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The cows in Farmer John’s pasture lead an idyllic life. They roam through tree-shaded meadows, tearing up mouthfuls of clover while nursing their calves in tranquility. Tawny brown, compact and muscular, they are Limousins, a breed known for the quality of its meat and much sought-after by the high-end restaurants and butchers in the nearby food mecca of Maastricht, in the southernmost province of the Netherlands. In a year or two, meat from these dozen cows could end up on the plates of Maastricht’s better-known restaurants, but the cows themselves are not headed for the slaughterhouse. Instead, every few months, a veterinarian equipped with little more than a topical anesthetic and a scalpel will remove a peppercorn-size sample of muscle from their flanks, stitch up the tiny incision and send the cows back to their pasture.

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The biopsies, meanwhile, will be dropped off at a lab in a nondescript warehouse in Maastricht’s industrial quarter, five miles away, where, when I visit in July, cellular biologist Johanna Melke is already working on samples sent in a few days prior. She swirls a flask full of a clear liquid flecked with white filaments—stem cells isolated from the biopsy and fed on a nutrient-dense growth medium. In a few days, the filaments will thicken into tubes that look something like short strands of spaghetti. “This is fat,” says Melke proudly. “Fat is really important. Without fat, meat doesn’t taste as good.”

Ricardo Cases for TIMEMosa Meat has recruited a global team of lab technicians and biologists to develop, build and run its scaled-up operations. Rui Hueber, checks the health of recent cell samples.

On the opposite side of the building, other scientists are replicating the process with muscle cells. Like the fat filaments, the lean muscle cells will be transferred to large bioreactors—temperature- and pressure-controlled steel vessels—where, bathed in a nutrient broth optimized for cell multiplication, they will continue to grow. Once they finish the proliferation stage, the fat and the muscle tissue will be sieved out of their separate vats and reunited into a product resembling ground hamburger meat, with the exact same genetic code as the cows in Farmer John’s pasture. (The farmer has asked to go by his first name only, in order to protect his cows, and his farm, from too much media attention.)

That final product, identical to the ground beef you are used to buying in the grocery store in every way but for the fact that it was grown in a reactor instead of coming from a butchered cow, is the result of years of research, and could help solve one of the biggest conundrums of our era: how to feed a growing global population without increasing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are heating our planet past the point of sustainability. “What we do to cows, it’s terrible,” says Melke, shaking her head. “What cows do to the planet when we farm them for meat? It’s even worse. But people want to eat meat. This is how we solve the problem.”

Ricardo Cases for TIMEOnce stem cells are isolated from the biopsy and fed a nutrient-dense growth medium, they thicken into filaments of fat. Once mature, they can be blended with cultivated muscle cells to create a product similar to ground beef.

When it comes to the importance of fat in the final product, Melke admits to a slight bias. She is a senior scientist on the Fat Team, a small group of specialists within the larger scientific ecosystem of Mosa Meat, the Maastricht-based startup whose founders introduced the first hamburger grown from stem cells to the world eight years ago. That burger cost $330,000 to produce, and now Melke’s Fat Team is working with the Muscle Team, the (stem cell) Isolation Team and the Scale Team, among others, to bring what they call cell-cultivated meat to market at an affordable price.

They are not the only ones. More than 70 other startups around the world are courting investors in a race to deliver lab-grown versions of beef, chicken, pork, duck, tuna, foie gras, shrimp, kangaroo and even mouse (for cat treats) to market. Competition is fierce, and few companies have allowed journalists in for fear of risks to intellectual property. Mosa Meat granted TIME exclusive access to its labs and scientists so the process can be better understood by the general public.

Livestock raised for food directly contributes 5.8% of the world’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions, and up to 14.5% if feed production, processing and transportation are included, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Industrial animal agriculture, particularly for beef, drives deforestation, and cows emit methane during digestion and nitrous oxide with their manure, greenhouse gases 25 and 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide, respectively, over a 100-year period.

In 2019, the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change issued a special report calling for a reduction in global meat consumption. The report found that reducing the use of fossil fuels alone would not be enough to keep planetary temperature averages from going beyond 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, at which point the floods, droughts and forest fires we are already starting to see will negatively impact agriculture, reducing arable land while driving up costs. Yet global demand for meat is set to nearly double by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), as growing economies in developing nations usher the poor into the meat-eating middle class.

Ricardo Cases for TIMEThe Mosa team. From left: Peter Verstrate, co-founder and chief operating officer; Maarten Bosch, CEO; Mark Post, chief scientific officer, at their headquarters in Maastricht, Netherlands, in July

Growing meat in a bioreactor may seem like an expensive overcorrection when just reducing beef intake in high-consuming nations by 1.5 hamburgers per week, per person, could achieve significant climate gains, according to the WRI. But denying pleasure, even in the pursuit of a global good, is rarely an effective way to drive change. Earlier this year the U.N. published the largest ever opinion poll on climate change, canvassing 1.2 million residents of 50 countries. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents view the issue as a “global emergency.” Nonetheless, few favored plant-based diets as a solution. “For 50 years, climate activists, global health experts and animal-welfare groups have been begging people to eat less meat, but per capita consumption is higher than ever,” says Bruce Friedrich, head of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit organization promoting meat alternatives. The reason? It tastes too good, he says. “Our bodies are programmed to crave the dense calories. Unfortunately, current production methods are devastating for our climate and biodiversity, so it’s a steep price we’re paying for these cravings.” The best solution, says Friedrich, is meat alternatives that cost the same or less, and taste the same or better. Melke and her fellow scientists at Mosa say they are getting very close.

According to Mark Post, the Dutch scientist who midwifed the first lab-grown hamburger into existence, and who co-founded Mosa Meat in 2015, one half-gram biopsy of cow muscle could in theory create up to 4.4 billion lb. of beef—more than what Mexico consumes in a year. For the moment, however, Mosa Meat is aiming for 15,000 lb., or 80,000 hamburgers, per biopsy. Even by those modest metrics, Farmer John’s little herd could supply about 10% of the Netherlands’ annual beef consumption. Eventually, says Post, we would need only some 30,000 to 40,000 cows worldwide, instead of the 300 million we slaughter every year, without the environmental and moral consequences of large-scale intensive cattle farming. “I admire vegetarians and vegans who are disciplined enough to take action on their principles,” says Post. “But I can’t give up meat, and most people are like me. So I wanted to make the choice for those people easier, to be able to keep on eating meat without all the negative externalities.”

Even as it sets out to change everything about meat production, cellular agriculture, as the nascent industry is called, will in theory change nothing about meat consumption. This presents a tantalizing opportunity for investors, who have thrown nearly $1 billion at cultivated-meat companies over the past six years. Participating in the high-profile stampede to invest in the industry: Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett and Leonardo DiCaprio. Plant-based burger companies such as Impossible and Beyond already paved the way by proving that the market wants meat alternatives. Cellular agriculture promises to up that game, providing the exact same experience as meat, not a pea-protein facsimile.

While private investment has been vital for getting the industry off the ground, it is not enough given the immense benefits that the technology could provide the world were it developed at large scale, says Friedrich of the Good Food Institute. Cultivated-meat production could have as much impact on the climate crisis as solar power and wind energy, he argues. “Just like renewable energy and electric vehicles have been successful because of government policies, we need the same government support for cultivated meat.”

In the meantime, regulatory approval helps. In December 2020, GOOD Meat, the cultivated-meat division of California-based food-technology company Eat Just Inc., was granted regulatory approval to sell its chicken product to the public in Singapore, a global first. Later that month, a tasting restaurant for cell-based chicken produced by Israeli startup SuperMeat opened in Israel. Cultivated meat could be a $25 billion global industry by 2030, accounting for as much as 0.5% of the global meat supply, according to a new report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. But to get there, many technological, economic and social hurdles must be tackled before cultivated cutlets fully replace their predecessors on supermarket shelves.

When Austrian food-trends analyst Hanni Rützler appeared onstage to taste Mark Post’s burger at its public debut in London, on Aug. 5, 2013, her biggest fear was that it might taste so bad she would spit it out on the live video broadcast. But once the burger started sizzling in the pan and the familiar scent of browning meat hit her nose, she relaxed. “It was closer to the original than I even expected,” she says. At the tasting, she pronounced it “close to meat, but not that juicy.” That was to be expected, says Mosa co-founder, COO and food technologist Peter Verstrate—the burger was 100% lean meat. And without fat, burgers don’t work. In fact, without fat, he says, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a piece of beef and a cut of lamb. Fat isn’t necessarily harder to create than muscle. It’s just that as with protein cells, getting the process right is time-consuming, and Verstrate and Post prioritized protein. The technology itself is relatively straightforward and has been used for years in the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture insulin from pig pancreases: identify and isolate the stem cells—the chameleon-like building blocks of animal biology—prod them to create the desired tissue, and then encourage them to proliferate by feeding them a cell-culture medium made up of amino acids, sugars, salts, lipids and growth factors. Scientists have been trying for years to use the same process to grow artificial organs, arteries and blood vessels, with mixed results.

Post, a vascular cardiologist, used to be one of those scientists. He jokes that stem-cell meat, unlike organs, doesn’t have to function. On the other hand, it has to be produced in massive amounts at a reasonable cost, and pharmaceutical companies have spent decades and billions of dollars attempting—and largely failing—to scale up stem-cell production to a fraction of what it would take to make cultivated meat affordable. If cellular-agriculture companies succeed where so many others have failed, it could unlock a completely new way of feeding human beings, as radical a transformation as the shift from hunting to domesticating animals was thousands of years ago. Despite investor enthusiasm, that’s still a big if; Eat Just, the company closest to market, is producing only a couple hundred pounds of cultivated chicken a year.

Many of the scientists at Mosa reflexively attribute sentience to the cells they are working with, discussing their likes and dislikes as they would those of a family pet. Fat tissue can handle temperature swings and rough handling; muscle is more sensitive and needs exercise. “It’s like producing cows on a really microscopic scale,” says Laura Jackisch, the head of the Fat Team. “We basically want to make the cells as comfortable as possible.” That means fine-tuning their cell-culture medium in the same way you would regulate a cow’s feed to maximize growth and health. For one biopsy to reach the 4.4 billion lb. of meat in Post’s theoretical scenario, it would have to double 50 times. So far, Jackisch’s team has made it to the mid-20s.

Ricardo Cases for TIMELaura Jackisch in front of the analytics lab, where Mosa measures the safety of products.

A lot of that has to do with the quality of the growth medium. Until recently, most cultivated-meat companies used a cell culture derived from fetal bovine serum (FBS), a pharmaceutical-industry staple that comes from the blood of calf fetuses, hardly a viable ingredient for a product that is supposed to end animal slaughter. The serum is as expensive as it is controversial, and Jackisch and her fellow scientists spent most of the past year developing a plant-based alternative. They have identified what, exactly, the cells need to thrive, and how to reproduce it in large amounts using plant products and proteins derived from yeast and bacteria. “What we have done is pretty breathtaking,” she says. “Figuring out how to make a replacement [for FBS] that’s also affordable means that we can actually sell this product to the masses.” In May, the Fat Team fried up a couple of teaspoons. Though they could tell from the cell structure and lipid profile that they had created a near identical product, they were still astonished by the taste. “It was so intense, a rich, beefy, meaty flavor,” says Jackisch, a vegan of six years. “It was an instant flashback to the days when I used to eat meat. I started craving steak again.” She nearly picked up a couple on her way home from the lab that night.

For all the successes that cultivated-meat companies have broadcast over the past few years, biotechnologist Ricardo San Martin, research director for the UC Berkeley Alternative Meats Lab, is skeptical that lab-bench triumphs will translate into mass-market sales anytime soon, if at all. Not one of the companies currently courting investment has proved it can manufacture products at scale, he says. “They bring in all the investors and say, ‘Here is our chicken.’ And yes, it is really chicken, because there are chicken cells. But not very many. And not enough for a market.”

The skepticism is justified—very few people outside of Israel and Singapore have actually been able to try cultivated meat. (Citing a pending E.U. regulatory filing, Mosa declined to let TIME try its burger. Eat Just offered a tasting but would not allow access to its labs.) And the rollout of Eat Just’s chicken nuggets in Singapore raises as many questions as it answers. At the moment, the cost to produce cultivated meat hovers around $50 a pound, according to Michael Dent, a senior technology analyst at market-research company IDTechEx. Eat Just’s three-nugget portion costs about $17, or 10 times as much as the local McDonald’s equivalent. CEO Josh Tetrick admits that the company is losing “a lot” on every sale, but argues that the current production cost per pound “is just not relevant.” At this point, says Dent, making a profit isn’t the point. “It is not in itself a viable product. But it’s been very, very successful at getting people talking about cultured meat. And it’s been very successful in getting [Eat] Just another round of investments.”

On Sept. 20, Eat Just announced that its GOOD Meat division had secured $97 million in new funding, adding to an initial $170 million publicized in May. The company also recently announced that it was partnering with the government of Qatar to build the first ever cultivated-meat facility in the Middle East outside of Israel. In June, Tetrick confirmed that the company, which also produces plant-based egg and mayonnaise products, was mulling a public listing in late 2021 or early 2022, with a possible $3 billion valuation. But all that investment still isn’t enough to scale the production process to profitability, let alone to make a dent in the conventional meat industry, says Tetrick. “You can make the prettiest steak in the world in the lab, but if you can’t make this stuff at large scale, it doesn’t matter.”

The biggest obstacle to getting the cost per pound of cell-cultivated meat below that of chicken, beef or pork, says Tetrick, is the physical equipment. GOOD Meat is currently using 1,200- and 5,000-liter bio-reactors, enough to produce a few hundred pounds of meat at a time. To go large scale, which Tetrick identifies as “somewhere north of 10 million lb. per facility per year, where my mom could buy it at Walmart and my dad could pick it up at a fast-food chain,” would require 100,000-liter bioreactors, which currently do not exist. Vessels that big, he says, are an engineering challenge that may take as long as five years to solve. GOOD Meat has never been able to test the capacity of cell proliferation to that extent, but Tetrick is convinced that once he has the necessary bioreactors, it will be a slam dunk.

San Martin, at UC Berkeley, says Tetrick’s confidence clashes with the basics of cellular biology. Perpetual cell division may work with yeasts and bacteria, but mammalian cells are entirely different. “At a certain point, you enter the realm of physical limitations. As they grow they excrete waste. The viscosity increases to a point where you cannot get enough oxygen in and they end up suffocating in their own poo.” The only way San Martin could see cellular agriculture working on the kind of scale Tetrick is talking about is if there were a breakthrough with genetic engineering. “But I don’t know anyone who’s gonna eat a burger made out of genetically modified lab-grown cells,” he says. Mosa Meat, based in the GMO-phobic E.U., has absolutely ruled out genetic modification, and Tetrick says his current products don’t use GMOs either.

That said, his rush to market has led him to rely on technologies that go against the company’s slaughter-free (or cruelty-free) ethos. Not long after the company’s cultivated chicken nugget was released for sale in Singapore, Tetrick revealed that FBS had been used in the production process, even though he concedes that it is “self-evidently antithetical to the idea of making meat without needing to harm a life.” The company has since developed an FBS-free version, but it is not yet in use, pending regulatory review.

Eat Just’s initial bait and switch left a bad taste, says Dent. Cell-cultured meat technology may be sound, but if consumers start having doubts about the product and what’s in it, there could be a backlash against the industry as a whole, particularly if FBS continues to be used. “The first products are what everybody will judge the whole industry on,” says Dent. He points to the botched rollout of genetically modified seeds in the 1990s as a precedent. “Despite the science pointing to GMOs being a safer, more reliable option for agriculture, they’re still [a] pariah. It could go the same way with cultured meat. If they get it wrong now, in 20 years, people will still be saying, ‘Cultured meats, uh-uh, freak meats, we aren’t touching it.’”

For the moment, Mosa is focused on re-creating ground beef instead of whole cuts. A ground product is easier, and cheaper, to make—the fat and muscle come out of the bioreactor as an unstructured mass, already fit for blending. Other companies, like Israel’s Aleph Farms, have opted to go straight for the holy grail of the cellular-agriculture world—a well-marbled steak—by 3-D printing the stem cells onto a collagen scaffold, the same process medical scientists are now using to grow artificial organs. So far, Aleph has only managed to produce thin strips of lean meat, and while the technology is promising, a market-ready rib eye is still years away.

Small thin slabs are exactly what Michael Selden, co-founder and CEO of the Berkeley-based startup Finless Foods, which is producing cell-cultivated tuna, wants. Few people would pay $50 for a pound of cultivated beef—15 times the cost of the conventional version—but consumers are already paying more for high-grade sushi. “Bluefin tuna sells in restaurants for $10 to $20 for two pieces of sashimi. That’s $200 a pound,” he says. Sashimi, with its thin, repeatable strips and regular fat striations, is much easier to create than a thick marbled steak, and Selden says Finless Foods has already produced something “close to perfect.” His cell-cultivated bluefin tuna is nearly identical to the original in terms of nutrition and taste profile, he says, but the texture still needs work. “It’s just a little bit crunchier than we want it to be.” But he’s confident that by the time the product makes it through the regulatory process—he’s hoping by the end of the year or early 2022—his team will have perfected the texture. If they do, it could be the first cultivated meat product on the U.S. market.

Cell-cultivated luxury products could be the ideal thin end of the wedge for the market, attracting conscientious—and well-heeled—consumers who want an environmentally friendly product, and thus creating space for the technological advances that will bring down the cost of commodity meat alternatives like cultivated beef and chicken. “People who are buying ethical food right now are doing the right thing, but the vast majority of people are never going to convert” when it’s only about doing the right thing, says Selden. “So we want to make stuff that competes not on morals or ethics—although it holds those values—but competes on taste, price, nutrition and availability.” Assuming they can, it will revolutionize the meat business.

“If I was in the beef industry, I would be shaking in my boots, because there’s no way that conventionally grown beef is going to be able to compete with what’s coming,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. There are many reasons people eat meat, ranging from the taste to religious and cultural traditions. But the bulk of meat consumption is not cultural, says Verstrate of Mosa Meat. “It’s just your average McDonald’s every day. And if for that type of consumption, if you can present an alternative that is not just similar but the same, without all those downsides that traditional meat has, then it simply makes no sense to kill animals anymore.”

Four of the world’s five largest meat companies (JBS, Cargill, Tyson and BRF) are already embracing the technology. From a market point of view, it makes sense, says Friedrich of the Good Food Institute. “These companies want to feed high-quality protein to as many people as possible, as profitably as possible. That is their entire business model. If they can make meat from plants that satisfies consumers, if they can cultivate meat from cells that tastes the same and costs less, they will shift.”

A transition to a lab-grown meat source doesn’t necessarily mean the end of all cows, just the end of factory farming. Ground beef makes up half the retail beef market in the U.S., and most of it comes from the industrial feedlots that pose the greatest environmental threats. Eliminating commodity meat, along with its ugly labor issues, elevated risks of zoonotic disease spread and animal-welfare concerns, would go a long way toward reining in the outsize impact of animal-meat production on the planet, says Friedrich. “The meat that people eat because it is cheap and convenient is what needs to be replaced. But there will always be the Alice Waterses of the world—and there are lots of them—who will happily pay more for ethically ranched meat from live animals.”

Small herds like Farmer John’s could provide both. John feeds his cows on pasture for most of the year—rather than on cattle feed, which is typically more environmentally intensive—and rotates them through his orchards in order to supplement the soil with their manure, a natural fertilizer. When he needs to feed them in the winter, he uses leftover hay from his wheat and barley crops. It’s a form of regenerative agriculture that is impossible to replicate on the large scale that industrial meat production requires to overcome its smaller margins. “We want good food for everybody. But if we do this [the old] way, we only have good food for some people,” John says. That’s why he’s willing to embrace the new technology, even if it is a threat to his way of life. “This is the future, and I’m proud that my cows are part of it.”

It’s likely to be more than a year before John can finally taste the lab-grown version of meat from his cows. Mosa is in the process of applying for regulatory approval from the E.U. In the meantime, the company is already expanding into a new space with roughly 100,000 liters of bioreactor capacity, enough to produce several tons of meat every six to eight weeks. Richard McGeown, the chef who cooked Post’s first burger on the live broadcast, is already dreaming about how he will cook and serve the next one at his restaurant in southern England. He’d like to pair it with an aged cheddar, smoky ketchup and house-made pickles. “It would do great,” he says. “Everyone loves a good burger.” More important, he’d love to serve something that is as good for the environment as it is good to eat.

Ricardo Cases for TIMEJosias Mouafo stands in front of a CNC (computer numerical control) machine which makes custom made parts for Mosa’s processes.

But for those in the $386 billion-a-year cow business, a battle is brewing. As production moves from feedlot to factory, cattle ranchers stand to lose both jobs and investments. Like coal country in the era of clean energy, entire communities are at risk of being left behind, and they will fight. “The cattle industry will do everything they can to call lab-grown meat into question,” says Leiserowitz. “Because once it breaks through to grocery stores, they’re competing on basic stuff, like taste and price. And they know they won’t be able to win.”

The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association has already petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to limit the use of the terms beef and meat exclusively to “products derived from the flesh of a [bovine] animal, harvested in the traditional manner.” A decision is pending, but if it comes down in the favor of the cattle industry, it could create a significant barrier to market adoption of cell-cultured meat, says Dent. “For a new product that consumers don’t know and don’t trust, the terms you can use make a critical difference. Who’s going to buy something called ‘lab-grown cell-protein isolates’?”

“It’s meat,” says Tetrick. “Even down to the genetic level, it is meat. It’s just made in a different way.” Tetrick, who won a similar naming battle in 2015 when his company, then known as Hampton Creek, successfully maintained the right to call its eggless mayonnaise substitute Just Mayo, says the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association’s complaint is as senseless as if the U.S. automotive industry had argued that Tesla couldn’t use the word car to describe its electric vehicles, on the basis that they lacked an internal combustion engine. Still, he says, naming is critically important. As the technology has gathered speed over the past several years, terms including cell-cultured, cultivated, slaughter-free, cell-based, clean, lab-grown and synthetic have been variously used, but consensus is gathering around cultivated meat, which is Tetrick’s term of choice.

Verstrate, at Mosa, is ambivalent. “Ultimately we’re going to produce a hamburger that is delicious. We can call it meat or we can call it Joe, but if a meat lover consumes it and has the same experience as when consuming a great Wagyu burger, then we’re good to go.”

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BP profits rise amid soaring energy prices

The oil giant says it expects natural gas prices to remain high during peak winter demand.

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Lessons for This Moment in Business From a Hit Broadway Show

Like so much of the world in the spring of 2020, The Lehman Trilogy shut down before it really even got started, after just four preview performances on Broadway.

This past September, the play—about the roughly 160-year rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, from the investment bank’s origins in the American slave trade to its bankruptcy filing and role in the 2008 financial crisis—returned. Like the glowing offices depicted in its every-company-looks-this-way set, it’s been reimagined: On opening night, director Sam Mendes stood to welcome the crowd by highlighting the production’s “renewed understanding” on issues of disease and health, race, and community.
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Stefano Massini’s original play, in Italian, was translated by playwright Ben Power, who describes a constant process of evolving the script to fit our current zeitgeist. “I first started thinking about the play before the election of Trump, before the referendum in the United Kingdom that changed our relationship with the world. The play uses the past to understand the present moment,” Power says. “And so as the present moment has changed dramatically and in myriad ways since 2016, the play has evolved as well,” with tweaks in dialogue, continued scrutiny of history, and an embrace of diverse casting.

Post-pandemic hiatus, The Lehman Trilogy, like its audience, is more conscious of the ethical considerations that shape businesses past and present. The new version raises more difficult issues around what a global workplace and economy can and should be at this moment in time—issues that all of us will continue to wrestle with long after the curtain goes down.

We will repeat history, but must keep reexamining it

The latest version on Broadway updates itself to make clear the unequivocal connection between slavery and the three Lehman brothers, who were slaveowners themselves and began their company as a dry-goods store before entering the cotton trade in antebellum Alabama. In one new piece of dialogue, a doctor in Montgomery says to the brothers: “Everything that was built here was built on a crime. The roots run so deep you cannot see them but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned.”

This disparity between who works and who profits—a gap highlighted in recent months by waves of strikes, battles between employers and employees over workplace safety, and an increased spotlight on the undervaluing of essential workers—is a running theme in the play’s revamped version. “There were some workers who societies had held as not being really important,” said actor Adrian Lester, who plays German-born banker Emanuel Lehman. “And you go into a lockdown and suddenly you realize, everyone is equally important to make things run. These elements filtered into our approach.”

The play reserves judgment, though, and rests on the audience’s imagination and, ultimately, internalization of being complicit in broken and unethical systems. “We have to display the ignorance of the brothers,” Lester says. “They’re completely unaware of the depth of the suffering that they’re engaging in and therefore profiting from. We have to allow the audience to draw their own conclusions.”

The roots of capitalism

The pandemic allowed the play to dive even deeper into what Power calls “a new dawn of consumerism.” In one scene, Lester as a 1960s marketing director (the actors playing the three brothers all play other roles) presents to Lehman’s board a future where the act of consuming goods matters more than the goods themselves. The word “BUY” is scrawled over and over on the glass walls encasing the conference room. The word just lands differently now, after a year and a half of rethinking the things we buy, how they arrive in our hands, and the values of the companies that produce them. And also if we even need all that stuff.

“I love doing that speech because you can feel the audience looking at me: Where is he going with this?” says Lester. “It sort of has a mirror held up to them. They need to buy the next iPhone over the next Galaxy over the next thing… I don’t actually need this. I’ve been told that I need this to keep up.”

Hardly colorblind casting

Then there’s Lester himself. All three actors on stage bend roles by age and gender, but Lester, who is Black, also plays white characters. In a moment when companies (and Broadway) are reckoning with their role in upholding racial inequality, his very presence deepens and transforms the meaning of every message and the integral role of race, including whiteness, in the creation of current capital markets.

For instance, there’s a moment in the show when Lester-as-Emanuel Lehman the cotton broker carries the commodity across the stage, fraught specifically because of who’s doing the carrying. And another line later as he plays the marketing director: “A young man from Mississippi. Segregated at school, now he stands in the boardroom. On the top floor.”

“They can see the play operating on so many levels,” Lester says. “Having me do this role and play someone who is pleased about the amount of money they’re making off cotton with the other two brothers, it creates an indictment of the whole process.”

The metaverse of yesteryear

Both artists talked about the “ideas of things versus the things themselves,” as troublesome. Our interview came the morning after Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a new name and sweeping mission for his troubled empire: Meta. He focused on the company’s desire to establish a “metaverse,” which allows users to interact in immersive, virtual, and mixed-reality environments. “You’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. “Instead of looking at a screen, you’re going to be in these experiences.”

Based on the history of Lehman Brothers, that’s a scary thought, Power says. Lehman’s collapse, according to this trilogy, is a story of hubris and greed but also the lack of the tangible. Lester says there’s a fine line between trading on “the idea of things to the idea of the fake.” Power adds: “The characters in the play would recognize the drive into the metaverse. There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment and the digital world that is taking us … into a realm of obstruction. From the lessons of the play, that is an exhilarating, but potentially dangerous, trajectory.”

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Whatever Happened to Amazon’s Drone Delivery Service?

Amazon’s squadron of delivery drones was supposed to be in full flight by now. And the fall of 2021 would have been an opportune time to have little automated flying machines delivering packages to customers—what with all the trouble human workers are causing around the country with strikes and labor shortages. Amazon announced an experimental drone delivery service with great fanfare as part of a 60 Minutes feature in 2013. Amazon’s promise was quite remarkable: Your packages—containing anything from toothpaste to a new smartphone—would arrive right at your doorstep (or on your lawn) by way of a drone that lands, drops your parcel and flies away.
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Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s then-CEO, said in the televised segment that it would likely take “four to five years” to turn the “R&D project” into a reality.

Nearly eight years later, the world’s leading online retailer is struggling to make progress with its Prime Air program. So, what happened?

“Prime Air is committed to making our goal of delivering packages by drones a reality,” Amazon said in a statement to TIME. “We are pioneering new ground and it will continue to take time to create the right technology and infrastructure to safely deliver packages to customers.”

Since the program got underway, Amazon has revealed a few delivery-drone designs, and in August of 2020 it received the Federal Aviation Administration’s permission to begin conducting drone operations. The company told TIME that it continues to collaborate closely with the FAA and other regulatory bodies around the world. It is running tests of the delivery program and has logged thousands of flight hours.

Even so, Prime Air has suffered numerous setbacks, including rounds of layoffs, unexpected surges in workload, and a work environment fueled by unrealistic expectations, former staffers told Wired earlier this year.

Projects that take longer than expected to get off the ground are hardly unusual at big companies, and Amazon is no different. Over the years, the company has had mixed success releasing products like smartphones and in-home grocery scanners. It recently discontinued Amazon Echo Look, an Alexa-enabled device that scanned a user’s outfit and offered questionable fashion advice.

Even in 2021, the idea of drone delivery still sounds somewhat fantastical, but widespread use of these small aircraft could have an enormous impact. Drones have potential to be even more efficient and environmentally friendly than a modern electric delivery van. The Biden administration has expressed interest in developing the field of drone delivery and logistics, and for uses like infrastructure inspection. The initiative has plenty of challenges, however, including the need for more warehouses and concerns about airspace safety with a potential sky full of whizzing drones. Still, as Amazon struggles, other companies are racing to be the first to offer widespread service.

Where delivery drones have worked

Google parent company Alphabet is forging ahead with its own version of the futuristic delivery service. In Logan, Australia, suburban drone deliveries are taking off, thanks to Alphabet subsidiary Wing. The delivery drone company, previously part of Google’s “moonshot” initiatives, reached a pivotal milestone, announcing in August that it made its hundred thousandth delivery.

The drones have moved over 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,000 loaves of bread and 1,200 roasted chickens (known as hot chooks in Australia). Wing says it hasn’t faced a single delivery issue during its flights in Logan, and has run thousands of internal flight and delivery tests at the same time.

Wing CEO James Ryan Burgess thinks opportunity lies in a decentralized delivery system scattered throughout a region, citing Logan as an example of a city wherein the company can operate smaller groups of drones in multiple areas.

“You can imagine a future where there are delivery drone aircraft scattered throughout a city in the most appropriate places,” says Burgess. “Those aircraft can serve the community whenever somebody has a need to receive a package or send a package.”

Since Wing’s drones can wirelessly charge from their landing pad when they return from a delivery, the infrastructure requirements are minimal. “Our best estimate at this state at Wing is that there will be a mix of central and distributed delivery technologies in the drone space,” says Burgess. “That way, they can serve and integrate with merchants of various scales in the best way possible.”

Wing, which grew its operations in Australia this year, is looking to expand from its single U.S. location in Christianburg, Va., and Finland “in the coming months.”

Wing’s drone deliveries are automated, but monitored by pilots who function more as air traffic controllers than anything else. Routes are determined based on factors like distance, weather conditions and airspace regulations, and deliveries are dropped in front of homes using a winch, with no human interaction required.

More efficient and ecological—to a point

When it comes to making deliveries efficient and environmentally friendly, faster seems to be better. The less time a drone spends in the air is a primary determinant of its energy consumption according to Carnegie Melon University Professor Costa Samaras. A 2018 study coauthored by him discovered that, over certain distances, drone delivery is more efficient than ground-based delivery, especially if drones are traveling at higher speeds.

Samaras notes that drone deliveries won’t phase out more traditional methods of transporting goods, but will instead complement them while being more environmentally friendly.

“There are other areas where an electric cargo bike is for sure going to be better, and there are areas where maybe a bigger electric truck would be best,” he says. “You don’t necessarily want your computer monitor being delivered by drone.”

But speedy drone delivery in cities might be less eco-friendly when carrying heavier items, and they could also be more of a noisy nuisance than delivery via electric vehicle. “Do we want hundreds or thousands of drones over all of our cities?” says Samaras. “That’s a much deeper and more important question.”

Still, the environmental concerns loom. A company like Amazon might create drone delivery facilities to make good on faster guaranteed delivery times, but that would also mean more facilities to operate and maintain, and more of an environmental impact.

Indeed, the promise of drone delivery means everyone can order everything and have it arrive almost instantly. But in urban environments, people ordering a cup of coffee or breakfast bagel first thing in the morning might not be a feasible option, and could lead to increased pollution. It also means that providers would need more space dedicated to shipping and maintaining drones, which means more warehouses. You could have a single warehouse and fly drones until their batteries die, says Samaras, but that defeats the efficient nature of drone usage. For more efficient flights, companies will need multiple warehouses storing identical products to deliver to neighborhoods.

“If you needed a new phone, for example, you’d have to have a phone in a warehouse in the Bronx, you’d need a phone in a warehouse in Brooklyn, in Staten Island, and now you’ve got three warehouses,” says Samaras. “Now you have to heat, light and power those warehouses, and that amount of energy degrades the benefits from that [drone delivery].”

Currently, Samaras says drones for delivery use in rural areas paired with delivery trucks are an ideal application of the technology, considering the environmental cost of driving something like a multi-ton delivery truck to every house in a rural community. Drones are already being used by hospitals in far-flung regions to deliver medical supplies like blood, and by the U.S. Army to move military equipment like ammunition.

Few studies have looked at the ecological effects of drones flying over neighborhoods, and the effect on wildlife is still being researched, though videos (shot via drone) have shown that animals don’t take kindly to the buzzing aerial copters. A European Environment Agency report on drones and sustainability points out the growing tension between drones and animals, especially birds.

“Bird species… were found to be more sensitive to disturbances relating to the presence of drones,” said the report. “Evidence is growing of bird-drone interaction, such as two eagles mistaking a drone for food in Austria.”

Meeting ‘uncharted’ demand

Decentralized drone delivery could also lead to less congestion, according to University of Texas operations management professor Milind Dawande, which is more obvious vital now than ever as the global supply chain stalls in shipping bottlenecks at ports. But Dawande coauthored a study last year that showed how using drones to decrease delivery times could lead to an increase in demand.

“No one has captured this demand until now,” says Dawande. “You have never heard that your order is going to come to your door in 15 minutes. So it’s all an unchartered territory actually.”

Dawande thinks it could lead to companies competing over zones of control, with customers prioritizing speedier deliveries from retailers able to deliver to them faster based on their proximity to a drone distribution center. You might have two competing big box stores near you, but if one can guarantee you a 15-minute delivery rather than a one-hour window, you’re more likely to choose the closer one. That speedy delivery could increase the number of orders. It makes what would’ve been a car ride, evening delivery, or next-day delivery into a purchase that will show up before your first cup of coffee gets cold.

“The guy who can reach the customer fastest is the king,” says Dawande. “Therefore, if I have a warehouse here, within 10 miles, I am king. If you have a warehouse there and we don’t, then you are the king. So there will be bubbles, and they will monopolize that region and share the market in the rest of the region.”

So what’s holding up the great drone delivery experiment? Both Dawande and Wing CEO Burgess cite the FAA as a hurdle when it comes to bringing more drone delivery services to regions in the United States.

“The bottleneck is the regulatory framework,” says Dawande, who suggests drone delivery companies will have to adhere to guidelines and regulations from multiple agencies in the U.S. “There are federal laws, there are going to be state laws, there are going to be city laws… Of course, technology is improving every day, but the regulatory framework, how quickly it reaches maturity, will certainly determine how widespread and how fast [drone delivery] will be adopted.”

Companies like Amazon and Wing have received the FAA’s existing Part 135 certification, which allows them to participate in delivery via drone services with a limited number of pilots and drones. Still, according to the FAA, companies must obtain airspace authorizations from local governments before they begin sending drones carrying packages through the air.

Those authorizations have the potential to get complicated. Each state has its own rules for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky, for example, prohibit flight paths over certain properties like prisons or railroads. Some states have prohibited delivery of certain items (like medical marijuana) as well.

Still, Dawande believes drone deliveries will be inevitable thanks to slowly easing regulations, citing the FAA’s recently simplified remote ID laws for drones, which would’ve required drones broadcast a unique identification signal (which won’t go into effect until 2023), as well as increasing pilot privacy and dismissing the requirement that personal information be logged in a government database. The FAA is also making it easier for pilots to renew their drone pilot licenses by waiving testing fees.

If the commercial UAV market, valued at over $22 billion this year, is any indication, you can expect that 30-minute toothpaste delivery sooner rather than later.

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