Imagine sitting down with a visionary banking leader, Jamie Dimon, who's been at the helm of JPMorgan Chase since 2005. In a candid conversation, Dimon shares insights into his journey from a family man from Queens to leading the world's largest bank. He touches on topics such as risk management, the importance of staying prepared for unforeseen economic shocks, and how his educational roots tied to finance discussions at the family kitchen table prepared him for monumental responsibilities.

Through the lens of global finance, Dimon addresses the influence and power that come with running a multi-trillion-dollar Institution like JPMorgan. He candidly reflects on how he's often tasked with balancing the demands of his corporate role and the expectations of contributing positively to the economy and society as a whole. Furthermore, while dealing with crises and competitors like fintech and big tech companies, he Pragmatically explains the necessity of size in banking and the role of technology in shaping its future.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Titan [ˈtaɪtən] - (n.) - A person or entity of great reputation or influence.

I'm about to go meet one of the titans of banking.

2. Institution [ˌɪnstɪˈtuːʃən] - (n.) - An established organization or foundation, especially one dedicated to education, public service, or culture.

Jamie Dimon is an Institution.

3. Speculation [ˌspɛkjəˈleɪʃən] - (n.) - The forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.

There's been plenty of Speculation he might run for office someday.

4. Mitigate [ˈmɪtɪˌɡeɪt] - (v.) - To make less severe, serious, or painful.

JP Morgan stepped in to Mitigate the damage from the collapse of Silicon Valley bank and First Republic.

5. Pragmatically [præɡˈmætɪkli] - (adv.) - In a sensible and realistic way.

He Pragmatically explains the necessity of size in banking and the role of technology in shaping its future.

6. Resiliency [rɪˈzɪljənsi] - (n.) - The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

One of the great things about America is our constant Resiliency, ability to adjust.

7. Adjack [əˈdʒak] - (adj.) - Closely related to or touching on another field or skill.

We want to offer you great travel and great hotels, and great restaurants, and so there are all these adjacencies on everything we do.

8. Autocratic [ˌɔːtəˈkrætɪk] - (adj.) - Relating to a ruler who has absolute power.

Autocratic leadership gets a stasis.

9. Vilification [ˌvɪlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən] - (n.) - Abusive or defamatory speech or writing.

When I hear the constant Vilification of corporate America, I personally don't understand it.

10. Redeploy [reɪˈdiːplɔɪ] - (v.) -To use or assign resources to a different task or function.

If it replaces jobs, we hope to Redeploy people.

Jamie Dimon: Navigating The Financial World with Vision and Purpose

I'm here in London. It is a bustling Monday morning and I'm about to go meet one of the titans of banking. Hello. You guys love these meet and greet things. It's good to have a good handshake. Have you ever met, like, I feel like I know you because I've seen you so many times. Vice versa.

Jamie Dimon is an Institution. Since 2005, he's been the head of the world's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase. He's widely seen as a rock in the storms of 21st century finance and even at times, a kind of guardian of the US and global economy. He's a leader and he understands the importance of stepping up at a time where there's great uncertainty. This country is a lot better off because Jamie Dimon has been running JP Morgan. He's also a highly visible figurehead in the banking world, always in demand for media appearances, where he reliably delivers hot takes on the current thing. I could care less what bitcoin trades for, how it trades, why it trades, who trades it. If you're stupid enough to buy it, you'll pay the price for it one day. Diamond always seems to be ready with blunt insight into the events of the moment.

But I wanted to zoom out and talk about his broader philosophy to learn about the principles that guide the decision making of this incredibly influential person, a family man from Queens who's at least as invested in being a dad and a grandpa as he is in shaping the global economy. So you're on the road. How often? I say, actually, we checked last year, it was like 120 nights or something like that, but some of it is. Covid, catch up. I feel like I need to visit people. Right. And all these conferences are on again. And of course I'm here. I do more than just this conference.

Right. Do you have any travel hacks? What does that mean? You know, ways to make your life easier? Yes, I. Well, I try. When I land, when I exercise, when I eat, when I don't get tortured by people. You have a lot of folks from Bloomberg here. Uh huh. This is the Jamie Dimon treatment. Exactly. So how long have you been at Bloomberg? I have been at Bloomberg 13 years. Where are you from? I'm from Hawaii originally. Hawaii? Yeah. And married? I married. Children? Four kids. Holy moly. Yeah. How do you do it? What do you mean? How did you juggle it all? I pretty much had a binary life. I worked and family, so you didn't see me in black ties and red carpets and very rare stuff like that.

