 Good morning, John. I once witnessed two women talking to each other about how they can't help but judge other moms who take their kids to McDonald's. And this, you know, made me kind of mad. It's not the greatest injustice in the world, but come on. Even leaving beside the fact that not every mom has the same amount of money and free time that you have, people understand the world differently. Some people see fast food as a less healthy but simple and tasty option. Some people see it as cruel garbage that they would never subject their children to. And like the reality is, fast food isn't good. There are better options for the environment in our bodies. But like we're all humans experiencing the world differently, so make your fast food decisions and leave the judgment out of it. We're headed into a part of this pandemic where things are going to be less clear. Sometime in the next month, 25% of the people in the U.S. will be fully vaccinated, and a lot of them will be the most at-risk people. Sometime in the next few months, mask mandates are going to be lifted even in places where the governors aren't doing weird political signaling to their base. And I'm worried about this stage of the pandemic being, like, pretty stressful. What behavior becomes okay when you're vaccinated? What behavior is okay when most people are vaccinated? Who's going to decide those things? And how are we going to judge each other for our behavior? And when we do judge each other, what does that do for our conception of our society and each other? Here's the truth thing. The goal of vaccines and behavioral changes are the same, and they are twofold. One, we do these things so that the individual doing the thing doesn't get sick or gets less sick. But even more importantly, number two, the virus spreads more slowly because there are fewer people shedding it. That second thing is the real goal of public health advice, slowing the spread of the disease kicks ass. Especially when every sick person infects fewer than one other person because that's when it stops active exponential spread and instead, you just have little outbreaks. And look, COVID isn't going away, like maybe ever, but it will be much less of a problem in places where lots of people give vaccines. And so I think, I hope, that we will transition into it being less big of a deal and we're gonna have to decide for ourselves what behaviors are okay. But to what extent are we gonna decide also for other people what behaviors are okay? And a society does have an acceptable disease burden. In the U.S., every year, something like 30,000 people die of flu. Some of those people are infants and children and we vaccinate and we tell people to wash their hands and stay home when they're sick. But we did all the stuff that we did before with that situation. Now was that the right thing to do? I don't know, but we acted as if it was. Every individual person's decisions matter and different people will make different decisions and people who are more careful are gonna average the people who are less careful and those behavioral changes will average with the efficacy of the vaccine and the result will be the total disease burden. So yes, people who are more careful and who are able to be more careful will be helping the people who are less careful, whether that's because they can't be or they don't want to be or because they've bought into a different version of reality than I have. Different people are gonna understand risk differently. They're gonna understand citizenship differently. They're gonna understand societal impact differently. And the importance of behavior change is gonna slide out as the importance of the vaccines slide in. As long as nothing goes terribly wrong. My advice, what I'm gonna do, keep taking precaution. I'm gonna keep wearing a mask at the grocery store when I'm fully vaccinated because there's still a small chance I could spread the disease. But here's the point. I'm also really worried that we've all spent a year cooped up looking at social media where the average stranger you hear about sucks pretty hard because like strangers who don't suck don't get turned into memes. Plus we're exiting four years of having a president whose favorite pastime was fanning the flames of anger and frustration with each other. And now we have this symbol of how we understand the world literally strapped to our face or not. And I'm worried about in myself and in other people the judgment and frustration that's gonna come with seeing people acting differently than I would act. Especially with our news seemingly higher than ever skepticism about whether or not our neighbors are good people. I feel like that takes like an existing wound of judgment and frustration and skepticism about the the goodness of humans in our society and makes that wound deeper and harder to heal. I don't really want to play that game, but also I'm not sure I can stop myself. So that's just a thing I'm worried about. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.