HigherIQ — Sunday, June 28, 2026

It's Sunday, June twenty eighth. Quick recap of the week. We covered six episodes and a lot of them ended up being about the same thing: systems that are designed to work against you while looking like they're working for you. Here's what to take into Monday. Monday we looked at streaming and subscription fatigue. Netflix went from $7.99 to $17.99. Disney+ went from $6.99 to $18.99. YouTube TV went from $35 to $83. The average household now spends $278 a month on streaming and connected TV, which is more than cable ever cost. We cut the cord to save money and rebuilt cable in a worse configuration. The only thing we actually got rid of was the cable box.

Tuesday was the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed in the 1870s to prevent mechanical typewriter keys from jamming. The typewriter hasn't existed in decades but we're still using the same layout because the cost of switching is too high, even though you can change your keyboard to Dvorak for free in your phone's settings right now. The concept is called path dependency, and once you see it, you see it everywhere: Fahrenheit, miles, the fact that NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one team used metric and another used imperial.

Wednesday was the housing crisis. The Senate passed a bill 85 to 5 blaming Wall Street for buying up homes. Wall Street owns about three percent of single-family rentals. The real issue is that we're short two to four million homes and local zoning laws make it nearly impossible to build in the places people want to live. The people who benefit from high home prices, existing homeowners, are the same people who vote in the local elections where zoning decisions are made. The villain isn't BlackRock. It's the system.

Thursday was earthquakes, after a 7.1 hit Venezuela. The USGS says they've never predicted a major earthquake and don't expect to learn how. The most important fact from that episode: the 2010 Haiti earthquake was magnitude 7.0 and killed over 200,000 people. That same year, Chile was hit by a magnitude 8.8, five hundred times more powerful, and 525 people died. Same planet. Same year. The difference was building codes.

Friday was Prime Day and the economics of waste. Americans will spend over $26 billion during a four-day sale. The average garment is worn seven to ten times before being thrown away. We throw away 81 pounds of clothing per person per year. There's a pile of discarded clothes in Chile's Atacama Desert so big it's visible from space, most of it with the price tags still on. The fashion industry produces more carbon emissions than all international flights and shipping combined.

And yesterday we finally got to a topic that's been on our list since April: why we yawn. Nobody fully knows. The oxygen theory is wrong. The leading explanation is brain cooling. Contagious yawning appears to be driven by empathy, and 72 percent of dogs in one study caught yawns from a human stranger. If you yawned during that episode, it means your empathy circuits are working. Six episodes this week. Streaming, keyboards, housing, earthquakes, consumption, and yawning. The thread connecting most of them is that the systems we live inside weren't designed for us. They were designed for the people who built them, and we inherited the consequences. See you tomorrow.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.