The Jamie Dimon Interview

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26:29Yep. The AI cloud takes removing deployment friction even one more step. In some cases, developers don't even need to push code anymore. Agents can release features continuously, infrastructure configures itself, and interfaces adapt to how you work. If you want to build the future of software, head to Vercel .com slash acquired. That's V -E -R -C -E -L dot com slash acquired. And just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Now is also a great time to thank another of our favorite companies, Anthropic, and their AI assistant, Claude. Claude has really transformed our workflow here at Acquired.

27:04Preparing to interview Jamie Dimon requires serious research, obviously. Decades of banking history, regulatory changes, three financial crises, building the fortress balance sheet. This is exactly the kind of complex analysis that Claude is excellent at. Ben and I have never had assistance here because we think it's important for us to do the research ourselves. But Claude now gives us the best of both worlds. It's an extra set of hands that we have full control and visibility into what it's doing and how. So where Claude is especially great for me is extended thinking mode. When I asked it to analyze JP Morgan's strategy through multiple financial crises, I could watch Claude's reasoning through each decision point step by step.

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28:24So whether you're preparing for your own high -stakes meetings, interviews, or conversations, or you just need an AI you can trust with serious work, Claude thinks with you, not for you. That's claude .ai slash acquired. All right, David, catch us up to the merger. So you run Bank One for four years from Chicago. And then in 2004, you merge with JPMorgan Chase. In what is termed at the time a merger of equals, I think JPMorgan Chase referred to it as that, Bank One shareholders get 42 % of the combined company. I mean, I think people don't realize how much of JPMorgan Chase is Bank One today. That's why it's a little irritating to me when they say, you've been running it since i was running jp morgan i was running 40 of the company for the whole time and uh when i got to bank one and i'm not working around the clock i i already knew that a logical strategic merger might be jp morgan okay i know all these companies and that's the other thing about fortress balance sheet is you also have real strategies that survive the test of time and you know you're not flipping and flopping um and then i'm sitting there and of Of course, the tape comes J .P.

29:31Morgan Chase to merge. So we're worth like $25 billion. They're now worth like $80 billion or $90 or whatever the number was. I'm like, well, there goes that dream. But four years later, our stock was up to, you know, doubled or something like that. There's actually come in, and it was in the target range. And I had been meeting with Bill Harrison, the current chairman of J .P. Morgan at the time. We were talking about it. We both knew it made business sense. They were kind of looking for a CEO. So we had been talking probably for a year and a half before that. They're looking for a CEO. Did they give BankOne shareholders 42 % because they were looking for a CEO?

30:11There were two lawsuits. Okay. So we got the premium. They got the name and the location. And I effectively had kind of control from day one because inside the merge agreement, and this is almost unheard of when we get the premium, is that to not have me become CEO 18 months later, 75 % of the board would have to vote me out. Right, the default was you were going to become CEO. And the board was eight Bank One people and eight J .P. Morgan people. And I knew a lot of the J .P. Morgan board members, too, who respected me. And Bill Harris and I were very close. But that was the agreement. They got sued for paying too much to buy me.

30:51I got sued for not taking enough. You can't win. I think every shareholder is probably happy to be. But it worked out. Yeah. All right. 2006. Before we get to 2006, when you were going through that process, and even maybe the couple of years before you and Bill were talking, you're starting to think about J .P. Morgan as a partner. I'm curious, did the brand, did the name J .P. Morgan factor into your thinking at all? Did you view that as an asset? I mean, J .P. Morgan brand is a Tiffany name. I didn't value it in the deal. And what I looked at, I had given my board, I think the first thing is run your company well.

31:31And people thought I was going to start doing deals immediately. I was like, no, we suck. We haven't earned the right to run someone else's company yet. When we're running a good company, we can merge with somebody. But the first thing I looked at was business logic. And that every business, we had a consumer business, they had a consumer business, we had a credit card business. They were both terrible. They had a credit card business. They had a big investment bank. We had a big US corporate bank that needed some of those investment banking stores. We both had a wealth management business. I knew we could save a lot of cost saves.

32:01So the business logic would be impeccable. Then there's the ability to execute. Like, can you actually get it done? Because you've all seen a lot of deals where they fall apart. They don't have management. They don't consolidate the systems. They have infighting. It kind of happened at Citi. And so you don't effectuate. And then there's the price. So I knew we had a Tiffany brand, but it didn't value, because if everything else didn't work out, I don't think it would have mattered that much. Interesting. All right, so I'm going to fast forward just a couple of years. It's 2006. You're officially chairman and CEO of the combined JPMorgan Chase.

32:35And 2006 on Wall Street is like, go, go, go, go, baby. It's like, you know, 1980s all over again. I think you had the same incentives as everyone else, but you behaved very differently. Am I missing something? Did you have the same incentives? You pulled J .P. Morgan back hard on the risk side in 2006. I did. So there were cracks out there in 2006. You may remember the quants. There started to be a quant problem in 2006. We definitely saw subprime get in bed. And I pulled back on subprime. I wish I had done more because if you look at what I did, you say, okay, well, you saved half the money, but you would have saved more.

33:14You still had some losses. But we also had, I'm going to say, less, maybe a third of the leverage of the big investment banks and a lot more liquidity. So in 2006, I started to stockpile liquidity. And, you know, looking at the situation, I was quite worried. The leverage, you may not remember this, but the leverage, because of accounting rules in Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the banks, the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage. And it was go -go. So for every $1 I'm putting in. CMOs, bridge loans, the whole thing. Like in 07, the bridge book of Wall Street was $450 billion.

33:57Today it's $40 billion. JP Warren can handle the whole $40 billion today, though we're not the $40 billion today. And they were much more leveraged deals. And a lot of them fell apart, collapsed. And that was before you had the collapse in the mortgage markets, which really took down a lot of these banks. But you did have the same incentives, and you had the same access to information that a lot of these other folks did, but you didn't blow up. What explains this? Because usually behavior follows incentives. yeah well first of all if you work for me i would tell you i don't care what the incentive is don't do the wrong thing and and don't do the wrong thing to the client if you treat yourself if you're the client how would you want to be treated and i i had gotten rid of i mentioned that one risk thing there were multiple risk things like that they were being paid to take the risk so you can sell you were telling us about the uh the auto loan business yeah but they'd be being paid but the second i put in all these new risk controls all of a sudden you weren't making money by taking that leverage because I was looking at how much capital could actually be deployed if things get bad.

35:00And so I was looking at earnings through the cycle. But very importantly, all of these investment banks were doing side deals, private deals, three -year deals, five -year deals. I got rid of almost all of them. This is for comp with senior bankers. So today at JPMorgan Chase, we do do things, and I know some of my partners in the room here, but we all know about it. There are no winks. There are no nods. There are no side deals. there's almost no one paid on a particular thing because if you're paid on a particular thing you can do the wrong thing and meanwhile you're not helping the company you know manages risk or something like that so we change the incentive programs and I'm quite conscious about incentive programs that they don't create miss you know misbehavior but it's also very important if you're in a company and you say the incentive program is doing it you should tell the company this incentive plan is not incending the right behavior versus either the customer and a lot of it was leverage So if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books, if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20 % of the profits, you'll go to 40 times leverage.

36:04It's literally going to add 25 % to your bonus. And so I got rid of the profit pool of 20 % and the leverage. And I lost some people, too, in the meantime. That's funny. JP Morgan, as part of the system, had the same incentives. But you changed the incentives for the team within the company. Okay. All right. We've got to go to 2008. March, March 13th, 2008, Thursday, 2008. Yeah. It's Thursday night. You get a call from Bear Stern's CEO. The stock closed that day at $57 a share. It's like 150 a couple months before. Three days later, God, I remember it like yesterday. I was working on Park Avenue on Wall Street.

36:45I remember that night, $2 a share. You're buying Bear Stern's. Tell us the story. So I was at Avra on 47th with my parents and my parents' favorite restaurant. My whole family was there. It happened to be my birthday. I don't normally get emergency phones. Happy birthday. And Alan Schwartz, who was the current CEO, we'd seen their stock go down. I knew they had some real problems because we saw their hedge funds and some of the things that were taking place there. And he said, Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight before Asia opens. Which I said, I don't know how to get $30 billion for you. and have you called Paulson or have you called Tim Geithner so we all called, I called up the management team I went back in, I probably had a bite and said goodbye, went back to the office probably had 100 people come in that day that night, they all got dressed they went back to work, it's an emergency we now rang all the bells for emergency Bear Stearns went bankrupt spoke to the Fed about, let's just get them to the weekend we had one day and we needed a Saturday and Sunday and we concocted this loan so we couldn't lend the $30 billion and the Fed technically couldn't lend the $30 billion, but the Fed couldn't lend to us technically and I could technically use the collateral of Bear Stearns so we got literally a one -day loan.

