Nabeel Durrani: my mother told me, if you fail, don't come back

A 17-year-old in Peshawar with seven bands and no plan

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Nabeel Durrani as a PhD in artificial intelligence working out of Australia on autonomous drones — what Muzamil calls “the future weaponry that is AI driven, the tech that is going to be used in the future wars.” The technical résumé is impressive, but Muzamil makes it clear from the first minute that this conversation is about the story, not the title.

Nabeel was born in Peshawar to a middle-class family. His mother worked at an NGO, his father was an electrical engineer who also taught and had spent time in the United States. He went through Garrison Army Public School and passed his matric with around 55%. By his own admission he was not a top student. He cleared the entry test for Fazaia Degree College, but the demanded fee — eighteen thousand rupees — was, in his words, “a lot of money for us at that time.” His mother told him to take the cheaper option: government college, three thousand rupees for the year. He went.

Two things happened over the next two years that, in retrospect, set the rest of the story up. The first was that he learned what he calls “duniya-daari” and “street smartness” — how to navigate a system without strictness or structure. The second was that he discovered he was unusually good at English. He took an IELTS course and scored seven bands at the age of seventeen. He started teaching it to younger students for pocket money and, in parallel, fought his mother to take a night job at the only call centre in Peshawar — eleven at night to six in the morning, seven thousand rupees a month, selling calling cards and mortgages to clients in the US and UK.

The turning point in this stretch is told as one of the sharpest moments in the conversation. A senior at a tutoring institute had liked Nabeel enough to offer him a 12,000-rupee-a-month job as an IELTS instructor. He went back two days later to sign the contract. While he sat waiting, his own former IELTS tutor walked in, went straight into the boss’s office, and a few minutes later the peon was called: “Sir, ye jo Nabeel baitha hua hai bhai, uska — bachcha hai, usse ghar bhejo.” Send the kid home. Nabeel describes this plainly: “That broke my heart literally.”

It is the moment, in his own telling, when he decided Pakistan would never see his actual skills. “Yahan mera kuch nahi banta,” he told his mother. “Yahan mujhe sab age se aur physique se dekh kar judge karenge, not looking at my skills.”

How Australia happened by accident

Nabeel had wanted to go to the United States. His aunt lived in Texas. But it was 2007 and US student visas to Pakistan had effectively shut down. The family pivoted to the UK — “jaise har desi Pakistani ka khwab hota hai, UK jaane ka.” They paid two lakh rupees to a consultant in Saddar to enrol Nabeel at the London College of Commerce. A week later, the consultant had absconded with the money.

A family friend lent them more money on interest and told them not to give up. They walked into the next consultant’s office on the same street — the one Nabeel assumed would also defraud them — intending to ask about the UK. Within an hour the consultant had sold them Australia. “Mujhe Australia ka ABC bhi nahi pata tha,” Nabeel admits. “Main cricket nahi dekhta tha. Ek ghante mein usne hame Australia bech diya.”

Nabeel describes the pitch with the dry clarity of someone who has had fifteen years to look back at it. The consultant said the UK had become “gaaonwan gaya” — too crowded with Pakistanis, no PR, no jobs. Australia, by contrast, was heaven: PR in two years, jobs everywhere, a welcoming culture. “Seventy percent of it was a lie,” Nabeel says now. But it worked on his mother, and it worked on a 17-year-old looking at an Australian map for the first time, picking Queensland because he liked the sound of the word.

The family took out a forty-lakh-rupee bank loan as show money for the visa. Within a month — not the six months the consultant had warned them about — the visa came through. With one week’s notice, Nabeel was on a plane.

The envelope and the sentence

At Islamabad airport his mother handed him a sealed envelope and looked at him, in his words, “dead in my eyes.” Inside the envelope was AUD 22,500 — the family’s entire savings, equivalent at that time to a Pakistan rupee figure that he says was “literally kul sarmaaya.” The first semester’s fees were paid. He had no accommodation, no job, no contacts.

“Bachhe,” she told him. “Kamiyaab nahi huye to wapas nahi aana.”

If you do not succeed, do not come back.

This is the line the episode title takes its weight from. Nabeel narrates the moment without melodrama and notes that he opened the envelope only after the plane took off. “Mera rang peela ho gaya na,” he says — I went pale. The dollar at the time was 45 rupees. He had three months before his next ten thousand dollars in tuition was due.

Garage living, catalogues, and a gas station counter

The first weeks in Brisbane are described in granular, unsentimental detail. He landed at the airport, called a number a stranger at the airport had given him, and ended up in a Queensland house where five Pashtuns from Peshawar were living in a converted garage — five mattresses on the floor, a kitchen, and one bathroom. They were all educated cab drivers. They fed him, gave him a mattress for sixty dollars a week, taught him to cook, and welcomed him in Pashto he couldn’t speak well.

His first paid work, on day two, was catalogue delivery — chunk mail. He rented a car from one of the Pashtun cabbies, drove a ten-kilometre radius from eleven at night to four in the morning, then went to university in the day. The pay was fifty dollars a week. When his bag tore, he switched to a stolen-feeling shopping trolley with steel wheels that announced him on every street.

The job that paid the bills was at a fuel station owned by a woman named Mercedes who owned fifteen of them. She had spotted his CV stapled to a form he had filled in casually a month earlier. The call came mid-shower on a Friday before Jummah. The wage was twenty-two dollars an hour for an eight-hour shift, three shifts a week — what he calls “a lot of money.” The catch was the location. The last bus passed forty-five minutes before he could lock up at night. He would walk four and a half kilometres in the dark to a train station, and when he missed the last train, “80% of my salary went to the taxi to get home.”

A third job — as a waiter and kitchen hand at a restaurant called the Hog’s Breath, where the owners renamed him “Bill” because that’s what came out when they tried to say his name — filled the gaps. He worked all three jobs while taking a full bachelor’s degree in business analysis at university.

The single most important detail in this whole section comes quietly: Mercedes eventually lent him four thousand dollars, interest-free, when he was short on his next semester’s fees and at risk of being deported. He paid her back by getting her, her family, and her friends to refuel at the station and pocketing the cash for her. “Allah farishte bhejta hai,” Muzamil observes. The angels Allah sent.

The university nobody attends

When Muzamil presses Nabeel on how he managed three jobs and a degree at the same time, Nabeel pushes back on a Pakistani assumption that Western universities are necessarily harder. “Pakistan ko main yahan credit doonga,” he says. “Yahan ki jo education hai, itna aapke burden daalte hain, jab aap overseas jaate hain to aapke liye aasan ho jaata hai.”

The structure of an Australian degree, he explains, is built for people who work. Lectures are optional and recorded — Nabeel says he attended maybe three in three years. Tutorials are where attendance and marks count, and tutorials are scheduled across multiple time slots a week, so the student picks what fits. He only had university two days a week, often one. He could borrow a laptop from the library for free for the first year because he could not afford one of his own.

He got HDs — high distinctions, above 85% — in his first semester. Word spread. Students from Gulf countries, Dubai and Saudi, who got four thousand dollars a month from their governments as a study stipend, started paying Nabeel to do their assignments. By the time he graduated he had seven or eight regular customers and charged up to two thousand dollars per assignment. He was a bachelor’s student writing MBA assignments. He notes, with some pride, that one MBA assignment he wrote scored 60% — a pass.

He took an extra six months to finish the degree because dropping a subject saved fee money. He graduated in 2013.

The IT helpdesk job that was meant to be six weeks

Towards the end of the bachelor’s, Nabeel got the call that changed the shape of his career. He had been applying to anything that sounded white-collar on seek.com.au, padding his CV with experiences he had never actually had. He had spent years quietly practising an Aussie accent by repeating every “good day mate” he heard, twice, under his breath. When a recruiter named Julie called him during a gym workout about a council IT helpdesk job, he answered in that accent.

The contract was for six weeks. He stayed a year and a half. He kept the fuel-station job the whole time — eight to five at the helpdesk, six to nine asleep, eleven at night the night shift began. “We work like robots overseas,” he says. “This is my routine for the next four years.”

Mercedes eventually fired him to push him into IT work full-time. “She is my mentor,” Nabeel says. By 2013, after a year and a half at the council, he had been approached by a law firm as their IT manager. He oversold himself, learned quickly on the job, and started managing projects for fifty lawyers and a hundred staff. “Lawyers are very hard people to work with,” he says. “Bahut kuch seekha.” He was earning around AUD 100,000 a year across his jobs — six to eight thousand a month — and had been sending at least a lakh rupees home every month since 2009.

He also paid back the original seven lakhs in loans — fees, ticket, interest on the show money — within seven months of landing.

