Joe Cross - Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead

Full transcript: Joe Cross on London Real

5:44 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr. Joe Cross, who is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, author, and wellness advocate who directed, produced, and was the subject of the award-winning documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, which has been seen by more than 20 million people around the world, as well as its sequel Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead 2. You wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Reboot, with Joe Ju’s Diet book, which is credited with having accelerated the plant-based eating movement. Joe, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to London Real.

6:30 Joe Cross: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s great to be here, mate.

6:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, there’s so many things I want to ask you about the movies, the books, you know, the movement, but there’s one quote that really stuck out in my mind from you, and I’m just going to read it out because I think it, I think a lot of people can relate to where you were at the time. So I’m going to start, and you said, the night before my 40th birthday, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the bloke staring back at me, more than 100 pounds overweight, loaded up on medication to manage a chronic autoimmune disease. I finally realized it was my own excessive behavior over the past 20 years, too much junk food, too many sweets, too much alcohol, tobacco, and stress that got me in this mess. I had squandered my health in the pursuit of wealth, and that was a very, very tough thing to acknowledge. That’s a powerful statement. Yeah. How long ago was that?

7:28 Joe Cross: Well, I’m 48 now, and that was, as you said there, it was actually the morning of my 40th birthday, is when that happened. I’d been out to celebrate the night before, and I’d had probably 10 beers, 10 pints, if you like. I’d had probably two bottles of wine, half a bottle of vodka, two packets of cigarettes, and enough Chinese food for probably half of China. And that was the welcome to 40 Joe. Go out, smash yourself, hammy yourself, wake up, go to the medicine jar, take pills for a chronic autoimmune disease that I’d had for eight long years. I was pre-diabetic,

8:04 I was high cholesterol, high blood pressure. Bottom line, Brian, is that I was a time bomb waiting to explode. Hence the honest conversation that day in the mirror, and I don’t know what caused it. People often ask me why then, one at the week before, one at the month before. And as Oprah would say, it’s the aha moment, and that was my aha moment. And I think it comes down basically to probably a bit of vanity in that I had a four in front of my birthday. I was all of a sudden 40, the big four-oh. And it just seemed like only yesterday that I was 20, that I was running around playing rugby, rowing, running. My rib cage was very evident, abs were present. I was fit, I was healthy, I was strong, I was a lifeguard. And

9:07 This wasn’t in the brochure, I didn’t sign up to be the fat old white guy at 40. I didn’t sign up saying, yeah, you know what, I’ll take some of that diabetes, that’ll be good, and some of that higher cholesterol, yeah, and give me a double serve of high blood pressure. I’ll take that. That just happened, and it happened real quick. And so that little time machine that I used that day to travel back to see how things were, I used that to go forward and to say, wow, well, if 20 years went by that quick, what’s the next 20 going to hold? And that was pretty frightening, that was confronting, that was scary. And I even thought, you know, it’s possible I may not be here, I may not make the next 20. And so I had this sort of, this moment where I made the commitment. In Australia, we have a term which is shit or get off the pot. And it’s about procrastinating. I’d been doing a lot of procrastinating. And this was like, you know what, enough is enough. You either do something about this joke, or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’re going to suffer the consequences. So I didn’t know what to do, Brian, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something.

10:22 Brian Rose: And you were 320 pounds at this point?

10:24 Joe Cross: Yeah, I was 320 pounds. I was loaded up on a multitude of medications. The autoimmune disease I had is a thing called chronic urticaria, which is essentially, the body has a, all of us have a defense mechanism in our immune system that if anything breaks the dermis, your skin, if like, for example, a mosquito bites you, when the mosquito puts its, you know, I don’t know, beak or stinger or whatever, it is the bite that goes into your body, your mast cells, right, M-A-S-T, the mast cells are kind of like the lookout guys. And they go, hold on a second, you know, breakage down here on the big toe, a mosquito is just poked through the big toe. So the mast cells in that region get a signal from the brain to release histamine, and the histamine is released, and it localizes the potential poison that maybe that mosquito put in. So it sort of protects the rest of the body. It’s an incredible mechanism for, you know, our immune system, how it works, to localize an invader, if you like. The problem with my immune system, my defense mechanism, is that it was confused about pressure versus a breakage of the skin. So if you shook my hand too hard, it was confused that maybe a thousand mosquitoes had just bitten my hand, and therefore the mast cells released untold amount of histamine, and that didn’t have a lot of places to go, so it would leak into the joints. And all of a sudden my hand would swell up like it’s been

11:57 Slammed in a car door, and my fingers couldn’t move. It was like an arthritis sort of thing, and I was rendered useless for five or six hours. And then I had to take high doses of prednisone to sort of get the mast cells back in check.

12:12 Brian Rose: And you’ve been diagnosed with this eight years earlier?

12:16 Joe Cross: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I talk about it is that I broke at 32.

12:20 I was whole, I was in good shape, I was fixed if you like, all my life, and I broke at 32. And I remained broken right through until I made the changes. I’m not broken anymore, but I was broken.

12:34 Brian Rose: It’s funny because you talk about this the night before your 40th, and that sounds familiar. I know we both used to work kind of in the financial industry, futures, and trading. And that night out sounds very typical. Let’s see, that’s 10 pints, two bottles of wine, the big meal, the shots, normal, the cigarettes, and then let’s do it again the next day. And who drops first? Well, then you’re not up for it. And so you just get ingrained into that culture towards that’s normal.

13:09 Joe Cross: 100%. And that’s a big problem we have is what is normal.

13:13 You know, what crowd you’re running in, and what all of a sudden the new normal, and this is a trap that I definitely fell into. The lifestyle that I generated around myself, which was really the focus on wealth, not on health. I like to think about it, Brian, that we’re all jugglers, you know, all of us, every single human on this planet is a juggler. And we all juggle predominantly five things is what we juggle. We juggle love, we juggle career, we juggle family and friends, we juggle self, and we juggle health. They’re the five things that we’ve all got in our balance. And let’s face it, juggling five things, it’s a lot easier juggling four, it’s a lot easier to juggle three, and two’s easier than three, and so on, right?

14:08 So I just said, you know what, bugger this juggling five, I’m going to put love and I’m going to put health over there. And I’ll just, you know, family and friends I can handle pretty easily. But that career thing, I’m going to really focus on that and self wealth. You know, I’ll indulge myself, I won’t do the spirituality self, I’ll do the self indulgence. So juggling sort of three things, I was really good at that. But as you and I both know, Brian, somehow it doesn’t work that way. If you put those other things over to the side and don’t tend to them, it’ll come back to bite you. And you know, that biting comes in the form of breaking. And I often refer to the way that the world is binary. I think binary is a word that I associate with. You know, you either buy or sell, you’re either awake or asleep, you’re pregnant or not pregnant, you’re male or female, you’re dead or alive. All these computers, everyone listening to us or watching us, it’s all zeros and ones.

15:09 And I also think that when you go and cast a huge net against the population of the world, you either find people that are broken, or people that just need a little bit of tweaking. Haven’t met anyone who’s perfect yet, Brian. I know a few people who think they are, but I haven’t met anyone who’s perfect. So I think we all can fall into one of those two camps, you’re broken, or you just need some tweaking. And I certainly was broken. And so what I do now, and what I talk about now, and what I’m focused on now is trying to help and inspire and educate and above all entertain the both camps, the broken and the tweakers and give them a path to maybe certainly going from unbroken or broken to unbroken and fixed. And for the tweakers to maybe get on the path and journey to find out a little bit better way to succeed.

16:05 Brian Rose: Can you tell me how the movie got made? Why America? Why did you go to juice? I know you did some research as far as what the human body had subsisted on all the time. But from that 40th look in the mirror on your 40th birthday to touring across America for 60 days, starring in your own film, how did that manifest itself?

16:27 Joe Cross: So the movie was much later than the change. So the first step was, I need to fight fire with fire here. I’m in a bad way. I mean, this is the equivalent of your house being on fire. You can’t pause. You got to call 911, right? You got to get assistance. And so once I

16:45 Came to this conclusion that my house was on fire, I very quickly tried to work out, well, what can I do about it? And so no, no thinking about a movie, nothing about America, all about what do I do? And because I’m a business guy, and I had like eight or nine companies at this stage, I’d moved on from finance, and I had a bunch of startups and technology and all sorts of things. And I was busy, you know, you know what it’s like, if you’re running that many companies, and you’re doing stuff, you’re working, you know, 65, 70 hours a week.