38:00And then the next day, we had thousands of people come in due diligence and we went through every loan, every asset, every balance sheet, all the derivatives, all the lawsuits, all the HR policies, like real due diligence, a two or three -day period and bought the company at that night $2 a share. Hank Paulson was saying, why are you paying anything for it? I said, well, I do have to get shareholder votes. Right, because you need bear shareholders to approve the deal. It was a public deal. And the worst part of it is I was going to get the lawsuit from the bear holders. And I knew that. That you didn't pay enough for that.

38:30But we couldn't let it go bankrupt. It wasn't like an industrial car you could buy in bankruptcy. It would have been gone. And the crisis would have just unfolded. Okay, two questions. One, what would have happened if it went down? two afterwards did you think it was over no uh so we already had so that was march uh you know what happened with lehman it was an uncontrolled failure there was money locked up everywhere people panicked they started pulling money up everything that would have happened with bear so it did stop that and i would have thought that it gave other people other time to clean up their act so literally six months later i would have thought some of the other firms were much had more liquidity, more capital, and we're a little bit more prepared for what might be happening.

39:17We already had the stress in the system. You saw it already. It was going to mount. It wasn't going to go away. There were tremendous losses coming. So we bought it and probably did help. In hindsight, it didn't stop the crisis from unfolding. We bought it. And then like a week later, we changed to $10 a share. It had been at $120. And the way to think of it is it was $300 billion of assets and a $12 billion tangible book value. We wrote off the whole tangible book value when we bought the company. We had to liquidate the loans. We had to hedge stuff. We had severance costs, lawsuit costs, and we basically used all that.

39:57So we paid a billion dollars for a company that had been worth $20 billion recently. The building we're in now was worth a billion on the balance sheet for zero. And we got some very good people and we got some good businesses, but it was an extremely painful process. I've seen estimates that in the fullness of time, after really dealing with unwinding all the stuff there, it cost you $15 to $20 billion. So it cost you $20 anyway. It was the $12 billion we wrote off. That didn't cost us. We didn't really pay for it. And then the government sued us on the mortgages, which I was quite offended by.

40:34And I really was. Take this problem and then we'll see you. This is the government. When you, you know, whatever government you did a deal with, that's not the government down the road decides, I don't care. We're going to come after you anyway. So while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay $5 billion on the bad mortgages that Bear Stunz had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't, put it this way, I don't know how to say this, I wouldn't really trust the government again. Okay?

41:10I've got to ask a follow -up question to that. Is that a structural thing? Just the way that we're set up with a new administration every four years? Yeah, they don't feel obligated to what the prior administration did. And, you know, even some contracts were violated in this thing, which I won't go through. Literally contract. I mean it would have been tortious interference that had been company to company, but they basically you know since you Operate under their laws, you know, they can basically take you down. So you know, I went to see Eric Holder Trying to settle his mortgage stuff which we settled.

41:51I brought my lead director He expected me to come and be pounding my chest and and I went in and said Eric I Am here to surrender I Cannot fight and I cannot win against the federal government you know that a criminal indictment can sink my company I will not do that to my company or my country I'm here to surrender before I surrender I want you know the circumstances by which we bought Wamu and Bear Stearns because 80 % what they're asking for related to Bear Stearns and Wamu not JP Morgan Chase and I went through the whole thing you know he said thank you I'll take in consideration but they never gave me the accounting so I don't know what they did And so it is what it is.

42:33It was quite painful. But we've got to move on. We'll move on from this. We won't keep you. Well, we'll move on from the specifics. David's like, actually. I do have one more thing. Whether you would have done it again wouldn't have, you know, very clear. It was not a great deal on paper for J .P. Morgan. but as we look at it now the reputational value the reputation of J .P. Morgan now is unlike any other in the industry part of why you're worth $800 billion is that reputation a lot of what created that reputation was that weekend yes, I know I say I wouldn't trust the government if the government called me up they did it again if they called me again and said we need your help to save our country Of course I'm going to.

