03 Miguel

Hi, I'm PJ Vote.

This is the Crypto Island miniseries.

This is episode 3, Miguel.

That story after these ads.

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Okay, so I have to confess something, which is that the reason I told you a 45-minute story about Constitution DAO was because I wanted you to meet this other person, but I didn't think you could understand or appreciate this other person unless you understood that context.

So can you just tell me, just introduce yourself, like say your name, who you are?

Yeah, so I'm Miguel.

I'm 19 and I'm a maker, which means that I do way too many things to be able to group in some way.

And that's pretty much it.

And where do you live?

I'm living currently in Spain, in Madrid.

I talked to Miguel over Zoom from the bedroom in the apartment he shares with his roommates.

Black t-shirt, lilac-colored hair.

He was still wearing a wristband from a cool party he says he went to a few months ago.

Miguel was a member of the Constitution DAO core team, and he kind of seemed to be everybody's favorite.

I was curious about Miguel.

I was curious what path had led this teenager into trying to buy my country's constitution, but also just into crypto at all.

What was his life like?

I'm going to play you the conversation we had.

And at 19, are you in school?

What?

What?

No, no, no.

I was in university for like three months and then dropped out.

Because of

last that long.

Why did you drop out?

I also dropped out.

Yeah, for a multitude of things.

First of all, like it was around when COVID hit.

So I was in an empty campus on another country doing online classes.

And I was like, why am I here?

Also, I realized like, I'm coding in class.

And if I'm coding in class, I learn this stuff that I could be reading around.

Why am I in class?

Like, why am I here if I'm not paying attention?

And I just think,

just after dropping out, I got into crypto.

So that worked out great.

And what got you into crypto?

Actually, a bunch of, like, I knew about crypto for like years.

I feel like everyone in text notes something about crypto, but I thought it was like this hang wavy speculation coin go up kind of thing

and then one of the first nft booms early last year a bunch of friends decided to just like get together and make actually some like 3d cabbages as a I think as a yoga just like as a small project and they invited me to help out with making cabbages wait cabbages yeah like the the vegetable yeah why did you guys want to make 3d cabbages why was

i i have no idea I joined after that decision was taken, but we made like four NFT NFTs that were like one-of-one cabbage art.

That's so funny.

And then did people, how did that go?

That went great.

That was like when the foundation, NFT platform has just started.

We were one of the first people in there, sold a bunch of NFTs, and especially it helped me and a bunch of other people in the group.

We ended up all getting jobs in crypto and just like working for Rainbow, Aave,

Showtime, a bunch of just like crypto companies.

How do you explain to your parents what your life is?

I don't.

I've given up on that.

I just like tell them that I code.

What do they do?

They are architects.

Are they doing

real world architects, not metaverse architects?

How does a 19-year-old kid from Spain end up being part of a project to buy the U.S.

Constitution?

I mean, to be honest, the start of that project was simply just like, we saw the article, we thought it would be fun, we started making jokes about it, and then it got serious.

Yeah.

And I was part of this group of people, Gas Station, that was like one of the main sources of people for the project.

So that's kind of how it started.

And then, I mean, for me, it just felt like...

I don't know, like I said, it took me years to get into crypto just because the reputation that crypto has outside of like the people that are working on it is really bad

just like yeah speculation and just like bubbles and whatever it is scams and i feel like we need to just like get the word out of the new things that we are working on in order to for like more people like me who would love this space to be able to actually like

look into it so that was one of my main motivations other it another one was just like It's fun.

The yoke was funny.

Actually, doing it for real would make the yoke even funnier.

Yeah, this is the worst thing you can ask somebody to do

Or it's not the worst thing It's one of the worst things which is to ask somebody to explain a joke But like for you what was funny?

What why were you like this is a great joke?

Like what was funny to you about the idea of it

I mean

Maybe it's not like the funniest joke ever, but just like there's this

moment in Twitter where like all the people in your timeline are just like rehashing the same joke and improving on it.

And everyone just like they're like tweeting about the same token and trying to like shit post and make yokes and everyone is like one-apping each other and we had like five hours of that for the constitution even be like before before we started doing anything so i feel like that's the level where like it's new to it and it's new yoke you see it's like even better than the last one and there's this kind of serendipity on the whole timeline which is it feels really great

i know exactly the feeling you're talking about which is like like who can heighten this more like oh like it'd be funny if we did this well it'd be funny if we did the crazier version of this it'd be funny if we we did the craziest version of this.

I'm serious about the craziest version of this.

And now, like, yeah, and even like making yokes, I remember one of the people in the project Dan just like tweeted

one of these pictures, like a cat with a computer tweeting

that said, like, me trying to figure out if the constitution is a security and stuff like that.

And just like random stuff that in context made a lot of fun when everyone was in on the yoke.

And so I feel like we went on that for like almost a day.

And then at the end, it was like,

there are these people that like like actually want to do it for real and had like started to contact so the vis and museums and stuff i was like let's let's do it

then we just like i created the discord a friend created twitter account and we just like started sleep posting and then went to bed woke up like four hours a later and we had like 2k followers a bunch of like a thousand people in the discord and we were like what what is happening and so we just like started to try to figure out how the hell do we do this like it took us i think uh three days to actually set up the crowdfunding because we wanted to make sure that all the legal stuff was in order first and all of those things so we started working on that we started just like shit posting and tweeting about it and trying to get as much

like because i have a very specific definition of shit posting which is like might not be yours mine is you're kind of putting up bad dumb jokes over and over again that you know aren't that funny but they're kind of funny in the repetition what do you mean when you say shit posting i mean i guess my definition is just like tweeting whatever like literally whatever, yeah,

without without thinking it first.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's maybe a little bit too generic, but I don't know.

Just like it happens for a bunch of people, especially in like MySphere, that have this really specific kind of Twitter voice that works really great with this.

So if you curate that voice, you make really great, great tweets.

And if you don't create it at all and just like tweet whatever you feel like, you make really great shit posts.

Was it fun?

Had you ever been in a position where you were tweeting in front of such a big audience before?

Yeah, no, it was really fun to just like figure out things to tweet.

The best way to put the joke, we were also working on like all the boring stuff at the same time.

So it was really fun, getting the community excited.

Yeah,

it was a really wild week.

What was the boring stuff you were working on?

Were you coding it?

No, I mean, I personally, I'm a coder.

I know nothing about like projects management.

So of course, I did project management.

Makes absolute sense.

Yeah, at the start, I was mostly helping with managing the Discord, tweeting, and kind of like helping organize everyone.

I just realized as we're talking, I'm 36 years old.

I've nodded my head a lot of times when people said they were a project manager, but I don't totally know what one does.

I mean, me neither.

That's the thing.

Because another thing is just like we are now being asked about

thoughts on like the state of DAOs and whatever.

And the thing is like, we don't have a fucking clue.

Like we just made the whole thing up on the spot, consulted no one and looked at nothing of what other people were doing.

We just made it up.

So the whole project management thing was just desperately trying to coordinate people.

And I don't know if that's like what a project management does, but that's what I tried to do.

Just like get people to work on stuff.

Maybe the day before the auction and the day after things got like more serious and we actually like were just like full focused on it.

But at the start, it was mostly just like it became even funnier and funnier.

And I told my real world friends, hey, I'm going to buy the Constitution of the United States.

And we're like, what?

So it's like added to the more real that this thing was to me, the funnier it was.

Yeah.

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Welcome back to the show.

So when we left things, Miguel and his friends were trying to buy the United States Constitution at auction.

The auction ended.

No one had any idea who had won.

I had no idea who had won because

they didn't let the people that were there in person tell, even the rest of the team.

So, like, I, there was like five minutes where I had no idea if we had won.

And then

I had to tweet in like the screenshot of the notes up saying, like, hey, we lost.

And so

I learned about that like five seconds before the rest of the world did.

How did you feel seeing the text?

I mean, honestly, I felt like,

first of all, at that point, we had all been like working 20 hours a day, sleeping four hours for an entire week.

So I was pretty tired.

I won't lie, like, one of the first things that crossed my mind was like, I'm finally going to be able to sleep.

It's a relief a little bit.

Yeah, and I feel like from the outcomes, like, obviously the best outcome was to like

win the constitution, but I feel like one of the second best was just like, we managed to do this incredible thing.

We managed to educate millions of people, on board, thousands of people into crypto.

That was like the first contribution.

And now we just get to close this off.

It's like a one-time thing.

We don't continue it.

And we just leave it as a good thing that happened, like as a good example.

And that's it.

And I feel like that was also a pretty good outcome.

So I was, I mean, I was bummed, obviously, but I was still pretty happy about everything and they have like a good example of like what we're building that is not just like oh bitcoin is just like app whatever

you're not excited about the part of crypto that is just like are people gonna get richer

no i mean i like there's i don't know i've never been like into finance or into money at all

And I feel like this technology that we're building is really, really exciting for a bunch of reasons, but I don't know.

I just like don't really care about the monetary product as much i would say just like really excited to play with the technology and to see all the cool things that we can build with it

why is it more exciting for you to build on web 3 than to build web 2

i feel like one of the really really cool things about web 3 is that it's like

pretty unexplored territory that like you can kind of just like join two ideas together even like think about something walk three steps in any direction and you end up in completely unexplored territory, like a part of crypto that no one has ever even like thought about.

And you can just like use that to do whatever.

You can build stuff, you can tweet about it, you can document it.

It's kind of like an ongoing exploration, whereas for a while, I did like the whole IndieMaker software as a service apps thing.

And it feels like

everything is invented in that point, where you're just trying to, I don't know, shave a little use case off of Excel and put it like a UI with gradients and then sell it to a bunch of other SaaS apps.

And that's like the whole thing that you're doing.

And in here, you're like building really exciting apps.

You're building protocols.

You're playing with cryptography.

You're building things that maybe millions of people will use.

You're making things that make a difference.

And just like not just another to-do app.

It's funny, though, because it's like the trade-off is like you get to work in a whole new space, but it's also you're working in a space that is like

very,

I think a lot of people find confusing.

And then also a lot of people have a very set idea about what that space is.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's.

I feel like the thing is just like we have the option to change that.

Like if we build really cool things and if we do a great work at like improving design and documenting everything that we do and just like making things that are actually useful, we actually have the option to change that.

And that's also really exciting.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

I also just feel like there's something about being young and encountering a new world where people are just like, you're the the project manager now you're gonna help us by the constitution we're gonna make your jokes and put them in front of people it's just like a very it's something that like i feel like every few years the internet decides to give to some people in one place and it's it's a very special thing yeah like i wasn't around like the start of the internet but it kind of feels like what i imagine that would have been and it's just like even Even if like you don't make money or you don't whatever, it still feels like a lot of fun to build for that kind of people.

Yeah.

You feel like you're creating a world.

Yeah.

Miguel Piedrafida.

You can find Miguel online where he tweets from his account at M1GUELPF or at the Constitution DAO Twitter account, a ghost ship that still sails the seas.

If you want to learn more about these episodes and the world of crypto as I discover it, check out my newsletter at pjvote.com.

I also answer questions there in the comments thread, and I'll be dropping in recommendations for weird and interesting stuff I'm finding on the internet.

Again, that's at pjvote.com.

This episode of Crypto Island was edited by Shruthi Pinamanani and mixed by Rick Kwan.

Theme music from Christine Andrews.

If you like the show, you can find new episodes and my newsletter at pjvote.com.

Thanks for listening.

See you soon.