Demographic Collapse, Broken Visas & Why Global Talent Is Rerouting to Southeast Asia – E594

"Talent is bell-curved, right? In the sense that from people who are super good in this one domain to people who are not good in this domain. So Jeremy is horrible at piano, but he's probably good at podcasting in the Southeast Asia context. Not world-class. And that's the talent piece, which is like, I'm on one side for this one skill. And then we talk about it, which is there are certain hubs, right? Talent vortexes that suck in talent. And so if you wanted to be the best at, I'm just example, acting, you probably want to go to Hollywood. And there's some local regional hubs like Bollywood. Obviously there's the Chinese who have their own Hong Kong nexus for acting, et cetera. So there's these pockets for their own local markets, but Hollywood is that talent vortex for acting talent." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

"I read a very interesting article, I don't know if it was The Economist or The Atlantic, that was basically saying the decline in fertility globally is actually driven by smartphones. So they basically said, you know, people have all these other things like enough childcare, not enough, you know, all this other stuff. But they said if you map it, right, you know, people always like to hold up Scandinavia as like a place that has really good childcare and child leave policies. But even in Scandinavia, fertility rate is going down. And so they made the argument that it's actually like, if you map smartphone penetration, that's how you see the fertility rates correlating and that the places with the highest fertility have the lowest smartphone penetration." - Shiyan Koh, Managing Partner at Hustle Fund 

"You know, there's this feeder program, which is like, you know, in undergrad, you wanted to be a bio scientist and then suddenly you started zooming in to be like, I want to do like longevity and aging. And then you do your, then you did your master's, then you go do your PhD at Harvard. And so there's this massive suction effect. Where Harvard had these like rock star professors that were globally known. And then they got this incredible bench of like super hungry, super ambitious, super smart. And then people, and then money comes in and it's like, you know what? You know, like you did this, you did that. Why don't we do the next thing on top of that, right? And then those labs were spitting out patents, startups, spinoffs." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

Shiyan Koh, Managing Partner at Hustle Fund, joins Jeremy Au to examine how geopolitical shifts, demographic decline, and education policy are reshaping global talent and innovation flows. They explore Japan and Korea’s push into Southeast Asia, the unexpected impact of smartphone culture on fertility, and how political actions in the US are disrupting the university pipeline and research ecosystems. They also critique bureaucratic inefficiencies in tech transfer and reflect on assimilation policies, academic flywheels, and the cultural nuances behind talent mobility.