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Working for Kanye, Building "Items" for Delta Force | Justin Klahn | Ep. 445

Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC

Cleared Hot

Society & Culture

4.911.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2026

⏱️ 207 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Justin Klahn is hard to put in a box. Twenty years inside Nike Innovation. Years embedded with JSOC units building gear that had to actually work. Time consulting with three-letter agencies, DARPA, and the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory. A run working directly for Kanye West. He calls himself a problem solver, and the resume backs it up. His new book is Innovator's Handbook.

We open on the divorce conversation, the kind of failure neither of us wished for, and what it takes to show up for a partner the second time around.

From there it gets wide. The competition mindset that separates the top of the JSOC food chain from everyone else. What it's actually like to sit in a room with Kobe, with Tinker, with Kanye. The Nike origin stories most people don't know — the real Jordan re-signing, the Pantry, the relationship between Phil Knight and Steve Jobs.

We dig into the supernatural. Faith. Conspiracy and control. How a guy who advises high-stakes operators stays open enough to consider anything but grounded enough to still get the work done. 

And we end on the AI workflow he used to write a book in two weeks — and what that says about where the world is going. 

The Innovator's Handbook: https://a.co/d/01Zqj9Q7

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Okay, got the red smoke.

0:03.1

Gun runs, north and south, west of the smoke.

0:09.0

Okay, copy, west of the smoke.

0:11.2

I'm looking at danger close now.

0:13.6

I'm all winter, baby.

0:14.5

Give it to me.

0:15.0

I need it.

0:16.0

You're cleared hot.

0:17.2

Copy, cleared hot.

0:19.0

I feel like the government failed because if it was a compliance test, they went overboard.

0:23.1

And now if there was something real that did come out, people would say, fuck you and then drop dead.

0:30.3

That's true.

0:31.1

You know?

0:31.7

So I don't know what they would have gotten out of that test other than FearWorks is a compliance mechanism.

0:37.2

And you had to see how people reacted to that. But... would have gotten out of that test other than fear works as a compliance mechanism and you

0:37.5

had to see how people reacted to that but it pushed some people a lot of people so hard

0:44.7

that even in probably in the face of evidence showing to the contrary i don't know if they would do

0:49.0

anything so i don't know it's complicated it mean, what, so what data could come out?

0:55.3

There's still people driving around alone in their car with masks on. Yeah, I saw that a little bit, though. I mean, you've seen this. I'm sure Asian countries specifically, like masking is not that uncommon in a lot of other areas. And a lot of them do it just because they don't feel well. It's like a societal thing. I see that and I just assume that either,

1:11.2

A, they have some, uh, like a illness or whatnot or maybe it's like, I mean, who might

1:16.5

have tell people to live their life? If you want to wear a safety mask? If it's your comfort mask,

1:19.9

go to town, dude. Go to fucking town, you know. I mean, I'm always, I'm always impressed with

...

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