Jamie Dimon’s worldview: JPMorgan Chase CEO on the economy, an AI bubble, and leadership

His opinion and counsel are sought after by leaders across all sectors, from tariff impact to return-to-office mandates to best management practices. Dimon, who’s led effectively even through instability and hardship, including two major personal health episodes, says his goal now is to live deliberately. He has three major priorities: his family, his country, and what he views as his personal contribution to the world: leading JPMorgan Chase. Fortune‘s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell sat down with Dimon to pick his brain about all of it and to bring listeners the best advice for navigating their own lives and jobs. 

Here’s some of what they discussed during their 45-minute conversation:

On the price of gold and bitcoin

• Why Dimon says it’s one of the few times in his life that it is semi-rational to have gold in your portfolio, though he himself is not a gold buyer
• Why Dimon shies away from sharing his views on bitcoin publicly to avoid “death threats and shit”

On new technologies, like AI

• Why Dimon is confident that AI is real and recommends companies stop debating and invest in it
• The program JPMorgan Chase implemented to train its workforce on AI, and how JPMorgan Chase uses the technology, from identifying fraud to marketing
• What institutions can do to protect the public from job losses that Dimon says are coming
• How blockchain technology could replace systems that are “clunky or late or not 24/7”

On an AI bubble and circular AI investing

• How comparisons to the dotcom bubble don’t account for the eventual success of giants such as Google and Meta
• Why Dimon believes you can’t “look at AI as a bubble,” but acknowledges that some projects won’t be done the way they were announced, or won’t get the power they need
• Why you have to evaluate AI projects and deals on a case-by-case basis to assess if investments will pay off, based on the revenue potential of the players involved

On whether or not the U.S. has overplayed its hand on China

• How China has significant rare earths at its disposal, but given rare earths aren’t rare, the U.S. “should be able to fix that.”
• Why Dimon wants to see deep engagement with China
• How supply chain security leads to national security

On the Trump Administration

• Why Dimon says tariffs are complicated but the Trump Administration’s approach is good “in some ways”
• His thoughts on the Trump Administration running the American government like it’s a business in need of a turnaround
• Why the Trump Administration needs to be careful when taking shares of companies (like Intel) in exchange for investment

On New York City and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani

• What Dimon has learned about what makes a good and bad mayor in the city
• His willingness to work with Mamdani if he wins, even though Dimon does not agree with some proposed policies
• Why he’s frustrated that he, and JPMorgan Chase, can’t participate in local politics

On Europe

• Why he believes the continent is in need of a “common market”
• Why Europe, like the U.S., needs to teach citizens that pro-growth policies benefit them
• Why he doesn’t think Brexit was “a good thing to do”

On management and leadership

• The key to longevity in the CEO role. Dimon has outlasted almost every other Fortune 500 CEO in tenure.
• The traits he sees that lead to failure in business and management
• Why it’s important that he and his management team take road trips to local branches, offering those employees “beer and immunity”

Listen to the vodcast or read the transcript, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, below.

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Dimon’s view of the economy and inflation

Alyson Shontell: So Jamie, you were in New York this morning giving great earnings reports, actually, and now you’re here. It’s the life of the CEO to be on the road. We appreciate your time with us. I just wanted to open with an economic snapshot from your vantage point. What’s happening in the economy? What’s happening in the global economy? What are the main signals you’re looking at?

Jamie Dimon: So, first of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. I have a little laryngitis, I apologize for that. Look, the global economy is inscrutable. So I’m going to tell you, but I want to point out, whenever you talk about it, we always say we’re worried about this or uncertain about that. You can open the newspaper of any month, of any year, of anything, it’s always that way. Always. What you have to do is compare it to an average. And I do think an average is more complicated. It’s more complicated because of trade and tariffs. It’s more complicated with huge global deficits. Inflation is not going away. The geopolitical situation, the remilitarization of the world, these are fairly serious things. You know, interest rates and I think the chance of surprise are pretty high. Underneath that, if you look at America, the consumer is doing fine, unemployment is good, wages are not going up so much, labor’s gotten a little bit weaker. Wholesale credit has been good, but I suspect that’s, you know—we borrowed and spent $10 trillion over the last six years. Of course that’s going to drive corporate profits and corporate credit, so that may weaken. The whole world is a deficit issue, and so I’m kind of in the cautious category, and also made cautious by the fact that asset prices are high, you know, in some form of bubble territory. But that doesn’t mean they can’t go over 20% more. Credit spreads are at historical lows. So it looks like the markets, the world, has priced in, I’m going to call it, a continued soft landing. And you know, if you looked at next year—and I hate forecasting—what’s the odds of recession? Well, in any one year, it’s 20% or 30%. So, I think the market’s pricing in 10%, I’d say 20% to 30% is probably more accurate. The chance of not being surprised by something next year—and then you look at factors like tariffs, it’s just a straw on the camel’s back. You know, it’s not the one thing that’s going to break the camel’s back. It’s always a confluence of factors that do that, and it’s very hard. Maybe AI will one day figure it out, but it’s very hard for human beings to consistently forecast real inflection points in the economy. 

