[Host]: Well, first I have to say a big thank you to all the speakers today. Um, we have actually had 10 of them on the podcast, so you can binge it this weekend. Now, one person we've been trying to get since we started the podcast four years ago is Jamie Dimon. Now I have a philosophy in life that "no" is a rest stop on the way to "yes" and in this case it has worked. But just Jamie, before we welcome you onto the stage, just a few snippets here. JP Morgan's origins trace back to 1799 to a company founded to supply water to a growing New York City. It quickly evolved into a bank and shaped its lasting legacy. Over the next two centuries, it grew alongside the economy, financing railroads, supporting industry, and expanding with global trade. But its role became most visible in moments of crisis. In 1907, as panic spread through the financial system, JP Morgan helped organize a response, stabilizing markets at a critical moment and exposing the need for a central bank. Through the Great Depression, it endured one of the most severe economic downturns in modern history. In 2000, the merger of JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan created a new kind of institution. And in 2008, it stepped into the center of the crisis, acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Built on generations of decisions and culture, today JP Morgan Chase stands among the largest and most influential financial institutions in the world. Welcome.

[Jamie Dimon]: Well, warm welcome. Warm welcome.

[Host]: When we look at these pictures showing the history, the first question has to be: what is the culture that has made you able to be so successful now after 200 years?

[Jamie Dimon]: First of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. He is persistent by the way because when he asked me about could I come in 2025, I said I can't. He said what about this date in 2026? So here I am. But I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. The cultures are... my whole life I was always cautious about when you talk about culture because you can say all words... a lot of say "employees", "customers" and they don't mean it. So the real way you develop a culture is you're just driving it, the grit and courage like every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, every person you hire, every person you fire... that it really is about doing the right thing for the customer eventually. Obviously, do they got to take care of your employee? A lot of cultures on Wall Street, as you know, it was about money. How much money can someone make? And you know, some of the things in Wall Street are built on compensation schemes, they're not serve-a-client schemes. And so, I've just been relentless. When we first did the JP Morgan Bank One merger in 2004, I had a book, "How We Do Business", and Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said, "You got to send it out." I was like, "No, let's do it first. Let's let people experience the detail, the diligence, the fortress balance sheet, all these things, the follow-up, the open meetings that you have to speak up. It's not even a choice hopefully." So, and if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture.

[Host]: You say you have to fight it every day.

[Jamie Dimon]: Yeah.

[Host]: What what are the kind of things you do in meetings?

[Jamie Dimon]: So, you got to get out. So, when you do in the meeting or in a bus trip or on a road trip that you're talking to your people, everyone knows that you're only trying to do the right thing for the company. So, no one at the company can say they're going to insult me as long as they say because I think it's in the best interest of the company, the client. I didn't bring my list. But that when you take a trip, I come back with a long list of stuff. Matter of fact, my management committee doesn't like when I come back from a trip because they know I'm about to lay on them. Why do we do this and why do we do that and why do we do this? And this is across technology and just about everything else you do. But even in that room, you know, I tell people, my management team, the agenda is your agenda. Don't say to me, you didn't put on the agenda. you have to say that is everything important on this list and it actually puts the burden on the other people to say well you skipped this or what about you know that issue or something. So every business has a follow-up list, every business when you travel around the world you know knows each other and it's hard work. I mean it's harder than I thought, but looking back you actually do build a common culture.

[Host]: Why is it so hard?

[Jamie Dimon]: Because you have to be relentless. I mean you know, when I go around, I try not to let even one little thing skip my attention. So if there's a customer complaint and someone says to me why are you paying that's so minor, I say well I'm paying attention to that because we might be doing the exact same thing to a million people. It's not that minor. Or it was a teller who told us something that shortened how long it takes to open an account. I've been in buses with management teams and they don't want to hear from the teller or the branch manager what's going on in the branch because they find it insulting. Whereas I look at them, I realize they probably shouldn't have that job.

[Host]: What's the thing you still have on your sheets which you haven't managed to?

[Jamie Dimon]: I have a list of calls I need to make, a list of people who owe me something. That's the most important one.

[Host]: Well, I for sure owe you one now after this.

[Jamie Dimon]: No, no, not owe me like that. Like I've asked a question. I'm waiting for a follow-up. I want to know why this happened or why that happened. Did we fix this customer complaint? It could be on anything. Then I have a list of things I need to think about. I have a list of things which are going to go on another list, but I just jot it down because... so it's follow-up dates, calls, immediate issues, and I probably burnt through that list once every two or three days. I carry a little folder which has one by each business, much more detailed like very detailed.

[Host]: You say in your... by the way you write a fantastic letter every year and in the letter which recently came out you talk about bureaucracy and the way you have to fight it. How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization because you're now a huge organization, right?

