Jamie Dimon talks Trump, AI and America’s future on The Axios Show | Full Interview

Happy to be here.

Yeah, so first of all, thrilled to be here. I have enormous respect for you all these years and we've always done this, so it's not like a brand new thing for us. 'cause it's mortgage is a small business and I'll give you a more detail, but last year, I've been complaining a little bit about, I've been speaking about the frame of the American dream for years and I think you have to acknowledge that there's a flaw and it's more for the lower paid individuals in America and maybe more than that, but if you focus there for a minute, so we've always done these things, but we asked our team this year, we did a security resilience initiative, what more can JP Morgan do and so the team got kind of excited and we went through every part of it and they came back with a whole bunch of stuff, so I think it was this coalescence, it becomes like a crusade when the company gets behind it, so we're rolling it out tomorrow. The first part would be small business, so what is that? So we already bank 7 million. We're gonna go try to bank 10 million, we're gonna try to bring more capital to it, but more than that, a thousand more bankers, more rural areas, more, we call 'em business consultants. We're gonna double the amount of business consultants. We're gonna try to provide them better healthcare. A lot of 'em don't have healthcare, so we're gonna put on website, I'd call it ancillary services, data advice, all these things. How can we help small businesses grow? I think we have, I forgot what we call it, but we're gonna educate something like a hundred thousand in how to do a better job running small businesses. In our branches, we have Zooms. You can go on Zoom and talk to 3000 branches, maybe a hundred thousand people at one time, taking advice, you know, giving questions, so same thing for mortgages and affordable housing. We're one of the leaders in both. What can we do to bring it to more people skills. How do you get people making more money, so there's maybe a little philanthropy dollars there about how you can help in local schools that teach kids skills that give them well paying jobs at 17 or 18. In fact, that camera is looking into Queens, there's a school right across the bridge there called Aviation High School and it's a high school. It teaches you high school stuff, but it also teaches you how to maintain seven aircraft and 95% of the kids graduate and they earn 70,000 plus a year. Their mom and dads may come go, it's an unbelievable thing, and that's what we need more of that and then also financial education and a lot of our branch in LMI neighborhoods bring people in, teach 'em about mortgages, saving money, how to open new accounts. All the various things we need to do a little bit more about healthcare, both for our own people, for small business, and we call it vital institutions, so I think I've mentioned six. Vital institutions, which we already do, is we bank cities, schools, states, hospitals. How can we do more, do a better job for 'em, so it's this whole thing. We're gonna roll it out in pieces. We can't do it all at once and now's the time to do the best we can and double down and make a country. The other thing was really important to me America's military strength is also predicated on its economic strength and that economic strength is somewhat predicated on the fact that it's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and equal opportunity. If you want to have an equal opportunity country, you need to do some of these things to give people more opportunity.

So I think you put it in context just a little bit for all the people there. We still have the most prosperous nation the world's ever seen, the best military. We're in great position and we have issues, so I totally agree with that and you can't fix problems when you don't acknowledge them. The most important thing to me is the geopolitical. We need to keep the world free and safe for democracy. That dwarfs all other things, so if you ask me, having a strong economy, strong military, real strategies around this, most important. We'll work our way through AI. I think it's gonna, again, in context, it's gonna save lives. It's gonna cure cancers. Your kids may live to a hundred without all the pain and suffering went through and that's a good thing. It may cause disruption in the short run because it may eliminate jobs faster than the economy can adjust to that and then we should have plans for that. We should really think through what are we gonna do JP Morgan? What can schools do? Retraining, reskilling, upskilling. What can government do? Incent those behaviors. So I do think we can get around this, but we should start thinking about that today and so, if I understand the uncertainty, Warren Buffet used to always talk about America got through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, and always came out at the end. We have the most prosperous nation world's ever seen, the most innovation world's ever seen. When you travel around America, you probably read the James Fallow book about what he found. You have innovation in Boise, in Austin, and Fort Elkhart and Detroit would be a great example where cities, people adjust and we'll be okay. but we should acknowledge the problem to try to fix them.

Partially.

Yeah, we have, but we still are the bastion of freedom for the world.

Yeah, I would step back on that one a little bit when you say it's a war of choice. I've heard a lot of people say there was no imminent threat and the threat means that it hasn't happened yet, the bad thing hasn't happened. They've been killing people around the world for 45 plus years. They've killed a lot of Americans. They funded not just Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, they funded 30 or 40 other groups. They have terrorist cells here. They were about to get their ballistic missiles, I think you just found out can go almost 3000 miles now. They never gave up nuclear. They were bad, so I don't look at this like does it create all this uncertainty? Absolutely. Does it create more short-term risk for the oil prices? Absolutely. I'm praying it ends well. I don't know everything the American government knows. I don't know if you know the military has been planning things like this extensively in a lot of detail, so they know more than we do. They have more plans than we do and I literally hope it turns out well and that somehow we get peace in the Middle East permanently, but having those folks, their throat on the Straits of Hormuz and funding all these proxy wars, why the western world put up these proxy wars for 45 years is kind of beyond me. I don't know what all the facts were about why now and I agree with you, it creates risk and it may be better for Russia.

And I always say that there's no divine, even America has no divine right to success and we have the Constitution, which is extraordinary. That's the embodiment of values, so it's the legal embodiment of freedom of enterprise, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, equal opportunity. That's what that is and those values are actually the things that are strong for this America, including God, family, country, work ethic. I think we've gotten a little bit soft. I think we made a huge mistake in not teaching this much more in the schools. Did America have failures? Absolutely. Should we look at that and tear down with this unbelievable country done? Absolutely not, so the real risk is our heart, our soul, our grit, our courage. That is the actual real risk because that will drive the economy. America's military strength is predicated upon America's economic strength, our economic strength is predicated in keeping this wonderful system going, fixing it where it did something wrong, but there's too much today, like just tearing it down. It quite bothers me that we don't celebrate the values of virtues, particularly in this 250th year of the anniversary. So yeah, I am worried about that. It is a troubled time, but we're gonna get through this too.

Well, I'm gonna stay away from the military stuff.

Remember it was built to defend, but it's a weapon that could be used to attack. They're not used to attack and I've been worried about this for, I've written about it for years that cyber is huge and it's getting worse every single year. Now of course America's got unbelievable cyber capabilities too, so if anything closes down part of America, you can assume we'll close down part of our adversaries, if not more, but I do think people, it makes people worried about the job part and so while maybe in the long run, I really think some developed nations people might be working three and a half or four days a week, living longer, curing cancers, no airplane crashes, no car crashes. That's unbelievable, but if it happens too fast, what do you do? And that's why my view, like I do at JP Morgan, okay, anticipate what might be a risk, we don't know, but not knowing and thinking it's possible, what are you gonna do? So JP Morgan is gonna, and we always did this, but we're gonna really double down, re-skill, retrain, relocate, use AI to serve a client unabashedly, but make sure we keep taking care of our people and I think the country can do that, done the right way.

I think, but remember, so there are shortages in tons of jobs today. There are blue collar, but there are hard jobs. I remember going to a place that taught kids or even people who are 45 years old, how to manage advanced manufacturing tools. We call it a blue collar job, but you're basically managing a computer that manages the tool. We have jobs everywhere like that and we need more welders, more electricians, more plumbers, more, and these become very sophisticated jobs and then high schools, community colleges, unions do a very good job at this training people, so I kind of agree with you. I think if we kind of get our act together and plan for this, we can handle the negative outcome. The other thing is, remember there are a lot of things that AI will barely affect. So it is like it's gonna affect every job. It's gonna affect a lot of jobs. Wat it does with government jobs, I don't know. Police firemen, I don't know. I mean, so we should take a deep breath.

No, I don't have a fear of that yet.

Well I read the same stuff you read and I do think you need some kind of guardrails around it. I think we're also very smart, we'll probably build some guardrails. We do a lot of work in that, I don't see that personally, but you could come up with Odyssey 2000, see that maybe how can lose control a little bit.