What are some of the longer-term cycles that you’re keeping an eye on that may not be reflected as much in the numbers today, but you’re a little bit worried about? 

That’s a very important point. I always do future-back. People look at, oh, the data today, unemployment today. Well, unemployment was good. Markets were good in ‘71, and then they crashed. That was true in ‘80, and then they crashed. That was true in ‘87, there was a crash. That was true in 1990 and it [went] down. So, you can’t look at current data. You’ve got to anticipate data. So here’s some anticipatory data: Deficits are not going away, and that will bite one day. I don’t know when. Inflation—what I see is health care prices going up 10%, food prices not going down. Immigration policies are inflationary. The remilitarization of the world is inflationary. The restructure to trade is inflationary. The capital needs from AI and infrastructure is large, growing, and probably inflationary in the short run. The risk is that rates go up, inflation goes up, and the Fed can’t cut rates rates anymore. Maybe it has to reverse course. When I look at risk, I just put that on the table among all the possibilities of outcomes. And we are prepared for that more than most. In fact, if you look at all things being equal, we’ll make more money if interest rates go up. On the other hand, if interest rates go up because of inflation and there’s stagflation, we will do much worse on credit volumes and a whole bunch of stuff I can’t predict.

Can I play a game with you?

What?

Can I play a game?

Sure.

Can we play overvalued-undervalued? 

You could try. I always tell the press, you can ask whatever you want, and I can say whatever I want.

Dimon on the value of gold, AI, and more

We’re gonna play a game! It’s time to play a game. So, gold—overvalued or undervalued?

I don’t know. I mean, I’m not a gold buyer. It costs 4% to own it. It could easily go to $5,000 or $10,000 in environments like this. This is one of the few times in my life I say that it’s semi-rational to have some in your portfolio. Asset prices are kind of high, so in the back of my mind, that cuts across almost everything at this point.

Bitcoin.

Blockchain is real. Stablecoins may have a real use. We have the JPMorgan coin. Tokens will be real, programmable money will be real. All of that will be real. I’m not going to say that about Bitcoin, because then that’s all I’m going to read about in the headlines, and then I get, you know, death threats and shit like that.

So, it’s not a pet rock, but maybe a pet rock. TBD. But the underlying technology, you think, is…

I’ve always said that. Blockchain is a technology that we’ve all been yapping about for 12 years, and it’s not fully deployed, because it’s hard to deploy blockchain that we all agree, and permissions, rules. We do use it. We use it—intraday repo. I think it can replace certain tech, certain systems we all use that are clunky or late or not 24/7. Those are all legitimate complaints, and blockchain may be one of the things that fixes that. Other technologies can fix it, too, by the way. It’s not the only thing that can fix it, and sometimes it’s a solution looking for a problem. We already move money, real-time payments. Most of it moves digitally. It runs through AML, KYC, risk systems. You can’t just replace all that with a blockchain and think you’re doing what regulators and governments want you to do. So it’s a little more complicated than just, it’s going to replace everything.

Next, Nvidia.

I can’t comment on them. There are some of these names that I just don’t want to give specific stuff. Unbelievable company. AI itself is real. I know we’re gonna talk about AI a little bit later, so I’ll reserve that for that.

Okay, so then, what about OpenAI? That’s the last one. 

Well, again, are we going to talk about AI in general? You wanna do it now?

How JPMorgan Chase uses AI—and where Dimon sees its potential

Yes, that’s next.

Either way, first of all, I think you should all use it. Stop debating open, closed, little models, bigger. It’s going to be all that. It’s gonna be faster, it’s gonna get cheaper. You have specialized models. We have 2,000 people doing it. We’ve been doing it since 2012, we have hundreds of use cases. We can identify benefits of like, $2 billion, maybe $2.5 billion, I was told today, either cost saves or revenue enhancements. And it’s just part of how we run the business today, just like big math was that before, and it’s making huge improvements to certain things. Other things are hard to measure, like gen AI. We have almost 150,000 people using it a week on internal documents, for report writing, for reviewing legal documents, for summarizing things. It’s just hard to tell the productivity. I do think it’s real. I think in total, AI is real. Just like, if you go back to 1996, in total, the internet was real. There were a lot of people in there. You could look at the whole thing like it was a bubble, remember [that] it crashed at one point. But out of that came Google, YouTube, Meta. So I think in total, it will pay off. It’s hard to know exactly which ones will, and they won’t be the ones you necessarily predict today. There may be some attributes of winner takes all, that may not be true. I mean, we’ll see over time how that works.

I think that’s completely true. Underlying the hype is a real tech that is extremely transformative.

Extremely good, and you need power. It’s high capital usage, unlike the internet, so it’s got different dynamics. The power may not be there, in some cases. Bad guys can use it, but bad guys use the internet, on social media, they use airplanes for bad things. And so I do think there should be proper, thoughtful regulations and guardrails to protect the public. It will eliminate jobs. I think people should stop sticking their heads in the sand. So did tractors, and so did cars, and so did… and now if it happens too fast, we, society, government and businesses, should figure out how we can save jobs, save people, retrain, income-assist, you know, early retirement is something. So you can’t just take all these people and throw them on the street where the next job is making $30,000 a year, when they’re making $150,000. You’ll have a revolution. So we should be thoughtful about that. But in the meantime, you should get good at using it, and deploy it, and we’ll figure it out.

There’s so much in there that I could dig into, so I’m going to try and tackle a little bit at a time. One is your investment in AI as a company. There’s been this well-cited MIT study that so many of these early corporate pilot programs of AI have just been giant money pits, and they haven’t been that effective in generating real returns for companies. I know you just came out with a report that said you guys have invested about $2 billion in, you’re getting about $2 billion back. It sounds like a break-even point, finally.

And I was wrong about the $2 billion cost. It’s considerably less than that. I think MIT was talking about generative AI, not about AI. So most of the things that we apply AI to—AML, KYC, or risk or fraud, very specific things, or errors or customer service—it works. Reconciliations, you apply it—and sometimes by just improving your procedures, it’s not even really AI, it’s just part of the process improvement. You go in and all of a sudden your headcount’s down 40% and your time to get something done is not 12 days, it’s 12 hours or 12 minutes. So it absolutely works. You can overcount the cost-saves, the revenues. It works for fraud. We know our fraud costs are coming down. Most people’s are going up. It works for—we spend $10 billion a year on marketing, and we know it’s gonna work on marketing. I mean, marketing, by its nature, is very inefficient. Put the stuff on the wall and see what happens. It will be able to measure multiple different things, and it can measure productivity. It reduces coding times for those who use it by 30%, that’s all real. Generative AI is the other category where, you’re really, using generative AI to read documents. So you might have used it to figure out some of these questions here.

Never. (A little.)

Yeah, but you can say, well, it saved me two hours. You know, what’s that worth? Did you just spend two hours doing something else? So we don’t really know. And I think it’s a mistake to try to calculate everything positive. We spend a lot of money getting data into the proper format so it can be used by AI. We’re just doing it. We’re not measuring how much it costs. We’re just going to get it in the proper database, et cetera. But it is completely real. And again, I think MIT is either wrong, or it was just generative AI. I think it was just generative AI.

Interesting. So did you have any big corporate failures, though, as you were figuring out how to make more efficiencies with AI? Any learnings?

We did something different. It’s not “in tech,” even though them in tech are deep partners in whatever they do, and tech does a lot of the heavy lifting. … And then we have a mirror inside every company: credit card, consumer, trading. And most, I think, it really works. Part of it is in your mind. How do you deploy it? I can’t tell you, use AI. You have to figure out how you’re going to use it. Sit down, think about it, call friends at other companies. So, most of them actually work. But I say some are maybe disappointing. There’s no example where we spent, you know, $400 million and it was a complete waste of money. There’s none of that. And even if there was, it was part of just the learnings of getting something done.

So you’re recommending, to a lot of companies, you think it’s time to be investing in it?

Absolutely. You should be using it. When we meet for business reviews, every business review, at a detailed level—what are you doing in technology? What are you doing in AI? What are the projects? How are you improving it? We’re sending people to a master class where the management team says, My God, I didn’t know it could do that for me. I didn’t know it could read 100,000 documents. I didn’t know it could correlate this database with that database and tell me patterns that I can’t possibly see, which is how we’re picking up a lot of fraud. It’s pattern recognition, the part of some of the AI machines that human beings can’t pick up. So, use it. Get good at it. Make it part of your tool set, your weapon set, and you’ll learn. It’ll get better all the time, your management will get better. And you should do it, in any business. 

And did you say you’re sending your executives in your team to a master class in AI? How are you training your teams in it?

We had a request from our own people. So as I said, we have 150,000 people using large language models on inside data. And remember, the inside data, private data, is huge, and it’s not in the web. And therefore, you know, all the data is being used, right? That’s not completely true, and we use data both inside and outside, but a lot of people are saying, I want to learn. I want to know how to use it. How do you think about it? So our HR people did a great job. They formed a master class. Some was at headquarters, I think some was at MIT. Some inside people, some outside people. We just had the first one, and I haven’t gotten a report back. I always tell people to do something like that, and they say, This is great. This is wonderful. I want to know if, six months later, they say it was useful, and so we’re going to find out. But I’m sure it had some benefit.

Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Fortune Media

Awesome. Last question on AI—so the capex spending on it, especially from tech companies, is tremendous. AI companies, I’ve read a stat, have accounted for 80% of gains of U.S. stocks in 2025, and companies investing hundreds of billions in AI accounts for an estimated 40% of U.S. GDP growth this year. Does that concern you as you look at the markets? What kind of a bubble are we talking about? And also the cyclical nature of the investments going into these AI companies—AMD into OpenAI, back into the chips, things like that.

It’s 40% of the increase in GDP, which I forgot was 2.5%, so it was a big increase in capex. And remember that capex is roads and cement and steel and servers and connectors. It’s a million different things going on. I wouldn’t say I’m concerned. And like I said, you can’t look at AI as a bubble, though some of these things may be in a bubble. In total, it’ll probably pay off. Some of those projects won’t get done the way they were announced. You know, someone won’t get the power they need. And when you look at how they’re done, I call it “Project Finance.” If JPMorgan’s leasing a building from you, that’s a pretty good credit. If you are relying on a company that doesn’t have revenues to pay you for your lease, that’s not the same thing. Or, you know, who’s responsible for finishing the building? Is there insurance on it? What if the machines don’t work? What if the chips fail? What if—who’s taking all these risks? And so you’ve got to go, literally, project by project, and even on that investment scheme, it’s not abnormal to have vendor finance, which is what you see a lot. I’ll buy part of your company, you get the cash, I’ll finance your purchase. You’ve got to go one by one to say, is it pushing the bubble or is it real? Are they really going to develop stuff that’ll have productive capability to pay off on the investment? Like I said, in total, I think they probably will, but one by one, I don’t know.

Dimon’s “Liberation Day” experience—and his opinion on tariffs and global trade

So, I want to jump ahead to just a little bit of a near-term look at the market to 2026. The Trump administration has done a lot this year. The first thing I want to actually ask you is, on April 2, when the Liberation Day tariffs dropped, what was your day like? Tell me that 24-hour day in the life of Jamie Dimon.

I do remember it, I remember the market going down considerably, and then for a couple of days after. That number caught people by surprise, and I think, appropriately, the administration backed off of it and assigned people to go country by country to come up with these agreements in principle. And the market … mostly recovered once, you know, it seemed more rational. And so I think you’ve seen that pattern exhibit itself. That’s how they negotiate—we’re out here, we’ll move here, see how you’re moving. What works, what doesn’t work, and in some ways, it’s good. It’s wrong for people to say it’s not good. To respond to legitimate complaints about what you’re doing is a good thing to do, and to make adjustments is appropriate. Which they’ve said they’re going to do in India, they’ve said they’re going to do in China. The market went down 1,000 points when the minor trade war happened. So, that’s the right thing to do. But they’re still out there. These are our allies and friends, and we should finish these things and put them in place. I think they’re getting better at it. They’re very complicated. In fact, someone from the government told me that you need hundreds of people to negotiate one deal. I think the whole trade department has … 150, and there were 100 of these. So, it takes a little bit of time to work through. And the really important thing to me, by the way—we need to keep the Western world together economically. And while there are legitimate trade complaints, both about national security, we made some failures, and unfair trade. I hope, at the end of the day, that we are embracing our allies and our non-allies. India is not an ally of ours, but I think we should embrace them. They’re a natural ally. All we have to do is reach out our hand. Trade is part of that. But I’ve also been told that hopefully that will be resolved soon, too. 

That gets into the bigger geopolitical reordering that’s happening around these tariffs. And yes, they’ve come down from that April 2 day, for the most part, pretty much everywhere, but it is creating ripple effects. Yes, we’re getting some nice revenue back into the country, but also, other countries are turning to each other for help. And if you look at China, I wonder, do you think we’ve overplayed our hand there a little bit? They corner the market on rare earth, they have turned to the rest of the world to make up some of the business loss from the U.S. in these trade talks. So what’s happening there?

I think it’s very complicated. You know, this is a multi-player, multi-year game. And so the initial response is, you’re absolutely right. Negotiating a settlement here does not mean you don’t do things going forward. I think you have seen people do that. And there are layers of these things where, you can move some business over here, but you can’t move it all. You can avoid some tariffs over there. It’s complicated. And with China, it’s the most complicated. They’re the biggest trading partner of everyone in the world. In the rare earths, yeah, they’ve kind of cornered it. But rare earths are everywhere, they’re not rare. This is the processing, mining, and dirty. We basically outsource dirty stuff to other countries, is what this was. And we should be able to fix that. But they also, when they do something like that, they’re also telling the world they’re willing to do something like that. And so, this goes a little bit of both ways. I would be in favor of deep engagement with China, where there are legitimate issues, and there are some about how they subsidize industries, and they should be very specific. And then anything about national security, to me, has got nothing to do with China. It’s got to do with the need to make sure that things are done here or in friendly places with secure supply chains that we need for national security, our defense, and our safety. That’s a whole different issue, that it should be unilateral. That’s not a negotiation.

