Some people exude energy. A vibe can be dead, and they glide into the room like they’re made of raw, uncut aura. Suddenly, everything’s in motion. If you’ve been in a room with Wiz Khalifa, you already know the score.
The man can step into the club and have the dancers throwing money at him. If there are levels to the weed game, Wiz is at the top. After two decades of making and taking hits, he’s accomplished what so many people have tried to do and failed: He’s launched a successful celebrity weed brand, Khalifa Kush, and managed to keep it hot when so many celebrity-driven brands have cashed out or crashed out.
We had the chance to chop it up with Wiz oceanside in Malibu over the holidays to hear about his genesis, his world and his plans for the future.
The Come-Up
Anyone familiar with the Pittsburgh native’s music catalog knows that Wiz has been repping the plant since day one. It’s been the calling card of his career.
Wiz knew Cannabis was going to be a major part of his life when he was a young buck. In fact, he recalls the exact moment his hobby became his lifestyle.
“It was when I heard ‘Gotta Stay High’ by Three 6 Mafia,” he said, referring to the smokers’ rallying cry “Stay Fly” from the 2005 album “Most Known Unknown.”
“I was sitting in my crib. I was in like 11th grade, maybe, and I was wondering if I was smoking too much weed at the time. I heard the beat, and I was like, ‘Damn, I need to find that song.’ And then I went and I found the actual first verse and hook — because this was back in the day, before YouTube and all of that shit — so you really had to dig deep. I ended up finding it, and on the hook, they were saying, ‘I gotta stay high till I die.’ And I was like, ‘Damn, me too.’ Man, that’s when I figured it out.”
When it comes to the strain that made the biggest impact on him during those days, Wiz doesn’t hesitate. “It was Purple Haze back then,” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah. Purple Haze was like the original bomb ass weed. They used to call it Piff. Everybody wanted Purple Haze. Cam’ron made it super popular, but it was like the best weed on the East Coast. Out here on the West, they was always smoking Kush, and they was smoking Grapes. That’s what I smoked first when I came out here was Grapes, in Oregon or some shit like that. I had never really smoked Bay Area weed. And then when I went to the Bay, that’s when I met Berner, and that’s when I started smoking Cherry Pie and real OG Kush. We had Sour Diesel and we had Headband back in the day, but it wasn’t until I met Berner that the OG got as real as it is.”
As his relationship with the plant grew, so did his music career. The two were intertwined from the jump, with “Burn Sumthin” as a standout on his 2006 debut, “Show and Prove.” Then, in 2010, his career hit full flower. First, he dropped the “Kush and Orange Juice” mixtape. Then he hit us with “Rolling Papers,” and his trademark anthem “Black and Yellow.” He closed out that seminal year by teaching an entire generation of smokers how to roll a perfect joint, all while sitting in a hot tub, in a video that, as of today, has nearly 14 million views on YouTube.
In his life as an artist, Wiz sees weed as an integral tool for enhancing the creative process.
“I love music, and I work really hard at making music,” he said. “I’ve been working hard since before I was smoking a bunch of weed. And I think I found weed at an appropriate time because I was able to develop my skills and my passion, and the weed never got in the way of that. It only enhanced it. … You got to be at a point where you’re able to handle the weed because not everybody is as successful and functional while smoking this much pot.”
The Brand
Considering how long weed has been a part of his personal brand, it only makes sense that Wiz would have his own actual weed brand.
That started to become a reality in 2012, when he linked up with friends from his youth, Will Dzombak and Tim Hunkele, who developed a cultivar specifically for and with Wiz. The strain? Khalifa Kush.
Described as an “indica-dominant hybrid OG,” the KK hits the gas and pine notes, and it served as the bedrock for the brand, which launched to the public under the same name in 2016.
Now, they have a solid lineup of genetics that have all been hunted in collaboration with Wiz, with his palate in mind.
In 2020, they brought in current CEO DJ Saul, and as of writing this, they’ve grown to 15 markets around the world: Domestically in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, and internationally in Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Thailand and Israel, with more to be announced soon.
The KK team even proved its chops by winning the Leaf Bowl Award for Best Indoor Flower – Sweets & Dreams at the 2025 California Leaf Bowl with their cultivar Point Breeze, a cross of Khalifa Kush and Gastro Pop. (For those keeping score, the Leaf Bowl is judged blind by some of the preeminent expert palates in global Cannabis. You don’t often see that kind of heat from just any celebrity brand.)
“There’s no disrespect to any of the other (celebrity) brands because I like some of them,” Wiz said. “But the difference between my brand is that I actually came up doing this before it was a brand of weed. So people understand that I would be doing this regardless, and they know that what it was built off of is everything that they see. … I think that we’ve just lived it enough to give it a good reputation. And that’s something that you can’t really just buy or put a face on.
“It takes years and years in the game and knowing and making other valuable moments with the culture as well,” Wiz said, continuing. “I have the how-to-roll video in the hot tub that’s taught people how to roll weed. And this is before content creating was a part of everybody’s marketing strategy, but we’ve been doing that for Khalifa Kush. So that’s why we’re going to last longer. Because we’ve been working longer. We’ve been pushing the idea and the lifestyle since day one. It all goes hand in hand. People who smoke weed or listen to my music or just know the brand in general, they have a really good foundation to go off of before they even walk in the door.”
The Collabs
The hip-hop world is all about features, and Wiz has lent a verse or two to a gang of artists over the years. So it makes sense that his weed career would be all about the collabs.
One of his biggest collaborators is someone he works with in both worlds.
“Berner taught me about legal weed,” Wiz said, referring to the founder of the global San Francisco-based behemoth Cookies. The company’s Maywood store in Southern California served as the first California retailer for the Khalifa Kush brand. “I wouldn’t have known anything about the whole weed game if it wasn’t for Berner. Me and Bern are always collabing. He’s always putting new albums out and shit. So anytime he’s doing a new album, he hits me up right before it’s done, and he gets me to put a verse on there. And I usually do the same with him,” he explained.
The collaboration doesn’t stop there. After playing funk legend George Clinton in the 2023 film “Spinning Gold,” Wiz and Khalifa Kush partnered on a weed brand called The Funk, with the Godfather of Funk himself (see this month’s “Cannthropology” for more on P-Funk).
“We did an interview where we sat down and kind of just discussed some shit,” Wiz said. “We kind of just sat there and talked for like two hours, bro. It was a really cool conversation. Then after that, it made sense for us to try to partner up and do some shit with weed. I gave him some of my weed, and he really, really liked it. So based off of that, he was like, ‘Yo, I kind of want to make my own strain just like this or whatever I could do.’” The Funk dropped in spring 2025.
The Man
Perhaps Wiz’s biggest collab project is raising his kids. He recently had his second child, and like so many parents who consume the plant, feels like Cannabis actually helps parenthood, rather than hindering it.
“For somebody like me who enjoys smoking pot as much as I do, it definitely helps with parenting and just to be relaxed and in a good zone at any point of the day, especially dealing with a lot too,” Wiz said. “I’ll forget to smoke weed sometimes. I’d be going all day or half the day, and I’d be like, ‘Damn, I need to smoke some fucking weed.’ And then everything gets cool as shit after that. But sometimes I’m with my kids so much I forget to.”
When he’s not making music, smoking weed or hanging with his kids, you can probably find Wiz in the gym. An avid trainer, he utilizes the plant to help him focus.
“Cannabis definitely helps with my training 100%,” he said. “It keeps me calm. It keeps me lighthearted. My mind-to-muscle connectivity is really, really sharp when I’m at a good stoned level, and I’m able to train. And it also makes me appreciate the weed a lot more. It’s funny because when I was younger, I just thought it was all about just sitting around and getting high. Somebody had invited me to work out, and I was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to work out because that’s going to take two hours, and that’s two hours that I could be smoking weed.’ And I’m glad that I thought like that at that time because now I can appreciate two hours to myself without smoking, and the feeling and the high that I get from exercising and sweating and breathing hard and physically coming in contact with some things.
“You get to enjoy livelying yourself up and enjoy that high,” he continued. “And then you get to bring it back down and enjoy the stoned high as well. So you get the best of both worlds, and I feel really blessed to be able to enjoy both because there are a lot of athletes who just, professionally, they’re not allowed to smoke just because of the rules or whatever. But they would enjoy that so much if they got to perform at that level and smoke at a certain level too. If you could hit a bong rip, you got some good lungs, man. It’s not hurting your lungs. If you can clear a fucking bong, bro. Yeah, dude. Yeah, that’s champion lungs right there.”
The Machine
Wiz came up during the dawn of the smartphone era, when streaming, social media and YouTube officially replaced MP3s and albums as the prime delivery mechanism for music and culture.
As a result, Wiz is always on. If you follow him on Twitch, you already know. He and Khalifa Kush Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Arakel (known on Instagram as @_stephaniecakes_) throw wild Twitch stream parties and get into all kinds of shenanigans on the platform.
During the Leaf Magazines photo shoot for this article, Wiz kept his Twitch audience plugged in for the majority of the time, asking “Chat” questions in between shots.
“My favorite thing so far is definitely when Nick did the handstand dab,” Wiz said, recalling memorable Twitch moments. “We did a random Steeler Sunday, and we had this dude named Nick. He came through, and we were spinning the wheel. And one of the commands on the wheel was to do a fucking handstand dab. And he did the dab, but he also ran away and was about to throw up everywhere, couldn’t find a trash can, ended up in the bathroom for like 20 minutes and yeah, just had to be carried up out of there. That’s rough. Yeah. It was cool. I fucked with it.”
Wiz’s Twitch channel recently surpassed 10,000 paid subscribers, and he dropped the album “Khaotic” as a gift to his fans to mark the occasion.
“The next thing that I want to do is a hundred-joint sleepover,” Wiz said. “So we’re going to smoke a hundred joints and then do a 24-hour stream. I think that would be just hella fun for people to be able to stay the night at my house or wherever we decide to do it. And then also I’m going to do something school-related, where it’s like a day in class, but it’s like a weed school though. So you’re learning about weed, you’re learning how to roll up, you’re learning all the different techniques. You know what I mean? Of course, we’re going to have lunch, we’re going to have PE and all of that. …Yeah, just incorporate weed in real life and have fun.”
The Plan
In May of this year, Wiz kicks off a U.S. and European tour with Machine Gun Kelly, which throws back to his collab with MGK from 2015, “Mind of a Stoner.” When asked whether they’re going to perform the track together, he plays it chill.
“We’ll see, yeah,” he said. Though he won’t confirm or deny an onstage Wiz-MGK team up, he can confirm that he has plenty in store for his fans and followers.
“I plan on releasing a lot of new music before then,” Wiz said. “So it’ll be the new stuff that I drop and always, always do the hits. It just depends on the temperature and the energy of where the fan base is. I feel like, especially through streaming, it’s going to attract new people and new attention, but I’m always going to have my core, so it’s going to be good to see a mixture of the two when I go out there.”
As for the brand, Wiz and the KK team have their sights set on the global stage.
“That’s the big part, and that’s the exciting part,” Wiz said, adding that a lot of innovative work is happening here in the advanced U.S. market that can be shared with other countries. “Overseas, they have a really big appreciation for the plant. They have a really big appreciation for the knowledge, and they just want to grow their shit and expand, and be on what we’re on as well. We have a lot of experience to catch them up on. So, as the laws loosen and people become more friendly overseas, that’s the next wave, in my opinion — the globalization of Khalifa Kush.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Wiz plan if it didn’t involve collabs. “I did a collab with YOKKAO, who’s a really popular heavy sponsor in Muay Thai and combat sports overseas,” he said. “We have Khalifa Kush in some Thailand stores because it’s legal over there. We have workout gear. We got yoga stuff. Anything that goes with the lifestyle. Like I said, this is all stuff that I do as well. So, with the lifestyle and with the people who believe in the lifestyle, we’re going to do it all together. We going to smoke together, we going to train, we going to wrap the babies up in Khalifa Kush blankets and put them to bed at the end of the night.”
While they gear up for that global push, at home in the U.S., the team is working with Wiz on pheno hunts for their jars. “Genetics are always advancing as time goes on,” he said. “So we try to do something new that’s going to stand out, and that’s going to be groundbreaking as well as go along with the culture. There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s just weed intuition and knowing what’s good weed and what’s not. … Sometimes, you just know.”
Of course, when asked whether there’s a favorite strain he keeps in his lineup at all times, his answer is on point. “The one I smoke the most is definitely the original Khalifa Kush,” he said. “Just the black and yellow one.”
