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👋 Wishing you a cold, dark day. Please take that lovingly — the annual World Happiness Report continues to suggest there’s something magical about our globe’s northernmost, sun-choked nations. List-topping stalwarts Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden again rose to the top of the Gallup-compiled measurement of citizens’ self-reported life satisfaction around the globe. As for the US, it is a country that was surveyed.

🎧 On the pod: Brand strategist Sonia Thompson shares her deeply human approach to inclusive marketing that actually works.

NEWS FLASH

🛰 Behold, the world’s most expensive game of bocce ball: Startup Katalyst Space Technologies landed a $30m NASA contract to launch a spacecraft designed to knock another spacecraft deeper into space. NASA’s decaying 21-year-old SWIFT Observatory is seen as a great testing ground for new docking tech, but it’s currently in low-Earth orbit and would likely burn up by the end of next year if left alone. Enter Katalyst, now targeting a May 2026 launch, to nudge it further out and keep it (and its testing utility) alive.

✌ How to reach the right destination without taking a trip: Mindstate Design Labs reports early success in its attempt to make “the least psychedelic psychedelic that’s psychoactive.” Which is to say a psychedelic drug that could treat mental health conditions without an associated hours-long hallucinogenic trip. Mindstate’s psychoactive compound was developed using AI models that analyzed more than 70k psychedelic adventures and misadventures logged by people in clinical trials, but also on Reddit and the dark web. They claim, per Wired, the drug yielded no serious side effects in initial testing, but it would assuredly still face a long uphill FDA clearance battle.

⚡ Let’s try this again: Moxion Power went bankrupt, despite raising $110m+ to build its portable batteries, a more environmentally friendly alternative to diesel generators. Now, co-founder Paul Huelskamp is back with Anode Technology Co., attempting to do the same thing with several ex-Moxion employees, per TechCrunch. Anode’s battery is smaller than Moxion’s, making it easier to transport, and designed to work at live events and construction sites and for EV charging. It’ll also use contract manufacturers to produce its batteries as opposed to doing it in-house like Moxion.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Bright idea: Logitech’s new ~$100 K980 keyboard runs on light. Its battery can only be charged with sunlight or artificial light (at least 200 lux) and, once charged, can be used in complete darkness for up to four months — though we’d be very concerned about a potential scenario in which we’d need to do that.
Large and in charge: Thor Industries teased a longer-range EV RV with a new hybrid engine that's able to reach up to 450 miles, a heck of a lot better than the 105-mile all-electric journeys the startup has been able to complete so far. The electrified motorhome is expected to start production next year.
Meta will roll out ad-free Facebook and Instagram subscriptions to UK users for $4-$5/month, citing the Information Commissioner’s Office’s “consent or pay” guidance, which lets users either consent to targeted ads that use their data or pay to avoid them.

OPTIMIZE FOR AI

Make your presence unforgettable

If you can step to any center stage, IRL or virtual, and articulate your mind-mush with clarity, that’s pure power.

Try serial keynoter Lorraine K. Lee’s presentation toolbox, which breaks down 7 ways to set the tone and keep the crowd’s attention.

Public preaching pro tips:

3 ways to draw them in instantly
The message resonance matrix
Pointers for varying voice
Body language guidelines
How to close on a high note

Never bungle bags come crunch time. We’ll just assume that all of you who scroll past this button are charismatic maestros.

Hook the sleepyheads

THE BIG IDEA

A staircase lined with numerous orange and white pumpkins, fake spider webbing, and bales of hay.

For fall vibes, call your pumpkin concierge

Great news for fall lovers who don’t have the time or energy to buy their own pumpkins, but do have the means — pumpkin concierges are apparently a thing.

What they are: essentially professional porch decorators who, for a couple hundred to thousands, will deliver seasonal decor to your doorstep and style your entryway into a Hallmark-worthy backdrop.

More of them are cropping up across the country, and this year, business is booming, per Axios.

