Search Engine - 03 Miguel

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

A conversation with Miguel Piedrafita. Why would a 19-year-old from Spain want to buy the US Constitution?  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm PJ Vote. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. This is episode three, Miguel. That story after these ads. This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I like seeing Square in action at my local coffee shop. They use Square for payments, and it just makes everything feel effortless. Quick checkout, digital receipts, sometimes even loyalty points.

It really enhances the experience and lets the team focus on serving great coffee, not fumbling with the register. Square works wherever your customers are. You can manage inventory, track sales, and access reports in real time. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash engine. That's SQUU. A-A-R-E dot com slash GO-S-E-E-O-S-E-E-R-E-R-E-B-MAR. 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 said 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? What, what? No, no, no. I, 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 it 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 learning 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, you know, 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, 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 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. Why was... 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.

That's so funny. And then did people... How did that go? That weren't great. It was like when the foundation, NFT platform has you started. We were one of the first people in there, sold a bunch of NFTs and especially it helped me.

A bunch of other people in the group. We ended up all getting jobs in crypto and just like working out. But for Ray, Bo, Ave, 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 tell them that I code. What do they do? They are architects.

Are they just... 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. 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 that project. So that's kind of how it started. And then, I mean, for me, it just felt like, I know, like I said, it took me years to get into crypto.

Just because the repetition 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. Another one was just, like, it's fun. The joke was funny. Actually, 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 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 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 doing about the same talking and trying to like shitpost and make yokes and everyone is like one up in each other. And we had like five hours of that for the constitution. Even before we started doing anything. So I feel like that's the level where like it's new tweet and it's new yoke. You see it's like even better than the last one. And 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 would be funny if we did this. Well, it would be funny if we did the crazier version of this.

It'd 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 yokes, I remember one of the people in the project, Dan, just like Twitter, one of these pictures of like a cat with a computer 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 actually wanted it for real and had like started to contact Sotheby's 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 see 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 discont 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, 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 try to get as much people.

When you say shit posting, 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 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 Masphere that have this really specific like kind of Twitter voice that works really great with this. So if you curate that voice, you make really great tweets. And if you don't create it around 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.

Like the best way to put the joke, we were also working on like all the boring stuff at the same time. So I 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 a thing because like another thing is just like we are now like being asked about like thoughts on like the state of doubts and whatever and the thing is like we don't have a fucking clue like we just made the whole thing up

on this boat consulted no one and looked at nothing of what other people were doing where it's like made it up so the whole project management thing which is 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

Maybe the day before the auction and the day after, things got more serious and we actually were just like full focused on it. But the story was mostly just like, it became even funnier and funnier. And I thought like my real world friends, like, 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. More after these ads.

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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 have one, 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 was 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 base was just like, we managed to do this incredible thing, we managed to like educate 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. I was. bumped, 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 parts as much, I would say. It's 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, like,

pretty an exploratory. You're going to kind of just like join two ideas together. Or even like think about. something, walk three steps in any direction, and you end up in completely an explore territory, like a part of crypto that no one has ever even 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 I, for a while, I did like the whole indie maker software as a service app thing. And it feels like everything is invented at that point where you're just

like 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 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 it's like not just another to do app. It's funny though because it's like the tradeoff 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 like 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. 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 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 Piedraffita. 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 Shruthy Pinamennini 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.