The Jamie Dimon Interview

Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

Ben: David, we completely blew it. We went into Jamie Dimon’s office, had our little meet and greet. We did not ask about the duel pistols.

David: From the duel, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which J.P. Morgan owns and keeps in their headquarters. We blew it. We didn’t ask to see them. We’ll just have to come back.

Ben: When they finish the new building, I’m sure they will be in the executive floor. We can go get a viewing of the piece of American history.

David: Speaking of American history, let’s do it.

Ben: Let’s do it. Welcome to the Summer 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I’m Ben Gilbert.

David: I’m David Rosenthal.

Ben: And we are your hosts.

Today’s episode is the story of a rising star on Wall Street in the 1980s, who worked with his mentor to merge and acquire their way to the top of the financial world in the 90s, who then got fired unexpectedly by that same mentor, who cast about deciding what to do next, and then in 2000 accepted a job, turning around a poorly run Midwestern bank. Over the next 25 years, he would orchestrate one of the most remarkable runs in banking history and really all of corporate history.

This is the story of Jamie Dimon and how he created the modern financial behemoth, J.P. Morgan Chase, out of the beleaguered component parts of Bank One, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and First Republic.

Jamie is now the longest-serving CEO of any major Wall Street bank, and is viewed as the great stabilizer of the American financial system, especially during the 2008 financial crisis. He now sits atop the largest bank in the US, with an over $800 billion market cap, which is more than twice their nearest competitor. They are the only bank within spitting distance of these big trillion-dollar tech companies that we’ve covered here on Acquired.

To really put a finer point on the dominance, they are the most valuable company east of the Mississippi in the United States, and the only company east of the Mississippi worth more than half a trillion dollars.

David: Incredible.

Ben: So the question, of course, is how did he do it? Banks fail. Financial firms often have spectacular blowups, and large organizations, period, financial or not, can often get so bloated that they slow down to a crawl. What did Jamie Dimon do differently?

Well, today’s episode we have Jamie with us himself to tell the story. We recorded this live in front of 6000 Acquired fans at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. You’ll notice it’s a different format than our usual episode. We’re always trying to figure out what version of Acquired works live with an audience, and this is our latest iteration.

The Radio City show also has a second act, a late night talk show, where we had conversations with the CEO of the New York Times, Meredith Kopit Levien, and the Chairman of IAC, Barry Diller, plus some cameos from around the Acquired cinematic universe. We cannot wait to share all of that with you at a later date.

Well, if you want to know every time an episode drops, check out our email list, acquired.fm/email. Come join the Slack and talk about this with us afterwards, acquired.fm/slack. If you want more Acquired between each monthly episode, check out ACQ2, our interview show where we talk with founders and CEOs building businesses in areas we’ve covered on the show. And before we dive in, we want to briefly thank our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan.

David: The same J.P. Morgan, which is funny because when we started planning this show together, gosh almost a year ago, it was immediately clear to Ben me that the very best person who Acquired could interview in New York also happened to be their CEO.

Ben: And as you all know from the episodes over the last couple of years, J.P. Morgan has been a fantastic partner of ours, and their payments team demoed all kinds of cool technology at the event. Our huge thanks to the J.P. Morgan team for putting on the show with us, and if you ever want to learn more, just click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

With that, this show is non-investment advice, David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Onto our conversation with Jamie Dimon.

Well, this feels appropriate.

Jamie: You guys dressed up for me.

David: You dressed up for us, too. Thank you. Last year we had you on the video board at Chase, and you were looking very summery there. You look great tonight.

Jamie: Thank you.

Ben: Well, we know you’re a big history buff, and we consider ourselves historians of all else. What we’d like to do here tonight is walk through the 20-year story with you of how you turned J.P. Morgan Chase from a bank among many to the most systemically-important financial institution in the world. Are you game?

David: Sound good?

Jamie: Sounds great. Thank you. Yeah.

David: We want to start in 1998. You and your mentor, Sandy Weill, have just spent the past 13 years building the modern financial institution conglomerate, really the blueprint for what J.P. Morgan Chase is today, except it’s not J.P. Morgan, it’s Citigroup. Everybody on Wall Street in the entire world expects that you are going to be named CEO of Citigroup in short order.

Ben: This is 1998.

David: 1998. This is not what happens. Instead, you get fired and you have to restart your whole career, everything, your whole life from scratch.

Ben: Sorry to start here, by the way.

David: But before we get into what you do next, what was the model that you and Sandy built at Citigroup?

Jamie: First of all, I am thrilled to be here. I want to congratulate these guys for building the Acquired. It’s a great, intelligent addition to what we need to learn in society.

I would say it wasn’t quite the model because if you look at what we did at commercial credit Primerica (then Travelers and merged) we were a financial conglomerate. We bought lots of companies and lots of different businesses. We fixed them up, we turned around, we made money, and then we merged it with Citibank, which obviously was a huge bank.

My view was we should skinny it down and shed the parts that aren’t that important to the rest of the company, and keep the things that strategically belong together, together. It was one of my small disagreements with Sandy about the future of the company. But it was big. It was making a lot of money. It was quite successful at the time. Then I got fired.

Ben: So how are you feeling in that moment?

Jamie: When I got fired?

Ben: Yeah, that moment.

Jamie: Well my wife is here and I was hosting 100 people recruiting kids in my apartment in New York City. Same apartment I have now. They called me. We had me and asked me Sunday at 4:00 PM that night. Sandy and John Reed called me up and said, can you come a little early? We’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk about. I was the President and Chief Operating Officer. I said, I can’t. They said, well, it’s really important, so I drove up there. I sat down in the room with Sandy and John. They said they want to make a few changes, and there are three of them.

They said, one, we want to make this person in charge of that. I said, okay, well that didn’t make sense to me. The second one, they wanted to make someone in charge of the global investment bank, which I was running. I thought it was another stupid decision. And the third is they said, and we want you to resign. I said, okay.

At that moment I knew it was all arranged. The boards had voted, the press release was written, the management team was coming up. I waited for the management team to come up. I wish them the best. I said, you guys have a chance to build one of the great companies. They all thanked me. Sandy said, you want to do the press with me? I said, yeah, but I’ll do it from home.

I went home, went to see my kids. One of my daughters here, too. They were 14, 12 and 10. I walk in the front door and I tell them I was fired. The youngest one says, daddy do we have to sleep on the streets? I said, no. We’re okay. The middle one was always obsessed with college for some reason. Can I still go to college? They said, yeah. The one who was here was the oldest one said, great. Since you don’t need it, can I have your cell phone?

And then that night, about 50 people came over, all the same people I just met, all the management team bringing whiskey. It was like, have been in your own wake. There’s one really tall guy who came in, a very good friend of mine. My daughter looks up and says, who are you? He says, I work for your daddy. She says, not anymore, you don’t, and that was it. I was okay. I tell people, my net worth, not my self worth that was involved.

Ben: And for anyone who doesn’t already know Jamie’s story, you were the rising star. Citi was the biggest bank. You were the heir-apparent. This was unfathomable, and for you to take it this gracefully, it says a lot.

So you’re wandering in the woods, as best I can reconstruct it for about 18 months. Is that right, figuring out what’s next?

Jamie: Yeah. It took me a while to exit, sign agreements, and get out. They were mean. And then I stepped in the office and it was late. We went for a nice, long vacation and stuff like that. When I got back in September—that was six months later—I started going to work here. I had nothing to do, but I went from nine to five, started calling people, and thinking about what I’m going to do. It was in the [...] building, so I go for lunch downstairs every day.

Ben: At the Four Seasons.

Jamie: At the Four Seasons, and I explored everything. I started my own merchant bank. I could have retired just teaching, just investing, but I was 42.

Ben: And you took a call about running Amazon, didn’t you?

Jamie: I went to visit Jeff Bezos, who was looking for a president at the time. He and I hit it off. We’ve been friends ever since. He’s an exceptional human being. But it was like a bridge too far. Even though that movie just come out, When Sally met Harry, I was thinking, my God, I’ll never wear a suit again. I’m going to live in a houseboat. This would be really great.

Ben: What alternate universe we’d be living in?

Jamie: It would’ve been an alternate universe, but I’m still good friends with Jeff. I got at least one good thing out of it. Then I got serious. I was offered jobs to run other big global investment banks. Hank Greenberg who ran AIG called me up and said, you should come join us. I was thinking, I’m going to go from Sandy Weill to you? I had to have my head examined to do something like that.

Ben: I didn’t know the AIG story.

Jamie: Well, that happened years later too. Then I got a phone call from a head hunter about Bank One. You guys said a lot of you probably know Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus, and Arthur Blank ran Home Depot. I loved them. But at my first dinner with them, I went to see in Atlanta, I said, I have to make a confession. Until you guys called, I had never been in a Home Depot.

Ben: We were actually wondering, David and I were [...].

David: We were talking about life-long New Yorker.

Jamie: My friend made me go up there, get some equipment, plants and stuff like that. But I love their culture, their attitude. They wanted me to do it. Ken Langone says, I still should have gotten you. I wasn’t going to pay you enough. Of course, it had nothing to do with anything like that. And I had Bank One.

But Bank One was my habitat. I was used to financial companies, services, banking. It wasn’t quite global. It was a little global at the time, and it was a troubled bank. I decided that life is what you make it. It was hard in my family. We had a move. For anyone who’s going to move, kids (I think) they were 14, 12, and 10 or something, it’s hard.

David: Some context on Bank One for folks who are not familiar. It’s not in New York. It’s a large bank, but it’s a troubled bank. It’s based in Chicago.

Ben: When you say large, David, it’s a $30 billion market cap bank. Citigroup where you just had been before, was a $200 billion bank.

Jamie: It was $21 billion at the time. You have the right numbers, but it did a split, so if you look back, it was more $20 billion or something like that. Citi was $200, but I didn’t worry about that. In life, you make things what they are. I don’t like complaining about over spilled milk. You just put on your pants to get going. You see what you can make out of it.

David: But it sounds like you had opportunities to stay in New York, to run bigger, more glamorous things.

Jamie: I did. This one, I was going to run the company. The other ones would’ve been some investment banks. I didn’t really trust some of the people who were talking to me about that. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that I explored. I took phone calls, some small companies, some big companies. There are a couple of subprime mortgage companies who called me. I was like, absolutely not.

David: We’ll get to that.

