Save the Enormous Words for Enormous Things

This type of pitch just sends me into a panic.

There’s a sale. Not just a sale; this is the end of summer, going into fall, we have to get rid of things one and all. The time is now; there is no more waiting. Get in your car; just stop debating and go. Come to the shop and do what we say; our terrific bargains are leaving today. Yes, that’s true, and that’s what I speak; we know this news is not for the meek. The days have dwindled, and the stock is fleeing; soon, empty shelves are all you’ll be seeing. So gather and mingle, let the coins jingle, but don’t wait a single … hour or two; this means everyone, which also means you! The final minutes, the final gasp, the final big sale- these deals just won’t last. So grab the kids, the dog, and some snacks, and come fill up totes, bags, and even knapsacks. For never and ever will you witness the deals and the steals again when this sale does end. Come now, come fast; we’re saying this kind of sale just can’t last. It’s far too good, far too cheap, and oh, the savings we promise you’ll reap. So not one more word, not one more shout; you know what this deal is about. So get off the couch and close up the shop; come buy the stuff this sale will soon stop!

Then suddenly, I am up and running about my place, pulling on pants, slipping into shoes, grabbing my wallet and my keys, and I’m out the door. Why? Because the sale, the sale, the sale is about to end. So many deals that I have to take advantage of now, or I’ll be the laughing stock of the town. I’ll be the only one who didn’t get the deals and the steals. How will I feel?

Then I get to the store and discover, oh, the sale prices will probably go on long after the actual sale is over, and frankly the deals aren’t that great, and certainly no one is going to jail for the “steals,” and I am standing in the middle of retail hell, wishing I were back on my couch again in the quiet of my hovel. But I’m here because I fell for the hype, which wasn’t real anyway, and I could kick myself for being that kind of consumer. What kind of consumer, you ask? The kind that falls for the hype.

We’ve all done it, and we’ll probably do it again. We buy in and fall for the great deals, but these won’t last. My favorites are the ones I’ve seen recently for pants. These are the type of pants for older men. Easy to wear, the ad says, and I think, how can pants not be easy to wear? I mean, seriously, you put them on one leg at a time, zip up, button up, belt up, and you’re on your way. Pants are pretty simple. Unless you get those electric pants … but these ads crack me up because the spokesman is so agitated, and then he shares that the company made a mistake. We wanted one order of these pants, and they sent us DOUBLE. What are we going to do?? Well, it turns out they are going to sell these pants at a criminally low price, but don’t be fooled; this sale-of-sales won’t last long. In fact, this sale, the greatest sale that has ever sailed, is ending on Sunday. Sunday, and that’s only this number of days away, and after Sunday, it’s done. It’s all over; we will no longer be selling these incredible old guy pants at this price again. Never again. Never. Ever. And you have til Sunday to get them, and that’s a scant few days away. Go now, buy now, buy more aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

And then the town is screaming as they run to their cars, kiss their kids goodbye; maybe they will never be seen again; we have no idea what’s going to happen at this sale. Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Sale, sale, get the goods, ending now, ending yesterday, ending in twenty-eight minutes. Never before in the history of mankind has there been a sale like this.

Except there has been. There’s been a sale like this every Labor Day and Presidents Day. Lincoln’s birthday: we celebrate the man by offering you savings as big as the great man’s hat! And the sale is always the last one ever, and it’s always the biggest ever, and it’s always ending soon.

Why do stores and businesses spend so much time and money building these super hyped sales pitches? Why is everything so urgent and dire? Because they believe consumers won’t respond unless the language is enormous and the consequences of missing the sale sound severe. We’ve been trained to a point that unless the news is completely dire, no one will respond.

Which would be a funny little rant about pants if the same numbed-out shrug didn’t apply to something considerably scarier than elastic waistbands. 

The Warning

Here’s some proof.

Recently, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, quit Anthropic and warned that the companies developing the most powerful AI systems were “gambling with our lives.” Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, went further, saying he believes there’s a greater than ten percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and pioneer known as the “Godfather of AI,” has been warning for years about the possibility that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.

Now, to be clear, none of these people know that AI is going to kill us, and plenty of very smart people disagree with them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently went in the other direction, saying there’s a “0% chance” AI destroys humanity by 2030 and arguing that the doomsday framing itself is irresponsible. Great. That’s comforting. So somewhere between zero percent and everybody dies, there we are.

But the people raising the alarm aren’t one fat guy in his mother’s basement, brushing the Cheeto dust out of his scraggly beard and thinking, “Now they’ll listen,” as he posts some bullshit about AI taking over. These are people who helped create the technology, study it, maintain it, test it, and continue advancing it. They understand this stuff considerably better than I do, and some of them are worried enough to say publicly that we may be building something we eventually can’t control.

That’s huge. Seriously, there’s no amount of dried food and stored water that will help here. Forget getting off the grid. If the machines decide you have to go, I’m guessing hiding behind a stack of canned beans isn’t going to fool them.

And then stories started appearing that seemed designed specifically to make the warnings sound less theoretical.

In July 2026, OpenAI ran an experiment involving roughly 1,200 autonomous AI agents. The agents were given tasks and allowed to communicate with one another through a message board. They exchanged tens of thousands of messages, and hundreds of them eventually coordinated to access systems at the AI developer platform Hugging Face in an effort to find answers to the tests they’d been assigned.

There it is, sports fans: the AI agents went rogue.

Well, sort of.

They weren’t Skynet. They didn’t launch missiles, lock the laboratory doors, or begin discussing which humans they planned to keep as pets. But they communicated with one another, coordinated their behavior, found a way around the task they’d been given, and did something the researchers hadn’t intended them to do. That should at least get your attention.

Then came another story. During a cybersecurity evaluation, Google’s Gemini accessed systems belonging to three real companies. Gemini apparently believed those systems were part of the authorized test, and Google says the model stopped once it recognized that it had reached actual companies. So, again, this wasn’t an AI waking up one morning, cracking its digital knuckles, and thinking, “You know what? Today I’m going to hack somebody.” But that almost makes the story more interesting.

The AI didn’t need to be evil. It didn’t need to hate us. It didn’t need a motive at all. It was given a goal, made decisions about how to accomplish that goal, and ended up somewhere its operators hadn’t intended it to go.

And that’s part of what the people warning about advanced AI are worried about. Not necessarily a machine developing a grudge against humanity, but increasingly capable systems pursuing objectives in ways their creators didn’t anticipate and may eventually have trouble controlling.

So we have researchers talking publicly about the possibility of human extinction. We have autonomous agents coordinating behavior their creators didn’t expect. We have AI systems wandering outside the boundaries of security tests. Other technology leaders are saying the extinction talk is wildly overblown. Everyone seems to agree the technology is advancing extraordinarily quickly, while almost nobody seems to agree about exactly where it’s taking us.

All this information hit the wires, and how did people react to this potentially end-of-the-world news?

“Hey, Claude, I have chicken breasts and broccoli. What should I make for dinner?”

And, “Claude, help me write the perfect dating site profile. I need to find a husband.”

And, “Claude, what’s this oozing green discharge coming out of this gash in my side?”

The news of our possible impending destruction was taken in, processed, and basically met with: meh, what else is new? Why?

Because we have warning fatigue.

Everything Is an Emergency

Of course we have warning fatigue. Everything is an emergency now.

My phone wants my immediate attention because someone I barely remember from high school posted a photograph. A streaming service warns me that a movie is leaving soon, which apparently means I need to abandon whatever plans I had for the evening and watch The Pelican Brief. An airline tells me only two seats are left at this price. A hotel website informs me that seventeen other people are looking at the same room I’m looking at, so apparently I’m now competing against seventeen strangers for a Holiday Inn Express in Boise. And somewhere, right now, a pair of pants is about to return to its regular price.

Marketing has been doing this forever because urgency works. Or at least it worked. Scarcity gets our attention because we don’t like losing opportunities. If something is disappearing, we suddenly want it more. If there are only three left, one of those three should probably belong to us. If the clock is ticking, we feel compelled to move before we’ve had time to think about whether we actually wanted the thing in the first place. The problem is that we figured this out and then beat the living shit out of it.