[Jamie Dimon]: Yeah. I really believe this: bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else. And you could be a small company and have it, you could be a big company and have it. It's always the manager. The way you fight it is with me all the information is shared beforehand. So you know there's no one secret. I remember going to companies and they wouldn't share with that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting. If someone comes in and says, you know, Nikolai wants X and I don't believe that's right. I say, well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to them. Every everything, no matter how small, get on the road, go see clients. And clients are a gift because, you know, look, they're demanding, they should be. But they also tell you what our competitors are doing better, why we didn't get something. I uniquely know it might cost $30 million to build a payment system to a country. But, you know, it's easy to say, well, we're going to do it now. I just found out why the staff isn't doing it. So, when you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it. That's a mistake. When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying that was a great meeting, we'll pick it up again next week, it's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with "okay David you're going to do X. Talk to these people." Not hierarchical. Talk to HR, consumers. Come back make a recommendation. I always ask "if you're king for today what are you gonna do?" Because people walk in and they admire a problem. If you ask them what they're going to do, they say, "Well, I look at this." I said, "No, no. What would you do?" And honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling to try to answer that question. And so, have the right people in the room. Very often, people think you go back to your office and you think, no, usually you iterate over and over and over and it gets you to the right place.

[Host]: Talking about the right people in the room. You said teams should be small like Navy Seals, right?

[Jamie Dimon]: Very little politic meaning. Also, we don't do a lot of super presentations. Like I think you should celebrate all the time, but when you're in a management meeting with me is what does the other guy do better? Stripe kicked our butt. PayPal kicked our butt. Okay, I can go one after another. So no matter how good we think we are, I point out who's doing better. We're the number one FX trade in the world, but we're number seven in Vietnam. Why is that? And so you really dig drill down and find out what you're not doing well, what people aren't collaborating on. Uh and then you have to get rid of the jerks, you know, and if you don't, no one believes you.

[Host]: Who are the jerks? What makes a jerk?

[Jamie Dimon]: It's all about them. They admire problem. I say they're like good bureaucrats do. They're graded process, but they like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome. I like the inputs. You know like when you talk about business you talk about your the output, your output is your performance, your branch something like that but what was the input? Did you train the person properly? Did you build the right technology? The input will drive the business for 20 years, the output's just the result of what you did all that time. But the sharing part eliminates a lot of it... they simply can't get beyond the fact that they're always talking about like the next job, the next thing and pounding their chest. Obviously, men do that more than women. But you see these diseased behaviors... and I have to earn my trust and respect every day, too. It isn't like I walk in a room and somehow you have to trust me. You don't. You're going to be watching closely. What does the boss do? What does he say? Does he really mean it? Does he follow up? And hopefully I'm trusted by people and they know it's okay to say anything to me. Doesn't bother me whatsoever.

[Jamie Dimon]: My board now, I've been doing this since I got to Bank One in 2020, meets without me every single meeting. I asked them to do it because you know I'm a little forceful. I have my opinions, but every time there's a big decision, I have the other senior executives come and say what they think. They might disagree with me. But after that, I leave the room and the board meets 100% without me. Uh, and usually the lead director usually gives me a call afterwards or a handwritten note, you know, a little coaching what I could do different, what they want to hear about, what they're concerned about. Uh, and it made me do a better job. I was never worried about it. No one... I have never done a presentation at the board. A lot of the presentations are verbal. So, if you went in there, you'd heard the person say, "Hey, in investment banking, we did great in fixed income. Let me talk about how we're going to expand bankers in these eight cities... Here's the risk associated with it. We looked at other options A and B, but we'd picked this one C." So, it's just a verbal and the board loves it.

[Host]: I asked the CEO of one of the other big American banks, what made JP Morgan really special? And he said, well, it's about the firm. It's not about the individual people. How do you install that?

[Jamie Dimon]: I think that you know, you know what it is. We all know sports teams. You know when the team's working. They're doing their job. They learn their plays. They all want to win. They pass off. And you know when there's someone on that team who is just winning for everybody and business is the same thing. I always say, "Yeah, it's because they're better generally." but you know it when you see it and you know that person who's ruining it. I'm... I just wear the jersey. I'm not even the senior coach. I'm like the general manager. You know, we have people running the businesses who actually like they're the quarterbacks. They're making the decisions. I wrote in my letter about it's like a neural network. She can call anyone around the world to help our clients and they'll get an immediate answer. That neural network you can't replace it. By the way, AI won't be able to replace it at least not for a long time.

[Host]: You say the teams need to operate a bit like Navy Seals. What do you mean by that?

[Jamie Dimon]: I think you got to have small teams that are fully authorized dedicated to accomplish something. So I remember trying to do digital account years ago and the first reaction you get is tech says okay, AI says okay, sales says okay, marketing says okay, branch system says okay. If it's 1% of each person's job, it will not get done. You need a dedicated people authorized to build a digital opening. They obviously have to rely on lots of people but they have what they need on the team. It's hard to do. You also need the platform. Kind of like these Navy Seal teams. They all have common equipment, common languages, common intelligence. They don't pick their own guns and their own tanks. That's common. You got to make sure that the common one doesn't create an enormous bureaucracy that kills the ability of the team. And you have to have like little war rooms. Okay, are we going to do this with Data Bricks or Snowflake? Get the people in the room and work it out. Don't allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year.

[Host]: Great. Well, let's move from corporate culture to risk culture. What are you seeing in the credit market just now?

[Jamie Dimon]: Yeah. First of all, when it comes to risk, you have to be really disciplined and examine it over and over and over with risk reports shared. So the United States is doing fine. Private credit is at 1.7 trillion. Investment grade is 13 trillion. Mortgages is 13 trillion. So, it's not huge. It's not systemic. However, there's been a slightly deterioration across a wide spectrum of stuff: assumptions too aggressive, leverage a little bit higher, too much ratings arbitrage, covenants have gone a little bit weaker. I think there are more than a thousand private credit people. I guarantee you not all thousand of them are [brilliant]. So my view, we haven't had a credit recession so long. So when we have one, it will be worse than people think.

[Host]: What are the risks you are most concerned about just now?

[Jamie Dimon]: Oh, cyber. The bad guys can use cyber and they're going to get stronger and more powerful in terms of finding vulnerabilities. And then geopolitics. I don't worry about the US economy. The economy is like the weather. The most significant thing for the future of the free and democratic world is the geopolitics. I'd say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship that NATO has to stay strong. We need to work with our trading partners to keep the western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. The fragmentation would be the reason that a book is written one day "How the West Was Lost". Which is precisely what Russia and China wants.

[Host]: How worried are you about inflation at this stage?

[Jamie Dimon]: I'm not worried about it, but on the list of scenarios would be... the worst case is stagflation. I just wouldn't take it off the list. I think there are a lot of inflationary things out there including the Iran war, the remilitarization of the world, the infrastructure needs of the world and our deficits. I don't know how the world running deficits like this isn't inflationary. It is possible that inflation ticks up and that will catch a lot of people off guard. Given the level of government debt, I just think maturity should say you should deal with it as opposed to let it happen. The way it's going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis and then we'll have to deal with it.

[Host]: Should we move to Europe? 25 years ago, the GDP of Europe and America was the same. Now Europe is 70% of the US levels. And you say that Europe never finished its economic union. What do you mean by that?

[Jamie Dimon]: Yeah, we're slow walking into a real problem here. I think the European Union was one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind, but it never got finished. Part of the point of the European Union is have a common market so that all of the companies can compete across all countries just like you can in the United States. Also bureaucracy, anti-business taxes not conducive to growth. Mario Draghi wrote the Draghi report. He lists 300 recommendations of which they've done seven or eight. If that number becomes 50% of America, your companies will not be able to compete with American and Chinese companies. The Chinese are building juggernauts in almost every industry. You're going to need scale and scope. Europe being weaker is actually bad for our long-term health.

[Host]: Moving on, what will AI do to JP Morgan and the way you work?

[Jamie Dimon]: No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand. We're going to use AI to do a better job for you. We've been doing it for 13 years. We have use cases around risk, fraud, marketing, hedging, note taking... and it is really powerful stuff. AI is also used by bad guys. So we spend a lot of money in cyber defense. Don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it. If someone got my passcode, they're in the payment systems. We're going to have to work together with the government to get this right. We need to say to people, "Hey we love you, we got this job here, here's training." This may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust. We don't want to have so many jobs loss that you're creating huge social problems.

[Host]: Talking of which, on the one hand you've been very vocal that you want everybody to come back back to the office, on the other hand you say in your letter that you think at some stage will work three and a half days.

[Jamie Dimon]: Sometime down the road with the more productivity, human beings will probably be working three and a half days a week. We'll have wonderful lives. I think work in the office is a different issue that is collaboration, socialization, idea generation. I just don't think it works very well for a whole bunch of types of jobs and if it doesn't work for the client we're not going to do it. We're here for the client, we're not here to satisfy my employees that they don't want to do it. If you don't want to come back to work, you're going to have to find a job somewhere else.

[Host]: What is a winning corporate culture for you?

[Jamie Dimon]: I'll give it to you real quick: people real detail from facts analysis. You never give up on it. Don't believe the number. Think about a little bit. There are good expenses and bad expenses. There are good revenues and bad revenue. Then you want to have a complete openness with management teams. Detailed followup list. People got to have a little grit, a little bit of courage to speak up. Treat everyone with respect. Earn your respect every day. I make a lot of mistakes, so you also trust me we'll fix them. And it makes me very proud and it motivates me tremendously that we're giving opportunity to people. Sometimes they whisper complaints in my ear, but I check. I always check.

[Host]: Jamie, it's been extraordinary. Thank you so much.

[Jamie Dimon]: Thank you very much.