Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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To get your septic tank emptied, there were two options: hire someone to shovel it onto the street — or pay a high price to the cartel of "toilet suckers." -
Team Indicator takes on the World Cup. We drink, we cheer, we watch the game and, of course, we bring our economic indicators. -
The World Trade Organization: Can't live with it, hard to crush your trade opponents without it. -
The origin story for those duty free shops in airports go back to a port town in Ireland trying to cash in on the early days of air travel. Since then, the bargains have become much harder to believe in.
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We meet the man who invented duty free shopping and find out if these tax free stores are really saving us any money. -
Today on the show: the economics of drought, and why the rational thing to do in California right now is use more water. -
A tariff is not a targeted strike. China has not placed a tariff on U.S. soybeans, but the mere suggestion that it might, has already begun shifting the global flows of the crop across four continents, creating arbitrary winners and losers well beyond U.S. soy producers.
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Today on the show: how an economic fix helped made the deadliest job in America safer, and why people are angry about it. -
In the final part of the three-part series, the Planet Money satellite gets placed on top of a rocket and the countdown begins. There is a lot that can go wrong when going to space, and it's a nail-biting ride for everyone on launch day.
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Once you get a satellite, you need to find a large tube filled with explosive fuel to take your satellite to space. Luckily, there is fierce competition among rocket makers to give you a lift. In the second of three-part series, Planet Money travels from California to New Zealand to see which rocket with blast their satellite to the stars.
