Unscripted Cannabis

Mark Gillilan started Kyoto Botanicals in 2020 as a THC-free CBD company, years before federal law moved the same way. On this episode of Unscripted Cannabis, host Mr. Gudwudz (Just Jay) asks him why he built it that way from day one, and what the federal hemp rule taking effect November 12, 2026 means for everyone who didn't. Mark got his start in hemp wellness about ten years ago at Charlotte's Web, and today Kyoto Botanicals makes broad-spectrum CBD and functional mushroom products.

The full written recap is at Mark Gillilan: THC-Free by Design, and there's a closer look at the new rule in November 12 and the 0.4 milligram rule.

In this episode

Find Mark and his products at kyotobotanicals.com, and more conversations at Unscripted Cannabis.

Farmer Tom Lauerman started growing cannabis at 13 in San Diego, got arrested at 16 in the Ocean Beach pier parking lot, and has spent every decade since fighting for the plant. On this episode of Unscripted Cannabis, host Mr. Gudwudz (Just Jay) hands him the floor, and Tom walks through his whole history in one sitting: the collective, the raid, the farmers markets, and the two days he spent teaching federal scientists what a cannabis farm actually looks like. He runs Farmer Tom Organics, where he offers consulting for cannabis and hemp farms.

The full written recap is at Farmer Tom Lauerman: The Seed That Started It All.

In this episode

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Tom has agreed to come back for a part two with listener questions.

Most cannabis brands believe the product sells itself. Dan Serard, Chief Revenue Officer of Cannabis Creative Group, has watched hundreds of them find out it doesn't. On this episode of Unscripted Cannabis, host Mr. Gudwudz (Just Jay) puts his own brand on the table and Dan turns the conversation into a live consulting session.

Dan has been with the agency since it started in 2018 under the name Champ Digital. It has since worked with more than 600 clients in about 36 states, all with in-house, US-based staff. Before cannabis he ran fitness clubs in downtown Boston and Santa Monica, where he set out to be "the mayor" who knew every member and business owner. That education-first, no-hard-sell habit is what he brought to cannabis. His profile is on the Cannabis Creative Group team page.

The full written recap, with the 90-day plan laid out step by step, is at Dan Serard: How to Market Cannabis When the Platforms Are Against You.

In this episode

Dan's 90-day plan for any small brand: run a rebrand or positioning exercise so the brand reads as premium, fix the website's call to action and value proposition, and get the product into people's hands at events with a camera rolling.

More on this theme from Unscripted Cannabis: You Have To Educate People Why, and Just Jay: The Church Elder Who Sells Smoking Accessories, the story of the host behind Gudwudz. Just Jay's writing is at MrGudwudz.com.

This episode was underwritten by National Vapor.

Relief is not healing. That is the whole episode in three words. Becca Williams spent years as a television news reporter, producer and anchor, medicating through it, always feeling better for a while. The feelings kept coming back. Host Just J talks to her about what she calls the third wave of cannabis, and why the plant on its own does not do the work.

Becca positions her work as a third wave. The first is recreational, including what she calls adult use. The second is medical, treating a specific ailment. The third is intentional and conscious use as a tool for emotional processing and trauma work.

The distinction is not branding. Each wave has a different measure of success. The first asks whether you enjoyed it. The second asks whether the symptom moved. The third asks whether the thing that caused the symptom is still there.

This is her defining framework and it is worth sitting with. Using cannabis as a palliative, checking out on the couch through the hard parts, gives you transitory relief. You feel better while it lasts. Then the emotions come back, because nothing was released. Only postponed.

Healing, in her account, is a different mechanism. It conditions the nervous system and creates new neural pathways, and it removes an emotional layer permanently. She tells her students that once a layer has been processed through the framework, they will not need to do that specific piece of work again.

She did not arrive at this theoretically. She medicated with cannabis through her television years and always felt better temporarily. The emotions always returned. That is a summary of her account in the episode rather than a quotation.

Becca does not endorse cannabis without a container. Her term for what the plant does is nonspecific amplifier: it intensifies whatever state you bring to it. Bring avoidance and you get amplified avoidance.

So the framework supplies the direction and the plant supplies the intensity. She trained for four years in Emotional Liberation, a system developed by a Kundalini yogi, and she is also a clinical nutritionist, which is why the physiological side of this gets as much attention as the emotional side.

Her argument is not that therapy fails. It is that trauma is held somewhere language has trouble reaching, so a modality built entirely on language will run out of road at some point. That is the gap she is trying to work in.

The same criticism lands on psychedelic macro journeys. A big experience produces a glow. Without a framework for processing what it opened, the glow fades and the layer is still there.

The last stretch of the conversation is about generational trauma, and specifically what it looks like when the cycle finally ends with somebody. Not the moment of insight, which is easy. The years afterwards, which are not.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Her work lives at beccawilliams.org. (The address printed in the original notes for this episode, becawilliams.org with one c, no longer resolves.)

Williams, Becca. Interviewed by Just J. “The Difference Between Relief and Healing.” Unscripted Cannabis, 2026. https://unscripted-cannabis.castos.com/episodes/becca-just-magic-episode-apr-23-2026

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.

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

Cannabis went from healers to big business in about thirty years, and somebody filmed the whole thing. Documentary maker Jeremy Norrie has been in cannabis activism since the dabbing tools were homemade. This episode of Unscripted Cannabis, brought to you by Discount Vape Pen, runs from hemp freedom activism through legalisation to what he calls the current regulatory collapse, then goes somewhere much stranger.

Norrie’s activism predates the industry. He was involved early enough to have helped pioneer dabbing tools and to have produced award-winning Cannabis Cup entries. That gives his documentary work a spine most cannabis journalism does not have: he was there for the part nobody filmed.

The arc he traces goes medicinal use, then hemp advocacy, then legalisation, then the guardrails. His view is that the guardrails are where the damage is being done now.

The recurring critique is the distance between the legal framework and what actually happens under it. Legal operators carry a tax burden that unlicensed ones do not. Product mislabelling and industry opportunism run alongside enforcement aimed at the wrong targets.

The alcohol comparison does the most work. Two intoxicants, two completely different regulatory regimes, and the difference has more to do with history and lobbying than with harm.

For an independent filmmaker the distribution question is now the whole business question. Norrie is direct that platform algorithms are uncontrollable and that they reward sensationalism over quality, which shapes what gets made and not just what gets seen.

He also draws a parallel that is easy to miss: the tricks people use to game digital platforms and the loopholes people use to game cannabis regulation are the same behaviour in different clothes. Both are systems where the rules change faster than anyone can comply.

He is neither an evangelist nor a refusenik. AI gives creators range they did not have and raises questions about authenticity that the industry has not answered. The section on AI-generated entertainment and the future of streaming is speculative and he says so.

The harder point underneath it is about incentives. If sensational content is what gets distributed, and AI makes sensational content nearly free to produce, the pressure on careful work gets worse rather than better.

Roughly a third of this conversation is about unexplained phenomena: alien encounters, interdimensional experiences, astral projection, lucid dreaming, altered states. It is a genuine turn and it is not filler.

What makes it worth listening to is his method. He treats extraordinary claims the way he treats cannabis policy claims, which is to say he cares about credibility and about the value of debunking. He is looking for the truth rather than for the story.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

He is on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Norrie, Jeremy. “Cannabis From Healers to Big Business.” Unscripted Cannabis, 2026. https://unscripted-cannabis.castos.com/episodes/documentarian-jeremy-norrie-cannabis-from-healers-to-big-business

Len May says healthcare is really sick care: a cookie-cutter, insurance-reimbursed system that treats the symptom in a 15-minute visit and never asks what caused it. He is the CEO and co-founder of EndoDNA, a genetics-first decision-support platform for functional and integrative practitioners with 11 patents behind it, and a former California dispensary owner who got into genetics after watching two people react differently to the same varietal. His background is on the EndoDNA about page.

The method: read the DNA first, layer on bloodwork (a moment in time) and epigenetic markers, build a protocol across three levers (pharmaceutical, supplements, lifestyle), then close the loop with patient-reported outcomes plus what has been methylated or un-methylated, tuned over time by an LLM grounded on Anthropic's health model with EndoDNA's own guardrails.

Jeremy's full recap, with the endocannabinoid explainer and the grandma-at-chemo case written out, is at Len May: Cannabis, Your DNA, and Personalized Wellness.

In this episode

Related on Unscripted Cannabis: Mark Gillilan of Kyoto Botanicals on THC-free CBD, the founder Jeremy brings up on the regulation question, Becca Williams on the difference between relief and healing, and Brad Poulos on how Canada legalized cannabis.

Unscripted Cannabis is hosted by Just J and Jeremy Rivera. This conversation was Jeremy's. More episodes and articles at unscriptedcannabis.com.

Cannabis cannot buy ads, so it has to be found. Brady Madden founded Evergreen SEO to work exclusively in a category where every mainstream paid channel is closed. Mack Lunn interviews him about what that constraint does to a marketing strategy.

Brady came out of general digital marketing and built an agency aimed at one industry. That is normally a positioning choice. Here it is closer to a technical specialisation, because the rules a cannabis operator works under have almost nothing in common with the rules anyone else works under.

No paid search. No paid social on any major platform. Restrictions on email and on what a landing page can even claim. Everything that is left is organic, local and reputational.

Brady puts weight on brand recognition, and in this category it is not soft. A person who already knows your dispensary searches for it by name, which is the one query no competitor can outbid you on and no algorithm change takes away.

That makes offline presence, community work and word of mouth into search inputs rather than separate activities.

He is clear about the role of technical work. Cannabis sites tend to get built quickly, often on a menu platform bolted onto a template, and then never audited. Crawlability, indexation and site structure problems accumulate quietly.

That is good news for an operator willing to fix them. In a category where competitors cannot outspend you, being the site that search engines can actually read is a durable advantage.

The last practical constraint is legal geography. What you may sell, ship, claim and advertise changes at the state line, and so does the search intent. A national playbook does not survive contact with this industry.

Brady pushes on KPIs, and in this context the reason is specific. Cannabis marketing budgets get questioned harder than most, so a programme that cannot show measurable outcomes gets cut first. Decide what counts as success before the campaign, not after it.

He also touches on AI and what it does to SEO practice. The short version from this conversation: the tooling is changing faster than the fundamentals are.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

His agency is Evergreen SEO.

Madden, Brady. Interviewed by Mack Lunn. “Exploring The Cannabis Marketing Space.” Unscripted Cannabis, 2025. https://unscripted-cannabis.castos.com/episodes/exploring-the-cannabis-marketing-space-with-brady-madden