Name: Jack Corbett
Age: 25
Hometown: Granville, Ohio
Currently Lives: A two-bedroom apartment in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles that he shares with a roommate.
Claim to Fame: Mr. Corbett is an assistant producer of the NPR show “Planet Money,” who creates chaotic, studiously unpolished videos about economics for TikTok. Using pixelated graphics and low-fi editing, he produces skit-like primers on such arcane economic topics as Korean jeonse loans, how the NFT bubble can be explained by the greater fool theory, and time theft for low-wage workers.
“I try not to learn how to do things right,” said Mr. Corbett, who records his videos on a refurbished iPhone X. “For a while I used green screens as my drapes.”
Big Break: After studying film theory at Ohio State University, Mr. Corbett was hired in 2019 as an intern on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series, where he helped produce segments with Taylor Swift, Coldplay and others.
He asked to help with “Planet Money” and created a video explaining how the stock market has built-in circuit breakers using found images of peaceful waterfalls and horses. It was uploaded in 2020 and has been viewed more than 300,000 times. After commenters praised its educational value and offbeat humor, the higher-ups at NPR encouraged Mr. Corbett to keep posting.
Latest Project: When Starbucks workers in Buffalo unionized last December, Mr. Corbett created a 90-second video on how to organize a union in four easy steps. Organized labor was important to his great-grandparents, who worked in steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, and coal mines in West Virginia.
“I know unionizing is a real challenge, but the directions to unionize are so much easier than anything I’ve ever had to do for the D.M.V.,” he said. “Sometimes these processes or concepts turn out to be a lot less complicated than they seem.”
Next Thing: Mr. Corbett is working on a music video for a hyperpop song by Madge, an artist and producer in Los Angeles. The video, which will be released this spring, is intended to be disorienting, as if someone had dropped the camera by accident. Music videos are “the last non-cringe way to make experimental video stuff,” he said.
A Romantic: Mr. Corbett listens to a lot of Romantic-era classical music, which sometimes plays in the background of his “Planet Money” videos. He loves the moodiness of Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin and the “famous cutie pie” Franz Liszt. “Their nocturnes are so sad, and occasionally their stuff gets a little spooky,” he said. “All of these characteristics are things I see in myself.”
