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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The Planet Money team discovered an old superhero languishing in the public domain, a superhero that seems perfect for a radio network. Could NPR rescue him?
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To figure out why evergreens are so costly this year, the Planet Money team decided to get into the tree business. NPR shares what they've found.
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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." -
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.
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NPR's Planet Money team explores why Irish bars look so similar all over the world and what happens when you take an authentic national experience and turn it into an export.
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President Trump has made American manufacturing a central concern. Can a complicated approach called a border adjustment tax make it happen? Planet Money looks at how it's supposed to work.
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NPR's Planet Money team follows the oil they bought on the final part of its journey — into someone's gas tank.
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After buying 100 barrels of crude oil and delivering it to a pipeline, NPR's Planet Money team goes to a refinery to see it turned into gasoline.
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One of the perks of being in the European Union is easy travel. Flights are cheap and there are no border checks between most of the countries.
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What happens when a country decides to sell its water then hits a drought? Our Planet Money team takes us to a country in Africa that might have given away its most valuable resource.
