Republicans should be deeply troubled by the appointment of Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence. The combination of malevolence, sycophancy, and incompetence that he has displayed in office has a name: pultification. /1

With Fed Chair Jay Powell reaching the end of his eight-year leadership, it’s time to assess his legacy. I take up the challenge in today’s PCB Central — the good, the bad, the ugly. Link below.

Like many people, I can sometimes have a tendency to run and hide when I feel rejection coming on. For a long time I thought this was sheer arrogance on my part, but that’s not it. It’s the indulgence of a small soul. I mean that literally. Aristotle had a name for it: mikropsychia, or “small-souledness” (mikros = small, psyche = soul). It is the vice side of the Aristotelian virtue, megalopsychia, or great-souledness. The great-souled person knows their worth and is comfortable accepting the honors, trials, triumphs, and setbacks associated with where they are in real time and in real life. That great-souled person can also do the same for others: there is no ego in the great soul that exaggerates a person’s prominence or desert beyond their actual capability. The small-souled person is the opposite. Not only can that person fight and fuss for more than they deserve. A small-souled person can self-sabotage to preclude a moral desert that should be theirs to enjoy. So it has sometimes been for me. I would sense an impending rejection, start to panic, begin to withdraw, and create self-protective narratives of preemptive success that meant I didn’t actually want that thing that wasn’t mine anyway and had the wise foresight to get out of its way before anything bad could happen. How do we break that pattern? How do we sit with rejection and let it be the teacher to us that it can be, expanding our souls and giving us better purpose? What might great souledness give us — in business, in life, at home, for our health — when we live with achieve it? I explore these questions and bring some receipts from a fourth grade crush to present-day failures in today’s PCB Central. Link below.

You had questions and I had answers in today’s PCB Central post. I talk about the Fed’s balance sheet, what I would change about bank supervision, whether Kevin Warsh is going to survive the Trump gauntlet, why Latter-day Saints don’t have godparents, whether I actually truly love triathlon training, and how I use AI. Take a look, link below.