Remote Work: Dude, It’s Fine; Onboarding Legal Technology; and Art by Rob Joyner

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

The Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia with guest Rob Joyner. We explore the artier side of life. And then how much have you really considered the zag nut candy bar? The answer obviously is not enough, but Jared’s going to catch you up. But first, your host Jared Cara.

Jared Correia:

It’s time for the Legal Toolkit podcast, which means that I just yelled at my family to be quiet so I could record this episode.

Speaker 3:

I thought I told you to shut the fuck up.

Jared Correia:

And yes, it’s still called the Legal Toolkit podcast. Even though I do actually know what needle noses pliers are, just don’t ask me if I’ve ever used them before. I’m your host Jared Correia, you’re stuck with me because Principal Max Anderson was unavailable. He snapped because his wife was a dirty, dirty tramp. I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys and bar associations. Find us [email protected]. I’m the COO of Gideon software and intake platform for law firms. Learn more and schedule a [email protected]. Now, before we get to our interview today with Rob Joyner of Center Base, I want to take a moment to talk about working from home or perhaps not. It’s kind of funny how quickly people forget the COVID-19 pandemic. You remember that that started at the end of the last decade and now we’re already halfway into the next decade.

Yeah, bro, it’s almost 2025. Pretty whack honestly, if you ask me. But as I mentioned, folks have short memories and law firms have started to backslide a bit on some of the traction they picked up during and after the pandemic. If you’re interested, one particular area of backsliding concerns the decreasing flexibility around work from home arrangements within law firms. So look, knowledge workers being required to go into an office to sit in front of a different computer was always stupid, especially when a commute was involved. That’s just a straight up waste of time and resources. And aside from the death and destruction, rot by the pandemic, yeah, that was pretty shitty. Other things were going about as well as they ever had for employees. Everybody was making money, didn’t have to spend any of it. They were chilling at home. I almost bought a fucking zebra.

Get this. It turns out that people who work in front of a computer can work in front of any computer, including the ones in their own homes. Not only that, those folks usually work more when they work from home and supportive technologies like web conferencing. Have you heard of Zoom and asynchronous communication platforms? Have you heard of Slack? Can supplement traditional in-office conversations. Now, when the pandemic hit and everybody started sheltering in place, folks were like, how about that? This actually works. And it was pretty simple to make the transition. It’s almost like people should have been working from home the whole time and not in the office. Fast forward to the start of 2024 and law firm owners are asking their staff, attorneys and administrators to come back into the office physically for increasingly higher number of weekly days. Monday turns into Monday and Tuesday.

Monday and Tuesday turn into Monday through Wednesday. It could be that people are back in the office five days a week at some point in the near future. So basically obvious question why now I’m old enough to know that lots of times people don’t have a real reason for doing things. That’s called bullshit. And generally speaking, the harder people argue, the less confident they feel about their reasoning or the fact that it probably doesn’t exist. Maybe they just want to do the thing they’re doing and that’s enough reason for them. Or maybe be just maybe they’re resistant to change and want to go back to the way things were because that’s the way they felt more comfortable. So I’ll be perfectly honest with you when I tell you that I’ve never heard anyone give me a truly legitimate reason for why knowledge workers need to be in an office like ever.

That’s the real deal. The closest that anyone has ever come was to suggest, and actually several people have suggested this, that the same comradery and professional development inside the office doesn’t happen outside the office. Good lord, is there a more lawyerly thing to say ever? But that’s just really a failure of imagination. The new networking and professional development gets done online anyway and is frankly a better approach. Now, I’m not saying you need to be a hermit and never leave your home, although that would be fucking great, but there’s no reason your staff can’t work from home and come in for a quarterly in-person session or a retreat for example. Just make sure you give people a reason to come in, like buy them pizza or something like that. Little Caesars is the shit, but I guess we could do Pizza Hut if necessary. So if you’re calling people back into the office or thinking about it, let’s just take a minute to calculate the cost, not for nothing.

