Pakistan's last two years are a story about a changing world order

Why the podcast stopped

Muzamil opens with an apology. He had been away for two weeks. The first week was Muharram, when internet service in Pakistan was also unreliable. The second he spent visiting family in the United States. Dil Ki Baat episodes would now resume on a regular schedule.

Then he explains a bigger pause. About five months earlier he had stopped the TBT podcast after season 4. Its last episode, the 400th, set out his reasons. Since then he has spent the time on research and soul searching.

The core problem, he says, was direction. The podcast had given him income from ads, respect and some fame. Its real value for him was learning from very smart and successful people, and his viewers learned by proxy. But he no longer knew what he was looking for. “The first question is, what is my question?” he says. “What am I trying to find?” Without that, he felt the conversations suffered, so he stopped.

Everyone blames someone else

Part of his research was about the root causes of Pakistan’s problems. On the surface, he says, people discuss politics and blame the rich or business owners. Each person believes he is doing the right thing and that someone else is ruining the country.

He gives a small example. Stopped by police for riding without a helmet, the first reaction is to point at all the others riding without one. In his view, this habit now runs from the ordinary citizen to the top businessman and the elite. He does not blame people for it. In a poor, survival-driven economy without a working social contract, self-reflection is hard. That is why he wanted to study comparable countries and how they evolved over the last 50 to 60 years.

A world order under challenge

His first interest area is familiar to regular viewers. In Muzamil’s view, Pakistan’s main economic answer is to raise exports, dollarise businesses and globalise work, including freelancing for clients worldwide.

The second came from studying Pakistan’s politics of the last two years. People get distracted by what one politician said or what happened in court or jail, he says. Step back and you see geopolitics behind much of it. The world order, meaning who is the superpower and whose system runs, is being challenged. New powers are rising. He compares it to a village where the old chaudhry’s authority is contested and one or several new ones are rising.

He stresses that the chaos is global. There are wars, economic collapses, rising inflation and angry, anxious people in many countries. He points to Bangladesh, held up for two years as the success story, where students had just protested against their government. In his account, its export figures had been overstated by around 10 billion dollars, and its government had shut down the media and imposed a curfew.

Even small decisions are linked to this, he argues: what business to start, what job to take, where to look for opportunity. “In the next three, four, five years, everything is about to change,” he says. The global power system, the financial system, how people invest and how they save are all in play.

Why chaos pushes people toward meaning

Muzamil is open about his own shift. Until about two years ago he held the worldview he grew up with, widened somewhat by the podcast. Over the last two to three years, that foundation broke. When something you believed for 30 years breaks, he says, you become cynical and question everything, and answers do not come easily.

He describes himself as someone who needs a framework built from data and research. In chaotic times the data keeps shifting. In those times, he says, people move closer to religion, because religious philosophy is evergreen and answers the larger questions about life’s purpose. As he has grown more spiritual, Islam, Islamic philosophy and Islamic history have become his third interest area.

He also thinks the era of “quit your job, build a startup, become a millionaire” is over. The next ten years, in his view, will be hard to navigate.

Season 5: three subjects

The good news is that TBT season 5 starts that Friday. A season runs to 100 episodes. He guarantees one guest a week, on Fridays, and hopes to reach two. This time he has set clear topics and questions.

The first subject is Pakistan’s economy. Muzamil wants to understand what is wrong with it and how Pakistanis can earn in dollars and integrate with the world. He estimates 12 to 13 million Pakistanis live abroad, and he wants to learn from them about how they left, what businesses they run and what openings exist where they live.

The second is geopolitics: what the United States, Russia and China are planning, where BRICS and the Western alliance are heading, and how Pakistan should position itself. He wants Pakistanis to look beyond their own well, because where to move or whom to trade with depends on it.

The third is Islamic philosophy. He wants to speak with Islamic scholars and academics who are not Pakistani, including researchers with PhDs in Islamic development economics, Islamic finance and Islamic history. In his view, Pakistani religious discourse has absorbed many cultural elements, often without scholars realising it. He has visited many Muslim countries where people express their faith openly without the conflicts he sees at home. He is careful to add that he is not saying Pakistani scholars are bad.

Two practical changes follow. Many conversations will be in English, because the guests will be American, Chinese, Iranian, Russian and others. He apologises to viewers who prefer Urdu, and asks those who can follow English to step out of their comfort zone. Language, he says, carries culture and knowledge with it. If a phrase is unclear, ask in the comments, search it or use ChatGPT.

Many conversations will also be recorded online. He is based in Dubai and cannot fly to every guest. Of the first eight to ten he has planned, one is an Oxford University professor and another is at the University of Sussex, both in the UK. He admits remote recording loses some emotion and sometimes sound or picture quality. He now thinks the value of the content matters more than sitting face to face.

Neither optimism nor despair

Muzamil wants viewers to understand why the old system worked as it did. Why the dollar dominates payments instead of the yen or the euro. Why America became the richest state. He rejects black-and-white answers on both sides. Foreign powers played their games, he says, and Pakistanis also made their own mistakes. The truth has a lot of grey.

Change is inevitable, he argues, and hard times carry opportunity for those who prepare. He gives the example of the 1929 downturn, when many industries collapsed and cheap entertainment helped turn Hollywood into a full industry.

He describes his own path. From 2020 to 2022 he was very optimistic. Then he turned pessimistic for a time. Now he calls himself cynical: slower to follow slogans and quicker to ask questions. He says he is not talking about domestic politics here, and that the world is much larger than that. Sentiment turned negative, and it will turn again.

He worries about young viewers, often 25 to 27, who might give up after two or three bad years. If the next few years will be hard, he suggests, study the situation, spend time with family and put full effort in when conditions improve. Economists he spoke to offered a silver lining. They told him Pakistan’s economy had been running like a Ponzi scheme, with money circling through plots and no real value. Moving to a value-driven economy, they said, means the old one has to break first. That transition is painful and chaotic, and Muzamil believes it is what Pakistan is living through now.

Islamic finance beyond interest

Muzamil also wants to explore where economics meets Islamic philosophy, especially the Islamic financial system. All three of his subjects meet here, he says, because the leading superpower carries its financial system around the world.

After two to three months studying Pakistani scholars, he found strong work in many areas but weak understanding of finance and economics. In his view, Islamic finance in Pakistan begins and ends with interest, and takes even interest narrowly. The original Islamic financial system was a philosophy of equality. It opposed hoarding and had zakat, several kinds of taxes and a concept of charity, all serving a clear purpose. He argues that even people who avoid mortgages and credit card interest live inside a financial system that is un-Islamic at its core, and that this helps explain global inequality.

“I am not coming here as an expert,” he says. He is exploring, and he asks critics to bring facts, references and books in place of insults.

No local politics this season

He ends with a firm rule. Local politics will not be covered in season 5. Of roughly 400 conversations in his career, fewer than 5% were with politicians. Those eight or nine episodes, he says, created most of the controversy and accusations, while hundreds of conversations on startups, business and IT drew smaller, loyal audiences.

Responding to controversy on YouTube helps no one, in his view. A real dispute belongs in court. He says he has always kept his guests away from controversy, which is why he does not make shorts or pull clips out of context. If viewers want his political opinions, he occasionally shares them on Twitter.

He closes by asking for topic suggestions on Pakistan’s economy, geopolitics and Islamic philosophy for the season ahead.