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This week on Unscripted Cannabis, I sat down with someone I’ve been co-hosting with for a while but hadn’t yet had the chance to put in the hot seat: Just J, better known as @MrGudwudz and the founder of Gudwudz (gudwudz.com). Just J is a church elder, a middle school math and science teacher of 13+ years, the author of three books including Eternity in Real Time, and the creator of a handcrafted wooden smoking holder he’s been refining since 2003. This conversation goes deep — faith, loss, legacy, and what happens when you decide to stop performing a single version of yourself for external approval.
Who Is Just J? A Community Builder Who Questions Every System
Just J describes himself as a community builder, a thought builder, and — at the core — a systems builder. Growing up as a young Black boy in Jackson, Mississippi, he watched systems fail people from the inside: the social structures of a racially tense South, and a church with a thousand members whose congregants’ lives didn’t reflect the transformation the faith promised.
“A lot of everything that I put out in the world is about intentionally constructing and being the architect of your better self and your better life,” he told me. Whether that’s Gudwudz, his books on philosophy and belief, or 13 years of finding the ‘next him’ in a public school classroom — it all flows from that same source.
Cannabis and the Church: An Elder’s Honest Reckoning
One of the most memorable threads in this episode is Just J’s account of how he ended up building a cannabis company while serving as a church elder. He came up with the Gudwudz concept in 2003. His first wife — devout, church-grounded — pushed back hard. After seven years of marriage and a two-year battle, she died of breast cancer that became lung cancer. She never smoked.
After she passed, Just J made his peace with the contradiction: “I feel like this is something God gave me. So I’m gonna use whatever He gave me to take care of the people He put in my life.” He also reframes the ‘wide vs. narrow path’ scripture in a way I hadn’t heard before — arguing that individual spiritual autonomy, not conformity, is actually the narrow path. If everyone’s walking arm-in-arm in lockstep, that’s the wide one.
He was also diagnosed with ADHD at 48, which added a therapeutic dimension: research suggests THC can quiet an ADHD brain’s noise rather than amplify it. The doctrine-vs-personal-experience tension resolved, for Just J, in favor of lived experience.
What Gudwudz Is — and the Business Problem Just J Hasn’t Solved Yet
A Gudwudz is a handcrafted wooden holder — about 60mm long — designed to let you smoke a joint, blunt, cone, or cigar from start to finish without burning your lips or fingertips, without needing tweezers, and without interrupting the ritual. It cools the smoke, accommodates users with dexterity limitations, and consistently leads to less consumption because of better, more direct delivery.
Just J debuted it at the Cannabis Cup in Denver — as one of the sponsors — and ran a successful promotion with a Tri-State cannabis Uber service. Every time someone actually tries it, they get it immediately. The business challenge he put to this show’s audience: how do you scale an experiential product when every social platform except X bans cannabis advertising? If you have ideas, he wants to hear from you — find him at Mr. Gudwudz on Facebook.
Twenty Years of Revision — and How AI Finally Helped Him Finish
Just J is the author of Keys to the Kingdom (begun in 2005, revised for 20 years), The Point of Life, and Eternity in Real Time — his latest. He makes a distinction that resonated with me: writing from what’s inside you is easy. Writing for publication — engineering the reader’s emotional and intellectual journey toward the conclusion you intend — is hard. It took 20 years and an AI editorial process to get Keys to the Kingdom out into the world. He has no regrets about using AI: book launches cost so much that you need every tool available to compress the timeline.
Legacy Is Ideas — Not Assets
The deepest part of this conversation was about legacy. Just J’s father died at 38. His first wife died young. He’s now 48 and 10 years past the ceiling he’d unconsciously set for himself. He told me:
“There’s nothing you have right now that cannot be taken from you — except for what’s in your mind, except for your ideas, except for what you learn. Everything else? I’ve seen it go.”
His legacy looks like ideas, not real estate. He wants to help engender a new way of thinking — turning the lens inward rather than outward, looking for fixes inside the self rather than inside systems. “If just one person finds it and that becomes the first domino — I’ll be happy with that, because I know I got it out.”
Connect with Just J
- Website / Gudwudz: gudwudz.com
- Facebook: Mr. Gudwudz
- Substack: Today in Eternity
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