A gourd-geous service

Packages typically include pumpkins, hay bales, and other fall items, but vary depending on price and aesthetic. For people who also want to outsource the clean-up, that’s often an option, too.

In Virginia, Patch to Porch sells packages ranging from $300 for 28 pumpkins, to ~$1.3k for 96, including design, setup, and removal.
In Salt Lake City, Pumpkin Porch Fairy offers style and sustainability, sourcing its decor locally, decorating, and then donating the items to the community or back to farms.
In California, Sweet Thistle Farms cuts out the middleman, delivering pumpkins fresh off the vine, with packages starting at $400.

It’s niche, but not unlike other seasonal services, like holiday decorators who install Christmas lights, wrap gifts, and decorate trees, or Instagramable businesses like bed parties.

The trend is gaining steam, but…

… it all started five years ago in Texas, thanks to the OG pumpkin hustler and owner of Porch Pumpkins, Heather Torres, who’s turned her hobby into a six-figure business with 20+ employees, per Business Insider.

She offers four packages, including a 30-pumpkin arrangement for $325 (the smallest and most popular package) and a $1.3k+ one for “the true pumpkin lover” that includes two 50-pounders and other decorative items.

Who in their right mind would pay so much for a temporary display? Apparently plenty of people: she sold out last year and is already sold out again for 2025.

Torres also coaches other entrepreneurs on how to start their own pumpkin concierge business (at $4.5k for a two-hour session) and has helped 12 others break into the business, per BI.

Now, she’s expanding her pumpkin empire nationwide by franchising.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A too-bright idea? Digital billboards, hailed in our YouTube comments as “visual smog, not effective, expensive, public spam,” may not be the most popular thing out there, but they sure are lucrative, per this deep dive on the economics of owning a billboard in the US.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of Gen Zers whose values deem them hirable, at least according to a study from Suzy Welch, a business-school professor who wrote about her work in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Welch created an assessment called the Values Bridge to help people understand their personal values, which her team of researchers used to compare Gen Z’s values to those that companies claim to want most in new hires.

From a survey of 2.1k hiring managers, Welch’s team learned that achievement — wanting demonstrable accomplishments and success — and a desire to work were the first and third most important values to hiring managers, but ranked 11th and ninth for Gen Z, who prioritize values like self-care, helping others, and authenticity. Meanwhile, a 2024 survey found that 75% of surveyed business leaders found some or all recent college grads they’d hired to be “unsatisfactory.”

So maybe Gen Z spells troubles for managers who want work horses, but... perhaps kids these days are onto something? Their values actually sound nice.

AROUND THE WEB

📆 On this day: In 1913, Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, disappeared from a steamship traveling from Belgium to England. His body was found several days later in the water, but the cause of his death remains a mystery, with some suspecting he was murdered.

🎢 That’s interesting: Theme parks are fun. Engineering them is sometimes not.

🗞️ Newsletter: The Follow Up is a twice-weekly newsletter that talks about sales like your friend, not your boss.

🐈‍⬛ Game: Tap to jump.

🐕 Aww: Excellent haul.

QUOTE OF NOTE

Be great at one thing. The world does not reward general talent. The only place that works is on Jeopardy.

Sorry, generalists — unless you’re Ken Jennings, “Shark Tank” star Robert Herjavec suggests budding professionals looking for success better get really good at just one thing. For the 63-year-old cybersecurity exec, that special skill was communication, which he told Fortune helped him stand out among the tech crowd and become a millionaire by 26.

What we’d like to know is if sitting on a beach counts. (Asking for a friend.)

SHOWER THOUGHT

If the sentient cars in the movie Cars depict other vehicles like tractors as animals (cows), then they must have spontaneously and rapidly evolved as a species within the last 100 years, with Lizzie being one of the original propagators as horses/carriages must not have existed at all. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Ben "Go big or go-urd" Berkley.

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