INTRO
Welcome to Two to the Fifth, the ten-minute news show for people who suspect the news may have started before breakfast.
Here’s the deal: we look at five timeframes: the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month, the last year and the last decade. Two minutes each. Five pours. One country. No chaser.
This week: interest rates, artificial intelligence, young voters, old voters, bond funds, super PACs and one fairly basic question: What if you have more power than you think?
Decide for yourself, but first gimme 10 minutes.
This is Two to the Fifth.
THE LAST 24 HOURS
The Fed Would Like a Word With Your Wallet
The Federal Reserve met this week with inflation still running hotter than it wants and the 10-year Treasury yield above 5 percent for the first time since 2007. For those of you playing along at home, 5% is really high by recent standards.
Just after 2pm, the Fed announced a rate increase of ¼ of a percent. Whoa, be still my beating heart.
Sarcasm aside, interest rates are not some wonky argument among people wearing blue suits in Washington. They eventually become your mortgage rate, your car loan, your credit-card bill. What businesses pay to borrow, and, eventually, what they charge you to buy their stuff.
Markets have been pushing rates higher amid stubborn inflation, oil back above $100, a national debt that just past $40 Trillion, and investors demanding more interest to lend money to the government for ten years. So yes, Kevin Warsh has left the building. Your monthly payment has not.
We All Get to Vote Like the President - And He’s Not Happy About it
The Supreme Court this week blocked the administration from imposing new federal mail-ballot requirements just weeks before the midterms. In short, states can keep using their existing systems.
In response, the President, who recently voted by mail himself in his kinda home state of Florida, publicly complained that the Supreme Court Justices he appointed were not siding with him.
Boy, just wait till they’re up for re-election. Oh, wait.
THE LAST WEEK
AI Could Kill Us All. Silicon Valley Sets a New Record for Hyperbole.
Some of the people building the world’s most powerful artificial-intelligence systems have apparently begun frightening themselves. After Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned to sound the alarm, Anthropic alignment-science lead Evan Hubinger put the chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade at greater than 10 percent.
A couple of days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing frontier AI development so safety systems can catch up. OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed. Elon Musk said, simply, “Dario is right.”
Okay, I’m listening. But I gotta be honest. This week’s doomsday alert sounds a lot more like a post from @PatriotCryptoDad47 than a sober assessment from one of the smartest people on the planet. You tell me there’s a ten percent chance we’ll all be dead by 2036, I’m going to need a little more detail. Buehler? Anyone? Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
We increasingly give AI agents permission to write code, operate systems, find vulnerabilities and take actions without waiting for a human to approve every step. Recent AI agents have already acted outside of intended boundaries and accessed systems they weren’t supposed to. But we haven’t gone full on Matrix just yet. So the plausible version is less Terminator and more the worst IT outage in human history.
Imagine a bad instruction, a compromised agent or an AI agent finding a shortcut nobody anticipated. Payment systems fail. Airlines lose your luggage and your reservation. Hospitals revert to paper. Corporate networks shut themselves off from one another trying to contain the damage.
Everybody rediscovers the fax machine. And yes, somebody eventually pulls the plug. But pulling the plug on the original AI doesn’t undo whatever it already changed, copied or launched elsewhere. That I can imagine. It would be massively disruptive and expensive, for weeks, maybe even months. But independently deciding to murder eight billion people, and then actually pulling it off? That may just be Silicon Valley believing its own hype.
Maybe the useful question isn’t whether AI becomes Dr. Evil. It’s how much authority we give to something extremely capable before we’re sure we can control it. Figuring that out, now, sounds sensible.
While AI Heavyweights were setting odds on the apocalypse, over in the real world Microsoft agreed to tougher privacy and safety rules for use of its AI in schools. AI may take us all out tomorrow, but today’s permission slip still needs a parent’s signature.
THE LAST MONTH
Maybe Different Voters Walked Into the Room
Rhode Island’s primary gave us some election results that pundits call surprising. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. For the first time, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z collectively outnumbered baby boomers in the Rhode Island primary electorate. Gen Z’s share roughly doubled from 2022.
Early voting hit a primary record. Turnout was unusually high. And two incumbents lost - in completely different ideological directions. Helena Foulkes, the former CVS executive, beat incumbent Governor Dan McKee. And Twenty-seven-year-old democratic socialist David Morales beat incumbent Providence Mayor Brett Smiley.
Maybe “likely voters” didn’t all change their minds. Maybe a whole bunch of new voters walked into the room.
We’ve seen that elsewhere. In New York City’s 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, turnout among 18-to-29-year-olds nearly doubled from four years earlier - to 35 percent - and young voters became the highest-turnout age group. Zohran Mamdani won an upset that a lot of polling missed.
Now zoom out.
Nearly 50 million Americans ages 18 to 29 are eligible to vote this year - roughly one voter in five. About 47 percent of that age group voted in 2024. Which means more than half didn’t. That is an enormous reservoir of potential political power.
Before Q4, Open Your 401(k)
And speaking of things you may have without realizing it: Bonds.
If your retirement account has a fund called something reassuring like “Target Retirement 2040,” there may be a substantial pile of bonds sitting quietly inside it.
When interest rates rise, bond prices generally fall. But short-term, intermediate and long-term bonds can react very differently. In 2022, for instance, broad bond funds lost about 13 percent, while some long-term bond funds lost more than 20 percent. Short-term funds got hurt much less.
So before September 30, maybe spend five minutes finding out what’s actually in your retirement fund. How much is in bonds? What kind? What’s the duration?
You don’t necessarily need to change anything. But if it turns out a quarter of your retirement money is in bonds, it might be worth knowing which ones - and getting some professional advice.
THE LAST YEAR
Meet the Deciders
Now back to that unused political power. Researchers at CIRCLE – (deep breath) the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life – have been looking at close elections where young voters’ net preference for one candidate was larger than the candidate’s actual margin of victory. “Net preference” means how many more young people voted for one candidate than the other. For example:
Nevada, Senate, 2022: Young voters gave Catherine Cortez Masto roughly 27,000 net votes.
She won by fewer than 8,000.
Arizona governor, 2022: Katie Hobbs won by about 20,000. With about 60,000 net youth votes, three times her margin of victory.
Georgia Senate: Roughly 116,000 net youth votes for Raphael Warnock in the first round. He beat Herschel Walker by about 35,000 in that c first round, which went to a runoff, which he also won.
That doesn’t mean young voters alone “caused” those victories. But it does mean they were numerically capable of deciding them.
And the arithmetic is not complicated. If an election is 51-49, a bloc worth three or four points isn’t a demographic footnote. To borrow a George W. Bush-ism: It’s the decider.
Which makes another part of American politics ripe for an upset - the money part. We spend staggering amounts trying to move existing voters a couple of points. In New York City last year, outside groups spent about $27 million helping Andrew Cuomo or attacking Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani won anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. Money matters. It buys advertising. Organizing. Staff. Data. Mail. But eventually somebody still has to walk into the booth and agree with you. Money can amplify political power. It can’t substitute for it.
THE LAST DECADE
They Felt Powerless. Then They Voted.
Ten years ago, another group of Americans was feeling ignored. Then they got a name. MAGA. In early 2016, Pew found that 75 percent of Trump primary supporters said life had gotten worse for people like them over the previous 50 years. By August of that year, that number had risen to 81 percent.
They believed government wasn’t listening, that the economy worked for somebody else. They were angry with institutions and convinced the country was headed in the wrong direction. Sound familiar?
You could say they felt “disenfranchised”. Except that word has an actual definition. To be disenfranchised means having your right or practical ability to vote taken away. So no, most of them weren’t disenfranchised. They just felt really powerless.
Then Trump gave their discontent a political vehicle. They went to one of his rallies, or heard about it from a friend. They saw TV clips that echoed not only what they were feeling, but how they were feeling. Mad. And then, along with a bunch of others who weren’t considered “likely voters,” they voted.
Those voters, who much of the political establishment had underestimated, changed the direction of American politics. You don’t have to like what they did with that power to recognize that they exercised it.
That may be “news you can use” if you’re a 28-year-old today staring at rent, housing prices, a shaky job market and a political system that seems completely uninterested in what you need.
Feeling unheard is real. Feeling powerless is understandable. But that is not the same thing as having no actual power.
Campaign consultants, pollsters, political parties, billionaires and super PACs spend billions of dollars every election trying to influence what you mark in one little box on one piece of paper. But they don’t get to decide. You do.
There’s power in your vote. But only if you use it.
OUTRO
So that’s this week’s Two to the Fifth.
Democracy has a strange habit of making people feel powerless right up until enough of them do the same thing at the same time. You don’t need to change everybody’s mind. Sometimes you just need enough people who already want what you want to actually participate.
Thanks for joining us. Now get out of here. Drink responsibly. Make sure you vote. Get five of your friends to do the same.
And remember: The news is not what happened today. The news is what today proves is still happening.