Communication

It was his duty to see that the prisoners were quickly and humanely disposed of.

he performed his grim task with a dispatch and an efficiency for which even the condemned must have been grateful in that nothing is more horrible than an executioner whose hand trembles and whose heart wavers pursuing the same devices a few weeks back when lenin forced the chequette to be made subservient to the department of interior and communications the public looked upon this step as a real compromise and a definite move towards the abolition of the secret police trials again became public with employers and other unbelievers in socialism openly represented by lawyers who had long ceased to regard their profession as anything but a dead asset Lenin never dismisses men he can trust.

So while Dzerzhinsky ceased to be head of the once all-powerful Extraordinary Commission, he was elected in the same moment Commissar of the Interior and Communications, although temporarily he was sent to Siberia to expedite grain shipments for the famine areas.

Thus the history of the Cheka repeats itself.

In the first moments of elation following the March Revolution, when prison doors were thrown open all over Russia and prison records were publicly burned, it seemed as if the day of the secret police was forever past.

Yes.

Communication anxiety and regret.

This is the second reason.

I have

that too.

Communication.

Yeah, you do.

Do

[swoosh] Arguing with yourself may be the best way to flourish.

My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

[upbeat music] Today, I'm excited to speak with Martin Seligman.

I'm completely aware of all of that.

But I think that we've seen through things like the Communications a- and Media Authority at times having nebulous discussions about, um, uh, good taste or these sorts of things, right? There's 28 million versions of what the word harmful is.

There's 28 million versions, and we keep being told that, you know, silence is violence and all these, all these other definitions and backdoor words.

So rather than the obvious, which is harmful, okay, should we be doing things that are, are, are stopping the, the, uh, the depiction of abuse? Yes, yes, yes.

Thank you very much, Senator.

I do appreciate it.

Uh, Senator Sarah Henderson there is the Shadow Communications Minister.

There's, there's something in this.

I've actually been thinking a lot about AI and where things are headed.

There was a recent political article that detailed the open AI hack, and it's itching my brain in ways way beyond marketing and communications.

I'm actually starting to consider the demise of our society at the hands of AI.

And that thought is not super fun.

Buy enough impressions, show up in enough feeds, and familiarity did the rest.

Now it's going to start running in the other direction.

If the gatekeepers are AI agents, then the only things that matter from a marketing and communications perspective are what we say about ourselves and who corroborates it.

The signals you can buy count for a little less every day.