Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by The Hartford, a leading provider of employee benefits and income protection products that is dedicated to standing behind U.S. workers to help them pursue their goals and get through tough times. For more information about The Hartford, visit thehartford.com slash employee benefits.
We've also got a link in our show notes. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.
Hello, Terribles. If you have been around for the past couple years, you know that Terrible Thanks for Asking Premium, TTFA Premium, is our paid subscription platform where we post ad-free content, bonus episodes, etc., etc. Being an independent production means that there is not a big company behind us. It means that we are supported by the
Thank you so much for tuning in.
support to our show, we welcome you. We welcome you to do that. There is a link in our show notes and you can always go to ttfa.org slash premium to sign up.
This episode that you are about to hear aired just for our premium subscribers a while ago. It's one that I love, one that I feel good about, one that I want to share with you in its entirety. It's basically a sample of what else you can get if you sign up for TTFA Premium. So here you go.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Terrible Thanks for Asking Premium. We are working on our next season, which will be available in September. But until then, this is where we are making episodes. And this is one that I've been thinking about for a long time. And so have many of you because I raised this question.
to our listeners, to people who follow me on Instagram, I asked, did you get into the Gifted and Talented program? Did you not? And how do you think that affected your adulthood? And obviously I'm going to tell you how I think it affected mine. Not well, not well, not well. I was not aware of
of what it meant to be gifted until I switched schools in second grade. I switched a little bit into the school year, so I was not just arriving in second grade to a school where most of the people had been there since kindergarten, but I was also arriving when the first day of school jitters had given way to school
amongst each other to congeniality to grade school classes are mixed up from year to year or they were at the school for me and the new alliances had already been formed. A classroom culture had already been formed and then I arrived.
Our school was a three-story old Catholic school. Our gym was like a sub-basement that was a nuclear fallout shelter, I believe. And I believe that because there was a sign above the second stairwell that you had to take to get down into the depths of the Minnesota earth that said fallout shelter. And...
While we went down to gym class to play various forms of dodgeball that were actually more dangerous and more violent than the original,
a certain group of us, a faction of our classroom would just sort of peel off at the regular basement level. And they would go into this room that had a lot of mystery to it. It had rugs, it had beanbags, it had a chill vibe, but also it had a vibe of superiority because in that classroom, these were SOAR kids, S-O-A-R. What did the acronym stand for? I couldn't tell you except that I believe the A stood for advanced. And when I found out that there were kids in
In my class who were special, I said, why am I not one of them? Why did my former teacher not send word that a luminary would be joining their midst? I read The Hobbit when I was five. Was it an abridged version from the library that came in a plastic baggie that had the plastic...
on the top that snapped together. You can just feel when you got it right and it snapped and it needed a baggie because it also came with a corresponding cassette tape so you could follow along with the words you were hearing. Yeah, yes, it was. It was an abridged version, but nonetheless, it was The Hobbit. I belonged in that room, but I couldn't get into that room until we had done taping.
statewide testing. And when we did, the results came back and they said, this girl can read baby. Yes, she can. And I got to go to SOAR and it was so underwhelming. It was so underwhelming. We weren't doing anything in there. They were not doing maybe building a couple extra dioramas. It was basically advanced crafting and
But I still felt pretty damn special when all the other kids would go down to sweat it out in little squads doing basic calisthenics or the presidential physical fitness test. And I was just reading a book. Yeah, that felt pretty special.
Now, I have grown into the kind of adult who is in therapy, the kind of adult who has really struggled to separate her value from what she does or what she has accomplished. The metabolism rate I have for success of any kind is so low.
So fast. I can barely enjoy the feeling of a job well done because it could be a job perfectly done and perfectly done and faster and better than anybody else.
And I know a lot of people like this, a lot of insufferable adults who can't take criticism without feeling like they're going to die immediately because obviously the criticism means that they're a terrible, no good person and they should give up. Adults who really, as my friend and former producer Hans Butow put it, are only as good as their last interaction or their last accomplishment is.
♪♪
So I put this out on the podcast. I put it out on Instagram and I said, how'd this affect you guys? And these are some of my favorite kinds of episodes to make because they include your voices. In some cases, they include more of my voice because I'm reading emails. I got permission to read them. It is okay. But here we go. Here are your own gifted and talented stories.
