George Hahn

The flow of capital, like the trajectory of history, clots around compelling stories.

Entrepreneurs, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward.

Before America was a nation, it was a story told by traitors who recast their rebellious colonies as bastions of liberty and themselves as patriots.

Mastery of narrative is humanity's superpower, as the arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.

Communities with a larger share of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation and procreation.

Storytelling reinforces their evolutionary resilience, efficiently transmitting survival-relevant information.

At the beginning of the space race, the story was about Soviet pioneering and American stagnation.

The Soviet space program had put the first satellite into orbit, Sputnik, sent the first dog into space, Laika, and completed the first manned mission, Yuri Gagarin.

So how did we beat the Soviets to the moon in less than a decade?

A. We changed the story from one about us falling behind, the space race, to one we could win, the moon race.

Privately, President John F. Kennedy told NASA Administrator James Webb he wasn't that interested in space.

But he said we were going anyway to demonstrate that starting behind, we passed them.

In his 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston, JFK tapped into a sense of national urgency.

He defined space as a new frontier and leveraged America's competitive, pioneering spirit with a call to action.

JFK's story pulled the future forward by capturing America's capital, 5% of federal spending at the height of the Apollo program, and imagination, especially among young people.

A number of NASA's key scientists and engineers were in high school or college when JFK gave his speech.

Seven years later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Eagle module at a site later named Tranquility Base, the average age at mission control was 28.

The narrative arc continues to bend toward expanding human knowledge, as JFK's story inspired multiple generations to dedicate their careers to science and engineering.

As President George H.W.

Bush explained nearly two decades after it ended, the Apollo program was the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketchpad.