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Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. This is episode three, Miguel. That story, after these ads. Surge Engine is brought to you by SpotPet. Surge Engine listeners know that I love my dog more than anything else in this world. I want to be buried in a pyramid with him when he dies or when I die. Whoever goes first, we're going together. I want to share a message from our trusted companion in helping you be ready for any unexpected vet visits. SpotPet Insurance.
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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 Now 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 Down 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? No, no, no. I was in university for like three months and then dropped out. Because of... So it didn't really 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 it was like, why am I here? Also, I realized like I'm coding in class. And if I'm coding in class, I learn new stuff that I could be reading around. Why am I in class? Like, why am I here if I'm not paying attention? And then just in general,
Just after dropping out, I got into crypto, so that worked out great. And what got you into crypto? Actually, I knew about crypto for years. I feel like everyone in tech knows something about crypto, but I thought it was like this hand-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. I think as a joke, just like as a small project. And they invited me to help out with making cabbages. Wait, cabbages? Yeah. Like the vegetable? Yeah. Why did you guys want to make cabbages? I have no idea. I joined after that decision was taken, but we made like four NFTs that were like one of one cabbage art project.
That's so funny. And then did people, how did that go? That went great. It 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 it, 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 out. But 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? 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? Yeah.
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...
Like I said, it took me years to get into crypto just because the reputation that crypto has outside of 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 get the word out of the new things that we are working on in order for more people like me who would love this space to be able to actually look into it.
So that was one of my main motivations. Another one was just like, it's fun. The joke was funny. Actually doing it for real would make the joke 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? 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 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 shitpost and make jokes and everyone is like one-upping each other and we had like five hours of that for the constitution even like before we started doing anything
So I feel like that's the level where each new tweet and each new joke you see is even better than the last one. And there's this kind of serendipity on the whole timeline, which feels really great.
I know exactly the feeling you're talking about, which is like, who can heighten this more? Like, oh, it would be funny if we did this. Well, it would be funny if we did the crazier version of this. It would be funny if we did the craziest version of this. I'm serious about the craziest version of this. And now, like... Yeah, and even like making jokes, 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 joke and so i feel like we we went on that for like almost a day and then at the end it was like there there are these people that like actually wanted it for real and had like started to contact sodevis and museums and stuff and i was like let's let's do it
Then we just like, I created the discord, a friend created a Twitter account and we just like started to posting and then went to bed, woke up like four hours later and we had like 2K followers, a bunch of like a thousand people in the discord and we were like, 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, 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
- Shitposting and tweeting about it and try to get as much people. - When you say shitposting, like, 'cause I have a very specific definition of shitposting, 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 their repetition. What do you mean when you say shitposting?
I mean, I guess my definition is just like putting whatever, like literally whatever. Yeah. 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 like my sphere that have this really specific like kind of
Twitter voice that works really great with this. So if you create that voice, you make really great, great tweets. And if you don't create it on 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. Like the best way to put the joke, we were also working on like all the boring stuff at the same time. So that 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 project management. So of course I did project management. Makes absolute sense. Yeah, at the start, I was mostly helping with like 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 our thoughts on 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 like made it up. So the whole project management thing was just like desperately trying to coordinate people. And I don't know if that's like what a project management does, but that's what I try to do. Just like get people to work on stuff.
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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 the people, 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, um...
win the constitution but i feel like one of the second base which is like we managed to do this incredible thing we managed to like educate about millions of people on board thousands of people into crypto that were like the first contribution and now we just like get to close this off it's like a one-time thing we don't continue it and we just like leave it as a good thing that happened like as a good example and that's it and i feel like that's that was also like 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 going to 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 don't really care about the monetary part as much, I would say. I'm just 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 Web3 than to build Web2? I feel like one of the really, really cool things about Web3 is that it's like...
pretty unexplored territory. 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 the whole indie maker, software as a service apps thing. And it feels like everything is invented at that point where you're just trying to 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 are 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 project manager now. You're going to help us by the constitution. We're going to make your jokes and put them in front of people. It's just like a very... It's something that I feel like every few years the internet decides to give to some people in one place. And it's a very special thing. Yeah. I wasn't around the start of the internet, but it kind of feels like what I imagined that would happen. 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 Piedra Fida. You can find Miguel online where he tweets from his account at M1GUELPF or at the Constitution Doubt 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 Shruti Pinamaneni 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.