But if you still own or rent one of those big downtown office buildings, maybe that’s not the best use of your budget. Now, if I owned or leased a large office building in a major city at the outset of pandemic, which I definitely did not, I would’ve put a plan in motion to dump that lease or sell that building as soon as I could have. Once it became clear that work from home was a thing that worked and the grandest such experiment on the subject ever conducted, not a lot of people working from home on their computers during the Black Death, you just don’t need to maintain the cost of an office building any longer. And even as law firms are bringing back attorneys and staff, almost nobody’s back five days a week. So at best, you’re clearing what? 40% of the benefit of your physical space.

That’s just not a good business decision. Therefore, you should be making plans to dump the obligation or wait for it, use it in an entirely different way. There’s lots of different ways you can rent space out in your building or sublease it. You could hotel specific offices. You could offer external folks coworking spaces. Yeah, there are people who aren’t necessarily knowledge workers who need to come in or you could take advantage of the firms that do want to bring their knowledge workers into the office. You could set up a mail drop. You can allow a coffee shop to open on the first floor for those other suckers who actually make their people come into the office. Those motherfuckers are definitely going to need some coffee. The other thing about requiring staff to be in office is that for those folks to come into an office on a weekly basis, they need to be housed in your general locality.

Now, this is just math, but that necessarily means that you’re limiting your employee and contractor pool if you don’t have an in-office requirement. Or alternatively, only require attendance at less regular intervals like we talked about before. You can hire attorneys anywhere within the jurisdictions you operate, not for nothing, but you could also use remote lawyer staff as a way to expand to jurisdictions in which you operate. Hey, how about that? And you can also hire non-lawyer staff from anywhere like literally anywhere in the world. Choosing from a larger group of potential employees means that you’ll likely have better options for hiring. Geography is just a circumstance. It doesn’t mean anything when it comes to competence. So if you don’t require in-office attendance, that means that you literally have your pick of the best workers you can find hell, I take my chances with those improved odds.

Now with respect not only to the potential employees you could have, but also with respect to the employees you currently have. You should know that the jig is up. There’s no more mystery as to whether things can be done differently. Everyone just lived through a period where employees and contractors worked from home for a full two years straight and now you’re going to tell people with a straight face that they have to come back to the office. No, they fucking do not, and they know it. So why are you being disingenuous? Not only that, but while these other law firms keep trying to encroach on the work from home status of their staff, you can create a competitive advantage for your law firm by offering more flexibility and more opportunities to work from home, especially for younger employees who value flexibility and who don’t treat their jobs as sacrosanct.

In the same way that boomers and Gen X members have work from home, the most flexible of schedule, flexibility is the most important benefit you can offer. Full stop. And because it’s such a significant competitive advantage for law firm owners to offer work from home entirely or at higher levels than other law firms, you should embellish it, promote it, publicize it, talk about it whenever you can. You’re the shit office space ain’t what it used to be. But don’t fight it. Lean into it. Use it for other purposes. Call me. We’ll talk all about it. Now before we talk with Rob Joyner of Center Base about onboarding legal technology and his flourishing side hustle as an artist, oh, and some ai, listen to these messages from our sponsors, all of whom we love unconditionally unless they get involved in some really weird shit. Okay, everybody we’re back at it. Let’s get to the meat in the middle of this legal podcasting sandwich. Today’s meat is corned beef, which is basically salt cured brisket. If you didn’t know, there’s no actual corn in it. So I feel kind of robbed though. It is a main ingredient. Corn beef hash, which is very underrated. Alright, let’s interview our guest. We have today a first time caller on the Legal Toolkit Show. It’s Rob Joiner, the senior vice president of business development at Center Base. Rob, how are you?

Rob Joyner:

I’m great, and thanks for the explanation on corn beef

Jared Correia:

Corn beef, hash is delicious. But I guess if we were both actively seeking out eating corn beef hash on a regular basis, we might be talking from a hospital Ward. So let’s do something else. I’ve been looking forward to having you on the show for a long time. So we’re going to talk a little bit about a great hobby that you have that’s to tease everybody that’s coming up next. But let’s start with what you’re doing now. Full-time work, you’re at center base, you’ve been there for a little while, and if folks who’ve known you from there, your roles changed a little bit over the course of time. So you want to give me the Center-based story?

