All right, we're going to start with some optimistic science and breakthroughs, and we'll get to some optimistic politics, and then we'll get to our optimistic holiday coming up. Everybody good? Lots of optimism.

All right, starting in with a study that shows you—there's a paper written by Brandon Busch, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Florida. He found that the key drivers of loneliness, of course, is not being with people, but that you can solve your loneliness—not completely, but it helps a lot—to have online friends. So if you don't have any online friends and you're lonely, you should try to get some. For example, you could join Coffee with Scott Adams on the Locals platform, scottadams.locals.com, and for a very small subscription fee you could get to hang out with all of us in the man cave pretty much every night after dinner. We just hang out. I didn't start it that way. I started it as just extra content. I didn't know what it was going to be. But it turns out that there are so many lonely people in the world that just knowing that somebody they recognize and likes them and is glad they're there can talk to you almost every day. So if you're in it for reducing your loneliness, you made a good play. It's worth the money.

All right, there's a study from The Conversation that says the future looks bright when you're optimistic. So apparently optimism makes you healthier. Did you know that? Optimism makes you healthier. It does, because if you're optimistic you're more likely to have a better attitude and less stress, and we know that stress causes bad health. And optimists are also more likely to do the things that you're supposed to do to stay healthy. So if you know that eating and exercising and staying away from bad stuff is good for you, the optimist will actually do that stuff. Why? Because they think it'll work. If you think something's going to work, you're far more likely to do it. So optimists live longer.

One of the reasons you watch this show is that I make you more optimistic. I do that intentionally, and it makes you think, wait a minute, maybe I could lose weight, maybe I could exercise more, maybe I could be smarter about my vote. Yes, yes, yes. And I think I added about seven minutes to your life just by that little bit of optimism. Seven minutes. You're welcome.

All right, there's a University College London study. It says that the language used by mothers affects the oxytocin levels in infants. I'm going to give you an example of that, and I'm going to see if you needed the science to tell you that the oxytocin would be better under one scenario than another.

"Oh, what's that you got there, little Bobby? Oh, blocks. Oh, looks like you built a little fort. Is that what you wanted to do? Oh, good job. You built a little fort. Nice. What are you going to do next?"

Okay, that's one way. Now compare this other style of parenting.

"What the hell have you got these blocks all over the floor, you blockhead? Jeez, I'm going to step on one of these and break my ankle. Get out of my sight. You disgust me."

Now, if you compare those two parenting styles, which one do you think is creating a healthier child? That's right. Maybe you could have just asked me and not done that study. I'm pretty sure the oxytocin of your baby is better if you're nice to them and you show interest. Yeah, do that.

According to the Daily Wire, there's a new study that says that life may have existed on Mars because they found some rocks that have all the telltale signs of having been associated with water. So you don't need to know the details, but apparently you can look at a rock and tell if it's been associated with water in the past. And so they think maybe it is. But I have a question: Where does the water go? Is that the dumbest question of the day or the smartest? I actually can't tell. Where does it go? Now, I assume somebody's going to say, like, if the atmosphere can't hold it, you know, if it's not insulated, it'll just go into space. Does water go into space? I mean, how could it escape the gravity of the planet? Even if it turns into vapor, can vapor escape the gravity of the planet? I'm seeing yes. So if we did not have greenhouse gases, does that mean we would lose the water on Earth? It would just— I understand evaporation, but evaporation is still a closed system. It doesn't go anywhere; it just changes its form. But does it really go into space and just keep going? The thing I don't understand is how could it escape gravity. I got questions. I'm not sure that the fast answer is the right answer. And it's funny that I don't know the answer to that. Doesn't that seem like that would be sort of common sense? Like everybody who had a good education should be able to answer the question: If Mars once had water, where'd it go? I should be able to answer that. So I'm a little embarrassed that I can't, but you know, I don't care about embarrassment.

All right. Well, the price of lithium batteries apparently is going to plunge and keep plunging. Doesn't matter why, but probably just supply and demand. But lithium prices will plunge, making electric cars way more competitive with gas engines, because right now if your battery dies in your electric car, that's not such a good economic situation for you. But if the price of the batteries keeps going down, then you could lose your battery and just say, oh well, $5,000 for a new battery. It's way better than a new car. So it would be similar to the price of replacing your engine. So that can change things.

On top of that, there's a company, Radiant, which is looking to mass-produce portable nuclear reactors starting in 2026. So their CEO, Doug Bern, I guess had some experience in the Elon Musk world of engineering, so it's a serious person. And they showed a picture of them. So these one-megawatt nuclear reactors, they look like the size of a bus. So basically one of them would be the size of a bus, and you could put more than one of them next to each other. So you could have one location but you could have a couple of buses parked next to each other and it'd be one megawatt. So you're basically powering a small city. And it looks like the entire process would be easy to just drag one in there and hook it up and turn it on. Do you realize what a big deal that would be if this works? If they could really make mass-produced—see, mass-produced is the key to it all, because mass-produced just tells you it's economical, it's easy, there'll be lots of them. If they can really—so it looks like they've designed it from the ground up with the purpose of being super safe, super cheap, and easy to produce and get approved. What if this works? And OB Bet is not the only company. I mean, rules, Rice's in this space, there'll be others. This is gigantic. It's one of the biggest things in civilization.

Meanwhile, Honda has created some kind of solid-state battery that's going to be 50% smaller, according to New Atlas. So it's not important that Honda has a battery that's way, way better. It's just part of this bigger story that battery technology—this is the reason I give you a battery story almost every day. If you didn't understand that the entire world of battery and electrical storage is so dynamic right now, it almost guarantees epic breakthroughs because it's just lots of good science, lots of prototypes, lots of money, and everybody knows that's where it has to go. I mean, you're going to have to get to the point for sure that we can do electric and store it and store it economically. So everything's heading in the right direction. The free market's doing it.

Elon Musk is saying the F-35, our most expensive fighter jet, is maybe not as smart as having just lots of drones. I think that's right. It does seem to me that a drone air force is both inevitable and would be superior to fighter jets, just because you could cover the sky with drones and probably stop any fighter jet, I would imagine. If you had a whole drone swarm, imagine you could take out a very expensive jet without too much trouble. Now, I suppose there's a height issue. Maybe that might be part of it. But he's probably right that we need to save some money and turn ourselves into a drone force.

Speaking of Elon Musk, Starlink's new system now can connect to your mobile phone with no extra equipment or special app. So I don't know exactly what that means, but I think you can take your regular existing phone and instead of saying I'm using one of the regular phone companies, can you now just select Starlink as your provider or extra provider? Is it in addition to or is it instead of? So I don't know the details of this yet. But imagine having a phone made by Elon Musk that actually had real security so the government couldn't get into it, if that's even possible. Probably not possible. But wow, that's a pretty big deal.

All right, I'm going to make an announcement. Public announcement. Are you ready? Public announcement number one: Do not ever follow my stock advice. I don't give advice. But because I talk about big companies publicly, you know, as part of what I do every day, I feel like it is an obligation to you, my audience, that I tell you if I make any investment change in a company that I talk about. So you already know that I own stock in Tesla. So if you hear me saying good things about Tesla, what you should say is, oh, he probably would have said that even if he didn't own it. Now, the truth is I don't think I would lie to you about a stock I bought. But from your point