English-Speaking Nations Are Sadder Than Ever & USPS is Running Out of Cash

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0:29Toby Maloney:Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why are English-speaking countries so unhappy?

0:37Neal Freyman:Ben, the U.S. Postal Service is running out of cash. It's Friday, March 20th. Let's ride.

0:48Toby Maloney: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.

1:19Neal Freyman:I, for one, am 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 jaunt. Moving time, 35 minutes, 58 seconds. That is good for an 8-minute-per-mile pace. Elevation gain, 6.6 feet. 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.

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2:36Toby Maloney:Terms and conditions may apply. 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-25s in English-speaking and Western European countries, life evaluation scores have dropped by almost one point over the last decade on a scale of one to 10. They also found that teenage girls are most at risk from social media fueled unhappiness.

3:12Toby Maloney:15-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. It's lowest ranking ever. Australia is 15th. It used to be fourth. And Ireland, 13th. So who is happy? No surprise here. Finland and the rest of the Nordics, which continue to dominate the leaderboard.

3:46Toby Maloney: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? Thanks for asking.

3:56Neal Freyman:What stood out to me is it's not social media itself as a blanket 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 TikTok, even X, versus communication-first platforms, which are things like WhatsApp. They actually found 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.

4:35Neal Freyman:So there also is 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 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.

4:57Toby Maloney: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 kids under 16. So they said we need to watch. 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 so critically important for what could happen with the rest of the world.

5:29Neal Freyman:And then I do want to give a shout out to Costa Rica because their rise has kind of been like the sleeper story in this happiness report. They jumped from 23rd to 4th 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 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 and

6:06Toby Maloney: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 and they barely have any light and it's cold.

6:29Neal Freyman: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 U.S. 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.

7:09Neal Freyman:Last year, USPS reported a net loss of$9 billion. The year before, that loss was$9.5 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 pushing first 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. Neil, carrier pigeons might soon be the only method available to send out my winning inputs.

7:47Toby Maloney: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 money every single year since 2007. And mail volume is simply plummeting. Total mail volume peaked in 2006, fell nearly 50 percent by 2024. First class mail specifically is down 80 percent since 1997. So you have pressure on mail volumes. No one's sending mail anymore besides you who are sending wedding invitations and receiving wedding invitations.

8:33Toby Maloney:At the same time, it has to deliver to these rural areas where it's extremely loss making roots. So it's going to be in a financial pinch. If you looked at this business model and said, would you invest? Someone would look at that and say, absolutely not.

8:45Neal Freyman: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, and 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 Walmarts of the world, and see how much they would pay the agency to carry out this last mile delivery.

9:25Neal Freyman: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.

9:58Toby Maloney:And you can see Postmaster General David Steiner, also cool title, Postmaster General, go flipping through the playbook and seeing, OK, 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.

10:32Toby Maloney:or we have to raise the cost of first-class stamps. Right now, they're 78 cents, and he thinks that we have to raise them to almost$1, 90 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 U.K. charge about$3 and$2.50, respectively, for the same service. So either you've 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.

11:02Neal Freyman: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.

11:38Neal Freyman:While Uber drivers are a great source for an unhinged chat at 2 a.m. coming back for the bar, CEO Dara Khashrishahi 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 robo-taxi 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 bets around.

12:17Neal Freyman: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 stocked, Louis, because of how it's positioning itself within the self-driving race.

12:30Toby Maloney:Request 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. It was the first time that an 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 Kazur Shahi to figure out how Uber could fit into this self-driving paradigm.

13:09Toby Maloney:It looks like he found an angle.

13:10Neal Freyman:Yeah, but people are nervous that Uber could be cut out of the self-driving 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 risk by not developing your own technology, eventually maybe we don't need Uber anymore because we have these other options available to us.

13:54Toby Maloney:But Kasrussi thinks he can make Uber indispensable to the self-driving ecosystem by becoming that back-end B2B platform, that mission control that controls everything. thing 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, 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 needs. Yes, Waymo's going by itself, but at the end of the day, who's going to charge these vehicles?

14:29Toby Maloney:Who's going to clean them? Who's going to maintenance them? Uber thinks that it can be that Ford self-driving. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our Dog of the Week right after this.

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