A pediatrician stood in front of Texas lawmakers this week and told them high school seniors are legally carrying Vegas around in their pockets.
She was talking about apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, where an eighteen year old can bet real money on a soccer match or an election. The Texas Medical Association wants the minimum betting age raised to twenty one. These apps sit in a regulatory gap right now. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversees them, and they aren’t classified as gambling. Texas already bans most betting, but the platforms themselves sued to stall the state’s effort to close the loophole.
Here’s what’s been sitting with me all week. Raising the age to twenty one delays the problem. It does not solve it. A twenty one year old with no financial literacy is exposed in exactly the same way an eighteen year old is.
A recent survey from Junior Achievement and the MissionSquare Foundation found that eighty percent of teens have never heard of a FICO credit score. Forty three percent think an eighteen percent interest rate is manageable. Nobody taught them that a contract priced at seventy cents implies a seventy percent chance, or that the house always keeps the edge over time.
This is close to home for me. I’ve been working with a team at Western Washington University on FinPrep, an AI tool that helps teachers build financial literacy lesson plans instantly. A 2024 study by Tyton Partners and Next Gen Personal Finance found that one semester of high school personal finance is worth roughly $100,000 per student over a lifetime. About thirty states now require that course, up from eight in 2020. Everywhere else, fewer than one in ten students get any financial education before graduation.
The same gap shows up in the workplace. Amazon committed $1.2 billion to train 300,000 U.S. employees. IBM pledged to train two million workers in AI skills by 2026. Both companies are betting on the same idea: build the capability, then expect people to know what to do with the tools. An employee who understands the fundamentals of financial literacy tends to save carefully, spend efficiently, and think like an owner instead of a renter.
This Week
Pick one young person you’re responsible for, your own teenager or your newest hire, and name the single financial skill they’ll need to be successful. Then spend twenty minutes this week teaching it, the way you wish someone had taught you.
Who is that person for you, and what’s the one skill they need most?
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