On 14 September 2026, I watched Steven Bartlett’s conversation with Jiang Xueqin on The Diary Of A CEO. Afterwards, I kept thinking about how much of everyday life depends on systems we rarely notice until they stop working.
A payment going through. Electricity reaching a building. A supplier delivering equipment. An organisation being able to trust its own records. The interview left me with serious concerns about how geopolitical instability could reach those systems, and whether our approach to cybersecurity is sustainable enough to withstand that pressure.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Diary Of A CEO is Steven Bartlett’s podcast featuring extended conversations with entrepreneurs, scientists, health professionals, authors, athletes and other public figures. Subjects range from business and leadership to psychology, health and society. The format gives guests room to explain their thinking and experiences, although appearing on a popular podcast does not make every claim established fact. About the show.
Jiang’s conversations are worth watching even if history or politics usually lose your attention. They connect distant events with familiar concerns: employment, prices, energy, technology and the services we rely on. You do not need to agree with his predictions to find value in examining those connections. I would watch with curiosity, while questioning how he moves from evidence to conclusions.
In this episode, Jiang discusses the dollar and the international economic order, American military influence, the war involving Iran, and vulnerable shipping routes. He explains how semiconductor production depends on specialist knowledge, equipment, minerals and manufacturing spread across several countries. He also explores fertiliser, food production, water scarcity, ageing populations and migration.
The discussion extends to Russia and Europe, China and Japan, and possible political upheaval in the United States. Some predictions, including a siege of New York and Lionel Messi becoming Argentina’s president, move much further into speculation. His closing reflections concern faith, family, empathy and what makes human life meaningful.
Two subjects particularly caught my attention: his scenario of an attack on financial infrastructure, and his concern that AI could increasingly serve surveillance and control. I do not regard his prediction of civilisational collapse as established. Nevertheless, these subjects raise practical questions that deserve attention now.
Imagine being unable to pay for groceries because digital payments are unavailable. The first problem is access. If financial records have also been altered, the challenge becomes establishing which information can be trusted. An unavailable banking app, corrupted transaction data and permanently lost money are different situations, requiring different responses. The interview moves quickly between them.
That distinction matters because clear explanations prevent fear from filling the gaps. A serious outage can be damaging without every account being erased. Equally, restoring a service is insufficient if the information behind it remains unreliable.
This concern already exists beyond the podcast. On 31 August, the Financial Stability Board warned that frontier AI could change the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, with potential consequences for confidence across financial markets. That supports taking the threat seriously, while leaving the likelihood of Jiang’s particular scenario unproven. FSB assessment.
My broader concern is how failures connect. Consider an organisation whose payments, customer communication and recovery instructions all depend on services reached through the same login provider. Losing access could disable several responses at once. Two suppliers may also depend on the same infrastructure underneath, creating less independence than their different names suggest.
WeChat offers a useful illustration. In mainland China, the domestic service, Weixin, combines messaging and payments with mini programs for services such as shopping, food ordering and transport, all within the same app. Tencent’s overview. For someone who relies heavily on that ecosystem, an account-access problem could interrupt several everyday activities at once, even while the underlying businesses remain operational.
Western digital life is not organised around an identical platform, but the example makes concentrated access easier to understand. Convenience becomes a dependency when there is no practical alternative. Whether services sit inside one app or behind several different interfaces, I would ask the same question: can people still communicate, pay and reach essential services if their usual way in stops working?
The physical world adds another layer. Digital services require electricity, cooling, communications, replacement equipment and people who know how to operate them. A cyberattack can coincide with an energy shortage or delayed hardware delivery. Resilience has to account for those combinations, rather than assuming everything around the incident remains available.
The current economic picture shows both pressure and adaptation. On 10 September, the IMF reported shipping through Hormuz at approximately one tenth of pre-war levels, while still expecting around 3% global growth. Reserves, alternative energy sources and reduced demand had helped absorb the disruption. Those buffers have limits, but their effect demonstrates that responses can change outcomes. IMF briefing.
