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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

Related: storylines/v4v-music-empire · storylines/bull-market-euphoria · storylines/pleb-persecution · storylines/pledditor

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 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.1

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.1

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.”2

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.”3 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.3

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.4 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.5

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”6 — 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.”7 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?”8

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.”9 Creed, after twenty months, has been promoted to merely bad.

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.1 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.3 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.

Footnotes

  1. Bugle News, 2024-03-01 — “Creed Launches Ordinal Collection FollowIng Interest From Bitcoiners”. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Bugle News, 2024-03-09 — “Ben Justman Hospitalized For Mental Breakdown After Listening to Higher 10,000 Times In A Row”. ↩

  3. 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

  4. Bugle Weekly 39 @ 57:05. ASR gives “Ben Jossman”, “Hire by Creed” for “Higher”, and “Lynn Alden”. Rod’s rule is at t=3407. ↩

  5. Bugle Weekly 53 @ 34:49. ASR renders Pub Key as “PUBG”; attendees are listed by Rod at t=2097–2144. ↩

  6. 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. ↩

  7. Emergency Broadcast: Podcasting Under Attack @ 16:13. Rod is voicing an unnamed purity-tester, not speaking as himself; the tweeter is never named. ↩

  8. 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). ↩

  9. 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”. ↩