America, the Casino

Americans have always loved to gamble, and not just at the blackjack table. The analogy between Wall Street and a casino is nearly as old and durable as Wall Street itself: Just a few months ago, Warren Buffett blasted the Street as a “gambling parlor.” But in recent years, our appetite for risk has taken more quotidian and pervasive forms—the ubiquity of sports-betting apps, meme-stock mayhem, the peak/valley cycles of crypto. Main Street has become a casino, too.

The theme of risk permeates this issue of Fast Company. I’d be lying if I told you this was intentional. But as I read through this month’s features, I found the thread undeniable. In a sense, the fact that it was an editorial accident makes the point. Our attraction to risk is everywhere, cloaked in a variety of disguises. 

If there’s a better example than the NFT mania that recently seized the crypto world and then the broader world, I’m hard-pressed to find it. At the heart of that speculative frenzy was a mysterious company called Yuga Labs, which birthed the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the 800-pound gorilla of NFT projects. In a Fast Company exclusive, associate editor Yasmin Gagne and staff writer Connie Lin, with an assist from deputy editor David Lidsky, tell the strange and supremely entertaining story behind Yuga Labs—and lay out its plans to write the next chapter of the internet. 

The value of a digital ape is debatable. The value of homeownership, generally speaking, is not. But what happens when Silicon Valley enters the residential real estate market and tries to disrupt the American dream? That’s the subject of senior writer Ainsley Harris’s brilliantly reported investigation of Divvy Homes, a major player in the nascent but growing rent-to-own business. As she reveals, this new model injects new risk into what has always been considered the safest of investments.

No story in this issue reflects our nation’s hysteria for betting more directly than “Star Spangled Gamblers,” contributor Courtney Rubin’s experiential tour of political prediction markets—in other words, betting on elections. I don’t want to spoil the story (some of Rubin’s conclusions may surprise you), but I will seize this opportunity to say this: On November 8, there’s one thing we can all do to mitigate the growing risk to democracy itself. Vote.

Even our cover subject has built his career around taking chances—and turning that danger into thrilling entertainment. Jimmy Chin is an adventurer and photographer best known for making Free Solo, an
Oscar-winning documentary (you can bet on the Oscars, too) about a climber who scaled one of the most terrifying rock faces in America—without ropes. Chin is now working with the North Face’s Explore Fund Council to summit a new sort of peak: increasing access to the outdoors for a diverse new generation. And as staff editor Jeff Beer explains in the profile of Chin that anchors our Brands That Matter package, the North Face is winning style cred on the street without losing it on the mountain. Now that is a death-defying feat of branding.