My perspective comes from cybersecurity, process management and the delivery of services. I believe a sustainable response starts with protecting essential services and building the ability to recover. Cybersecurity needs to become a continuing responsibility shared by leadership, operations, suppliers and technical teams. It cannot depend entirely on the security department noticing everything and persuading everyone else to act.
Start by understanding what must keep working. Identify the services people depend on, the consequences of losing them and the systems required to restore them. Include external suppliers, identity services, electricity and communication channels. Give each critical service a responsible owner who can make decisions and secure resources.
This also changes the conversation about priorities. A technically impressive dashboard means little if nobody has agreed how long an essential service can remain unavailable. Understanding the human and operational consequences makes investment decisions more concrete.
Make recovery something people have practised. Backups need protection from the same incident that affects production systems. Organisations should test whether they can restore usable information, check its integrity and resume essential work. A successful backup notification alone cannot answer those questions.
Exercises should involve the people making decisions, answering customers and operating services. What happens if the normal messaging platform is unavailable? Who authorises a temporary workaround? How are transactions recorded during an outage and checked afterwards? Those details determine whether a plan remains useful under pressure.
Financial authorities already recognise the importance of preparation across connected organisations. The European Central Bank’s approach includes identifying dependencies, sharing information and running exercises across institutions. There is an existing foundation to build on; implementation and continued practice matter. ECB resilience framework.
Fund prevention and maintenance consistently. Patching, replacing unsupported equipment, reviewing access and retaining experienced staff are recurring responsibilities. Contracts should define support lifetimes, incident cooperation, recovery expectations and workable exit arrangements. Otherwise, today’s convenient purchase can become tomorrow’s dependency that nobody knows how to replace.
For the immediate term, I would prioritise strong authentication, restricted administrative access and separating systems so that one compromised account cannot reach everything. For future purchases, I would ask how the technology can be updated, repaired and eventually replaced. Those questions should be answered before an organisation becomes dependent on it. A system that is affordable to acquire but difficult to maintain can leave a lasting security problem.
Extra capacity costs money, so choices need to follow the importance of the service. Leadership should assess whether a saving removes something the organisation would urgently need during disruption. Sustainability means being able to maintain the protection over years, with realistic budgets and workloads.
Treat communication as part of the response. People need to know what is affected, what remains available, what they should do and when they will hear more. Where the cause is uncertain, say so. Avoid attributing an outage to a hostile state before the evidence supports it.
Staff also need a safe way to report mistakes and unusual behaviour. If speaking up brings blame, useful information may arrive late. Awareness should help people recognise risks, ask questions and act confidently. Training people to fear technology is unlikely to prepare them to use it responsibly.
Give AI clear boundaries. Where AI can access systems or take actions, permissions should match the task. Keep consequential actions reviewable, maintain records of what happened, and provide a practical way to stop or reverse activity. Introducing AI should come with a clear account of responsibility when it makes a mistake.
Jiang’s surveillance concern also deserves scrutiny. My position is that collecting more information about everyone should require a specific justification, defined limits and independent oversight. Security measures need to protect privacy and allow people to challenge decisions affecting them. Technology should help people retain agency over their lives.
Prepare together for the longer term. Governments, sector organisations and suppliers can support shared exercises, useful threat information and accessible guidance. Smaller organisations need realistic help implementing safeguards. Essential services benefit when their partners can recover too.
I would measure progress through questions that remain useful after the headlines change: can we restore a critical service within the time we promised? Have we tested that claim? Do we know where our suppliers depend on the same systems? Can people reach us when our usual channels fail? Did we address the causes identified after the last incident?
These actions will not settle international conflicts. They can reduce the chance that disruption spreads unchecked into ordinary lives. They also give us something constructive to do with the concerns raised by an interview like this.
What stayed with me after watching Jiang was the need to look beyond the screen. Behind every system are people trying to work, communicate, buy food and care for someone. That is what I want cybersecurity to protect, now and as technology changes. When an organisation promises that people can depend on it, preparation is how that promise becomes credible.