Maybe, every analysis I've seen makes it very hard because of our system. The two parties, if you're gonna run for a president as an independent, you gotta get over 50% electoral votes. That's really hard to do when you got the two parties who are probably gonna get 27%, a minimum, 20%, 7% electoral votes, and then it goes to the house and they decide and usually they pick whatever party's in charge of the house, but I think you might see that over time.

No, I don't think so.

It's hard, I'm very hard pressed to think I should be doing something like that. I love what I do.

Yeah, I do get asked, I'm not sure I'm suited to it. I've never been in any campaign at all. You've run stuff. I've run stuff, yeah, but I'm a banker, I'm a New Yorker. I'm 70 years old. I've had a couple of health problems. It's just probably not me, plus I love what I do. Like from this platform, I can help so many things. Running for president is kind of quixotic. I'd have to give up this to do something else as quixotic, so I'm not sure it makes sense. Plus we're so tough on our politicians. We just annihilate them and I just think it's wrong. I don't know what to do about that and then their families for generations almost and so it's hard to subject your family to that and anyone who does it, I applaud, but it's hard.

I think they just got too far to the left and too anti-business and too lack of common sense. When I look things like is climate a real issue? Yeah, it is. Did we do a lot of stuff that was intensely stupid? We did and people know that. Do we overdo DEI in a lot of cases? Yeah, we did and people know that. We look at do people believe that Washington is not a swamp? Like who on the show thinks that we give Washington another trillion dollars, that it would be well spent as opposed to go out to their own special interest groups? The inefficiencies they see in the system is extraordinary. The litigation is extraordinary. The deficit as you already mentioned is too high and so I think we made people kinda shocked, but I think what'll happen to the Democratic party, because I speak to my Democratic friends all the time, it won't be that someone figures out what they should do and how they're gonna do it and how they should say it, it'll be when someone comes along who's a leader and says this is what we're doing. We're not doing that and we're gonna do this, we're will include, the heart and soul of America not dragging down America, not blaming successful people for everything, but actually saying, we're gonna fix the schools. We have a problem, we're gonna fix 'em, we're gonna keep the strongest military, we're gonna lift up our lower paid people, like I would double the earned income tax credit. I think it's to be the best way to get money into the hands of lower income people. I would judge schools on outcomes. Do these kids get jobs and what do the jobs pay? If I was the federal government, I'd say use that. I think it is what they do in math when they're in third grade or something, but after that, are they getting good jobs? There are solutions to these problems and we've messed up lots of these policies Look at our permitting. It's almost a joke now when you try to get something built in a lot of states and it takes so long and so let's roll up our sleeves, see what our problems, are attack the problems, and I do think you'll see a hopefully a democratic leader come forward who does that. And you had that with Clinton and it isn't that the party figure out the words, it's that there's a person who comes forward, figures out how they wanna lead, and then leads.

I can't answer that question. I don't wanna answer it. I mentioned the names would be pissed off, plus I'd have to give it some thought. I haven't thought that through. There are people, I remind people we didn't know about Barack Obama two years before his election. We didn't know about John F. Kennedy really. We didn't know about Clinton. We didn't know about George W. Bush. We did know about Hillary Clinton and George HW Bush. We didn't know about Trump before his first election. We probably didn't believe about Trump before his second election. Someone's gonna come forth, people emerge, they become leaders of a group that take the group, but they have to be a leader. They cannot be pandering to every little part of their party. That does not work. They have to have common sense. They can't just come forward and say, you know, the way I'm going to fix this is I'm gonna have a chip sack, but make it a jobs program. People know that doesn't work and so if you're gonna do something, do it a way that actually works, explain it to the people. and if you make a mistake, admit you made a mistake and change course.

