🏈  Flag football’s touchdown

👋  Happy Monday. And happy birthday, iPod! The beloved piece of tech turned 25 last week. Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod at a press event, touting “1k songs in your pocket” for $399. The original model required a Mac with iTunes, and Apple claimed an entire CD could be transferred in under 10 seconds and 1k+ songs in under 10 minutes. Thank you for many wonderful years, iPod, and sorry to the family computers we had to ruin along the way with LimeWire downloads. 

NEWS FLASH 

🐺 Can we still call them puppies? Warhound, founded by Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences cofounder Ben Lamm, emerged from stealth last week with $200m in funding to deploy genetically engineered military dogs. The startup wants to rebuild the US supply of working dogs, since 80%+ of them are currently imported from Europe and fewer than half are fit for service. Colossal’s gene-editing tech would create dogs that are faster and more agile, while Anduril would outfit them with tech and protective gear. But do they like belly rubs?

📿 It only has ears for you: Nirva, cofounded by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, raised $33m for a lightweight pendant that is designed to listen only to your speech. As privacy concerns grow around ambient devices and smart glasses, the device is trained solely on the user's voice and filters out other people's voices. While the pendant can track your to-dos, its primary goal is to offer personal insights around your emotions and communication for self-improvement. Promises, promises.
🐊  Keep an eye on those crocs: Florida startup CrocAlarm is developing an AI-powered sonar system to alert the public if crocodiles or alligators are lurking in the water. Still in early stages, the device will have a siren that flashes green if the coast is clear, and red if trouble is near. While gator attacks are rare and often happen when humans swim in known habitats, limiting human-gator contact can also help prevent gator killings. Sounds good to us.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• A cancer breakthrough: Moderna and Merck announced that their mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma reduced risk of death or recurrence by 42% compared to standard treatment.
  
• Sky-high prices: The number of people screened at US airport checkpoints is estimated to decline for the first time since 2020. Those who do fly spend big, though — airfare in September was up 22% from the same time last year.
  
  
• Nuclear building blocks: Startup Blue Energy aims to revitalize the nuclear energy industry by building enormous 1.5k-ton blocks that can be easily assembled like Legos to build a power plant — lowering costs and reducing multi-year projects to just one year.
  
• Superbugs beware: California startup Radical Numerics says it injected an AI-designed virus into a human for the first time. The custom-designed bacteriophages only kill targeted bacteria by hijacking their own replication system to help patients with antibiotic-resistant infections.
  

PRODUCT PLAYBOOK

Tips for reinventing uber-boring products

You don’t know Eric Ryan, but that’s why this exists. He’s the creative brain behind eye-catching Target aisle darlings like Method soap and Olly vitamins.

His thoughtful, simplistic designs are filled with go-to-market wisdom. Save his product playbook for turning blah products into brilliant brands.

What we bundled:

• Proven framework: 5 of Eric’s high-creative tactics.

• Live product lab: Workshopping ideas with Sam and Shaan (My First Million).

• 10 rapid-fire rules: For brilliant product positioning.

Reinvent boring stuff

THE BIG IDEA

Teen girls are hitting the flag football field

If you only have hazy memories of flailing across a field in a mesh pinny playing flag football in gym class, you may not realize we're living in the Golden Era of flag football.

Flag football is surging in popularity, especially among girls and women — so much so that the NFL is betting $192m on its future, per Bloomberg.

Who's on the field?

With growing concerns over concussions and other serious injuries from tackle football, flag offers a safer, non-contact alternative that preserves the foundational skills and spirit. It's also more accessible to players of different sizes and body types, and with less equipment, it's less expensive.

While the sport has grown in popularity across the board, the increase in participation among girls is particularly dramatic:

• Over 100k American high school girls played flag football during the 2025-26 school year.
  
• There was a 48% jump from the previous year, and over 550% from 2021.
  
• Around 800k girls from ages 6 to 17 play flag football.
  
• Today, 4k high schools in 40 states offer girls' flag football.
  
• It was the only team sport to see overall participation grow among American kids from 2014 to 2024.

A touchdown for the NFL

Another driving force behind flag football's rapid growth is the NFL — and not just for the love of the game:

• The NFL, with other investors, pledged $192m toward the sport as part of plans to develop a professional flag football league for men and women.
  
• Flag football will make its Olympic debut in 2028, expanding the league's fan base internationally.
  
• Research shows that kids who play sports are more likely to become adult sports fans, and influence their parents' fandom.
  
• The NFL's Sam Rapoport is widely credited with helping to grow girls' flag football.

To be fair, the NFL Foundation has provided 40k+ schools with free equipment, so it's not just about the bottom line.

The league's investment has also helped pave the way for nonprofits, corporate sponsors, and NFL teams to invest millions of dollars in youth, high school, and college flag football.

The NCAA is expected to make women's flag football a championship sport next year, and a growing number of colleges are building programs to attract students.

Maybe we should have taken gym class more seriously.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Jump in overseas sales that century-old Jipyeong Brewery reported in 2025, per Bloomberg. The brewery is one of South Korea’s largest makers of makgeoll — a traditional rice wine that’s been made for ~2k years — which is rising to popularity after spending hundreds of years considered “cheap, low-quality, and beloved by grandpas.”

Exports are still dwarfed by soju’s $96.5 million haul last year, but if Gen Z’s taste in sweaters tells us anything, it’s to take grandpa-inspired trends seriously.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1918, Stonehenge’s last private owner Baronet Cecil Chubb gifted the site to the British people after buying it three years earlier on a whim at an auction.

🌍  Game: Wordle for international cities.

💡 Get inspired: Leaf through the stories of Mindstream’s Most Interesting Women in AI.

🥛  That’s fun: Try to see the glass half full. Literally.

🐈  Aww: A jealous sibling.

SHOWER THOUGHT

I turn on the lights when I get home. My cats might think my presence brings light to the world. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "Gym class hero" Friedman.

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