'd never experienced anywhere else, and and that's largely why we first thought about trying our arm there before the opportunity came up. In Singapore and you An Indonesian beach or a Thai beach, I thought you were a surfer, that would make sense.
Speaker 4:Very bad surfer. Oh, so I was assuming you'd retire back to the UK. I couldn't take that climate again. I was going to say no, so I was assuming you'd retire back to the UK.
Speaker 1:I couldn't take that climate again. I was going to say no, no, no. I was going to say Sorry to all those British people that are listening, but I couldn't take that climate again, oh well no, your retirement plans suit my retirement plans.
Speaker 4:I'm going to come and see you wherever you are. That sounds really good.
Speaker 3:Lee, yeah, so you know I like my sea fishing yeah so I would probably go somewhere like this sounds really sad, doesn't it? Maybe the Witterings or Salsey or somewhere like that? Oh that's good, I know, not a million miles away, but you know just somewhere where. I could sort of walk out of the house, walk down the beach and just set the rods up and sit there all day brilliant and listen to two IPs in a pod on your headphones there'll be other people doing it by then, of course you'll never be giving this up.
Speaker 4:You'll never be giving it up.
Speaker 3:Come on, we know this thank you so much, michael, for spending time at Inter with us on that podcast. Thank you for the invitation thank you, as ever, for being an amazing host, amazing host.
Speaker 2:We'll see you next time.