“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.
Big Daddy Mieos is the patriarch of Wagmi studios and a certified JB OG. He’s seen Juicebox evolve from it’s very beginnings to the robust platform it is today, and he launched one of its very first projects back in the day. Meios is a gentle conductor of creative JB branding and a level-headed voice of reason within the JB community. Read on to learn a bit more about this awesome JB contributor, what he’s up to right now, and the origin story of Wagmi Studios.
Hey Mieos! What’re you up to right now and what’s on your mind?
Hmm… the thing that has been occupying my attention and creativity a lot lately has been this desire to convert the greater portion of juicebox projects from these crowd-funded single-purchase projects to something more like a product or service or longer-term projects that build out and make full use of JB tooling.
It’s really also about trying to find a way for creators to run creative endeavors on web3 because they believe web3 is where we’re going, but may not be super comfortable with web3 yet. I feel like I’m really hunting down people who I know may be able to bridge this gap and show some excellent JB use cases.
I think DAOs are still new enough where the people themselves have to be the tools, almost like fleshy UIs that can help navigate doers who may not be fluent or even conversational in the web3 world. Definitely not an easy person to find.
No, haha, definitely not! We’re stuck in a beautiful moment where V2 is starting to open up an opportunity for non full-web3 nerds, whereas with V1 there really wasn’t much chance for non web3-nerds. V2 is starting to change that and I think that will lead to more great things.
How does Wagmi fit into all this?
I think Wagmi has to take a position of palatable education. I think good branding does that. It points people in the right direction for the kind of info they want. I’ve always wanted Wagmi to be more educational, but when we started to do this with V1, V2 was on the horizon so we held off. After all with all the changes coming with V2 it didn’t make sense to produce a lot of content that would all just have to be redone a few months later. Now that V2 is here and coming into its own, we can really go full force into this endeavor.
For what it’s worth, when I started, as a total JB n00b, the Wagmi videos were really the easiest entryway to me.
Yeah and that’s what it’s about. We want creatives, people who may be a bit unclear on web3, but who see where its going and recognize its value. And those people will bring their supporters over. Making great content to help ease that transition into web3 is a biggie to attract those people.
In terms of Wagmi’s future, I’d ultimately love to see Wagmi move away from full-time JB stuff and move more toward helping projects on the platform succeed. We could give these projects a little shove in the creative department, whether by helping them with animations, designing mascots, and who knows what else.
I’ve felt like JB High could be a central point of info for newbies. Obviously a lot of that exists already elsewhere on the web, but do you see any value in really doing like a “web3 crash course” on JB High to truly onboard a total n00b from starting to finishing their first project creation?
I don’t think it’s overkill to do that at all, we just have to be clear on our time cost, and we shouldn’t invest too much time if there are more efficient ways to do it. I think a web3 crash course could be done in 2-3 animated shorts plus maybe a page or two on JB High; it’s not a heavy lift.
How’d you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you’ve been there?
From the very beginning, I was trying to figure out from what JB could be. Jango’s take was that JB was a payment terminal, so I was like okay, are we building Stripe for web3? But then he was talking about treasuries, and discount rates and bonding curves, and pre-minting tokens and reserve rates, and I was like man, nobody’s gonna have any idea what this is. When I finally grokked it I was like “Ohhhh, this is what this could be!”
I saw some possible use cases, and was talking to some of the early guys about what it could do, but I think none of us really grasped it. It was so new and there just wasn’t really a concept you could build off, you really had to understand it for what it was, as something unique, and that took time.
But before even all that happened, I was working with Sage to figure out the brand and how we can we make this whole JB thing feel cool, and actually one of the first things we messed with was claymation.
I saw a claymation video floating around! Is that one of those early things?
Yeah, that’s one of the first things Wagmi ever did! It was a lot of fun.
Another biggie early on, actually probably the first thing that came up as important, was starting to think was how could we help people understand what JB could do. So I figured “Oh, I could launch a project on JB and that could serve as an example for people of what to do.”
So I told Sage, hey, let’s run something like an animated studio/illustration studio out of JB, really as an example of JB’s power, and that was the birth of Wagmi. And it has been an absolutely great example. I’m really glad we did that rather than stay as paid contributors in JB itself. It serves as a great example for how projects can coexist in the space and serve one another.
Was JB your first jump into web3?
Yeah, it was! I’ve just always been interested in tech projects and when I got to know jango and peri and they were talking about tech projects I just wanted to hang out and learn, and to try to help in any way I could.
Man, that’s such a high bar for a n00b to get into.
Haha, yeah it was a high bar, I still remember it took me 4 months! I spent 4 months saying the words and having no idea what I was talking about— “Yeah yeah yeah, the payment terminal, and getting ETH out and bonding curve, and the redemption rate,” I had no idea what I was talking about, and then, finally one day it clicked! It was so rewarding, and it validated to me so much of what I had been trying to grasp.
I ran into that in a very dense philosophy text once that was like that. So hard to grasp, you wanna walk away, since you definitely don’t wanna stick around and feel stupid. That’s a tough spot to be in.
Yeah! Sticking around and feeling stupid sucks. You want to help, you want to chip in, and halfway through a sentence you realize damn, I don’t know what I’m saying, but now I’ve started talking and I gotta finish this sentence, haha. It’s like the brain needs contextual points of knowledge to learn the next thing, and some things are so far away from these basic knowledge nodes that you can’t bridge the concept. Then you’re like “Oh, it’s like Uber for Mcdonalds?” and it clicks all of a sudden. But what if you don’t have that basic script where you have to really put two or three of those nodes together to bridge over to a new concept. Sometimes you have the right teacher and they know that’s the case, and they’ll build that out for you, but otherwise you’re kind of reinventing the wheel in your mind, and for sure that can be so frustrating.
I’m glad it clicked for you (and for me!). Who’s your fav contributor, and why is it Stevie G?
Haha, I love this question. I would say the thing that attracts me to Stevie G is his uncanny ability to come off as hyper-authentic. There’s never a moment where I listen to him that I’m not like, “This dude is so real, he’s like, such a good human.” Regardless of whether or not you are a good human, or you think you are, many times I come off as an asshole—
Oh yeah, you don’t need to tell me, coming off like an asshole unintentionally is a lowkey superpower of mine…
Hahaha! But Stevie G, man, I never once get that impression from him. Stevie G is an authentic G.
Definitely. What would people be surprised to learn about you?
Hmm… Let’s see… I’m an avid mountain biker. I actually used to be an avid kite boarder, but I picked an occupation that’s in direct conflict with kite boarding season. There was a point where I thought I may go pro. Hmm… other than that, as a child I was forced to do Hooked on Phonics, it’s probably not funny for anybody under the age of 35 since it didn’t exist for anybody that young, but like, when I had to do it, it was a joke, it was literally a joke that people would say to diss each other.
I remember that… it was a schoolyard way to call people dumb.
Right! And when they said to to me I was like, “Yeah, actually, I am dumb!”
Haha, to be honest that’s a pretty awesome comeback! Thank you for taking the time, Mieos!
Thanks!