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Hey everyone and welcome to our throwback episode.

In our throwback episodes, we are reintroducing you to some of our most popular episodes.

This is great for new listeners who want to learn more about the work we've done in the past,

and it's a great refresher if you've been a listener for a long

time. Enjoy. So tell us a little bit about how you got into debate. It's actually an interesting

story when I was growing up. I was in eighth grade, and I actually started off doing like

speech and interpretation events. I was a duo interpretation competitor. And then when I moved to high school, I went to the first meeting that they had for what they called the forensics team at that time, but basically speech and debate. And when I was in there, there were seniors pitching every event. And they got the policy debate. And what they said was like, if you like to argue, if you're into politics, if, you know, you like certain topics and they listed a number of them, I'm like, this is the event you should try. And I gave it a try. And actually, it was, you know, the night before one of the first tournament through the year, I wasn't supposed to be debating. And I got called the night before by someone who was dropping out. And they told me, well, will you be able to fill in for me? And I said, sure. I went to the tournament, competed at the varsity level. I've never done debate before. Only had a short-of-a-file folder with a very small background on what I was supposed to be doing. And, you know, I ended up doing very well at that tournament. It just kind of got me hooked at that point because I am a naturally competitive person.

And it just, you know, it just sort of clicked on me.

My whole life I grew up kind of with some political background and always involved in sort of campaigning and things like that.

And national issues always are very interesting to me.

And policy debate, what I sort of focused on is very focused on like national oriented politics. So as a result,

it just sort of all kind of played in together at one point. It was like the perfect storm. But,

you know, it's just kind of a weird story that I started off doing speech and then just turned

into doing debate based solely on a small pitch from a couple seniors and went from there.

That's pretty cool. Because even though I went through law school and not many of my colleagues have a

background in debate, so it's a very niche skill.

So can you break down for the audience kind of how those competitions work?

Yeah.

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