The Matt Walsh Show - The Subscription Economy Is Killing the American Dream

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

The American Dream now comes with a monthly fee. Ep. 6 - The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution is available, exclusively on DailyWire+ here: http://dwplus.watch/RealHistoryCommunism - - - Today's Sponsors: Hillsdale - Read the classics. Study the West. Start right now at https://Hillsdale.edu/WALSH ZipRecruiter - 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now, you can try it FOR FREE at https://ZipRecruiter.com/WALSH PureTalk - Go to https://PureTalk.com/WALSH to switch to the only wireless company awarded five stars in every category by Consumer Reports. No service contract. No cancellation fees. Just phenomenal U.S. customer service on the 5G network that powers America. Preborn! - For $28, you can provide an ultrasound and help parents see their child, hear the heartbeat, and choose life. Dial #250 and say “BABY" or visit https://Preborn.com/WALSH - - - DailyWire+: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're all aware of the WEF's now infamous threat. You'll own nothing and be happy. Globalists have been using that phrase for a decade. Now, it understandably, it's led to a lot of backlash. If you manage to survey 100 normal non-schizophrenic people on the street, all 100 of them would tell you that owning property is preferable to borrowing everything. Just from a PR perspective, it's even remarkable that they even attempted to push this messaging. It's obviously appalling. But as it turns out, you don't really need any buy-in. from the public in order to force this plan down their throats. You can tell customers that they're buying something, and you can clarify explicitly that they're purchasing it and not renting it.

And then one day you can simply remove the product from their homes, and you don't even have to offer them a refund or anything. This is one of the more important stories that isn't getting a lot of mainstream attention, but it's a very important sign of where things are going. Tens of thousands of people in the UK and Europe who purchase digital content on Sony PlayStation Store, which sells games, movies, and television shows, recently received the following notification in their inbox. And here it is, quote,

From September 1st, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library. Thank you, PlayStation Store. That's it. They don't even get a refund. Not an apology. They're simply informed.

that, although they thought they were purchasing this content, it was actually an extended rental, and now it's gone. To be clear, customers navigated to the store page for various movies and television shows, and they had an option. They could rent a movie, which they'd have to view within a month, or they could spend more money and, quote, purchase it. What's being deleted from their accounts are the purchases, including films like Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, Highlander, Hot Fuzz, Paddington, Rambo, First Blood, as well as First Blood, Part 2, Robocop, Shark Nato, Terminator 2, 2, Judgment Day. Several television shows will also be removed, including American God Season 1 and Below the Surface Season 1.

A couple of years ago, a similar purge nearly took place. This is from Business Insider back in 2023, quote, Sony is removing hundreds of discovery titles from users' video libraries that they already purchased. Users who bought any of the hundreds of listed programs will no longer be able to access the content as of December 31st, according to a legal notice posted by the company. Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased discovery content, and the content will be removed from your video library, according to the note. Now, in that case, Sony eventually signed new license arrangements that restored access to this content, but the point was made. You know, even when you purchase something online, you don't actually own it. You're at the mercy of whatever license you're agreeing to, which is 5,000 pages long and which no one will ever read.

And indeed, just a few years later, Sony has said that it will begin removing digital purchases from everybody's account. Now, for now, these purges are unique to Sony, but every single online service that sells movies and television shows, works the exact same way. I looked at the terms of service on Amazon Prime Video, for example. This is another service that says you can buy movies instead of just renting them. But when you read the fine print on the website, here's what you find. Quote, availability of purchase digital content. Purchase digital content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the service as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons,

and Amazon will not be liable to you if purchase digital content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming. This should obviously be disclosed to everybody on the actual store page. Instead, it's buried in the fine print. So they're lying about what they're selling you. They're lying about what you actually own. In response, maybe you're thinking, well, it's just movies and television shows. They're not that important. But, which is true. But this general philosophy, the idea that you don't own something, even after you've paid for it, obviously is not restricted to entertainment. This is just a symptom of a larger problem. As you've probably noticed, it's infecting pretty much every industry.

