After sustaining a career-ending injury on the professional tennis tour, Berke turned to medical marijuana as a pain reliever and became a cannabis activist.
Berke finished with a 19–5 record, earning All-America honors, Ivy League Player of the Year, and first team All-Ivy.
Off the show, Berke tried to return to the tennis tour with drug prescriptions and spinal injections, but experienced side effects that made him turn to marijuana as a pain reliever and obtain a license from California to smoke medical cannabis.
[2][6][7] Berke spent a few months setting up a business selling the Moosh Pillow, a neck support for airline travelers that he had pitched during one episode of The Rebel Billionaire.
[8] The video featured appearances by Playboy Playmate and internet celebrity Amanda Cerny and a short cameo from Macklemore in a show of support for the parody.
[2] His campaign events attracted celebrities like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Rob Gronkowski, and Reggie Bush.
[18] For his second run for mayor in 2013, Berke ran a more serious campaign, assembling a team and crafting a platform based on a new public transportation system.
He created a platform he called "2020 Vision," unveiling a six-year plan to address police misconduct, flooding, and pension liabilities.
The centerpiece of the plan was the SkyLink, a $100-million cable car system strung across Biscayne Bay, linking Miami Beach to the mainland and addressing traffic and parking problems.
[18][19][20] The four-way race was eventually won by millionaire Philip Levine, who spent an estimated $4 million of his own money on the campaign, more than any other candidate who had run for Mayor of Miami Beach.
This happened because the cannabis industry lacked marketing channels, since major media providers restricted online marijuana advertising.
Berke decided to create a social media network allowing advertisers to target the marijuana community and industry.
By the end of 2016, Bang was running one of the leading cannabis-related Facebook pages, as well as sites on Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, with a dozen influencers with 250,000 to 10 million followers each.
[7][23] Bang Digital Media attracted attention outside the marijuana market in 2016, when it used the then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as the test case for its chatbots, which were the first AI personalities to sell products to humans via Facebook Messenger.
[28] An amendment banning cannabis consumption in churches was submitted to the Colorado House of Representatives on the same day and rejected as an unconstitutional restriction on religion.
[29] The Church is open to the public and offers a daily light show and meditation called "Beyond" which has become the highest rated tourist attraction in Denver.
[30][31] Berke opened Munchie's Pizza Club, a dog-friendly "1980s style pizzeria" in April 2021 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,[32] with the kitchen being supervised by Fort Lauderdale based executive chef, Todd Erickson, the first Floridian chef to beat Bobby Flay on the Food Network television show "Beat Bobby Flay.