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A church elder who founded a cannabis company. Just Jay, known online as @MrGudwudz, spent thirteen years teaching middle school maths and science and two decades questioning the systems he was handed. He is the founder of Gudwudz, a handcrafted wooden smoking holder built to put ritual and intention back into smoking, and the author of Eternity in Real Time and The Point of Life.
Jay opens with a deceptively plain self-description. He is a systems builder. What he means by it goes deeper than process design: he has spent his life examining the systems people are handed, religious traditions, social norms, family patterns, and asking whether they actually serve the people living inside them.
Growing up as a young Black boy in Mississippi, inside a church that told him the world was written off and he should stay safe, he started asking why. He is now thirteen years into teaching middle school maths and science and transitioning to full-time entrepreneurship. The question never stopped.
He came up with the Gudwudz concept in 2003. His late first wife pushed back hard. A church elder should not be helping people smoke better. After she died of breast cancer that became lung cancer, the woman who never smoked, he decided he was finished performing one version of himself for external approval.
His reframe of the wide-path and narrow-path scripture is the part of this episode people quote back. If you are all walking arm in arm in the same direction, that is the wide path. If you are alone with God working out your own salvation, that is the narrow one. It is a defence of individual spiritual journeys against religious groupthink, made from inside the church rather than from outside it.
An ADHD diagnosis at 48 is what brought him to cannabis for its focusing effect. Doctrine on one side, direct personal experience on the other, and no comfortable way to hold both.
Any founder with an experiential product will recognise this. Demand is generated by the experience. Generating the experience at scale requires demand that does not exist yet. Chicken, meet egg.
He got real proof of concept at the Cannabis Cup in Denver and through a Tri-State Uber cannabis promotion. People who tried it understood the difference immediately. The bottleneck is not the product. It is the first moment.
Paid social would normally solve this. Every major platform except X bans cannabis-adjacent advertising, so the category has to build demand through channels that were never designed for it: events, word of mouth, and putting the object in someone’s hand.
It is not only cannabis. On Unscripted Small Business, Marc Pitts, founder of Discount Vape Pen, described running into the identical problem a decade earlier and reaching the same conclusion Jay has: if the paid channel is closed, organic is not a tactic, it is the whole business.
After 2015 or 2016 you couldn’t do paid advertising almost anywhere… In our case, we stuck to the hard facts: we’re not going to be able to get through on paid advertising. Any of those efforts could be a wash in a day, or cause a much bigger issue even for our organic rankings. We were forced to really learn everything we could.
Two regulated categories, ten years apart, both pushed to the same answer.
Jay separates writing from the inside from writing for publication. He had been revising the same manuscript for two decades. What finally moved it was AI, used as an editor rather than an author, which is a more honest account of what the tools are good for than most people give.
He now has multiple books out, including Eternity in Real Time and The Point of Life, and writes a Substack called Today in Eternity.
Watching his first wife lose her hair, her health and eventually her life clarified something. Everything material can be taken. His father died at 38 of a heart attack. Jay is ten years past that age now and treats every day with urgency rather than panic.
The books, the Substack and Gudwudz itself are all the same conviction expressed three ways. Get what is inside you out into the world, because somebody somewhere needs it as their first domino.
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Gudwudz | His handcrafted wooden smoking holder, designed for ritual and intention |
| Just Jay / @MrGudwudz | Community builder, systems thinker, middle school maths and science teacher of 13+ years, author |
| Eternity in Real Time, The Point of Life | Two of his books |
| Today in Eternity | His Substack |
| The Cannabis Cup, Denver | Where the walnut Gudwudz made its debut |
| The wide path and the narrow path | His reframe of the scripture, favouring individual journey over groupthink |
| Jackson, Mississippi | Where he grew up, and where the questions started |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
Gudwudz is at gudwudz.com. He writes as Mr. Gudwudz and publishes Today in Eternity on Substack.
Just Jay. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Cannabis, Faith & the Architecture of Self.” Unscripted Cannabis, 2026. https://unscripted-cannabis.castos.com/episodes/magic-episode-01
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