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Good morning.
Dale Sanders proved once again that old woods burn warmest. The 91-year-old reclaimed his crown as the oldest person to complete the Appalachian Trail on Monday. Nicknamed “Grey Beard” because, well, obviously, Sanders completed his hike of the 2,193-mile trail that runs between Georgia and Maine after setting out on September 6 last year. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy allows hikers a full year to complete the path.
Sanders’ journey included resting periods and injury delays, with one particularly rough fall leading to a short hospitalization. But the man who first set the record in 2017, when he was 82, remained undeterred. After all, his friend and fellow hiker M.J. Eberhart, whose trail name is the undeniably awesome Nimblewill Nomad, completed the trail at 83, motivating him to train to reclaim his title. In addition to the Appalachian record, Sanders is also the oldest person to paddle the 2,340 mile-long Mississippi River, which he completed at the spry age of 87. When you hit the elliptical on gym break later, remember you’ve got nothing on Grey Beard and Nimblewill Nomad.
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*Presented by Sprott. Stock data as of market close on August 31, 2026.
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*Please see important METL disclosures below.
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Millions of high school students are returning in the next week to contend with polynomials and logarithmic functions. But the most anxiety-inducing math these days is the more basic arithmetic of oil reserves.
Global energy markets have been under a pall of uncertainty since the two-month window to negotiate a US-Iran peace closed last month. On Monday, the two countries exchanged strikes, marking the first US attack in a month. Brent crude oil futures rose 2.7% to $90.52, and gas at the pump averaged $4.08, or 28% more than a year ago.
Canadian Holiday
US refineries have been operating near full capacity during the war. In the week ending August 21, they processed 17.4 million barrels of crude oil per day, the highest level since 2019. The US posted record exports of crude and petroleum products this summer, and the oil sector reported the biggest profits in years. But, with the war back on, many fear a looming supply cliff just got steeper.
Canada, which typically ships 4 million barrels of heavy crude to US refiners per day, is slated to take 300,000 barrels of daily capacity offline this month for scheduled maintenance. The US would normally offset that by tapping the country’s crude oil reserves, but the efforts to negate the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have cost the country more than 120 million barrels in storage in 2026. The volume of crude held in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell 3.1 million barrels to 286.6 million barrels last week, the lowest level since the early 1980s. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US hopes sanctions will bring Iran back to the negotiating table, while President Donald Trump is touting a (light-on-details) oil deal with Venezuela. But that won’t fix the short-term supply problem:
- Trump said the US will control 17 Venezuelan oilfields that would boost output by 1.5 million barrels per day.
- The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Chevron, which rose 2.1% Monday, and Halliburton, which rose 1.9%, are in serious talks to sign deals involving Venezuelan crude. But it will take massive investments and lots of time to get this oil online, with Jefferies analysts writing “legal and execution risks remain high, with any major production uplift likely years away.”
  Brave the Cave: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a remarkable engineering achievement, which is now its own issue. America’s oil reserves are held in dozens of huge underground salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana. When oil is drawn out, water must be pumped in to maintain the integrity of the caves. Officials say a minimum of 70 million barrels is required to stabilize the caves, but experts have warned escalated structural risks kick in when the reserves drop below 300 million barrels. In other words, right now.
Written by Sean Craig
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OpenAI thinks it’s on pace to make $1 billion in revenue from its ad biz annually. The AI company said Monday its annualized revenue run rate hit $1 billion in less than 200 days since it started serving ads.
Annualized revenue run rate is an inside-baseball term that doesn’t mean OpenAI’s ad unit will for sure make $1 billion annually — but it could. While OpenAI said in April it expected to make $2.5 billion from ads this year, it still touted the $1 billion rate yesterday as a milestone for its diversified business model. The company is continuing to expand access for advertisers in more countries to buy ad space next to sage ChatGPT advice like “You’re absolutely right! You should get bangs.”
History Repeats Itself
Ads drive the vast majority of revenue for search and social media companies that rose to prominence around when AI was a digital mom in Smart House. About 98% of Meta’s total revenue comes from ads. The biggest piece of Alphabet’s revenue pie comes from ads as well, though its share is waning as the company’s cloud unit grows.
OpenAI has been slowly introducing ads to users’ chat boxes since first launching them less than a year ago. But its place in the digital-ads world has drawn some side-eye:
- Anthropic touted in its Super Bowl commercials that its Claude chatbot will remain ad-free, a not-so-subtle dig at OpenAI. The company wrote in a blog that the nature of many of its users’ conversations with Claude is “deeply personal” and ads in that context would feel “incongruous” or “inappropriate.” Perplexity meanwhile briefly tested ads before scrapping them.
- Advertisers, meanwhile, grew frustrated this spring with OpenAI’s slow rollout of advertising, per CNBC, and high costs. While OpenAI’s ads could pull directly from advertisers’ budgets for other platforms like Google and Meta, advertisers see AI-chatbot ads as a new and untested format that, for now, comes at a relatively high price.
Freemium: OpenAI’s fast-growing ad segment could support its other revenue sources, like consumer and business subscriptions, and make what’s expected to be a massive IPO more palatable to investors. Ads may be especially integral for OpenAI, since many ChatGPT users have free accounts. OpenAI’s focus on diversified revenue could also help shore up its revenue from the volatility its tech peers have experienced tied to marketers’ fluctuating budgets. Whether consumers will put up with ads while they’re consulting ChatGPT about their recent breakup, though? That’s TBD.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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Photo via Empire Today
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No one can accuse MAHA of being formulaic.
Even when the topic in question is, somewhat paradoxically, formula itself. Healthcare giant Abbott announced Monday that it would shake up infant nutrition markets by launching a ready-to-feed liquid baby formula made with whole milk. It’s a first-of-its-kind product on US shelves, and, yes, it’s an attempt to leverage the Make America Healthy Again moment and MAHA-curious parent demographic for every penny they’re worth.
Put Out to Pasteur
The benefit of whole milk-based baby formula, some parents say, is that whole milk more closely mirrors the fat blend found in breast milk than powdered baby formula mixed with water. Typical powdered formulas still provide all the necessary fats and nutrients that babies require; they’re just introduced by different means such as vegetable oils.
The whole milk formula market has already been tapped in the past few years, albeit only in powdered varieties. The debut of a ready-to-drink liquid product offers not just a more convenient alternative (there’s no measuring, mixing or shaking required) to the powder form, but a potentially far safer one:
- Since last year, powdered milk formulas from two different startups, ByHeart and Nara, have been linked to botulism outbreaks among infants. They were the first-known botulism outbreaks ever linked to baby formula in the US, according to the Food and Drug Administration, and neither has resumed sales.
- Abbott’s liquid offering, like other ready-to-drink liquid formulas, will undergo a sterilization process during manufacturing that kills all germs including the spores that cause botulism.
“We decided on a liquid-only approach to give families the benefits of whole milk, the convenience of a formula that’s ready when baby is, and the reassurance that comes with a commercially sterile liquid formula,” Abbott’s US vice president and general manager for pediatric nutrition, Misha Pardubicka-Jenkins, said in a statement on Monday.
Pricing Formula: One catch is that extra steps for sterilization add a lot of extra costs for liquid formulas compared with powdered ones. Abbott has already vowed to price its new whole milk product at a similar price point to its regular powdered formula, meaning catering to the MAHA crowd might require eating into its margins.
Written by Brian Boyle
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- Rage Against the Machine: Sony and Warner sued Anthropic, accusing the AI giant of “blatant theft” of copyrighted sheet music by The Beatles, Michael Jackson and others to train Claude AI models.
- Counter Sale: Nearly a dozen drugmakers agreed to voluntarily cut prices in sales of outpatient drugs to state Medicaid programs as part of new deals with the US government.
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Disclaimers
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