
Social media makes people sad & USPS might mail it in
Loading summary
A
Managing media plans for multiple clients can feel like herding cats. Disney Campaign manager is built for fast moving agencies looking for one simple ad buying solution to handle all of their streaming TV campaigns across Disney, Hulu and espn. Set flexible budgets, adjust on the fly and optimize for total campaign control across every buy all in one platform. Get started today@disney campaignmanager.com that's disney campaign manager.com
B
Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
C
And I'm Toby Howell.
B
Today, why are English speaking countries so unhappy then?
C
The U.S. postal Service is running out of cash. It's Friday, March 20th.
B
Let's ride. Good morning, happy Friday and welcome to the first day of spring. Get out there and go for a jog. Well, unless you're on an aircraft carrier trying to stay out of sight. Yesterday, Le Monde reported that a French naval officer exposed the location of the Charles de Gaulle when he logged a 36 minute workout on Strava, alerting the public of the ship's whereabouts in the Mediterranean. Toby, this is not the first time someone's revealed the location of a sensitive location on Strava. But they never seem to learn. The allure of posting your workout on Strava is just too strong.
C
I for one, are just happy he's getting a run in. Especially when you're cooped up on an aircraft carrier. Let's dive into these Strava stats. Distance run 4.49 miles. So this wasn't just a quick John. Moving time 35 minutes 58 seconds. That is good for an 8 minute per mile pace elevation gain. 6.6ft. Must have been a calm day on the seas. And he burnt 535 calories. I do empathize with him though. If you don't post it on Strava, if you don't get those kudos, then the run never happened.
B
Now a word from our sponsor. LinkedIn ads. Toby, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten? Can be anything. Anything at all.
C
All right. Might sound crazy, but easily the life size portrait of Dorian Gray hanging up in my attic.
B
How so?
C
Do you see any wrinkles on this face?
B
Yes. Anyway, for the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad NETWORKS, look to LinkedIn ads.
C
They have a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers.
B
You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
C
Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com MBD that's LinkedIn.com MBD terms and conditions may apply.
B
The World Happiness Report released yesterday for 2026 delivered an unhappy verdict around social media. Too much scrolling time appears to be taking a sledgehammer to young people's well being in English speaking countries and in Western Europe. The Happiness Report conducted each year by Oxford's Wellbeing Center, Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network said that among under 25 in English speaking and West European countries, life evaluation scores have dropped by almost 1 point over the last decade on a scale of 1 to 10. They also found that teenage girls are most at risk from social media fueled unhappiness. Fifteen year old girls who use social media for five hours or more a day reported a drop in life satisfaction compared to those who use it less. It's contributed to a perplexing but sustained decline in happiness for people in English speaking countries. For the second year in a row, no English speaking country appears in the top 10 on the World Happiness Report. The US is 23rd. The UK dropped to 29th, its lowest ranking ever. Australia is 15th, it used to be 4th and Ireland 13th. So who is happy? No surprise here, Finland and the rest of the Nordics which continue to dominate the leaderboard. Finland was the happiest country for the ninth time in the last decade while other Nordic countries like Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway were all in the top 10. Toby, what stood out to you?
C
Thanks for asking. What stood out to me is it's not social media itself as a blanket, you know, concept. It's the type of social media and the amount that you're spending on it. So there's just more nuance there. The report drew a line between algorithm driven visual platforms, think Instagram, think Tik Tok, even X versus communication. First platforms which are things like WhatsApp, they actually found a 7 in a 17 country Latin America study. WhatsApp and Facebook were linked to higher life satisfaction because you felt closer to your community, you felt closer to your family compared to Instagram, TikTok and X which led to lower happiness. So there also is like, there's like a Goldilocks zone of the type of social media and the amount of time that you're spending on it. If you spend under an hour a day on, you know, communication based social media, you actually are happier than a baseline person who doesn't spend time on social media. But unfortunately the average teenager with clocking upwards of Two and a half hours on social media. So not a lot of people are in that Goldilocks zone.
B
Yeah. And the report also says we should be watching what's happening in Australia. Australia just banned social media for anyone under the age of 16. A number of other countries and states in the United States have rallied around this particular concept of banning social media for, for kids under 16. So they said we need to, this is a very important global experiment because we have found that social media, especially visual based, algorithmic driven media, has led to unhappiness. So what Australia is doing is, is so critically important for what could happen with the rest of the world.
C
And then I just want to give a shout out to Costa Rica because their rise has kind of been like the SL in this happiness report. They jumped from 23rd to fourth in just three years. That has never happened in the report's 14 year history. And it's the first time a Latin American country has ever cracked the top five. And the report didn't look at anything necessarily tied to policy or gdp, which, you know, drives a lot of feelings of happiness in a lot of countries. It's family bonds, it's social ties, it's community stability, like these things that you can't necessarily assign a number to, but clearly, you know, makes a fundamentally happier society.
B
And I mean, the Nordics, they just continue to crush this, especially in a year with the Winter Olympics. Like everything is coming up. Norway and Finland and Sweden, they, they talk about how much trust they have in society, talk a lot about access to health care. They never sort of have to worry about that because it is all taken care of by the government. But yeah, Finland, nine out of the last 10 years, they're so happy they barely have any light and it's cold.
C
Moving on. The U.S. postal Service and Amazon are caught up in a relationship that makes couples on Love is Blind seem like a bastion of stability. Amazon, long the US Postal Service's biggest customer, is set to take its business elsewhere, saying it wants to reduce its usage by at least two thirds by the time its current contract with the agency ends this fall. That spells major trouble for the USPS and could cost it billions of dollars in much needed revenue. USPS delivered more than a billion packages for Amazon last year, which is about 15% of everything sent inside the country. That consistent volume has been a major source of stability for an agency that frankly stinks at making money. Last year, USPS reported a net loss of $9 billion. The year before, that loss was nine and a half billion over the past 14 years, it has lost $87 billion. Postmaster General David Steiner warned this week that USPS could run out of cash in less than a year without congressional action. Steiner wants Congress to authorize price hikes, push class stamp prices to just under $1, up from the 78 cents today. He also wants to raise the Postal Service's borrowing limit, reform the pension program and have a longer lease to raise prices for its services. Neal Carrier pigeons might soon be the only method available to send out my winning.
B
Maybe USPS is probably too big to fail, but at the same time it's also been set up to fail. At least in 2026. It has a government mandate to deliver to roughly 170 million addresses nationwide, regardless of cost, six days a week. And because of that, 71% of its delivery routes are financially underwater. It has lost every, it has lost money every single year since 2007. And mail volume is simply plummeting. Total mail volume peaked in 2006, fell nearly 50, 50% by 2024. First class mail specifically is down 80% since 1997. So you have pressure on mail volumes. No one's sending mail anymore besides you who are sending wedd invitations and receiving wedding invitations at the same time. It has to deliver to these rural areas where it's extremely loss making routes. So there it's going to be in a financial pinch. This is not. If you looked at this business model and said would you invest? Someone will look at that and say, absolutely not.
C
Let's dive into what's going on between Amazon and the usps because again, this is a very symbiotic relationship. Amazon needs someone to deliver its packages. They especially rely on the USPS in rural areas like you mentioned, to do that last mile delivery. They had been talking for over a year when Amazon initially wanted to increase the amount of delivery services that they were using with the usps. But then Amazon said the agency walked away at the last minute and opened up a bidding service where they wanted to solicit bids from other companies, maybe the Walmart of the world, and see how much they would pay the agency to carry out this last mile delivery. That kind of blindsided Amazon, which is why they're putting out all this press saying, hey, we're weaning off the Postal Service at this point because we don't know if we're going to win the bid. We don't know if we will still have the ability to rely on them going forward. Meanwhile, the Postal Service is like, we want to see what our fair Market value is. We feel like the Amazon deal, though, it gives us a lot of revenue. Maybe we've been underpaid by this singular company. Let's see what the market is showing. Run it more like a business. So just an interesting rift between two partners that do rely on each other for a lot.
B
And you can see Postmaster General David Steiner, also cool title, Postmaster General, go flipping through the playbook and saying, okay, we are. We have lost however many tens of billions of dollars over the past few years, he told Congress this week. We're going to run out of cash within a year unless we do something. So you can see them going through and probably going through the possible options. And that was probably what they opened the bidding process with Amazon for. So they want to raise more money. Right now they have a debt limit of $15 billion. They say we have to raise more money or this thing is not going to continue as it has been for more than the United States has existed. Or we have to raise the cost of first class stamps. Right now there's 78 cents and he thinks that we have to raise them to almost a dollar ninety to 95 cents. And he said, look, compare this with the rest of the world. Sending mail in the United States is super cheap. By comparison, France and the UK charge about $3 and $2.50 respectively for the same service. So either you got to borrow more, cut costs, which they're trying to do, or raise the first or raise the cost of stamps. That's how you can somewhat be financially valuable.
C
It's stock of the week Dog of the week time the segment where Neil and I pick one stock that went all chalk in their March Madness bracket and one stock that thought mid majors had a chance. This year I won the pre show game of who can do more Bulgarian split squats. So I am up first and my stock of the week is Uber, who is pivoting hard towards self driving. Yesterday Uber announced plans to invest up to $1.25 billion in the EV maker Rivian to launch a fleet of robo taxis over the next five years if all the correct milestones are hit. The two companies are aiming to deploy 50,000 autonomous vehicles operating across multiple countries by 2031. While Uber drivers are a great source for an unhinged chat at 2am Coming back for the bar, CEO Dara Khosrow Sahi thinks an empty front seat is, quote, one of the most critical areas of focus of the company. The market likes the partnership approach Uber is taking. The company actually sold off its self driving arm in 2020 for proving too costly. Now it's working as the middleman between car companies and riders, hanging 10 on the robotaxi wave without danger of eating a full face of steep costs that come with developing its own tech. Uber now counts Rivian, Lucid Stellantis, Zoox, Waymo and even Nvidia as autonomous vehicle partners as it spreads its bet around. Neil. The market liked this deal more for Rivian, whose Stock popped over 10% on the news, while Uber's was basically flat. But I'm making the executive call that Uber can also be stock Louis, because of how it's positioning itself within the self driving race.
B
Requests granted. Yeah. Uber suddenly finds itself at the center of the self driving universe. It is shocking for those of us who remember how much of a disaster their initial foray was back in March 2018. An uber self driving test vehicle killed a pedestrian, was the first time that a autonomous vehicle had killed a pedestrian. So their project was absolutely in shambles. They were trying to make it in house. They killed that in 2020. And now they are partnering with 25 Self Driving Car developers, including Waymo, who is the other leader in this race. It's just a remarkable turnaround and a repositioning by Khosrow Shahi to figure out how Uber could fit into this self driving paradigm. Looks like he found an angle.
C
Yeah, but people are nervous that Uber could be cut out of the self driving, you know, pie because Waymo has partnered with Uber in some markets like Atlanta and Austin. But it's going at it alone in far more markets like Dallas, Orlando, where you just open up the Waymo app to queue a Waymo. You don't need to open up the Uber app. Another threat is AI agents. People think that eventually you'll just delete the Uber app. And if you want to call an autonomous car, you can tell one of your agents, hey, just get me a car. That would also cut Uber out of the circle. So even though it's taking this partnership approach, which seems smart because you're taking on less risks by not developing your own technology, eventually, maybe we don't need Uber anymore because we have these other options available to us.
B
But Kosher thinks he can make Uber indispensable to the self driving ecosystem by becoming that back end B2B platform, that mission control that controls everything. On a recent podcast on Semaphore, he said that autonomous cars need to be serviced, charged, repositioned, insured, financed and washed. He said these are very sophisticated machines that need lots of tender loving care and he thinks Uber with their massive fleet already are in a great position to be that back end service that autonomous vehicles. These yes, Waymo is going by itself but at the end of the day who's going to charge these vehicles? Who's going to clean them? Who's going to maintenance them? Uber thinks that it can be that for its self driving.
