Los Alamos.

1970

I came into this world in Los Alamos, New Mexico—a desert town that somehow carried heavy snow, perched on a high plateau an hour’s drive up a winding road from Santa Fe (I was born in Albuquerque, actually, but Los Alamos is where my parents lived). You didn’t pass through Los Alamos by accident. You climbed to it. The town sat isolated at 7,000 feet, bordered by canyons, cut off from the rest of the state in ways that were physical, cultural, and psychological.

On the surface, Barranca Mesa looked idyllic: kids riding bikes in looping streets, grills smoking in backyards, the calm order of a place that felt carefully designed. Underneath, it was a town of badges and gates, built on nuclear secrets and the long shadow of the Manhattan Project. The Cold War wasn’t an abstraction there. It was ambient—part of the air pressure.

Los Alamos was full of scientists, and full of churches. High-pressure, high-expectation people everywhere you looked. Nobel-level intellects mowing their lawns on weekends. Deep conservatism wrapped tightly around radical ideas about physics, responsibility, and the end of the world. It was a place obsessed with control and precision. Mistakes were not a casual thing.

We lived through the transition from Nixon to Carter, a time when the world felt volatile and unsteady. Our living room glowed with the flicker of the evening news. My father watched Vietnam on TV, trying to understand a world that seemed designed for chaos while he worked at the Lab to make sure that chaos didn’t end everything.

The Klein house ran on relentless, obsessive learning. Learning wasn’t a hobby; it was the current that ran through everything. My father, a mathematician and physicist, lived by a simple rule: learn your way through it. When the contractor for our house bailed mid-build, my father fired the crew and built the entire damn thing himself—hammer by hammer, night after night. Friends showed up with tools when things went sideways. He called them angels.

In my blood and in my environment lived the spirit of the organizer. We were a tiny tribe—about sixty Jewish families—in a desert of labs and canyons. Too small for a full-time rabbi, we took turns leading services ourselves, making meaning together out of borrowed prayer books and desert silence. It was my first real lesson in organizing: you don’t need a boss or an expert to create power. You just need a few committed people who won’t quit on each other.

From an early age, I was always organizing things—and sometimes losing big.

In elementary school, I tried to organize a class production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I didn’t just want a play; I wanted a system. Roles, cues, timing, staging. I sketched it all out, trying to hold the whole thing together in my head. That was when the music teacher stepped in. My version was too complicated, too ambitious, too much. I was sidelined—quietly but decisively—and the project moved on without me.

It was my first real lesson in failure. Not the kind where you try and fall short, but the kind where you build something earnestly and get removed from it anyway.

Another lesson came later: nothing is permanent—at least not if you’re doing it right. Sometimes organizing isn’t about holding power at all. It’s about starting something, learning every job because you have to, and then giving those jobs away once other people are ready to carry them. If you succeed, you make yourself less necessary.

As a kid, getting sidelined felt like loss. Over time, I learned the difference between being pushed out and stepping back. One is failure. The other is design.

That sense of purpose came with a heavy cost. I was born under a cloud of worry—a sickly kid who lost a kidney at age two and spent a decade being watched like fragile glass. I absorbed the OCD that ran like a background program in our house and turned it into something clinically extreme—rituals and counting meant to ward off a second Holocaust. I grew up standing between my parents’ mental loops and my own physical ones.

This became the terrain of my life: gathering small groups of people and trying to make something meaningful together. Through rough-and-tumble experiences—from the streets of Queens to neighborhoods in the Deep South—I learned how to listen, how to earn trust, and how to get people to join projects and do hard things together.

Some people say I’m too open. I’ve had my share of bad coping mechanisms. But I’ve learned that struggle doesn’t disqualify you—it can be the source of your strength. I’m driven to make the world better, whether through movements for the poor or by working with inventors to ensure technology is shared by the many rather than hoarded by a few.

Every year on Yom Kippur, my father would rise to read Jonah and the Whale. He read it as a law of nature: the whale spits you out. You can be swallowed by despair or betrayal, but you will not stay inside forever. You wash up on dry land—broken, maybe—but alive, with another chance.

The whale spits you out.

And then you start building.