The quick context on your firm, and I'll let you unpack this, is that Dimension is very focused on life sciences more broadly, so you're very plugged into the scientific community. The thing I wanted to talk about is the limitations being put on immigration and on the ability of people to come study in American universities and contribute to that scientific community. Before we dive into the topic, I want to establish your perspective. Tell us a little bit about Dimension, what you're doing, and how much time you spend plugging into the academic and scientific community.

Dimension is three years old, investing out of our second fund, $500 million, a 2025 vintage, at the intersection of the union of life sciences and technology. We spend a ton of time at the cutting edge of science and technology, very close to the primary literature, crawling the halls of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, so on and so forth. And obviously we're close to the leading academic scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs, who tend to be, if not teams of totally immigrants, teams of at least partial immigrants. So it's obviously a topic that's near and dear, but I think probably to the broader American population as well.

You shared an article that talks about how "America First" will destroy US science, and about the self-owns, the forced errors, that would damage America's capabilities. Number one is alienating us from our allies. Number two is completely shutting off what you called the wellspring of global brain drain that we've taken advantage of for so long. That's such a crisp articulation of why this is damaging to us. As you read the headlines and see the limitations being put on immigration, why is it immediately such a compelling problem?

Before we jump into the academic science stuff: I was walking out of the Equinox here in SoHo last night, and there was a billboard on top of a subway station with a little trivia game. It was two truths and a lie. The lie was that six out of the last six NBA MVPs have been immigrants. Do you know who the most recent NBA MVP was? Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for the Oklahoma City Thunder. He was born in Canada. The six prior were also all immigrants. So seven out of the last seven National Basketball Association MVPs are immigrants.

Imagine for a second if the National Basketball Association started putting restrictions on or limiting who could be allowed to win the MVP, who could play for American teams, so on and so forth. Would it still be the premier product in the country? Would the NBA still outcompete no leagues in Europe or China, Africa, so on and so forth? Of course, not at all. It would be a joke.

And so if we want to be excellent, there's almost, in many ways, an existential angst for America: either we are excellent or we're disallowing immigrants. My co-founders, Adam, Nan, and I are all first-gen immigrants. Adam moved here when he was finishing his graduate studies in Australia, and he has a line that I think you'd be okay with me saying, which is that he came here to be in the majors. He wanted to compete with the best of the best. He was born and raised in Australia.

So there's almost a self-selection bias for immigrants who end up here, because they're leaving their family, their homes, everything they've ever known, and they're betting on themselves to be excellent and compete with the best. I can imagine that if you're homegrown here in the US, it could be a little bit intimidating, because everybody who's not from here is self-selecting to compete. They're self-selecting to give up everything they've ever known and be in unfamiliar, totally new conditions, betting on themselves. So, of course, it can be a little bit intimidating, but we are the beneficiaries of that.

From a science and technology perspective, I suspect most people who listen to your podcast are familiar with the post-World War II era brain drain into US universities. At this point, we're touching eight decades of benefits from that. I used ChatGPT last night just to quickly pull up some stats. 30% of US STEM professors are immigrants. 45% of US STEM professors at top 50 universities are immigrants. 55%-plus of US computer science professors are immigrants. Eight out of the 11 OpenAI co-founders are immigrants. Four out of the top 10 tech companies in America were founded by immigrants. If you just take NVIDIA plus Alphabet plus Tesla, founded by immigrants, that's $6 trillion-plus in market cap. That's over 30% of China's GDP. One out of every three Nobel laureates in the US were immigrants who came here under either a student visa or a research visa at a US university.

And so an attack on immigrants coming here to pursue science and technology is, I think explicitly what I wrote, essentially pouring concrete on the wellspring of innovation that we have uniquely benefited from. I promise you, every country on the planet looks at what we have and wishes they had it. It's a total self-goal.

You're seeing increased influence of foreign entities on some of the science in American universities. It's a different subject, but you're starting to see these pieces come together. And then you see things like the ban specifically on international students coming from China, where they're trying to look for connections to the CCP. If there is this increasing conflict, and fear of a potential conflict, with China, that is a concern folks would push back with. I think the scale of the limitations they're putting on makes it clear that it's a justification, not the reason. Otherwise we would do it very differently. But what's your response to that?

It's tricky, because you'll read four different articles and come up with six different justifications, some of them internally contradictory, none of them entirely sensical. If you were worried about Qatari financing or philanthropic donations to US universities, you should similarly be very, very, very wary of Qatari 747s being funded for the next Air Force One. If you're worried about Chinese students coming to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, so on and so forth, getting an education and then moving back to China, we should make it easier to have green cards for anyone who has a STEM degree from a top 100 US university to stay here. We should actually run the analysis and figure out the numbers of Chinese citizens who are educated here who go back and work in China. Did they have offers? Could they have stayed in the US? What were their actual first motivations or primary choices?

It's funny, I have a little bit of a unique situation in that my mom did her undergrad at Tsinghua in 1978, as China was leaving its era of isolation. I grew up with all of these stories of her at a Chinese university as one of the first generations of foreigners coming into China. She used to recount them, and I would laugh as a kid hearing these stories, because they sounded so outlandish and nonsensical: Chinese students who were hired by the government to spy on her, microphones that were put under her desk to track her, university faculty asking to read letters from my grandparents to her, making sure that she wasn't spying or doing whatever.

It sounded outlandish and obviously authoritarian, closer to something you would read in Harry Potter with the truth, the Ministry of Truth, than anything else. And now we're approaching that here. It's gone full cycle. Unless you're aware of how these things have gone in history and how they're normalized from time to time, I think it's really sad and disheartening to see that starting to occur here.

As a firm, you're spending a bunch of time on these campuses engaging with people doing cutting-edge research. Do you find that it's a mixed bag, where some people want to go back and some want to stay? Or is it a consistent narrative that people who come here to do research in the majors, as Adam would say, want to stay and continue to contribute to America's ability, as opposed to going back to the country they came from?

People want to stay here. We have the best either academic institutions and/or the best free markets. Right now we are attacking both. If you're a leading technologist or scientist, you probably want to be amongst your best peers in research and academia and/or your best peers in entrepreneurship, right? And if we are making that increasingly difficult, we're thwarting their intentions to stay here.

The numbers are already showing that, by the way. The number of immigrant applications to leading universities is down. If you go and talk to the leading presidents or faculty at Oxbridge or universities in Europe, they are right now licking their lips, thinking about the PIs, the professors, the postdocs, and the students that they're going to poach from US universities and take to the Planck Institute in Europe, for example. That's happening right now in real time. We're losing our top talent.

And again, Kyle, as somebody who knows the entrepreneurial ecosystem, talent is such a power law game. Finding the 0.00001 person significantly outmatters. It matters more than almost anything else you can do. And the same is true in academia and research, science and technology. So we're giving every reason for those four-, five-, six-sigma people to not stay here, to not consider coming here, or to want to leave here.

You talked about some of the folks going to Europe. Is China trying to fill that role of pulling as much international talent into China? There's a similar vortex where companies looking for supply chains may find China the obvious choice. Do you think that's going to happen with talent, or is there still enough fear of going to China that it leads folks to go to places outside of China?

If you're a longtime US ally or trade partner, and you're headquartered ex-US but have based a non-trivial portion of your corporate strategic and supply chain assumptions on the US, right now you are disregarding any fiscal duty you have if you're not thinking about how to hedge it.

Again, we're about 12 or 15 hours past various courts in the US claiming the tariffs are maybe not legal overall. Whether or not that comes to be, even just the schizophrenia, which is embarrassing on a global scale for us to exhibit, the schizophrenia that other companies that are ex-US are being forced to deal with, is itself a reason for them to think about hedging.

So when I think about what makes the US spectacular and great, it's open trade, free markets, and excellent global talent. If we thwart open trade and free markets, if we push our allies away from us, or at least force them to consider other options because they don't want to be caught in this schizophrenic mess, then yeah, that hurts us in the long run.

If you're one of the top 1% of researchers coming out of other countries who would have been working in the US and now is not, is the immediate thought that if I can't go and play in the majors in the US, I go to China? Is that the next logical flow of talent, in the same way that companies think about filling the gaps in their supply chain with China? Or are there some limitations on how much talent is going to flow in that direction?

I think if you're a Chinese national, you're probably thinking, "Okay, I'm going to go home: Tsinghua, Peking University, so on and so forth." If you're English-first and from Western Europe, you're probably thinking of Oxbridge. And you're not just thinking about where in these 50-some-odd states you want to end up. You're thinking globally about where you want to go. So it's less that we're pushing these top, top, top practitioners only to China. We're pushing them out of our confines.

On the supply chain side, as you think about companies, China is clearly the largest, most capable industrial power that can suck up that lost trust or attention. On the talent side, it's not necessarily one-to-one. But the biggest damage to us is not that those people are going to China. It's that they're not coming here. And if they're not coming here, we're not getting access to that high-quality output.

The 120-plus US Nobel laureates that were won by immigrants who came here for university studies and research will no longer be US Nobel laureates. The NVIDIAs, the Googles, the Alphabets, the OpenAIs of the world will no longer necessarily be domiciled here. We're giving people cause for doubt. We're insanely privileged to have benefited from that for, again, eight-plus decades now. To be even threatening that a modicum, an iota, at all should at least be a reason for folks who are invested in technology and science, and American hegemony, Western hegemony, to take a pause.

I think that's a perfect place to wrap up, because I think you're exactly right. If what you're invested in is our ability to maintain superiority, the absolute last thing you want is to cut off our access to that talent. Zavain, thanks so much for joining me to unpack it and dig into it.

I appreciate it. Thank you, Kyle.