YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Lubetzky

lines on the record
82
first
2026-04-20
most recent
2026-04-20
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “And tried this, and I opened the jar and I force feet to put gentlemen with a piece of baguette and like let him try the product. After two hours, as he gives up and he gives me a purchase or he offers to buy 12 jars for $33. And I leave the store and I tell myself, Daniel, you're a winner because you didn't give up, you're going to win. But then the next week I go by that store and the shelves, he hasn't moved one jar. And then a month goes by, he hasn't moved one jar and the jars now are full of dust and they look bad and they look bad for him and they look bad for me. And that's when I start learning to think more long term and to think about where should this product fit and only be there for them.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I start at 7 a.m. in the morning on 122nd on Broadway, and I walk down store by store, store by store, and I tell myself I should not go to the next door till I get a purchase order from that store. I think it's all about grit and I think about, I need to get this product in every store. And in my mind, that means that product belongs in Whole Foods, but it also belongs in the convenience store in the corner, and it also belongs in Bloomingdells and Macy's. And so the best example I can tell you about this is I go to a Korean grocery store. There was Mr. Lee on 84th on Broadway. And I tell them about my product and I tell them all the social mission. And he says, I'm sorry, like, this is a bodega. We only sell paper, ketchup, just essentials. We don't sell fancy soon Deutomers present. And I said, yeah, but you don't understand. It's about piece in the Middle East and you have a community that's going to.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It's the most delicious product out there because it's the right value proposition from them. And that's earlier on, again, one of my other mistakes is I started selling in the street fairs in New York City. And everybody, I'm talking about the social mission, I'm talking about the social mission. They're listening to social mission and they think you're adorable and they keep walking. And when I start talking about the features of the product, then people start trying it out and taking more seriously and they try it. It's actually good. It stands on its own merit. The mission cannot, it can be an added reason to believe, but it cannot be what drives the sale.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So we were trying to talk about that. And obviously the characters, Moshe Pupik and Alimish Mumkin, you would buy the jar and there would be a little book and it had this fable about how thousands of years ago the impending armies in the Middle East were about to kill each other. And the great chef Moshe Pupik called his magician friend Ali Mishmumpkin and they quickly concocted Disandre Tomero Spread whose aromas was so magical that it spread across the horizon and he put the rival armies in a friendly trance and they were so re-energized that they used the strength of the sun to melt their weapons into spoons and use the spoons to partake the Sundrudus prote. But what I discovered along the way is that if your two mission forward, consumers will give you one shot, but then they think they're doing you a favor. And what I discovered is you need to make sure that you're not trying to tell the consumer do this because of the mission. You want them to buy it because...”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We started with Sundero Spread, basil pesto, and olive spread. And the products are actually very high quality, but the packaging and the branding, the brand is called Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmumpen's world famous gourmet foods. I still don't know why it didn't work out.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “After a few months in Israel, to your point, I realized that I need to go to the US because we need to develop a market. He can make the product, we figure out the first part, right? How to make it.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “They were super receptive because this was remembered the romantic time. This was after 1993, after the Oslo peace process. And it's hard to appreciate and remember how magical that time was, but you would go to Arab capitals and you would go to Arab towns and they wanted to do business with Israelis. Like it was like the new Middle East. It was Shimon Perez's New Middle East. There were a lot of resentments, a lot of suspicions, but I can't recall right now a single incident when somebody said no, I don't want to deal with Israelis.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Exactly. There's, I was going to say, he was not using Google. So, you have to go to trade shows, you have to go to the governments, you have to go through introductions, you have to, it was so much harder.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Glass jars from Portugal and olive oil from Italy and Sandro Tomero, who's buying all the stuff in Europe and it was very expensive. So I start mapping up with you all, we could buy the glaciers in Egypt through my research. I knew that we could buy the Sandre tomatoes in Turkey and we could buy the olives from Palestinian farmers. And I started showing them why don't we do this together in the Middle East. And he decides to give it a shot with me.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “The way it works is I'm doing my research and I go to a supermarket and I see this obscure looking jar of sundried tomato spread and I don't know what it's a sundried tomato. I've never tried a sundried tomato. I try the spread and it's delicious. It's so good. And I go back to the store to buy some more and there's no more. And I talk to the distributor, to the store manager, where's this thing? I want to buy some more. It's really good. And they're like, sorry, the company went out of business. And I can't get the idea of my joint ventures out of my head. I can't get the idea of this delicious bread on my head. And all of a sudden they emerge. And I'm like, oh my God, what if I can restart it? So I asked for the name of the bankrupt guy and he connects me to Joel Benesh. And Joel Benish is this beautiful human being who had a number of Arab friends and I tell him the idea for peace works. And the reason he went back is he was buying”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I was in Mexico watching the Rose Garden ceremony, and I'm like, oh my God, I need to do this. And so I told Sullivan and Cromwell, I'm taking a leave of absence. I'm going to try this out.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Practice for a couple months. I passed the bar, I worked at Sullivan and Cromwell, and that's when the Oslo process happened.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yes, and I started learning more about this conflict and I started thinking once I went to law school, I thought I was going to become a diplomat. And then that idea of building bridges between people kept being around in the back of my mind. And I ended up writing a legislative proposal in law school for how to turn my theory into practice.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “My hope was to become partners with my father. I wanted to start a business with my dad. And my dad wanted me to do something with my life, quote unquote for him who had been deprived of an education and him and my mom. They wanted me to get a graduate degree. So I applied to Stanford Law School. I got in. And when I went to law school besides starting a business, my passions were resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. I was very passionate about figuring out ways to use economics to help Israelis and all of their Arab neighbors recognize each other's humanity, break stereotypes, cement relationships.