17:15 Brian Rose: Right. And you were running successful businesses. Yeah, you know, you had a proven track record that you could get things done. You would just never focused on your own health.

17:25 Joe Cross: Correct. So I ditched a bunch of these things sold up as quickly as I could. This all took about a year. Okay, so it wasn’t like the day after my 40th birthday, I went out and started eating broccoli. No, I was that hung over that I think I had some McDonald’s. I mean, I needed I needed to have my food, right?

17:42 I didn’t panic, but I knew that it had to be the priorities needed to be shifted. And I needed to flip things around. So you just don’t panic and do it overnight. But I had to do it quickly, because I needed to keep the momentum of this interchange inside me this shift. And so I used logic, I really went and said, Okay, in business, what do we do? We focus a lot on the problems. I’m a problem. I’m now the new startup, the new business is fixing Joe. I had outsourced my health to other people. When I got sick, I went to doctors, I went to pharmaceutical companies, I said, Here’s some money, fix me. I’m too busy to worry about this. I’ve got businesses over here.

18:28 You guys went to college, you went to university, you’re the scientist, here’s a bunch of cash. Give me a call when you got it all worked out. And I’ll come back. Pretty stupid, and they didn’t get it right.

18:41 Brian Rose: Well, I mean, this is what most people do.

18:43 Joe Cross: What I what I just described, most people do. Yeah, that’s what they do. They outsource their health to somebody else. And so on that day, when I decided to bring it in house, when I decided to bring it home, I needed to have a plan. So I used logic. I mean, I, I basically said, Okay, so let’s just think about this for a second. You know, I’m 40 years of age. But really, am I 40? You know, what am I?

19:08 I’m a member of this race called homo sapien. That is a member of the humanoid family. And I’m not really 40 years old. I’m actually 7 million years old. And if you think about homo sapien, I’m like 225, 230,000 years old, depending who you talk to, which means that I’m a product of 15,000 sets of grandparents that are swap genetic material to create the magnificently.

19:40 And we are top of the food chain. We are it. We are the most incredible, sophisticated species on this place we call home, planet Earth. How did we get to be so damn successful? What did we do for all these years that made us king of the jungle? And I, at that moment, started to realize about this incredible love affair, this incredible partnership connection that we have had with plants, this bond between mother nature and her goodness and her resources and humans. You start to think about it. I mean, just think about all the things that they’ve done for us or what they do for us from providing shelter, you know, treehouses or timber, tables, beds, chairs in the old days, whatever.

20:45 Be able to throw a few logs on a fire to keep us warm in winter. The CO2 we breathe out, they take that in and flip that O2. And of course, above all, they provide the total food group called plant fruit, the total amount of energy, all of the macronutrients being carbohydrate, protein and fat, and all the micronutrients. They’re all found in plants, the vitamins and minerals, the phytochemicals. It’s all there. The complete guide to food is all found in plants. And so this magic of what, for example, say a cucumber is in that it grows from the seed and takes nutrients from the soil and the atmosphere, the nitrogen, and then all of a sudden this H2O that falls from the sky. And of course, the big daddy in the sky just shines that power down and bingo, you have this magical plant called a cucumber that is harnessing all of this energy and information for our four or five trillion cells that make up the incredible you and me. We take for granted all the time. We don’t think like this. I certainly didn’t think like this. So once you discover or have an understanding from a very big picture point of view about this magic, this story, this love story, this partnership, and then I looked at myself and basically went, okay, what did I do? I gave mother nature the bird at age 18. I basically said, thanks very much for all the help you’ve given all my ancestors and everyone else on this planet. I’m Joe Cross. I’m master of the universe. I don’t need you. See you

22:31 Later, mother nature. And I turned my back on her. I went and lived on this new food called process food. I went and lived on what effectively is dead food and then animal product, which is kind of like recently dead food. So I put a lot of dead into my body. And of course that affected life in me.

22:54 I didn’t consume life. I consumed dead and recently dead. And of course the human body is a pretty incredible thing. I mean, I, from the age of 18, 17, when I left home, 18, you know, five years, 10 years, I was good. I mean, I held up all right. But 14 years later, 15 years later, when I was 32, I broke because no one can ignore the biological laws of cause and effect. You will break. So because I understood all of this, Brian, I basically said, you know what? I have to go back, knock on mother nature’s door and see if she’ll have me back. I’ve got to give this a shot.

23:31 I’d heard something from a professor Ron Penny, who was a very, very, very well-known, respected doctor in Australia. And he said, Joe, 70% of all disease in the Western world is caused by our lifestyle choices. 70. 70.

23:44 Brian Rose: And do you agree? You think that’s about right?

23:47 Joe Cross: Oh, yeah. I have no doubt that.

23:49 Brian Rose: And what are those lifestyle choices that are causing this?

23:52 Joe Cross: Well, the big three are smoking, the amount of exercise we do or don’t do, and the sort of food and drink we consume.

23:59 They’re the big three. And then the next three, hot on the heels, is the sort of sleep you get, how you manage stress, and how much love and intimacy is in your life. And these are the big six lifestyle choices that affect 70% of disease. I mean, it’s kind of insanity. So I went down that list and went fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. I mean, you know, I was I was a disaster. You can’t fix everything overnight, Brian. I’ve learned that. So I just attacked one thing or really two, I gave up the smokes, because that’s not that difficult, you know. And I decided that I needed to go back to Mother Nature. And she sort of said to me in a little funny way when our little chat I had with her over time, she said, Joe, listen, I’ll, I’ll let you back in. You know, when I knocked on the door, she said, you can come back in, but I’m not gonna wave a magic wand. I’m not going to fix you on day one. And I don’t know if I can fix you. But like in any relationship that’s broken, and my relationship with her was broken, that if I put the effort in, and I really try hard to mend this, and I pay her the respect, and I put it in and do the hard yards, that you’ll see what she could do.

25:10 Brian Rose: You’re very well versed in this. But you taught yourself all of this. Yeah. Over the years.

25:16 Joe Cross: Well, I taught myself this at that moment in time. This was this was like a realization that I had been a complete asshole. I’ve been an ignorant, stupid man when I thought I was a smart man.

25:29 I was focusing on wealth. And I was ignoring health. I mean, I was an idiot. I was thinking that the boats and the cars and the watches and the they were more important than the micronutrients and the blood pressure and the cholesterol.

25:44 Brian Rose: Were you able to keep any of the peer group you had at age 40, as you made this transformation?

25:50 Brian Rose: Or did they all think you had lost it? Did they think that you were just gone in some strange new way?

25:57 Joe Cross: I think some of them thought that. I think that, you know, I didn’t lose any friends. I mean, my friends are, you know, I’m fortunate, if you like, but you know, lady luck does follow a person of action. But I was fortunate in the fact that I had good friends, but I put a hard, I put effort into my friendships. I don’t take it for granted. I put the hard yards in.

26:22 And so they were a bit like concerned when I disappeared, like, from 2007 to 2011. I had no film to show for it. We’re skipping ahead to the film idea now, because at the first beginning, I now realize I’ve got to go back to plants, right? So the plants idea is a simple one. And then when they when they sort of realized that I was now going to just drink juice, and the way that came about was that because I was 100 pounds heavier than I should be, I kind of asked the question, Brian, why? Why is it so like, what’s the purpose? Why is it so, you know, such a bummer that eating pizza, drinking beer, having chocolate ice cream while watching football puts on weight? It’s so unfair. I mean, I just used to love doing that.

27:18 Brian Rose: Okay, I can argue that I still love doing that. Many people love doing that many more.

27:24 Joe Cross: Yeah, every day. Exactly. So I had to ask the question, what’s the benefit to the human body, to our ancestors, to our existence, going back to that big picture view, what has been the benefit for us as a warm blooded species to be able to have this ability to regulate our weight by gaining and losing pounds. You know, our human body is made up predominantly of five things, a skeleton, organs, fat muscle, and liquid, blood, water, whatever you want to call it. And the only real two that you can adjust and control and have some say over is the muscle and the fat. You know, you can let muscle wither away, you can build muscle, you can stack fat on, you can burn fat off.

28:16 And so I started to try and understand this as to why was I 320 pounds, you know, what was going on there? The best idea I could come up with logically, Brian, in all honesty, was just using my logic was, you know what, well, Mother Nature used to give and she’s take away there was feast and famine. The fact that we live now in this modern day world where there’s a feast on every corner, that wasn’t always the way. Most of the existence of our ancestors had times where there was plenty or times where there wasn’t much at all. And in fact, lots of times when there was nothing. And so this resonated with me that essentially what was going on is that this fat fool that I was looking at in the mirror on that day was essentially a body that was protecting me. My body was looking after me. So from that moment on, I don’t see fat people now. I don’t see any fat people anywhere in the world. I see people who are carrying lots of extra energy. And I’m like, is there a famine coming here that I don’t know about? I didn’t get the tweet. I didn’t get the email. What’s happening? So holding on to all of this energy, my body was saying, Joe, don’t worry. When that famine hit Sydney, you can be the last man standing. I’ve got you covered. I’ve got you protected. Those pizzas and burgers you had when you were 22, they’re still here waiting to be used up.

29:36 Brian Rose: Right. You’re almost reframing the fat. It’s not a bad thing or a lazy thing. It’s just you’re holding all this energy.

29:44 Joe Cross: Correct. And what I’ve learned is that actually being fat is not the problem. Okay. Like if you want to just, anyone listening out there who’s carrying, you know, 10 kilos, 20 pounds, 50 pounds, whatever, think about it this way. Actually having the fat on you is not really the problem. It’s not great, but it’s not really the problem. The real problem is what you did to put it on and what you’ll continue to do the lifestyle you did to put it on the amount of fat that had to be supplied through the arteries, the plaque that’s built up, the problems of the lifestyle in the past. That’s where we are causing the drama. So then once you understand this and you realize that plants are the answer and that possibly not eating is the answer, you have a dilemma because I’ve got to live on plants, but then I’ve got to not eat. And so put them together and you get juice because what’s juicing? Juicing is drinking water filtered through plants. That’s what it is.

30:50 Brian Rose: I’m still trying to get my head around that.

30:53 Brian Rose: Drinking water filtered through plants and getting the essential.

30:58 Joe Cross: Well, most plants, right, like if we take our cucumber, it’s mostly water. And orange is mostly water. Apple is mostly water. Most plants are mostly water. We are mostly water. Our planet is covered in water.

31:14 Water is life. This is the key thing that you ask anyone, anyone who knows anything about science, you need water to have life. So for us or for the way that I was thinking about this is that, well, we all know water is good for us. Water is like the best thing you can drink. It’s life.

31:34 So surely drinking water that’s been trapped in a plant, when you extract that out, that’s got to be good for you. Now, why has it got colour? Why when you pull it out, is it green or purple or red or yellow or orange, our five primary colours of the fruit and vegetable rainbow? Well, that’s the sunlight. That’s the energy. That’s the phytonutrients. That’s the good stuff. You see, the plant, if you like the cucumber, the structure of the cucumber, the cellulose, that’s what holds all those nutrients together. That’s Mother Nature’s packaging.

32:13 That’s how it packages. And that’s how it protects from the microbes and heat and oxygen that wants to get in there and basically destroy, consume or dehydrate the plant.

32:25 Brian Rose: Right. And it gives it structure so it can get the sunlight.

32:29 Joe Cross: Correct. It gives it destruction. Now, that structure we call fibre. And fibre is great for us, but fibre is fibre. Fibre does two main things. It slows down the absorption of sugary, sort of based fruits or veggies, and also cleans out our colon, which is really important. But the actual essence, the micronutrients that our cells need, that information, that’s not in the fibre.

32:55 The fibre is the thing that carries it. And that’s the stuff that comes out in the water. That’s what’s in the water. That’s the colour. And so, essentially what I did, if you think about it, Brian, is I sort of had this moment of realisation that I was needed to do action. I had six months of lots of thinking and really sort of going to a high part, you know, when I say high part, like that 100,000 foot view of life, and then zooming in every now and then and looking at things and using a macro, micro view. And I came to the conclusion that with 70% of all disease being caused by lifestyle choices, my issue was getting well. The fat part wasn’t the main drive.

33:40 It was all about getting off meds. It was about staying alive. It was about quality of life. It’s about being healthy. Then I said, right, I’ve done 20 years of basically saying, Mother nature, see you later. I’ve now knocked on her door. I’ve done the crime. Now I’ve got to do the time. So I locked myself up in what I’m calling fruit and veggie prison. I sentenced myself to two years of hard labour with fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, seeds and whole grains.

34:11 I figured that with 20 years of this complete arrogance and ignorance that take 10% of that, that would be enough of penance. And if at the end of two years, I was still sick, I was prepared to accept that I was in the 30% camp, not the 70, the unlucky, just genetics, bad luck, blame my ancestors. Okay, wrong place, wrong time. And the juicing part was kind of like going into prison and putting myself in solitary confinement for the first two months. That was the logic that I’d arrived to.

34:48 Brian Rose: You knew it wasn’t going to be sustainable, but it was something you had to do.

34:54 Joe Cross: It was something that I felt that because my, because us, we have done this in the past, I really felt that fasting was something that we’d forgotten to do. And it was critical and important.

35:08 Look at all the religions, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhism, Christianity, they all have fasting in them. Look at animals when they’re sick, they don’t eat. Talk to a race horse trainer. Horses can’t talk to race horse trainers and tell them how they’re feeling after a race. But a horse trainer knows that if the horse eats up the meal, they’re good as gold. If they don’t eat, they know there’s something wrong. When our little babies are born, there’s three ways they tell us there’s something wrong. They scream like hell, they give us a temperature, or they go off their food. So littered through, you just got to look, you just got to open your eyes and see that the idea of not eating is something natural and normal for human beings.

35:51 Brian Rose: Right. Just not us Westerners or us people used to many meals a day. Modern day people that are genetically mismatched for the modern times.

35:59 Joe Cross: So I said, right, I’ve got to do the fasting, I’ve got to do the plants, let’s combine it. Drinking water just didn’t seem right. Gut feel led me down the way of juice only 60 days. I did 60 random number, there was another bloke with my initials who did 40 days.

36:14 I thought, you know what, I can’t do that. I better go a bit longer than him.

36:19 Brian Rose: Did Jaycee fast for 40 days?

36:21 Joe Cross: He did. He did 40 days of water. Water. Yeah, he did 40 days.

36:25 Brian Rose: Did you consider a water fast?

36:27 Joe Cross: I did consider it, but it just didn’t feel right. The gut feel was all these beautiful plants and I could drink water through them. That seemed like a bit more logical to me. Anyway, so once I started telling a few buddies that I was going to do this, that I was all fired up, ready to go, a mate of mine said, listen, you know, he was in the filmmaking world. He said, mate, you are the most least likely person to do something like this. Because this is in 2006, we’re talking about this now.

36:56 Brian Rose: Okay. Pre YouTube.

36:57 Joe Cross: No, no, no. YouTube was one year old. One year.

37:00 YouTube is one year old. It’s one year before the iPhone. Okay. This is when DVDs were big. Remember those things?

37:06 Brian Rose: I do.

37:06 Joe Cross: So the things that are around like this, he used to put them in a player and press play. So DVDs were big. And so I thought, you know what, my mate, he probably talks a bit of sense. And there’s a couple of things that could be helpful in this. Number one, there’s going to be a lens on me, which will help me stay in prison. Kind of like the guard, accountability.

37:26 Brian Rose: Right. The warden accountability. Yeah.

37:28 Joe Cross: And also there’s also the fact that if this works, boy, this would be fun to show people because I’m not Robinson Crusoe here. There’s a lot of other people that are just like me.

37:36 Brian Rose: Right. Had you been a bit of performer at all in your life?

37:39 Had you felt comfortable in front of cameras or?

37:42 Joe Cross: No, no, never been in front of a camera. Okay. All right. I mean, perform. I mean, I could always tell a story and tell a joke and, you know, hold a dinner party conversation to ransom. I could do that, but not to the level where I am now or making films or anything. No, no.

37:59 Brian Rose: Okay. So you decided to do this film, but you had already experimented with juicing before the film started.

38:05 Joe Cross: Well, I hadn’t, I certainly hadn’t done 60 days of just juice, but obviously in the lead up, I was like, what’s this going to be like? You know, I had a few, had a few goes at it. It wasn’t something that was, it wasn’t a lifestyle. You got to understand something, Brian. If I knew this was going to work, forget the film I would have done at the day.

38:23 Like I didn’t know this was going to work. And as it turned out, look, I committed to two years, right? 60 days of juice. I’m still sick. It wasn’t like 60 days just healed me. I did another three months.

