Jeremy Rivera sits down with Just Jay of Goodwoods.
In this special “get to know the co-host” episode of Unscripted Cannabis, Jeremy Rivera turns the mic on his sometimes co-host Just Jay (aka “Just J,” @MrGudwudz) to learn the man behind the brand. Jay describes himself as a community, thought, and systems builder who has spent his life questioning the social and religious systems he was handed growing up as a young Black boy in Jackson, Mississippi, and inside the church. He traces the unlikely intersection of being a church elder and a cannabis entrepreneur, the origin of his Goodwoods smoking holder, his ADHD diagnosis at 48, the loss of his first wife to cancer, his teaching career, and his journey self-publishing books with the help of AI. The conversation closes with Jay’s open business challenge: how to scale an experiential product.
A childhood spent seeing broken systems
Jay points to his upbringing as the root of his systems thinking: a young Black boy in Jackson, Mississippi, during a time of overt racial tension, and a kid raised inside a thousand-member church. Even as a child growing into maturity he looked at the social and religious systems he was told to adopt and concluded they were broken, watching them fail in the lives of the families and friends around him.
The church elder who sells smoking accessories
Asked about the intersection of being a church elder and running a cannabis company, Jay jokes it is “an intersection with a lot of vehicular accidents.” He resolved the tension through internal work and a reading of scripture: the “wide path” is everyone walking arm-in-arm in group think, while the “straight and narrow” is an individual journey to “the God of Justin,” not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He chose authenticity over performing one acceptable version of himself.
ADHD and the case for cannabis
Diagnosed with ADHD around age 48 – which he finds frustratingly late – Jay learned that THC can act differently on an ADHD brain, quieting the noise and narrowing focus rather than just exciting it. With a brain that “never stops working,” he found cannabis useful for processing and centering, which forced a choice between adopting a group’s values or values aligned with his own experience.
Loss, irony, and pushing past pushback
Jay’s first wife, deeply opposed to his Goodwoods idea on religious grounds, died seven years into their marriage after a two-year fight with breast cancer that turned into lung cancer – a painful irony for a woman who refused to smoke. After her passing he decided the gift was God-given and committed to using it to provide for the people in his life. His father’s death from a heart attack at 38 left Jay feeling he was “under a clock,” fueling his urgency to get his ideas out into the world.
Writing is easy; publishing is hard
Jay wrote his first book, “Keys to the Kingdom,” like a theological dissertation around 2005, banging out the draft in months – then spent 20 years revising it until his eyes went “numb to the page.” He credits AI with finally letting him self-publish, taking on the role of an editor to work through the manuscript step by step, which also let him rework an earlier book, “The Point of Life.” His latest is “Eternity in Real Time.”
Looking inward as the next dimension
Drawing on his economics and teaching background, Jay frames human growth as moving past length, width, height, and space-time into an internal dimension – turning the scope inward. He argues that the causes, answers, and fixes are all rooted internally, and that if people did that real internal work, the next generations could live in a world with far less racism, sexism, and “othering.”