Hi, Nora and everybody else. I'm Natalie, and I was in the Gifted and Talented program at school. I'm now 29.
And it has taken me most of my 20s to realize that when you're gifted and talented, all that meant for me was that my anxiety was never seen in school as a bad thing. It was just like I cared about getting straight A's. It was anxiety.
It was perfectionism. And because my anxiety showed up in wanting to get good grades, no one was like, oh, this is not a bad thing. Okay, I highly relate to this because, yes, being gifted was an outlet for my own anxiety. And I was just a very anxious child in the 90s, but we really just called anxiety being annoying at the time.
I was plucked from the masses of second grade and put in a gifted and talented program. But the gifted and talented program at my school had like two tiers.
And there was, like, a really gifted and talented and a kind of gifted and talented. And I was in the kind of tier, and the kids in the kind of tier just, like, got a special spelling book with harder words. And the kids in the best tier got to, like, go on the bus and go –
to a special place to learn harder school. And I got to like go to Sonic and the bus after their class, their special class. And I was very, very, very, very, very jealous. And I had them test me twice. You know, I was like legitimately in second grade. I did the test and I only made the first year. I was like, hit me again. Like test me again. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. And I had testing anxiety ever since. So, yeah.
Yeah. Right. It's not enough to stratify kids into smart and regular. You also have to stratify the gifted kids and say, now, look, some of you are so smart that you deserve Sonic. You deserve a slushie and a plate of tater tots delivered through the car window. That's how gifted you are.
I actually graduated from the then number one school in the nation, the School for the Talented and Gifted, and that was my high school. I graduated, actually, I believe it was 47 out of 47, bottom of the class, number one high school in the nation. And I don't feel very gifted.
Look, someone has to be number 47. Someone has to be the 47th smartest kid in the country. And that person was you. That person was you. But just if there is a flaw to this system, I think it is pretty well illustrated by this caller and feeling like being dead last in a
class and school filled with the best of the best made her a loser. When I was in first grade, I was pretty on the ball about getting my work done and whatnot. And I didn't somehow pass the IQ test to get into the gifted program. So they retested me and they literally told me my IQ was seven points too low to get into the gifted program. And therefore they wouldn't let me in, even though I was fairly gifted.
good at getting my work done on time and fairly efficient with all of that. So they tested me again in third grade and they wouldn't let me into the gifted program again because probably my IQ was too low. But they did give me extra work I could complete inside the class just to fill my time since apparently I had some time on my hands. But I've been pretty bitter about that ever since. And mostly I think gifted programs aren't really what they're supposed to be.
You mentioned, when did the gifted program fuck anyone up? And, well, I don't know if I can say fuck on here, but when I was about in third, fourth grade, I was made to take two different tests to tell if I was either gifted or slow because my teachers couldn't tell which. And that's what they told my parents, and that's what my parents relayed to me. Probably could have been handled better, but...
Yeah. So how's that for some validation to sit with for the rest of your life? Still pretty pissed about that. Okay, bye. As much as I want to believe that your parents didn't tell you...
that you were either gifted or slow? I bet they did. I bet they did. And I also bet they're like, no, we didn't. And you're like, no, you didn't. Even if you're being slightly hyperbolic, it doesn't even really matter because guess what? That's how it felt to you as a kid. That's how you felt. Hey there. I am calling in regards to elementary school me and
and the gifted program. I am a dyslexic female. I was diagnosed in
kindergarten and from there on out pulled out of class every day by another teacher to go to a special needs room to where they tried to teach me it affected my life greatly and the lack of self-confidence is huge I feel like I'm always pulled out of class and on the flip side still have more regular
intelligence and street smarts than most and my brain works in a different way and I do feel extremely capable of all things but it definitely sucked. Yeah when we talk about the curse of the gifted child there's also the curse of the child who was labeled as not gifted I don't know if they still do this
But as children, we were often asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we were told, well, like it's school is important. The permanent record is important because it's all adding up to who you will become as an adult. And so if you do not make this, if you are not picked here, then you will never be picked.
I am sorry that you didn't get picked, but also I have almost no street smarts. So you could rob me and tip the scales of justice whenever you want.
