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Yes, Obama, who was the guest editor for our November issue, spent his childhood watching and re-watching Star Trek. But for the leader of the free world, his fandom goes beyond unbridled enthusiasm for gadgets and space travel. As he said in an interview with Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT’s Joi Ito, Star Trek is more than a story of intergalactic adventure. It “was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems.”

As much as Star Trek was about space travel and futuristic world-building and intergalactic domination, it celebrated curiosity and teamwork—values that inform innovative exploration from the Enterprise to NASA to Silicon Valley. “What made the show lasting was it wasn’t actually about technology,” Obama says. “It was about values and relationships.”