38:38 It wasn’t like effectively, the way I like to think of it as I was let out on good behavior, on patrol, on parole, if you like, five months after going to fruit and veggie prison. 60 days of juice and 90 days of just consuming fruit, vegetable, nuts, bean seeds, juicing it, blending it and eating it. After five months, no more medication, a hundred pounds down, felt the best I’ve ever felt in my life. I was on top of the world. Like, I can’t describe how good I felt. And I was no longer broken. I was fixed. So now I didn’t need, in my opinion, to do the next one year and seven months of hard labor. I started to slowly bring other food groups in very slowly. It took four years before I had red meat, for example.

39:29 So it slowly, I brought things back in. And of course, the film had a life itself. You asked me why I go to America. The main reason I went to America is back then, there was no Game of Thrones. There was no Downton Abbey. And Americans weren’t watching anything that was made anywhere else in the world except America. So if you’re going to make a film and you want to get people to watch it, you’ve got to go to where they are. And so I went there and also driving across Australia, there’s not a lot of people to talk to in the middle of the desert. So it would have been pretty lonely. But it’s notoriously hard to stay on a diet on the road. But I guess you were, the movie was about the diet. So yeah, and I wanted to, you know, I wanted to, yes, it was, but I also wanted to sort of say that, you know, going across the country wasn’t the original idea. It was actually just to go to America.

40:21 I got bored being in the one spot. I just wanted to get off and go. So I went. If you notice in the film, it’s not until the last 30 days that I start to travel, because the first 30 days, I’m just hanging around New York and I’m bored. And I just had to get out. So yeah, it was harder, but it was actually more interesting to see stuff and talk to people.

40:41 Brian Rose: Right. Can you talk about the first three or four days when you went to juice, the symptoms you had and the headaches and the withdrawal symptoms? I, when you described it, I’ve heard you talk about it. It just didn’t, you know, it seems so foreign to me. And then how you felt after that.

40:57 Joe Cross: Yeah. So I didn’t know at the time that this was going to be so bad.

41:01 I didn’t realize it. I now know, I now know obviously what was going on, but I didn’t know then. So I felt like a big 18 wheel truck driver or not truck driver truck had run over me. I thought I was going to die. I was that sick. I mean, I forget the cameras. This is the, this is the inexperience of not making a film.

41:24 Brian Rose: Right. You didn’t get this on tape.

41:26 Joe Cross: Cameras even when I was feeling this bad, I wanted to look good. I mean, it was crazy, right? This was in what I know now, this would have been gold. We’ve got some of it, but I kicked them out of the room. I said, Oh, leave me alone. I don’t want to do this.

41:37 I’m forget the movie. I’m dying here.

41:40 Brian Rose: This is the first four days of filming.

41:44 Joe Cross: Yeah, it’s the first four days. Basically because, you know, what see, see, our bodies want to live. Survival is a big thing for humans. And thirst and hunger are just two major survival mechanisms that we have at our disposal. Think about this. Imagine if you had a little boy or a little girl born that never had the mechanism of thirst, like never got thirsty.

42:14 That’d be really dangerous because that little baby could forget to drink and when they tend forget to drink. So you’d have to have some kind of an alarm system just to remind, Oh, I must drink water, I must drink water, I must drink water. Otherwise you die. You go five, six days, 10 days without water, you’ll die. So we have this built in mechanism that says thirst, Oh, I’m thirsty, I’m parched. I need some water. We had this built in that’s been passed on to us by our grandparents, by the 7 million years of evolution. That’s what we own. We own that and food or hunger is the same thing. Grumpy, agitated, make you sick, make you tired, make you not be able to focus on anything else, Brian, except food. When you don’t eat, your body’s going to start telling you who’s in charge. And so think about it. If we didn’t have this powerful thing about making us eat, you and I wouldn’t be. No one would be watching. No one would be listening to this show because no one would have survived. They would have forgotten to eat. There are other things going on. Trying to stay warm, trying to like hang out, have sex, all these things were going on. Food took huge risk, leaving family, going out, trying to bring food back, big issue food. So the idea that you can just not eat and not have any pain, that’s insanity. You’re going to go through pain, but it doesn’t take long before the body says, oops, we’ve been here before. Brian’s back on the savannah. Joe’s back on the savannah.

43:50 Let’s dull down the pain bit now because we’ve thrown everything at him trying to make you meat over the first three or four days of you and he couldn’t, but it’s not his fault. There was no food around. So now let’s give him a lot of energy. Let’s give him better eyesight, better sense of smell, better hearing, better focus. Let’s fire him up so he can get off his butt, get out of the cave and walk 50 miles and find us some food.

44:12 Brian Rose: Fascinating. It’s funny, I had clients when I worked in the city who would do Ramadan, and so they would be fasting for 30 days. And I remember one of them telling me, he’s like, I was like, how do you do it? I was on the phone and we were trading or something. And he said, Brian, he’s like, I can smell everything. I could see everything. I could sense everything.

44:28 And I didn’t know what he was talking about.

44:31 Joe Cross: And that’s what happens when you fast for a little while. Because your body’s in survival mode. It’s bringing everything much more senses come alive, trying to help you stay alive.

44:41 Brian Rose: Right. And so how did you get through those three days of pain? I mean, didn’t you want to go back and grab the nearest thing?

44:48 I’m sure some caffeine would have made you feel better. Some ice cream or some burger or something. You seem like a disciplined guy.

44:57 Joe Cross: Yeah. Well, you know what it was? It was the fact that I didn’t think I had a choice because this was my last shot at trying to fix being broken. And so it was more that fear of what life would be like if I could make the next 20 years. You know, there’s a number that people talk about in life. They talk about your life expectancy. We’ve all heard this, right? Yeah. I think in the US, it’s 79 for a male and 81 and a half for a female. Well, there’s a new number we talk about now, which is not life expectancy. It’s healthy life expectancy. And for a male in the US, that’s 64. Now that’s crazy. I think it’s 66, 67 for a female. That is insanity. It’s a little bit more in the UK and a little bit more in the US. Sorry, in Australia. But that is insanity. That healthy life expectancy for a male in the modern day, 64. So in other words, we’re just going to accept that by the time you get to 64, you’re broken and you’re not ever going to be fixed again.

46:02 So that’s what drove me through those days. That’s what I try to share with people who are broken, who want to be fixed again and be well again, that you cannot do 20, 30, 40, 15, whatever the number of years is, ignoring and turning your back on mother nature and thinking that 10 days on juice will write everything and get everything back to them. You just can’t do five, 3,000, 9,000, whatever it is, days of that ignorance and think that some small amount is going to repair you.

46:43 You’ve got to think big picture here. And look, think about it. It’s not a bad trade, really. I did 20 years of smashing myself and then five months of commitment and I’m good again. They’re not bad. That’s not bad. That’s not too bad. That gives a lot of people hope.

47:01 70% chance if you’re chronically sick, 70% chance you’re doing it to yourself. It’s worth trying to find out whether you’re in the idiot camp or the unlucky camp, right, Brian?

47:11 Brian Rose: What happens after the movie? Is it a hit immediately? Does it take time? And then the message gets out there and then do you have to make sure the message is received correctly?

47:22 Because I’m guessing a lot of people say like, okay, I get it, Joe. I’m going to juice for seven days. I’m going to be good. Or I’m going to juice the rest of my life, which isn’t what you’re saying, either.

47:33 Joe Cross: No. So what happens is the movie takes forever to get made because it costs a lot of money. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have too many people hired. It’s like the financial crisis comes. The world’s imploding. This is where my friends are thinking Joe’s lost his marbles because he’s in an edit room in the West Village of New York and the Aussie dollar has fallen to 50 cents. The stock market’s crashing. Everything else in my life is coming undone. Here I am pouring thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into some digital content that no one knows.

48:02 Brian Rose: Did you finance it yourself?

48:04 Joe Cross: Yeah, well, most of it. Then eventually I had to get other investors in because I was basically getting broke doing this, right? And then I ended up spending a year on the road with the film doing festivals and I was getting great response. It all led to this premiere in April of 2011. We did the premiere in New York and LA and nothing happened. It was like three months, April, May, June of nothing. I’ve got to say, that was when I started to really think, boy, maybe all my friends who were telling me that I was an idiot, maybe I was right.

48:40 Maybe they were right because nothing’s happening here. I mean, this isn’t, you know, there’s nothing happening.

48:47 Brian Rose: Right. But you felt good.

48:49 Joe Cross: I felt good, but you got to understand I’ve just put, you know, five, four years, five years into a project that consumed me and that I gave up everything else. Cost me, you know, a lot in time, relationships, a lot of stuff in terms of, you know, it cost me to do this. And I was expecting something bigger. I was expecting to be embraced more and nothing. Right. And so there were some moments there, some very, very, you know, there was probably one night that I spoke to one buddy of mine and I basically sort of said, you know, I think I’ve really messed this up. I think, I think, yes, I’ve got my health and that’s great, but I think I could have done it without the film because it’s not really, it’s not doing what I thought it was going to do. It’s not being seen. It’s not helping.

49:39 Brian Rose: Welcome to filmmaking, right? So many broken hearts in filmmaking.

49:43 Joe Cross: And so, and so then I went, okay, well, look, you know, I’ve got to pick myself up. That’s life. You know, move on. But at this stage, Netflix wasn’t a phenomenon. This is 2011. And Netflix streaming had just sort of got going. And I was told by my guys, the movie distributor guy said, oh, and it’s going to be on this thing called Netflix. It’s going to start July 1. I didn’t know what it was. I had no idea. I never heard of it because I didn’t live in America and I didn’t get the red envelope when you get the DVD sent to you. So I had no idea. Now, originally, when I started making this movie in 2007, I thought maybe 10,000 people that watch it on DVD. And I thought that I’d get this guy to make the film. I’d go over to do the 60 days and then I’d go back to my normal life. So I didn’t think I’d get involved. As it turned out, I was committed and it took a lot more and I went and filmed the truck driver. We did lots more. We filmed. So I had to take control of the project. So now I needed, there was more of a vested interest in getting more people seeing it, which is where I was at this point. And something happened on July 1 and July 2 and July 3. When it went on Netflix, my service started to melt. Within two weeks, you couldn’t buy a juicer in the whole of the United States. Target, Walmart, JC Penney, Bloomingdale, empty. Millions of people started talking about this within

51:07 Two months. I went to Whole Foods in Princeton. One of my first stocks I went to pre-Netflix. I promised you this, Brian. Two men and a dog turned up to watch the film. We had like 50 seats.

51:22 I put my little laptop up. I projected onto a little screen like this. Two men and a dog turned up to sit down and watch the film. Some people who were going past, it was in the big bulk section of Whole Foods in Princeton. And a few people who were going past in their trolleys stopped and saw 10 minutes and kept walking. A year later, after the movie broke on Netflix, I went back to the store to do a screening. They had to lock the store. They couldn’t let anyone in. There was over 360 people inside a year later. So this phenomenon of Netflix, this ability for people to stream, share, watch, rate, just took this film to an audience that I didn’t even know.

52:09 I knew they existed, but I didn’t know that there was a way to get content to them. And so that was a big turning point, you know? Service melting wasn’t good for the people trying to get on, but it was nice to have so much attention. And then I slowly built a company and a business around that and publishing and more films and so on. But that’s the story of how it got going.

52:36 Brian Rose: Why? Why do they love your story so much?

52:39 Joe Cross: I don’t know. I think you’d have to ask them, but if I had to sort of take the feedback of the audience that I’ve got is I think number one, they liked the fact that it was real. They liked the fact that I didn’t preach and didn’t tell people what to do. And it was more about me just trying to do something. I think they liked the

53:03 Transparency of it all. But I guess that’s the first point, honesty. I guess I’d have to say honesty being true is what I think. I think, you know, when people, there’s an old saying that people are really smart, but crowds are dumb. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s an old saying. And when you make films, you’re not making them for a crowd. You’re making them for a person. It’s a personal individual experience. And I think people have inherently really good bullshit radars. I think people can work out when someone is not telling the truth, when someone’s telling a pork pie, as we like to say in Australia, which rhymes with pie.

53:47 Brian Rose: A porky pie, yeah.

53:48 Joe Cross: A porky pie. So I think we know this. There’s a gut feel we all have. Some of us are more attuned to it than others, but I think people realize that the story that I laid down was real, transparent, true. And I think people appreciated that.

54:07 Brian Rose: And you have a way of doing it without preaching, and you weren’t really selling anything when you made that movie. It was about you, and people do. I mean, that’s the thing about these days you see the reality pieces and, well, not reality shows. That’s a bad example. But on YouTube, for example, people gravitate to real, real, transparent stories. And they can tell them from a mile away when there’s some type of a pitch in there. And you didn’t have that.

54:33 And you were doing a documentary back when, I mean, nowadays it’s easy to, but in 06-07, it wasn’t a simple thing to get done, was it?

54:39 Joe Cross: No, no, it wasn’t. Now, there’s not a lot of money in wellness, to be honest. There’s not a lot of money in people.

54:45 Brian Rose: Interesting. I would have thought different.

54:47 Joe Cross: But there’s not a lot of money when people are well.

54:50 Brian Rose: Oh, right. Yeah, of course. Okay.

54:53 Joe Cross: When you’re well, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on trying to go from being broken to fix your well. So people say to me now, what are you selling? I mean, obviously, in order to keep making content, in order to invest and spend money and raise capital from investors to build out a business, you’ve got to have a plan that shows revenue is going to come in the door. So the way I think about it is that if the content that I can make can be easily accessible, some of it free, some of it, you know, you pay a license to a company like Netflix, which can be 10 bucks or 14 bucks a month, whatever it is, and then you can watch as much as you want. And hopefully you watch mine. That’s a way of getting a brand, a name, a message out there. So I’m running with that model. And then if people are interested and want to find out more, they can buy a book, they can go online and they can pick up an app, or they can download something, or they can just go to the website with mostly and it’s free.

55:58 So I don’t know whether this business model is going to work. I’m not sitting here saying, oh, no, no, mate, this is the best thing ever. This is the best business I’ve ever done. Far, far from it. But I think that I’d much rather be doing what I’m doing now in providing all of this information in a fun, interesting, exciting, entertaining, inspirational way, and being of service and making this much money or losing this much money at the moment, versus doing what I used to do where I was serving no purpose to anyone else.

56:36 I was basically just making money out of money and making a lot of it. I’m much happier doing what I’m doing now than I was then. And I would never have thought that’d be the case. So that doesn’t mean, by the way, that I discount the fact that I can’t do incredibly well and be successful in doing what I’m doing. I don’t think of it like that.

57:04 I don’t feel any guilt or anything attached to, if I’m hugely successful over here in making movies and content about wellness and I can get a huge deal and slate deal done with companies like Amazon or Netflix or iTunes. I’ve got no problem with that. I’ve got no problem with being successful. We live in a modern capitalistic world. What I don’t want to do is sell something or create something that is not true, that try to make something out of somebody’s by trading in their false hopes, giving false hope. I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want to be a part of that karma. So my message is a very simple message. It’s about reconnecting with mother nature, loving your plants and loving yourself. You show me someone who’s broken. I’ll show you someone who’s more than likely got those two relationships are in strife in their body, in their world.

58:04 So my message is love plants, nurture them, get them into your body, take that information and that nutrition, that energy, get it in. As much of it as you can. Not extreme. If you’re broken, yes, you got to go extreme until you’re fixed. Then for the tweaking, you just got to have a lot of them. You just got to have most of them. Try and make it half of what you eat if you can.

58:28 And then love yourself. Stop being your own worst enemy. Life’s tough. It’s not easy. Try and love yourself. Give yourself pat on the back. Don’t focus on the 10% or 20% that’s not working.

58:41 Focus on the 80% or 90% that is. Give yourself this momentum, pats on the back. Don’t get out of the shower in the morning and say you’re fat and ugly and gray and old. Get out and say, you know what, you’re looking good today, Joe. Brian, you’re on fire. Bounce around in front of that mirror and tell yourself that you’re wonderful, that you’re beautiful, that you’re amazing, that you’re strong. I’m not talking about taking 100 selfies a day. I’m not talking about being arrogant and ignorant. And I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about truly caring for yourself and getting out of the way and stop being your own worst enemy. Those two bookends, love yourself, love your plants. That’s mostly 80, 90% of my message. And you don’t need to give me money. You don’t need to pay me to do that.

59:25 Brian Rose: That theme of loving yourself is coming up more and more often with the people I sit down with here. And the more that I think about it, when you’re having those cigarettes and when you’re necking those pints and eating that food, I think it’s almost a subconscious message that you’re giving yourself that you don’t love yourself. And you’re not worth making that little bit of a sacrifice for. And I think that all adds up in your brain into where you’re really thinking, well, I really don’t think that much of myself because this is the way I treat myself. And so the whole my body is my temple or that kind of thing. There’s a reason for that. I think because it just shows from the very basic

1:00:03 Thing that you love yourself more than just doing that. One thing I noted about you, a lot of people come here on this program and they have a message where they made a movie and they work really hard and it’s a fantastic movie and they put it out there and kind of what you happen. They go to the film festivals and it just flops. And there’s two things I note about you. One is you work very hard as in you really put the time in. You’re going five weeks after this now across America, 22 different cities. I mean, you’re putting in the FaceTime to make this happen. It doesn’t just happen. Some people ask me all London Real, you just show up in your place and the people come over. I mean, there’s a lot going on here. A lot of work.

1:00:41 I like to make it look easy because I think it’s kind of a fun thing to do, but it’s all the ground, you know, it’s all the grinding that makes it look like this. But the other thing these people don’t do is that they just treat it as a piece of art and they never turn that art into, I guess, like a product. And like you said, you can have something for free and you can have something here or a book or if they want to come see you in person, you give them lots of ways where they can get more or less of your message.

1:01:06 And I think that’s something that’s very important for especially artists to kind of understand is that you need to kind of go to that next level or your art’s just going to kind of die. And maybe in your case, your message might have just died if you hadn’t been more of a business sense.

1:01:24 Joe Cross: Yeah, well, coming from a business background, I think I probably had an advantage. But I will say this, you know, I remember reading an article about Steve Jobs, who I think we could all agree is incredible visionary when it comes to business. And I remember reading it and he was asked about what are the three things you need to have to be a successful entrepreneur.

1:01:46 And he said, there’s not three, there’s four. And he said, first thing you need to do is you need to be able to take lots of risk. Second thing you need to be able to do is you need to make huge sacrifice. Third thing, you got to be really passionate about what you’re doing. And to a certain degree, that third one, that passionate can really help the sacrifice in a way you’re passionate, you can sort of get a bit of trade off. But he said the fourth thing you need, you need luck. You don’t have luck. You can have all those other three things. It ain’t going to happen. So I really take that to heart. And I’ve got lots of friends of mine who are billionaires or multi hundred millionaires. And they all talk about luck being a huge part of their success.

1:02:30 And look at me. You know, if I tried to make this movie 10 years earlier, it would never have seen the light of day. I got lucky that at the time when I decided to do this, not knowing about Netflix, not knowing about YouTube, not understanding the way that the world was going to go in the breakdown of this dissemination of digital data, I had no idea this was happening. I just got lucky. I had no idea the tsunami of change would be coming for people wanting to put better nutrients into their body. I was just born at the right time to be 40 at that moment in time to do what I did, to have the realization to be lucky enough to put it on camera, etc, etc, etc.

1:03:12 So yes, you know, that’s Steve Jobs’s four things. Joe Cross’s three things are the truth will set you free. Lady luck follows a person of action. And you don’t learn anything new. You just remember what you’ve forgotten. And so I run those three rules through my life. And I take those forward.

1:03:32 And I figure that if you put the effort in, you know, if you put the effort in, and you work hard, you can put yourself in a position to get lucky. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

1:03:45 Brian Rose: And you keep working after the first movie, you made the second movie, you made the books, I can imagine your next two years, you have a lot of ideas, commitments, content coming.

1:03:57 Joe Cross: Yeah, I’m pretty well, I here’s what I’m thinking, you see, I’ve got to be careful.

1:04:02 I’ve got to be careful because I’ve got to stay true to the message. Yeah. So I can’t go crazy and work like I used to because then I’ll get sick again. And then lifestyle will suffer. Right.

1:04:14 So there’s a balancing act that I’ve got to pull myself up on here. So right now, I’ve got a bunch of exciting ideas for shows. I’m, I’m, it’s really great to be on your show today, Brian, because I respect the fact that your show is not soundbite. Your show is much more value and it’s deep. And it allows the expression of thoughts and ideas, and it’s uncut. And that’s great. You know, I think that, you know, if I was to sort of like stake a claim in the ground, I think you’re onto something.

1:04:51 I think that the world’s getting a bit sick and tired of the one minute and two minute, and three minute, you know, noise that happens. And people are realizing that the soundbite is actually detrimental to society in many respects, and that people need to put the effort in. They need to do a bit more deep, that nothing, you know, dreams are free. You know, you’ve got to put the hard yards in. You want actual, you want actual results. And so I’m taking a view that I want to dominate the, what I’m going to call long form, high production, personalized, well personality driven, if you like, content when it comes to health and wellness, and happiness. I like to put happiness in there as well. So I feel that, you know, in five years time, eight years time, I would like to have my content being 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour, one hour and a half sort of zone.

1:06:02 Sure, there’ll be one minute, two minute stuff that I’ll do for people. But if I’m doing it, I like the idea of it being longer and deeper and more value add. And I want to have content that’s out there on Netflix, on iTunes, on Amazon, on whatever platform wants my content, based on, you know, licensing arrangements I have in place. So that I can give people this rich tapestry of not my expertise, because I am not an expert, I am far from an expert. But what I feel that I am fortunate enough to be in the position that we’re fortunate again, is that I’ve got access to really smart, interesting people. And I’ve got a chance now with an audience to create more content that really just might help them lead a happier, healthier, longer life. And that’s exciting to be at that precipice of change.

1:07:00 I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it, I don’t know, but at least it’s nice to be able to be excited about potentially being able to do something.

1:07:09 Brian Rose: I think people really are looking for connection, and they want to know that other people that are like them and suffering from the same problems they have. And I think, I agree, the short sound bites and the Instagram photos and all that, I think it slowly chips away at our own feeling of community or, you know, the group mind.

1:07:28 And so I’ve found these long form pieces where people can really listen and really get an experience of what you’ve gone through. People seem to be craving it, you know, which is quite the opposite of what you expect.

1:07:41 Joe Cross: Yeah, no, I think that, you know, I think you’re under something and hopefully what I’m going to be doing will work.

1:07:48 Brian Rose: Good, I’m excited to see that. A couple questions from our fans on YouTube. I’m going to hit you with them. One of them says, I’m juicing on a budget and they wanted to know which non-organic vegetable and fruits are okay to juice. Do you take a break from juicing once in a while and your thoughts on GMOs?

1:08:06 Joe Cross: Right, so let’s take the juicing on a budget and the organic question.

1:08:10 Okay, so I think that the single most important way to get the budget down for this, such an important food group, the plant group, is to get you know your farmer. Get to know your farmer. Wherever you live, you’ve got to work out a way to get to know a farmer or a number of farmers. In America, they’ve got this thing called CSA, which is community supported agriculture. It’s all over America. Here, where I’ve just been in the north of England, I spoke last night to a couple hundred people. They say, how far do you got to drive to be, you know, on a farmer’s doorstep? I said 15 minutes. So wouldn’t that be nice on a Saturday to go around a bunch of farms and say, hey listen, how about if I get 20 families together, would you do a whole bunch of stuff for us direct? So we don’t need to go through the big guys and pay all that extra money.

1:09:07 And getting to know your farmer means you get to know the practices of how that farmer is performing. Because just because it’s organic doesn’t mean it’s better than something that is conventional. So this is an area that there is a lot of conjecture and there’s a lot of people that are saying this and saying that. You know, I get confused in it and I speak to really smart people. So my view is really get to know your farmer, talk to him about it, get his point of view. If it feels right and that what he’s doing with his cucumbers or what he’s doing with his kale works, then I reckon that’s a better way of going. That goes to the same with the GMO. It’s the same theme. So I was recently on a farm in Iowa and the farmer’s name was Kate and I think it was called Wild Woods Farm. And Kate, she wouldn’t have been any more than 24, 25 years of age.

1:10:02 She had like five or six farm hands working for her that were probably 16 and 17, all girls. And you know, you add up all their ages, they weren’t even nearly close to where I was at. And I spent the day with Kate and she has 100 families through her CSA. That’s her client. She has no other clients. There’s a hundred families in the Des Moines area of Iowa. And she goes to work every day making food, raising crops to go down for these families to eat. She’s connected to them. They all know her. They know what’s going on in her life. She knows what’s going on in their life. When she makes too much kale, do you think she charges? No. She said, he had some more. So there’s this partnership between the person who is bringing those plants to the family and the people who are in the family that are buying produce, that are buying the groceries. Brian Wonsink is a good mate of mine who was also in movie number two.

1:11:00 He calls them the nutritional gatekeeper. They are the person that is deciding what balance of processed animal and plant is coming into the home. So it’s a big responsibility. Understanding GMO, understanding organic, the way that I sit with these questions and the way that I have in the little information I have to date, or the amount of information I have to date, is to get to know your farmer and talk to these people who really understand it much better that you trust. I love this local based movement. I love the fact that one farmer might just have a local clientele of 100 families and that’s it. By the way, she is not an organic farmer.

1:11:45 She uses organic practices. She’s not certified. She doesn’t have the government signing because that’s too expensive for her to go through. So here’s an example of someone who’s doing everything the way that organic farmer is, but she can’t say it’s organic. So you see what I mean?

1:12:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, you have to be careful with that loophole. Someone asked about your protein intake during juicing and after. You mentioned it a bit before. After you did that, you slowly brought red meat back into your diet four years later. You must get asked this a lot.

1:12:15 Joe Cross: Protein is critical in our diets. Obviously, the building blocks, macronutrient, protein, carburetor, fat. If you are going to juice for more than 15 days, you need to bring protein powder into your juicing. 15 days is about the limit. After that, it’s detrimental to not put a supplement of protein in. Because you lost muscle over juicing. Back then, I didn’t know.

1:12:44 Brian Rose: Right. So you were losing muscle and fat in that juicing.

1:12:49 Joe Cross: Of the 100 pounds that I lost over those five months, it was 30% muscle, 70% fat.

1:12:56 Brian Rose: Okay. That’s very good to know.

1:12:59 Brian Rose: Last one, what’s your favorite all-in-one juice blend? I’ve seen you with the apples and the cucumbers and the lemon and the ginger, the kale.

1:13:07 Joe Cross: Yeah, so I have an answer to this, which is really two things. I mean, and really does, it moves around. It’s kind of like saying, what’s your favorite movie? Sometimes you feel like it’s the short-term redemption. The other time, it’s the big blue. I sort of run around, but I love the mean green because it’s the cucumber, it’s the kale, it’s the celery, it’s the lemon, the ginger and the apple. I love it. Okay. It’s my go-to green juice.

1:13:31 But if I’m going for a hike or I’m going to go and do a workout in the gym, and it’s like, say, it’s not the first thing I’m doing. Say my gym workout is going to be at 10 a.m. or something, then I love a watermelon, pineapple and ginger just to fire up the hydration. I just love that juice. And then of course, in wintertime, when I want something a bit more warmth, I like going for sweet potato and beets, carrot and some pear. I love that.

1:13:59 You can throw in a bell pepper if you like.

1:14:02 Brian Rose: More carbon, that one?

1:14:03 Joe Cross: Well, this is all the juice, but then I love blending as well. So I’ll get out my blender. You know? Yeah. And this is a big difference that people don’t really understand. Yeah.

1:14:15 Brian Rose: Because I used to invite a mix of Big Kale Shake and I used to post them on Twitter. But now I understand that’s blending, which is different.

1:14:23 Joe Cross: Yeah. So I use a Sage juicer when I’m in the UK or a Breville juicer when I’m in the US. That’s a centrifugal juicer that separates out the water from the fiber, the structure.

1:14:33 This is much more closer to drinking water when you juice. And don’t worry about all this stuff about heating and all that. That’s all internet garbage because it’s only slicing the plant once. Whereas when you put in a blender, whether you put it in a Vitamix or a Breville or a Sage Boss or a Bullet, whatever you are blending, you’re chopping that produce up over and over and over again. So you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that because in a centrifugal juicer, you’re creating heat by slicing it once. But over here, you’re slicing it 10,000 times and that heat’s okay over here. You can’t have both sides. So that’s internet rubbish.

1:15:12 So juicing, much more like water. Blending, much more like outsource in the chewing to a machine. So this is much more like food. So blending is a great way of upping the intake of micronutrients. You now get the whole plant. You get the fiber. Here’s the rub though. When you put something in a blender, you’ve got to add a liquid in. So you are essentially diluting the nutrient content.

1:15:41 When you juice, you’ve got a high level of micronutrient concentration. When you blend, you’ve got less. Still good. Now you’re adding fiber in. So what I love to do, if I’m not in juice only mode, which is about 30 days of the year, I’m in juice only mode, I will juice, blend and eat my plants because that brings in a variety, taste, all different types of ways that I can try and get at least 50% of my calories, which is my target coming from plants.

1:16:17 Brian Rose: 50% is where you’re at right now.

1:16:20 Joe Cross: That’s what I, 50% for 330 days of the year and 30, I’m at 100%.

1:16:24 Brian Rose: Okay. So you still take that 30 days out. I love that.

1:16:29 Joe Cross: I love doing my, my, my reboots.

1:16:31 Brian Rose: Okay. Joe, can I ask you a bit about some of your success secrets? You’re obviously a successful business stand before this. Now you’re building this into a great brand. What are your success habits as in what are those daily routine pieces that you do that finds, that you find kind of keeps you on top?

1:17:09 Brian Rose: What keeps you awake at night?

1:17:12 Joe Cross: What keeps me awake on a jet lag?

1:17:16 Brian Rose: How many days a week do you travel?

1:17:19 Joe Cross: I travel way too much. I have, I have, I’m living at a hotels and have done since for four years now.

1:17:30 So, but I’m getting a home soon. I promising myself that.

1:17:35 Brian Rose: In Oz?

1:17:35 Joe Cross: No, probably in New York. But I would say what keeps me up at night?

1:17:41 You know, I sleep pretty good. I, you know, there’s, there’s the fear that there’s a responsibility that I have to, to staff. You know, I’ve got like 14 people that work for me. There’s a responsibility there. There’s investors. I have responsibility there.

1:18:01 And I want to make sure that the decisions that I’m making and the choices that I’m making can hold it all together. So, out of 365 days in the year, maybe there’s, maybe a dozen nights, maybe 10, maybe a dozen probably be, there’d be some sleepless nights, because I wonder, am I doing the right thing? Should I do this? And should I be doing that? And you know, so there, that’s, you know, it more comes to business than it would to anything else.

1:18:37 I’m pretty happy with my, with my life, the juggling I’m doing now, I’ve learned to juggle those five things. There’s lots of room for improvement, you know, my exercise regime has got to be better. That’s comes with the routine of travel and not having a routine. So, you know, I’m looking forward to the back end of this year to get some more stability and get a house and get a gym membership and try and be in New York for the back end of this year. And I’m looking forward to that. So that’s, that’s exciting. I turned 50 next year and I sort of said to myself, I wanted to be at like 15% body fat when I’m 50, I’m 24% now. So, you know, I was 42%.

1:19:17 And I’m, you know, so I’m moving in the right direction. But, you know, it’s, sometimes it’s two steps forward and one step back. It’s not a straight line and nothing really is. So I’ve got some personal goals that I want to achieve. I want to make sure that, that we don’t get, you know, caught out in, in, in trying to go for cash versus staying true. And that’s always a fine line, you know, how much you push. And so, you know, there are, there are some things that are happening later in the year that, that are gonna sort of be apparent to people on television and stuff. I want to make sure that they are, they’re true and they’re real. And so, you know, there are, these are things that sort of keep me up.

1:19:59 Brian Rose: Right. Responsibility to your organization more than anything. Yeah. Right. Responsibility to others. Others, yeah.

1:20:06 Brian Rose: Which is good because it makes you accountable and makes you do things that you might not do if you were just responsible to yourself.

1:20:14 Joe Cross: Yeah, I think so. I, you know, I think that there’s a, there’s a, there’s something about, well, what I’ve noticed in, in, in this new book that I’ve been talking about, I, I come up with these seven keys, which, you know, basically I’ve noticed in people who have been successful in keeping the weight off, staying healthy and thriving.

1:20:34 And, and one of them is this accountability and community. And you know, what’s fascinating is there’s not so much the people who have someone to talk to, it’s more the people that are helping others that do better.

1:20:46 Brian Rose: Right. So it’s actually this paying it forward, which, which I wouldn’t have thought when you say it, it makes sense, but it just wasn’t something that was present. I’m a living example of that. I just gave a TED talk about three months ago and, and, and by doing this every week, I’m almost held accountable to producing the show and becoming a better person.

1:21:05 And if I say I’m going to do something, it has to be done. And so I never thought about it, but after like a year or two, I was like, wait a second, I am accountable. And so instead of me telling someone they are, I actually become, so it’s fascinating.

1:21:20 Joe Cross: You see, I’m doing a TV show on happiness right now. And I, you know, see, if you think about happiness, like happiness is not something that’s achievable and sustainable. Because if you’re just happy all the time, you cease by default to be happy, because happy is an elevated sense of, of, of it. So to me, I’m more interested in like life purpose, having a purpose. So if you have a purpose, I think you can get happiness every now and then, right? Good days and bad days, but you can get happy. But so to me, it’s about this purpose. So what I would throw back to you, what you’re doing is you have purpose. And so it’s that purpose that you have and that I have and that people who are actually generally unhappy out there, anyone listening to this, ask yourself this question, you probably don’t feel very useful. Because the more useful you are, genuinely, the more happiness you can achieve in your life, you’re not going to be happy all the time. But you can achieve more happiness by being more useful. And therefore, how do you be useful? You find a purpose, you find something that you can contribute to something that you’re a part of and the community.

1:22:30 Generally, not always, but generally plays a big role in that.

1:22:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, because ultimately, that’s going to be people could be people in your work, it could be your family, it could be people you’re trying to give an example to, but it’s ultimately going to be someone that you’re accountable to. Joe, I always ask my guests a few questions right at the end. I’m going to hit you with these. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Joe, and give that young man a bit of advice. I don’t know if he was doing in the pits, doing this. What would you tell him?

1:23:02 Joe Cross: I’d say what you’re doing is 99%. Stick to it. 1%, the one little thing you should change, there’s one thing you should change, you should love your plants more. Don’t turn your back on Mother Nature. Just get some habit going. Don’t go extreme, don’t go crazy. Get some habit going of maybe having a liter of juice or a half a liter of juice and a green smoothie or some superfood smoothie every morning. Just do that. That’d be the one thing I would say.

1:23:41 Brian Rose: We had an author in here by the name of Graham Hancock. He’s written some amazing books and he calls them our plant allies. That’s what he calls them. I always loved that phrase. When you were talking earlier, I was like, our plant allies. One other thing I would say is I’d probably say, just be aware on October 19th, 1987 as well. Just be aware of that.

1:24:03 Joe Cross: The crash. The crash.

1:24:04 Brian Rose: Second part of that is what is the best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal?

1:24:15 Joe Cross: The best advice. I think that back in the days of trading, I had a mate of mine, Craig, who was 12 years older than me. We used to talk a lot. He was kind of like a Zen master to me.

1:24:37 I was young. I was in my 20s. I used to ask lots of questions about life and about things and trying to work stuff out. I guess that the best advice that I got from Craig, which I’ve always used going forward, is don’t be afraid to ask questions. There is a saying that you’re better off to keep your mouth shut and let people…

1:25:09 How does the saying go? It goes, you’re better off to say nothing than open your mouth. You know what I’m talking about? It’s like people in the room, I’m going to get this right in a second, is that open your mouth and better off keeping your mouth shut and letting people think you’re an idiot than opening your mouth and proving it. Now, I’m glad I got that out. I don’t agree with that. I don’t mind about people thinking I’m an idiot. I feel that asking questions, if you don’t know the answer to them or you’re not sure, I think that is really important going forward because if I didn’t ask questions, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you today.

1:25:54 So I think asking questions, another thing I learned through that whole process was to trust yourself. You know, you got to just listen to that inner voice and allow the personal guidance system, if you like, allow it to take you where you’re going and just trust. You know, that you don’t need to listen to lots of people. You can just listen to yourself because generally you know when something is on or off.

1:26:25 Brian Rose: Last part of that question, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us somewhere around the world that wants to make some changes, what is the one thing that you would suggest that they do?

1:26:39 Joe Cross: One thing I suggest they do. So let’s assume that these are big lifestyle changes we’re talking about. If it’s a big lifestyle change, then I’d go back to this, you know, something that is more about not costing them money and that would be about making sure that they love themselves and that they are not getting caught up in this world of comparing themselves, particularly if they’re 20 years of age, through the social media platforms of Snapchat or Instagram and you know someone else has got this, someone else looks like this, they got more likes. This whole idea of measuring themselves up against other people, I think that’s dangerous. So I’d caution them on not doing that. I’d caution them more on

1:27:32 Just what I said earlier, believing in self and realizing that at 20 years of age, you’ve got plenty of time and a life ahead of you. And so find something, you know, if it’s a change career wise, find something that interests you. Find something. And if you’re in a job that doesn’t interest you, use that opportunity to work out your threshold for what you can take and how to manage people. Use it to your advantage. There’s always some silver lining, somewhere in everything. I used to think this when I was really sick with my illness. I used to think, you know, there’s someone else that’s a lot worse off than me right now. So I shouldn’t feel sorry for me. And you know, that’s probably if they’re making changes, I’d sort of say to them on that and try not to make all the changes at once. You know, little changes, little things can lead to really big results. Takes time, but if you’re 20 years of age, hey, you’ve got time.

1:28:43 Brian Rose: How can people get a copy of the book? How do they find out more about you? What’s the best way?

1:28:50 Joe Cross: So the rebootwithjoe.com website, which is our site, rebootwithjoe.com, has all the information they need. If they want to watch my movies, it’s on Netflix, on iTunes, it’s on Amazon, it’s on lots of digital platforms. The books are on the website, it has where they are. If you’re in the UK, they’re in Waterstones, they’re in Barnes & Noble, in the US, they’re on Amazon, of course, in Australia, the same. My Twitter handle and Instagram is at joedthejuicer and on Facebook, I’m just joe cross. And we have the fan page, fat sick and nearly dead as well.

1:29:29 We’ve got a newsletter that’s probably the place that we give the most information out and you can sign up for that at rebootwithjoe.com. And so yeah, that’s, you know, we’re on all those touch points. Ron, we have to be.

1:29:42 Brian Rose: Because, you know, as you said in your story, you know, you never, at a company called Netflix, you never saw that coming. And all of a sudden, it’s a huge conduit of information. I feel after spending this much time with you, that, you know, the juice and our plant allies were just a way for the rest of us to get to know you.

1:30:00 And there’s so much more of a deep message in there when it comes to loving yourself or even just being in the present and all those kind of pieces. So I have to thank those allies. And I’m really looking forward to the other things you’re talking about, you know, the purpose versus happiness. And it was fascinating because I first found out about you through the movie, but the more I watched your footage, there’s a lot more going on here than just juice.

1:30:26 Joe Cross: Water and drinking water through plants is really important. But what it does, it gives you the power to then go on and be who you are. And look, you know, there’s lots of people out there that, you know, working and eating, so working and sleeping is something they do around food. You know, I think we’ve got to try and get our balance back. And there’s so much more to life than just eating. And there’s so much more to life than having a difficult time with eating and body image. And there’s a lot going on out there. And it’s exciting to be alive at this incredible time. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to fix. There’s a lot of, you know, scary stuff going on. But at the end of the day, this is our time, you know, we have, you know, what’s it been 15, 16 billion people have ever lived on the planet Earth. And we’ve got seven or eight of them now, you know. So it’s an incredible time to be around. And it’s an incredible time to be a part of change. And I think, as you’ve probably heard me say before, if you’ve watched any of my stuff, is that the best way to change the world is change yourself.

1:31:32 Brian Rose: Yes. Amen to that. I’ve lived that in the last few years. So and I’m going to start changing my habits. You know, I guess everyone thinks that they have a good diet when in fact, most of us don’t. And I am not having enough of my plant allies in my diet. So I’m going to start doing that. I used to walk away

1:31:50 From the juicing because I thought, you know, the tough guy blends and he takes all the pulp. But now I understand the difference. So I’m committing to do that.

1:31:58 Joe Cross: Do both.

1:31:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, I do both even better. It’s funny, Joe, because earlier you said it’s about the journey in life. And that’s our tagline here at London Real. We say it’s about the journey. So thank you so much for coming on, sharing your wisdom. Please come back again next time you’re in the UK.

1:32:13 Joe Cross: Love to. And let’s stay in touch and peace to you and on your journey.

1:32:17 Brian Rose: Good luck with it. All right. Thanks so much.

1:32:19 Brian Rose: Thanks for enjoying.