Unscripted Cannabis

Jeremy Rivera
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship

We're talking with profesionals, growers, software vendors, dispensary owners, enthusiasts all who work in the cannabis industry.

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Farmer Tom Lauerman: From a 1999 Raid to Teaching the CDC About 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, and his own site is farmertom.com. The full written recap is at Farmer Tom Lauerman: The Seed That Started It All. In this episode Shelter from the Storm, the Prop 215 collective Tom grew for in San Diego: about 20 patients, $50 a month if you could afford it, and a jar filled once a week on the honor system. "It was a true collective model." The 1999 raid that started with his dog nipping at a neighbor's fence, why the collective kept a media list (a lesson from Brownie Mary), and how NORML's lawyers and a courthouse protest got the charges shelved. The case led to San Diego's first medical marijuana task force. Moving to Oregon's Applegate Valley, then a five-acre former nursery outside Portland on the Washington side, where he cleaned the soil with pumpkins before growing. Washington's medical marijuana farmers markets, the magazine covers that came out of them, and lobbying in Olympia while the state wrote its legalization rules. The live extraction demo he organized for TV news that helped change the state's mind about concentrates: "If you don't regulate and tax, people are gonna continue to blow themselves up." Hosting CDC and NIOSH scientists on his farm in 2015 for a union-requested health hazard evaluation, including the CyberGlove study that produced the carpal tunnel warning for trimmers. The Lund Report covered the study. Teaching cannabis courses at Clark College, training over 300 farmers through his Hemp Farming Academy, and working as an expert witness in a large Kentucky hemp case. Why he turned down a deal that would have owned his name and face, and why he answers "exit plan?" questions the way he does. His role as a San Diego cannabis social equity applicant and the county think tank that won 600 feet for outdoor grows, where some cities wanted 1,200 to 1,500 feet. "Once you get arrested, the worst thing has happened and you really become an advocate for the plant at that point." - Farmer Tom Lauerman "Being an advocate's more about being an educator." - Farmer Tom Lauerman "There's still a lot of us in the trenches fighting." - Farmer Tom Lauerman Connect Farmer Tom: farmertom.com and farmertomorganics.com. He's Farmer Tom Lauerman on Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Your host, Mr. Gudwudz (Just Jay): mrgudwudz.com and gudwudz.com. Meet him on his own episode. Tom has agreed to come back for a part two with listener questions.

  2. Jun 25

    Dan Serard: How to Market Cannabis When the Platforms Are Against You

    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 Why Meta and Google flag cannabis and ancillary brands: no promotion of sales, no "$30, buy one get one" offers, and no smoke or smoking imagery. Dan's team still runs compliant digital advertising by leaning on lifestyle and education, and he explains why AI-written ad copy misses those nuances. A live teardown of Gudwudz, the $20 handcrafted walnut smoking accessory: show it in people's hands, use real-world use cases and testimonials, and put the value proposition at the very top of the site, because you have less than a second to catch a scroller. "If you build it they will come" as the deadliest belief in the industry. Start local or regional, prove the concept, then expand, the way one client grew from 60-plus stores in Nashville to 20 more in South Carolina. Why cannabis spreads by word of mouth: the porch at the house party, where strangers become best friends. The two channels nobody can shut off. First, organic SEO, plus a Google Business Profile. Second, email marketing, which means building the list at events and trade shows. Acquisition versus retention: SEO, ads and awareness bring people in, and email, SMS and loyalty platforms like Alpine IQ keep them buying. Premium versus merely expensive. Nail the brand identity first (voice, tone, blacks, golds and mattes), stay consistent for three to five years, then refresh based on what customers say. What an engagement costs: everything is custom scoped, brand packages typically start around $5,000 and digital retainers around $1,500. "That's the kiss of death. I think if you build it they will come because you might have a great friend network, a great product, and you know, you think everyone wants it? Well, you gotta educate people why." - Dan Serard "SEO is always gonna be king when it comes to searching products online." - Dan Serard 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...

  3. Jun 19

    Becca Williams: The Difference Between Relief and Healing — Third Wave Cannabis and Emotional Liberation

    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. Key takeaways Three waves, not two. Recreational, then medical, then intentional use inside a framework built for emotional processing. Cannabis is a nonspecific amplifier. It magnifies the state you are already in. If nothing is providing direction, it amplifies that too. Relief is transitory by design. Getting baked through the hard part feels better while it lasts because nothing was released. Healing conditions the nervous system. Becca’s claim is that a processed layer stays processed and does not need redoing. Talk therapy has a ceiling on trauma. Not a dismissal of therapy, a statement about what talking can reach. The macro-journey glow fades. A big psychedelic experience without an integration container leaves you where it found you. On this page The three waves of cannabis Relief versus healing Why the container matters more than the plant The limits of talk therapy When the generational cycle stops People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The three waves of cannabis 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. Relief versus healing 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. Why the container matters more than the plant 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. What a container actually means A defined intention set before the session, not during it. A method for proces...

  4. Jun 19

    Cannabis, Faith & the Architecture of Self: A Conversation with Just Jay

    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. Key takeaways He describes himself as a systems builder. Religious, social, educational. The question he never stopped asking is whether a system serves the people inside it. The wide path and the narrow path, re-read. His reframe: walking arm in arm in the same direction is the wide path. Working it out alone with God is the narrow one. Gudwudz started in 2003 as a bamboo prototype. It debuted properly at the Cannabis Cup in Denver, in walnut. The experiential product trap. Demand comes from trying it. Getting enough people to try it requires demand you do not have yet. Every major platform except X bans cannabis-adjacent advertising. Which removes the obvious way out of that trap. An ADHD diagnosis at 48 is what brought him to cannabis for focus, and put doctrine and personal experience directly at odds. Legacy is ideas, not assets. Everything material can be taken away. He has watched it happen twice. On this page The architect of your better self Church elder meets cannabis founder The Gudwudz problem: you have to try it to get it Twenty years to finish a book Legacy as ideas, not assets People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The architect of your better self 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. Church elder meets cannabis founder 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. The Gudwudz problem: you have to try it to get it Any founder with an experiential product will recognise this. Demand is generated by the experience. Generating the experience at scale requires demand...

  5. May 13

    Documentarian Jeremy Norrie: Cannabis From Healers to Big Business

    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. Key takeaways Legalisation did not end the fight, it changed the venue. The tax wars and legal double standards came after the win, not before it. Cannabis and alcohol are not regulated on the same terms and the gap is not accidental. Localised law is the real complexity. Medical rights and recreational rights diverge county by county. Algorithms reward sensationalism, which is a structural problem for anyone making careful documentary work. AI is the next monetisation cliff. New creative range on one side, authenticity and morality questions on the other. He applies a journalist’s standard to extraordinary claims, including UFOs, spirits and consciousness. Open-minded, not credulous. On this page From hemp freedom to regulatory collapse Tax wars and double standards Algorithms, monetisation and the black box AI, filmmaking and the moral questions The part about UFOs Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper From hemp freedom to regulatory collapse 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. Tax wars and double standards 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. Algorithms, monetisation and the black box 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. AI, filmmaking and the moral questions 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 i...

  6. Apr 27

    Len May: Cannabis, Your DNA, and Personalized Wellness

    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 Genes as a circuit breaker. Only 20 to 30 percent of the switches are on at birth. Food, environmental exposure and stress neurochemistry flip the rest. The stress-to-elbow-pain chain: a near miss floods you with cortisol, a genetic predisposition breaks down your own anandamide too fast, the immune system overreacts, and the doctor treats the elbow. Why a room of doctors went silent at Len's talk and then texted him questions for half an hour, and the LLM EndoDNA built so a practitioner can interrogate the genome in eighth-grade language on the EndoDNA platform. The endocannabinoid system, discovered in 1992, has nothing to do with smoking weed. Anandamide is Sanskrit for bliss. THC has a narrow therapeutic window, and today's 70 percent THC products are completely unnecessary. Addiction genetics: alcohol, opioid and amphetamine dependence genes plus impulsivity genes are a formula for disaster. Cannabis is not physically addictive, and sugar is probably more addictive than caffeine than cannabis. Grandma at chemo: a poor metabolizer on a high-THC gummy hallucinated and warned everyone off the devil's lettuce. Sublingual delivery, less THC, more CBD and linalool turned her into a walking referral. The full case is in his book Making Cannabis Personal. The tequila test. Nobody calls the tequila company after a rough night. Adults are accountable for the dose. Regulation: no federal testing standards, none at all for CBD, and a plea for federal quality control, prescribable tinctures and pharma collaboration without a ten-year FDA wait. Len's third book, Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, on ADHD and polymathy, and his show Everything is Personal. He posts as @lenmaydna on Instagram. "Your DNA is your life's GPS. It shows you where your potential potholes and where your traffic jams are in your own road, so by understanding this you can take specific actions to avoid those potholes." - Len May "It's the most regulated unregulated industry that we have." - Len May Related on Unscripted Cannabis: Mark Gillilan of Kyoto Botanicals on THC-free CBD, the founder Jeremy brings up on the regulation question,

  7. 01/21/2025

    Exploring The Cannabis Marketing Space With Brady Madden

    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. Key takeaways The paid-media ban is the strategy. When you cannot buy attention, organic search stops being one channel among several and becomes the channel. Brand recognition does the work paid media usually does. People search for the dispensary they already trust. Technical SEO matters more here than in most verticals, because the sites are often built fast on templates and never audited. State regulation fragments everything. What you can say, sell and rank for changes at the state line. Pick KPIs that survive a compliance review. Measurable success is what keeps a cannabis marketing budget alive. AI is changing how cannabis buyers search before it changes how agencies work. On this page Marketing inside a paid-media ban Why brand recognition carries cannabis search The technical SEO gap State by state Measuring it so it survives People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Marketing inside a paid-media ban 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. Why brand recognition carries cannabis search 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. The technical SEO gap 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. State by state 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. Measuring it so it survives 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. People, ideas and sources mentioned EntityWhat it is Evergree...

    Exploring The Cannabis Marketing Space With Brady Madden
  • 7 Episodes

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We're talking with profesionals, growers, software vendors, dispensary owners, enthusiasts all who work in the cannabis industry.

Information

  • Creator
    Jeremy Rivera
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    Unscripted Cannabis