Ramtin Arablui
speaker
1,100 appearances
12 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 27 Aug
Ramtin Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 6.
Appearances
This is Siddharth
Several years ago, he became interested in a metal called cobalt, a key ingredient in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.
It's what keeps that little battery icon green as we scroll through social media or turn on GPS or swipe right or left on a dating app.
That interest landed him in the Democratic Republic of Congo because...
And most of that cobalt comes from a specific region of Congo called Katanga.
At the urging of his colleagues, Siddharth went there in 2018.
The moral clock.
Cobalt brings up a troubling contradiction that is embedded in the fabric of our culture, our way of life.
The disturbing reality is that we in the developed world are collectively tolerating the suffering and brutality exacted on thousands of people in the Congo so that we can make technological progress.
And as Siddharth said, this is something that goes back over 100 years.
It's a cycle that keeps reemerging like a ghost haunting the world.
In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to explore the history of Congo's tragic role in the formation and development of the world economy and meet the people who fought to end the cycle.
The late 1890s at the Belgian port of Antwerp.
A young man in his mid-20s employed by a British shipping company shows up for work.
Every day, his job was to... Stand
These materials were supposed to be a part of trade.
So naturally, he expected that items like manufactured European goods would be put on the ships heading back south towards Africa.
But instead, he saw those
The 1800s were a time of great transition.
Industrialization, railroads, automobiles, factories popping up everywhere.
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