For example, even if you generally tune out stories about corporate greed and, you know, the rising cost of living, this was a pretty unbelievable development that you probably remember. The automaker BMW announced a few years ago that it would begin charging customers a monthly subscription fee to use the heated seats that were already installed in their cars. The idea was that BMW's production lines would be simplified rather than having to make one batch of cars with heated seats and another without for every available paint color. And while you can make the argument this arrangement was more economical for BMW, the problem is that customers never saw any cost savings as a result of the change. BMW didn't lower the prices on all of their new cars by $1,000

or something because of their new streamlined production lines. And therefore, the subscription fee went over about as well as you'd expect. There were endless news reports about it like this one, which led to a lot of outrage. Watch. If you buy a car that has heated seats, you'd expect to be able to use them on a cold morning, right? Well, some BMW owners now have to pay more for that option. BMW recently rolled out subscription plans to overseas, that require owners to pay a monthly fee for heated front seats.

The seats are already installed in the cars, yet owners still have to pay $18 a month to use them. Or they can shell out $450 for a lifetime subscription. Now, might seem easy to understand why people rebelled against this, but if you think about it, there's some nuance to the reaction. There's a very popular commentator in the do-it-yourself community named Lewis Rossman, who did good job summarizing the reason for the outrage here. Rossman's point was, you know, it's one thing if the subscription fee unlock some kind of advanced

technology like self-driving or auto parking that the customers couldn't realistically implement on their own. People can tolerate that. And people do tolerate it all the time. Tesla is the prime example. But BMW is doing something very different and much more rudimentary. They were charging customers to send voltage to a transatlage to a transatlge. which is the most basic thing imaginable. It's something that a customer could hardwire on their own

in about 10 minutes, assuming the car didn't use software to lock them out, which you probably would. And that's why BMW's decision really infuriated people. You know, with cable or Netflix, your subscription fee at least unlocked content that you couldn't easily create on your own. But BMW's subscription for heated seats didn't feel any different from, say, a subscription to lower your car windows or a subscription to, to spin your wheels really fast. So very quickly, the outrage forced BMW to backtrack. They announced that they would stop charging a fee for heated seats. But executives at BMW made it clear that they didn't fully understand the reason that they had angered so many people.

This is from Edmonds, quote, BMW board member for sales and marketing, Pierre Noda, said, what we won't do anymore is offer seat heating by a monthly subscription. The heated seat subscription was reportedly going to cost buyers $18 a month, but Noda said BMW buyers feel that they pay double for the feature before insisting that isn't true. However, he acknowledged that perception is reality. While heated seats are out, other aspects of the brand's relatively new subscription model are not. It was just about the worst possible response BMW could have given. He's accusing customers of being stupid because they thought they were paying double.

and then he says that, well, even though they're stupid, they're still our customers and, you know, we've got to make them happy. Therefore, we're going to keep charging them subscriptions for basic built-in features of their cars, just not the heated seats anymore. And indeed, he wasn't kidding. This is a quote from a BMW spokesperson from the outlet Motor One, several years after the drama over the heated seats. It's quote, adaptive suspension is available through the connected drive store in the U.S., but a subscription isn't required. Still available as a factory option, but through the store it can be added to certain cars that weren't optioned that way originally.

Customers can try it out for a month at no charge, and if they like it, they can opt for a monthly or yearly subscription if they wish or simply buy it outright for a one-time $500 charge. To be clear, a monthly subscription isn't required to use the feature. So you're going to be charged $27 a month or a $500 one-time fee if you want to use your adaptive suspension. But whatever you do, don't call it a subscription. They say it's not a subscription because you can pay a bunch of money up front to own the feature indefinitely. First of all, this is exactly what they were doing with the heated seats.

