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Just Jay — known online as @MrGudwudz — is a community builder, systems thinker, middle school math and science educator of 13+ years, author, and the founder of Gudwudz (gudwudz.com), a handcrafted wooden smoking holder designed to bring intention and ritual to the smoking experience. Raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Justin spent his formative years questioning inherited systems — religious, social, educational — and dedicating himself to helping others design better ones. He is the author of multiple books, including Eternity in Real Time and The Point of Life, and writes at his Substack, Today in Eternity. He is currently transitioning from teaching to full-time entrepreneurship.
The architect of your better self. Jay opens the conversation with a deceptively simple self-description: he's a systems builder. But what he means runs deeper — he's spent his life examining the systems people are handed (religious traditions, social norms, family patterns) and asking whether they actually serve the people 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 just stay safe, he started asking why. That question never stopped.
Church elder meets cannabis founder — and why both can be true. Jay came up with the Goodwoods concept in 2003. His late first wife pushed back hard, telling him a church elder shouldn't be helping people smoke better. After she passed away from breast cancer that became lung cancer — the woman who never smoked — Jay decided he was done performing one version of himself for external approval. He reframed the 'wide vs. narrow path' scripture in a way that makes a compelling case for individual spiritual journeys over religious groupthink: if you're all walking arm-in-arm in the same direction, that's the wide path. If you're alone with God working out your own salvation, that's the narrow one. He also notes that ADHD — diagnosed at 48 — led him to cannabis for its focusing effects, which brought the doctrine vs. personal-experience tension into sharp relief.
The Goodwoods business challenge: you have to try it to get it. Jay's core marketing problem is one any experiential product founder will recognize: demand is generated by experience, but getting the product to enough people to generate that experience requires existing demand. He got remarkable proof-of-concept at the Cannabis Cup in Denver and through a Tri-State Uber cannabis promotion — people who tried it immediately understood the difference. The bottleneck is creating that first moment at scale, especially when every major social platform except X bans cannabis-adjacent advertising.
Legacy as ideas, not assets. Watching his first wife lose her hair, her health, and eventually her life to cancer clarified something for Jay: everything material can be taken away. His father died at 38 of a heart attack. Jay is now 10 years past that age, and he approaches every day with urgency — not panic, but purpose. His three books, his Substack, and Goodwoods itself are all expressions of the same conviction: get what's inside you out into the world, because someone, somewhere, needs it as the first domino.
Website / Goodwoods: gudwudz.com
Facebook: Mr. Gudwudz on Facebook
Substack: Today in Eternity (@EtodayInEternity)
The Unscripted Cannabis Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with cannabis entrepreneurs, industry voices, and culture builders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedcannabis.com.
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