C
All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our dog the week right after this. Today I got an ad for goat feed and now I'm questioning everything. Is the algorithm telling me to start
B
a farm that's broken ad targeting, throwing data at a wall, placing budget in the wrong place and giving the wrong audience an existential crisis in the process?
C
With Twilio you can stop guessing. Twilio lets businesses coordinate Smart promotions across SMS, RCS and WhatsApp to help reach the right people at the right time,
B
save your budget and reach the people who actually want to hear from you. Go to Twilio.com/daily show that's tw I l I o.com/daily show Neil Think fast
C
about what Order Fulfillment Shipstation's intelligence driven platform brings order management, rate shopping, inventory and returns, warehouse systems and comprehensive analytics all in one place, saving customers 15 hours per week on fulfillment.
B
With Shipstation you can connect to over 200 sales channels instead of five to seven disconnected tools, you've got one.
C
Try ShipStation free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Go to shipstation.com and use code MBDS. That's shipstation.com code MBDS.
D
Get in the game with the college branded Venmo debit card. Rep your team with every tap and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash, a new rewards program from Venmo. No monthly fee, no minimum balance, just school pride and spending power. Get in the game and sign up for the Venmo debit card@venmo.com collegecard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. select schools available. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo mesh terms max $100 cash back per month.
B
My dog of the Week is the Metaverse. The promise of an immersive 3D world filled with cartoonish legless avatars appears to be over after Metta announced this week it would be shutting down its VR social network. Horizon Worlds for Quest VR headsets in June. Andrew Bosworth met a CTO yesterday clarified that Horizon Worlds will actually remain on VR after hearing feedback from fans or fan. But it will essentially be in maintenance mode with limited support. In other words, it'll be a zombie. Metta had high hopes for the Metaverse, to say the least. After all, Mark Zuckerberg even changed the company's name in 2021 from Facebook to Metta to reflect what he called technology's next frontier. Speaking that October, Zuckerberg predicted, our hope is that within the next decade, the Metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers. It has done none of that. In fact, maybe the only thing it's been good at is setting money on fire. In total, Meta's poured $73 billion into Reality Labs, its virtual reality division that has never turned a profit and cost Metta billions of dollars in losses every single quarter to lose maybe a little less money. Earlier this year, Metta cut more than 1,000 employees from its VR unit. Toby Zuckerberg's vision of the Metaverse was widely mocked, even as he touted it as the next evolution of the Internet. Turns out the haters are right. RIP Rest in pixels.
C
Let's go back to the Metaverse peak hype cycle. McKinsey and Citi had this forecast of their own estimates of the Metaverse becoming a multitrillion dollar platform by 2030. We're at 2026 right now. It's got a couple trillion to go. The bet was on Gen Z socializing in virtual worlds. Meta and Mark Zuckerberg looked at, at Fortnite, they looked at Roblox and said, this is where young people want to hang out. I think the issue was they just never nailed the product. The legless avatar were just always too weird. Like, you know, Horizon Worlds was never a place that you did want to spend time in. Maybe part of the motivation, too was just renaming the company because they wanted to distance themselves from the Facebook brand that had taken some hits then. But I think the real motivation for making this gigantic bet is that Zuck really wanted to get back at Apple basically for owning, like, the smartphone platform and, you know, charging developer fees and being held hostage by this other big tech company. They wanted their own platform, their own system that developers would come and build their own apps on, basically become the the next generation iPhone. That bet did not pan out exactly as expected.
B
Yeah, the VR people don't want to live in virtual reality, at least not yet. With the current product suite available, the Meta Quest headse sales were down 16% year over year. From 2024 to 2025, the overall industry has declined for the last three years. Apple rolled out this 30 $500 Vision Pro headset a few years ago. It's scaling back production. So no company has nailed this yet. And it's very unclear going forward whether consumers want to put those goggles on and be completely immersed in a, in a world, whether there's legs or not.
C
And it's also not surprising that they're making the shift to kind of sunset their VR ambitions when they have kind of the successor already in place. Right now, I'm talking about artificial intelligence enabled devices like their Meta Ray Ban glasses. Those actually do have an audience. They are outselling traditional Ray Bans in some stores. So it does seem like the successor is here. So then why do you continue to spend money on a technology that people haven't resonated with?
B
It is just, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is the face of the Metaverse and the metaverse flopping. But I'm glad that you mentioned that. McKinsey said it was going to be a $5 trillion opportunity by 2030. Saigon Nadella, who is Microsoft CEO, also Time said the Metaverse is here. It's not only transforming how we see the world, but how we participate in it. Microsoft did shut down its own metaverse division in 2023, laid off its entire Metaverse team. So everyone back then, I don't know, we had to open the schools.
C
All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Jeff Bezos is done selling your paper towels. Now he wants to buy the factory that makes them. The Amazon founders in talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy manufacturing companies and then use AI to automate the heck out of them. According to a Wall Street Journal report. Bezos is calling it a manufacturing transformation vehicle. And it's his next big obsession. Remember, Bezos recently came out of stealth with Project Prometheus, a startup building AI that can understand and simulate how the physical world behaves. The idea is to use his learnings from Prometheus to help automate the factories and facilities owned by the fund, buy the company, insert AI and boost the margins. It is the same playbook private equity has been running for years, just with robots involved. Now, now we've been spending the last few years watching AI eat software. Bezos is betting it's also hungry for some hardware, too.
B
Oh, his critics were grabbing their torches and pitchforks that he wants to raise. This is one of the richest people on the planet. To raise $100 billion to automate human jobs and replace human jobs with robots. But obviously he's going to spend other people's money and not his if they'll give it to him. A lot of the older guard of Silicon Valley, as Wall Street Journal pointed out, is really interested in this concept of using AI on the physical world. On industrial manufacturing, Travis Kalanick, who was the Uber co founder, recently announced what his venture is. It's called Adams and it's a vision to transform manufacturing industries with AI, something that Bezos is also interested in. Elon Musk is pivoting Tesla to be a robot company. So particular old guard of Silicon Valley came of age in the in the 2010s, is really, really interested in raising tons of money to use AI on the physical world. Up next, if anyone was looking forward to the new season of the Bachelorette coming this Sunday, Toby looking at you, it's not going to happen anymore. In a last minute twist, ABC pulled the upcoming season after video emerged of its star, Taylor Frankie Paul attacking her ex boyfriend and father of one of her children. In 2023, Paul was cast as the Bachelorette after rising to stardom on the Hulu series the Secret Live of Mormon Wives Lives. But controversy emerged recently after it was revealed that she was facing a domestic violence investigation from a few years ago. Despite Paul doing the typical media rounds ahead of the season, everything changed when TMZ released the video of the altercation between her and her ex Dakota Mortensen on Thursday morning, causing Disney to pull the plug. In a statement from her spokesperson, Paul said that she is, quote, very grateful for ABC support as she prioritizes her family's safety and security. The statement ends with Paul saying she is currently exploring all of her options, seeking support and preparing to own and share her story.
C
Tough first week on the job for new Disney CEO Josh d', Amaro, who took over for Bob Iger literally on Wednesday of this week. The stock is already down 10% year to date and now he has a major crisis for one of ABC's biggest brand. ABC is looking at tens of millions of dollars in losses if it can't find a way to save the Bachelorette. So good luck, Josh.
B
Finally, the Dune 3 trailer dropped this week, causing Toby and all the other Lee San Al Gaib fans to break out in a cold sweat. But so did movie theater owners who began to confront a serious dilemma. Dune 3 and Avengers Doomsday, two of the most potentially lucrative films coming out this year, are slated to be released on the exact same day, December 18th. It's like the Nightmare version of Barbenheimer. While Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the Same Day in 2023, their audiences didn't have much overlap. These two movies do skewed heavily male. The concern is that they'd cannibalize each other and lead to fewer ticket sales overall, a brutal outcome when theaters are fighting for every audience member they can get. As one movie rep told the Hollywood Reporter, someone's got to move.
C
Someone's got to move. But also, the IMAX screens is a big issue here because Dune secured basically every IMAX screen for that weekend. Because that movie was filmed on IMAX cameras, it generally, you know, has catered more to like the cinema cinematography crowd with just its big views and vistas. Avengers Doomsday is going to have a lot less of those very lucrative big screen formats. But Disney's position is like, hey, look at what happened with Barbie. Like, they didn't have the Oppenheimer treatment in the large scale, but that movie made $1.47 billion globally. It actually outgrossed Oppenheimer. So maybe IMAX isn't as big of a draw in this particular case. Obviously you have to combine the two names and make a portmanteau of Dune and Doomsday. And luckily the film stars already did it for us. If Doomsday star Robert Downey Jr. And Timothee Chalamet, the star of Dune, were at an event in January and Downey joked, we both have films opening on December 18th and we decided to coin it, we're thinking Dunes Day. We'll see if we're still friends by then. That seems pretty on the.
B
Well, yeah, I was. I had not even thought about it before five seconds ago. And that was the first thing that came. Doomsday. But if you had to move one, which one would you move?
C
I mean, it feels like Disney because again, I think the thing is an issue, even though I just said it's not a big issue. That's kind of Disney coping, I think because you just make way more money from these big screen formats. It feels like a bigger event when you go to an IMAX theater. So if I was Disney, I would be the one to budge, especially because I was second to this weekend.
B
I thought you were just going to say Avengers has to move because I'm way looking forward to Dune 3.
C
I. Yeah, I probably am.
B
That trailer is insane. Go watch it and go down the
C
rabbit hole of the cameras used to film it because like, some of them are imax. Camera. Some of them are using real film, some of them are digital. Like the desert scenes are in digital to make them look like more intense. I'm not like a huge film buff, but I do encourage you to look how you know, the director used different moods and lighting to capture like different parts of the entire trailer.
B
Meanwhile, we're both seeing project Hail Mary this weekend, which is going to be sick. Ryan Gosling in space. And finally, I cannot wait to park myself in front of 10 TVs later today with the women's college basketball tournament tipping off and the men's event entering its second day day. Toby, how are your 15 brackets looking so far?
C
So I admired in 181st place in our MBD Group bracket. Right where you want to be after the first day. Wisconsin losing that one hurt. St. Mary's losing that one hurt. But nailed VCU, nailed Texas. And we can only go up from here. Looking forward though, to the T supremacy game later today. So Mitch Golditz posted on the biggest game of the first round is on Friday when Long island battles Arizona for iced tea supremacy. He's talking about the one seed Arizona taking on Long island, the Sixteen Sea. That is at 1:35pm this afternoon Eastern time. So tune in if you like tea.
B
1:35pm I'm probably going to be drinking an Arizona set of Long Island.
C
I hope so.
B
I see. And that's probably how it's going to shake out with Arizona as the 1 seed. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend weekend. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram at me Daily show let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Eugenia Ogu is our technical director. Hair and makeup is looking for true tv. Devin Emery is our president and our shows are production of Morning Brew.
C
Great show, Danielle. I wish you all well.
Release Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: Neal Freyman & Toby Howell
In this multifaceted episode, hosts Neal and Toby dive into the surprising decline in happiness among English-speaking nations according to the 2026 World Happiness Report, explore the financial turmoil facing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) due to Amazon’s business decisions, and discuss headline business and entertainment news. The episode maintains the show's signature mix of wit and insight while unpacking key trends in tech, business, and pop culture.
Neal and Toby blend news expertise with banter and pop culture references. They employ irony (“If you don’t post it on Strava, the run never happened.” [01:55]), wit, and accessible analogies (“the USPS and Amazon relationship makes couples on Love is Blind seem like a bastion of stability” [06:33]) to keep the discussion both informative and entertaining.
This episode delivers a snapshot of how digital habits are impacting happiness, why America’s oldest delivery network teeters on the brink, and how tech’s bet-the-farm gambles sometimes explode spectacularly. There's a through-line around disruption and adaptation—whether in national well-being, logistics, tech, or film—and through it all, Neal and Toby keep listeners laughing and learning.