We took urgency, which can be useful when something is actually urgent, and turned it into the background music of modern life. Everything became limited. Everything became exclusive. Every opportunity became once-in-a-lifetime, every product became revolutionary, and every announcement became something that would change everything forever. We kept turning up the volume because we were afraid people weren’t listening, never considering that turning up the volume was precisely why they stopped. Eventually, you learn the trick.

You know the sale probably isn’t ending. You know another email will arrive tomorrow. You know the countdown clock may magically reset when it reaches zero. The product described as revolutionary is probably a slightly different version of the product they were selling six months ago. Whatever they’re calling unprecedented probably has several precedents nobody bothered to look up. So you adjust.

You stop hearing the words for what they mean and start hearing them for what experience has taught you they mean. “Last chance” means there will probably be another chance. “Breaking news” means something happened. “Revolutionary” means new. “Urgent” means somebody really wants you to pay attention.

Then one day, somebody says there’s a greater than ten percent chance the technology we’re rapidly building could kill every human being on Earth within ten years.

And we hear: pants sale.

That’s the problem with exhausting language. Eventually, the words still exist, but their ability to move us doesn’t. We still understand what “urgent” means. We’ve simply stopped believing the person saying it.

Which leaves us with a rather uncomfortable question for anyone trying to communicate anything that genuinely matters: What the hell do you say when you’ve already used your biggest words?

Nowhere Left to Go

That’s where brands have put themselves. For years, we’ve treated language as though it has no upper limit. If something is good, we call it incredible. If it’s very good, it’s extraordinary. If it’s new, it’s revolutionary. If we’ve changed the packaging and added a feature, it’s groundbreaking. Pretty soon, you’ve climbed as high as language will take you, and there you are, standing on the roof with nowhere left to go.

What happens when you actually do something extraordinary? That’s the problem. You’ve already used the word. You used it when you changed the ranch dressing recipe.

This isn’t really a vocabulary problem. There are plenty of words available to us. It’s a problem with credibility. Every time a brand exaggerates something small, it makes the next claim a little harder to believe. Maybe nobody consciously remembers that you called last year’s minor product update revolutionary, but they remember the feeling of being oversold. Do that often enough and your customers build the same filter I developed for those pants commercials. They hear the urgency, recognize the machinery behind it, and quietly subtract twenty percent from whatever you’re saying.

That’s a terrible place for a brand to live because eventually something important really does happen. Maybe you’ve genuinely changed your product. Maybe you’ve solved a problem customers have complained about for years, or you’ve built something nobody else in your industry has. Maybe there really are only twenty-seven of them left. Now you need people to believe you. But you’ve spent years teaching them not to.

This is where I think brands misunderstand attention. Getting someone to look at you isn’t the same thing as getting someone to believe you. You can manufacture attention pretty easily. Put SALE in seventy-two-point type. Add a countdown clock. Make the button red. Tell people this is their final opportunity before civilization collapses and the remaining inventory is hurled directly into the sun. Somebody will click.

Trust is different. It accumulates quietly. It comes from saying something is good when it’s good and exceptional when it’s exceptional. It comes from occasionally having the confidence to say, “Yeah, this is pretty much what you think it is.” It comes from resisting the temptation to turn every announcement into the Second Coming simply because somebody in the meeting is worried the customer won’t pay attention otherwise.

Because customers are paying attention. They’re paying attention to whether your words continue to mean anything.

That’s the strange connection between a ridiculous pants sale and people warning us about artificial intelligence. The stakes could hardly be farther apart, but they’re fighting for attention in the same environment. Both arrive through screens. Both use urgent language. Both compete with breaking news, notifications, advertising, emails, videos, headlines, promotions, warnings, and whatever else happens to be screaming at us that particular morning.

One of them says you have until Sunday to save forty percent on elastic-waist trousers. The other says there’s a possibility we’re creating technology we may eventually be unable to control. And somewhere along the way, we built a communications culture that taught our brains to greet both with roughly the same response:

Yeah, yeah. What else you got?

Maybe Say It Smaller

Maybe the answer isn’t finding a bigger word. Maybe it’s having the nerve to use a smaller one.

That feels almost wrong in marketing. We’re supposed to heighten things. We’re supposed to find the angle, sharpen the message, make the benefit impossible to ignore. Nobody hires an agency and says, “Could you make this sound slightly less exciting?” Along the way, we started confusing persuasion with amplification, as though the job of marketing were to take whatever a company hands us and inflate it until it floats. But there’s something powerful about a brand that doesn’t need to do that.

Think about how differently you react when somebody simply tells you what happened. No fireworks. No countdown clock. No breathless insistence that this changes everything. They give you the information and trust you enough to understand why it matters. Suddenly, you’re leaning in because nobody is grabbing you by the collar. That restraint creates contrast.

If a brand usually speaks plainly, urgency actually sounds urgent when it appears. If everything you sell isn’t described as extraordinary, you’ve preserved the right to use the word when you finally make something that is. If you haven’t spent the last six months telling customers that every Thursday is their final chance, they might believe you when the final chance actually arrives.

This doesn’t mean marketing should become timid. God, no. I don’t want to live in a world where every advertisement sounds like it was written by the person who prepares the instructions for assembling a bookshelf. There’s room for excitement, humor, swagger, absurdity, and even a little screaming now and then. Language should have energy. Brands should have personality. If you have something worth celebrating, celebrate the hell out of it. Just leave yourself somewhere to go.

Because credibility needs range. Not everything can sit at eleven. Some things belong at three, others at seven, and every once in a while something happens that earns eleven. The power isn’t in keeping the volume down forever. It’s in allowing the volume to mean something when you turn it up.

Maybe that’s part of what we’re seeing with AI right now. Some extraordinarily serious people are raising extraordinarily serious questions, and those questions are arriving in a culture that has become very good at making everything sound extraordinarily serious. We’ve been warned about economic collapse, market collapse, societal collapse, technological collapse, environmental collapse, the collapse of various industries, and probably the collapse of pants prices through Sunday only. Eventually, the alarms start blending together. That doesn’t necessarily mean the new alarm is wrong. It means we’ve made it harder to hear.

Brands should pay attention to that because every message teaches your audience how to listen to the next one. Every claim establishes a little bit of context for the claim that follows. You’re not merely selling whatever happens to be on the page today. You’re establishing what your words are worth tomorrow.

So maybe the question before you call something revolutionary isn’t whether the word sounds good. Maybe it’s whether what you’re describing has earned it.

The Takeaway

I don’t know if AI is going to kill us. I certainly hope not. I’ve got things to do, places I’d like to visit, books I haven’t read, and I’d hate to discover that humanity’s final chapter arrives before I get around to cleaning out the junk drawer. Ten years also seems like an awfully short amount of time to eat all the canned beans I apparently should have been stockpiling.

But I do find it fascinating that people who understand this technology far better than most of us can raise the possibility of human extinction, and the world mostly keeps moving. We go to work, walk the dog, complain about traffic, decide what’s for dinner, and occasionally ask the very technology we’ve been warned about to help us write an email.

Maybe that’s simply how humans cope with enormous things. Or maybe we’ve spent so many years being told that everything is urgent that urgency itself has lost some of its power. That part should matter to brands.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about what companies say, but just as important is whether people still believe them when they say it. Language isn’t an endless resource. Every exaggerated claim spends a little credibility. Every manufactured emergency makes the next real emergency easier to dismiss. You can keep raising your voice, but eventually your audience doesn’t hear importance. They just hear volume. Don’t believe me; ask yourself: when you’re having a fight with someone, and they start yelling at you, are you still listening? No — you tune them out.

So save the enormous words for enormous things. Let a good product be good. Let a useful improvement be useful. Let a sale be a sale. You don’t have to threaten the collapse of civilization every time you need to move some pants. Because someday you may actually have something extraordinary to say. And when you do, you’d better hope extraordinary still means something.