TypeScript is smarter than you in many of these regards and it's just looking out for you. I also ran into another thing with this the other day Typeguard which was I used a regular function but because functions are hoisted if there's a possibility that that could be called before you select the element so they have to check inside of the function again. One way to type guard is using a utility method so number dot is number that's actually not a method in JavaScript but you couldYou could go on NPM and grab a utility method You could use an is error method that specifically checks for it or is is not a number as well. If else statement if else statements will narrow for