This is what he said about that.

One minute you're scaling your business and the next you're watching a bank collapse with all of your money in it.

And it was pretty, pretty difficult, pretty emotional weekend.

What is the funnel of doom?

Yeah.

Uh, and this is a concept I gotta, um, uh, recognize, uh, my very first, as an intern actually, in 1998 at a company called Trilogy, which is a but- somewhat of an infamous company around recruiting, and it's kind of where I learned the trade.

Uh, my very first manager, Jeff Daniel, uh, he-- we did this campus tour around the country talking to CS students, and that's where I first heard the term.

He coined that term.

So I had to acknowledge that.

But I think, uh, well, the funnel of doom forever, uh, almost forever as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a, like a funnel.

I heard from one of your candidates, here's the quote that I got, uh, that, "You and your team's ability to close and convert candidates with offers to accepts is extraordinary." What are some things you do that help get someone over the line that are kind of on the fence?

I remember watching it actually 'cause I wrote a story about it, but obviously it kicked off in the US, very quickly went over into the UK as well, but it was changing by the hour, and it was Friday night, wasn't it?

That's right.

Yeah.

It all, it all happened on a, on a Friday, and, um, it was, it was...

We were still in COVID, so we were still working at home quite a lot, and our finance director messaged me a, an article from the Daily Mail, which was basically a story around the, the US, um, the big parent company of SVB, um, was having problems, and there was a, there was a good chance it was gonna go into liquidation.

They'd just put the results out, um, and they weren't looking very, very good.

Um, and it very, very quickly snowballed as to is, is it gonna affect us in the UK? What does that mean for us? And we remember trying to get into the bank account, um, online banking on the Friday afternoon, and, um, sometimes you could get in it, sometimes you couldn't.

How does it work? What problem were you trying to fix when you started what was then Karrot, now Airtime Rewards?

What is the right way to be doing hiring today? What are the companies that are doing it backwards getting wrong?

Yeah, yeah.

And I was in... inside companies for a long time, you know, Facebook and Pinterest and Qualcomm and others.

And when you're in it, it's really hard to step back and see the broader pattern that's happening here.

And so with the GBD experience, you know, I think we worked with 500 companies over five years.

And so we got to see a lot.

And we got to see what we think the future of recruiting could look like.

Can you just talk us through? You gave me a really interesting example to talk us through how quickly this can move us.

How would you characterize the US-China relationship right now? Are the two countries finding a way to compete without direct confrontation, or are they steadily moving towards something more hostile?

I think it's fair to say that there's been a progressive deepening of suspicion between the two countries over the last 10 years, in fact, and that suspicion acts in a kind of cycle of mutual reinforcement too.

On the one hand, the US, I think, has become very disillusioned with previous shibboleths about the possibilities of transforming China through economic, social, and political engagement, eventually fostering some sort of liberalism in China and paving the way for Beijing to be accommodated in the international order.

Instead, I think there's a sense that engagement has in fact given rise to a stronger, more capable China that's also more internationally assertive, a more dangerous challenger to US primacy, and noticeably more autocratic, ideological, and nationalistic too.

China's approach to globalization and to international order is seen as, despite engagement efforts by the US in the past, as always really having been exploitative and self-serving in this narrative.

And under Xi Jinping, the US has also observed something substantially different, namely that the previous hide and bide strategy articulated by former leader Deng Xiaoping, in other words, that China should hide its capabilities and bide its time, has given way to a push on the geopolitical accelerator to the building of China-centric economic and political relationships globally, with Beijing often acting as patron to US adversaries or rivals.

There's been step changes in the development of Chinese expeditionary military capabilities and nuclear forces.

Do you think both sides are genuinely trying to lower tensions there, or are they simply buying time while they estimate forces, gather intelligence, pre-position?

Just take me to that issue about nations already finding alternative sources of supply, um, because simply the Strait of Hormuz is closed right now.

Yeah, I think it's happening on a number of different levels.

Uh, one thing we've certainly seen is the degree to which even European buyers have been crowded out of some of the spot markets by Asian purchasers.

Obviously, those countries that have the resources to get themselves some supplies to restock their reserves are grabbing for anything that they can get hold of.

Um, uh, there's been, of course, a warning from the International Energy Agency about this.

They're concerned that these kinds of scrambles for resources are having an exacerbating effect on, uh, fuel price rises and also, um, locking out a number of the poorer countries that don't have those means to acquire it.

So that's probably a tendency that we're likely to consi- continue to see to happen.

This is one of the messages that keeps on coming through.