43:22I'm a patriot that way. I would just try to come up with some ways to avoid the punishment by the next president. I would come up with something. You know what? You need the version of the merger agreement with JPMorgan Chase where it's like a 75 % of Congress needs to vote not to sue you. The default is you're not going to get sued. All right. So Bear Stearns happens. Six months later, you get another phone call. WAMU is going under. you do buy WAMU. Contrary to everything we're talking about with Bearer WAMU is actually a great acquisition, right? Yeah, so this is a lesson about acquisitions.

44:00It's very hard. Remember, we bought WAMU a week after Lehman went bankrupt. And most boards wouldn't have touched that at all. Because the whole system feels like it could. The whole system was in trouble. But WAMU put us in California, parts of Nevada, Arizona, not Arizona, Georgia, Florida, which we weren't in. So think of these really healthy states. And they had, you know, 2 ,300 branches. They were, and they had huge mortgage problems. But we had looked at it over and over and over. So we knew their mortgage books called. And we wrote off, we bought it for - And this was all before - We bought it for a $30 billion discount to tangible book value.

44:42Because they had debt. And we left the debt behind. And so and that 30 billion was approximately the Moore's loss was gonna be so we bought the company Think we bought a company clean. We wrote off all that stuff The books were clean and then we did something unheard of too the next day or two days later I went in the market raised another 11 billion dollars of equity, which I didn't really need But again, this is my conservatism. I was like, you know what this could get even worse And and I don't want to be short capital liquidity So we raised that to make sure our balance sheet was just as strong as it was after WAMU than it was before WAMU.

45:17And you already had the reputation to pull this off, right? I'm imagining in the worst month of the financial crisis, who can go out and raise $11 billion of equity? Yeah. People trust you. Well, yeah, we knew a lot of the shareholders, and you earn your trust over time with shareholders. And we gave them a quick little presentation. over the, you know, yeah, and a lot of them stepped up and said, this is great. And they also know we can execute it because behind the bare sterns, people forget the work is, the next day you've got 50 ,000 people consolidating, you know, 5 ,000 applications, branches, compensation programs, you know, settlement programs, you know, payment systems.

46:00It's a lot of work. But we obviously have the capability to do that, and we have the capability to do WAMU. I think we finished the WAMU consolidations in nine months, all of them. So that within nine months, we're all in the same systems, which allows you to start doing a better job in customer service and things like that. So this fortress balance sheet strategy and raising this equity capital and, you know, having additional margin of safety and conservative accounting. In retrospect, it seems like the obvious right strategy for running a large financial institution. Why wasn't everyone else copying it?

46:32Have people changed? And does everyone else run their banks like this now? I think people, the people are more conservative today. I think regulators are more conservative today. But again, I go back to people get involved in aggressive accounting. They don't look at stressing their own bank in a real way. You know, you saw people take too much interest rate risk, too much credit exposure, too much optionality risk, or sometimes it's new products. So if you look at the financial services, very often it's the new products that blow up. It takes a while. They haven't been through a cycle. And you had that with equities way back in 1929.

47:07You had it with options. You had it with equity derivatives. You had it with mortgages. You had it with Ginny. Even Ginny Mays at one point blew up, even though they're government guaranteed. Arguably, you had it with Quant and with LTE and CM. It happened with Quant. It happened with leveraged lending. And then people then become more rational how they run these balance sheets and how they think through the risk. So I have to ask you, is this private credit today? Say it again? Is this private credit today? I don't really think so. I don't think it's $2 trillion. It's grown rapidly. That's an issue.

47:39But what happens, the other thing about markets, there's some very good actors in it who know what they're doing. Customers like the product. So I always say, well, the customers like it. But there are also people who don't know what they're doing. And it's grown rapidly. So there may be something in there that would become a problem one day. I don't think it's systemic. So that $2 trillion, the mortgage market when the time it blew up was, I'm going to say $9 trillion. and a trillion dollars was lost. This is, you know, and it was... A trillion dollars was also more than a trillion dollars back then.

48:08Yeah, a lot of these private credits are not leveraged like that. It doesn't mean there won't be problems, but it's slightly different. But you look at the whole system, there are other things out there that, you know, are leveraged that, you know, can cause problems. Of course, people take secret leverage in ways you don't necessarily see it. What are some of these in your mind that are potentially problematic today? Well, look, I look at, when you look at asset price, they're rather high. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, but if today PEs were 15 as opposed to 23, I'd say that's a lot less risk, a lot less to fall, and you have some upside.

