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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How did the social security number become the most important identifier in the United States? And is that even a good idea?
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Two guys from different ends of the political spectrum agree that the economy is rigged. And they think they know who's responsible.
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We ponder the price of chicken, safe haven currencies, and the cash value of coupons. Why? Because you asked.
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How do you reinvent something as simple as the wooden shipping pallet?
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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.
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Phosphate is a crucial element, for farming, and for life. And there aren't too many places to get it. What if it runs out?
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Douglas Bruce had a bold vision for Colorado.
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What does a country with no debt look like? To find out, we went back to the United States in 1835.
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Five reporters go to the New York Produce Show and Conference, each on a mission.
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We've got a satellite. We got a rocket. We're heading to the launch pad.