It's the exact same policy complete with the buyout option. Only this time they're being more careful to avoid bad PR. by saying again and again that no subscription is required. But more importantly, no, you don't actually own that feature at all in any meaningful sense, even once you complete the purchase. If your car is totaled, the feature won't transfer to a new BMW, and your insurance company isn't going to pay you $500 for it, in all likelihood. For centuries, John Milton's Paradise Lost has been considered one of the great works of literature,

a Christian epic that wrestles with timeless questions about temptation, freedom, pride, in God's relationship with mankind. In one of its most famous lines, Satan declares, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. It's a line that cuts to the heart of rebellion, and Milton's response to it, is one of the most powerful

in all of Western literature. That's why Hillsdale College offers a free online course on Paradise Lost, taught by real Hillsdale professors. Paradise Lost gets at something true about human nature that most modern writing won't even touch. Milton understood that the root of every rebellion,

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walls to enroll. It's totally free. Start reading. Learn the class. Rediscover the West, start right now at Hillsdale.edu slash Walsh. I sometimes get asked how I keep up with everything, and the answer is pretty simple. I'm very clear about what deserves my time and what does not. Most things don't. I've gotten ruthless about cutting out anything that's just noise, unnecessary errands, pointless obligation, tasks I can handoff or automate. Protect your time, or you'll lose it. Those are really the only two options. We all have our own time-saving hacks for everyday life. But if you're a business owner, how can you save time hiring? ZipRecruiter. That's how you do. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested in qualified

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Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. What Sony and BMW are doing or attempting to do is not unique. They're just a couple of prominent examples of a phenomenon that we're all familiar with at this point. We're living in an era where increasingly we don't own anything. and we have no real legal rights to products that we're paying for. You can buy a $2,500 bike from Peloton, but it's basically useless unless you pay for an all-access membership, which costs $50 a month. You don't get your live classes or your workout library or your fitness progress or any of the interactive features that supposedly make the bike worthwhile.

You can buy a $200 digital wall calendar off Amazon, complete with smartphone integration so that all of your family's events are prominently displayed in real time on the refrigerator. but for the privilege of updating this calendar, you can expect to pay an annual fee of around $95 a year. Yes, calendars now cost $200 plus $100 a year, and people are buying this. You can get a Woop Fitness tracker to track your sleep if you're a crazy person, but some people think it's worthwhile. And regardless, it's the kind of thing that obviously shouldn't require a monthly fee, but if you want to use the device, then you need to shell out at least $25 a month, realistically closer to $40 a month for all the features. Otherwise, your device is nothing more than a paperweight.

You can pay $100 for a ring doorbell camera, but if you don't pay the subscription fee, which runs from $50 to $100 per year, then you'll probably end up like Savannah Guthrie's mom. Your ring won't save any footage at all. So if somebody comes to your house in the middle of the night and drags you away, well, good luck. Nobody will ever hear from you again.

You can buy a Volkswagen, but if you want to use the full horse horsepower the car's capable of, you'll need to pony up some more cash. Watch. Volkswagen just did something that should make every car owner furious. They're selling their electric ID3 with its full horsepower locked behind a paid subscription. The car comes from the factory with 228 horsepower, but if you don't pay a monthly fee, it's software limited to just 201. For about $22 a month, they'll flip a digital switch and unlock the power that was already inside the car that you paid for. You can buy an iPhone, but without a $5 a month iCloud subscription, you'll run out of space for your photos and movies.

Of course, you need to pay for the cell phone service monthly as well. You can buy a smart home device, but without paying for Alexa, none of your devices will communicate with each other. You can buy food on Uber Eats or DoorDash, but if you don't pay for an annual membership, you'll pay extra fees on every order. You'll also get worse drivers. You can buy an Xbox or PlayStation,

but if you want to play online with your friends, you'll need to pay something like $50 to $100 a year. for the privilege of doing that. You used to be able to go to the store and buy Microsoft Word. You know, old people will remember this. It came with a big box and everything. Well, now Microsoft pressures you to sign up for an Office 365 monthly subscription. And meanwhile, Ford locks down basic features like built-in navigation with live traffic as well as in-dast streaming apps behind a paywall.

You could pay $15 a month, $150 a year or a $750 one-time fee. Then there's an even more egregious Ford Security package, which is available on new F-150s, Mustangs, and Expeditions. For the low price of $8 a month or $80 a year, you'll get push notifications on your phone if somebody tries to force your door open or if the car's GPS location changes when the engine is off, meaning your truck is getting towed or maybe dismantled on the side of the road. But one of the most important features in this monthly subscription plan is called Start Inhibit. So this is a feature that, according to Ford, quote,

lets you respond quickly by remotely locking down your vehicle from being started, even if an authorized key is detected nearby. And the point of this feature is to prevent so-called relay attacks, like the one that you're seeing on your screen right now. And in a relay attack, a thief walks up to your front door or the side of your house with a large signal booster. And normally your key fob only on the side of your house. unlocks your car if you're within a couple of feet of the vehicle. But the signal booster

tricks your car into thinking that the key fob is right next to the door. The thieves then unlock the car, start the push button ignition, and they drive off before you realize what's happened. Now with the Ford Security Plan, the start inhibit will stop this kind of attack. It will prevent anyone from starting the car with the fob unless the start inhibit option is disabled in your Ford app. So in other words, Ford. wants to charge you a monthly fee in order to correct a security vulnerability that they have built into every single one of their vehicles. So instead of allowing you to, say, require a pin to be entered before your truck will start, Ford demands that you pay them $80 a year

to enable this feature within the app. Oh, you have to select Start Inhibit every time you park the car, which is, you know, obviously very convenient as well. Now, the upshot is that when you a new Ford, you're given a major incentive to subscribe to at least two different monthly plans in order to make the car function as it should. And that's not to pick on Ford necessarily. Again, this is an epidemic. Everyone's doing it. You can buy a $200 printer from HP only to discover that your ink cartridges have been remotely disabled because you canceled your HP Instant Ink subscription. That's something that actually happens to people for the record. and HP is proud of this program.

Watch. HP Instant Ink is a smart print subscription service that delivers ink the moment you need it. You get ink or toner, plus hassle-free deliveries. How does it work? Step 1. Pick a plan based on the number of pages you print in a month. Step 2.

Print whatever you want. Every page costs the same no matter how much ink you use. Step 3. When you run low, your smart printer lets us know, and we ship your ink or toner at no extra cost. Print more or less? Unused pages roll over, and extra pages cost just pennies.

Plus, you can change plans or cancel any time. They say you can cancel any time, but they don't tell you that if you cancel, they'll remotely disable the ink in your printer, nor do they warn you about any of the other problems that customers are experiencing. And there are quite a few of them. Here's one, quote,

I sent my printer up and ran the alignment and cleaning functions. They were some pretty bad streaky prints, but it was working. The black cartridge only printed exactly 50 pages, that coincidentally was the same as the plan I signed up for. And then it stopped printing black altogether, which I found odd. It didn't fade. It was like the ink was getting low. The black ink just stopped.

I assume this instant ink plan was where they would send you more ink when you needed it. They shut off ink cartridges that still have ink. That's some wasteful and fishy tactics, HP. On top of that, I'll learn there's an overage fee if I somehow print more from a shut off ink cartridge. This is going back into the box and will be sent back. Here's another glowing review. The worst program ever, I lost a credit card, and the monthly subscription failed to process, so HP turned off my printer.

I had to resubscribe to continue printing, then cancel the service. Shortly after that, my printer stopped printing again with the error code. You must subscribe to HP Instant Inc. So now my printer will not print. And response to these complaints, you might say, well, these people need to read the fine print. It's not HP's fault if the customers don't understand the licensed terms they agree to. And in a court of law, maybe you'd have a point. Now, I have no doubt that HP's lawyers would successfully defeat any class action lawsuit

over this subscription plan. Actually, when I looked this up, I discovered that indeed HP has been sued several times over this practice. Lawsuits allege that HP didn't deliver ink on time. The ink was prone to errors, et cetera. And they avoided any significant consequences because the terms of service basically prevent large-scale nationwide class actions. But the legal maneuvering isn't the point.