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I started from my dad as a Holocaust survivor who was nine years old when the war started, he didn't have a childhood. So he lived his childhood through our childhood. He loved magic, so we would go to magic conventions. But yes, when I was in college, I had a network of students that would sell watches. We also had a couple booths and shopping malls. It was fun but challenging”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yes, it was a very good business. The most fun business was that I was a magician and I studied one year abroad and I helped pay for my studies by traveling and doing shows on the streets of Paris and the streets of all over Europe”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So I had a bunch of jobs. He had the right to be in the United States as I was lawfully a resident, but I didn't have the right to work for somebody else. So I had to create my own businesses. So I would go to flea markets and sell not just watches, but also singing cops that you'd lift the mug and it would start singing and Christmas lights. all the crazy things you can imagine and my dad helped me out he connected me to a couple suppliers that would sell me some of these products and then i would buy them but then i had to wake up at 5 a.m in the morning and set up the booth and the eisenhower flea market and then finish at 6 p.m and it was it was really fun and”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “They play a fascinating game. They control the inventory. So there's more demand that there is ever supply. But yeah, it's a very coveted thing to have a license to sell those watches.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “He's traveling to Loretta a lot and he's traveling all over the world because it's like all of his clients are predominantly in Switzerland because he had the representation. The only duty-free representation in the world for these quality watches. And so that's why.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, well, he and his partners, their headquarters were in Laureto, Texas, which was truly a border town. My parents wanted to be a little bit more in the cradle of civilization. So we moved to San Antonio, Texas.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “The newspapers people started saying that it was the Jews' fault. You know, you can't really fully explain anti-Semitism or all these things. So all I remember is that my father said, my grandfather made a mistake to not take the warning signs. I'm not going to take the risk. And so something that's very interesting, even with epigenetics, that there's a lot of studies about children of Holocaust survivors, we see the world differently. I, in my mind 24-7, part of my brain that worries is hyperactive about everything and I worry about democracy, about rule of law, about humanity, about how to fight injustice. Like, it's just in my DNA. And I think it has a lot to do with what my parents taught me, but also with what I inferred from learning from his experience.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Maybe it was an earthquake 85, but there was also one earlier because I remember one building fell. And they started blaming the Jews for the earthquake. And my dad was like, I'm not taking a risk again. We're going to move.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Never crossed my mind that I was unsafe as a kid. I probably was a little bit naive, but it felt amazing. And yes, there was a lot of horrible periods of instability, including the 1960s that you're describing about when a lot of university students were slaughtered. But when I grew up, I was not fully aware of that. And around 1984, there was earthquake.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “It's not anymore, but back then we were living a little bit of a bubble or a cocoon and we're very proud of being in Mexico and being Mexicans, but we're also very proud of our heritage and like all sorts of funny things like my grandmother would make, you know how people make fun of the most disgusting thing in the world. I'm sorry not to offend people, but Gefiltefish. Have you ever tried Gefiltefish and it's cold and just horrible? We had a Mexicanized version of that called Gefilte Fish alvera cruisana. So we would meld this red warm sauce with a lot of spice and filter fish warm and taste good. So we did a bunch of combinations between our Mexican and Jewish cultures.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I was raising an immigrant community where there's a little bit of a bubble of a lot of Jewish survivors and immigrants in Mexico. And in my school, they taught you Yiddish and Spanish.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “The way he educates himself is by watching movies and reading the subtitles, and then by borrowing or being gifted used encyclopedias and devouring them, reading them cover to cover, volume A, volume B, volume C, after working two and three shifts in the factory, he eventually garnered enough money with my grandfather to start a little jewelry shop and that grew and grew on Mexico in Mexico City. And then almost like a bad Jewish joke, five Holocaust survivors joined forces to build a business on the border between Mexico and the United States, where they sold duty-free wares. For example, my dad was in charge of watches. One of his partners was in charge of wine and liquors. The other was in charge of cosmetics. The other one electronics was very big.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Talked about it, and when he talked about it, it consumed them, but then he lived his life with kindness. He didn't let that darkness of that chapter darken him quite the opposite. He saw his new life as an opportunity for him to bring light to the world and he always, even today, if you come to San Antonio, Texas where we moved to after when I was 16 years old, people, when they see my last name, oh, were you related to Mr. Roman Lubeck? I'm like, yeah. It's like, oh my God, he was, and they'll tell you stories about how kind he was to them. Like everywhere you go, people still talk about him. And you look back and it really did shape almost all of my decisions.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “He did. And guy, you're correct. There were a number of survivors in our community in Mexico City, and there were predominantly two types. One were the people that shot it out. They could not talk about it.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Yeah, it was very rare guy because only 1% of kids his age survived. And he was a tall kid. So when he was registered in the Dachau concentration camp, he was 12 and a half years old. But the documents say that he was 15 and a half because my grandfather lied and convinced the guards to let him work for it was a labor camp. There's a lot of deaths, but it was designed to make the inmates build machines for the Nazi operation. And my father ended up being with my grandfather in that camp for three years.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “He was born in Riga, Latvia, raised in Lithuania, and when he was nine years old, the World War II broke out, he ended up in a concentration camp. And after surviving, he was for six months in a refugee camp and then ended up in Mexico.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “No, no, that's what I thought. If you're selling zero, it's really not good, but it could also mean that the proc didn't even make it to the shelves.”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Walmart came to us and the buyer liked our product. And you know, one of the most significant dangers is when a buyer loves you because sometimes you're not ready and you couldn't say no to Walmart and we didn't have salespeople or systems to check if our product was selling through. And one of the things that I learned in our industry is you can get reports and look at your sales per store. What do you think it means, guys, if you're selling zero per store”

    2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT