Pakistan cheers get-rich-quick schemes and doubts real builders

A strange relationship with money

Muzamil opens with a contradiction he sees everywhere. Pakistanis want to make money, as people and as a nation. But when they see a rich person, a negative feeling arrives. He must be privileged, or corrupt, or he cut a corner. Offer the same people a scheme that doubles their money, and they lean in.

He has seen it on his own podcast. Over four years he has spoken with about 400 to 450 guests, from academics and doctors to artists and founders. The business guests who built real, productive companies, people like Abdul Razak Dawood and Musaddiq Zulqarnain, draw little interest. Muzamil describes Zulqarnain’s company as dollar-earning, tax-paying and run by the book, with thousands of employees. Yet comments call such people rich men chasing luxury. Meanwhile, he says, one guest who ran what looked to him like a Ponzi-style scheme, nicely wrapped, was praised as a visionary. The same audience cheers Tata, Mittal and Elon Musk.

Where the distrust comes from

His first explanation is historical. In his reading, the nationalisation of the Bhutto era planted the idea in the national DNA that the rich man is the root of all harm. The 22 families were demonised. Muzamil believes that was wrong. Pakistan was industrialising fast in the 1960s and 1970s, he argues, well before India opened its economy in 1991. Had those industries stayed with their owners, Pakistan might have its own Tata or Mittal today.

His second explanation is about the present. Pakistan’s economy, he says, is rent-seeking and unproductive, and it rewards the wrong people. Young people learn from what they see. If the system rewards shortcuts, they learn shortcuts.

Money is a representation of value

So he goes back to basics. “Money in itself does not hold value,” he says. “It is a representation of value.” The real value is food, fuel, travel, electricity. Value is created first, by sowing a seed or doing work, and money only represents it.

Without that idea, he argues, debates go wrong. When he says real estate works like a Ponzi scheme, people hear “never touch property.” His point is that a productive system sits underneath it. When he said in an earlier episode that Bitcoin may be the most Islamic form of currency, some took it as a signal to buy meme coins. His long partnership with Sarmaya rests on a simple view of the stock market: put money into companies doing productive work, help them raise capital, and grow with them over time. The market, he says, often sells the opposite: get in, double it in days, rotate.

Why your car costs more than in India

Muzamil uses cars to show how the economy actually works. Pakistan’s cars depend on imports, and imports depend on dollars. If the country’s dollars allow only, say, 200,000 to 250,000 cars a year, the price will settle wherever buyers are willing to pay. A carmaker has no reason to cut it. “The problem is not Indus Motor,” he says. “It is a macro problem, a productivity problem.” Until the country earns more dollars, cars will stay expensive.

The same logic explains why he disagrees with people who say Pakistanis should ignore politics. The political economy, in his view, is a small pie that shrinks each year. Inside it, the only game is to take someone else’s share. Stocks, property and crypto then become zero-sum: one person wins, ten lose, and the winner posts his car online. “You play a zero-sum game,” he says, “and I am talking about growing the pie.”

Show and substance

He recalls a Binance event in Lahore around 2021 or 2022, where crypto influencers stepped out of Land Cruisers. In his view, many of them had sold land, caught a pumped market, and bought a car. He calls that luck. A stock, he says, has a business underneath it. Meme coins, in his reading, are pump and dump. When a friend says put two to two and a half lakh rupees into a “file” and collect 40,000 a month, the right question is how.

His podcast taught him a pattern. Abdul Razak Dawood, from one of Pakistan’s old industrial families, arrived at a small studio in a DHA plaza in a Toyota Corolla, talked for an hour and a half and stayed to chat. You would not have guessed his wealth. Other guests arrived with six cars, a team of 15, or guards posted outside every house on the street. One recording felt so wrong that Muzamil stopped it after 15 to 20 minutes. His conclusion: “The more drama a person makes, the more insecure he is.” People with real value, he says, have no need to show it.

He also notes a double standard. English-speaking, suited businessmen who pay large taxes are called thieves in the comments, while people who live on unearned money are greeted with respect. A rich person’s duties, in his view, are to earn it honestly, pay tax and zakat, and harm no one. After that, what they spend it on is their own business.

Why charging for knowledge draws anger

Muzamil sees the same confusion in how people treat teachers. Launch a course after years of free content, and the comments say you only did it for money. He admits he waited two years to launch his own course for fear of that reaction. A guest who does SEO work for Alibaba told him the same thing, as did others who say they cannot find trained people to hire.

He also rejects the lazy critique that a politician wants power or a YouTuber wants views. Of course they do. “That’s the business,” he says. People work jobs for money. The real debate should be about whether the work is ethical and productive.

Morals are not stupidity

He gives two examples from his own life. In Dubai, developers offered him one and a half to two lakh dirhams per flat sold to Pakistanis. It was legal and regulated. He said no, because he would have had to promise returns of 20 to 40% while he believed the market was in a bubble and due for a correction. He also refuses to cut short clips from his podcast, because short clips travel when they are outrageous, and that means embarrassing a guest who came at his invitation.

A student in his course, whom he trusts, asked why he does not just make the clips and take the reward. That question stayed with him. “We live in a time where it is somehow stupid to not make money for a moral reason,” he says. He admits he sometimes wonders if the market is right about him. Then he says he is satisfied with what he has.

Scams rise in a downturn

Muzamil closes with a warning about cycles. When times are bad, scams and Ponzi schemes rise. People in fear jump at offers that are too good to be true. His test is simple: a good business returns 10 to 15% a year, so ask how anyone can promise far more. Families with old money, he notes, talk about 8 to 15% growth. Newcomers talk about 200% and 500%.

His own preferences follow from that. He would hold Bitcoin for ten years rather than chase meme coins. He says only about 1.5 lakh Pakistanis invest in the stock market and believes that number should be one and a half to two crore, but only after people learn how markets work. He sees Islamic finance, in its original form, as productivity-driven industrial capitalism, and believes the gambling ban points the same way. He expects the current cycle to reverse, and his advice to people tired of holding out is plain: keep your head down, focus on long-term compounding, and do not join the schemes.