YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Gold

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114
first
2026-05-25
most recent
2026-05-25
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah. I mean, I would buy freeze dried strawberries, and then I would grind them in a food processor and turn it into a dust. Or I would buy cinnamon and I would make a cinnamon peanut butter because it was a powder. And so very quickly I had 30 or 40 different jars. And again, so let's just say you wanted to make honey peanut butter. Really, it sounds simple. Three ingredients. Peanuts, honey, and salt. All right, well, what type of peanuts do I want to use? Because at the store here, there's Valencia peanuts, there's Virginia peanuts, there's Spanish peanuts, there's runner peanuts. And then do I want a light roast or a dark roast? And some peanuts have skins on them and some don't. What happens if I make peanut butter with a skin on it, right? And so now one ingredient turns into like eight different, you know,”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “All these jars are numbered, and I would keep a journal. And the journal would have the number and it would have the percent of peanut butter and the percent of other ingredients, including salt. So I'm like, okay, well, if I find one I really like, I want to make sure I can replicate it. And so I'd have all these jars. They'd all be numbered. I put some in the cupboard. I'd put some in the fridge. I'd want to understand how temperature impacted the product. And I tried a lot of different things at that time”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “There's banana chips. There's freeze-dried banana. There's dried banana. There's banana flavor, banana syrup. So then you start experimenting with different types of banana. And before you know it, like, you know, okay, should this be 10% banana, 5% banana, 20% banana? And so all of those two ingredients, peanut butter and banana, can turn into like 10 jars.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “But then, you know, if you wait three or four hours or overnight, it gets kind of mealy and it doesn't hold up well. And after a day or two, I'd realize, oh, well, that's why they don't have all these different flavors, because in a few days, the texture's off and it doesn't taste good. And then just you start thinking okay, well, it's probably the water activity and the oil, oil and water don't mix. What if I used less honey? What if I use something that had very little water, if no water? And then you start to run these experiments. An example is banana, right? So that's kind of the holy grail for me”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So at that point, you're like, okay, if you can grind it in a store, how hard can it be to make it? So you're like, I bet a food processor can make peanut butter. So then I would go to the co op and I would buy five pounds of dry roasted peanuts and five pounds of dry roasted almonds. And then I'd bring them back to the apartment and I would use the food processor. And you would literally, you turn the food processor on, it grinds everything up, and then you stop it, you take a spatula, you push down the sides, mix it up a little bit, turn it back on, do that three or four times, and you have peanut butter. you know, under a minute. And so then I would take the peanut butter and I would add honey to it. Then once I add the honey and then you put it in a jar and it's warm and it's freshly made, it's perfect. It's perfect.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Now you're eating this sweetened peanut butter with jelly, right? And you're like, wow, this is really good. And now you're using honey. And you're like, this is really good with honey. Why isn't anybody just selling it? You know, peanut butter and honey. That seems pretty simple. And then, you know, and so then you just start thinking, can you not make peanut butter and honey? Does it not work together? And so then that's when I started to get curious and started to kind of like create formulations and recipes.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Oh, yeah, they're great. They're great. And then what really got me curious is you'd walk the aisle and there was a small little peanut butter and nut butter section. And there was a preserves, jams, and jellies section that was three times the size of the nut butter section. And it was just shocking to me. There's all this variety. In all of these different preserves, but not with nut butters. And so then I have a sweet tooth, and so I would go home and I would make a peanut butter and jelly, and sometimes, guy, I'd run out of bread and I would just take the jelly and the peanut butter and mix it in a little bowl together and just eat it with a spoon, right?”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah. What's interesting is if you walk into a natural food store, you were going to a co-op or you were going to a specialty store and even like at the regular grocery food stores, it was smoother crunchy and they don't have all the oil at the top of the jar. And then you could also just grind your own, right? They used to have these grinders in the store and you would just take an empty container, put it under it, and you would wait 30 seconds and watch it grind.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, I'd say growing up peanut butter and jelly was the first thing I learned to make peanut butter and banana is to this day one of my favorite sandwiches and it was cheap.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “A lot of salads, beans, nuts, a lot of tofu, tempeh, you know, textured protein, chicken nuggets and things were coming out. And so, you know, boca burgers and veggie burgers.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Honestly, like for the first year that I'm here, I just want to make friends fit in. And I want to learn where the good mountain biking spots, you know, the good ski areas and just get settled. And in the back of my mind is, okay, there's a university here and I would like to go back to school at some point”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I wanted to go to a university town. I wanted to find a town near the mountains that had a university. And at that time, it was like, all right, well, I had a friend who went to University of Boulder and he loved it. And so I just started there, totally on a whim and just moved out here and started to wait tables in Boulder. And that would have been in 2001.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I was vegetarian, I had long hair. I really felt like I was a hippie. And so the goal at that point was to move as far away as I could. And I went to the Bay Area. And I lived in Point Reyes. And I lived there for about a year. And then I met like, you know, some real like living up the land hippies. And I realized I'm actually quite square. And maybe I'm not a hippie. But, you know, what am I? Where are my people? Where do I belong? And so after a year of waiting tables and working in Norcal, I decided that I wouldn't give the mountains a try.”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “You can imagine the Confusion when you are studying to become a lawyer and then I move to Colorado and I'm waiting tables and I'm like yeah I'm getting closer to go back to school you know I'm in a college town now and everyone's yeah so then I come home and I'm like hey I've got something I want to show you guys I'm really excited about it and they're like oh you know is this a college application are you going back to school and I'm like and I take the lid off the shoebox and I'm like I want to make peanut butter”

    2026-05-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT