The Permission to Be Ridiculous: Flying Cars, Play, and the Future of Innovation

In October 2026, Tesla revealed a redesigned version of its long-delayed Roadster at a SpaceX test facility in Texas. The car climbed a curved ramp until it hung upside down, held itself in place with an underbody fan system, and then used cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX to flip back onto its wheels. Tesla says production is planned for 2028. Whether the most extreme versions ever reach public roads is another matter.

On Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard treat the moment less as car news than as a prompt for a broader question: what is the value of ideas that look ridiculous?

Playpens and playgrounds

Modern education and work are full of language celebrating creativity and boundary-pushing. Yet creativity is often expected to happen within limits set by someone else, closer to a playpen than a playground. Sean describes a high school project to build a mousetrap-powered car, which he completed by having the mousetrap trigger a model rocket engine. It outdistanced every other car in the class and earned a D for not following the expected path. The lesson many people absorb from experiences like this is not "be creative," but "be creative in approved ways."

Spectacle, spinoffs, and power

A long-standing argument holds that ambitious, seemingly frivolous projects pay off indirectly; NASA's research budget is often defended through the technologies that trickle out into everyday life. Fan systems that let a vehicle grip a surface at any speed might find uses far beyond sports cars, perhaps in specialized rescue vehicles. Yet there is an uncomfortable complication. When the most visible acts of technological play are funded and fronted by some of the world's most powerful people, celebrating the play can feel inseparable from endorsing the power. One response the hosts return to is widening access: more of this kind of experimentation in universities and public research labs, where results can be shared openly.

The flying car as a borrowed future

Futurist Jim Dator's second law holds that any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous. Flying cars complicate that. They still look ridiculous, yet they are also among the most familiar images of the future, inherited from more than a century of inventors, industrialists, and cartoons. Futurists sometimes describe this as a "used future": a vision borrowed rather than imagined. The challenge is distinguishing ridiculousness that opens new possibilities from ridiculousness we have simply grown used to.

The more durable question is not whether any of us will drive an upside-down car, but how to create places where students, researchers, and teams have room to pursue the improbable without needing a billionaire's budget to do it.

Listen to the full conversation on Modem Futura, Episode 108.

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The Right to Be Unpredictable

Most of the systems we now live inside share an unstated goal: to make us easier to predict. Recommendation engines learn from what we've already watched. Professional platforms reward the cadence that worked last time. Large language models, trained on the archive of what humans have already written, carry the norms of the past into every answer they give. None of this is malicious. It is simply what optimization looks like when the thing being optimized is a person.

In Episode 101 of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I ask a question that sounds abstract until you start noticing it everywhere: is unpredictability a right, a responsibility, or a luxury?

Why we both want and resist predictability

Humans organize. We divide land into countries and time into calendars and people into first and last names, because a society that can anticipate the future can prepare for it. But the things we prize most — creativity, innovation, discovery, the founding of anything new — come from someone seeing what the existing model didn't contain. A fully predictable civilization would be static, and as Andrew puts it, static is another word for dead. Unpredictability isn't noise in the system. It's how the system evolves.

Predictability breeds fragility

Futures thinkers talk about black swans, events no one saw coming that reshape everything in hindsight. One of the arguments in this episode is that over-predicting is how you breed them. The more tightly you control what you expect, the less you can see, and the more exposed you become to whatever you've foreclosed. Minority Report gets invoked here not as prophecy but as a used future: a story about prediction at scale that also shows how brittle such a system becomes the moment an unpredictable human enters the loop.

The playpen problem

Education is where this tension is most visible. Institutions say they want critical thinkers and problem solvers, then assess everyone against the same template. Andrew calls this a playpen, a space defined by what you cannot do. The alternative I've been arguing for over the past decade is a performance of understanding, where learners demonstrate depth in a form they define. Then there's the playground, which has edges too, but inside them imagination is permitted to run.

Constructive unpredictability

Not every deviation is creative, and the episode is careful about that. The distinction we land on is constructive versus destructive unpredictability. The design challenge, for educators, technologists, and anyone building the tools we'll think with, is to create systems that don't just tolerate serendipity but make room for it deliberately.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/46cmohk

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BcLR19gSOYvg1F6k8Imuc?si=8QQEKsocSt-K3dOQZzUlxg

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/JNjtU5uP1e4

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/

Giving new life to an old Apple G4 Cube

I have always liked the look the Apple G4 Cube desktop computer case.  Thanks to my colleague Frank T. I was given an opportunity to recycle this once fairly iconic computer into something still useful in my office - a plant holder.  I was looking for a new little art project and this gave me the perfect little springboard to do something creative.

Frank had found this old G4 Cube and removed all the electrical components, circuit boards, cables etc.  It sat on his desk for a while and I always thought how neat it might be to re-purpose this piece of computer equipment into something more green, like a plant holder.  When Frank retired he tossed this little case my way, and well, I went right to work re-purposing it.

This was a really quick little art project, in total it only took about 15 minutes to do.  It only required simple hand tools (Phillips screwdriver, pliers and some wire). I had thought for a while how I liked the juxtaposition of the cold high-tech (well, once upon a time that is) computer case with the warm softness of a living plant growing from it.  To me, this little plant holder represents the possibilities of recycling old computer equipment into something useful again, and the reclaiming of life by nature over man-made obstructions.