Day: August 10, 2025

• Joshua Webley moved to Kuala Lumpur in 2024 and found it hard to meet new people.
• His casual dinner meetups with fellow expats gradually grew into a thriving community called The Expats Club.
• Webley got married early this month, and most of his guests were friends he met through the club.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joshua Webley, who founded The Expats Club after moving to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Ten years ago, I left the UK to travel.

I was born and raised in a small town about 150 miles north of London. It’s one of those places where nobody ever really leaves, but I wanted to see more of the world.

For the next seven years, I lived the digital nomad life, traveling through various countries such as Indonesia, Spain, and Morocco, while working remotely for a health insurance company based in Thailand.

But when I got to Malaysia, I fell in love with the country, the lifestyle, everything. It felt calmer and less chaotic than other parts of Southeast Asia that I’d seen.

I ended up living in Malaysia intermittently over the years, spending several months at a time taking it all in. It was also in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city, where I met my now-wife, Rachel, who is Malaysian.

In July 2023, I was offered a job with a wealth management firm in Kuala Lumpur. The visa process took around six months, and by January last year, I was fully settled in the city.

I realized I didn’t really know anybody

I’d moved around so much by then, and the longest I’d ever stayed in one place was two or three months. I didn’t know who to ask about restaurants, or who to ask out for a drink when I finished work on a Friday.

Although I had been to a few networking events, they were all really professional. You’d go there, and then you’d come home with 10 property agent business cards and five health insurance pamphlets.

It came to the point where I thought, OK, I need to do something more.

I ended up joining an English society, but the problem with that was I’d be surrounded by other English people. I didn’t come to this side of the world just to meet English people; I wanted to meet everybody.

So I went to a Facebook group for expats and wrote a post that said, “Does anybody want to come out for a curry on Friday?”

Twenty-nine people showed up for that, and things just took off from there.

Now, we host the Curry Club

Here’s how it works: Attendees make a small donation to a chosen charity, which serves as their RSVP, and we meet at a local restaurant. Everyone pays their own way.

The donation helps ensure people show up — it feels like buying a ticket. If 50 people RSVP without donating, traffic or rain might mean only 10 show up. I don’t want a restaurant owner telling me they brought in extra staff only for hardly anyone to show up. This system keeps it fair.

Sometimes, we also host a volunteer event with the chosen charity. As we’re here in Malaysia as expats, the idea is to try to give back to the community that has welcomed us.

Even though it’s called the Curry Club, a lot of times we don’t only do curry houses. We’ve also had Spanish tapas and Italian food. The next one will be German.

Over time, it has grown into something bigger

The Expats Club is a community for people who have moved to Malaysia. These days, it’s a team effort — my wife handles the club’s social media and digital marketing.

People in the community also organize their own smaller meetups now, such as to play golf or pickleball, or to go hiking. All I have to do is kick-start them by creating the first few events. Once they’ve all met each other, it becomes self-sustaining.

There are also dedicated groups for retirees, business owners, and women. Rachel hosts the women’s group events. People can join whichever groups interest them and connect with like-minded individuals.

In addition to Kuala Lumpur, we’ve started hosting meetups in other parts of Malaysia, including Penang.

Beyond social events, the community has also become a resource for expats navigating their move to Malaysia, whether it’s visas, housing, or other local know-how.

We made good friends — most are retirees

They come around our house, and it’s amazing. They clean everything up, and they don’t stay too late.

My wife and I got married early this month, and most of my guests were friends I’ve met through the Expats Club.

When my best man, who’s the same age as me, was arranging my bachelor’s party, I had to tell him, “Look, here are the people who are coming, but just be careful because most of them are over 70 years old. I don’t want anything too crazy.”

When you move abroad, as much as you’re gaining new insights about living in a new country, you are also saying goodbye to your network. It’s especially tough when there’s a big time difference.

Now, things are different. I’ve actually made friends and built a beautiful community of people that I can love and trust.

Do you have a story to share about relocating to a new city? Contact this reporter at agoh@businessinsider.com.

• AI is used in pathology in Singapore to improve diagnostic confidence and efficiency.
• Dr. Cheng Chee Leong said AI could allow pathologists to do more with less.
• This is important as patient cases get more complex, said the anatomical pathologist.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dr. Cheng Chee Leong, the head of the department of anatomical pathology at Singapore General Hospital. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m drawn to pathology because accurate diagnosis is the critical starting point for proper treatment and management. In my field, we examine tissues under the microscope to determine a patient’s disease or condition.

Pathologists need to spend more time dealing with the increasing complexity of our practice. AI has the potential to improve our productivity.

With the increasing aging population, we will be dealing with more complex patients. Our elderly population is living longer, and we will have patients with multiple conditions at the same time.

We’re always dealing with a relative shortage of manpower, and that is complicated by the fact that we are being asked to actually do more and more with the tissue.

For example, in the past, prostate biopsies might require four parameters for an entire case. Now, we have to deal with more specific parameters for each individual specimen.

Sometimes, the number of specimens can reach 20 to 30, which is at least 10 to 20 times the amount of work that we’re actually used to. This is not very sustainable because you will never be able to increase the number of manpower needed to deal with things by 10 to 20 times.

That’s where AI will need to come in, allowing us to do more with less and deal with more parameters without increasing the amount of resources.

AI could highlight areas of interest more quickly than we might examine under high magnification, improving both confidence and efficiency.

AI has been part of pathology for years

I’ve been involved in medical informatics for more than twenty years, starting when I was a medical officer in the Singapore Armed Forces.

We were exposed to machine learning-based tools for digital pathology images about a decade ago.

A project between Singapore General Hospital and AI Singapore from 2020 to 2021 focused on using AI to differentiate a tumor called fibroepithelial lesions. These aren’t your traditional breast cancers, but rather two related conditions that can sometimes mimic each other: fibroadenomas and phyllodes tumors.

We built AI algorithms to attempt to differentiate between these two lesions on biopsy materials. The goal was to improve our diagnostic confidence and better guide treatment decisions.

AI isn’t infallible — especially in complex cases

Even the best-trained AI will have a margin of error, and its performance depends heavily on input data.

AI still has some way to go in integrating complex data to guide us to the correct diagnosis alongside what we see under the microscope.

For example, we examine other data, such as patients’ electronic records and radiology reports, to better understand the whole clinical picture.

Unlike trained professionals, AI still has issues with adaptability and generalization, including dealing with issues in less-than-optimal circumstances.

AI is very dependent on its training data. When AI encounters tissue that’s been processed differently — for example, samples from overseas labs that have different colors or appearances — it may perform suboptimally.

Sometimes, AI will mistake folded tissue on the slide as a positive finding when it shouldn’t be. A trained human professional will be able to find ways to approach novel findings and situations they have less experience with, rather than trying to force-fit into a category that AI may tend to do.

For now, the human in the loop is inevitable. We always practice a margin of safety to ensure that we don’t make mistakes.

After all, many years of training helped us build the knowledge base that will allow us to make accurate interpretations and diagnoses.

With time, AI, given enough training, data, and the right guidance, may actually be able to do better.

While AI will not replace doctors or humans in the medium to long term, a human without AI ability will not be able to keep up with the rapidly evolving healthcare field.

AI will eventually transform the way we work. It will require us to acquire a different skill set and demand that we practice at a higher standard.

Do you have a story to share about AI in healthcare? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.