Neither is the abstract theoretical economic argument. the idea that somehow all of these subscriptions are saving the consumer money or providing more consumer choice or whatever. The issue is that the sum total of all these different subscriptions, which are extremely frustrating and confusing for millions of people, has a clear effect on the mindset of the typical consumer, if not their political views. It gives people a very real reason to hate capitalism. I mean, for one thing, just at a practical level, all these subscriptions, make things more expensive. There are hidden costs that stack up over time,

particularly if you forget you have an active subscription. All these monthly payments also mean that consumers have much less control than they used to. One of my producers just bought a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which apparently comes with a complicated U-Connect system that caused some kind of glitch, which prevented the ignition from turning on when the button was pressed. This bug kept coming back,

and ultimately the dealership wanted $200 just to diagnose the problem. Not even to solve it, just to diagnose it. 30 years ago, our parents would have just swapped carburetors in the driveway. People were comfortable with the products they owned. They were easier and less expensive to fix. All that's gone now. We have less control than ever before. On top of that, you're giving away a lot of personal data, which you probably don't even know about,

every single time you sign one of these license agreements. The odds are very good that when you log into Ford Security Service or Jeeps, you connect, they're sharing your driving habits with their advertising partners. In fact, it's written into Ford's Privacy Agreement. In other words, apps that claim to make you safer are, in fact, Trojan horses for advertisers. That's what they're actually designed to do. The other problem here, of course, is that the prices of these services keeps increasing. That makes the cost of living much more unpredictable.

For ring cameras, the subscription fee to save your videos went from $30 a year in 2022 to 50. in 24, that's an increase of 60% in two years for the same exact functionality. But Amazon and Ring got away with it because once you have the Ring camera on your front door, you're much more likely to accept the increase in your monthly fee. After all, you have a major sunk cost in terms of your finances and in terms of convenience. And these corporations are constantly taking advantage of that. In the meantime, the corporations are completely blind to the risks of what they're doing, or they don't care.

I mean, when you're constantly billing your customers for products that they used to own outright, then sure, your bottom line might go up in the short term. And sure, some customers may not mind the additional fees. But the fact remains, people want to own the place they live, the car they drive, the movies they watch, the doorbell on their front porch. Ownership is one of the most fundamental components of living a fruitful, real human life. I mean, it's the literal American dream. the house with the white picket fence and all that.

And the assumption is that you would own the house and the fence. The tradeoff used to be that, you know, you would have less stuff, but the stuff you did have would be yours. And now we have the inverse of that where we have a ton of stuff, but we don't own any of it. But the thing is, all this stuff is owned by someone, specifically the corporations that rent it out. So we own less, they own everything.

It's anti-human, it's bad for our wallets, and it's bad for our souls. And it makes us much easier for the powers that be to surveil and monitor every single one of us, which they are. The moment a political candidate comes along and promises to wage war on the corporations that are depriving Americans of the ability to own anything, that candidate will win in a landslide. And if that candidate is AOC, let's say, then we have much bigger problems. I mean, certainly every major corporation will be targeted for destruction. As a result, as a country, we'll probably experience an economic crisis on par with the Great Depression. So it's very important to understand what's going on here and how it happened. The root of the problem is that Wall Street and private equity have become enamored with a concept known as SAAAS or software as a service.

You maybe heard this term before. what you may not have heard about is that a little over a decade ago, lenders develop something called annual recurring revenue loans or ARR loans. And these are loans in which lenders would hand out money equal to multiples of top-line revenue as opposed to profits. Private equity firms could use these loans to acquire very unprofitable companies as long as these companies had a subscription-based model that provided a lot of top-line revenue. The private equity companies then have about three years to make the company profitable by traditional metrics. So for example, imagine you run a widget company that has operating expenses of $18 million,

