Under The Social Influence
An interivew with Tokin Daily founder Paul Tokin.
An early online cannabis social influencer, Paul Tokin offers glimpses into his history in making cultural history through his Youtube channel Tokin Daily.
Tokin Daily is an iconic cultural Youtube show created by Paul Tokin out of a pure desire to share cannabis and kindness with the world. He found community, and they found him, and together they share bowls, wisdom, and lots of cheer. He charmed people with his kindness and compassion, and made it a point to share high spirits in the hope of generating a positive experience for the viewer each and every time. Paul’s work in socializing cannabis was part of a revolutionary movement that changed how people interacted with cannabis on social media forever.
In this interview Paul and I comment on the significance of forums, especially in the pre-2000’s. Forums are online communities where most people obtained information on cannabis at a time where it was not very accessible information. Paul shares stories about the blessed and recently deceased cultural icon Subcool, and talks about the time he and Nikka T coined the term “solventless hash oil (SHO)” a term now widely applied in the cannabis extraction and marketing spheres. He also talks about how online restrictions on popular channels make it difficult for people to share information without getting deleted, which is the equivalent of a modern day book burning, and new things he wants to share with his community on his own time amongst so much more. I intentionally left this interview long, as there was so much that I just couldn’t sacrifice for the sake of a short attention span.
I am especially honored to have interviewed Paul. I don’t feel cool enough to know Paul, honestly. I don’t mean that in any kind of pretentious way, he is simply a kind soul and his presence is lovely to be around. He’s the kind of charismatic soul that should be an influencer, as long as that means passing on kindness in the hopes it will stay lit, like a cherry on top of a good bowl.
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Paul: I came out here (to Hawaii from Colorado) in 2015 So four years that I’ve been here.
M.K: So you’re doing a kombucha project?
Paul Tokin: Well that’s kind of in the future, it’s gonna be sort of getting started kind of soon. For the past three and a half years now I’ve been working at a kombucha brewery/ vegan restaurant or vegan cafe kinda thing. So, I’ve been brewing the kombucha for a while now and that’s what put the idea in my head that I should be doing that for myself rather than for somebody else.
M.K: You’re obviously still doing Tokin Daily?
Paul Tokin: I haven’t been doing that for a while.
M.K: I saw your last few videos saying that Youtube shows were getting deleted?
Paul Tokin: Yeah, I got a warning strike and two additional strikes within a matter of like three days. So I was like, before I get that last strike that does just terminate my channel I’m just gonna make everything private again and stop doing the videos. Just because, I think when I start doing them again it gets too much attention going to my channel and that’s what brings the negative minded moderators into play again.
M.K: Damn, and there’s not really anywhere else that you can go to create like that can you?
Paul Tokin: Not really, not on the same level as Youtube, just because it’s the biggest channel. There are other options but I’m picky with things. For me it’s less about making money than doing it for fun. Maybe if I was more business oriented with it like I was at one point, making it like a brand, but there are elements of that that I didn’t care for so I didn’t pursue that.
If I was though, I would just make my own website at this point to draw my own traffic to just what they want to see. Not going through the channel eliminates the middleman.
M.K: A few years ago people were getting kicked off of instagram, accounts with tens of thousands of followers who’d been posting for several years, and that historical timeline, when they delete it, vanished. It’s gone forever. It feels like a modern day book burning. (15:35)
Paul Tokin: It sucks that it happens, it still happens but not quite on the level as it was at that time that you’re talking about, but if I could make an educated guess I’d probably say that it’s the same thing that happened with Youtube.
The main thing was that there was a new CEO at Youtube, she came to that position and it was basically just a power flex, a crack down on all of this not 100% family friendly advertising stuff. As the end user we have no power at all in that situation. And to lose all of those memories, all of the pictures, that sucks.
M.K: Okay so this is sort of like a culture climate question: do you know about Subcool, he was also a Youtuber?
Paul Tokin: I literally just found out like a half hour ago. Unfortunately everybody has to die at some point. The best you can do is live an awesome life where you have the chance to create a legacy and he’s definitely one of the people that certainly created a legacy, so, cheers to Subcool.
M.K: The reason why I asked to do this interview with you is because I feel like you’re a representative of this really intimate side of the counterculture. You created a relationship and you built a community from scratch using pictures and being on the internet for people to watch if they wanted to, similar to Subcool.
Paul Tokin: Yeah sharing the love of the plant with other people who also love the plant, I think that’s basically what it was.
M.K: And you started it by educating too, right? You were taking pictures, pictures are worth a thousand words.
Paul Tokin: I started just showing off basic things. I certainly had a few videos there were educationally oriented, showing basic processes of growing. One of the greatest things was when I worked at a dispensary, one of the growers…we didn’t necessarily not get along but we weren’t great friends or anything. One day he comes to me and says, “Aw dude, I was just looking up this issue, I saw this video and I was learning so much from it and then I looked down at the uploader and I realized it was you.” He just thanked me, you know, and that was a video that I had uploaded a few years prior.
M.K: Well, what Youtube helped you do was document and put it on a timeline. So that somebody could see that you’ve been doing this for a long time, which I feel like definitely helps your reputation at that point, because people see how many people have been participating with you also.
Paul Tokin: Prior to doing Tokin Daily I started uploading content on the internet, just pictures and stuff on web forums in the early 2000’s, and Youtube came along so I started uploading Youtube videos in 2006. For a long time it was just kinda every now and then I’d upload a video of the plants I was growing. That’s when I started doing the low stress training videos and just basic stuff because I liked sharing information. So when I learned how to clone, when I built my first cloner I was like, “Fuck yeah I’m gonna make a video of all this and show everybody else what I did.”
Just the feedback that I got from doing it was what kept me wanting to keep doing it. Just keep expanding and keep on going into new facets of everything that has to do with the world of cannabis.
M.K: Your feedback is really touching actually. Some of the things that people have to say to you is like, they really love you.
Paul Tokin: Oh for sure. I like to think that because I’ve done it for such a long time now, I’ve definitely imparted a core element of positivity, because positivity was very much on my mind when I started making the videos. I realized that when I’m making this kind of content, I directly control the vibe of somebody’s entertainment, it’s what they’re choosing to do with their life, so if I can do things in a certain way that does more positive on any level, well then that’s a good thing.
That was my mindset going into it. Doing it for so long the people that enjoyed watching my videos fell into the vibe so, win win I like to think.
M.K: What ignited your passion into cannabis in the first place? You said you were posting in forums in the early 2000’s.
Paul Tokin: I fuckin’ loved what it did to my brain. I went so long in my life without smoking, because I was anti-drugs for a long time with the exception of caffeine. I was a nut for caffeine as a kid.
I grew up in an environment where I had a lot of visibility of what alcoholism and a lot of cigarette smoke does to you. I hated cigarettes and I didn’t care for alcohol, so that turned me off to doing all drugs. I didn’t have a whole lot of exposure to weed until…the time was ripe when I was 22 years old and that first bowl I smoked I was like, “Fuckin A if I could go back in time and force teenage me to just smoke a fuckin’ bowl I would do it in a heartbeat.” I would go back in time and slap myself silly until I forced myself to smoke pot.
It was that realization right there, that this is something that I need in my life. That just made me jump into it and try to spread the love and knowledge, everything I could about the plant as a whole.
M.K: Now with kombucha, is that what you’re going through with it too?
Paul Tokin: I would say it’s much more financially motivated, there’s a high rate of return on the profit. Don’t get me wrong I love kombucha and it will probably be a large part of my life for years to come.
M.K: Do you still keep up with the Tokin Daily community?
Paul Tokin: Not enough. I feel bad a lot of the time for a lot of my hardcore audience because for the past couple months I just disappeared. I’ve recently started posting a little bit more, instagram pictures and what not but I’ve been horrible about keeping up with them. A lot of times what I do is, when I do get around to uploading a video I try to stay active with the comments. Like anybody who leaves any sort of comment that allows an opening for me to reply back to, I will reply, even if it’s just to say, “Hey, I see you, I appreciate you.”
M.K: Is that because you’ve been busy or does that have to do with Youtube restrictions?
Paul Tokin: That played a part in it but it’s hard to say exactly. A few things in life lined up perfectly for me to really want to take a break and apprecitate the hell out of taking that break, but still having that base desire to want to be create and make videos again, just on my own time.
M.K: Maybe even some kombucha videos?
Paul Tokin: I started doing one along those lines, it’s like a basic how to. I want to get into that a lot more in depth and just like the weed videos I want to share the knowledge. Just like weed, there’s a lot of things about kombucha that people just don’t know, and I think once they do know it’ll take away the unknown element. I want to help ease them into approaching it.
I try not to care too much because in the end Youtube is a website that somebody else owns, they have the ultimate say in whether they want my content on their site or not. I know something will come along that I like, it’s already starting with that website the weedtube. There’s always gonna be an alternative because there are always going to be people who are looking to provide that kind of content. That’s just one of the generational facts of life is that kids will rebel. People will always want to show off that counterculture side of things.
M.K: There’s this interview that got posted with Nikka T, I think, did you see it?
Paul Tokin: I don’t think so.
M.K: It’s called, “A History of the Solventless Dab.” You didn’t know about it?
Paul Tokin: Oh, I may have seen a post he made about it but I don’t think I actually clicked on it at the time.
M.K: The interview mentions you in it, which is why I guess I assumed incorrectly that you would have known about it.
Paul Tokin: I probably know what he’d say about it.
So the whole evolution of his solventless hash oil. Somewhere along the lines of 2011ish, it was when I was working at a dispensary and he was working in the back area in the warehouse area. That was like the birth of Essential Extracts. One of the batches he came out with was super oily, super melty, and I want to say that I maybe coined the term “solventless hash oil,” and the reason I liked SHO was because it was near enough in similarily to BHO but it wasn’t, and I liked the letter S because it reminded me of a certain car, the Taurus SHO performance edition of the car. I don’t love the car or anything but I knew the name fit. So that was the inception of the term and the product.
M.K: He says that you both were like, “Whoa that doesn’t look like bubble!” I could imagine how y’all would geek seeing that.
Paul Tokin: I don’t remember the strain exactly, maybe it was a Bubba Kush that he might have had. That batch separated anything that he had done previously, and it gave it that extra texture. When he put the lighter up to it, it just exploded with the bubbles.
M.K: So you smoked some of the first SHO, by technical term the first. Legendary.
Paul Tokin: Good times, good times.
M.K: Did you know that you’re in Urban Dictionary?
Paul Tokin: Yes. My coworkers actually found that out a while ago and made mention of it. That’s cool.
M.K: I remember one time we were sitting outside Illuzion, and we smoked a bowl together. You told me that you started as mostly a photographer. I was wondering how much cannabis photography was around when you started doing that.
Paul Tokin: Oh, like none. It was shortly after Denver had fully legalized it with the I-100 in like 2005. It was legal in the city, I had my medical card, so in my eyes it was just one of those things. Fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen. It was a gamble, and it all went smoothly for the most part throughout the whole career in terms of legal stuff.
Just taking pictures though, I never did it with a professional camera, I just had a point shoot camera and it had a macro feature on it. I like taking macro shots so I would get as close as I possibly could to just get a really detailed nug shot, or hash shot. With the Youtube thing, I started making videos and putting them up because Youtube had literally just started allowing high definition videos. Not 1080p but 720p, that was the first high definition.
That’s when I bought a video camera and started shooting videos, that was around 2006 I want to say. That was cool because I always liked the idea of video over picture because I wanted the 3D aspect of a plant by going around it rather than just showing a picture from a certain angle with certain lighting that you can kind of manipulate to look better than it actually is.
M.K: So early 2000’s you were posting in the forum threads. Then in 2005 you decided to share pictures because legalization hit. Then Youtube did the 720p thing in 2006 where you started doing videos.
Paul Tokin: Back in the day there were always people who wanted to show off their pictures, so on a lot of the internet forums there were usually picture threads. Back in the day people were a lot more anonymous about it but once again, once I got my medical card I changed my approach and started adding more information to my posts. Stuff that might not necessarily be considered illegal, but things that other people weren’t as willing to show off. I was doing it legally for the most part, rather than coming completely from the black market side of things.
M.K: Where were you learning about growing at the time? On forums? The forums were revolutionary.
Paul Tokin: For the most part. I had a couple books that taught me some base knowledge. I was also big on learning from as many different sources as possible, so the availability of the forums at the time was great to me. You had the big ones like Overgrow from back in the day, ICMag that’s probably still around though I haven’t logged in for years, and there were so many more forums with people on there. I was about soaking in all of the possible information.
M.K: Do you think you’ll stay in Hawaii for a long time?
Paul Tokin: Probably. If I move from here it will be somewhere even more remote, a different island paradise probably. Most likely I’ll be staying here though. Maui just has that perfect element of remote country with a bit of town life to appease me.
M.K: Well, you know you better than I know you, are there any questions I didn’t ask that I should have asked?
Paul Tokin: True but I get weird when the pressure is on. Like I want to be helpful but I don’t know what to say to be helpful.
You know, kinda going back to something else. You mentioned Subcool earlier on. Shortly after he started doing his video series, the cannabis cup came to Denver. He was in Denver and we were in that little alley area back where it happened, what building was that, the Blazeville center was it?
I was in the alley and I was walking through, and he was walking into one of the other buildings and he flagged me down, waved me over, and he actually told me that I was one of the inspirations for him to start doing his videos. That was a situation in my life where I was humbled. Again a proper shoutout to him and everything that he has inspired, and all the videos that he’s done.
M.K: Cheers to that.