At my school, we started distinguishing kids from least intelligent to most intelligent around third or fourth grade. And the moment that we started doing that, I started having extreme anxiety dreams that I would be placed into what I considered to be the dumb group at the time. And my school did not make it very difficult to distinguish which groups were which because they used an extremely transparent, even for a third grader,
of classifying the groups with the red group being the group for the least intelligent children and the green group being the ones for the most intelligent children. So I'm not sure if they even thought that was going to go over our heads or if it was literally just as obvious as it seems. But that sense of anxiety that I wasn't going to be intelligent enough, I've carried with me throughout my entire life.
And it's never...
been proven to be true that I'm not intelligent. And in fact, the opposite has been proven many times. But I can't shake that feeling that I'm just not smart enough to accomplish the things I want to do in my life. And at this point, I graduated high school a year early, and I'm a senior in college. I'm a neuroscience major, and I'm applying for PhD programs. But somehow, I still think I'm stupid. And whenever people ask me my biggest insecurity, and I say, my intelligence is
They literally laugh in my face. But for some reason, I can't get it through my head that I'm an intelligent person. That's what the gifted program did to me.
I was put into the gifted program starting in kindergarten. I was at the pink table, which was the only table of kids that could actually read books starting in kindergarten. From that point on, my small class of 60 kids, there were 10 of us in the gifted program. I was the only female there.
I was constantly competing with all of these boys to see who could get the best grades. To this day, I still feel feelings of inadequacy. Four of us went to the same engineering school afterwards, and I look at our jobs, and I just –
I can't help but think, oh, my engineering career where I'm doing phenomenal isn't as good as so-and-so's engineering career. And I really think that that all started from being in the gifted program. I hate that you feel that way, but I love that you are an engineer. I love that you are out there breaking the glass ceiling and.
I love that you are a woman in STEM. I still do not know what an engineer does. So if you want to call and explain it to me in very, very simple terms, I would really love that. I was deemed gifted in kindergarten, which I don't even know what I was doing that was so great when I was five years old. But yeah,
I feel like from that point on, everyone, teachers and parents, it was kind of like telling you, "Hey, you should be good at this. You will be better than everybody else at this school at the time." And whenever that is just pounded into you for so many years, and then you get out into the real world and
people are better than you. I struggle so much when I'm not the best at something. And now I'm in my 30s and I just feel like if I fail at something, or not even fail, I'm just not the best. Those kinds of things will haunt me for years. I mean, something I did when I'm 20, I'll think about over and over again about why
I didn't do better. And now I'm a parent, I have a daughter and she's in the second grade and she is not the best in her class, she's not in the worst and that's totally fine.
I went to elementary school in the 80s and in fourth grade we all got tested at the beginning of the school year to see if we were gifted. And when the results came in, it turned out that everyone in my fourth grade classroom was gifted except for me. And so,
Every week, one day a week, I forget which day it was, they would all go to the library and have their gift-give program, and I would stay in the classroom. And my mother and teacher actually worked together to find an alternative activity, and so I went into the special ed room, and I actually read books to other kids. And I really enjoyed it. And usually when I tell this story, I talk about how it was such a good thing for me
But it also did leave me wondering, like, am I special? Am I not good enough, not smart enough? You know, why am I not gifted? Like...
every other kid in my class. Anyways, the next year, fifth grade, I didn't even bother taking the test because I knew I wasn't gifted. So again, I went and I read to the kids in the special ed classroom. And I certainly don't regret that. And I am gifted in empathy and kindness and creativity, even if I'm not in the gifted program.
Okay. If every kid is gifted except one, are they really all gifted kids? Are they? Are they? Maybe I'm just saying that to make little child you feel better for staying, doing your little activities. And I know it was good for you. I know it was good for you because you said it was good for you. And you know what?
You grew up into the exact kind of person that I hope I raise. I don't give a rip how my children are categorized or how they test on things. I want them to grow up gifted in empathy and kindness and creativity. So good job. I went to...
We get support from FOREA and the only people who can listen to this advertisement. I want everyone to listen to it unless you know me in real life, because I'm going to talk about intimacy products and I am a recovering prude. But I can tell you that I reached out to FOREA after using their products and I was like, I need you to be a sponsor on my podcast because I want to talk about this, even though it's hard for me to talk about, but I don't think that's just me. I think that's
A lot of us. Phoria has a cult following for a reason because their products transform people's sex lives. It feels like magic. It feels like alchemy. I don't know how to describe it other than to say if you think that you have had decent orgasms before, even good ones, if you feel like you've had good sex, you're about to
take it to a different level. You are about to have your mind blown. You are going to be just sailing through space on another planet and you will be amazed. You will be amazed. I am a huge fan of the Awaken Arousal Oil. The sex oil is also chef's kiss. They also have this thing called the Pleasure Set, which is their three best-selling products, which includes the Awaken Arousal Oil, the sex oil, and Intimacy Meltz.
