Go/No-Go

This month, manufacturing headlines ran the gamut. Midjourney, the AI image generator, has entered the scanner business. Jon and Alex unpack the Midjourney Scanner, a full-body ultrasound device the company is positioning as a wellness habit rather than a diagnostic tool, and why the medical community is wary of preemptive scanning. Dexcom traces a sensor theft back to an unauthorized distributor,...

Federico Faggin designed the first microprocessor. The Intel 4004 was the chip that first made it possible to put an entire programmable computer on a single piece of silicon. The process technology he developed at Fairchild Semiconductor became the foundation for every microprocessor, memory chip, and logic device built in the half-century since. The touchscreen on your phone exists because of wo...

The war with Iran keeps reshaping manufacturing in unexpected places. A bitumen shortage tied to the oil disruption is stalling road construction from India to Italy, and ships stuck in the Gulf are accumulating barnacles and jellyfish that foul their hulls and raise fuel costs. We trace that thread through a packed automotive segment: Ford's secret skunk works racing to build a $30,000 electric t...

Matt Angle is the CEO of Paradromics, a neurotechnology company building high data rate implantable brain-computer interfaces for people who have lost the ability to speak and move. The company's Connexus system, currently entering clinical trials, clocks an information transfer rate of over 200 bits per second (more than 20x the reported performance of comparable systems) and is designed to last...

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...

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 3...

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...

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 do...

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 Wil...

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...

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 r...

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: R...

Spencer Wright, Editor-in-Chief of Scope of Work , joins Jon to uncover the hidden history of the plastic bottle, one of the most widely produced and least appreciated manufactured objects in the world. His essay, Evolution of the Plastic Bottle , published here on First Article , examines the bottle’s long evolution from early glass and acrylonitrile designs to today’s lightweight PET systems, ex...

Kyle Vogt, founder of Twitch, Cruise, and now The Bot Company, joins Go/No-Go to discuss what it takes to build practical, everyday robots. Drawing on his experience at Cruise and The Bot Company, he describes how AI and autonomy are merging with traditional hardware disciplines to create machines that can safely perform useful household and industrial tasks. Jon and Kyle explore how today’s robot...

Skydio CEO Adam Bry joins Go/No-Go to talk about how drones have evolved from toys to tools to infrastructure, and how autonomy and AI could help American manufacturers regain ground in an industry long dominated by China. Jon and Alex also cover this week’s headlines: the FCC’s new authority to ban DJI drones, private jet owners renting engines during supply shortages, the death of San Francisco’...

In this episode of Go/No-Go, Jon Bruner visits Northwood Space in Los Angeles to talk with Bridgit Mendler and Griffin Cleverly about how they’re rethinking satellite connectivity. Northwood is designing and manufacturing phased-array ground stations that make communicating with satellites faster, cheaper, and easier to scale. Jon and Alex also break down the week’s manufacturing and product quali...

Introducing Go/No-Go, a podcast that dives deep into the reality of designing, manufacturing, and delivering products that change the world. Our first guest is Tony Fadell, creator of the iPod, founder of Nest Labs, and principal at Build Collective. He reflects on the small and large decisions that made his products into category-defining successes. We also talk through recent news headlines and...

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...