The Rest of the Story, 2025
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Hey, Erica Barris here. We are almost at the end of 2025, and there is no way to sugarcoat it. It has been a tough year for NPR and for local stations. But with your support, NPR will keep reporting the news. And here at Planet Money, we'll keep doing what we do best, explaining the economy in the most entertaining and accessible ways we possibly can. If you're already an NPR Plus supporter... Thank you so much. If not, please join the community of public radio supporters right now at plus.npr.org. Signing up unlocks a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from across NPR's podcasts. Visit plus.npr.org today. Thanks. This is Planet Money from NPR.
We have so many ways to communicate these days. Email, text, WhatsApp, Snap. Recently, some people have been communicating in the Spotify comments of our podcast episodes or working theories that it's teens trying to get around their phone's parental controls. Thanks for juicing the algorithm, kids, I guess. But lately, and I know this makes me sound like a grandpa, I have just been picking up the phone and calling people. On the phone, there's no subtext. There's no being left on read. There's no little ellipsis while you wait for someone to respond. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's instantaneous. Unlike voice memos, which are an assault on human dignity. You want to tell me something, but don't want to talk to me about it?
Type it out, bro. Anyways, the phone. Try it. It's my 2026 resolution. More phone. 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 Planet Money.
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. And a big part of the story, if I recall correctly, was about the downsides of this explosion in subscriptions. You actually called the show the subscription trap. Because people are not just getting oversubscribed out of forgetfulness, a lot of companies have also been doing more nefarious things, like making it difficult to cancel on purpose. But it seemed like this might all be about to change. That's right. When we aired the show last fall, the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, had just passed this new regulation called the Click to Cancel Rule.
The rule was supposed to require companies to make it just as easy to leave a service as it was to sign up. And also, it would have put big fines on companies that did not do that. Then two big things happened. First, President Trump announced a new FTC chair named Andrew Ferguson, who actually voted against passing the click-to-cancel rule. He said it was ideologically motivated and rushed through.
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