So big family life. I know you. I've heard you're a family man. Yeah. How old are your daughters now? 38? 36. 34 and seven grandkids. Six girls and finally a boy. Do you babysit? Yeah. My wife does more than I do, but I do. We do it together. They come over, sleepovers and all that kind of stuff. Any, any parenting advice? Just love them. Yeah? Yeah. So what do you like to do with your daughters now? Everything. We barbecue, we eat, we go to restaurants, we travel, we listen to music, we do wine. I love my son in law's. It's quite the test, going to meet Jamie Dimon as your future father in law. They have no problem. I'd be shaking in my face. God knows if I ever say something where I wrong, they correct me. They like fighting me wrong about something.

If that sounds modest. Well, there's nothing modest about Diamond's professional life. JP Morgan Chase is the world's biggest bank by market cap and one of the biggest companies of any kind. In 2023, they set a record for the most profits of any us bank ever, $49.6 billion. It's no exaggeration to say that entire economies depend on this bank. JP Morgan played a crucial role in stopping the bleeding during the 2008 financial crisis. The better we do here, the better be for the United States economy, and more recently stepped in to Mitigate the damage from the collapse of Silicon Valley bank and First Republic. Diamond regularly speaks with prime ministers and presidents around the world, and there's been plenty of Speculation he might run for office someday.

All this translates into a great deal of power and influence. You've built a bank that's $4 trillion in assets and counting. How big is too big? I think the question is what works for consumers and industries and stuff like that? So, you know, if you want to build a Boeing aircraft, you have to be big. You can pretend that you don't if you want to do what JP Morgan does. We move $10 trillion of money around the world every day. We bank some of these companies in 30 countries, we bank countries, we bank the world, bank the IMF, we bank the United States government. You have to be big. You can't do those things and be small.

I applaud the small banks. We're the biggest bank to community banks and regional banks and stuff like that. And I understand some of the stress they're under. We're trying to help, so it's not either or. So going a little bigger picture now. You run the biggest bank in the world, you have our money you've got world leaders on speed dial. That's a lot of power. How do you decide when and how to wield that power? Yeah, I'm not sure. I have a lot of people in speed dial. So you say all that. Sometimes I think I'm just riding the Bronco and hanging out for deal life.

You know, I love what I do. I try to talk to everyone. I try to keep my mind open. One of the benefits from traveling the world just in Mumbai and Switzerland and seeing clients, you learn a lot, and you try to make sure that you're doing a proper assessment of the world, that you're looking at the options. You're not like just saying, we're going to do this. I look at it as part of our job to try to have countries to help countries do the best they can for their citizens. So we bank countries. We also advise them on skills and trade and economics. You look at our research, it's a lot around how does an economy run? So when you go to, like, when I got back from Mumbai, we research 150 companies now or something like that. So we're educating the world about those companies.

We're educating the world about the indian economy. As we do that. We also educate the Indians about what works in their economy and what doesn't work. And those are important things to lift up society. You've got this reputation as a sort of white knight for the economy. Do you ever feel pressure to come in with the save? I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to do. Obviously, my family comes first. Okay. But to do a great job for my company and our clients, I also feel a huge burden to do a good job for my country. So, you know, when my country wants me to do something, and we talk all the time to, you know, the senators and regulators, what can we do to make the system better, to lift up the country, lift up inner cities? We're trying to figure out how to make society better, and I do consider that part of our job.

You grew up talking finance at the kitchen table as a kid. What was it like growing up, Jamie Dimon, like, what do you think prepared you for all this? Well, I grew up in Jackson, ICe queens, and my grandparents, three were greek immigrants. One was born here. I don't think any of the four finished high school. It was a loud table. People argue and stuff like that. But my parents were, while my dad was a stockbroker, you know, I was the only one who took interest in that, reading the paper, understanding. I bought a stock when I was 1213 or 14. You know, they didn't ask us to go into finance. So my older brother's a physicist, my other brother's a teacher. And so it was basically, do the best you can, make the world a better place, treat everyone with respect, have a purpose in life. It was more around that, but a lot of intellectual debate at the table.