I think it's possible, but unlikely. I think there will be a lot of anti, not anti-AI but people saying we've gotta control AI, we've gotta make it work for society. That's a perfectly reasonable thing. I think if someone's just anti-AI, I'd think that won't work. I mean, you know how many citizens already use it on Gemini and things like that and you use it. When I read your stuff, which I read all the time, you acknowledge that you're using AI to get smarter and write things and stuff like that and the anti-rich thing has been around a long time and I do understand it because I think separated the two pieces, the piece that's really important is that we have in fact left the lower income folks behind and I remind people who are well off that they don't worry about their schools. They don't live in crime riddled neighborhoods, so if you are making less income and you're in a poor rural area or an inner city area, your schools aren't good, you go to crime inner neighborhoods, more divorce, less jobs, all the things that it is become intergenerational, so let's acknowledge it and fix it. All of us, Democrats, including unions, Republicans should say that shouldn't happen that way and the policies that created that were both Democrat and Republican. All of those policies did not work in the inner cities. Someone wrote a great article, they went back to the town or the state, I think it was West Virginia where President Johnson announced a war on poverty and it had like 30% unemployment and a lot of crime and a lot of drugs and they said, in this state, we've now spent $500 billion, something like that, but the same town, 30% unemployment, a lot of drugs and a lot of crime. That means the policies didn't work and we know policies actually work and so I just think we have to get better at good public policy and remind people that good public policy is free, doesn't increase the deficit to spend the trillion dollars we're already spending K to 12 and get better outcomes and so that's what I would-

I think it's because of what I said that that it is truly left the people behind and you have these slogans about why the rich caused all that type of stuff, which is not true, but there is some truth to that. If you were the average citizen here and you say these wealthy people getting unbelievably wealthy and this segment's been left behind, that's kind of annoying. Now, if you look at America in truth from the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties to 2010, Americans have been doing much better, including lower income. Someone did this little chart the other day that their homes are bigger, they have air conditioning, we all have us, air conditioning, more this more that, more incomes, but relatively, they were left behind and the aggravation of your schools not doing well, not having jobs, trade, closing down a plant in your town, those were real. There's evidence that those towns that lost that plant, not only did unemployment go up, so did suicide, so did depression and we didn't fix it. Shame on us, but let's figure out how we're gonna fix it going ahead. I hate crying over spilled milk. It's not my nature.

Yeah, well, there's a couple things here. This has been going on for a long time. I don't trust doctors, trust my doctor. I don't like politicians, I like my congressman. I don't like banks, I love my bank. JP Morgan is very trusted by our clients, so it's not true that it's not trusted. It's very trusted, in fact, more trusted than people think and I think that you just said it inside a company, these CEOs are trusted people. They're not distrusted, not distrusted by the local communities. Most of 'em are very pro-government, pro-help, pro-community, pro-America, but if you go back in history, CEOs didn't comment on, I get asked by of course all my Democratic friends, you gotta say something. I said you didn't ask me to say something every time I didn't agree with Biden or Obama. CEOs aren't used to commenting on every single policy that comes out there, but I do agree with you on this, and this is a major point to me, we, business, made a mistake by not getting more involved earlier. I do not believe that the problems of society will be fixed by politicians alone. That's not an insult to politicians, most of the really good ones, they want help to figure things out and we business kind of step back. That's what happened in Europe where the political leadership class became a permanent political leadership class and I think it ended up being a mistake, so the business round table has been quite active in corporate governance, immigration, taxation, regulation, healthcare, pensions, all for the good of the country and so I do agree with that point that we should step forward and do things that are good for the country. Like John F. Kennedy said, don't ask what the country could do for you, ask what you could do for the country and we gotta have a little bit more of that spirit. We gotta be a little tougher than that. Help your government. A lot of these folks help the government. If you actually talk to the CEOs, they're always going down to help their government. They're not going on TV, but they're always going down to see what they could do to make America better, but I do think that we have to do a better job. Detroit is a great example. Detroit was like one of the major American cities that did not have a renaissance and Mayor Duggan comes along with the write in vote, a white man in a town that's more than 80% Black, basically saying to people, anyone who can help me, civic society, government, business, come help me. I want jobs, I want safety and in his two terms, or maybe three terms, he did an unbelievable job and that's what works, collaboration around schools, jobs. He brought in some major plants, the police collaborated, they didn't have all the same problems that the rest of everyone did after the murder of George Floyd. He got the hospitals on time, the lights on, jobs going up, people are moving in for the first time in god knows when and so that's collaboration. People working together to fix their hometown and by the way, that happens in a lot of small towns, so remember you're major media and I'm a CEO in New York City, you go to a lot of these small towns, you guys do a lot of local stuff, they don't feel that way. They don't even talk about us in Austin, Texas or Fort Ellacart or Blasey or Spokane. They're actually doing quite fine.

