Go/No-Go

Lumafield

Go/No-Go is about the calls that make or break great products. We go deep into the reality of designing, manufacturing, and delivering products that change the world and reflect on the small and large decisions that make them what they are. We also cover the latest manufacturing and recall news, and look inside products using industrial CT to learn how things get built right (or wrong). Hosted by Jon Bruner and Alex Hao.

  1. Allbirds collapses, SpaceX IPO targets $1 trillion, Iran buys a Chinese spy satellite, Sony Honda AFEELA canceled, Slate raises $650M, lab-grown chocolate.

    6D AGO

    Allbirds collapses, SpaceX IPO targets $1 trillion, Iran buys a Chinese spy satellite, Sony Honda AFEELA canceled, Slate raises $650M, lab-grown chocolate.

    Allbirds sold its name and assets for $39 million after a $4 billion IPO in 2021, and the shell listing is now being used to raise $50 million for a GPU-as-a-Service company called NewBird AI. We use it as a window into the D2C brand era and what it takes to build a consumer brand that lasts. SpaceX filed confidentially for a June IPO targeting $50 to $75 billion at a self-assessed valuation over $1 trillion, with Starlink generating $11.4 billion of that revenue in 2025. Iran acquired a Chinese spy satellite with half-meter resolution for $36.6 million through an in-orbit delivery model designed to sidestep export restrictions. A Citrini Research analyst rode a speedboat through the Strait of Hormuz to find out whether the blockade is real. On the automotive side: the Sony Honda AFEELA is canceled before release, Honda expects a $15 billion loss and its first unprofitable year since 1957, Slate raised $650 million for a bare-bones $25,000 EV pickup, and Stellantis is recalling 700,000 vehicles over a fire risk. We also cover lab-grown chocolate and why cocoa went from $3,000 to $12,000 a ton. Links from the discussion: Allbirds pivots to AI hyperscale as NewBird AI: https://www.theverge.com/news/912484/allbirds-ai-hyperscale SpaceX files to go public, setting stage for huge IPO: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/technology/spacex-ipo-elon-musk.html Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases: https://www.ft.com/content/1fddd2cd-1294-4e9c-a17d-5ea06b399355 Citrini Research: Strait of Hormuz field trip: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-hormuz-a-citrini-field Sony Honda Mobility cancels AFEELA 1 before release: https://www.shm-afeela.com/en/news/2026-03-25/ Slate Auto raises $650 million Series C: https://www.wardsauto.com/news/slate-auto-says-650m-boost-will-get-it-to-next-stages-of-production/817388/ A new kind of hybrid car is about to hit America's streets (EREV explainer): https://apple.news/AMS9PudLNTgedX0f8eo1MkQ Stellantis to recall up to 700,000 cars worldwide over fire risk: https://www.reuters.com/business/stellantis-recall-up-700000-cars-worldwide-over-fire-risk-2026-04-01/ Israeli startup makes world's first lab-grown chocolate bar: https://www.ft.com/content/ea3610be-2a9d-45ac-b4c9-5e18225fed6b CT scan: cacao pod: https://voyager.lumafield.com/project/3af46887-0dea-447a-8629-a0d16cb4073a

    30 min
  2. The Takata airbag recall: how a propellant chemistry decision in the 1990s became the largest and costliest automotive recall in history, and why it still isn't over

    APR 23

    The Takata airbag recall: how a propellant chemistry decision in the 1990s became the largest and costliest automotive recall in history, and why it still isn't over

    We open with a Takata airbag sitting on the desk in front of us: a unit manufactured at the Monclova, Mexico plant at the center of the recall disaster, purchased on eBay and arrived by UPS ground. We couldn't determine whether it's one of the recalled units. The Takata airbag recall is the largest and costliest in automotive history, spanning just about every major automaker and now approaching 30 US deaths. We reconstruct the engineering story: how ammonium nitrate became the propellant of choice over cheaper and less stable alternatives, how its crystalline structure degrades through heat cycles and humidity over time, and how that degradation turns a supplementary restraint system into shrapnel. We also CT scanned the airbag, and we walk through what the scan reveals about how these assemblies are constructed. The organizational story runs alongside the engineering one: falsified test data, a 50-year Honda-Takata supplier relationship that led to complacency instead of accountability, a regulatory revolving door, and a whistleblower who spent years trying to prove that recalled airbags were being shipped as non-hazardous freight. The recall completion rate is now at 98%, a remarkable figure. The remaining 2% represents over a million vehicles still on the road, and the units that haven't been replaced are the oldest and most degraded. Links from the discussion: NHTSA Takata Recall Spotlight: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle-safety/takata-recall-spotlight Check for Recalls using your vehicle identification number (VIN): https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls Ticking Time Bomb: The Truth Behind Takata Airbag (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFL0pnV4hx8 NHTSA Takata recall history and key terms (fact sheet): https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/120916-fact_sheet-takata_recall_history_and_key_terms-tagged.pdf Lumafield CT scan of the Takata airbag: https://voyager.lumafield.com/project/5af653fa-13c1-4287-b3df-db4efebd992b

    36 min
  3. Nick Terzulli of Fellow on inventing Espresso Series One, why home espresso has stagnated for decades, and the physics of heating water on 120V.

    APR 14

    Nick Terzulli of Fellow on inventing Espresso Series One, why home espresso has stagnated for decades, and the physics of heating water on 120V.

    Nick Terzulli is Vice President of Research and Development at Fellow, the San Francisco coffee equipment company whose products can be found everywhere from Target shelves to your favorite third-wave coffee shop. Before Fellow, Nick worked on military robotics and designed medical devices at Stryker and Dextera, before spending several years scrubbing toilets at a coffee shop for $10 an hour just to learn how to make coffee using the best equipment available. The central problem Terzulli came to Fellow to solve has constrained home espresso since the beginning: 120V household power limits thermal and pressure stability in ways that commercial machines, running on much higher amperage, simply don't face. The best home machines either take 40 minutes to heat up or sacrifice performance to achieve fast heat-up times. Terzulli's answer, which became Fellow’s Espresso Series One, uses three separate heating elements staged in sequence to achieve commercial-level stability with a two-minute heat-up time, a novel approach he holds the sole utility patent on. The conversation covers how that architecture came together, what it takes to design for both the beginner and the specialist, how Fellow uses firmware and over-the-air updates to build community around its machines, and why designing coffee burrs from scratch was, in his view, the hardest technical challenge of his career. Links from the discussion: Fellow: https://www.fellow.com Espresso Series One: https://fellowproducts.com/products/espresso-series-1 Ode Brew Grinder: https://fellowproducts.com/products/ode-brew-grinder-gen-2 Fellow Drops (coffee subscription): https://fellowproducts.com/pages/fellow-drops Aiden Pourover Coffee Maker: https://fellowproducts.com/products/aiden-precision-coffee-maker Coffee Bean Roast Level CT Analysis: https://www.lumafield.com/first-article/posts/the-industrial-ct-guide-to-coffee-roast-levels Coffee Scan of the Month: https://www.lumafield.com/scan-of-the-month/coffee

    40 min
  4. Iranian cyberattacks hit medical device supply chains, the Pentagon orders 3,000 Skydio drones in 72 hours, a blood-filtering fraud earns federal charges, and plug-in hybrid owners almost never plug in.

    APR 2

    Iranian cyberattacks hit medical device supply chains, the Pentagon orders 3,000 Skydio drones in 72 hours, a blood-filtering fraud earns federal charges, and plug-in hybrid owners almost never plug in.

    The conflict with Iran has reached U.S. supply chains: an Iranian-linked cyberattack wiped devices across Stryker's global operations overnight, cutting the medical device company off from the hospitals it serves. We also cover the Pentagon's 3,000-drone Skydio order completed in 72 hours, California gas at $5.89 per gallon, a Fraunhofer Institute study finding that plug-in hybrid owners mostly don't plug in, criminal charges against a former ExThera Medical executive for concealing patient deaths from the FDA, Cargill's computer vision system that found $200 million in beef without adding a single cow, the OmniPod 5 recall, and iFixit's MacBook Neo teardown. Links from the discussion: How Cargill uses AI to get more meat from the bone as beef prices soar: https://www.ft.com/content/9089e369-92f4-48dc-ac09-46b6a62035a6?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Iran-linked hackers wipe Stryker devices in cyberattack: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stryker-hit-with-suspected-iran-linked-cyberattack-52f6615c Suspending the gas tax, reducing refinery regulations pushed by two Democrats running for governor: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-17/suspending-gas-tax-reducing-refinery-regulations-pushed-by-two-democrats-running-for-governor The uncomfortable truth about hybrid vehicles: https://www.theverge.com/column/890135/truth-hybrid-vehicles U.S. Army places largest single-vendor drone order in American military history with Skydio: https://www.skydio.com/blog/u-s-army-usd52-million-order-skydio-x10d ExThera cancer filter federal charges: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/business/exthera-cancer-filter-federal-charges.html Uber’s $1.25bn deal with Rivian for robotaxis: https://www.ft.com/content/9e09df32-cfc7-4a9e-9acd-fab25653a25c?syn-25a6b1a6=1 MacBook Neo is the most repairable MacBook in 14 years: https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years Insulet OmniPod 5 recall (FDA): https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/insulet-initiates-voluntary-medical-device-correction-certain-omnipodr-5-pods-us Scan of the Month: Drug delivery devices: https://www.lumafield.com/scan-of-the-month/health-wearables

    34 min
  5. ValuJet 592 crashed in 1996 with 110 people aboard. We reconstruct the layered failure and what Perrow's normal accident theory says about why it happened.

    MAR 27

    ValuJet 592 crashed in 1996 with 110 people aboard. We reconstruct the layered failure and what Perrow's normal accident theory says about why it happened.

    In May 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 crashed into the Florida Everglades six minutes after takeoff from Miami, killing all 110 people on board. Investigators traced the fire to chemical oxygen generators loaded into the forward cargo hold without safety caps on their firing pins. What they could not trace was a single point of failure, because there was not one. We work through the layered collapse William Langewiesche documented in his landmark 1998 Atlantic article: work orders written in language the mechanics could not parse, safety caps that did not exist anywhere in the shop, paperwork signed off on work that was never done, a shipping clerk who put quotation marks around the word "Empty" on the manifest, and a copilot who recognized what he was looking at and said nothing. Drawing on Charles Perrow's theory of the normal accident and Diane Vaughan's concept of the normalization of deviance, we examine how the same mechanism that produced Challenger produced this, and where the two failures diverge. The deeper question the episode keeps returning to is one Langewiesche raises and does not fully resolve: if the failure emerged from the gaps between organizations rather than from within any one of them, and if adding more procedure to a system can increase the complexity that makes these accidents possible, what actually closes the gap between what the paperwork says and what happened on the floor? Links from the discussion: "The Lessons of ValuJet 592" by William Langewiesche, The Atlantic (1998): https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98mar/valujet1.htm Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691004129/normal-accidents The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons by Scott Sagan: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691021010/the-limits-of-safety The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan:https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo22781921.html

    38 min
  6. Why has manufacturing gotten dramatically cheaper for 200 years, and construction hasn't? Brian Potter of Construction Physics has spent years finding out.

    MAR 12

    Why has manufacturing gotten dramatically cheaper for 200 years, and construction hasn't? Brian Potter of Construction Physics has spent years finding out.

    Brian Potter is the author of Construction Physics and The Origins of Efficiency, published by Stripe Press in 2025. He is a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress. Manufacturing has gotten dramatically cheaper over two centuries. Construction has not, and that gap isn’t closing anytime soon. Brian Potter has spent years trying to understand why, first as a structural engineer, then inside Katerra, the SoftBank-backed startup that raised billions to factory-build housing and went bankrupt trying. His conclusion is that the forces behind falling manufacturing costs resist construction for reasons that are structural, not accidental. Jon and Brian trace those forces from Ford's interchangeable parts to SpaceX's materials choices to the specific dynamics that have kept American shipbuilding uncompetitive for 150 years, and turn at the end to whether anything seems likely to change. Links from the discussion: Construction Physics (Brian Potter's newsletter): https://www.construction-physics.com The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press): https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency The Origins of Efficiency on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Efficiency-Brian-Potter/dp/1953953522 Institute for Progress: https://ifp.org Katerra (background on the SoftBank-backed construction startup): https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/01/softbank-backed-construction-giant-katerra-said-to-be-shutting-down-after-raising-billions "Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?" (Brian Potter, Construction Physics):https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships

    47 min
  7. Go/No-Go Episode 007 | Tesla Pivot, Amtrak Fleet, Olympic Medals

    FEB 23

    Go/No-Go Episode 007 | Tesla Pivot, Amtrak Fleet, Olympic Medals

    Tesla reallocates production capacity toward robotics and autonomy. Ferrari challenges screen-first design in its new electric Luce. Amtrak begins deploying its Airo fleet from a 60-acre Siemens facility. Olympic medals fail in competition. Airlines tighten power bank rules. Sugar markets shift under GLP-1 demand changes. A DJI robot vacuum security flaw exposes IoT risk. And frozen orange juice reaches the end of the line.

    31 min
  8. iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari on the hidden design of modern electronics, CES-week manufacturing headlines, and a Reconstruction of Juicero, the $700 connected juicer that defined over-engineering.

    JAN 6

    iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari on the hidden design of modern electronics, CES-week manufacturing headlines, and a Reconstruction of Juicero, the $700 connected juicer that defined over-engineering.

    iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari joins us to talk about the hidden engineering behind modern electronics. What do glue, modularity, and repairability reveal about design and manufacturing? Plus: CES-week stories on cooling, satellites, and packaging, and a Reconstruction of Juicero, the over-engineered $700 juicer that became Silicon Valley’s favorite cautionary tale. Links from the discussion: iFixit: RedMagic 11 Pro Teardown: The Phone With a Tiny Pump Inside : ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHcglQFr-Ss⁠ The Verge – Racks of AI chips are too damn heavy : ⁠https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/844966/heavy-ai-data-center-buildout⁠ The Verge – Starlink and Chinese satellites nearly collided last week : ⁠https://www.theverge.com/news/844502/starlink-and-chinese-satellites-nearly-collided-last-week⁠ FT – The surprising survival of fashion catalogues : ⁠https://www.ft.com/content/ca0a447d-f8d5-4b6d-9143-a659be311a92⁠ TechCrunch – How Luminar’s doomed Volvo deal helped drag the company into bankruptcy : ⁠https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/16/how-luminars-doomed-volvo-deal-helped-drag-the-company-into-bankruptcy/⁠ Packaging Dive – Cold-chain packaging companies adapt as dry ice supply falters : ⁠https://www.packagingdive.com/news/cold-chain-packaging-adapt-dry-ice-supply-co2/807720/⁠ Juicero on Bloomberg : ⁠https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze⁠ Juicero Teardown on Bolt : ⁠https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/

    1h 19m
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Trailer

5
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

Go/No-Go is about the calls that make or break great products. We go deep into the reality of designing, manufacturing, and delivering products that change the world and reflect on the small and large decisions that make them what they are. We also cover the latest manufacturing and recall news, and look inside products using industrial CT to learn how things get built right (or wrong). Hosted by Jon Bruner and Alex Hao.

Information

  • Creator
    Lumafield
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Go/No-Go

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