d on today and you're thinking to yourself, God, I hope there's a whiteboard too. Double whiteboard. Wait till you see it. It'll be the best thing of the day.

All right. Here's an interesting factoid to tie things together. Rob Henderson, who I follow on Twitter, who's got lots of interesting psychology thoughts, he cited around a study that said that envy, the feeling of envy, is above all a phenomenon of social proximity. So the point being that envy is what you feel about the people closest to you, your neighbors. So you feel a lot of envy toward your next door neighbor maybe if they have more than you do, but you don't care so much about somebody who's living on the other side of the world because you don't have exposure to them. You only have envy for the people close to you.

But what happens if you're a species who evolved to have envy but luckily for you it's limited to just the people around you so you can kind of handle it? Well, I got a lot of envy but at least it's just sort of the people around me. And then you get the internet. Now suddenly you have Instagram and social media and your ability to experience envy goes worldwide. So you have this little problem, which is you're envious of your neighbor. Now you're envious of the whole freaking world, or at least the ones who are doing better than you. And that seems to be every single person who posts because they only post their awesome day. Here's my vacation. Here's my good thing that happened, etc.

So I've got a feeling that one of the ways that social media makes us all mentally sick is that we were not evolved to handle that much envy. We have a certain amount of envy capacity and it's just blown right through. And so I wonder if instead of regulating social media with a publisher 230 or regulating them in terms of free speech or regulating them in any way, maybe you should regulate them as medical devices. See where I'm going with this? Because I think it would be trivially easy to show that social media has an impact on mental health. Would you even have to do a study? I suppose if you were talking about having some kind of medical regulation on them then you'd have to do some study because you want data on it. But you wouldn't have to wonder how it's going to come out, right? Do you have any wonder about whether social media is affecting people's mental health? I mean, not really, right?

So why don't we just regulate it as a medical device? I mean all of social media. Because look at the conspiracy theories, the mental health problems that came out of it. I would argue even that the attack on the Capitol, you could blame Trump and we'll do that later, but I would say that all of these things are a mental health issue either directly or at least adjacent. Because whatever is happening with the most extreme conspiracy theorists, are you kind of all the way into mental health problems or is that just people with different opinions? At what point does belief in something that is obviously not true go from well that's just somebody who's less informed to actual serious mental health issue? Where's that line? It's pretty blurry at the moment, isn't it?

So if we wanted to most directly and usefully regulate social media it would be as some kind of a medical device. I don't know what that would look like in terms of regulation but I could easily imagine for example children not being allowed to use it or to use parts of it. Wouldn't it be easy to imagine that children would not be allowed to use TikTok? It's easy to believe. When I say children, maybe children under 12 or something like that. There might be some cutoff where you just don't want kids to have access to it at all. They would be ruined for life if they did. I think that would be reasonable.

So all of the other kinds of regulatory things don't really have a chance at this point. But if we could produce enough evidence that has a medical element to it, regulate it that way.

A lot of trolls have been coming at me today. Well actually I'll get to that next. That'll be the other side of the whiteboard. And on the fr