Rob Joyner:

Yeah, center Base is a growth and management platform for mid-size law firms. So we specialize in the mid-market. I started there 10 years ago. At the time center base was just a technology and what we found 10 years ago was there weren’t many cloud products for law firms and there weren’t any that were really robust and flexible, which is what a lot of law firms were looking for just based on the legacy systems that they were using previously. So I started with base in sales and I grew with the company. I was our CRO until about two quarters ago, and now I’ve moved into more of a business development role and there’s some really exciting things going on. So I have the opportunity to go out and meet with people and really educate them on future proofing their law firms for something that we’re seeing right now, which is AI and just how AI is about to really disrupt this space.

Jared Correia:

I’ve heard of this ai of which you speak, you just came back from Legal Week in New York. I was in

Rob Joyner:

Legal week, yes.

Jared Correia:

How was it this year?

Rob Joyner:

It was a great show. I will tell you that that thing called AI that you mentioned was probably on 50 to 70% of the booths. What was interesting about it was the feedback that I was hearing is people are really looking at what’s out there. They’re starting to think about it. They’re starting to educate themselves, but they’re not necessarily ready to make a move. Mind you, for a mid-size firm or for a larger firm, it’s a much bigger move and they can’t be as nimble. They can’t just try things out at scale. So a lot of them are looking at what are the different data sources that these products are using, how are they being used, what are the applications? How do we build this into the architecture of our tech stack? So it is fascinating to start having these conversations and hearing how people are thinking about it within their firm.

Jared Correia:

Well, I’m glad you braved the cold for legal. I certainly was not doing that. So you were finding that firms are in monitoring mode right now for ai. Do you think they’re close to making purchases or are we kind of far away from that?

Rob Joyner:

It’s interesting. So we saw when legal tech products went to the cloud, it became the Wild Wild West. There was so many different options, and then we saw market consolidation. I think we’re getting into that wild wild west mode where you see new vendors popping up, you see existing vendors pouring a lot of money into it, and so there’s a lot of different things going on. Some are just bringing chat GPT into their products. Others are actually doing something with ai, and so I think there’s more development to happen. I think by the end of 2024, we’re going to have a much better picture of the direction in which AI is going. Some of those that are popping up will go away and some of the bigger vendors out in the space are going to start having more bigger projects that they’ve rolled out on AI and larger products around it.

Jared Correia:

Let me follow up on that a little bit because this is something I talked about on the show the other day. One of the things that I think is really difficult here is figuring out like, okay, what am I going to pay for an AI product as a law firm? Because a wholly different payment model, I think what people are used to paying for in legal software right now, AI is going to be more expensive. It may be an overlay on what they’re already using. What does that look like? Are you sensing resistance from that from attorneys or people have not even addressed that issue yet?

Rob Joyner:

It’s funny you bring that up. I’m actually looking at it from almost the reverse standpoint. What are the customers going to expect AI to do to their bills, right?

Jared Correia:

Oh yeah, that’s good. Let’s look at it from that angle

Rob Joyner:

That I think is interesting. So when you look at a more educated gc, for instance, or an in-house team that’s working with a private practice firm, they’re going to have certain expectations of firms using ai. This is making you more efficient. What does this mean for my bill? So when we are talking about future proofing firms for us, these managing partners and these partners that are coming in seat now that are associates, younger partners, they’re going to really have to look at AI and think about their firm more as a business than a traditional law firm. They’re going to have to look at margins, profitability, where do I put resources? How do I use technology to make me as efficient as possible? And that’s different than the last generation of attorneys or managing partners have viewed technology. So it’s going to be an interesting ride over the next few years.

Jared Correia:

I think that’s a good point you make. It’s kind of more embedded than other technologies have been. Alright, so let’s talk about this notion of future proofing the law firm. This is kind of something you’ve been talking about a lot lately. Some of that involves ai, but it’s broader than that. So if I want to future proof my law firm as an attorney, what should I be thinking about?

Rob Joyner:

So when you look at midsize law firms, there’s a lot of ’em that are still not on cloud-based technology. They’re using the same technology that they invested in in the late eighties and the nineties, early two thousands, and a lot of these are software. So when we’re talking about future proofing, I made a point earlier that it’s like the wild wild west out there in ai. People aren’t ready to make decisions yet, but think about your core tech stack right now. You have your billing and accounting software, you have your legal research, you have your document management. You might have some specific solutions geared towards different practice areas. When you’re thinking about future proofing, are those systems in a place where you’re going to be able to work with your ip, your content, your client information? Are you going to be able to work with those within an AI environment?

So what that means when you’re looking at products, one is that the vendors you’re working with on those core areas of your firm, are they cloud-based? Do they have open APIs? Do they have an initiative themselves for ai? Because if you’re still on a server-based software, say in six months, the markets progress quite a bit and it’s time to make that switch and really bring AI into the firm. I don’t think it’s going to be that fast, but say that happens, right? And you’re still on a survey-based software. We’ll just use what center-based does the billing and accounting, the practice management, if you’re having to make that change to your core system of record and then bring AI on you’re 18 months behind your competitors.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, that’s the process to that.

Rob Joyner:

So you need to start thinking about it. You need to start having those conversations. You need to start architecting what your future will look like from a tech stack within a firm, because I think AI could do more to legal tech than going to the cloud did right? Over the last 10 or so years.

Jared Correia:

Oh, it’s certainly the most progressive thing that’s happened since that by a wide margin. I think you’re right. Yeah. I don’t think it’s a fad either. So I should ask you before we leave this topic, what’s going on at center base? Any new updates over there? Features, and are you guys, I’m assuming you’re looking at ai, but I don’t want you to get in trouble, so just talk about what you can talk about.

Rob Joyner:

Sure. So Base is doing a lot of really exciting things right now. I’m more excited about what we’re doing right now than I have been in quite a while. We just made an announcement a few weeks back. We’ve come out with a new built-in document management system, so it’s in the core platform. We’re wrapping it around the Microsoft environment, so we’re wrapping it around the tools that attorneys are using all day long. The backend is actually using SharePoint, but since it’s part of our core product, we’re going to be able to use things like workflow capabilities to make you more efficient and how you’re routing documents, how you’re getting signatures or following up on those documents with clients. We’re going to be able to do things like automatically capture your time, which is one of our core value propositions is we can capture up to about six hours per timekeeper per month right now, and we’re going to be able to do more and more of that with Affirm as they begin to use our document management and email management within the platform.

We’re going to continue to expand on that and wrap around the core products that you’re using. We’re going to be a platform. So when you look at a lot of the options on the market right now, a lot of ’em are just software. They’re your billing and accounting software, but we’re going to be that core platform that’s not only going to do a lot of the core functions built into center base itself, but it’s going to be able to connect to all the applications you’re using so you’re able to leverage that data, the workflows, the automated time capture, and then get your reporting and make your business decisions from using our technology.

Jared Correia:

Nice. Alright. I guess we’re waiting on the AI stuff.

Rob Joyner:

The AI

Jared Correia:

Working, we’re working

Rob Joyner:

On as well.

Jared Correia:

You tell

Rob Joyner:

The AI we’re working on as well right now. So you’ll hear some announcements about that throughout the year, but we haven’t made any formal announcements there yet.

Jared Correia:

Alright. Let’s talk about something else you’re engaged in regularly, which is getting law firms onboarded onto new software. Yes. So what’s the trigger point for that? Is it like, Hey, I don’t want to have a server anymore, or do you find that there are other specific reasons why people are like, I need something different?

Rob Joyner:

There are a lot of reasons why firms are looking at cloud-based software. I would say the easiest one is yes, we want to get off our server or the software we’re using right now is no longer supported. There’s a lot of other reasons as well. For instance, our billing process right now is not very efficient. We feel like we have time leakage within the firm, so we’re missing time that we could be capturing and we want a cloud-based software to do that. You see reporting and being able to make those business decisions, do our managing partners have the visibility they need in order to grow the firm? So it’s all over the board, but yes, there’s so many that are still on server-based software and are just trying to get to the cloud. You can serve your clients better when you’re on the cloud. I call it the Amazon effect. Your clients want answers right now. As soon as they need something, they want the answer right then. And so on a cloud-based application, you’re able to work from home, you’re able to get to it from your mobile device. It gives you the ability to serve your clients better.

Jared Correia:

That’s so much easier to discover all that stuff. One thing I think is really interesting is that in legal and other places, there are more generations working in a single workspace right now than ever before. It’s kind of crazy. 70 and 80-year-old attorneys usually in positions of choice making, working with a lot younger attorneys. How do you manage that? It’s really hard, I feel like, to get people from different generations with different values. I’m not talking about ethical values, but values of how they work on the same page with this stuff. How do you overcome that?

Rob Joyner:

It’s tough. It’s something we talk about too. If you get people involved in change and they feel like their opinion is heard, it’s much easier to get them to buy in. A lot of the times you’ll hear a partner group decide, Hey, we want to make this change. They’ll assign it to a member of their administrative staff, go figure out what we’re going to do and then come back with it. If I’m that administrator, I’m pushing back some and I’m trying to get the partners involved earlier on because I’ve found that when they’re part of the process, you tend to have a successful project versus when you wait and get them involved at the end from a generational standpoint, you have to think about what’s motivating them. If you’re a partner that’s about to retire, and I’m going to you Jared, you’re a partner and I’m asking you to spend X amount of dollars on a system that’s not going to do too much for you. You have to think about that and maybe this system again is going to help us capture more time. And what that’s going to mean for you is as you’re retiring out or as you’re still a partner, you’re going to see that in your bonus or your split at the end of the year with the younger generation. Some of it’s about lifestyle. I’ll stick on a,

Yeah, I’ll stick on time capture because it’s one of my favorite things. I always talk about it. It would be hard to be in a position where you’re having to write down every minute of your day, right? Yeah. One thing for the younger attorneys is, Hey, it’s going to be a better lifestyle. You’re not having to do that. The system’s capturing your time. You can go home on time, you can see your family, you can have a life outside the firm. So it’s just about figuring out what motivates different people, just like anything else within a business and positioning it properly.

Jared Correia:

Excellent. All right. One more question for you. Okay. I think the biggest objection I hear from people in terms of new software implementation is none of the stuff we talked about. I think it’s more like, I’ve got all this data, how do I move it around? Especially if I don’t even really know where it is right now. So how do you approach that and do you see it the same way or do you just glide over that?

Rob Joyner:

It’s interesting because there’s a bunch of different perspectives on it. Some vendors, they’ll only allow you to bring over minimal data and others will let you bring over that full history of data. It depends on where your current tech stack is as well, right? Do you have a server that you, is it end of life or is it going to keep running for a few years where you can keep that data in your legacy system and reference it from time to time? We offer at center base, we offer everything from a basic starting balance, migration all the way to your full history with your Journal entries and all that. I find that somewhere in between is usually the best option. Imagine this Jared, you’re moving to a new house and you’re like me. You’re a parent, right? There’s tons of junk you have, I’m sure in your house.

Jared Correia:

I’m looking at it right now. Go on. Right, right. Tell me more.

Rob Joyner:

So if you’ve been on a system for 20 years, it’s like living in a house for 20 years, are you going to pack up everything, all your junk and move it to the new house, right? Or are you going to start out in a cleaner environment? I hesitate to say start from scratch, but in a better place. And so usually there’s a middle ground there. One that we often push people to do is bring over just your open bills into a billing system. Don’t bring over that full history. All your closed matters you can access usually in your old system. Just bring over those that are still open in the detail there. Then you’re not gunking up and junking up your system from day one. It’s hard to bring over that data. And a lot of the times, the updates you did over time caused issues within that data as well. So it’s a nightmare to convert and it’s going to be harder on you as well.

Jared Correia:

Good stuff, Rob. I knew it’d be good stuff. That’s why I brought you on. Thanks for coming on.

Rob Joyner:

Thanks for having me.

