Justin Cummins and Jenni Lippold

00:00 It.

00:03 Awesome. So now we have started a recording. All right, take turns reading your BIOS out loud. All right. You can read mine or I can read yours, whichever you want to do first.

00:18 Or do you want to do the introductions first?

00:21 Oh, yeah, probably do that. Yeah. I'm Jenny, I work at StoryCore. How are you, Justin?

00:31 I'm good. I'm Justin. I also work at StoryCorps.

00:36 Whereabouts you live? Where I should have for the last night. Here?

00:40 Yeah, I live in Atlanta.

00:42 I'm over in the Portland, Oregon area.

00:45 Oh, nice. How's the weather?

00:47 Absolutely stunning today. It's a beautiful fall day. Mountains look gorgeous. Got some little bit of orange starting to pop up in the hills. It's amazing.

00:59 Awesome. And then so we'll move to BIOS and I can read yours first.

01:03 Okay.

01:04 All right, so this is Jenny's bio. I come from a small family that moved around a lot. I was born in Lansing, Michigan, but lived all over the Midwest, southwest and Pacific Northwest. I have been a registered independent since I turned 18 and prefer to not be party bound ever. I started out my career in the arts over 18 years ago, but morphed into tech since then. I married a software engineer, had two children and bought a tree farm in Oregon. Awesome.

01:42 Right on. Hi. My name is Justin. I'm 32 years old and a father of 13 year old daughter. I recently got married and have a lovely family with two dogs and a foster dog. I am a part of a lot of political discussions. Wonder why but don't often contribute. That is well put. That is that is a good descriptor.

02:08 Thank you.

02:09 Part of a lot of discussions. I don't often contribute. Awesome. I love it. You have a daughter? My daughter is ten going on 16. She wants to be older so bad.

02:23 Yeah, it's a struggle. Girls are way harder than I expected.

02:35 I have a little boy who's seven, and he just is pure energy mixed. He wakes up and he just goes all day. But there's almost zero drama in his life. He's got like, his guy pals. He plays with hot wheel cars, he runs and plays in the trees. That's it. Life is good. And then my daughter has so many different little things that are all very dramatic at any one time. And her biggest thing lately is she so very badly wants to be older because she thinks all the older girls get to do all the cool things like drive and have YouTube channels that we refuse to let her have and any number of things that she thinks is abyssimally unfair. But I don't know, I think that's just girls, maybe.

03:35 Yeah. My daughter's getting to the age where you have to pick up on the cues that she actually wants to hang out with you because normally she'll just be on her phone and texting friends and it's like, okay, what happened? To the little girl that wanted me to go play basketball outside with her all the time. And it's either, hey, can we go get ice cream? Or I don't hear from her whatsoever. So it's like, all right, kid, we need to find some balance. Family time is important.

04:10 Yes.

04:12 But yeah, she actually turns 13 on Friday.

04:17 Oh, wow. Okay, so what is the birthday party of choice this time?

04:21 Murder mystery.

04:23 Oh, that's cool, right?

04:26 Yeah, I think she did good. She invited all of her friends, gave them different people to play, and I'm supposed to be the host of it.

04:37 Well, that's so creative. Did she come up with this?

04:40 So it's like a board game, kind of like it's like a murder mystery pack that you buy online and then you give everybody the different characters and you have one person that's the host. So that's my job. We're going to have god. My entire family is coming to stay with us in Atlanta and then all of our friends.

05:03 Oh my.

05:04 We will be having a house full this weekend.

05:07 Bless you as you go forth into your weekend.

05:11 I'm nervous. I've got to get the house clean.

05:14 I was thinking about what a cool dad, though, that you're doing that for her. That's going to be so much fun.

05:20 I think. So we got to break out all the Polaroid cameras and all that stuff, get lots of photos. It'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm excited. Also nervous.

05:36 This is fun, for sure.

05:40 But let's see in your bio, you moved around a lot. What's your favorite place that you've lived so far?

05:49 Probably a tie between where I'm at right now because I love it, and where I was in my twenty s. I lived in San Francisco for about six years, and I lived there right when everything was happening in 20 08 20 08 20 09 yes, 2008, recession bad. And also at that time in the Bay Area, if you were in tech, it was just very exciting. I worked for a lot of startups and they got bought out. And so it was like the game to get Google to buy you, get Pandora to buy you, get Apple to buy you. And I'd always go work with these entrepreneurs that were like two or three people in their group and help them with their product and then get it out the door and then be like, oh, well, now you're bought out by filling the blank company. So I'd move on to the next one. So it was very exciting. San Francisco was a lot of fun. It's very different now, but at that time it was so much fun. And before kids, before homeownership for me, before a lot of big, I had, I had a lot of freedom. And I just thought that San Francisco was beautiful. It had all the outdoorsy stuff within reach, but also all the big city stuff which I really liked at that time in my life. Right. And now I live on I mean, I am in the Portland, Oregon area, but Portland is about 35 minutes away. I'm up into the mountains and we bought a Christmas tree farm and I love it. It's beautiful. I see the mountains every morning and tons of FIR trees. And I've got some animals and a big old dog that goes and runs throughout the trees and chases my kids around. And I love mean, I do miss the buzz of being in the city because we used to live right in the heart of the city, both San Francisco and in Portland. We used to live right downtown and that was a lot of fun. But at this, I guess season where I'm at, it's amazing.

08:00 That's awesome. And sorry for my dogs in the background.

08:03 It's totally fine. No, mine's outside. Otherwise he'd be behind me barking too. If he heard a bark, he'd bark right back. It's a beautiful day. So I kicked him out.

08:14 There you go.

08:15 Because eventually the rain is going to start and he won't be out for super long at that time.

08:20 Yeah.

08:21 Atlanta. Are you in the center of Atlanta?

08:25 I used to be. I used to live in Buckhead and then I also lived in the upcoming area, which is called the Beltline. But COVID happened. We kind of got tired of being in the city. Me and my wife had just moved in together after doing long distance. We lived in 1100 square foot apartment for, god, a year and a half all during COVID And it was like, no, we need a house. And so we bought that's why we moved.

08:55 That's exactly why we right. Yeah.

08:58 It was just like, I'm sorry, I love you, but I need some space.

09:03 I'm sorry, I love you but I don't want to see your face again for like an hour. That's all.

09:09 And what's funny is we bought a house that was probably too big for us because we were like, okay, we'll start working on growing our family and stuff and we have room for two offices, but we share an office and we still look at each other pretty much every single day.

09:28 But it feels more spacious because you have more space.

09:31 Exactly.

09:32 I totally get it now. My husband and I both work remote and I'm in one part of the house and he's in the other part. But we have our lunches together, we have our coffee together and he's my office buddy. The same deal. Because of COVID That's what got us thinking about moving 100%.

09:52 Yeah. We live like a half mile outside of our perimeter of the city. So we're in a small suburb town that's like a newly developing area and it's great. We live in a neighborhood that's like straight out of the 50s. Everybody goes outside, grills, has community parties.

10:16 It's so great.

10:18 It's awesome. It's a good place for kids, and you can look out the window and you see a bunch of kids playing in the neighborhood. It's awesome.

10:25 Isn't that funny how that changes? I never wanted any of that when I was younger, and now that's all I crave. I just love I love that I can look out and see the kids play and know the neighborhood safe and understand, know all the people, and they're all out doing their barbecuing stuff. And it's funny because we're tech, but the rest of them are farmers, but they still treat us super nice. It's great. And we do have interesting political conversations, but everybody's really kind to each other. It's super nice. And I never would have thought about that, I think. Not even ten years ago, I liked being right in the hub of everything and the buzz. And now I just love that it's quiet. Ish it's interesting? Different.

11:07 Yeah, for sure.

11:09 All right, friend. Well, this is awesome. What a great conversation. Justin, I do have to leave you because I have to go to two other conversations and I'm gathering all yes.

11:19 I got one more.

11:21 I'll buzz through our steps. Three sure. Four, five, six. I'm going to say I'm all done. All right, my friend. Thank you for being a tester. Thank you for having this conversation with me.

11:33 Yeah, thank you so much.

11:34 Stop recording. And then Martin's going to have all these great videos to look at tonight.

11:39 Great. Well, if you ever need anything, please feel free to reach out. Okay?

11:43 Awesome. Thank you. Let me know after you go through all this. Jump into that testing channel and just if you've got some initial thoughts, frustrations or good things, anything. Just if it's fresh off coming from all of them, put it in there and we'll gather that.

12:00 Got it. Awesome. Thank you so much.

12:01 Thanks, Justin. Bye.