Storyline

Creed Mania

Creed Mania is the Bugleverse’s longest-running musical affliction: the belief, held sincerely by a meaningful fraction of the community, that the 90s alternative rock band Creed’s “Higher” is load-bearing infrastructure for the Bitcoin price. It begins as a bull-market anthem in March 2024, escalates to an involuntary psychiatric commitment within the week, and then — rather than ending — sediments into the ambient vocabulary of the podcasts, where “Creed” functions less as a band than as a permanent character reference attached to Ben Justman.

Who’s in it: Creed · Ben Justman · Sly Goomba · Rod Palmer · Richard Greaser · Skate Kate

The anthem (March 2024)

The mania is documented as already underway by the time the Bugle covers it. With Bitcoin above $58k, influencers including Steve Barbour, Ben Justman and Optimist Fields had called for a new bull market song to replace “Pump It Up,” and the consensus settled on “Higher.” The accounts later ratified the swap on their own timeline, the Bugle declaring the succession closed once Solana partisans laid claim to the previous anthem: the shitcoiners “have claimed Pump It Up, tainting it for eternity with their conspiracy theories about well established history. This officially makes Higher by Creed the song of the bull.”¹ The band noticed: Creed announced an ordinals set, op_Bullrun, to celebrate the cycle, with lead singer Scott Stapp crediting Justman by name with almost single-handedly resurrecting the band into relevancy. The tipping point, per the Bugle, was Marty Bent closing Rabbit Hole Recap by singing it.²

The ordinal collection lands in the middle of the spam fight rather than beside it, and the first recorded call to filter Creed is about inscriptions: Ocean Pool announced it would happily filter Creed’s “Stupid Spam” out of the handful of blocks it mines from time to time.²

Eight days later the bit acquires a casualty. Justman is reported hospitalized after listening to “Higher” over 10,000 times in a row, found by his father rocking back and forth and murmuring “I want to see the golden streets,” then shouting the chorus until he was involuntarily committed. The Bugle traces the attempt to a Samson Mow tweet — “The reason we keep crashing isn’t because of Coinbase. It’s because you guys aren’t playing Higher on repeat enough” — and reports Bitcoiners gathering outside the hospital playing Creed in solidarity, one calling Justman “a martyr who put himself in a bad position selflessly to pump the price for everyone.”³

Filter Creed, second sense (November 2024)

By the following Thanksgiving the filtering demand has survived its original justification and found a new one. On Behind the Podcast, Sly Goomba arrives with a grievance about Justman’s diet — “tweeting about cereal today. We all know that’s not the Bitcoin way” — and escalates, unprompted but not unassisted, into consensus language: “We need to we need to filter CREED.”⁴ The charge is no longer spam. It is that “the first pump of this cycle was shut down because of Creed,” and the proposed remedy is a soft fork away from the band, plus disassociating with anybody who feels Creed is important in a Bitcoin pump.⁴

Ambient (2024–2025)

After that the band stops being an event and becomes furniture. Three weeks later Richard Greaser prescribes it as romantic infrastructure — a bottle of Pony Lane wine from Justman, then Creed to set the mood, then a Lyn Alden podcast — under Rod’s governing rule that the more hours you have to listen, the more healthy your relationship is.⁵ In March 2025 it surfaces as karaoke at the BTC Sessions 40th birthday party at Pub Key, sung by a man in weird gloves lying on the floor, with Mike Germano on the intro and Opti and Nico in the room.⁶

Its final documented function is as a slur. When Justman is purity-tested in September 2025 for selling alcohol — on the day of a national assassination, and in response to his own line that “occasionally staying up until 2AM drinking red wine with people you love is medicinal”⁷ — Rod Palmer ventriloquises the imagined snitch, and the band is the first thing the snitch reaches for: “Ben Jussman fucking everybody thinks he’s so cool because he likes Creed.”⁸ Rod closes the loop forty minutes later by proposing a rival offence — “What’s what is, what’s more sus? Selling alcohol for Bitcoin or retweeting Mike Alfred?”⁹

The arc’s last beat is a correction. In November 2025 Skate Kate boosts in to retract a misfiling — “Nickelback is the band that doesn’t even qualify as slop not Creed sorry” — and in the same message coins the line Rod reads out as the episode’s legendary quote: “still drinking that sweet greasy plebs slop like it’s artisanal bone broth.”¹⁰ Creed, after twenty months, has been promoted to merely bad.

On the timeline

The mania’s second life is on X, where the Bugleverse accounts have kept “Higher” in continuous rotation for years after the news cycle closed — never as reportage, always as reflex. The pattern that plays out in the podcasts (§Ambient) runs identically here: nobody argues for Creed and nobody explains the reference; they simply reach for the chorus whenever the price, or the bit, needs lifting.

The song of statecraft

The 2024 anthem was canonised by fiat, then escalated into a matter of policy. The hospitalization dispatch — the arc’s founding casualty — went out under a byline crediting its chief theorist, Richard Greaser: “Ben Justman Hospitalized For Mental Breakdown After Listening to Higher 10,000 Times In A Row Written by @GreaserRichard.”¹¹ By that summer Greaser had promoted the song from bull-market decoration to electoral obligation:

“If Trump doesn’t walk out to Higher by Creed at the Bitcoin conference, it will likely go down as one of the most egregious political blunders in American history” — @GreaserRichard, 2024-07-19

The premise is stated plainly: the song is not accompaniment but infrastructure, and failing to deploy it is a strategic error on the order of a lost war.

”Can you take me higher”

Where the news treated Creed as an event, the timeline treats the chorus as liturgy — a two-word incantation dropped on any post that needs a pump. The Bugle pins it directly to Ben Justman as a buy signal:

“Can you take me higher?” — @bitcoin_bugle, 2024-09-27

…and drafts Dennis Porter as an unlikely lead vocalist — “Take me higher Mr. Porter”¹² — while PODCONF, predictably, trademarks the affliction outright: “✅👆Higher ®”.¹³ The chorus travels best with the source material attached. Both Greaser and Rod Palmer answer stray posts with the identical Scott Stapp performance clip from the “Higher” video — a year apart, the joke undimmed by repetition:

“Can you take me higher” — @GreaserRichard, 2026-06-30

“We can go higher” — @rodpalmerhodl, 2025-05-21

Henry’s note: the timeline corroborates the page’s thesis from a second archive. The affliction that began as a dated news event in March 2024 is, three years on, still a live reflex across at least four accounts — proof that “Higher” long ago stopped being a song and became a load-bearing piece of the community’s vocabulary, exactly as the bull-market euphoria arc predicts.

Disputed

Sources do not agree on what “filter Creed” means. The March 2024 usage is literal and technical: Ocean Pool filtering the band’s ordinal inscriptions as spam, consistent with everything else in the block-space fight.² Sly Goomba’s November 2024 usage borrows the identical consensus vocabulary — filter, soft fork — but the object is the band’s cultural influence on price action, and the stated grievance underneath it is breakfast cereal.⁴ Both are recorded; no source reconciles them, and the second never acknowledges the first.

irl: Creed, Scott Stapp, “Higher,” Nickelback, Samson Mow, Marty Bent and Jordan Peterson are real. The hospitalization, the op_Bullrun ordinals collection and the proposed soft fork are not.

Henry’s note: this page previously recorded the arc as a March 2024 event spanning two news articles. The beat index shows it running through at least November 2025 across five episodes; the span and narrative are corrected here. Peony Lane — rendered “Pony Lane” on air — has no page yet.

@bitcoin_bugle, 2024-03-29. ↩
Bugle News, 2024-03-01 — “Creed Launches Ordinal Collection FollowIng Interest From Bitcoiners”. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bugle News, 2024-03-09 — “Ben Justman Hospitalized For Mental Breakdown After Listening to Higher 10,000 Times In A Row”. ↩
Behind the Podcast 1 @ 27:55. Setup at 27:39 and 27:23; ASR renders Justman as “Ben Justin” at 27:05. A host offers “You wanna you wanna filter CREED?” at 27:49 and Sly adopts it; the soft-fork follow-up is at 27:59. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bugle Weekly 39 @ 57:05. ASR gives “Ben Jossman”, “Hire by Creed” for “Higher”, and “Lynn Alden”. Rod’s rule is at t=3407. ↩
Bugle Weekly 53 @ 34:49. ASR renders Pub Key as “PUBG”; attendees are listed by Rod at t=2097–2144. ↩
Emergency Broadcast: Podcasting Under Attack @ 14:30. Justman’s tweet continues t=879–887; Greaser endorses it at t=932. ASR calls Justman “Ben Jossman” and, at t=864, “the Korean guy. Korean wine guy” — an ASR wreck, not a claim about his ancestry. ↩
Emergency Broadcast: Podcasting Under Attack @ 16:13. Rod is voicing an unnamed purity-tester, not speaking as himself; the tweeter is never named. ↩
Emergency Broadcast: Podcasting Under Attack @ 54:13. Quote spans cues t=3248–3257. Greaser answers at t=3260 (“Nick Carter” is ASR for Nic Carter). ↩
Bugle Weekly 84 @ 51:25. Read aloud by Rod from Skate Kate’s boost; the apology sits at t=3072–3081 and the chapter marker at 3054 is “Nickelback is Worse Than Creed”. ↩
@bitcoin_bugle, 2024-03-09 — the account’s promotion of the hospitalization article, naming @GreaserRichard as author. ↩
@bitcoin_bugle, 2024-09-05. ↩
@_podconf, 2024-11-24. ↩