48:46I would say at 23, there's not a lot of upside, and there's a long way to fall. And that's true with credit spread. So, and we look at, we stress test everything. We do like 100 stress tests a week, you know, and to make sure we can handle a wide variety of things. And then the other thing, and the biggest risk to me is cyber. I mean, I think the cyber stuff is, you know, we're very good at it. We work with all the government agencies. They would say the chamber stuff, we spend $800 million a year or something on it. We educate people on it. We just do. But it is, you're talking about grids and communications companies and water and even part of the military establishment.

49:22The protections are not what you need if we ever get in any kind of war where cyber is involved. And China is very good at it. And so is Russia. But Russia is mostly criminal, which is slightly different. All right. I'm going to pull us back to the story. We're going to fast forward to 2023. We're not really equipped to talk about Russia. It's not what we do on acquired. Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic both fail. You're there again. Did you see it coming? What lessons did you learn from how 2008 went that you could apply in 2023? Obviously, you bought First Republic. It's a Silicon Valley bank.

50:03Both Silicon Valley bank did some very good stuff. But they both had something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrated deposits. Not uninsured because people are misstating that concentrated. And so a lot of venture capital. What happened with Silicon Valley Bank and kind of First Republic is some of these large venture capital companies, call them there are hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, told their constituent clients that they invested in, who all banked in Silicon Valley and First Republic, the banks aren't safe, get out. And they all removed their deposits.

50:35And Silicon Valley Bank, I think they had 200 billion in deposits, 300 billion, 100 billion in one day. And that caused the problem, but they also had other problems. They didn't have proper liquidity, they didn't have their collateral posted to Fed, and they had taken too much interest rate exposure. and the interest rate exposure was hidden by accounting. It was called held to maturity where you don't have to mark even treasuries to market. And I always hated held to maturity but it gives you better regulatory returns and stuff like that. But when that held to maturity, if you said what's the tangible book value of one of these banks and you said it was 100, well, all of a sudden it was 50 if you just marked that one thing to market.

51:12And now you're into judgment land. At what point if you saw a bank where just that one mark had the tangible book value dropped to 40 or 30 cents the dollar would you panic I would have said that's too much risk and you know the regulators helped us because they said rates are going to stay low forever so these banks bought a lot of three percent mortgages and when you know three percent words when rates went up to five percent you know worth 60 cents in the dollar or 50 cents and that was it and so both those had they took too much interest exposure known to management and it was known to the regulators and fixable.

51:48So we knew a little bit about Silicon Valley Bank. We were trying to compete in that area so we learned a lot afterwards about how to do a better job for that ecosystem of venture capital. We have a whole campus in Palo Alto now. We've hired 500 innovation bankers. We cover venture capital companies. We're not as good as they are yet. We're going to get there because we're organized slightly differently. And we knew First Republic. We were watching it. I called Janet Yellen that I said, that company's in trouble and one or two others. If you want to, we'll take a look. We could probably buy it and eliminate the problem.

52:20They waited a little bit too long. It was kind of a little melting ice cube. But you can imagine, the day we bought it, you never heard about it again. We hedged all their exposures in a couple of days and we merged everything in. We wrote everything down. But we did get some good stuff from them. We actually got some good people. The normal thing in acquisition is they're terrible, get rid of them, or they failed. But we also looked at what they did, how they dealt with clients. Some of them may be clients here. They did a great job with high net worth clients. Single point of contact, you know, concierge services.

52:49So now if you go down Madison Avenue, you see things called J .P. Morgan Financial Center. That's your first J .P. Morgan branded consumer effort, right? Yes. Because it's kind of based on that. When you walk in there, we know your small business. We know your mortgage. We know your consumer banking. We can get you travel. We can do a whole bunch of different stuff. So very high level services. I think we have 20 of them now, but I'd love it. And if it works, you know, in 20 years, we'll have 300. And so these things are opportunities and I hope it works. You know, you don't always know they're going to work for a fact, but so far, so good.

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54:35That's S -T -A -T -S -I -G .com slash acquired. They have a generous free tier and a $50 ,000 startup program. Just remember to tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. So we're effectively caught up to today. And if we're trying to, now we've got the whole story. We've got a lot of context. Obviously, that didn't go into every detail. But if we're now trying to answer, yes, if we're now trying to answer the question, how did you separate from the pack? Why did you become a completely different animal than your whole competitive set? What are the things in your mind that led to this success?

55:06Well, look, I mean, I don't know totally. First of all, because we skipped over strategy a little bit, and this is important for you all that we have, what we do is the same thing that a community bank does other than investment bank, global investment banking. Okay, so if you walk into a small community bank, they know your business account, They know your consumer account. They usually have a trust company. They used to call it trust. They'd manage your private affairs. They'd set up a trust for you and they'd do stuff like that. And their CRM is up here. They don't need a Salesforce CRM because they know everyone in town.

55:39And they didn't do big -time global investment banking. But the strategy, those businesses fit together. They feed each other. And so does investment banking. A lot of our middle market clients use investment banking products. A lot of our consumer clients use some FX. So all of our businesses feed each other. There's no extraneous. We got rid of everything that didn't fit a strategy. And then you start building client businesses and client services, fortress balance sheet, fortress accounting, all those various things. And, you know, and I've always talked about. So it's holding a portfolio of things that actually feed each other.

56:15They actually fit. Whereas, you know, Citi had consumer finance. That didn't fit. Life insurance. That didn't fit. Property cash. That didn't. They eventually got rid of them all. Sandy just wanted to do more of them. He bought an American General, which did truck leasing, for God's sake. I mean, once you get involved in these things, it's hard for people to understand the risk in each one of these businesses. But all of ours fit. I don't like hobbies. I don't like things. And we've made plenty of mistakes because you have to try and test things. And then you're always investing for the future.

56:45That investment is always people, branches, and technology. And that's true whether they're investment banking people or consumer bank people are opening consumer branches. Or I think Doug Pettner is here and Troy Rohrbach who run the Global Investment Bank. But they've opened commercial banking branches all over Europe. And I think you're telling me it's going great. And it's feeding all other parts of the company. So just sticking to your knitting, constantly investing, not overreacting to the market. Markets are like accordions. And then sometimes, you know, if you're strong when others aren't, you have a chance to buy things you want to buy.

57:21And then always look at the world from the point of view of the consumer. What do you want? How do you want it? How do you want to get it? Can we provide it to you in a way that makes sense for us too? You know, not going for the last dollar and nothing like that. And building teams of people. You know, our people are curious and smart. They have heart. They have soul. They give a damn about, you know, the guards in the company and the receptionists. And it's not just about the big time bankers and people pounding their chest. We don't try not to put up with that. And we have big time bankers.

57:53They are exceptional. But the company serves the clients. And I think the clients know that. When you really dig in to start analyzing JP Morgan's financials, you kind of see this one thing that jumps right out at you, which is the efficiency ratio. for every dollar that you make compared to your competitors, you get to keep 15 cents more of that dollar as profit. It's not hard to see how that compounds and how that allows reinvestments. And why is your efficiency ratio so much better than competitors? It is literally continuously investing and gaining business at the margin and not stopping and not stop starting.

58:34And And the thing about margins, too, is that we have that margin while investing a lot. It's much easier to have that margin and just, you know, we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. We can do a lot of things. Your margins will go up. Your growth will go down. Your long -term margins will probably get worse. So we kind of look right through the cycle and we look at the actual economics that we do, not the accounting of what we do. And, you know, we have, you know, we've built it over time. We have great people and great products.

59:05And there's some secret sauce I'm not going to tell you about. We do Investor Day, and we tell everyone everything. And I'm sitting there watching my – I never do presentations. I'm watching them do the presentations. I'm saying, oh, God, we're just giving away too many secrets here. So there's secrets as to why the efficiency ratio is so good. Well, you know, I saw Howard Schultz here before, you know, and – I'm not supposed to say that, probably. It's okay. It's okay. No, but – We're glad you invited your friends. Look what he built over the years. You know, the consistency, the curiosity, the heart, the, you know, branch by branch products.

59:37It's just always doing that, knowing you're going to make mistakes, but building the culture that just kind of plows through that. And you all know, I do use sports. Sports is a great analogy. If you have a sport team with a bunch of real jerks on it, are they going to be a great team? Almost never. You know, if the team members aren't giving it their best every day during practice, you look at Tom Brady, every day at practice he worked hard. You know, if people are not giving their best, you're going to have a great team. And it's not that different in business. The difference in business, you can BS about it all the time.

1:00:09You can make up stories. But in sports, you see it, you know, on the playing field. Do they have the team? They play together. They don't even have to be friends. They have to practice, know their teams. And so I do think companies have that. It's like a sauce that works. And you've seen it at lots of different companies, you know, not just JPMorgan Chase. Yeah. So, all right, we've got one last question for you. If you look back to 2008, which was a long time ago now. To 2001? To 2008, which was a long time ago now. All of the other leaders that were involved in that era have long since retired.

1:00:47I mean, I think many folks within JPMorgan Chase have long since retired since then. It seems like you're working as hard as ever and in it as much as ever. Why are you still here? What keeps you going? Yeah. So I want to thank my wife who's here, too, who suffered through all this with me all these years and probably couldn't have done it without her.

1:01:14Look, I don't know, but I do believe my grandparents were all Greek immigrants. There we go. My grandparents were all Greek immigrants who didn't finish high school, but there's a Greek ethic. And you don't even realize you're learning from your parents, from the ground up. and Judy's parents, my wife's parents were the same, which is, you know, have a purpose. You know, it could be art, it could be science, it could be military, it could be business, it could be just being a great parent, a great teacher, you know, but have a purpose and then do the best you can. You know, give it your all. Don't, like, be one of those people who's complaining all the time.

1:01:50You know, you give it your best and then treat everyone properly, everyone. You know, like, including, like, if there's a bully, beaten up on someone, you had to stand up for the someone. You were not allowed to allow a bully to do it. So how you treat people, what you do. And so in my hierarchy of life, the most important thing is my family. It still is. The second thing is my country, because I think this country is the indispensable nation that brought freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, which we have to teach everywhere we go about how important it is. I don't think people fully understand it sometimes and then my purpose because you know they my family home every day and this is this is my contribution to this company I can help cities states schools companies employees and I get the biggest kick out of that and so that's what I do as long as I have the energy I'm gonna do it I can't imagine I'm not I don't play golf my daughter one of my daughters said dad you need some hobbies and I said I do we hanging out with you family travel barbecue and wine we now like whiskeys and I love I love history I think history is the greatest teacher of all time hiking I can't play tennis anymore because my back but those are my hobbies I don't buy fancy cars and stuff like that but this gives me purpose in life beyond family and beyond country plus I think this helps the country you know I get to do a lot of things for our country that I just think are quite meaningful from this job and so when I'm done with this I don't know teach and write I may write a book like Andrew or Sorkin did.

1:03:26I'll do something, but I've got to do something. I'm not going to twiddle my thumbs and smell the flowers. There are a lot of people who have floated your name for political or policy roles over the years. There is only one job that could possibly impact the country in a bigger scale than you're currently doing. Do you agree? Right now, yeah.

1:03:52Well, that's probably a great place to leave. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. David, Ben, these guys are great, by the way. So thank you.

1:04:10Well, that is it for our conversation with Jamie Dimon listeners. thank you so much to all 6 ,000 of you who came to watch in person. It was so cool. So cool. Well, we have some thank yous. First to our partners this season, JP Morgan, an incredible partner to us here at Acquired, Statsig, the best way to do experimentation and more as a product development team, Vercel, your complete platform for web development, and Anthropic, the makers of Claude. You can click the links in the show notes to learn more about each of them. As always, a huge thank you to Arvind Navaratnam at Worldly Partners for his excellent write -up on the Jamie Dimon years of J .P.

1:04:49Morgan, which is linked in the show notes. If you like this episode, go check out other recent episodes, like the start of our Google series, which is off to a screamin' start. Our Rolex episode, which is another one of our biggest ever. And then our interviews, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz. If you're new to the show, I think all of those are great places to start. After this episode, if you are still looking for more and you're like, I've already listened to all of those other episodes, we have a second show for you. ACQ2, the most recent, is an episode with Jesse Cole, the founder and the CEO, founder and owner.

1:05:24Owner, yeah. Yeah, he wears a lot of hats. All of them are yellow. At the Savannah Bananas. For something completely different. Yes. And if you want to talk about this with the Acquired community, come join the Slack, acquired .fm slash Slack. And with that, listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.