Jamie: We’ll get to that. So I just thought this was a chance. If the family’s willing to move—it took us a while, we had to live in a rental for a while—got a nice brownstone, and we end up loving Chicago. Chicago’s a wonderful city in a lot of different ways. Like I said, it is what you make it.

I put half my money in the stock at the time. I was going to be the captain of the ship. I was going to go down with the ship. I made it clear to everyone. I was here permanently, and it’ll be what it is. So I got to work literally the next day.

Ben: Did we do the math right? Right before you joined Bank One, you bought $60 million of stock?

Jamie: I did.

Ben: I’ve never heard of someone taking a CEO job and saying, I’m going to invest half my net worth in this company now.

Jamie: I thought it might be overvalued a little bit because people thought it might be sold or something like that, but I didn’t care about that. If you work at a company and the new CEO comes in, he’s from out of town, and you’re going to have a lot of shareholders, I knew a lot of the shareholders. I was going to know a lot of the shareholders.

I wanted them to know I was in 100% lock, stock, and barrel. There was no question. I would never sell that stock. I’m going to go down with the ship or go up with the ship. I was making decisions that I thought were right for long-term health of the company, not for a short-term type of thing.

Ben: So what did you find when you got there? Day one on the job, you start investigating. Is it better, or worse, the same than you thought?

Jamie: There had been an analyst called Mike Mayo who had done a report. I remember one of the great lines of the report, “Even Hercules couldn’t fix it.” It had been an amalgamation of Bank One, First Chicago, National Bank of Detroit. They had never put the companies together. They had multiple statement systems, processing systems, payment systems, SAP systems.

They had different brands, services coming down. We were losing accounts, they were closing branches. It was a mess. But it was all of it—systems, people, ops. But again, I met the management team. It’s hard. I walked in, I met six of the directors. There were 21 directors, 11 hated the other 10.

David: Wait, wait, wait. There were 21 board members?

Jamie: Twenty-one board members from the multiple acquisitions. They were tribal. They ended up hating each other. I knew that when I went in. I knew people. I spoke to a lot of people and did research in the bank.

But again, in life, you get handed these things and it’s not perfect. Even today, people want to be handed something perfect. It’s not perfect. I met six directors. I walked in. When I got offered the job, I shook all their hands. I told them, I’m going to do the best I do. I’m going to tell you the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the good, the bad, the ugly. We’re not going to bullshit. We’re going to try to build a great company. I’m going to need your help. And then they left.

So now I’m on the executive floor, I don’t even know where to go. So I knocked on someone’s door, the head of HR. I said, I do need an office and I really need an assistant. They were going to give me the chairman’s office in the corner. I said, no, no. I want to be right in the middle so I can see people. I stick my head out.

Then I went to meet the management team. They put them all in this conference room, nice, white, plush carpets. I walked in with a cup of coffee and they said, Jamie, we don’t drink coffee in here for obvious reasons. I looked at them, I looked at coffee, I looked at them, I said, you do now.

And then I just started meeting with them all. Yeah, the systems were terrible. The company’s losing money. I didn’t know all the businesses really well, so the credit card company had collapsed. That’s probably the business I knew the least. But again, that didn’t matter to me. I was going to try to fix it. It had some good assets and things like that, so I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

David: When we were chatting a couple of weeks ago in preparing for this, we asked you in the context of J.P. Morgan, what are the critical things in your mind that has made J.P. Morgan what it’s today? And the first thing you said was risk, the culture around risk, the way you treat risk.

Ben: And a fundamental understanding by management of risk.

David: When you got to Bank One, I think this is where you first started putting into practice the culture around risk. What was the risk culture at Bank One, and how did you change it?

Jamie: I’ve always been very risk conscious. Risk conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes.

When I got there, I just started meeting people and going through. I quickly realized that Bank One had more US corporate credit risk than Citibank did. The way they accounted for it was unbelievably aggressive. They had less capital, less reserves, less this. They were calling these things profitable, but they were basically losing money.

Loans in a lot of businesses, you have to be very careful about the credit business. Once I found out that, I panicked a little bit. I went through every single loan in the books, I marked them all down, put up more reserves, told the board about it, and then wanted to earn more revenues per dollar of risk.

For example in the middle market business, for every loan NII, we had 80 cents and 20 cents—

Ben: Net interest income for the non-banking.

Jamie: Net interest income from the loan, and 20 cents of other revenue like payments. By the time we merged with J.P. Morgan, we had 40 NII for the loan, and 60% NIR from other type of things like payments. One, you’re being paid for the risk, and one you’re being paid little for the risk. I always stress-tested, and I showed the board that if we have a recession and we were about to have one, how much money we’d losing credit?

I hired a woman called Linda Bammann who said, okay, if you’re going to let me do credit, you’re going to let me sell loans? I said, yes. Are you going to let me hedge loans? Yes. Can I do $10 billion? I said, yes. She said, okay, I’ll join. We probably reduced the balance sheet by $50 billion. Then we did have a recession, but we were okay by them, with one big bad one which is United, which went bankrupt. We basically owned it for a small period of time.

Ben: There seems to be a fundamental Jamie Dimonism, which is don’t blow up. A lot of other people have gotten decent at pricing risk, but everyone else seems to be willing to get closer to the line than you. Where did you develop this don’t blow up at all costs idea?