The three of them together is like the ultimate sexual experience. Like you will be so connected to your partner or to yourself. Like honestly, you have to try this. I urge you to have the urge to use these products, which will give you more of the urge. Treat yourself, treat your partner, but especially yourself. Go get your juiciest, deepest, sensual experience for yourself.
Foria has a deal. There's always a deal. Get 20% off your first order by visiting foriawellness.com slash terrible or use code terrible at checkout. That's F-O-R-I-A wellness.com forward slash terrible. You'll get 20% off your first order. You can thank me later. Honestly, don't thank me. All I need from you is for you to have that experience. Okay? Don't thank me. Thank yourself afterwards.
This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
We get support from Sun Basket. Cooking is not my specialty. I have historically been a person who is more of a snacker than a meal eater, a person who maybe has not taken the best care of myself, and getting a delivery from Sun Basket with the
gorgeous, healthy meal options that were actually easy and fun to cook has been such a delight. Sun Basket makes it easy and convenient to cook healthy, delicious meals at home. They take 30 minutes or less.
I'm gluten-free, which is not always the easiest when you also have picky eaters in the house. But we got our Sun Basket delivery. We unboxed it. We went over the meals and it was such a relief to know that we had meals that were pre-planned for us. And guess what?
Following directions, putting things together. That was fun for our kids too, our picky eater kids. And they even ate this stuff. I'm telling you, it was a lifesaver. We are at the end of summer here in our city. We are out of ideas for dinner. We are out of ideas for lunch. We are out of ideas, period. This was zero prep, zero mess. And voila, we had a beautiful, fast, gorgeous, healthy dinner.
Go to sunbasket.com forward slash terrible today to save $120 across your first four deliveries. That's sunbasket.com forward slash terrible, and you'll save $120 across your first four deliveries plus free shipping on your first order. You're going to love it. Go give it a try.
to a school district that was a feeder school district for an ivy league so everything was just like honor system on steroids when we were learning to read i kid you not there were like four or maybe five different reading levels there was like remedial normal above average
super above average and like geniuses. And I remember I was in the super above average but not genius category, and my friends were in the genius category, and I felt ostracized because I wasn't reading, I don't know, War and Peace at like six years old. I got into the gifted and talented program at some young age. I don't know, fourth grade, fifth grade, something like that.
It was great actually. I loved it. I was a pretty oblivious child, so normally when people tried to offend me, I was just like, "Oh, they're weird." But, but, because I passed a test to get into this program, my family started berating me. If I didn't get an A on a test or something,
Or actually, on several occasions, going over to a family member's house, they would let everyone else in my family in, in their front door, except for me. And then they would close the door, leaving me outside, give me a riddle, and not let me inside until I could answer the riddle.
Okay.
This is another one of the flaws of this kind of system, which is that there are so many different kinds of intelligence. I cannot solve a riddle to save my life. I cannot think of a riddle to save my life. I was with one of my friend's children who I am sure is in a gifted and talented program. I think all children are gifted. I think all children are talented. I think all people are, everybody has their own unique set of skills and insights that are
completely unique to them and cannot be replicated, but damn, do we love a categorization. Anyway, this child, this wonderful child went around the table and said, let's all say a riddle.
I had nothing to say. I could not think of a single thing at all. And not only could this kid come up with a riddle, the riddle rhymed. And I could not for the life of me think of what it was. The riddle was basically like everywhere I go, there are two of me. And the further away I get, there's more of me. Anyways, it was footsteps. The answer was footsteps. I, I,
If somebody would have been holding a gun to my head and said, if you do not solve this riddle, you will die. I would not be recording this podcast because I would be a cadaver.
I was in the gifted program, I think from like maybe second grade onward. And I mean, it's definitely a weird thing to get like bused out of school somewhere else for the day and then come back. But the worst memory I have is in fifth grade, my regular teacher
was just kind of the worst kind of guy. Like, I still have bad thoughts of him in my brain. But anyway, I left for gifted for the day to do, like, paper mache masks or, like, learn about the Holocaust. I came back, and my fifth grade class was learning about how to measure, like, using a ruler.
And I missed like most of the lesson. And so I got there and I didn't know how to use a ruler. I was like, that's great. Nobody ever taught me that. And I didn't know the answer to one of the questions. And he looks at me and goes, oh, misgifted. Don't even know how to measure. Who's gifted now?
And then I just burst into tears and cried the whole night. And my mom has a call, and then he apologized the next day. But I'll never forget that. Probably has messed me up for life.
Oh, I feel that. Oh, misgifted. Don't even know how to measure who's gifted now. Yeah, you know what? A lot of us don't know how to measure things. A lot of us actually missed out on crucial parts of our development because we were in a little room building a sort of scale diorama of a colonial...
Williamsburg home. Even though I lived in the Midwest, I would never lay eyes on Colonial Williamsburg. A lot of us missed out on some basic schooling to be in the gifted program. I want to read an email that I got that I think is a really compassionate take on the entire situation. It
And one of the things that I have to say is that I'm not blaming teachers. I'm not even blaming administrators. There are a lot of problems with our education system. It's just very underfunded. There's a lot of problems with American education. If you are a teacher and you want to talk about that, let's get into it, baby. Call me, email me. I would love, love, love to talk about that. I cannot imagine how difficult it is to be a teacher right now. I cannot imagine...
trying to tailor the learning experience for multiple kinds of children and their different intellects and abilities and hearts and minds and souls and backgrounds and
family lives. It's all so much. And I don't think that any teacher is like out there being like, God, how can I really jack up a kid's life? Let's label him as gifted. Let's label him as a dumb, dumb. I'm sure there might be a couple out there, but probably not the vast majority. So here's what I really liked about this email, this list of
listener was put into gifted and talented in third grade. Uh, their friend did not get into the program. And so things got weird, which I can see that happening. The education system is a scalding hot mess. And this is just one example of a well-intentioned initiative. Absolutely crapping the bed. I fully appreciate the need to challenge kids of all abilities. And I don't at all have a better solution to propose. Meaning
Me neither. I just know this one in so many ways wasn't good. And so much of what happens even now in terms of how kids are grouped and managed isn't good either. And so much of it comes back to schools not having the resources and staff they need to really approach these complicated challenges with ingenuity, grace, and compassion for all involved. And it just really, truly, horribly sucks.
I don't know the answers, but until we invest in the people that maybe do have them or at least have the ideas for what the answers might be, it's going to keep right on sucking. Blessed are the teachers navigating this chaos every damn day.
I actually go back and forth every time I hear this discussion around how much weight I think is fair to give the program in terms of the neuroses it may have instilled. Because here's where I'm at. Perfectionist, overthinking, terrified of failure, constantly feeling guilty for not living up to my potential, hating myself for not immediately being the best at every single thing I ever attempt. Word on the street is a lot of other GT kids struggle with these things too, yes?
And maybe it's entirely because of the program. Maybe it's partially because of it. Maybe it's not because of it at all. And this is just the fun manifestation of my anxiety that I would have no matter where I went to elementary school. But really, every time I come across the Twitter discourse of how gifted and talented messed us all up, I'm torn between taking it as a glorious validation versus resisting it as yet another instance of our society wanting to pathologize every little thing.
Maybe it's because of gifted and talented. Maybe that's a part of it. And maybe we're just people. I want to read an email that I got that,
It really, really stuck with me. There are so many others too. There's also this huge Venn diagram between gifted and talented programs and neurodivergence and people who really were on the autism spectrum or people who had ADHD, people who had anxiety, who were just sort of pushed into this program and told, well, this means you're special and
And there's also an entire group of kids who had to witness not being picked, who had to witness what it felt like to basically, if you're not special, if you aren't put in the special category, what does that make you? Does it make you ordinary? Does it make you average? Which there's literally nothing wrong with that.
Or does it make you garbage? And I think when you're a kid, and I say this as an adult who is constantly getting different forms of evaluation that is...
you know, even if you just work a regular job, right, you get evaluated every year, somebody will give you a 360 review. I get that too. Just my 360 reviews are public and mostly about how I have an annoying voice or an unpleasant face. I mean, those are the, those are the bad things. Other people say lots of nice things to me too, and about me and about our work. And that's wonderful. But the minute that you can
If you are inclined to this way, I should say, because I do know several mentally healthy people who are like, no, I literally could not have cared less about that whatsoever. It didn't affect me at all. But if you are a person who is predisposed to having your value tied to praise, having your value tied to the way that you perform a task.
If you are a person who is really, really affected by extrinsic forces and approval, then yeah, not getting picked is also going to jack you up a little bit. Like the caller who sat in the library while all of their classmates went to go do gifted stuff. What the heck? So I got this email. I'm going to read it to you because it really, really affected me reading it. And I
I wanted to share it with you. Growing up, I was not in the gifted program, but my brother and many of my friends were. I was terrible at math and my brother was in double advanced math. Side note, what is that? I'm sorry, this is Nora, not the email writer. Double advanced math sounds fake.
I later learned that I had undiagnosed ADHD and that made it so I wasn't able to do well on the timed standardized tests that were used to determine who got into those programs. I spent years thinking I was stupid and resentful about all the extra fun stuff my peers got to do. A lot of them would subtly brag about the fact that they were in advanced classes and it made me so angry.
In high school, I had teachers realize I was smart enough to be in honors and AP classes, and I got into those classes and I did well, but there's a part of me that still thinks I'm not good enough. I get so mad when people talk about how hard it was to be gifted. Try thinking you're stupid for years. At least the gifted kids got to think they were special for some part of life. When people talk about how hard it was to be gifted, it sounds to me like they're complaining that not every system is rigged in their favor like the education system.
I realize it's a lot more nuanced than that, but it still deeply frustrates me. I'm glad that life isn't determined by some standardized test you took in third grade. It frustrates me that some people seem to wish it was. That hits. That really, really, really hits.
And when I think about my perfectionism, when I think about my inability to have compassion for myself and often for other people who make mistakes, when I think about the way that I have to metabolize my successes so quickly and I just cannot...
ever seemed to even get enjoyment out of them, I can see how having sort of a hand on the scale that tipped it into my favor, that made me feel like things should be easy for me or that, you know, I should just naturally be good at things, was not good for me and also was not good for other people, other children, other future adults. These are also things that
prevalent. Regardless of the gifted program, these are all just sort of the symptoms of living in late stage capitalism where everything has been commodified. Everything can be measured. And when I think about and I see all these sort of direct to consumer brands that are packaging up our
our lives, the things that we do that connect us with each other and repositioning those as inconveniences so that they can sell us a product based on supposed convenience so that we can work more.
essentially, and use our hard-earned money to pay for these goods and services that will give us our free time back. But what do we do with our free time besides scroll Netflix or binge watch TikToks is we work. And if we do get enjoyment out of something, it is very, very easy to get sucked into, well, what is it for? What can it do? What can I do with it?
Raise your hand if you had a hobby and were told it should be a side hustle. Raise your hand if you have a hard time resting or relaxing because, well, one, you probably have a hard time resting and relaxing because you are forced to work that much to keep up with just the rising cost of living and or because you're so used to having things done.
measured and being rewarded for the things you do that you're sort of married to productivity. I might be projecting now. I often do, but based on the number of emails we got, I just know, I know that I am not the only one. I know the same thing that I think I told you at the
This has been terrible. Thanks for asking, Premium. Thank you so much for being here. I really, really do appreciate it. We are working on a regular season.
normal ttfa stories in the meantime we're making this sort of additional bonus content just that you know we're we're here we're working we're gonna figure it out i appreciate it so much if you want to call and talk about this or any other thing please do our phone number is 612-568-4441 and actually i made a brand new email that is just for you all it is only for premium subscribers it's
ttfapremiumatfeelingsand.co. That's spelled out. So it's ttfapremiumatfeelingsand.co. Thank you so much for being here. And you know what? Here's what I really want. Here's what I really want to say at the end. I think you're all gifted. I think you're all talented. I think you're all special.
And yes, I already said that if we're all special, none of us are special, but I think that's good. We don't need to be special. You can be gifted and talented and deeply unspecial. And that is just fine. That's us, baby.
When's the last time you thought about your employee benefits? I know you probably don't want to think about that right now, but they're important because you are important. Because people matter and so does technology, which is why The Hartford is so committed to providing a benefits experience like no other. Putting care and compassion into the technology behind benefits to create a better benefits experience for everyone. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits.