Character

Mike (High Hashrate)

Mike (High Hashrate) is a Bitcoin podcaster who no longer podcasts, a Swan alumnus whose show did not survive the departure, and — at the time of his only recorded appearance in the Bugleverse — the Wavlake recording artist Rundance. He sat for the seventh episode of Behind the Podcast on 23 January 2025, where Rod Palmer and Richard Greaser spent ninety minutes establishing that he had quit his podcast, failed every purity test put to him, sold an NFT to a fellow pleb at the top, and intended to make a film.

The announcer settles his status in the cold open, in one word: he is “the former producer and host of the High Hash Rate podcast.”¹

The former podcaster

Mike’s stated reason for quitting is a listening problem, not a production one: “I had too many hours of Bitcoin podcasts that I was listening to,”² — the forty hours per week doctrine metabolized into a disability. Rod audits the quota and finds him well over it, then reclassifies him: not a workaholic but a podcastaholic.³

The infrastructure failed in parallel. Mike’s High Hashrate YouTube channel had been attached to his Swan email address; when he left Swan, “that entire thing was nuked, unfortunately.”⁴ Rod lands the episode’s hardest observation on it — “Swan Swan did to high hash rate what they are accusing” Tether of doing to Swan.⁵ A hard drive died during a move shortly after, and Mike has been rebuilding the show’s back catalogue from an old backup ever since. He shouts out his co-host, Dan.⁴

Purity tests failed

Greaser formalizes the interview partway through, moving on “instead of talking about purity tests you are failing,”⁶ after Mike volunteers that he is “shamed” and suffering imposter syndrome. The tally is comprehensive.

He had been lectured in the group chats on the importance of Ayn Rand and had bought two copies of Atlas Shrugged — one per read, so he could tell them apart — which makes Greaser’s New Year audit (“you complete your goal of reading Ayn Rand cover to cover twice?”) a formality; Mike has not started.⁷ Greaser looks up the page count and prescribes thirty pages a day, which he calculates at nine reads a year.⁷ Asked to name a book on the history of money he has read, Mike offers none, and instead proposes a title of his own: “I think a good title for a book is Have Fun Staying Poor.”⁸ This arrives after twenty minutes in which the hosts refuse to let him shill Andy Edstrom’s Why Buy Bitcoin — a title Greaser considers self-evidently disqualifying, and which Mike could not remember reading: “what a stupid fucking name for a book.”⁹

The shitcoining is worse. Mike could not understand ordinals but could manage “the world of women NFTs,”¹⁰ whereupon Greaser reads the collection’s gender-equity mission statement to him on air and Mike reports that he felt included. His proudest moment in crypto is adjacent: he sold an extremely rare one at the height of the mania, it never recovered, and checking on it still makes him happy. “That’s one of my proudest moments.”¹¹ The hosts score this as a successful rug of a fellow pleb.

His nicotine is also non-compliant — Russian HEETS, illegal in America, obtained by his account “through extra legal means,” which he offers as “pretty high quality non KYC cigarettes.”¹² The defence collapses on a technical detail. They do not burn; Rod rules this proof-of-stake; Mike concedes it is a shitcoin cigarette.¹²

His bearishness, when finally located, has nothing to do with price: the Rock Paper Bitcoin boys’ pole shift thesis “really sent me down a a deep, dark rabbit hole for a long time,”¹³ costing him two weeks of watching the California mountains for a two-mile tidal wave.

Asked whether he had listened to the previous episode before coming on, Mike said no — prompting Greaser to audit the show itself: “Wait. So this is the seventh episode. Rod, are we are we zero for seven”.¹⁴ Rod thinks Fundamentals might be the one exception.

Rundance

Mike’s second act is music, and the Bugle caused it: he credits the hosts’ own Wavlake output — “you guys turned me on to just because I saw some of your work”¹⁵ — with getting him writing again. The obstacle had stood since an Eminem-influenced rap CD twenty-odd years earlier: he could write but not produce. An AI tool now takes his lyrics and iterates. His track “21,000,000” is played in full in the cold open, before a host speaks,¹ and he was writing a Ross Ulbricht song the same night.¹⁵

He can, under protest, still perform unassisted — offering the hook from his pre-Bitcoin track “I Am A Legend”: “I’m a legend, you fucking with a loaded gun. I told you, son.”¹⁶ Greaser offers to lay down a beat; Mike declines on the grounds that he has to be quieter in his office, and they take a rain check.¹⁶

The Backup

Mike’s ambition is a film, and his ceiling is local: offered an aspiration, he takes “I’d love to win a bugle,” ranking the Bugles above an Oscar in the same breath.¹⁷

The film’s “working title was The Backup,”¹⁸ a New York film-gig boy who ends up in El Salvador and is orange-pilled by a pupusa maker at a specific spot in Bitcoin Beach — Mike wants Miss El Salvador to play her. Rod, who had heard the earlier bit in which Greaser’s hypothetical eighteen-year-old admires your headphones in an enclosed space — “with a young boy, how would you orange pill?”¹⁹ — correctly predicts the film opens in an elevator.¹⁸ He then script-doctors the pupusa purchase into an ad read: the hero has to use the Strike app, and “If you sign up, you use my referral code, both get 10,000 sets.”²⁰ Mike agrees it is a good scene.²⁰

Fundamentals is cast on air — “I could I could write a role for fundamentals”²¹ — as the angry father of a bride at a wedding gig, yelling at the hero to point the camera at the right things. Greaser’s ruling on Mike’s qualifications closes the episode-long wilderness framing on ethnic grounds: he is genetically predispositioned “to make a good movie. Why is that? Because you’re Jewish.”²² Mike calls it a birthright; Rod’s kicker is that he was never a banker, but he was a filmmaker.²²

Reception in the boosts

Fundamentals’ 10,000-sat boost praises the previous guest at the current one’s expense — “Probably reading this after talking to a much leaner guest than Mars”²³ — which Rod reads aloud and identifies as a dig. Greaser notes the pattern it confirms: Mike is the second vaper in a row. Piez boosts 420 sats and four emoji, which Greaser decodes as cheers, the Swan sex cult’s mushrooms, Steven Lubka at the gym, and the Bugle’s own cigarette — “beers clinking, mushroom, strong-arm, cigarette.”²⁴

Greaser’s sign-off supplies the episode’s title and the closest thing Mike gets to a blessing: “I look forward I look forward to you building back my hash rate better. Make high hash rate great again.”²⁵