Jamie: If you look around risk, there’s always this ecosystem. You’ve always heard it. Everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s okay. This is going to work. This time is different. History tells you, learn, teaches you a lot.

I always say, if you did, my dad was a stockbroker. I bought my first stock when I was 14. In 1972, the stock market hit a thousand. It hit a thousand in 1968. I was already helping a little bit with stuff. By 1974, it was down 45%.

All the limousines in Wall Street were gone. Restaurants were being closed. Markets move violently. Then we had a recovery. In 1980, had a recession. 1982, you had a recession. In 1982, it was lower it would have been in 1968. It hit 800. Then in 1987, the market was down 25% in one day. In 1990, all these banks—J.P. Morgan, Citi, Chase, Chemical—were all taken to their knees by real estate losses, and they’re all worth about a billion dollars.

I think Citi was $3 billion at the time, and the other ones were about a billion dollars. Then you had the 1997, also real estate-related thing. You had the 2000 internet bubble. Then you had the great financial crisis.

If you go through history, there are tons of these things. Andrew Ross Sorkin is in here. I just read his book. He’s nice enough to send it to me 1929. Man, history does rhyme. Too much leverage, too much risk. Everyone thinks it’s going to be great. No one thinks it can go down a lot. That stock market went down 20% one year, 30% next year, 20% next year. At one point it was down 90%. Shit happens.

Ben: It seems like your philosophy is that the worst thing will happen. So just plan for it. Don’t say, oh, we’re good as long as this crazy, insane four Sigma event doesn’t happen. You’re like, no. That will happen, and it happens often.

Jamie: Yeah. When I look at it, when I do stress tests and a risk for high yield, I remember getting to J.P. Morgan and going through the risk books. Their stress test was that high yield would move 40%, the credit spread. That time was at 400 or whatever it was. That means 560.

I said, no. Our stress test is going to be worst ever. Worst ever was 17%. They said, that’ll never happen again. The market’s more sophisticated. Well, in 2008, it hit 20% and you couldn’t have sold a bond. There was no market. So those things do happen.

The point isn’t that you’re trying to guess them. The point is you can handle them, so you continue to build your business. I always look what I call the fat tails and manage that we can handle all the fat tails. Not the stress test the Fed gives us, but all the fat tails.

Markets down 50%, interest rates up to 8%, credit spreads back to worst ever. Of course, your results will be worse, but you’re there. The thing about financial services, leverage kills you. Aggressive accounting can kill you, which a lot of companies do. Also, confidence. If you lose money as a financial company—I always knew this too—the headlines are people read that. If they’re a line on putting their money with you, they look at that difference.

Ben: They lose trust.

Jamie: They lose trust, and that’s what’s caused you’ve seen runs on banks. You saw some recently because people take their money out.

Ben: One, there’s a thing that you just said, which is that you might do worse, but you’re there. There’s this trade-off that you make where you’re less profitable in the short-term, but at least you stick around.

If you look back at the companies that you’ve run—Bank One, J.P. Morgan Chase—is that true in the good years that you’ve actually been less profitable than those who are risk on?

Jamie: A little bit. You’re saying that if you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were earning 30% equity. Most of them went bankrupt. We never did that much. But in 2008 and 2009, we were fine and they weren’t.

But you want to build a real strong company with real margins, real clients, conservative accounting, where you’re not relying on leverage. It’s very easy to use leverage to jack up returns in any business, but in banking it could be particularly dangerous.

David: It seems like a core part, if not the entirety of this distilled into your operating strategy’s the fortress balance sheet. When did you first hear about the fortress balance sheet?

Jamie: I go way back to Primerica. I used to talk about that. You’re going to be able to survive the tough times.

Ben: Which was the early 90s?

Jamie: Probably the 1990s. Like I said, I grew up. My father and I went through those market things. I remember how hard it was on people on Wall Street. The fortress balance sheet is you run a company serving clients well. You have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I’m as conservative an accountant you can find. I don’t upfront profits when I can spread them over time.

Of course, accountants hate when I say this. You can drive a truck to where accounting rules. Accounting itself, that certain things are considered expenses but they’re good. They’re an investment for the future, but they’re called an expense. Then revenues, if I make bad loans, they are bad revenues. They will kill you. But for a while they look pretty good. It’s all those things—margins, clients.

In the banking business, the character of the clients you have will reflect on your bank. The first thing is, who are you doing business with? How you’re doing business? And also making sure your compensation plans aren’t paying people for stuff which is stupid or unethical. You always have to review these things to make sure you have them right because they change all the time.

Ben: All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Vercel.

David: Vercel is an awesome company. Over the past few years, they’ve become the infrastructure backbone that powers modern web development, and now the AI wave. If you visited a fast, responsive, modern website lately, or used a slick AI native app with agents and hyper-personalized interfaces, there’s a good chance it was built and deployed on Vercel.

Ben: For the past decade, they’ve been on a mission to democratize the lessons of the giants. Companies like Google and Amazon and Meta. The idea is developers shouldn’t have to spend weeks and engineering resources to stitch together dozens of services just to launch a web app.

David: Vercel made it simple. You write code, you ship it. Fast. Globally distributed, and without developing a second skillset in the nuances of deployment. That’s the magic of their framework-defined infrastructure, which basically lets developers and large teams go from idea to production without any friction.

Ben: As you may know, Vercel has been synonymous with front-end development. But now they do back-end and agentic workloads as well. Vercel calls this the AI Cloud, purpose-built for the next era of apps and already in production across companies like Under Armour, PayPal, Notion, and AI startups like Runway, Decagon, and Browserbase.

David: 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.

Ben: If you want to build the future of software, head to vercel.com/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.

David: Claude has really transformed our workflow here at Acquired. Preparing 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 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.

Ben: Where Claude is especially great for me is extended thinking mode. When I asked it to analyze J.P. Morgan’s strategy through multiple financial crises, I could watch Claude’s reasoning through each decision point step-by-step.

David: And it has full context by connecting to our entire 10-year base of knowledge here at Acquired through something called MCP, which you might have heard about—the model context protocol. They have prebuilt integrations with Gmail and Google Docs, and also services like Jira, Asana, Linear, Square, PayPal, as well as custom integrations for any internal tooling that you have.

Ben: And Claude is built by Anthropic, with a laser focus on accuracy and trustworthiness, which is exactly what we need.

David: If you want to start using Claude yourself or for your organization, go to claude.ai/acquired. They’ve got a special offer for acquired listeners, half price Claude Pro for three months, which gets you access to all the features mentioned above.

Ben: So 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/acquired.

David, catch us up to the merger.

David: So you run Bank One for four years from Chicago, and then in 2004 you merge with J.P. Morgan Chase in what is termed at the time a merger of equals. I think J.P. Morgan Chase referred to it as that Bank One shareholders get 42% of the combined company. I think people don’t realize how much of J.P. Morgan Chase is Bank One today.

Jamie: That’s why it’s a little irritating to me. They say you’ve been running it. Since I was running J.P. Morgan, I was running 40% of the company for the whole time. When I got to Bank one, and I’m not working around the clock, I already knew that a logical strategic merger might be J.P. Morgan. I know all these companies. That’s the other thing about fortress balance sheet is you also have real strategies that survive the test of time. You’re not flipping and flopping.

Then I’m sitting there and of course the tape comes, J.P. Morgan Chase to merge. We’re worth $25 billion. They’re now worth like $80 or $90 billion or whatever the number was. I’m like, well, there goes that dream.

Four years later, our stock was up to doubled or something like that. Theirs actually come in and it was in the target range. I had been meeting with Bill Harris and the current chairman of J.P. Morgan at the time. We were talking about it. We both knew it made business sense. They were looking for a CEO. We had been talking probably for a year-and-a-half before that.

Ben: They’re looking for a CEO. Did they give Bank One shareholders 42% because they were looking for a CEO?

Jamie: There were two lawsuits. We got the premium, they got the name and location. I effectively had control from day one because inside the merge agreement—this is almost unheard of—when we get the premium, is to not have me become CEO 18 months later, 75% of the board would have to vote me out.

The board was eight Bank One people and eight J.P. Morgan people. I knew a lot of the J.P. Morgan board members too, who respected me. Bill Harris and I were very close, but that was the agreement. They got sued for paying too much to buy me. I got sued for not taking enough. You get sued, you can’t win in these.

David: I think every shareholder is probably happy.

Jamie: But it worked out.

David: 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?

Jamie: J.P. Morgan brand is a Tiffany name. I didn’t value it in the deal. When I looked at, I had given my board. I think the first thing is run your company well. 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.

The first thing I looked at was business logic. 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 services. We both had a wealth management business. I knew we could save a lot of cost saves, so the business logic would be impeccable.

Then there’s the ability to execute. 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 that happened at Citi, so you don’t effectuate.

Then there’s the price. 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’ve mattered that much.

David: Interesting.

Ben: I’m going to fast forward us a couple of years. It’s 2006. You’re officially chairman and CEO of the combined J.P. Morgan Chase now.

David: And 2006 on Wall Street is like, go, go, go baby. It’s like the 1980s all over again.

Ben: 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 or did you—

David: You pulled J.P. Morgan back hard on the risk side in 2006.

Jamie: I did. There were cracks out there in 2006. You may remember the quants. There started to be a quant problem late in 2006. We definitely saw subprime getting bad. 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’ve saved more.

David: You still had some losses.

Jamie: Yeah, 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 looking at the situation, I was quite worried. You may not remember this, but the leverage, because of accounting rules and Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage. And it was go, go. The CMOs, the bridge loans, the whole thing.

In 2007, the bridge book of Wall Street was $450 billion. Today it’s $40 billion. J.P. Morgan can handle the whole $40 billion today though we’re not the $40 billion today, and they were much more leveraged deals. A lot of them fell apart, collapsed. Of course, and that was before you had the collapse in the mortgage mortgage, which really took down a lot of these banks.

Ben: 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.

Jamie: 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. Don’t do the wrong thing to the client. If you’re the client, how would you want to be treated? 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.

David: You were telling us about the auto loan business.

Jamie: 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 it can actually be deployed if things get bad. 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.

David: This is for comp with senior bankers.

Jamie: Almost all of them. Today at J.P. Morgan 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, meanwhile not helping the company manage its risk or something like that. So we change the incentive programs.

I’m quite conscious about incentive programs that they don’t create mis misbehavior. But it’s also very important if you’re in a company and you say the incentive programs do that, you should tell the company. This incentive plan is not incentivizing the right behavior versus the customer. And a lot of it was leverage.

If you look at the leverage in some of these securitization and mortgage books, if you have 30 times leverage and you’re getting 20% of the profits, you’ll go to 40 times leverage. It literally will add 25% to your bonus. So I got rid of the profit pool 20% and the leverage. I lost some people too in the meantime.

David: It’s funny. J.P. Morgan as part of the system had the same incentives, but you changed the incentives for team within the company.

Okay, we got to go to 2008. March 13th, Thursday, 2008. It’s Thursday night. You get a call from Bear Stearns, CEO. The stock closed that day at $57 a share. It was like $150 a couple of months before. Three days later—God, I remember it like yesterday, I was working on Park Avenue on Wall Street, I remember that night—$2 a share. You’re buying Bear Stearns. Tell us the story.

Jamie: I was at Avra on 47th Street, my parents and my parents’ favorite restaurant. My whole family was there. It happened to be my birthday. I don’t normally get emergency phone—

David: Happy birthday.

Jamie: Alan Schwartz 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. He said, Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight before Asia opens. I said, I don’t know how to get $30 billion for you. Have you called Paulson? 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 night. They all got dressed, they went back to work. It’s an emergency. We now rang all 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 Saturday and Sunday, and we concocted this loan.

We couldn’t lend the $30 billion. The Fed technically couldn’t lend the $30 billion, but the Fed can lend to us technically. I can technically use the collateral of Bear Stearns. We got the literally one day loan.

Then the next day, we had thousands of people come in do due diligence. We went through every loan, every asset, every balance sheet, all the derivatives, all the lawsuits, all the HR policies, 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, which became—

David: You need Citi shareholders to approve the deal.

Jamie: It was a public deal, and the worst part of it is I was going to get the lawsuits from the Bear holders. I knew that, but we couldn’t let it go bankrupt. It wasn’t like an industrial co you can buy in bankruptcy. It would’ve been gone and the crisis would’ve just unfolded.

David: Okay, two questions: (1) What would’ve happened if it went down? (2) Afterwards, did you think it was over?

Jamie: No. That was March. What happened with Lehman was an uncontrolled failure. There was money locked up everywhere. People panicked. They started pulling money out everything. That would’ve happened with Bear. It did stop that, and I would’ve thought that it gave other people other time to clean up their act.

Literally six months later, I would’ve thought some of these other firms had more liquidity, more capital, and were a little bit more prepared for what might be happening. We already had the stress in the system was you saw it already. It was going to mount. It wasn’t going to go away. There were tremendous losses coming.

We bought it and probably did help. In hindsight, it didn’t stop the crisis from unfolding. We bought it, and then a week later, we changed the $10 a share. It had been at $120. 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.

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 dollars on the balance sheet for zero. The fact we got some very good people and we got some good businesses, but it was an extremely painful process.

Ben: I’ve seen estimates that in the fullness of time, after really dealing with unwinding all the stuff there, it cost you $15–$20 billion.

David: It cost you 20 anyway.

Jamie: Yeah. It was the $12 billion we wrote off. That didn’t cost us. We didn’t really pay for it. Then the government sued us on the mortgages, which I was quite offended by. And I really was. I thought it was—

Ben: Take this problem and then we’ll see.

Jamie: Well, this is the government. 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 saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay $5 billion on the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. That’s what made me make the statement I wouldn’t do it again. Put it this way. I don’t know how to say this. I wouldn’t really trust the government again.

Ben: I 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?

Jamie: Yeah. They don’t feel obligated to what the prior administration did. Even some contracts were violated in this thing, which I won’t go through. Literally contracts. It would’ve been tortuous interference had it been company-to-company. But basically, since you operate under their laws, they can basically take you down.

I went to see Eric Holder trying to settle this mortgage stuff, which we settled. I brought my lead director. He expected me to come and be pounding my chest. 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 to know the circumstances by which we bought WaMu and Bear Stearns, because 80% of what they’re asking for related to Bear Stearns and WaMu, not J.P. Morgan Chase. I went through the whole thing. He said, thank you. I’ll take it in consideration. But they never gave me the accounting. I don’t know what they did. It is what it is. It was quite painful, but it’s got to move on.

Ben: We’ll move on from this.

David: I do have one more thing. Whether you would’ve done it again, very clear it was not a great deal on paper for J.P. Morgan. But as we look at it, the reputation of J.P. Morgan now is unlike any other in the industry.

Ben: Part of why you’re worth $800 billion is that reputation. A lot of what created that reputation…

David: Was that weekend.

Jamie: Yeah, I know. And I know I say I wouldn’t trust the government if the government called me up. They did it again. They called me again and said, we need your help to save our country. Well, of course, I’m a patriot that way. I would just try to come with some ways to avoid the punishment by the next president. I would come up with something.

David: You know what you need? The version of the merger agreement with J.P. Morgan Chase, where it’s like 75% of Congress needs to vote not to sue you. The default is you’re not going to get sued.

Ben: 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 Bear, WaMu is actually a great acquisition, right?

Jamie: This is a lesson about acquisitions. It’s very hard. Remember, we bought WaMu a week after Lehman went bankrupt. Most boards wouldn’t have touched that at all. The whole system was in trouble. But WaMu put us in California, parts of Nevada, Georgia, Florida, which we weren’t in. So think of these really healthy states. They had 2300 branches.

They had huge mortgage problems, but we had looked at it over and over and over. We knew their mortgage books called and we wrote off. We bought it for $30 billion discount to tangible book value, because they had debt, and we left the debt behind. That $30 billion was approximately what the Moore’s law was going to be.

We bought the company. I think if we bought a company clean, we wrote off all that stuff. The books were clean. Then we did something unheard of, too. The next day or two days later, I went and the market raised $11 billion 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 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.

Ben: And you already had the reputation to pull this off. I’m imagining in the worst month of the financial crisis, who can go out and raise $11 billion of equity? People trust you.

Jamie: Well, yeah. We knew a lot of the shareholders, and you earn your trust over time with shareholders. And we explained. We gave them a quick little presentation. A lot of them stepped up and said, this is great.

They also knew we can execute it because behind the Bear Stearns, people forget the work is the next day you got 50,000 people consolidating 5000 applications, branches, compensation programs, settlement programs, payment systems. It’s a lot of work. But we obviously have the capability to do that.

We have the capability of doing WaMu. I think we finished the WaMu consolidations in nine months, all of them. That was nine months that we’re all in the same systems, which allows you to start doing a better job in customer service and things like that.

Ben: This fortress balance sheet strategy, raising this equity capital, 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? Have people changed and does everyone else run their banks like this now?

Jamie: I think 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 saw people take too much interest rate risk, too much credit exposure, too much optionality risk, or sometimes it’s new products.

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. You had that with equities way back in 1929, you had it with options, you had it with equity derivatives, you had it with mortgages. Even Ginnie Maes at one point blew up, even though they’re government guaranteed.

David: Arguably, you had it with quant and with LT and CM.

Jamie: It happened with quant. It happened with leveraged lending. People then become more rational how they run these balance sheets now they think through the risk.

Ben: I have to ask you, is this private credit today?

Jamie: I don’t really think so. It’s $2 trillion. It’s grown rapidly. That’s an issue. The other thing about Mark is there are some very good actors in it who know what they’re doing. Customers like the product. 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. There may be something in there would become a problem one day. I don’t think it’s systemic. 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.

David: A trillion dollars was more than a trillion dollars back then.

Jamie: Yeah, a lot of these private credit are not leveraged like that. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be problems. It’s slightly different. You look at the whole system. There are other things out there that are leveraged that can cause problems. Of course, people take secret leverage in the ways you don’t necessarily see it.

Ben: What are some of these in your mind that are potentially problematic today?

Jamie: 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 say that’s a lot less risk. A lot less to fall, and you have some upside. I would say at 23, there’s not a lot of upside, and there’s a long way to fall. That’s true with credit spread.

We stress test everything. We do 100 stress tests a week to make sure we can handle a wide variety of things. The biggest risk to me is cyber. I think the cyber stuff is we were very good at it. We work with all the government agencies. They would say the [...] 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, communications companies, water, and even part of the military establishment. The protections are not what we need, but if we ever get in any kind of war where cyber’s involved, and China is very good at it, and so is Russia, but Russia is mostly criminal which is slightly different.

Ben: I’m going to pull us back to the story. We’re going to fast forward to 2023.

David: We’re not really equipped to talk about Russia. It’s not what we do on Acquired, but think…

Ben: 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.

Jamie: Silicon Valley Bank did some very good stuff. 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 missay that concentrated, so a lot of venture capital.

What happened with Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic is some of these large venture capital companies—hundreds of them, maybe a thousand—told their constituent clients that they invested in, who all banked in the Silicon Valley and First Republic, the banks aren’t safe, get out, and they all removed their deposits.

Silicon Valley Bank (I think) had $200 billion deposits, $100 billion in one day. That caused the problem. But they also had other problems. They didn’t have proper liquidity, they didn’t have their collateral posted at the Fed, and they had taken too much interest rate exposure.

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. 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.

Now you’re into judgment land. At what point, if you saw a bank where just that one mark had the tangible book value drop to 40 or 30 cents to a dollar, would you panic? I would’ve said, that’s too much risk.

The regulators helped us because they said rates are going to stay low forever. So these banks bought a lot of 3% mortgages. When rates went up to 5% worth 50 cents on the dollar, that was it. They took too much instrument exposure known to management, known to the regulators, and fixable.

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 had called Janet Yellen. 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. They waited a little bit too long. It was 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. 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 are maybe clients here. They did a great job with high net worth clients. Single point of contact concierge services. Now if you go down Madison Avenue, you see things called J.P. Morgan Financial Center.

Ben: That’s your first J.P. Morgan-branded consumer effort, right?

Jamie: Yes, because it’s 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. We’re very high level services. I think we have 20 of them now, but I’d love it. If it works in 20 years we’ll have 300. These things are opportunities and I hope it works. You don’t always know they’re going to work for a fact, but so far so good.

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Ben: We’re effectively caught up to today. Now we’ve got the whole story, we’ve got a lot of context. Obviously didn’t go into every detail, but 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?

Jamie: Well first of all, we skipped over strategy a little bit, and this is important for all. What we do is the same thing that a community bank does other than global investment banking.

If you walk into a small community bank, they know your business account, they know your consumer account, and they usually have a trust company. They used to call it trust. They manage your private affairs, they set up a trust for you, and they do stuff like that. Their CRM is up here. They don’t need a Salesforce CRM because they know everyone in town. 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. All of our businesses feed each other. There’s no extraneous. We got rid of everything that didn’t fit a strategy. Then you start building client businesses and client services, fortress balance sheet, fortress accounting, and all those various things. I’ve always talked about—

Ben: So it’s holding a portfolio of things that actually feed each other?

Jamie: They actually fit. Whereas Citi had consumer finance that didn’t fit, life insurance that didn’t fit, property [...] that didn’t… They eventually got rid of them all. Sandy just wanted to do more of them.

He bought American generalists, did truck leasing for God’s sake. Once you get involved in these things, it is 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. We’ve made plenty of mistakes because you have to try and test things. Then you’re always investing for the future.

That investment is always people, branches, and technology. That’s true whether investment banking people or consumer bank people or opening consumer branches. I think Doug Petno was here and Troy Rohrbaugh, 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. Then sometimes if you’re strong when others aren’t, you have a chance to buy things you want to buy. 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? Not going for the last dollar and not nothing like that. And building teams of people.

Our people are curious and smart. They have heart, they have soul. They give a damn about the guards in the company and the receptionists. It’s not just about the big time bankers and people pounding their chest. We try not to put up with that. And we have big time bankers. They’re exceptional, but the company serves the clients, and I think the clients know that.

Ben: When you really dig in to start analyzing J.P. Morgan’s financials, you 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. Why is your efficiency ratio so much better than competitors?

Jamie: It is literally continuously investing, gaining business at the margin, not stopping and not stop starting. The thing about margins too is that we have that margin while investing a lot. It’s much easier to have that margin. We can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. We could 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 look right through the cycle and we look at the actual economics that we do, not the accounting of what we do. And we’ve built it over time.

We have great people and great products. There’s some secret sauce I’m not going to tell you about. We do investor day and we tell everyone everything. I’m sitting there. 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.

Ben: So there are secrets as to why the efficiency ratio—

Jamie: I saw Howard Schultz here before, and I’m not supposed to say that.

David: It’s okay.

Jamie: No, but look what he built over the years. The consistency, the curiosity, the heart, the branch-by-branch products. It’s just always doing that, knowing you’re going to make mistakes, but building the culture that just plows through that.

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 look at Tom Brady. Every day at practice he worked hard. If people are not giving their best, how you’re going to have a great team?

It’s not that different in business. The difference in business, you can BS about it all the time. You can make up stories. But in sports, you see it 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. So I do think companies have that. It’s like a sauce that works. And you’ve seen it. Lots of different companies, not just J.P. Morgan Chase.

David: So, we’ve got one last question for you. If you look back to 2008, which was a long time ago now, all of the other leaders that were involved in that era have long since retired. I think many folks within J.P. Morgan 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?

Jamie: I want to thank my wife who was here, too, who suffered through all this, with me all these years, and probably couldn’t have done it without her. Look, I don’t know. But I do believe, my grandparents, all Greek immigrants, who didn’t finish high school, but there’s a Greek ethic. You don’t even realize you’re learning from your parents from the ground up. Judy’s parents, my wife’s parents were the same.

Have a purpose. 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. But have a purpose. Then do the best you can. Give it your all. Don’t be one of those people who’s complaining all the time. You give it your best. And then treat everyone properly. Everyone.

If there’s a bully beating 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 you do.

In my hierarchy of life, the most important thing is my family. 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, because I don’t think people fully understand it sometimes.

Then my purpose, because my family doesn’t want me home every day, this is my contribution. Through this company, I can help cities, states, schools, companies, employees. I get the biggest kick out of that, so that’s what I do. As long as I have the energy, I’m going to do it.

I don’t play golf. One of my daughters said, dad, you need some hobbies. I said, I do. Hanging out with you, family travel, barbecuing, wine. We now like whiskeys. I love history. I think history is the greatest teacher of all time. Hiking. I can’t play tennis anymore because of 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. I get to do a lot of things for our country that I just think are quite meaningful from this job.

When I’m done with this, I don’t know. I’ll teach and write. I may write a book like Andrew Ross Sorkin did. I’ll do something, but I got to do something, and I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs and smell the flowers.

Ben: There are a lot of people who have floated your name for political or policy roles over the years. It is hard. There is only one job that could possibly impact the country in a bigger scale than you’re currently doing. Do you agree?

Jamie: Right now, yeah.

David: Well, that’s probably a great place to leave. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us.

Jamie: David, Ben, these guys are great, by the way, so thank you.

Ben: Well, that is it for our conversation with Jamie Dimon, listeners. Thank you so much to all 6000 of you who came to watch in person. It was so cool.

David: So cool.

Ben: Well, we have some thank yous. First to our partners this season. J.P. Morgan, an incredible partner does 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. Morgan, 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 screaming 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 are 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?

David: Owner, yeah.

Ben: He wears a lot of hats, all of them are yellow, at the Savannah Bananas.

David: For something completely different.

Ben: Yes. And if you want to talk about this with the Acquired community, come join the Slack, acquired.fm/slack. And with that, listeners, we’ll see you next time.

David: We’ll see you next time.