Nick Fountain

Not scrolls.

Calls.

I bring this up because lately at Planet Money, it has been so satisfying to call up old sources.

It's for a show we do every year around this time, where we recognize that while we write nice endings to our stories, the music doesn't just fade up on the people we talk to or the storylines we're covering.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Nick Fountain.

Today, we check in on an engineer and patent attorney who made a safer saw.

On the Planet Money game, we have updates.

And on a diamond that may or may not have had a second life.

It's a show we named after the radio great Paul Harvey who had a radio show called The Rest of the Story.

It's our yearly rest of the story show where we check in on people and stories we've reported on throughout the years.

Our first update comes from Planet Money's consumer disservice correspondent, Alexei Horitskazy.

Hello.

Nico de la Fontaine.

Alexi, last fall, you reported a story about how the subscription business model has basically taken over the economy.

And you have an update about that story.

That's right.

So the episode explained why we're all living in this sort of subscription-based hellscape at the moment where, you know, a lot of us are signed up for way more services than we can keep track of.

And the story started back in the late 90s when this company called Salesforce started offering their software as a subscription service.

Then we explained how Silicon Valley venture capitalists helped export that model to everything from razors and meal kits to streaming services or, you know, new features on the tractor you just bought.