The Jamie Dimon Interview

- David, we completely blew it. We went into Jamie Diamond's office, had our little meet and greet. We did not ask about the dual pistols. - Yeah, from the dual Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which JP Morgan owns and keeps in their headquarters and we blew it, we didn't ask to see them. We'll just have to come back. - When they finish the new building, I'm sure they will be in the executive floor. We can go get a viewing of the, you know, piece of American history. All right, speaking of American history, let's do it. - Let's do it. (upbeat music) ♪ Ready, on the city ♪ ♪ On your rally ♪ ♪ I got the truth ♪ ♪ Is it you, is it you, is it you ♪ ♪ We got the truth now, now ♪ ♪ Is it you, is it you, is it you ♪ ♪ Seekin' down, take a step ♪ ♪ And the story on the way ♪ ♪ Got you now ♪ (upbeat music) - 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 Rosenthal. - 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. Then 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 Diamond and how he created the modern financial behemoth, JP Morgan Chase, out of the beleaguered component parts of bank one, JP 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 kind of 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 sort of big trillion dollar tech companies that we've covered here on acquired. And 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 of trillion dollars. Incredible. So the question, of course, is how did he do it? I mean, 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. So 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 6,000 acquired fans at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. So 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 had a second act, a late-night talk show, where we had conversations with the CEO of The New York Times, Meredith Cobbett-Levian, and the chairman of IAC, Barry Diller, plus some cameos from around the acquired cinematic universe. And 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 and areas we've covered on the show. So with that, the show is not investment advice. Dave and I may have investments from companies we discuss. And this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only onto our conversation with Jamie Dimon. - Well, this feels appropriate. (laughing) - You guys dressed up for me. (laughing) - You dressed up for us too, thank you. - Last year we had you on the video board at Jason. You were looking very summary there. You look great tonight. - Thank you, yes. Well, we know you're a big history buff and we consider ourselves historians evolve all else. So what we'd like to do here tonight is walk through the 20 year story with you of sort of how you turned JP Morgan Chase from a bank among many to the most systemically important financial institution in the world. Are you game? - Sound good? - Sounds great, thank you. (laughing) - We wanna start in 1998. You and your mentor, Sandy Wilde, have just been the past 13 years building the modern financial institution conglomerate. Really the blueprint for what JP Morgan Chase is today, except it's not JP Morgan, it's City Group. And everybody on Wall Street in the entire world expects that you are gonna be named CEO of City Group in short order. - This is 1998. - 1998. - This is not what happens, instead you get fired. And you have to restart your whole career, everything your whole life from scratch. - Sorry to start here, by the way. (laughing) But before we get into what you do next, what was the model that you and Sandy built at City Group? - Okay, first of all, I am thrilled to be here. I wanna congratulate these guys for building the acquired. (applauding) It's a great intelligent addition to what we need to learn in society. And so I was saying, it wasn't quite the model, because if you look at what we did at commercial credit, Prime America was 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. And you know, my view is we should skin you down and kind of 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 disappears with Sandy about the future of the company. And so, but it was big, it was make a lot of money, it was quite successful at the time. And then I got fired. (laughing) - So how are you feeling in that moment? - When I got fired? - Yeah, that moment. - 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. And they called me, we haven't imagined me a Sunday at 4 p.m. that night. And Sandy and John Reed called me and said, "Can you come a little early? "We've got a bunch of stuff to talk about." I was the president chief operating officer. I drove up, I said, "I can't." They said, "Well, it's really important." So I drove up there and I sat down in the room with Sandy and John and they said, they wanna make a few changes and they have three of them. And they said, "One, we wanna make this person "in charge of that." I said, "Okay, well, it 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, as they said, "I want you to resign." And I said, "Okay." 'Cause at that moment, I knew it was all arranged. The boards had voted, the press release was written, the management team was coming up. So I waited, for the management team to come up, I wished them the best. I said, "You guys have a chance to build one "of the great companies. "They all thanked me." Sandy said, "You wanna do the press with me?" I said, "Yeah, but I'll do it from home." So I went home, went to see my kids. They were like, "One of my daughters here, too." They were like 12, 14, 12, and 10. And I walk in the front door, and I tell them, "I was fired." And the youngest one says, "Daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets?" I said, "No, no, we're okay." And the middle one was always obsessed with college for some reason. "Can I still go to college?" And he said, "Yeah." And the one who was here was the oldest one said, "Great, since you don't need it, "I have your cell phone." (audience laughing) And then that night, about 50 people came over. All the same people I just met, all the management team, bringing whiskey, and it was like, "Habby, you own wake." And there's one really tall guy who came in, a very good friend of mine, and my daughter looks up and says, "Who are you?" He says, "I work for your daddy." And he says, "Not anymore, you don't." (audience laughing) That was it. I was okay. I was like, "I tell you, my net worth, "not my self worth," that was involved. And for anyone who doesn't sort of already know Jamie's story, you were the rising star. I mean, you were, the city was the biggest bank, you were the heir apparent. I mean, this was like unfathomable, and for you to take it this gracefully, you know, it says a lot. So, you're sort of wandering in the woods as I best I can kind of reconstruct it for about 18 months, is that right? Figuring out what's next. - Yeah, I, you know, took me a while to exit and sign agreements and get out. They were kind of mean. But then I stepped into office and it was late. We went for a nice long vacation and stuff like that. When I got back in September, so I was six months later, I went to my, I started going to work here. I had nothing to do, but I went from, you know, to nine to five and started calling people and thinking about what I'm gonna do. It was in the sequence buildings, so I could go for lunch downstairs