Good evening. Brent crude oil fell below $100 a barrel today, and ​West Texas Intermediate was right around $90. That’s down from recent peaks but still way up from before war broke out in Iran — it’s also not what people are actually paying, but that’s a different story.

That crude oil gets refined into the gas we put in our cars, the fuel airlines use in jets and the diesel used to ship your groceries. Prices on all three are way up, but today we’re going to focus on one proposal to lower diesel prices that lawmakers and governors are pushing right now.

Plus, we’ll look at what the rising cost of heating oil means for your utility bill this winter.  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor  

When Sarah Degn, owner of Fresh Hopped Farm in Sidney, Montana, last bought diesel for her farm equipment back in July, she paid $3.60 a gallon.

“Which was still a little over a dollar more than I paid a year before that,” Degn said.

Her 700-acre farm grows corn, soybeans, wheat, and some alfalfa. She has already harvested the wheat for the season, which took about a thousand gallons of diesel. Now, it’s time to fill up her tanks again.

“I got my prices this morning, and regular diesel is $6.14, and the dyed diesel that goes in the tractors is $5.60,” Degn said. “So, if I fill both of my tanks — which are both currently empty — it will cost me $11,740 as of this morning.”

Diesel prices keep hitting record high after record high. Nationally, a gallon of diesel costs $6.52 on average right now, up from $3.68 a year ago.

That hike is hitting farmers particularly hard — much of their equipment runs on diesel — which has Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, and others calling on the Trump administration to temporarily ban diesel exports to bring down prices.

“It sounds like a fairly easy thing to do that would maybe increase the supply of domestic diesel,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

But while it might reduce prices temporarily, “in the long-term, it's probably not such a great idea,” Daigle said.

On every episode of “Million Bazillion,” hosts Bridget and Ryan answer a question about money from a real kid — and meet a lot of wacky characters along the way. At the end of last season, they traveled through time with Doc Jones to learn why the U.S. stopped minting pennies. The new season starts next week!

Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, has been banned from Amazon as retailers stake out territory in the race to make agentic shopping mainstream. But shopping isn’t the only way Muse can help you spend money. Meta is reportedly testing the ability to make restaurant reservations and appointments with Muse… but those calls sometimes come from humans in call centers rather than bots.

404 Media reported that story based on internal messages and testing from Meta. 404 has also been reporting on quality assurance contractors within OpenAI, who read ChatGPT conversations from real people. Turns out some of those contractors have been fired… for using AI to do their job.