Jared Correia:

Will you hang around for one last segment? Sure. Come on back. Alright everybody, we’ll take one final sponsor break so you can hear more about our sponsor companies and their latest service offerings. Then stay tuned. As always, for the Rump Roast, it’s even more supple than the Roast Beast. Welcome to the rear end of the Legal Toolkit, everybody. That’s right, it’s the rump roast. We’re back. It’s a grab bag of short form topics. All of my choosing, why do I get to pick? Because I’m the host, but this time around we’re not doing a regular old rump roast because I want to talk to Rob about his burgeoning painting career. So let that be a lesson for the rest of you. Get an awesome hobby and I’ll ask you about that instead of torturing you with in ain trivia questions, which I love to do. So Rob, you’re in a good spot, man. You avoid the regular rump roast, but you’re a painter, right?

Rob Joyner:

Yes.

Jared Correia:

How’d you get into that man? Because that is not something I necessarily expect from a legal tech executive. So what happened?

Rob Joyner:

What’s funny though, the more people I talk to about the art, the more people I hear from, oh, I actually enjoy it myself, right?

Jared Correia:

Oh

Rob Joyner:

Really? So how did I get into it? I got into it when I was in college. I was trying to decorate my space and I could not afford anything for the walls. And I had a friend of mine who I was working with at the time, he said, Hey, why don’t you just try painting something yourself? And I laughed it off. A few days later I had some extra time on my hands and I went to the store and I bought a canvas. I bought some paint and the rest is history.

Jared Correia:

So no training whatsoever, you’re just like, I’m going to try this.

Rob Joyner:

No YouTube back then I went to Barnes and Noble and I would sit there. I even sold my Xbox at one point to buy art books because I was so broke. And yeah, I learned over the years.

Jared Correia:

Alright, Rob, so you’re hanging out at Barnes and Noble, you’re learning to paint, but how did you develop the style? I don’t want to make you blush or anything, and I dunno if you even like this guy, but when I was looking at your website the other day, I’m like, okay, A little bit of a Jackson Pollock vibe. Yes. No.

Rob Joyner:

So this is maybe a little bit. Jackson Pollock’s one of my favorite artists.

Jared Correia:

Oh

Rob Joyner:

Good.

Jared Correia:

I picked a good one.

Rob Joyner:

Artists feel differently about what I’m about to say, but I don’t think there’s anything original out there anymore. I think what you do is you find something you like, especially as an artist, as a young artist, and you try to replicate it and then as you replicate it, you begin to add your own twists and turns and then it becomes your own style. Early on, I could pull up paintings that look just like Jackson Pollocks, or at least my version not as good. And that’s one of the ways I started. But then it just changed over time. As you find new artists, you try new things and my technique and the texture that I used in my paintings happened because I was out in my garage painting one day and I couldn’t figure out how to finish a piece. And then I looked over at the shelf and I noticed there were certain supplies over there and I grabbed them and incorporated them in my art and people liked it. And the rest is history.

Jared Correia:

So I am no artist. So this is a very foreign concept to me. But you’re not just painting, you put stuff, other stuff on the canvas too. Can you describe the style a little bit? I mean, I thought it was fairly unique when I was looking at it.

Rob Joyner:

So it’s heavily textured. So a lot of my paintings are heavily textured, bright colors. From a scale standpoint, a lot of ’em are at least six feet and length, at least width. They’re height. That’s

Jared Correia:

Huge. I feel like

Rob Joyner:

They’re big. They’re very big. And I mean a lot of what I do these days are commissions. People will come to me and say, Hey, I want this look. And we work together. And for art, it’s similar to an attorney, I’m guessing in the fact that I can never shut off. I learned that about myself. And so I want to Gogo go all the time. If I haven’t accomplished something by 9:00 AM on a Saturday, I’m stressed out. And so for me it was about finding something that allowed me to redirect myself and recharge, but still feel like I’m accomplishing something. And that’s what art’s really become.

Jared Correia:

Sort of an outlet for different part.

Rob Joyner:

Your brain. Yeah, it’s a different part of your brain.