every day. - At the four seasons. And I explored everything. So on my own merchant bank, I could have retired, just teaching, just investing, but I was 42. - And you took a call about running Amazon, right? - Did he? - You took a call about running Amazon, didn't you? - I went to, I loved, 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 came out when Sally met Harry. I was thinking, my God, I'll never wear suit again. I'm gonna live in a houseboat. - Yeah. - This would be really great. What an old-time universe we'd be living in. It would have been an old-time universe, but I'm still good friends with Jeff, so I got at least one good thing out of it. And then I got serious, you know, and I was offered jobs to run, you know, big, other big global investment banks. Hank Greenberg, around AIG called me up and said, "You should come join us." I was thinking, "I'm gonna go from Sandy Wild to you." I mean, I'd have to have my head examined or something like that. (laughing) And I didn't know the AIG story. Then, yeah, well, that happened years later too. And then I got a phone call from a headhunter about bank one. And I was also, you guys said, "You thought of you probably know Ken Langone "and Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank ran at home Depot. "I loved them, but at my first dinner with them, "I went to see the land, so I have to make a confession." And so you guys called, "I'd never been in a home Depot." (laughing) - We were actually wondering, David and I were dating. - Yeah, we were talking about that. - My friend, my friend, maybe go up there and get some equipment and plants and stuff like that. So, but I love their culture, their attitude, they want me to do it. Ken Langone says, "I still should have gotten you. "I wasn't gonna pay you enough. "Of course, I 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, you know, it was a troubled bank. And, you know, I decided that life is what you make it. It was hard in my family. I had to move, I think, for anyone who's gonna move, and kids that, you know, I think there were 14, 12 and so on. - It's hard. - 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, based in Chicago. - When you say large, David, it's a $30 billion market cap bank. City Group, where you just had been before, was a $200 billion bank. - It was $21 billion at the time, 'cause you have the right numbers, but it's just split and so if you look back, it's like $20 billion or something like that. Yeah. And City was $200. But, you know, I didn't worry about that. It was like, you know, in life, you make things what they are. I don't like complaining about over spilled milk. You know, you just put on your pants, you get going and see if you can make out of it. - But you, it sounds like you had opportunities to stay in New York to run bigger, more glamorous things. - This is when I was gonna run the company. The other ones would have been some investment banks. I didn't really trust some of the people who were talking to me about that. And there was a whole bunch of other stuff that I explored. I took phone calls, some small companies, some big companies, there's a couple of subprime mortgage companies who called me and I was like, "Absolutely not." (audience laughing) - We'll get to that. We'll get to that. And so I just thought this was a chance, you know, and you know, if the family's willing to move and we got a nice, took us a while, we had a live in a rental for a while, but got a nice brownstone and you know, we end up loving Chicago. Chicago is a wonderful city in a lot of different ways. And, you know, I guess that is what you make it. You know, and I put half my money in the stock at the time. - I tied my, I was going to be the captain of the ship. I was going to go down with the ship. You know, I made it clear to everyone. I was here permanently and it'll be what it is. And so I got to work, literally the next day. - Did we do the math right? That right before you joined Bank 1, you bought $60 million of stock? - I did. - I mean, that's, 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." - Yeah. And I thought it might be overvalued a little bit because there was people thought it might be sold or something like that, but I didn't care about that. You know, if you work at a company and the new CEO comes in and he's from out of town, and you're gonna have a lot of shareholders, and I knew a lot of the shareholders. I was going to know a lot of the shareholders. I wanted to know, I was in 100%. Lock stock and barrel. There was no question. I would never sell that stock. And I'm gonna go down with the ship or go up with the ship. And they also, you as making decisions, that I thought were right for long-term health in the company. And I'm not for a short term type of thing. - 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? - You know, 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'd never put the companies together. So they had multiple statement systems, processing systems, payment systems, you know, SAP systems. They had different brands, you know, services coming down. We were losing accounts, they were closing branches. It was a mess. But, you know, it was all of its systems, people, ops. But again, I just, you know, I just, I met the management team, it's hard. You know, I walked in, I met six of the directors. I, there were 21 directors. 11 hated the other 10. Yeah, I mean, even if, wait, wait, wait. There were 21 board members. 21 board members from the multiple acquisitions. They, they were tribal, they ended up hating each other. I knew that when I went in 'cause I knew one people and, you know, I spoke to a lot of people, did research in the bank. But again, in life, you get handed these things. It's not perfect. You know, even today, people want to be handed something perfect, it's not perfect. And I was, so I met six directors. I walked in, when I got off of the job. I shook all their hands. I told them I would do the best I do. I'm telling the truth, the whole truth doesn't be true. The good, the bad, the ugly. We're not going to bullshit. We're going to try to build a great company. I'm need you help. And, and then they, they said, they left. (laughs) So now I'm on the executive floor. I don't even know where to go. You know, and so I kind of knocked on someone's door, the head of HR. I said, I do need an office, and I really need an assistant. And they were going to give me the chairman's office in the corner. I said, no, no, I want to be like right in the middle. So I can see people and stick my head out. And then I went to meet the management team. I went to this, they put them all in this conference room, a nice white plush carpets. I walked in with a cup of coffee, and they said, Jamie, we don't drink coffee here for obvious reasons. (laughs) So I looked at them, I looked at the coffee, I looked at them, I said, you do now. (laughs) And then I just started me with them all. And 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, it didn't, 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. - All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a long time friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would not, and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. - Yep, your risk surface changes every week now. Vender turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT. And your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. - Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta agent. 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That's V-A-N-T-A.com/acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. - When we were chatting a couple weeks ago and preparing for this, we asked you in context of JP Morgan, like what are the critical things in your mind that has made JP Morgan what it is saying? The first thing you said was risk, and was risk, and the culture around risk, and the original risk. - And the fundamental risk. - Understanding by management of risk. - 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? - I've always been very risk conscious. And risk conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes. And so 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 city bank did. And the way they accounted for it was unbelievably aggressive. And so they had less capital, less reserves, less this. They were calling these things profitable, they were basically losing money. And loans, a lot of business, you have to be very careful about the credit business. And once I found out that, I kind of panicked a little bit. And 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. So for example, in the middle market business, we had for every loan NII, we had like 80 cents, and 20 cents. - Net interest income for net interest income from the loan, and 20 cents of other revenue like payments. But the time we merged with JP Morgan, we had 40 NII for the loan, and 60% NII R from other type of things like payments. And one, you're being paid for the risk, and one, you're being paid little for the risk. And 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 lose in credit? So I hired a woman called Linda Bamman, who said, "Okay, if you're going to let me do credit, you're going to let me sell loans," I said, "Yes, I'm going to let me hedge loans, yes. Can I do 10 billion?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Okay, I'll join." And we probably reduced the balance sheet by 50 billion because--and then we did have a recession, but we were kind of okay by them. It was one big bad one, which was united, which went bankrupt. And we basically owned it for a small period of time. There seems to be kind of a fundamental Jamie Diamondism, which is, "Don't blow up." I mean, 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 sort of develop this? Don't blow up at all costs? Yeah, so there's, you know, around risk, it's always an ecosystem. You've all heard it. Everyone's doing it. Everyone's okay. This is going to work. This time is different. And, you know, the history tells you, learn the teaches you a lot. And I always say, "You treat it." And my dad was a stockbroker. And so 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 percent. All the limousines in Wall Street were gone, restaurants were being closed, you know, markets moved violently. And then, you know, we had kind of a recovery, in 1980, had a recession, 82, you had a recession. In 1982, it was lower than it had been in 1968, and it hit 800. And then, in '87, the market was down 25 percent and one day in 1990, all of these banks, JP Morgan, City, Chase, Chemical, were all taken to their knees by real estate losses, and they were all worth about a billion dollars. I mean, I think City was three billion at the time, and the other ones were about a billion dollars. And then, you had the '97, also, real estate-related thing. You had the 2000-internet bubble, you know, and then you had the great financial crisis. And I could, if you go through history, there's tons of these things. Andrew W. Sorkin is in here, and I just read his book, he's nice enough to send it to me in 1929, and 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. You know, that stock market went down 20 percent, one year, 30 percent next year, 20 percent next year, and one point is down 90 percent, you know, shit happens. 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, you know, for sigma event doesn't happen. You're like, no, that will happen and happens often. Yeah. So when I look at it, I always ask, like, when I do stress tests in a risk for high yield, the worst, I remember getting to JP Morgan and going through the risk books. And their stress test was that high yield would move 40 percent, the credit spread. And at the time was it 400 or whatever it was, that means 5, 560, okay? And I said, no, our stress test is going to be worst ever. Worst ever was 17 percent. And they said, they'll never happen again. The market's more sophisticated. Well, in '08, it hit 20 percent and you couldn't have sold the bond. There was no market. So, you know, those things do happen. And the point isn't that you're trying to guess, and the point is you, you can handle them so you can continue building your business. And so I always look what I call the fat tails and manage that we can handle all the fat tails. And not the stress test, the fed gives us, but all the fat tails. Markers down 50 percent, interest rates up to 8 percent, credit spreads back to worst ever. Of course, your results will be worse, but you're there. And the thing about financial services, leverage, kills you, aggressive accounting can kill you, which a lot of companies do do. And, you know, the goal should be, and also confidence, if you lose money as a financial company, I always knew this too. The headlines are, you know, people read that and they're relying on putting their money with you. They look at that difference. They lose trust. They lose trust. And that's which cause you've seen runs on banks, and you've sold some recently, because people run, take the money out. There's a thing that you just said, which is that you might do worse, but you're there. There's sort of 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, Big One, JP Morgan Chase, is that true in the good years that you've actually been less profitable than those who are kind of risk on? Yeah, a little bit. You're saying that, you know, if you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were in 30% equity. Most of them in bankrupt. We never did that much, okay, but in '08, '09, we were fine, and they weren't. So, but you want to build a real strong company with real margins, real clients, conservative accounting, where you're not relying on leverage, and it's very easy to use leverage to, you know, to jack up returns in any business, you know, but in banking, it could be particularly dangerous. So it seems like a core part, if not the entirety of this distilled into your operating strategy is the fortress balance sheet. And did you first hear about the fortress balance sheet? I've been talking about, I go way back to Primera, I used to talk about that. You're going to be able to survive the tough times. Just 20-90s? Probably the 1990s, and like I said, I grew up my father, and I went through those market things. I remember how hard it was on people in Wall Street. But the fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well. You have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative and accounting you can find. I don't up front profits when I can spread them over time. Accounting, of course, accounting, when I say this, you can drive a truck through accounting rules. And accounting itself, you know, that certain things are considered expenses, but they're good. They're an investment for the future, but they're cold and expense. And then revenues, you know, if I make bad loans, they are bad revenues. They will kill you. But for a while, they look pretty good. So it's all those things, margins, clients, you know, in the banking business, the character of the clients you have will reflect on your bank. So the first thing is who you're 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. And you always have to review these things to make sure you have them right because they change all the time. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real. Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower. 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But the question is, who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out ServiceNow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, David, catch us up to the merger. So you run Bank 1 for four years from Chicago. And then in 2004, you merge with JP Morgan Chase in what is termed at the time a merger of equals. I think JP Morgan Chase referred to it as that, Bank 1 shareholders get 42% of the combined company. I mean, I think people don't realize how much of JP Morgan Chase is Bank 1 today. That's why it's a little irritating when they say you've been running it since I was running JP Morgan. I was running 40% of the company for the whole time. When I got to Bank 1, and I'm not working around the clock, I already knew that a logical strategic merger might be JP Morgan because I know of these companies and that's the thing about Fortune's balance sheet. You also have real strategies that survive the test of time, you know, you're not flipping and flopping. And then I'm sitting there, and of course the tape comes, JP Morgan Chase to merge. So we're worth like 25 billion, they're now worth like 80 billion or 90 or whatever the number was. I'm like, well, there goes that dream. But four years later, our stock was up to, you know, doubled or something like that. Those actually come in, and it was in the target range, and I'd been meeting with Bill Harris and the current chairman of JP Morgan at the time, we were talking about it. We both knew it made business sense. They were kind of looking for a CEO. So we were, we had been talking probably for a year and a half before that. They're looking for a CEO. Did they give Bank 1 shareholders 42% because they were looking for a CEO? There were two lawsuits, okay, so we got the premium. They got the name and location, and I effectively had kind of control from day one, because inside the merger agreement, and this is almost unheard of, when we get the premium, is that But to not have me become CEO 18 months later, 75 percent of the board would have to vote me out. And the board. Right. And the default was, you were going because-- And the board was eight bank-one people and eight JP Morgan people. And you were a lot of the JP Morgan board members too, who respected me. And Bill Harris, I'm 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 know, you get sued. You can't win in these times. I think every shareholder is probably-- But it worked out. Yeah. All right, 2006. Before we get to 2006, when you were going through that process, and even maybe the couple years before you and Bill were talking, you're starting to think about JP Morgan as a partner, I'm curious, did the brand, did the name JP Morgan factor into your thinking at all? Did you view that as an asset? I mean, JP Morgan brand is a Tiffany name. I didn't value it in the deal. And when I looked at it, I had given my board, I think the first is run your company well. And people thought it 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 run a good company, we can merge with somebody. But the first thing I looked at was business logic. And that every business, we had a consumer business. They had a consumer business. We had a credit card business. They were both terrible. They had a credit card business. They had a big investment bank. We had a big US corporate bank that needed some of those investment bank insurers. 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 the ability to execute, like, can you actually get it done? Because you've all seen a lot of deals where they fall apart. They don't have management. They don't consolidate the systems. They have infighting. It kind of happened in city. And so you don't effectuate. And then there's the price. So I knew we had a Tiffany brand. But it didn't value. Because it probably didn't work out. I don't think it would have mattered that much. Interesting. All right. So I'm going to fast forward us a couple of years. It's 2006. You're officially Chairman and CEO of the combined JP Morgan Chase. And 2006 on Wall Street is like, go, go, go, go, baby. It's like, you know, 1980s all over again. I think you had the same incentives as everyone else. But you behaved very differently. Am I missing something? Did you have the same incentives or-- You pulled JP Morgan back hard on the risk side in 2006. I did. So there were cracks out there in 2006. You may remember the quants. There started to be a quant problem in 2006. We definitely saw a subprime getting bad. And that's, I pulled back on subprime. I wish it had done more. Because if you look at what I did, you say, OK, we saved half the money. But you would have saved more. You still have some losses. 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 to the situation, I was quite worried. The leverage, if you remember this, but the leverage-- because of accounting rules and Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the banks, the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage. And it was go-go. So for every one of you moving in, bridge loans, the whole thing, like in '07, the bridge book of Wall Street was $450 billion. Today it's $40 billion. JP Morgan can handle the whole $40 billion today, though we're not the $40 billion today. And they were much more leverage deals. And a lot of them fell apart, collapsed, and then, of course-- and that was before you had the collapse in the mortgage markets, which really took down a lot of these banks. But you did have the same incentives. And you had the same access to information that a lot of these other folks did. But you didn't blow up. What explains this? Because usually behavior follows incentives. Yeah. Well, first of all, if you work for me, I would tell you, I don't care if the incentive is, don't do the wrong thing. And don't do the wrong thing to the client. If you treat yourself-- if you're the client, how would you want to be treated? And I had gotten rid of-- I mentioned that one risk thing, there were multiple risk things like that. They were being paid to take the risk. So you were telling us about the auto loan business. Yeah, but they were being paid. But the second I put in all these new risk controls, all of a sudden, you weren't making money by taking that leverage. Because I was looking at how much capital could actually be deployed if things get bad. And so I was looking at earnings through the cycle. And then, but very importantly, all of these investment banks were doing side deals, private deals, three-year deals, five-year deals. I got rid of almost all of them. This is for comp. Almost all of them. So today at JP Morgan Chase, we do things, but-- and I know some of my partners in the room here-- but we all know about it. There are no links. There are no nods. There are no side deals. There's almost no one paid on a particular thing. Because if you're paid on a particular thing, you can do the wrong thing. And meanwhile, you're not helping the company manage this risk or something like that. So we change the incentive programs. And I'm quite conscious about incentive programs that they don't create mis-behavior. But it's also very important. If you're in a company, and you say the incentive programs do it, you should tell the company. This incentive plan is not incentive to write behavior versus to be the customer. And a lot of it was leverage. So if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books, if you have 30 times leverage, and you're getting 20% of the profits, you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's literally at 25% to your bonus. And so I got rid of the profit pool of 20% and the leverage. So yeah. I lost some people too in the meantime. It's funny, yeah. JP Morgan, as part of the system, had the same incentives. But you changed the incentives for team within the company. OK. All right, we got to go to 2008. March, March, 13th, 2008. Thursday, 2008. It's Thursday night. You get a call from Bear Stearns CEO. The stock closed that day at $57 a share. It's like 150 a couple months before. Three days later, got to remember it like yesterday. I was working on Park Avenue in Wall Street. I remember that night. $2 a share. You're buying Bear Stearns to tell us the story. So I was at Abra on 47. It's been my parents and my parents' favorite restaurant. My whole family was there. It happened to be my birthday. I don't know when we get the emergency birthday. And 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. And he said, Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight before Asia opens. Trace, I said, I don't know how to get $30 billion for you. And have you called Paulson? You're called Tim Geiter. So we all called. I called up the management team. I went back in. I probably had a bite and said goodbye. I went back to the office. Probably had 100 people come in that day, that night. They all got dressed. They went back to work. It's emergency. We now ring all the bells for emergency. Bear Stearns went bankrupt. Spokes the Fed about, let's just get them to the weekend. We had one day. Then we needed a Saturday and Sunday. And we concocted this loan. So we couldn't lend the $30 billion. And the Fed technically couldn't lend the $30 billion. But the Fed could lend to us technically. And I could technically use the collateral of Bear Stearns, so that we got the literally one day loan. And then the next day, we had thousands of people come and do diligence. And we went through every loan, every asset, every balance sheet, all the derivatives, all the lawsuits, all the HR policies. Like real due diligence, a two or three day period, and bought the company at that night, $2 a share. Hank Paulson was saying, "Why are you paying anything for it?" I said, "Well, I do have to get shareholder votes." And I was beginning-- - You need bear shareholders, too, for the day. - It was a public deal. And the worst part of it is I was going to get the lawsuits from the bear holders. And I knew that you didn't pay enough for it. - But you could let it go bankrupt. There wasn't like an industrial company combined bankruptcy. It would've been gone. And the crisis would've just unfolded. So-- - Okay, two questions. One, what would've happened if it went down? Two, afterwards, did you think it was over? - No. So we already had-- So those March, what happened to Lehman, it was an uncontrolled failure. There was money locked up everywhere. People panic. They start pulling money up everything. That would've happened with bear. So it did stop that. And I would've thought that it gave other people other time to clean up their act. So literally six months later, I would've thought some of those firms were much had more liquidity, more capital, and a little bit more prepared for might be happening. We already had the stress and the system was-- you saw it already. It was going to mount. It wasn't going to go away. There were tremendous losses coming. So we bought it and probably did help. And hindsight didn't stop the crisis from unfolding. We bought it, and then like a week later, we changed the $10 a share. It had been at $120. And the way to think it was 300 billion of assets. And at $12 billion, tangible book value, we wrote off the whole tangible book value in the-- when we bought the company, we had to liquidate the loans. We had to hedge stuff. We had severance costs, loss of costs. And we basically used all that. So 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. And we got-- the fact, we got some very good people. And we got some good businesses. But it was an extremely painful process. I've seen estimates that in the fullness of time after really dealing with unwinding all the stuff there, it cost you $15 to $20 billion. So it cost you $20, anyway. It was the $12 billion we wrote off. We didn't really pay for it. And then the government sued us on the mortgages, which I was quite offended by. (laughing) And I really was. I thought it was the-- - Take this problem and then we'll see-- - Well this is the government. When you, you know, whatever government you did a deal with, that's not the government now in the road to size. I don't care. We're gonna come after you anyway. So what we kind of saved this system a lot. We bailed a lot of people out. They made us pay $5 billion on the bed mortgages that bearish tons are done. And that's what made me make this statement I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't put it this way. I don't know how to say this. I wouldn't really trust the government again. (laughing) (audience cheering) - Would-- - I gotta ask a follow-up question to that. (laughing) Is that a structural thing? Just the way that we're set up with a new administration every four years? - Yeah, they don't feel obligated to what the prior administration did. And, you know, contract, even some contracts were violated in this thing, which I won't go through, literally contract. I mean, it would've been torches into fear instead of been company or company. But they basically, you know, since you operate under their laws, you know, they can basically take you down. So you, you know, I went to see Eric Holder trying to settle those mortgage stuff, which we settled. They put my lead director. He expect me to come and be pounding my chest and, and I went in and said, Eric, I am here to surrender. I cannot fight and I cannot win against the federal government. You know that a criminal indictment can sink my company. I will not do that to my company or my country. I'm here to surrender. Before I surrender, I want you to know the circumstances by which we bought Wammu and Bear Stearns, 'cause 80% of what they were asking for related to Bear Stearns and Wammu, not shaped to Morgan Chase. And I went through the whole thing. You know, he said, thank you. I'll take in consideration. But they never gave me the counting. So I don't know what they did. And so it is what it is. It was quite painful, but it's got to move on. - We'll move on from this. - We won't keep you. - Well, we'll move on from this specifics. (laughing) David, I do have one more thing. Whether you would have done it again, wouldn't have, you know, very clear. It was not a great deal on paper for JP Morgan. But as we look at it, now, the reputational value that JP, the reputation of JP Morgan now is unlike any other in the industry. - Part of why you're worth $800 billion is that reputation. - Yeah. - A lot of what created that reputation. - Was that the idea? - Was that the idea? - Yeah, I know, if you're, yes. I know I say, I wouldn't trust the government. If the government called me up, they did it and again. If they called me again and said, we need your help to save our country. Well, of course, I'm gonna, I'm a patriot that way. I just, I would just try to come up with some ways to avoid the punishment by the next president. (laughing) I would come up with something. - You need, you know what? You need like the version of the merger agreement with JP Morgan Chase, where it's like a 75% of Congress needs to vote not to sue you. And the default is you're not gonna get sued. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. - Yep, it's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Lagora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? - So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. - And that's how you get features that customers love like tabular review where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work, and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time. - And they recently launched Lagora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. - And Lagora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Lagora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Lagora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1,000,000 to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. - Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at lagora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. - So, BearSterns happens six months later, you get another phone call. Wammu is going under, you do by Wammu. Contrary to everything we're talking about with Bearer, Wammu is actually a great acquisition, right? - Yeah, so this is a lesson about acquisitions. It's very hard, remember, we bought Wammu a week after even when bankrupt. And most boards wouldn't have touched that at all. - 'Cause the whole system feels like that. - The whole system was in trouble, but Wammu put us in California, parts of Nevada, Arizona, not Arizona, Georgia, Florida, which we weren't in. So think of these really healthy states, and they had 2300 branches, they had huge mortgage problems, but we looked at it over and over and over. So we knew their mortgage books called, and we wrote it off, we bought it for-- - And this was all before-- - We bought it for $30 billion discount to tangible book value, because they had debt, and we left the debt behind. And so, and that $30 billion was approximately if the mortgage loss was gonna be. So we bought the company, think of we bought a company clean, we wrote off all that stuff, the books were clean, and then we did something unheard of too. The next day, or two days later, I went in the market, raised another $11 billion 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 that it was before WAMU. - And you already had the reputation to pull this off, right? I'm imagining, in the worst month of the financial crisis, who can go out and raise $11 billion of equity? - Yeah. - People trust you. - But yeah, we knew a lot of shareholders, and you earned your trust over time with shareholders, and we explained, we gave them a quick little presentation over the, yeah, and a lot of them stepped up, and said, this is great, and they also know we can execute it, 'cause behind the barest urns, people forget the work is, the next day you got 50,000 people consolidating, you know, 5,000 applications, branches, compensation programs, you know, settlement programs, you know, payment systems, it's a lot of work. But we obviously have the capability to do that, and we have the capability to do WAMU. I think we finished the WAMU consolidations in nine months, all of them. So that within nine months, they were all in the same systems, which allows you to start doing a better job in customer service, and things like that. - So this fortress balance sheet strategy, and raising this equity capital, and, you know, having additional margin of safety and conservative accounting, in retrospect, it seems like the obvious right strategy for running a large financial institution. Why wasn't everyone else copying it, have people changed, and does everyone else run their banks like this now? - I think people, the people more conservative today, I think regular is more conservative today, but again, I go back to people get involved in aggressive accounting. They don't look at stressing their own bank in a real way. You know, people take too much interest rate risk, too much credit exposure, too much optionality risk, and, or sometimes it's new products. So if you look at the financial services, very often it's the new products that blow up. It takes a while. They haven't been through a cycle, and you had that with equities way back in 1929, you had it with options, you had it with equity derivatives, you had it with mortgages, you had it with gin, even Ginny Maes at one point blew up, even though the government guaranteed. - Sorry, I know you had it with Quant, didn't it? With LTA. - It happened with Quant, it happened with leverage lending, and then people then become more rational, how they run these balance sheets, and how they think through the risk. - All right, so I have to ask you, is this private credit today? - Today again? - Is this private credit today? - I don't really think so. I don't think it's $2 trillion. It's grown rapidly, that's an issue, but what happens, the other thing about markets, there's some very good actors in it who know what they're doing, customers like the product, so I always say, well, the customers like it, but there are also people who don't know what they're doing, and it's grown rapidly. So there may be something in there that would become a problem one day, I don't think it's systemic. So that's $2 trillion. The mortgage market, when the time of blew up was, I'm gonna say $9 trillion, and $1 trillion was lost. This is, you know, - And it was, I know-- - Trillion dollars was also-- - In a higher than a trillion dollars back then. - Yeah a lot of these priorities are not levers like that. But it doesn't mean it would be problems, but it's slightly different week. But you look at the whole system, there are other things out there that are levers that can cause problems. Of course, people take secret levers in a way and don't necessarily see it. - What are some of these in your mind that are potentially problematic today? - Well, look, I look at, when you look at asset price, they're rather high. I'm not saying it's bad, but if today PEs were 15, as opposed to 23, I'd say that's a lot less risk. A lot less to fall, and you have some upside. I would say 23, there's not a lot upside, and there's a long way to fall. And that's true with credit spread. So, and we look at, we stress test everything. We do like 100 stress tests a week, and to make sure we can handle a wide variety of things. And then the biggest risk to me is cyber. I think this cyber stuff is, we're a very good at it. We work with all the government agencies. They would say the chain wears up. We spend $800 million here or something on it. We educate people, but it is, you're talking about grids and communications companies and water, and even part of the military establishment, the protections are not what you need. If we ever get any kind of war, where cyber's involved, and China is very good at it. And so is Russia, but Russia's mostly criminal, which is slightly different. All right, I'm going to pull us back to the story. We're going to fast forward to 2023. We're not really good to talk about, yeah, Russia. It's not what we do on a quiet, but I think-- Silicon Valley Bank. And first Republic, both fail. You're there again. Did you see it coming? What lessons did you learn from how 2008 went? That you could apply in 2023. Obviously, you bought first Republic. It's a Silicon Valley Bank. Both Silicon Valley Bank did some very good stuff, but they both had something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrated deposits, not uninsured, because people are mistaking that concentrated. And so a lot of venture capital would have a Silicon Valley Bank and kind of first republic is some of these large venture capital companies call them their hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, told their constituent clients that they invested in, who all banked the Silicon Valley and first Republic, the banks aren't safe, get out. And they all removed their deposits. And Silicon Valley Bank, I think they had 200,000,000 deposit, 200,000, 100,000,000 in one day. And that caused the problem, but they also had other problems. They didn't have proper liquidity. They didn't have their cloudal post of the Fed. And they had taken too much insured exposure. And the insured exposure was hidden by accounting. It was called held to maturity, but you don't have to mark even the treasuries to market. And I always hated held to maturity because-- but it gives you better regulatory returns and stuff like that. But when that held to maturity, the-- if you said, what's the tangible book value of one of these banks? You said it was 100. Well, all of a sudden, it was 50. If you just marked that one thing to market. And now you're into judgment land. At what point, if you saw a bank where just that one mark had the tangible book value dropped to 40 or 30 cents in a dollar, would you panic? I would have said, that's too much risk. And the regulators helped this because they said rates are going to stay low forever. So these banks bought a lot of 3% mortgages. And when 3% mortgages, when rates went up to 5%, worth $0.60 in the dollar, or $0.50. And that was it. And so both those had-- they took too much insured exposure, known to management. And it was known to the regulators and fixable. So 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 fired 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 lately, definitely. And we knew first republic. We were watching an eye call, Janet Yellen, that I said, that company's in trouble. And one of 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's kind of a little melting ice cube. But you can imagine, the day we bought it, you never heard about it again. We had to all their exposures in a couple of days. And we merged everything. We wrote everything down. But we did get some good stuff from it. We actually got some good people. The normal thing in acquisition is they're terrible. They get rid of them where they failed. But we also looked at what they did, how they dealt with clients. Something that they'd be clients here. They did a great job with high net with clients. Single pointer contact, conscious services. So now if you go down Madison Avenue, you see things called JP Morgan Financial Center. That's your first JP Morgan branded consumer effort. >> Yes, because it's kind of based on that. When you walk in there, we know you're small business, we know you're mortgage, we know you're consumer banking. We can get you travel. We can do a whole bunch of different stuff. So we're very high level services. I think we have 20 of them now. But I'd love it. And if it works, 20 years will have 300. And so 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, it's so good. >> All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. >> Yes. There is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. >> Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. >> It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers. And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. >> This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system. So teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. >> So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to Statsig.com/acquired to get started. >> All right, so we're effectively caught up to today. And now we've got the whole story. We've got a lot of context. Obviously, we 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? >> Well, I mean, I don't know. Firstly, you could be skipped over a strategy a little bit. And this is an important fuel that we have. What we do is the same thing that a community bank does other than investment bank, global investment banking. Okay, so if you walk into a small community bank, they know your business account. They know your consumer account. They usually have a trust company. They used to call it trust. They'd manage your private affairs. They'd set up a trust for you and they'd do it stuff like that. And their CRM is up here. They don't need a sales for a CRM because they know everyone down. And they didn't do big time global investment banking. But the strategy, those businesses fit together. They feed each other and so does investment banking. A lot of our middle market clients use investment banking products. A lot of our consumer clients use some FX. So all of our businesses feed each other. There's no extraneous. We got rid of everything that didn't fit a strategy. And then you start building client businesses and client services, fortress balance sheet, fortress accounting, all those various things. And I've always talked about-- So it's holding a portfolio of things that actually feed each other. They actually fit. Whereas, you know, city had consumer finance. That didn't fit life insurance. That didn't fit property cash. That didn't-- they eventually got rid of them all. Sandy just wanted to do more of them. He bought American journalists. Did a truck leasing for God's sake. I mean, once you get involved in these things, it's hard for people to understand the risk in each one of these businesses. But all of ours fit. I don't like hobbies. I don't like things. And we've made plenty of mistakes. Because you have to try and test things. And then you're always investing for the future. That investment is always people, branches, and technology. And that's true with their investment banking people, or consumer bank people are opening consumer branches. Or I think Doug Pettin was here in Troy, Roarback, who run the Global Investment Bank. But they've opened commercial banking branches all over Europe. And I think he would tell me, it's going great. And he's feeding all other parts of the company. So just sticking to your knitting, constantly investing, not overreacting to the market. Markets are like accordions. And then sometimes, if you're strong when others aren't, you have a chance to buy things you want to buy. And 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 receptionist. And it's not just about the big time bankers and people pounding their chest. And we don't try not to put up with that. And we have big time bankers. They are exceptional. And-- but the company serves the clients. And I think the clients know that. When you really dig in to start analyzing JP Morgan's financials, you kind of see this one thing that jumps right out at you, which is the efficiency ratio. For every dollar that you make, compared to your competitors, you get to keep $0.15 more of that dollar as profit. It's not hard to see how that compounds and how that allows reinvestments. And why is your efficiency ratio so much better than competitors? it is a little. really continuously investing and gaining business at the margin and not stopping and not stop starting. And the thing about margins too is that we have that margin while investing a lot. It's much easier to have that margin and just, you know, we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches to save a billion dollars next year. We can do a lot of things. Your margins will go up, your growth will go down, your long-term margins will probably get worse. So we kind of look right through the cycle and we look at the actual economics that we do, not the accounting of what we do. And you know, we have, you know, we built it over time. We have great people and great products and there's some secret sauce I'm not going to tell you about. We do investor day and we tell everyone everything and I'm sitting there watching my, I never do presentations. I'm watching them do the presentations, I'm saying, oh God, we've just given way too many secrets here. But. But. So there's secrets as to why the efficiency rate. Well, you know, I saw Howard Schultz here before, you know, and I'm not supposed to say that probably. It's okay. It's okay. No, but we're glad you invited your friends. Look what you built over the years. You know, the consistency, the curiosity, the heart, the, you know, branch by branch products. It's just always doing that, knowing you're going to make mistakes, but building the culture that just kind of plows through that and you'll know, I do use sports, sports is a great analogy. If you have a sports team with a bunch of real jerks on it, are they going to be a great team? Almost never. You know, if a, if the team members aren't giving it their, their best every day during practice, you know, the Tom Brady, every day at practice, he worked hard, you know, people are not giving their best. You're going to have a great team. It's not that different in business. The difference in business, you can be asked about it all the time. You can make up stories, but in sports, you see it, you know, on the playing field that they have the team. They play together. They don't even have to be friends. In practice, know their teams and so I do think companies have that, like a sauce that works and you've seen a lot of different companies, you know, not just JP Morgan Chase. So all right, we've got one last question for you. If you look back to 2008, which was a long time ago now, to 2008, which was a long time ago now, all of the other leaders that were involved in that era have long since retired. I mean, I think many folks within JP 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? Yeah. So I want to thank my wife who's here too, who suffered through all this with me all these years and probably couldn't have done it, couldn't have done it without her. Look, I don't know, but I do believe my grandparents, all Greek immigrants, there we go. My grandparents, all Greek immigrants who didn't finish high school, but there's a Greek ethic. And you only realize you learn it from your parents, from the ground up and Judy's parents. My wife's parents were the same, which is, you know, have a purpose. You know, it could be art, it could be science, it could be military, it could be business, it could be, it could be just being a great parent, a great teacher, you know. But to have a purpose and then do the best you can, you know, give it, give it your all. Don't like being one of those people who's complaining all the time, you know, you give it your best and then treat everyone properly, everyone, you know, like I, if I, you know, including like 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 what you do and so 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, free religion, free enterprise, which we have to teach everywhere we go about how important it is, I don't think people fully understand it sometimes. And then my purpose, because you know, they, my friends, I want me home every day and this is my contribution to this company. I can help cities, states, schools, companies, employees, and I, I get the biggest kick out of that. And so that's what I do and as long as I have the energy, I'm going to do it. I can't, I'm not, I don't play golf, you know, my daughter, one of my daughters said, "Dad, you need some hobbies." And I said, "I do. We, hanging out with you, family travel, barbecue, and wine, we now like whiskies." And I love, 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. You know, I get to do a lot of things for our country that I just think are quite meaningful from this job. And so, when I'm done with this, I don't know, I'm teaching right, I may write a book like Andrew O'Sorkin did, I'll do something, but I got to do something. Now, I'm not going to just twitle my thumbs and smell the flowers. There are a lot of people who have floated your name for political or policy roles over the years. 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? Right now, yeah. Well, that's probably a great place to leave. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. David Ben, these guys are great, by the way. Thank you. Well, that is it for our conversation with Jamie Diamond listeners. Thank you so much to all 6,000 of you who came to watch in person was so cool, so cool. As always, a huge thank you to Arvin Navarotnam at Worldly Partners for his excellent write-up on the Jamie Diamond years of JP 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 scream and start. Our Rolex episode, which is another one of our biggest ever, and then our interviews, Steve Balmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, and if you're new to the show, I think all of those are great places to start. After this episode, if you are still looking for more and you're like I've already listened to all of those other episodes, we have a second show for you, ACQ2. The most recent is an episode with Jesse Cole, the founder and the CEO, founder and owner. Oh, there. Yeah. He wears a lot of hats, all of them are yellow, at the Savannah bananas. For something completely different. Yes. And if you want to talk about this with the acquired community, come join the Slack acquired.fm/slack. And with that listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. ♪ Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Oh.