Diamond quickly rose through the ranks of finance. Right out of Harvard Business School, he became the protege of his dad's boss, Sandy Weil, a legendary banking deal maker. Diamond and Weil oversaw a series of massive bank mergers together through the eighties and nineties. Until, in 1998, Weil forced Dimon out of Citigroup and Dimon struck out on his own. Diamond landed on his feet as chief executive of Chicago based bank one. When bank one was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2004, diamond quickly ascended to the top spot. Just a couple years later, in 2007, Dimon warned shareholders that the bank was seeing trouble in its subprime mortgage business. When the financial crisis hit. JPMorgan's relatively cautious investing approach meant that they were able to help avert catastrophe by acquiring the struggling bear Stearns and Washington mutual.

That saved the government billions in bailouts and made chase the biggest commercial bank in America. Though american banks came in for some well deserved criticism, during this time, diamond emerged as a staunch defender of JP Morgan and the financial system as a whole. As a force for good. 224,000 employees. We give health care to 4000 people. We paid $10 billion a year in federal taxes. Over the last five years, we've given $600 million to organizations. This is a terrific company. And when I hear the constant Vilification of corporate America, I personally don't understand it. And I would ask a lot of our folks and government to stop doing it because I think it's just hurting our country.

At this point, more crises would follow. In 2012, a rogue JP Morgan trader nicknamed the London Whale lost the company more than $6 billion, putting the harsh spotlight of scandal on Dimon and calling his leadership into question. But Dimon weathered it all, keeping the top job even as other top us banks have gone through multiple CEO's. Along the way, he became a billionaire, a rarity among banking executives. Many attribute Dimons success to whats known as the fortress balance sheet. Essentially, he takes the cautious approach, never getting so overleveraged that the bank cant withstand a major unforeseen shock. The strategy has been criticized for leaving profits on the table, but it looks pretty smart when a crisis comes along.

Going way back, I used to do a presentation on the financial crises going back to those blow ups in Ginnie Mays Penn central commercial paper, the 87 crash, the 90 recession, the 74 recession. And if you make a list of all those things, you realize, and I'm not making fun of everything, they happen all the time.

And the best preparation is in our business, capital and liquidity, which Dodd Frank improved. We already had a lot. Be prepared. You can't be prepared after the fact. You got to be prepared before the fact. When I talk about risk management, it's always about the range of outcomes. Can we handle them? And beyond that, we talk about geopolitical crises. Cyber. I put cyber. You got to be prepared for that stuff. And it does happen, and it's going to surprise you one day. Just like am I surprised if oil, will I be surprised if oil goes to 150? I will not. It can easily happen if a bunch of factors fall a certain way. So the best thing is be prepared for any business.

When you think about risk, think about things that can go terribly wrong. Can you survive them? You know, it could be technology, it could be government regulations. It could be, it could be literally the weather. If you're a restaurant, you know, that might close you down. If you lose this week's business, you're out of business. You don't have enough cash. So you should think all that through.

Bill Gates once said, banking is necessary. Banks are not. To what extent could AI or fintech replace traditional banks? So I think, first of all, I remember him saying banks are dinosaurs. I spoke to him about it in 1997, and obviously he was dead wrong. He'd probably agree to that. But he's not wrong that technology changes everything. And if anyone is complacent or arrogant or think that because you have a big position today, you have a big position tomorrow, that's a mistake. But then you have to find what is banking.

Someone's going to have to hold the money. Someone's going to have to move the money. Someone's going to have to raise the money. Someone's going to have to do research around money. Those services will still be around, and hopefully we're doing it and using a lot of tech to do a better job at it. But I've always thought it's very possible that some tech thing intimidates a piece of that. And I've been writing about big tech going to our business. We got fintech, but we also have big tech, and they will embed payment systems in there. Some are going to white label banks, kind of what Apple did. They have the right to do that. I'm not against that.

I would be against unfair use of their position to dominate us in a business. Well, Apple is going deeper into financial services. Do you worry about the bank of Apple? Well, we're going to compete. So they have a tough competitor. You know, they hold money, move money. Yeah, they're a form of a competitor. You know, we also partner with them, but I'm very used to partnering and competing with lots of people.

Existential threat? I don't think it's an existential threat, but I think if we were complacent about it, yes. Still, as with most industries, an AI revolution is coming for finance. The question is, how much about banking will change to some predict AI will enable us to put our money on autopilot, telling you where to invest, planning your retirement, and even filing your taxes.

I know you mentioned chat GPT in your annual letter. Have you tried it? Yeah, if I had my phone, I'd show you. What do you use it for? I just ask you questions. Like what? I don't remember. What's Emily Chang gonna ask me? You've got a top notch group investigating Aihdeme. What are they up to? What's the next level of finance? You think AI can unlock? Yeah. So I think the most important thing is that AI is real.

We already have thousands of people doing it. Top scientists around the world. Manuel Veloza, who ran Carnegie Mellon machine learning. And it's a living, breathing thing. So people want to answer, what's it going to do? It's a living, breathing thing. It's going to change. There are going to be all different types of models and different types of tools and technology. But the way to think about it for us is every single process. So errors, trading, hedging, research, every app, every database, you're going to be applying AI.

So it might be as a copilot, it might be to replace humans. AI is doing all the equity hedging for us. For the most part, it's idea generation, it's large language models, it's note taking. While you're talking to someone, and while it's taking notes, it may actually say to you that, here's the thing of interest. The client might be interested in all error, all customer service.

It's a little bit of everything, but it is going to replace some jobs, of course. Yeah, but look, folks, people have to take a deep breath, okay? Technology has always replaced jobs. Your children live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology. And literally, they'll probably be working three and a half days a week. So technology has done unbelievable things for mankind, but, you know, planes crash, pharmaceuticals get misused. There are negatives. This one, the biggest negative, in my view, is AI being used by bad people to do bad things. Think of cyber.

But you know, the fact, and I do think eventually have legal guardrails around it, it's kind of hard to do because it's new, but it will add a huge value. And for JP Morgan, if it replaces jobs, we hope to Redeploy people.

So is there going to be a point where I can turn to chat JPM and say, I have 30 years or I want to get rich quick, what should I do with my money? Well, the rich quick, I hope it tells you that you're crazy. Yeah. But we in some ways can do a little bit of raid today.

And usually if you look at wealth plans that we have, which I think are quite good, they have a lot of AI embedded in that, or analytics embedded in that, and soon they'll have more AI. All that AI is going to do is know more about you, learn more about you, look at patterns and look at successful things in the past. So AI will be a huge aid to things like that.

Interesting. So do you see a finance super app in our future, or. Yeah, you already have that a little bit.

So ten years ago, I took the people who ran retail, Gordon Smith and a whole team, I said, you're getting an airplane and you're going to China. And they said, why? We're american. I said, go to China, you know, and they went to ping an and Tencent and WeChat and Alipay and all that, and they had all the super apps. I made them come back and do a big chart of super apps, all the services they do, what they do is a whole heck of a lot. WeChat, for example, combines text messaging, a social network and a widely used mobile payment system and has over 1.2 billion active users. The kind of ubiquity most american companies can only dream of. So I think in America, it won't be a super app, it'll be, I'm gonna call mini super apps. So you might like.

You can already do a lot of stuff with us around money, but that's why we do travel. It's an adjacency. It's not just a credit card. Now, we want to offer you great travel and great hotels and great restaurants.

And so there are all these adjacencies on everything we do that will be our tech driven and will be increasingly AI driven. What's your biggest AI fear? Well, I think Henry Kiss and Eric Schmidt wrote a book about, you know, if it gets used in weapons, but, you know, and that obviously could be terrifying if it's deciding who the enemy is, and then, you know, obviously it's gonna be used in cyber. Bad guys use AI. And while I think we need guardrails, no one knows exactly they should be yet, but it's not gonna stop bad guys. So we gotta think through the guardrails here. You wanna have plenty of innovation, you need guardrails.

Like, maybe it'll tell you at the bottom of something, this is generated by AI, but the bad guys still use it. And the question is how we're going to. I'm a little concerned about that. While AI is changing the technology of banking, geopolitics is creating a different kind of disruption. With tensions between powerful countries like the US, Russia, and China reaching a boiling point, there are signs the economic ties that bind the world are starting to fraye. Dimon, for his part, strikes a tone of cautious optimism about current events, but warns that we're living in a very dangerous time.

Our conversation took place before the recent outbreak of conflict in the Middle east, which he said will create ripple effects that extend far beyond the region. Where's China on the list of risks? When I say geopolitical, that's the big one. It's the thread from Ukraine. Oil and gas, food, migration, all our relationships, the most important one being China, that is the most important for the future of the world. And obviously, Ukraine is affecting it.

And in fact, it's very hard to see really positive outcomes with China until the Ukraine war is resolved, hopefully. Whether Ukrainians could say they have a victory of some sort. You said you're worried about another Trump presidency. How worried? Look, we need good american leadership, and I think that we need to explain to people why this is so important for the world. And so there's a little bit of this America first, and no american president is going to say America second. But what we need to explain is why Ukraine is important to us and why american security relies on global security and why our allies rely on that.

And if they can't rely on America, they will have to rely on someone else. And so I just think it's very important. Bob Gates writes in his book, the exercise of power, about the symphony of power, all the soft things, not the military, which we've overused, but diplomacy, development, finance, education, communication, obviously, economic trade, investment, all those things.

And I think we need a better job in that you're revered for your long term view. So I'd just like to tick through a few topics quickly and get a quick sort of one sentence, long term view. What's your long view on China? It'll be okay, but we need really good american leadership to do that. And don't worry, they're not a ten foot giant. They have a lot of issues. America's got a lot of strains. We should.

I like the fact the american government's talking to them constantly now, crypto. If you mean crypto like bitcoin, I've always said it's a fraud, so no hope for it. Well, if they think they're a currency, there's no hope for it. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's a public, decentralized Ponzi scheme. If it's a crypto coin that can do something like a smart contract that has value, there will be smart contracts. And blockchain works. To the extent crypto is accessing certain blockchain things, yeah, that might have some value.

American leadership, the most important thing for the world in the next hundred years, Warren Buffett would tell you one of the great things about America is our constant Resiliency, ability to adjust. Adjust. I mean, we adjusted pretty quickly to bad Covid and then getting out of COVID And american leadership moves pretty quickly. And Autocratic leadership gets a stasis. So you got to look at, yeah, sometimes democracy is messy, but it also allows change. Dimon is 68, and the question of succession is looming. In 2021, he received a bonus to stay on for another five years.

And while various JP Morgan executives are rumored to be in the running to replace him, nothing official has been announced. Given the success of Diamond's 18 year run, no one is particularly eager for him to move on. And for the moment, he shows no signs of slowing down. What advice would you give your 20 year old self? You have to work hard. That doesn't, but work smart. A lot of people don't. They waste so much time, and they don't think carefully. And there's a great quote. I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter. Any time to write a short one. That's respect to people.

You know, you get your thoughts together, have a process in place for decision making. Don't allow yourself to become weaponized, like, at all. Like, you know, and don't have it to the extent have your temper, it works against you. You always have to end up apologizing, have a thought process around things that are complicated, and you'll get better over life. You don't have to answer everything all at once, you know, I tell all the people, Jay Morgan, everyone should take care on their own. Their mind, their body, their spirit, their soul, their friends, their family, their health. They have to do that. It's part of their life. If you mess that up, you know, it makes everything else particularly hard, so.

And I heard a great speech from a woman once who said, you can have it all. You just can have it all at the same time. I like that advice. What else do you want to accomplish in the world, aside from making your bank succeed? Most important family and I have three wonderful kids, two wonderful son in laws, seven great grandkids. That is the most important. Second most important is my country, the United States of America. I'm a red blooded, full throated, free enterprise american patriot. And don't misunderstand that. And so, therefore, that is a big effort of mine, personally. And my country stands behind that to the extent we should." And then inside the company, I just hope people say, you know, we're gonna miss the son of a bitch when he's gone.

And he made the world a better place, and he created opportunity for all of us and our clients. You're sure you're not running for office? I'm pretty sure I have. I just spoke to some friends who left the US who said if you ran, they'd come back. I got four more votes.

Finance, Leadership, Technology, Economics, JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon