148. Ben's Heart Attack and Behind The Scenes of Building Collective Shift

My heart rate was going to 155 beats per minute. As soon as I woke up, I thought having a heart attack or a panic attack, it was just so overwhelming. I went to the doctor because I was having a heart attack, dude. He gave me blood thinners to slow my heart down.

Holy.

And sort of came back and just reassessed like, okay, this is unsustainable. I can't be doing the amount of work that I'm doing. Welcome back to another episode of the Bennebergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. I have to say, just quickly as we do this intro, one of our members thought I was saying NBA and CEO of Collective Shift for like 50 episodes. I just want to call out, that's NBA team. What does it even stand for?

Masters of Business Administration? Look, I will take NBA. I will go to the league. I will take the millions of dollars.

No, no worries. Anyway, continuing on, join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market. As well as a behind the scenes view of us scanning a fully remote subscription subscription research business here in Australia. If you love or even just enjoy these episodes, honestly, we'd love for you to leave a subscribe on YouTube. Give us a little follow on your podcasting app. We really do appreciate it as we don't do advertising. No affiliates, no commissions. It's how we keep bringing you the podcast every week. Now.

Ladies and gentlemen, as of right now, sort of last week of March, we're very excited. We're three and a half years into building Collective Shift and Berg's. It's been an epic month, man. We've, we've had our biggest month ever, which is poof, unbelievable. We actually did our biggest month ever in two weeks.

So how crazy is that?

We'd done it. We, we surpassed our biggest month ever.

So November was big for us because we had, was it the crypto convention and Black Friday sales? I think we beat that in December, a couple of quiet months. January, February. And we beat those high months in half a month, which is just unbelievable because we're not used to this. We've been through a massive bear market just getting absolutely smashed.

Yeah, we, yeah, we, we raised money a couple of years ago. We, we had to cut down the team. We had to last through the bear market. All of our competitors basically disappeared. You know, we were all in. You know, I was, I Invested everything I had into business. Everyone. Everyone had to take cuts.

Yep.

Really. Just to survive. And we. We believe that crypto was going to be here for a long time. We believed in helping people.

The fuck, man. It got tough, but it got tough a number of times.

It was so crazy. And you start to think that you're delusional, where you believe in this magic day that will come and you're like.

No, I believe in the opportunity cost. Like, oh, boss, what else could you be doing with your time, mate? How's that crypto going? When we went. We went to that event in Perth and everyone was like, why are you doing this? Was in the bare market.

Yeah.

Why are you doing this, Bo? Why do you work for this guy? Like, you're both lunatics.

Oh, yeah. They're like, what keeps you around? They're like. To me, they're like, you're a highly skilled guy. You can work wherever you want, you can earn lots of money. I'm like, but this is what I want to do. I want to be in crypto. I like working with the team. And they make you feel so crazy. Because it is crazy. It is legitimately crazy. We're taking a bet and we're like, we think this bet's going to pay off, but in those, like, times when it's like, you know, you don't have much money in the company, you have to make really hard decisions. The bear market's just wearing on you. You put in so much effort and you've got hardly any customers and you look at your mates that are working at, like, Amazon and you're like, fuck, I should just go and do that. A. Just go have long lunches. Like, what did you do for the month? I sent an email, like, how was your quarterly rocks?

Yeah. And I did a. Did a. Did a meeting on potentially new partnership.

Yeah. I'm thinking about, I need to do some more research. Give me another six months. It's like, bro, we're going to be dead in six months. I need to try 15 things today to surv.

Right? And the worst thing was, like, you know when you just put in so much effort, we're doing 15 things at once. We launched them all. We're going hard. We're doing all this effort for months and months and months and you just look and you're just still losing money. So how many times do we have conversations like, what the actual. Like, are we. Are we going. Are we, like, crazy? Like, are we actually living in a parallel universe here? And our belief is Just, we're completely naive and this is just never going to work because we're losing a lot of money and we're seemingly going nowhere.

Oh, and it was until probably November at the crypto convention where we saw how many people went to our talks, came up and spoke with us. There was a little bit of price action as well. We had a lot of members come in that were like, hey, okay, we've got something here. We're resonating with an audience. All right. That was the little kind of wind in the sails that we needed because it was. It was pretty barren desert before then. My.

And then basically what happened is that things started to pick up. The market rallied, like from 40,000 to 60,000 in February, and things just exploded. Like, my calendar for strategy calls were booked out for weeks. They still are.

We basically reduced the number of memberships we had. Now we only have our pro membership and our Platinum membership. And that's just been great. We packed the pro membership with so much value. People are loving that our refund rate is the lowest it's ever been. We get more testimonials than we've ever had. Like, I feel as though we really dialed in. And I think that's honestly bugs because I think again, we've stuck to our guns. We are aligned and incentive incentivized with our members. Like, we don't do advertising, we don't do affiliates, we don't do commissions. We're completely transparent. You can see our portfolios. We tell you when we're buying and selling. Like, the only way we make money in this business is through the subscription fees. And if our members are winning, they keep their subscription. And if they don't, they cancel. And now we're up over like a thousand or eleven hundred active paying members.

Like, that really came through in the public event that we had and the members only event where people understood that, hey, these guys are actually like, this is a bit different. Like, they're authentic, they're no bullshit. They answer questions head on there. And you post, you wrote this as well. They're relatable, but also aspirational. But before we get onto that, I want to get onto how we actually feel. Going from a scarcity mindset to now an abundance mindset, and how that's affected us personally in the business.

I mean, for so long we've been like, yeah, startup, lean down, don't do this, don't spend that. Oh my goodness, we spent $8 on a subscription. Cut that. You know, we can't afford that. Like you know, and coming out this side now, it's like, wow. It's like now, now we can come from this sort of scarcity defensive mindset to we really want to continue to be the best and biggest crypto research company in Australia. Like, we have visions that in 10 years time, we are the go to source of premium research and education for investors and businesses across Australia at the moment. You know, the, the morning star for crypto is what we're sort of in the back of our heads thinking about where we want to get to because we believe in crypto so much. And now it's, you know, that was always a dream and a vision, but I feel as though the last couple of months, it's now like, no, this is actually seriously going to happen.

And it's so weird where Even like in B2B deals we were sending out so many proposals, following up, it was just crickets. And now people are beating down our doors. Any multiple emails saying, hey, we need your research, let's do this deal, bro.

How, how so? In a bare market, 13 page, crisp PDFs, decks, conversations, like everything, just spending so much time getting it right, no one cares. Bull market, three emails, bang, signed up, like, research, just give us the research, we need it now.

Yeah, it's so crazy. It's like some of them just want to go. They're like, invoice us will pay today. It's like, whoa, all right, let's go. And man, even just for us, like we were talking before this episode about you wake up and you're got this anxiety of what's going to happen today, what do I need to fix what's broken, how much work we're going to have to do, what craziness is going to hit, what's going to change?

Yeah, yeah. And then also it's like you kind of still wake up with that, but you don't. You've got that level of comfort and security. You still go hard and you still make good decisions, but you don't, like, you still wake up anxious, don't you? You got something written down here and I want you to talk about it because we've not talked about it yet.

It's a different type of stress. I actually forgot to tell you this. So, like, basically I started taking over the strategy calls probably a month or two ago because I was like, you know, we need to, we need to take advantage of this. There's gonna be a lot of people wanting to sign up and we really want to put our best foot forward. All of A sudden the market rips and everything just explodes. And I've never seen anything. Well, I have in the previous business, but like it was different being at the helm this time around, seeing what was going on. Like to have to basically doubt this month we've doubled our biggest month ever. To see that on the front line was just insane. And it went from this stress of like, oh my God, we need to, we need to keep driving, we need revenue, we need money in the door, we need sales, we need to do this, need to do that now. It's like, oh my God, that's not a problem. You need to stay on top of it. Oh my God. Lost sales, you need to make sure they get in. Oh my God, I can't reply to these emails. I can't do enough calls. It was like 7:30 to 8:30 every day this month has been just like calls trying to bring people in, reply to people, send invoices, close payments onboard them. And it went this completely different stress. And the first two weeks I was always in all sorts because the market was ripping, everything was going crazy. I wasn't sleeping that great and I was tracking my, my, my whoop scores. Basically I was getting out of bed and as soon as I was getting out of bed, my heart rate was going to 155 beats per minute. As soon as I woke up, Whoa. Like you could saw it on the chart, it spiked like to the top of the chart every morning. And I was feeling these, like, I was like, I thought, I don't know, I thought I was having a heart attack or a panic attack. Like I was, it was just so overwhelming. I actually went to the doctor. Because it was having a heart attack. Yeah, because there was nothing wrong with me. It was just complete overwhelm of like how quickly things like took off and sort of came back and just reassessed like, okay, this is unsustainable. I can't be doing the amount of work that I'm doing in this time. And the back half of this month's been a lot better. But it was just this, it was like a, it was like a flick. And also that combined with this has been a three year bet that we made that this would happen. And for three years we were down, you know, you know, 20 to 10, right. It was like half time and we're down by like 10 points. Like three years, right. And it just never felt like we're ever going to get there. And literally within a week everything turned on its head. And one of the biggest things That I think has been such a winner for new members, has been our new platinum membership bergs like that. We've really found product market fit with that. And for those that don't know, it's our high net worth tier, sort of 100,000, quarter of a million dollar plus minimum invite only group where we have some really big portfolios in there that want more access to us. We launched that about six months ago and that has just gone bananas and it's been amazing and everyone's absolutely loving it. So that's been a real winner.

Absolutely, man. I want to touch on a few things there. It's a case of where we've made this huge bet. It's starting to pay off, but it brings new problems. Like, money doesn't fix your problems, it fixes your money problems. And money is also the beginning of your problems.

It exposes more problems.

Exactly right. So you went to the doctor, your heart rate is off the charts. That's basically the heart rate you have when you're sprinting and you're stationary.

Yeah.

So you go, you go to the doctor, he basically sorts you out, sends you home. And how have you managed since then, man? You said that you spoke to Trav.

Dude, he gave me heart. He gave me blood thinners to slow my heart down.

Holy. Okay, wait, wait. Okay, this is. This is even better. So you go to the doctor, you've got these major heart palpitations. Basically. It's. It's, you know, anxiety or stress. Could be a range of things.

Yeah.

And you go to the doctor's office. And what does he do? Does he run some tests and then gives you some medicine?

Yes, he basically runs these tests, gives me like, you know, just a basic checkup. I sort of talk through what's going on and.

Basically it's like, yeah, yeah, you've just got, you know, stress and anxiety. I'm just going to give you these pills. Like, what do they do is like basically slows your heart down. I'm like, right, well, that sounds terrible. Like, why would you take that? So, yeah, that should just like, you know, sort of calm you down. Just make sure you just be careful because it, you know, has side effects of like, you could pass out. And also I'm like, what? So it gives me these blood thinners and instantly I'm like, no way am I taking these things. Like, I'm not taking something that slows my heart down. That sounds just.

Were they blood thinners or beta blockers?

Might have been beta blockers.

Yeah. I don't think he'd give you blood thinners. That's quite dangerous, but beta blockers does that exact same thing. Well, he's got it. Okay. For those on the pod, he's gone to get the packet to see what they actually are. Blood thinners would be extreme, I think, in your case, but that. I'm not a doctor, so.

Apo. Propranolol.

Propanol.

Propranolol. Low hydraulic side apotex.

Yeah. Slows down your heart rate. So I. I think my mum actually takes this because she's got. She's got cancer, a whole bunch of stuff. She's got high blood pressure. I'm pretty sure this is the one she takes.

I actually remember this was the one where. I'm pretty sure when my dad was in hospital having heart attacks. And they just inject it into the IV thing and it stops your heart attack. That is crazy. So, yeah, here it is. Used to treat high blood pressure, a number of types of irregular heart.

Capillary stuff. Performance anxiety.

Yeah, and used to treat problems with angina and heart attacks, mate. Bloody hell. So. So have you taken common side effects? Nausea, abdominal pain and constipation. Enjoy it. So have you been taking these?

No, I haven't taken one. Okay. So basically, I walk out, I'm like, cool, gp. You're just going to tell me what the science says? No way am I taking these things. What I do is I go back to speak to Trav, update my schedule, slow things down, get back to meditating, get back to taking walks, and just, like, realizing that this is not going to end in a month. Like, this could be for the next year, year and a half, this could be this crazy. So I just need to fix, you know, fix the. The core problems. And the last week, week and a half's been. Been a lot better. But, yeah, yeah, ultimately. And now. And now, honestly, you know, you know, everything's sort of back in. Back in check. But at the start, I was, like. I was stressing out. And I think it came down to me just, like, really overwhelmed by how quickly things actually took off, like, in the market, our members and the business. And it was just like this whole, like, world just, like, flipped on its head in a matter of, like, two weeks.

Isn't this fascinating where even since those two weeks, nothing has changed? The thing that has changed is your reaction to the event that's happened. So there's an immediate reaction of, I need to do everything. I have to be on top of it. I have to answer every email, which is Unsustainable and leads to, you know, anxiety, high heart rate, all the, the terrible physical responses where your body's trying to cope to. Then I've spoken to Travis, I've reframed. I don't need to do everything yet. The situation hasn't changed. Isn't that just so crazy?

And, and like to double the size of your revenue in a month is just like, I mean that was from our biggest month. Like we've nearly 3x from last month. You know what I mean? Like it's just bananas like growth how quickly that's happened. And ultimately we have such high expectations on ourselves. Yes, one of our values at collective 50 is best in class. So it's not even the stress of onboarding these people. It's ensuring that everyone has an amazing experience and that's the killer.

And also I think you and I, we have that. We're definitely workaholics. We get a lot of pleasure and joy and sense of meaning from it and self worth. But also we're kind of perfectionists as well. We want to do as much as we can. We don't want to waste a second always be performing, which is a horrible way to live.

And ensuring all of our members getting a great experience. So it's like now that now the biggest problems are like scaling and ensuring everyone's having a great, great experience. But ultimately like all the metrics and all the feedback we're getting is just continues to be. Be awesome. And you know, we're also super dialed in on the markets. Burgers. Like we just had some great winners. I mean maple favorite of mine that, that hit. I think that hit.

Hit like local highs like last night I think.

Yeah, somewhere like that was great. And you were telling me about your portfolio. So before, before we, we move on. Yeah. It is a beta blocker. You can take it orally, intravenously or rectally. Ben. So you can shelf those tablets if you want.

So. So what? What actually. So you spoke to Travis and then what changed in your mind or what did you start or stop doing to stop those physical responses?

I had to prioritize these, these sales call like strategy calls. Like it was just, it was becoming too much like I was having, you know, 40 calls a week. Platinum onboarding calls. We have our platinum monthly calls. We're doing, you know, we're doing the, the big master classes. Then I was running the business then doing content, then the podcast, then traveling around, having to go to the office, doing in person events, running the business, managing the team like that is just unsustainable. Doing all of that.

I just want to go to bed thinking about it. I'm tired. You just saying that because I know how much work is between Beheen. Like you said like three words. There's like 15 hours of work behind those three words. And it's relentless. It just keeps coming in like there's no end in sight and that and.

And me as you know, ADHD entrepreneur, I can't stop until something's done and when it's just literally cannot end. Like we're just never ending. It's. That's like this is ever evolving. Not ability to switch off.

Yeah, you got that free floating anxiety. And the things that we've, the horrible things we've been through in the business, we don't want that again. So we go extra hard and try and capture every sale so it doesn't happen. But the consequence of that is we burn out. Your heart stops working properly and you go to the doctor and that.

And that was the thing, man. I had to step back and go, okay, cool. So the mystery, the biggest goal for the last three years was to get this business to a point where we were, we were okay. We had money in the bank and we'd be, we'd be profitable and you know, we're sort of moving from there. Well, that's all, that's all like out the door now. That's like tick box. What's next? So now it's like for me, I was sowing the weeds of like just day after day. I wasn't thinking about this is a marathon, not a sprint. And now I need to be thinking about the next five or ten years. Like not just March 2024. Like we want to be the best and biggest crypto research company in Australia in the next 10 years. Me going gung ho right now is not going to be anywhere beneficial for anyone if I burn out and I can't. And I get sick and I can't do anything because I've cooked myself.

We had this beautiful morning in Melbourne. So I woke up, I was in south bank. Went around the corner to this little restaurant called Sopreto. It's a breakfast place which then turns into a Mexican bar at 4 o'.

Clock.

And I've been holding off for three days not having this breakfast. I was eating this nice kind of chicken salad with avocado halloumi. Very healthy. Three days in a row. This is the fourth day. And I got the, I got the breakfast. And the breakfast was stack of pancakes with oreo crumb berries, ice cream and literally ice cream in a waffle cone turned upside down. It was just amazing. And then I was just like thinking. So I sent a couple of messages to Ben. He's like, man, are you free now? And I'm like, yeah. He's like, cool, come down in 15 minutes, comes down and then we go to south bank, sit in the sun, have a coffee and you play your diary about man, I've been journaling, this is what I've been thinking about. And you just started Talking about the 10 year view of collective shift and not the kind of one week or one month view that we've had for the last few years. And that was just a really beautiful conversation and really calming and reaffirming for me.

Yeah, it was so nice to even think that far out. Not that we hadn't thought that far out, but I feel as though there was so much in between getting there, there was just like not even any point thinking about that, like. But now we're at a point where that really is reality. And seeing the market, seeing where Bitcoin's being spoken about as a risk off asset, seeing it in the limelight, seeing everyday people get in this, in this, in this ecosystem, it's just, it's amazing. And then, and then burgs, that's not even like our crypto portfolios. Like I feel as though we've been so dialed in on some of the investments we've made. Like you know the Ethereum trade we made back a few days ago when we retraced 22, 25%, you know, somehow it was within like three or four hours of the bottom, like that's up 60%.

So talk about that. Why did we make that trade and then how did it happen?

Man, I've just seen this movie so many times. Like, you know, this bull market is playing out so, so closely to the last bitcoin halving event where you have these 22, 25, 30% corrections. I felt through the sentiment that I was, that I was seeing and I was living in about a week ago that things were very bearish, although fundamentally we're extremely bullish. And we had a 22 to 25% correction which we have multiple pullbacks in a bull market. And I've been and seen this movie before. These corrections can be life changing entry opportunities. And we had the Fed coming out about interest rates the next day and I felt that was going to be positive through our analysts feedback. So I took that into account. So I felt that as long as that was positive and these corrections hold up pretty strong fundamentally nothing had changed. Ethereum had underperformed. Blackrock had just come out with a hundred million dollar tokenized fund. That was the same day that or ish that the SEC was going to launch this thing into Ethereum. In being a security, it was all playing up to sentiment, negative fundamentals, extremely bullish and price was down in a bull market. Absolute massive buying opportunity. So what did we do? We loaded it up. Bergs. We made a pretty big investment into ETH. We shared it with our members. ETH was 3100, 3050 at the time. A week later at 3600.

So in the background like that might just seem like, you know, crazy. I'm plugged into the matrix. But you literally are. Because if you think about the activities you talked about, you're talking to prospects on the phone, on sales calls, you're talking about investing, you're talking about portfolios, you're delivering webinars to people and monthly platinum calls as well. You need to be across all the data. The sentiment you are with, you're creating your own content so you need research for that. You lead the content team and you're investing yourself. And you just said like you're plugged in. You basically feel the matrix because it's what you talk about all the time and you've got the multiple market cycle experience. So now we've, now we're in a position where we have money in the company. We now have crypto on the balance sheet which is a great trade. Like we're eating our own dog food and we run the company so we get more money so we can invest in more crypto.

And man, even just like as of time of recording like the COVID the investments that we've made, you know, well, Maple is one that I've spoken about publicly but that's just been a game changer. Like that's hit, that's just hitting as we speak. It's up 25% since we started this episode. Literally like we bought that at $5.50. It hit $29 just now. Like that's up. I don't even know what that's up.

You told me to buy at 13. I didn't.

Oh well yeah, but this is the thing. Like this is like we put that in, we put it out to members. These are legit things. That's amazing. And you know they're releasing updates soon as well.

Even the, even the low cap gaming token. I know you Own some of that. That just hit. That's up 38%. We hit $52. Just saying.

Let's go. Yeah, I think, I think we got a 35 entry for that one.

Yeah. So ultimately, like, I mean, at the end of the day, man, like, and I say this to people and people ask me sometimes, like, well, if you're so good, why, like, why do you need a collective shift? It's because we're doing the research anyway. We're investing a lot of money ourselves anyway and we're winning. So if we can share that research with others and they get the advantage of that and they make money, any money we make through the business, we can buy more crypto. Yeah, it's a leverage position to grow our wealth.

Exactly. And it's like what we like to do. Like, I like doing this podcast, you like doing content. And then we do that in the context of crypto, which we're doing anyway. So we get to build brands, we get to build a business, we get to get more money and we get to invest in more crypto. It's like a flywheel that just makes sense.

It's fulfillment, community, money and wealth. So good time.

Amazing, bro. Should we talk about the events that happened last week in Melbourne?

Oh yeah, that was epic. So for those that didn't come along or didn't see, we hosted three events in Melbourne last week. We hosted a free meetup for our community and social media followers on Thursday night, which was awesome. We then hosted a Friday night event for all of our members and we also hosted a platinum member lunch on the Friday, which was just epic. And Bergs, I mean, I think the member one was my favorite because just seeing all the members, Ben and Berg's listeners, you know, it was just, it was a great, great opportunity to meet everyone.

I think the events just got better and better. So let's start off with the, the public event. So that was just people on our mailing list or saw a tweet that could come down and they could talk to us. So I'm madly, like setting everything up. It was such a stitch up. So order, order like all the food and everything that was fine. But then tried to order some beers, man. Try to order some, like some wine, some ciders. Try to order on there. I'm in my little apartment in Melbourne trying to order a few days ahead and I'm like, I was too complicated. Like the Dan Murphy's website, there's like 8,000 beers. I'm like, I'll just go down to the store, go to the city, go down the store. And I'm like, okay, now it's easy. I want that, that ten cards of this. This is this. A guy talked to me and he's like, think about this, think about that. Brilliant. And I'm like, cool, I want to order this. He's like, oh, you can't do it at the store because we don't do delivery after it online. No worries. Go outside, go to the food court, sit down, type in my little order, get it all sorted, press buy. It's like, no, this is over retail quantities. I'm like, they're like, please email this thing and we'll get back to you in one to two business days. I'm like, email them. It turns out there's a number, get on the number, give them a call. And it's just nonsense, man. I just hate it. It's bullshit. It's going nowhere. It's wasting my time. Starting to stress out. So I'm like, fine, I'll put an order for like the equivalent of 10 cartons plus some wine, a few other things, and I'll order from the Richmond store, which is near Cremorne. It's fine. Went down there the next day with an Uber, right? And I told this guy, I'm like, bro, I'm going to dam if he's going to pick up some cartons and then take to the place. Is that okay? He said, yes, get there, buy more cartons. So we've actually got what we need and literally like four trolleys come up. So we've got like 10 cartons of like different beers, a couple of cartons of cider, a couple of cartons of non alcoholics and some wine. And it's literally filled up his entire boot and then filled up the back sea as well. We're driving to Cremorny, he's going down all these one way streets, all this nonsense. I'm like, oh, this guy's gonna kill me. Get there. Matt's there to greet me. I'm like, great. We get it all out of the car and then we've got this bunky fridge trolley that fits four cartons on it. So 20 trips later, up and down, we finally get it done. Then anyway, the next day I'm like, okay, there's a Coles. It's a five minute walk away from where we're having the event. Go down there. All I need is some ice and some coke. Buy the coke, get the ice, like do for an Uber. Great, Uber's here. In two minutes, we'll take us around the corner. Brilliant. Uber's 500 meters away. One minute goes by. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I can literally see the Uber. But, oh, no, guess what? The footy's on and you're not going anywhere.

Can we. Can we just add a point? So a few weeks ago, we're like, we need to do an event.

No, this was months ago, not a few weeks ago. This is a long time ago. Six weeks plus.

But he's like, okay, no worries. Yeah, let's do it. Event. Great idea. Let's make it happen. Just make sure there's nothing on in Melbourne at the time. I'm like, yeah, no, it's fine, man. All good. No, you know, typical, mate. That is all good. Nothing on Melbourne, you said.

You literally told me you checked.

Yeah, I may not have checked.

What was on, Ben, what was on?

Well, not only was the footy on, the biggest event in Melbourne was on. Being the F1, you potato.

This is like the biggest weekend in Melbourne. And you're like, no, it's fine.

120, 000 people a day. Biggest event in Melbourne was on.

You're a piece of shit. So I was going to stay at Crown, which is like 250 a night, and it was $1,200 a night, so I couldn't stay there.

Well, Leon paid 550 for his place and that thing was like a prison. It was that. That was bad.

It was. It was like drug flats that he was staying in. It was just a bedroom in someone's house. There was weed everywhere. He was taking photos. I'm like, bro, you're going to wake up. Missing kidneys, that's where. That's all that was available in Melbourne. Because Ben's like, yeah, it'll be fine, man.

It'll be fine. We need to get Louis on over next time to double check because we.

Need anyone but you.

All right if I try to organize all this stuff that you. You're talking about here?

It's such a stitch up. You're like, oh, you just need to get food. No, I had to go there. Greg's like, this is how the building works. This is how the TV works. Security. You got to wedge this door. This is how this happens. Cleaning's coming. Then this is how that. I'm like, oh, my God. What an absolute stitch up. Anyway, we got there in the end.

What about a bottle of Solo and a couple of knives of forks?

Oh, mate, it would have been the worst event. So. So anyway, it all worked out in the end. We got people to put their name badges on as well as the tokens they love and hate. Everyone was talking. Within three seconds, someone came up to me and he's like, burgs. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, how you doing, man? He's like, oh, I can't believe I'm hearing your voice. I'm like, the hugest, better Bergs fan. I'm like, oh, lad like, you just instantly mates when someone says that. Had the greatest conversations. Met haste to heaps of people talked a lot about crypto. The public event was great. The panel that you had was just phenomenal. Like, it was no bs. Every question was answered. If we couldn't do something like, we don't do that. You need. You're a degenerate. You need to go to another group. It was just so insightful and amazing. We even had people that signed up to be a member that night that came to the member event the next night that forked over two grand. It was just absolutely amazing.

Yeah, it was epic. The feedback was great. Platinum Lunch was just epic. Just the conversations we're having there with, like, big money, big strategies.

It was just like, so you've got people that work these impressive jobs, have significant wealth. And I just talked to one guy and we're in a very similar position. I'm pretty sure he has a lot more money than me, but similar mindset where he's late 40s, he owns his own business, he works all the time, and he's. He's very stressed and he just wants to go to Bali and live in a villa. And I'm like, bro, you could probably do that now or just go for a month and try, like, you know, see how your business is going to run. But as business owners, you don't want to let go. Like, you always want to touch the business, make sure things are going right. And we just talked about life and mindset and I think we're actually going to be accountability partners and keep each other accountable. And it was just one of those rare moments to talk about things you're going through and finding another human you don't even know until 10 minutes ago with the first time you met them. And you're going through the same experiences and having the same thought patterns and trying to break the old habits that you have you to get to the new life that you know you've been working towards, but you're not willing to let go of your old life and.

Your old habits and that's the power of network. Like having a peer to peer group, that accountability that we speak about, like, that's ultimately what we're putting together. A group of like minded individuals that all want to make money together in crypto. Like, how powerful is that?

It's absolutely incredible, man. The lunch was just great. I had to bail out early because someone has to be the adult and organize the event. So I went back, we did all the setup. I'm pretty sure the boys weren't going to get the ice, but they did.

I get the skewers coming down. We, we racked up a pretty healthy bill.

So I'm like, oh, I'll go back and do the event because no one else will. Luckily I had a couple of helpers and bears. Like, yeah, I'm just gonna stay here and drink. I'm like, great mate, thank you. Lovely, lovely mate. But then, then we went, we went back and it was just awesome. One of the first people that rocked up was Kent, who was on an episode a couple episodes ago. Absolute legend. So great to meet him in person. We talked about like the brain, his, like his heart, all the stuff around it, like gut health, gut brain access. It was just incredible mindset, like what's important and how you don't want to be stressed and removing from your life. And met the hugest BNB fan as well. He traveled from, I think it was Bendigo or something. I don't know where it was, but two and a half hours away on the train and he's just like, he loves it. He says BNB is an absolute pisser. He was a legend. Talk to him heaps. We did a panel as well. I went pretty hard at a few things. I was just letting loose.

Bergs is let loose on AI.

Oh, I ripped AI a new one.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm like, nah, this is my opinion. This is how it is. And just hearing, oh, Matt and Nick, oh my God. Like one guy asked a question, he's like, what are you guys focusing on? And Matt just goes on this like five minute talk. And usually when someone talks, you're like, I should probably stop them. But it was so Gucci. You're like, oh my God. Dropping the biggest alpha. And then Nick just backs it up as well. And then those guys were just swamped after people wanting to speak to them. And the member event, it was just on. We smashed all the pizza, got through so many beers, it was just like home. And people were saying like, they're like, oh, I've never actually spoken those words. Because when you're a degenerate trading crypto, which some of these people are, they're long term members, they're not going to say like, oh, I defy fat bag into dog whip hat or something. But when you say it, it comes out of your lips the first time and you're typing on the Internet. Whoa. That's what that feels like. It's just so comfortable to be able to talk to people like you at your level. And those levels were completely variable from beginner to full.

Dj yeah, I totally agree man. No, it was a great time, great month, great time to be alive. Crypto is obviously very much alive and well. We've got a very exciting time. We're still pretty bitcoin halving.

Like wow, bro, this is not even the test pump. This is the beginning of the beginning. And seriously, I said this at the event. Bitcoin has eaten silver 1.4 trillion. It's going to 8 gold at roughly 14 trillion. So it's going to be 700,000 a coin then it's coming after property. You better be prepared. That's just one coin, let alone all the other stuff we're doing and all the other things that we're talking about.

It'S life changing, isn't it, even for you. We said to you, you had a goal of buying your parents a house and you're going to do that through your investing and crypto portfolio. You might be able to do that through the business which is just life changing. Isn't that wild?

While I was thinking about it, I was actually about to update my strategy because it's all gone out the window. It's all going to be achieved very quickly. So I need to readjust and this is what happens, this is what I say to people. Having targets too far out is nearly null and void because things change like, like some of the targets on some of these altcoins, man, are going to be blown through the next couple of months like and we're nowhere near the top.

To, to achieve my goals I need to 2x my portfolio from here.

When you and I did so Bugs, we did a like a, you know, I guess our version of a strategy session and, and we sort of sat down and Bergs will take me through things and I had a bit of an opinion and I was like burks, like, you're like, you're like a couple of good moves away from like just taking everything off.

Like, do you understand this? And you're like, I know. You're like, oh fuck yeah, I didn't even like, you know, it's weird.

Like when you bounce it off someone else, it gets out of your own head and you're like, actually, the thing that I didn't place too much emphasis on will be life changing. And it's really weird. Like, it's like, it's not too many moves off and I'm like, I could just leave things the way they are and put a little bit more money in here and there and should be right, mate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of weird. And then you're like, well, actually, maybe I need to really look at my goals and have some bigger goals because the wheels are going to come off and things are going to go pretty. All right, mate.

Awesome times, guys. Thank you so much for listening. If you like the podcast, please, please share it with a friend. We'd love for you to, you know, get this, get this sort of information around. We want to help as many people as we can. This bull market, make sure they crush it. If you want to take the next step and join our journey, we'd love for you to think about becoming a member. We've got links in the description. You can book a strategy call, you can join one of our live free masterclasses. If you want a little bit more information, head over to our website and check it out. There is some awesome opportunities going to be available in the next 12 months and we're here to help you every step of the way. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.

See you, champions.