Jared Correia:

So how do you handle the commission stuff? Because a little bit as an artist, right? You’re like, oh, it’s my vision and stuff like that. And if somebody’s like, bro, I want you to use red, are you just like, nah, I think this would be better in yellow. Or do you just go with it?

Rob Joyner:

I have my limits for requests and I learned early on, so one of the first commissions I was asked to do 15 years ago was a portrait of four different people in camo. And it was a lot of money at the time. It took me a year and I had to give the money back because I just couldn’t do it. So I’ve learned to define that box for me. I was in architecture school before I was in business school, so you’d work 60 to a hundred hours on a project, then you’d stand up in front of the class and have it torn apart. And so you learn to have thick skin with something you do. And I find that I’ve defined the process. It’s just like selling anything. I’ve defined the process. I have a process of how I work through it with my customers and I ask, okay, what size do you want? What colors do you love? And what colors do you want to have? What colors do you want me to avoid? And then give me the rest of the room in between to make my own decisions on which way it should go. So I’ll get it about 70% done and then I’ll start to provide updates to the customer and we’ll work through it until it’s done. It makes it really easy. It’s fun, easy for first time collectors as well.

Jared Correia:

Note to self, don’t ask Rob to do a family portrait of my entire family wearing camouflage. Could you do a portrait of me like Putin on the horse shirtless? Can you make that happen?

Rob Joyner:

I can make some recommendations for people that can am

Jared Correia:

I only got two more questions for you. Go ahead. I think your paintings have some really interesting names. Like I was on your website and one of your paintings just called Your Room is a disaster. Is this some suppressed stuff? Trying to get back to your kids? How do you come up with a name like that? Because I have the same issue,

Rob Joyner:

So I try not to take the art too seriously. I like to have fun with it. So usually it’s the first thing that comes to mind, right? Makes sense. As I’m looking at a painting and I’ve been sitting here at the same spot trying to name a painting in the past and my kids have come and asked for a snack. And so I used that and incorporated that into the name. So a lot of my paintings are named based off of what’s going on in my life at the time.

Jared Correia:

That is awesome. Last question for you. You got a book too, right? You put together a coffee table book?

Rob Joyner:

I did,

Jared Correia:

I did. What was the inspiration for that and self publish that you’re working with some company, how does that work? I know it advances the business, but how’d you come to that decision?

Rob Joyner:

Yeah, so there was an artist in town that I wanted to meet and I kept reaching out to him. He didn’t reply to me and I realized he was my neighbor. And so one morning on a Sunday morning, I was playing basketball outside at one of the schools with a group of men. And I noticed he was there with his twin boys and he’s a well-established artist around the country. So I saw him there and I said, you know what? This is my shot. So I went up and gave him my 32nd elevator pitch and he invited me to his studio and one of the first things he said is, Hey, you become a real artist when you’ve published a book, so go make a book. So I was like, okay. So what I did, I opened up InDesign and I started designing it and I self-published. It took me probably three or four months to get done, but it’s just a nice keepsake to have for my collectors to have, and it’s a great marketing piece as well.

Jared Correia:

Rob, this has been great, and the second we’ll have info on Center Base will have info on Rob’s artwork. Rob, thanks for coming on today.

Rob Joyner:

Thanks for having me. Had a lot of fun.

Jared Correia:

If you want to find out more about base visit center base.com, if you want to find out more about Rob joiner’s artwork, visit painted joiner.com. That’s P-A-I-N-T-E-D joiner, J-O-Y-N-E r.com, painted joiner.com. That may give you the impression that Rob is painting himself, but let me assure you, he isn’t. He’s definitely painting other shit like large canvases. Now, for those of you listening in, jot him down Texas. We’ve got a Spotify playlist just for you. It’s a collection of artistic songs. Sadly, I’ve run out of time today to talk about zag knot bars in any great detail. Let me just tell you CliffNotes version, they’re like shitty Clark bars, but neither is as good as the 100 grand, which is the greatest candy bar of all time. This Jared Correia reminding you not to overdo it with your crankshaft on your model T, come on now. You’re just embarrassing yourself.

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