Dimon on the Trump Administration—and leading New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani

So, stepping back into the strategy of what the Trump administration seems to be doing. In some ways, they’re almost operating the American government like it’s a business in need of a turnaround. We have this ballooning deficit, and some things have been helpful in reducing that. Some things are not, like the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” But it seems like, if you listen to Howard Lutnick speaking, he’s talking about things like, well, revenue is coming in from tariffs, and why are we giving handouts to like, Harvard grants, and to Intel? We should be taking equity and getting upside potential for that. That’s sort of how a venture capitalist would think. And that’s not been done before in our government. Is this a good idea or not?

You had a lot in there. I think that government should be pro-business and pro-growth, and I think that’s very good. I think the tariffs, we think it’s going to collect at a run rate of about $400 billion a year, somewhat offset by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” That will be more stimulus, and a lot of that is front-ended. I think deregulation—I say smart regulation is a good idea. And everyone knows it is crippling to people. It’s redundant. It slows people down. You can’t move, it’s hard to get licenses. It’s hard to get permitting. It affects affordable housing. Of course, they’re right to be looking at that. And then, of course, when you say business, you know government isn’t business, but they should have the same, and I’ve been right about this for years—you give me your money for schools or whatever I do, I owe you. You gave me this. We said we’d do this. Here’s the outcome, here’s the cost per person, here’s how many people we covered, here’s how many people got jobs. And they don’t do that. So to apply certain disciplines to government, absolutely.

And until we do it, I would say, I’m going to guess there’s not one person in this room, even the most liberal Democrat in the room, who would say the government is well run and efficient. And they owe you that, and it is part of the reason people think Washington is a swamp, because it sucks up money. It’s the great sucking sound. How many of you think if we gave Washington another trillion dollars, that you will be better off? That poor people would be better off? Maybe a few people believe that, but you haven’t spent much time on what goes on in this town and how money goes to special interest groups and all these various things.

They already collect 20% of everyone’s profits. They’re kind of an “owner” of our “companies,” as you look at it. I think they have to be very careful about individual deals with individual logic. And I don’t know all the deals, so I don’t know all the things that took place. We know some of these companies were involved in some, so I can’t answer specific questions. But you’ve got to be very careful about why, what, when, where, what kind of precedent does this set? Is it national security? Is it fairness? I thought they did a very good deal with MP Materials. We were the banker on that, but they signed a long-term contract, which these companies need to survive. They bought a piece of the company. They probably tripled their money already. I think that is a reasonable thing to do, but it’s national security. And Intel’s national security, because I do think advanced chips are, but whether that was the way to do it, I’d have to leave that to people who know exactly what’s in the deal. And remember, whatever you think of it, if Democrats do it, that terrifies me. Those golden shares owned by Democrats, they’ll be dictating to us every social value system they believe. And that’ll be that. We’ll look like Europe in 10 years.

So, maybe the last political one. There’s a New York City mayor race happening. What are your thoughts on Mamdani probably becoming the mayor?

Oh, you know, I have to deal with the world I got, you know, not the world I want. And if he becomes mayor, so be it. What does he really think? He was part of that socialist democratic thing, which literally is more Marxist than socialist if you read it. But I don’t know what he believes of that, so I don’t want to assign all that to him. He’s talking to a lot of people. He’s convinced a lot of people. He’s willing to change. He wants to learn. I don’t know if that’s right—some people are what they are. They’re not going to change. And the rest of that’s just typical deception. Or he may change.

The other thing, which I would tell him if he were right here, I’ve seen lots of mayors. A lot of these folks have never run something. And all of a sudden they are running a huge bureaucracy—police, sanitation, fire, schools, potholes, crime, and that’s what the people want. A good mayor gets in that job and they realize, I’ve got to deliver those things. Those things are not Democrat or Republican, and they should be measured and tracked. You have meetings with good people. And some mayors and governors getting the job have never managed, and they grow into it. They get good people. They’re organized. They get other people to be organized. And some, they’re a complete mess the whole time they’re there. Running out, having 84 different advisors, responding to the last person in the room, and all of that kind of stuff. And we don’t know, I would hope for the best in this case. And, you know, New York will survive. We survived de Blasio.

New York is resilient, it is true.

But it is odd to have the bastion of American capitalism with a socialist getting that job.

Well, what does that say about capitalism and what needs to change?

Well, capitalism has a lot to fix. I’m not, like, everything works, free markets. We’ve never had free markets, totally free. You need properly regulated systems and disclosures. And a lot of those regulators do a good job. That doesn’t mean they didn’t overdo some of them. But, take New York City, and this is wrong, what I’m about to say: JPMorgan, me personally, cannot get involved in local politics, because we have pay-to-play rules, and multiple rules, by the way, but they’re SEC rules, if we do business with the government, which of course we do. But who could get involved? Every union? Lawyers? Real estate? Everybody. They took the main players in New York off the field. And I’ve asked my general counsel, who’s superb, by the way, and she’s brilliant. I ask her all the time, doesn’t that violate my First Amendment rights? And she says, yes, it does, but… and it’s wrong. There’s something wrong with that. I can’t speak up and I can’t fight for what I believe in New York City because we do business with the government. Which the lawyers do, the real estate [industry does], the unions do. There’s something wrong with our system that that’s how we fight these political battles. And gerrymandering, which maybe everyone uses it. You’ve got to do it, the other guy’s doing it. It’s a sick system, and it’s why we all question government. And if you’re gonna make it a fight, make it a fair fight.

All right, you want to switch topics, I’ll let you off—

But, by the way, if he becomes mayor, I will call him and offer my help. Doesn’t mean I agree with him. It may be that he asks for help in a way I refuse to do it, but maybe he’s actually looking for help and things we can do. And we can help the kids in our schools, the crime in our streets, or something like that, or capital. We will help them. I am a patriot. I help governors, mayors, presidents. We help people around the world. A lot of you think, how can you possibly be doing business in that country? We’re there for the country and the people of the country, not necessarily the prime minister or the president. And we’re there forever. We’re not there for one thing. That’s more like realpolitik. Get involved and grow up. That’s the world we got.

Dimon’s secret to C-suite longevity

Love it. That is great leadership. Thank you, I think we need more of that. Speaking of leadership, you have been at the helm of JPMorgan for quite a long time, about two decades, and that far exceeds the amount of time that most CEOs get to stay in the job. Seven years, I think, is the average for a man running a Fortune 500 and about five for a woman running a Fortune 500. What’s the secret to longevity in the role, other than, obviously, performing incredibly well, as you have?

Well, first of all, I love what I do, so I enjoy it, and I like our people. But I need my rest, I get tired. I always tell people, management is a lot of fun, except for two things…

…people?

Customers and employees. But I do enjoy it. It’s got purpose for me. I make our cities a better place, our clients a better place. We create opportunities for employees. We do great philanthropic work. We bank the cities, schools, states, hospitals. We’re the biggest small-business lender. We operate in 100 countries. I’ve met more presidents, prime ministers. That’s all fascinating, but my point is, you got to like it. And you got to do the job. You can’t retire in place. You don’t have Tom Brady go out in the field and say, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m kind of tired, so I’m gonna sit out this game. No, those guys—every practice, they give it their all. That’s every day, every meeting. I go to a lot. I’m gonna tell you, this is a little management lesson. When I go to a meeting, I’ve done the pre-reads, and you get 100% of my attention, 100%. None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail. If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It’s disrespectful. And so, when I can’t do that, I should move on. And so, some of these CEOs, if you look at it, some weren’t good. It took a while for the board to figure it out, or took an activist to figure out. Some were good and didn’t like the job. I mean, I know people who said, I don’t want to do this anymore. It is a burden to bear for many. The other thing, which I think is really important: There’s a humility about learning. I mean, every day, if I need to know something, I have to call you up to find out. I’m not an expert in everything that takes place in the company. And so, sometimes people write about, “he’s a micro manager”—

He does call.

—maybe more than some other people, but always learning. Things are always changing. I’m always worried. And I did a YouTube master class on this—if you get arrogant, complacent, a lack of curiosity, you’ll kill the company. That’s the petri dish for politics, which is stasis and death. And I really do mean that. Matter of fact, you should write an article. 

Tell me.

Years ago, Fortune did this thing about, I think they went back to 1910—you have the Fortune 500, whenever you started keeping that [1955]. How many people fell out over time? You did it recently, with just the top 10 or something like that. The churn is enormous, and the failures are very high. And if you look at the failures, and a lot of them sold out because they were failing. They were leaders, sometimes. Think of Nokia’s handset, BlackBerry, Digital Equipment, Sears, AMP, and it’s a lesson in these companies. The root cause was arrogance, complacency, denial, politics, all that stuff, instead of analyzing your business and saying, here’s what we’re good at. So, when I do anything, it’s the good, the bad, the ugly. I’m not interested in you spinning me. And I don’t spin my shareholders. You’ve never heard me be on an analyst call and spin, Oh, we’re great at this. I’m more like, We actually shouldn’t have done that. We failed to do this. And we failed to build Stripe. We could have, I’m not embarrassed about it. It’s just a fact, and I think people should acknowledge it in my own company, so we don’t miss the next one. And we’re going to miss some. You can’t hit a home run every time you’re at bat, but those are the basics. Keep working. Stay humble. Work hard. I talk about road trips. People say, Oh, you’re going to show the flag. I don’t do road trips to show the flag.

You go to every office, all around. 

I go around the world by plane, but we take a bus trip every year in jeans and polo shirts. We see branches and small businesses and call centers. I’m with my management team. We’ve had some press on the thing, watching us in action on the bus. We have tellers and loan officers, and we give them beer and immunity.

Beer and immunity, great management tip. 

I can go to any assistant at any teller right now, have a one-on-one conversation. I walk away with three notes of things we’ve got to fix. And I want my management team to do it. So it’s not about me doing it, I also get to watch them, if they’re able to do it—some aren’t. They just don’t like being lectured to by subordinates about what they’re doing wrong. And the Army has this great thing called the after-action report, even when they’re just practicing—what happened, how did it happen? And it’s not officers telling enlisted, it’s the enlisted and the officers talking together. You gave me an order to go down this rope at 10 a.m., but the stuff wasn’t in place when I got there. And so, it’s that open conversation that makes you a better company.

Q&A with the audience

Well, Jamie, I promised the people they could have their questions. So let’s turn to the audience for questions. I think right here in the front we’ve got Tami [Rosen].

Tami Rosen: First of all, your new building is extraordinary. I can’t believe we didn’t ask about it, but that’s not my question. So, I’m Tami Rosen from Pagaya Technologies. My question is this: The country really wants to be the winner at AI, right? We want to be able to win this race. But how can we do that when our immigration policies are now going to constrict us from getting the best talent, and our schools are not going to be able to take in those foreign students? And if you look at Silicon Valley, more than a majority of those founders are immigrants. So how can you, JPMorgan, your role, think about what we do in this space? Because it’s a real problem if you don’t have the best talent.

Dimon: Yeah, so I agree with you. We are the bright city on the hill that still attracts the best and the brightest. We should do that. I was with the president once where he said, after I get border control—which he has, it’s amazing how quickly, we’ve got to give him credit for that—but he said, I would stamp a green card onto everyone who had a degree and advanced degree here. I still believe that. And a path to citizenship for DACA. If DACA stays, a path to citizenship. I hope one day we get to real immigration reform. If you’re talking about H-1B’s, do you know how many H-1B visas there are in the country today? Six hundred thousand. And 160 million people work. So I find it hard to believe that that is going to change, whether you win in AI or not. So I do think, and there were legitimate complaints about H1-Bs—I always look at all the details when these things come up—about some people using it just to have cheaper staff to make more profit on consulting things. Some people will pay the price to bring in the talent they need. So, I think people will sort it out, somehow. It won’t be devastating. And then the other one you mentioned is foreign students. So, we’re in favor of foreign students. I think they should allow that. I think the university said it there. They pay full boat, for the most part, and they’re still here. It’s just, there’s talk in Congress about lessening the amount of Chinese foreign students, or something like that. I don’t know what’s going to happen there.

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg—Getty Images

Betsabeh Hermann: Betsabeh Hermann, Head of Research at Philips. I have a European question: You have warned that Europe is losing its competitive edge, and I’m just wondering, what advice do you have for European-based companies, and how could they gain some of that competitive edge back?

Dimon: I love Europe, and I think the goal of our policy should be, both militarily—I think there are legitimate complaints about NATO, but I think to make NATO and the allies stronger. And so that should be goal one. Goal two should be the economic side, which, you know, writ large, is investments. It’s how we treat each other, it’s tariffs, it’s other trade issues, it’s strategic communication. Do we tell people why these systems work better than those systems, et cetera? Europe does a lot of things well, so there’s not a total criticism. It’s that GDP per person has gone from 90% of America to like 65%, and that is on the road to 60%, 55%, and at one point, that’s not quite sustainable. And so my view, and the Draghi wrote a report. There are 300 recommendations there. I would take all of them. That is how you fix it. And so, maybe more efficient and effective social nets. Some countries have very good ones. They’re costly, but they work really well. Other ones have ones that don’t work really well.

There’s bad policies. They’re all over the place, around hiring and training, and you have the same regulations. You need a common market. One of the big advantages for JPMorgan Chase is, we have a huge home market. And there, they have fragmented markets. And it’s not just banking. It’s true for telecom. It’s true for some of your equipment you make. So, create a real common market. It was a huge accomplishment to have the European Union. They went about halfway there, and they kind of stopped. And then people got very upset, somewhat legitimately, because Brussels was this bureaucratic power that was imposing upon countries certain things they didn’t like, which led to Brexit. I don’t think that was a good thing to do, but we’ve got to recognize that. What does the European Union do, and what’s left to the states? And they shouldn’t be lecturing you about all your different policies in every different country. So capital markets, union, pro-business, pro-growth, permitting regulation. Deregulation, not worse regulation, smart regulation that reduces the extraordinary burden that it has there and drive innovation. They have, by the way, one piece of good news: They recognize it. So I look at Macron, Merz, Starmer, Meloni, they all know it. They’re all talking about it. I think they all mean it. They’re talking to each other, both about strengthening NATO and about strengthening the economy. It’s going to be hard. And I think we all need to put some elbow grease [on]. We also have to tell people [that] pro-growth policies, they may be good for big business and business, [but] they are very good for the citizens of our country.

And we’ve missed teaching people that lesson. And then we should also acknowledge, like in the United States of America, the bottom 20% have been left behind. Their incomes haven’t gone up for 25 years. They’re dying seven years younger. Their schools suck. They go back to crime-ridden neighborhoods. And then they get lectured to by the elite. And when they see some of the things the government does, like EV credits, which may make you all feel good, they don’t benefit from EV credits. Defunding the police hurt them. Their schools aren’t good. So most of you, your kids go to schools, and you don’t even worry about it. You don’t worry when you go home. And we did that. That was Democratic and Republican policies, for the last 30 or 40 years, did not have the outcomes we wanted, and we should recognize that, and then ask why. I always remind myself [that] if you don’t recognize a problem, you cannot fix it. So Europe and America, it’s a similar list, I’ve written about it, and we’re going to get more involved in lobbying for good policy for Europe, because I think it’s that important to the Western world.

Deborah Di Sanzo: Thank you very much. Deborah Di Sanzo, Best Buy. So, another thing we need to be successful in AI is data centers that take clean water and electricity. Water and electricity run by the city and states that don’t have capital. What can be done?

Dimon: The markets are going to fix that. You know, people are building plants in different places. They’re finding ways to reduce water need. A lot of these plants, they’re building their own gas plants right there. They’re drilling right there, and they’re putting these big data centers right next to that gas plant, which gives continuous energy. Some of these things will take place. There will be, I don’t know if it would be a conflict, what is for consumer power, what’s for wholesale power of these data centers, is it raising the price? There’ll be a lot of issues like that, which I hope are quickly sorted through so we can build some of these data centers and also serve our clients. Gas prices are down, electricity prices are up, and they’re going to continue going up. And one of the ways to fix it is to fix permitting. That is, make it much harder, much costlier for almost all these projects being built. That’s true for solar and wind. And you know, they look at these things. It takes so long to get—when you put a billion dollars in the ground, if the payoff is in 10 years and not four, how do you feel? And it’s also true for pipelines that bring clean gas into New York. For wires that bring clean energy from Canada into Massachusetts, which can’t get built because Maine and New Hampshire said you can’t put the power lines there. We’re crippling ourselves. I can give you a million examples, and it’s kind of sad.

Heather White: Hi. Heather White, Chief Legal Officer, Genpact. I have more of a comment than a question, because I don’t think you’re going to answer what I want to ask, but I listened to you on Acquired recently. You did a podcast that was great. I think there are a lot of women in this room who would love you to run for office.

Well, at 69 you’d be young.

Dimon: I’m aging nicely into that job. So, I think I’m a little too young for the big one.  

Maybe you could answer in a yes or no. Do you foresee running at some point in your life?

Dimon: I do not. And I love what I do, and so, I’d have to give up something I do for something which would be, at best, quixotic. And I think, from this perch, I do everything I can to help my country. We just announced that [Security and Resiliency Initiative], a trillion and a half dollars. We help veterans, we reach out to all LMI, lower-income communities. We’ve hired 15,000 vets. We help schools, cities, states, Detroit. We get involved in public policy in Europe. In parts of Asia, we get involved. I’m gonna meet the development finance banks while I’m here, the IMF is this week. So, we do all of those things to make it a better world. And I think that’s the best I can do, and it makes me feel very good doing just that.

Well, Jamie, it has been a pleasure to have you here with us today. 

Wait, you didn’t ask me about journalism. 

Well, are you gonna buy Fortune at some point? That’s on the list, right?

I wanted to buy Fortune, and my board wouldn’t let me, just so you know. And they were right, and plus, it might have tainted—I would never have gotten involved in editorial stuff. It is absolutely critical. One of the things I’m doing tonight is, I have salon dinners with press all the time now, just to talk about these issues so they know they can ask. We’re open. We get other CEOs to do it, to educate them, because they educate the influencers. Those influencers, senators, congressmen, staff, governors, mayors, and over time, it works, and I think it could lead to better public policy. It’s got to be done the right way. But journalism does that. They educate the world, and they should. Sometimes they’re too—I think some are so biased, it’s hard to listen to them anymore. But I always say, we keep on doing it. Put elbow grease in it. And if I bought Fortune, I would spend a lot more money on the reporter side. The best reports, I think, [are] detailed things and strategies, successful women, failures, countries, things that work and things that don’t work, and more of that. I love deep content. There’s nothing like it. I read a tremendous amount every day, and you’re always looking for those deep insights, which usually come from what you read. I read five papers in the morning. I read things like Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, The Economist is the best, of course I read Fortune, Boom, Gloom & Doom Report. A lot of eclectic stuff, and that’s how the world is going to stay smart.

It’s so important. We’re the fourth estate, we uphold democracy. So I appreciate that you understand that and that you support it. Jamie, thank you so much for your insights and your time. 

Folks, thank you.