Faisal Aftab: the 1971 system is over, and Pakistan is mispriced

A returning guest, and a set of predictions that came true

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Faisal Aftab back to Thought Behind Things for what is now his third appearance. The framing is deliberate. The last conversation, recorded around 2022, was built around a set of macro predictions about Pakistan and the global economy. Most of those calls, Muzamil notes, have played out roughly on time — give or take some movement in the calendar. That is the reason the conversation is happening again. The first time, Faisal was operating mostly in the shadows of the local market. This time, he is a judge on a prime-time television show watched by millions, and the country is debating whether what it is seeing on screen reflects an economy that is actually working.

“It’s always a pleasure,” Faisal says, settling into the conversation. Muzamil pulls him straight into the question the audience came for: how was the Shark Tank experience, really?

Why Shark Tank Pakistan actually worked

Faisal admits he had reservations going in. He had two specific worries. The first was reputational: institutional investors operate inside a quiet decorum, and reality television is the opposite of quiet. The second was production quality. Pakistan Idol had failed not on concept but on execution, and a “half-cooked localisation” of a global format can damage the people inside it. What changed his mind was meeting Usman Malik, the local executive producer and Sony licensee, and then seeing Sony’s global producer physically on set running quality control.

Muzamil’s curiosity is sharper. Startups and business are not mass-market topics in Pakistan. Most of the contestants spoke in English-accented Urdu rather than the polished broadcast register the country’s TV is usually rebuilt around. And yet the show landed. Why?

Faisal gives three reasons. The first is Shark Tank India. He had not realised how heavily Pakistani audiences were already following the Indian edition, or that younger founders and businesspeople were openly saying they had learned how to read a P and L from watching it. The second is the deflationary squeeze on the traditional economy. “Every person has become an entrepreneur of some kind over the last five years,” he says, “even if you have a job — freelancing, selling T-shirts, restaurants, makeup, whatever it is.” The third reason is the one he flags for later in the conversation: AI is coming for jobs, the younger audience knows it, and entrepreneurship has stopped being an aspiration and become a survival mechanism.

“The timing could not have been better,” he says.

The process behind the pitches — and the FBR question

Muzamil presses for the truth behind the entertainment. Reality TV has to be edited for drama. How much of what airs as a thirty-minute pitch is real, and how many of the announced investments actually close?

Faisal unpacks it carefully. The producers are blind to who is pitching until the founders walk on set, which means the selection has been done by the show’s own team and not by the sharks. Many more pitches are shot than aired. Question-and-answer sessions that get cut to eight or nine minutes on television actually ran for two hours in the room. After the show, due diligence begins in the same shape it would in any venture deal — and the numbers, often, do not add up. He references the global producer’s own data: roughly forty percent of pitches that announce on Shark Tank globally make it through to a closed deal, and the producer told him to “adjust that downward for South Asia, maybe twenty-five percent.” Even at twenty-five, Faisal argues, the value of the show is not the deals. It is the education. The audience that matters is not the conglomerate in waiting; it is the eight-year-old who watches an episode and learns what top line and bottom line mean.

Muzamil raises the LinkedIn rumour that the FBR has started chasing Shark Tank founders for tax. Faisal is sceptical the post was real and thinks the media picked up a “gimmick,” but he refuses to use the question to attack the regulator. His view is the opposite of the prevailing entrepreneur grievance. “If the FBR is coming in, that’s probably because you’ve kept your business out of the books,” he says. The longer he spends evaluating Pakistani companies, the more convinced he is that the “two sets of books” culture is what makes growth-stage investing in Pakistan almost impossible. Venture capital, he argues, is the one entry point where an investor can set the ethos correctly from day one — and that is part of why he chose early-stage in the first place.

The 1971 monetary system ended in 2021

The conversation pivots to the macro frame Faisal has been pulling toward all episode. Muzamil’s setup is precise: Pakistan has no real funnel from saver to investor, the stock market is not absorbing IPOs the way it should, and venture capital cannot finance the country alone. So the question is whether ordinary Pakistanis are starting to ask how they participate.

Faisal’s answer reframes the question. To understand why Pakistanis feel what they feel, he says, you have to look at the monetary system underneath everything. “The system that began in 1971,” he says, “ended in 2021.” The reference is to the end of the Bretton Woods gold standard — when the dollar was decoupled from gold — and the subsequent fifty years of debt-backed monetary expansion. That cycle, in his reading, is now in its hyper-debasement final phase. The wars at the empire’s doorstep — Ukraine on Russia’s border rather than Iraq or Afghanistan — are downstream of the systemic change, not separate from it. The US inflation that consumers feel is not a temporary distortion. It is the long-term credit cycle ending.

“Everybody is feeling that things have changed,” he says, “but not everybody has been given the memo.”

The implication for Pakistan is twofold. Disposable income is being eaten by food and energy costs — the two categories the CPI conveniently does not count properly. And consumer demand collapses behind it. What looks like a national mood problem is actually a monetary problem in disguise.

Pakistan as a documentation play, not a poverty story

Muzamil pushes Faisal on the comparison he keeps reaching for. India is being pumped up by Western media as the next growth story, but its growth has been wildly unequal. China grew much more equitably. Where does Pakistan sit?

Faisal disagrees with the framing that Pakistan is as poor as the macros suggest. He points to the restaurant traffic — “Jhangir-bari se lekar har restaurant packed tha” — and to the tax numbers. Out of roughly seven million registered taxpayers, only about 1.5 million actually pay anything. Out of two hundred and fifty million people, the real money is sitting in a parallel undocumented economy. He calls Pakistan a trillion-dollar economy of which only a third is documented, and refuses to let the official measures define the potential. “Just because something doesn’t touch the banking system,” he says, “we’ve decided we won’t count that revenue. Colgate and McDonald’s are not complaining.”

This is where his case for the next decade actually lives. India became the world’s fifth-largest economy not because of new productivity alone but because it digitised an undocumented base. Pakistan, in his view, is now where India was around 2016. Smartphone adoption, digital payments, and the regulatory push from the OECD, FATF, the World Bank, and the IMF are all converging on the same outcome: an economy that gets documented whether its politicians want it to or not. “Every digital footprint is a form of documentation,” he says. He believes the country’s digital payment adoption is, behind the scenes, “one of the fastest in the world” — something he says he is privy to from his proximity to the regulator. The public mood underestimates how prepared Pakistan actually is for the next system.

The AI disruption hits the white-collar middle class first

Faisal then walks Muzamil through the second force he sees converging with the monetary reset: AI. He sketches a Moore’s-law timeline that he wants the audience to take seriously. At the start of 2024, ChatGPT-class models had an effective IQ of around 155. By the end of 2025, by his reading of the doubling curve, that crosses 310. By 2030, above a thousand. Einstein, for reference, was 160.

The conclusion he draws from that curve is unfashionable. The first casualties of AI in Pakistan are not the labourers everyone worries about. They are the aspirational white-collar middle class. “Paralegals and junior lawyers may not exist,” he says. Accounting firms running 1980s-era software cannot survive against agents that can do the same work in real time. OPD-level general practice, the first stop in most medical journeys, is exactly the layer most easily automated. The people whose parents spent their life savings sending them to LUMS for an MNC job are, in his framing, structurally the most exposed.

The flip he draws is sharp. Industrial-age education, designed to break a child down into a compartmentalised cog, is no longer the right preparation. “I don’t think most of this education framework is applicable,” he says. “Some of the B-grade and C-grade students in school turn out to be the better entrepreneurs, because they are actually more creative and able to think outside the box.” His prescription is not policy reform. It is to make data cheap, give people tablets and smartphones, and let voice-to-voice translation collapse the language barrier that has kept rural Pakistan and rural Latin America from collaborating on shared problems.

The hedge: gold, bitcoin, and skills the next cycle cannot take

The longest single stretch of Faisal’s argument is about how an individual actually protects themselves through the transition. He gives Muzamil the math directly. In 1971, the rupee was four to the dollar. Today it is around 275. That is one form of debasement. But run the same math against bitcoin and gold. Bitcoin began at fractions of a penny; it now takes one hundred thousand dollars to buy one. Gold has moved from a few hundred dollars an ounce to roughly twenty-five hundred. The dollar itself, he says, has been “debasing at a rate of about ten percent a year.”

The conclusion is uncompromising. “You cannot survive unless you hedge against this debasement,” he says, “and obviously nobody is going to tell you that, because information is not symmetric.” The educated and affluent figure it out first, hedge first, and the last person to realise becomes the biggest loser. The honest job question is no longer “is this a good salary,” but “is this salary keeping up with debasement.” If it is not, the trajectory has to change quickly.

The second half of the hedge is skill. He keeps returning to the same point: never in human history has the entire knowledge repository sat inside a device people already own. “If you have the dedication, you can master any subject within a month,” he says. The people who scroll TikTok are not using the device. The people who use it to learn are quietly buying the only asset whose price the next debasement cycle cannot touch.

Systems, not actors — and why he stopped blaming the government

Muzamil sets up a key Faisal frame: study systems, not individual political actors. Faisal agrees and pushes it further. He does not care who is in power, in Pakistan or in the United States. “Whether you want to watch the circus of Kamala or Trump, that’s your choice,” he says. “Central banks and money are where the power is, and it’s always the people inside the system long term.” Faces channel public anger; systems determine outcomes.

That position lets him sidestep the activist trap. Asked whether the dollar shortage is a government problem, he reframes it as a system problem inherited across multiple governments, with rent-seeking baked into subsidised electricity, three-percent industrial loans, and the property and car-price spirals those distortions produced. “I’m not an activist,” he says. “I can’t come and fix it. My job is to identify the talent in Pakistan.” His own bet: across three or four funds, produce four or five unicorns and four or five founders who exit two- to three-hundred-million-dollar companies. Those people, in his theory of change, eventually become Pakistan’s Musks and Bezoses — the actors with enough sway to make policy bend.

He extends the systems argument to history. Pakistan, he reminds Muzamil, is seventy-five years old. India and China have civilisational continuity Pakistan does not. The country is, in real terms, still building its identity, and impatience with that process is misplaced. Founders, he says, think in decades. Jeff Bezos thinks in centuries. A country that wants to break out of its three-and-a-half-year debasement cycles has to be able to think the same way.

Asset prices, productivity, and the unravelling ahead

Muzamil closes the macro stretch with the question he is best placed to ask, sitting in Dubai. A modest townhouse in Dubai now rents for over half a million dirhams a year. A well-paid banker earns eighty or ninety thousand a month. The math does not work. Stock markets are at all-time highs. Pakistan’s own asset prices have, in pockets, gone flat or run ahead. What is real?

Faisal’s answer is consistent with everything he has said. Asset prices are not pumped because productivity has caught up. They are pumped because the unit of measure is itself collapsing. The right reference point is not whether the rupee is weak against the dollar but whether the dollar is weak against gold and bitcoin — and it is. Pakistan, in his framing, has the rare advantage that its asset prices have not yet fully participated in the debasement, which is part of why he thinks the country is mispriced.

He shares a personal turning point. In 2008, watching Citigroup and Goldman Sachs drop to almost a dollar a share during the global financial crisis, he realised the demigods of finance he had been taught about at college were a system, not an arithmetic. “I studied finance, I studied economics, and nobody ever taught me that gold was a system,” he says. “It’s been very conveniently omitted.” That was the moment he started studying the monetary order from underneath, and it is where his current framework comes from.

The closing read: who survives the next three-and-a-half-year cycle

By the end of the conversation, Faisal and Muzamil are working a single question from multiple angles. Who actually makes it through the next decade in Pakistan?

Faisal’s answer cuts against the country’s usual sympathies. The people at the bottom of the layer have already adjusted — they have been forced to. The people most exposed are not the poor but the complacent: the gen-four and gen-five inheritors who relaxed inside a system that no longer exists, the salaried middle class running on their parents’ playbook, the LUMS graduates who walked into an MNC job assuming the path would hold. In the last cycle, he points out, it was the nawabs who lost the most when the system rotated underneath them. This cycle will not be different in shape, only in faces.

The under-thirteens — Gen Alpha — are the ones he is most optimistic about. Their wiring is digital from birth; they will invent in the new paradigm rather than retool into it. Everyone older has to actively change their brain waves. He is not gentle about it. “Nobody ever got rich doing a job,” he says, “unless you’re corrupt.” The implication is not that everyone should quit. It is that everyone with a job needs to ask whether the salary clears the debasement bar, and if it does not, to rebuild the trajectory before the next three-and-a-half-year cycle does it for them.

Muzamil closes by drawing the through-line. The actors do not change the system. The system changes the actors. Pakistan, on Faisal’s read, is about to be changed — by AI, by digital documentation, by a monetary reset that began in 2021 and is still unfolding. The opportunity, for the small share of the audience willing to see it, is exactly the same size as the disruption. The people who hedge, learn, and build for the next paradigm will, he insists, be fine. The people running the old playbook will not.

The conversation ends where it began: with a returning guest making another set of calls on the record, and a host who has watched enough of them come true to take this set seriously.