There may be some of that, but that was true. I don't know, that was true under all presidents. They didn't speak up. They didn't say, I'm against that policy of this president, so like that generally, and I understand that, but maybe more should speak up.

I'm not. This is the important part. You can't comment at every little thing and particularly when people make statements that you know they're gonna modify later. You guys are always chasing your tails because he's like putting out the lure out there and the press all goes running to it and they waste so much time. So take immigration. we should all be embarrassed that we now have immigration border control that we didn't have and when we didn't have it, everyone said, well, it can't be done, it's hard to do. Well, no, actually, it got done damn quickly and we need border security. We need to decide who enter our country. This has become a major problem around the world, even a bigger problem in Europe because most of the people entering our country here wanna be American citizens. They wanna work. Now that we've done that, the BRT's always supported a path to citizenship for law abiding folks. I've heard President Trump say that every now and then. Absolutely, he hires some of 'em. DACA stays more merit based, proper asylum, the things that 80% of Americas say absolutely. and so the BRT is on their, I believe it's on their site, to support that. Almost all the CEOs do. They just don't want to go on TV every day and say it, but they say it privately.

I don't wanna say here.

No, I'm not afraid of it. I just think sometimes he raises some wonderful issues, that things that universities should have been doing a better job at and but I'm not in favor of taking away all their R&D and so it's more like that. You gotta slice that catch sometimes.

Oh, so tariffs, tariffs are a very small part of our economic relationship with countries. There are some unfair things that countries are doing and it got the people at the table. I'd like to finish the trade deals. I would do bigger trade deals with people and bigger free trade agreements, which I've heard him say he would do too, so what's the other subject you raised?

You gotta go through every single one. I'm happy that the government, more the Department of War, did this deal for MP materials. If you wanna build rare earths here, we have to do things like that. We give 'em kind of outtake agreements, otherwise it won't work. I haven't evaluated every single deal they did. I think we should be very careful when government gets involved in that, but government's got involved in 0.01% of stuff. It isn't like they got involved in everything. They should be careful. If they're gonna do things like that, it should be very, very well thought through.

Well I don't think they were. In '08, he went to jail for prostitution or something like that, which wasn't considered a terrible crime of some sort if you actually read and then one of mistakes we made if actually read what they call it, the pleadings, they were pretty clear that it was much worse than that, but they settled here, but they thought here, and the other thing you, you guys should be asking is the government knew a lot. Why didn't the government do something about it all those years he was abusing these young women, they knew, but you're right. I think someone wrote a great article too, it was more about his connections, why all these people talk and got together and it was embarrassing for them and I don't know why, I think some people, they'll do anything to be in the inside club or something like that and introducing people. I think some people were, they're innocent, they didn't know, some knew. I agree, I agree. I think is why people like him stay away from someone like me because I would've been like what the hell are you doing? Remind myself when people, I learned this lesson years ago, if someone calls me, if you called me up and said you want to introduce me to so-and-so to dine and meet, my answer would be to you, here's my telephone number, have 'em call me directly. I wouldn't put up with being introduced to people by people for very reasons like that because I don't wanna be in between or like someone's doing a favor for someone or sometimes you don't even is true. They're asking me to call that person or I bring them by. I'm like, well, why? I do think there are clues to how you can avoid those things.

I don't know, I'll still be here and obviously that's ups the board. I love what I do. I'm devoted to doing it. We've got absolute fabulous team members and when I move on from CEO, the current plan would be that I stay as executive chairman for a while, so we'll see. You know, David Sinclair and others say that we're five years away from escape velocity. You'll start to reverse age, so if you can hold out for five years, you can do it forever. Yeah, that'd be right. I do think the next generation will live to a hundred without all the diseases we've had and stuff like that. They'll be very lucky.

I don't know, not forever but longer.

I think that's too far in the future. I think work gives you purpose and I think there'll be plenty of work and play. I think people have more time for love and family and hiking and reading history and things, which are all great pleasures. I remind people of this AI world, you're still gonna have to do those things, still have to make babies, you're still have to take care of 'em, you're still gonna have to eat, you're still gonna have to go for a hike, you're still gonna wanna go skiing, you're still gonna wanna love the arts and love the science and love just the knowledge, but purpose is a wonderful thing in life and that's what pursuit of happiness is. It's like having a purpose that you're pursuing, whatever that purpose is done to be business, it could be art, it could be teaching, it could be media, educating people, so I think that purpose is a part. I think if people didn't have a purpose in life, that'd be really hard.

Well look, you uniquely know 'cause I met with these guys when they set up Axios. I would've probably funded the whole thing 'cause outta the respect that I have you, I would've never have gotten involved in the editorial stuff, but we both agreed it would be bad for you, it'd be bad for JP Morgan 'cause we couldn't advertise in Axios, something like that.

It'll be something different about policy, but I think educating people is unbelievably important, so I put the education you get in school, I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media's the great influencer. We all wake up in the morning, we read media, I read an awful lot, but if you think of the senators, congressmen, administrative officials, regulators, governors, mayors, and all of their staff, remember very often it's their staff who's reading to you that is learning to do something and we have to do a good job at that and in some ways we haven't. I look at a lot of bad policy, it's because the people who write policy didn't do a good job and the media doesn't explain it well and kind of flip flop and back and forth and I think most of the problems we have are fixable. The political issues are tough, but the actual policy could be fixed, but it'll never be fixed if you don't acknowledge there's a problem. If we don't acknowledge that our inner city schools are not doing a good job, we cannot fix it.

Well, I'll do business with people I like I'm gonna probably write a book maybe about more about management and stuff like that and I might do one on the financial crisis. It's a lot of stuff that really people don't fully understand about what happened. I may teach, I may teach somewhere because I like teaching and then yes, I might do something around a media related thing.

Oh, be open-minded. Read everything. Analyze everything over and over, oh your management team, makes the whole management team knows about it. It's not like I play a secret. I know you do this, that everyone talks about everything. It's all debatable, it's all open. Have the CEO have a little grit. You better say, okay, we finished that conversation. Have a great decision making process. People sometimes think that decision making is, I've heard everything, I go home and I think. No, it's usually iterative. I come in the next day and say, Jim, I thought about that. What about X? Let's do another analysis and eventually you find the answer. They always say have great people around you and I know a lot of people, they think they do, but you can see that they're not. Great to me means they're open-minded and have fun. Get out there. I'm writing my chairman letter this year, but one of the things I occurred that culture is real, but that word is so misused. Sometimes people think, oh, I run an open place. Every issue is raised, but you go to their meetings and people are afraid to talk and other people, it's complete open conversation and it's because the leader wants it to be open. There's nothing you can say to me to offend me because I'm just trying to do a better job. That's all for the client, for the country, for community and they know how to delegate. They know when not to delegate. That's what I wanna write about. It's a wide bucket of things. I've made a lot of mistakes and a lot of what I learned was by making a mistake, like acting out of anger, allowing yourself to be weaponized, having an opinion before you had the right to have an opinion. Not getting the right person in the room, not working through the issue. Jeff Bezos talks about the, the one way door versus the two way door. Better to be more careful. Like when you hire people, generally if they're gonna be close to my operating committee, everyone in the operating committee interviews them, not just two people. and so we have a talk, but we're trying to do is the right thing we're trying to do. Management is fun. Great quote, someone said, 'Being a CEO would be great if you didn't have customers or employees.'

Have a legacy.

Just do what you do really well and then when you're gone people say he or she made the world a better place as opposed to I've gotta come up with something unique and different so I can make a name for myself. I always say if a CEO says they have to have a legacy, sell the stock.

Thank you. Appreciate it.