Robert Smith

speaker

2,515 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Aug

Robert Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

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Planet Money · The continent nobody owns & everyone benefits from (Summer School) · 26 Aug 2026 podcast

And where you have workers, that means that business and economics come into play.

Let's play a little bit of Ira's tour of McMurdo Station and the sound of life there in 1979, and we'll give you an update afterwards.

That was NPR's Ira Flato in 1979.

As much as I would love to play all of his reports from the South Pole, we are going to stay at McMurdo Station for a few more minutes.

Forty-five years later, the place still has a frontier industrial town feel, but they have much stricter environmental regulations about spilling fuel and recycling waste.

I also hear the dormitories are much nicer than huts at this point, and they are heated.

Remember that Ira mentioned a store at McMurdo, which got our attention here at Planet Money.

We had a number of listeners write in recommending people we could talk to about this, and found one that actually worked at the Navy's store down there for a few years in the 1980s.

Perhaps the sole businesswoman in the entire place.

So I didn't know this, but there's a whole part of the Navy that runs general stores on all the big ships around the world, and they operated one out of McMurdo station.

I mean, everyone needs stuff.

Liz ran the Antarctic store, which means she ordered the merchandise, which could take six months to arrive.

She organized the tiny, tiny space, she set prices.

There were a couple weird things about running a store in such a remote place.

One was that your customers already have everything they need for free.

If you're a scientist there, the food is included, the lodging is included.

included, the equipment and clothing are included.

So what would people want to even buy in a store like this?

Liz discovered when she got there that Antarctic shopping isn't a necessity.

It's something you do when you are bored.

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