but you collect $15 million in subscription fees a year. So you're losing millions of dollars every year. You have a negative cash flow. Now, in the normal scenario, the bank wouldn't give the private equity company any money to acquire your business because you're too risky. But with an ARR, the bank might loan the private equity company some multiple of your annual recurring revenue. So for example, they might give the private equity firm $40 million, which is roughly three times your annual subscription revenue. And now the private equity firm

can purchase your widget company, fire half of the employees, increase margins, and sell it off in three years. The ARR only became popular in the United States within the last 20 years, and it's completely changed how the entire economy works. Every company now wants recurring revenue in order to allow private equity companies or anyone else to have an easier time acquiring them, which obviously means a big payday for the owners of the company. Now, to be clear, this isn't some nefarious conspiracy to fix the markets or anything like that. The reason ARR loans have become popular is that they tend to make everybody involved much wealthier. It's the same reason why every major restaurant is reheating food from the back of a Cisco truck.

If people are willing to pay more money for inferior products, if people are willing to pay increasingly insane subscription fees for the rest of their lives, then major corporations and private equity firms will happily oblige. In our world today, people have been trained to believe there's always a catch. If something costs less, it must be worse. If customer service is good, you'll sacrifice coverage. If coverage is great, you'll pay twice as much. It seems there's always has to be, always has to be some kind of trade-off like that, but not with Pure Talk. Consumer Reports just did a massive survey of wireless providers across the country, and Pure Talk was the only one to earn five out of five stars in every category, including coverage, support, value, and data. So you're getting better

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For two and a half centuries, we've talked about the ideals this country was founded on among them. One of the most important is the idea that every person is endowed by their creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everything else depends on that first right, the right to life. And yet every day, unborn children are denied it. That's why the work of pre-born really matters. At pre-born network clinics, mothers facing unexpected pregnancies are met with compassion, practical support, and a free ultrasound. The ultrasound changes everything.

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or give securely at preborn.com slash walsh. That's preborn.com slash walsh. Every gift is tax deductible. The only way out of this downward spiral, short of electing president AOC and destroying the entire country, making all these problems much worse, is to reward businesses that sell finished products, not just subscriptions. There's a massive market opportunity here, and already some companies are capitalizing on it. Vinyl records are having a comeback for exactly this reason.

Go to the top floor of your local Barnes & Noble, and it's like going back in time. They have vinyls all over the place. They're selling record players. Even in the 1990s, that would have been retro, but people are paying a lot. of money for vinyals because they're tired of borrowing everything and owning nothing. Look at the popularity of steel books as another example. If you're not familiar, various studios are releasing films on Blu-rays and 4K discs, and they're packaging them in steel cases. And the cost for these steel books usually ranges from 30 to 50 bucks. The profit

margins are substantial. That's very expensive for one film, obviously. But here's the thing. spending on steelbooks has been growing dramatically over the past few years, even as sales of other forms of physical media have declined. Steelbooks routinely sell out within minutes of going online. Their entire online community is dedicated to hunting down the steelbooks. So it's not hard to see what's going on here. People are tired of a status quo where they don't own anything, where everything they license can be deleted from the internet at a moment's notice. And in response, people are, shelling out more money in order to lock down something tangible, something physical that they can hold in their hands, even if it's just a Blu-ray movie or a vinyl record. This is a signal, albeit a small one, that's easy to miss. Now, put simply, it's not possible for people to be happy without owning anything. The more we borrow everything we use in our lives, the more we careen towards the same fate as every other civilization that didn't respect the right of private property. And that fate ultimately is total collapse. That's what the WEF wants. It's what AOC wants.

And unless we recognize what's happening and reward the few businesses that still allow us to purchase actual products instead of licenses, we will give the WEF and AOC and every demented politician like her, exactly what they want. Once upon a time, there was a country. Not just a country, but a big one, an empire. And in that empire, there was an upper middle class family, where two boys were raised by their mother, loved books, Uncle Tom's cabin in the Bible.

Their father admired the country's leaders. They were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shit. the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother, read the same books, but decided to lead a movement. First they came for the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions. And again, no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities. And again, most people just ignored it. Change after all was something they could believe in until it was too late.

Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.