The PhD nobody told him to do

When Muzamil asks how he moved from “low value fix-the-printer work” to senior research, Nabeel’s answer is structural rather than ambitious. He noticed, working alongside Australian colleagues, that white-collar Australians “never stop learning.” His CIO, a “big shot,” did not even have a master’s. Nabeel decided he would. He did an MBA part-time, then a PhD part-time, alongside full-time IT work. He calls the PhD his “hobby.”

The research area was autonomous robotics in drones, with a focus on military applications. He completed the thesis during COVID, after being made redundant from a company that “couldn’t afford” him, and graduated in 2021. The redundancy, in his framing, was the gift of time. By the end of the conversation it is clear that the PhD is also what unlocked the work he does today — two days a week for the Australian Defence Force on AI algorithms for drones and robots, three days a week as a senior project manager on large IT delivery programs. The last contract before the recording was a four-year hospital build in Townsville where he managed twenty-plus staff across business analysis, programming, and software-hardware integration for everything from internal systems to MRI machines.

Why contracts pay eleven times more than jobs

This is the section of the conversation where Nabeel turns from storyteller to advisor, and it deserves attention from any Pakistani technologist considering overseas work. His core point: the “desi mentality” of chasing permanent jobs in Australia is leaving money on the table.

“Pakistanis abroad don’t get this,” he says. “Where the risk is in contracting, that is also where the money is.” A project manager with ten years of experience in a permanent role, he argues, is being paid a fraction of what the same role would pay on a daily contract rate. He puts an average project manager’s day rate at AUD 1,200. At program level, two thousand dollars a day. Public holidays unpaid, no leave entitlement, no notice period — and still, by his maths, “at least six times better off.”

When Muzamil presses him for a number, Nabeel says that compared to a full-time job, his current contracted income is “at least eleven times more.”

The two prerequisites he names are not technical. “Aapka attitude achha hona chahiye, aur aapki ek image market mein achhi honi chahiye.” A sharp LinkedIn profile, recommendations, the right contacts. Recruiters, he says, will not read past your first page. The Muslim name and absent photo on a CV play a role. The LinkedIn photo and network are where the decision gets made.

The redundancy at the bottom of the food chain

The conversation pivots, in its second hour, to AI — Nabeel’s actual field. His thesis is sharper than the diplomatic “AI is our friend” opening. The people most exposed to displacement, he argues, are precisely the Pakistanis who currently send the most remittances home.

“Pakistan se jo majority remittances aati hain,” he says, “wo tamam taxi drivers hain, cleaners hain, kitchen hands hain, waiters hain, chefs hain — those are exactly the jobs that machines can do most easily and replace most easily.” He cites the autonomous cleaning robots he has personally seen on the floor at Brisbane Airport, with a single human supervisor following behind them who, he says, is not actually required. He notes Dubai’s autonomous taxi rollout. He thinks the Gulf labourer remittance stream — the foundation of Pakistan’s current-account balance for forty years — has roughly a decade.

He goes further. Mediocre programmers, in his view, will not have a job in five years. Microsoft’s Power Apps and similar low-code systems already let a non-technical user type “build me a ride-hailing app with these features” in plain English and compile a functional app in minutes. “Aap jo programmer pe ratte hain, uske oopar aap rely kar rahe hain — aap usse dinosaur ka kahte hain, woh aapko koi aur turtle banakar de deta hai. Phir back and forth.” That intermediation, he believes, disappears.

The roles that will survive, by his reading, are at the top of the technical curve and in cyber security, which he expects to grow substantially as drones, robots, and crypto infrastructure expand the attack surface.

Universal basic income and who actually pays for it

Muzamil’s counter-argument runs for several minutes and is one of the longer Muzamil monologues in the conversation. He outlines Elon Musk’s universal-basic-income thesis: that the automation premium accruing to businesses can be taxed and redistributed, so that people displaced by AI have a floor while a smaller, voluntary working population competes for the remaining roles.

Nabeel’s pushback is not ideological — it is fiscal and behavioural. Australia, he points out, has roughly AUD 800 billion of national debt and a population of twenty-five million. “There has to be a ceiling somewhere.” Welfare states will pay enough to survive, not enough to live well, and even that floor will come under pressure as populations age and migration flows shift. And on the politics, he is blunt: “Rich people don’t pay taxes. I pay tax from my salary. I pay zero tax from my business. Companies will never want to pay more tax. They fund the campaigns of the governments that get elected. Everyone knows it.”

The conclusion he draws is personal rather than political. “It is our own responsibility — kis field mein le kar jaate hain, kis tarah hum apni roti kamayenge. Unki zimmedari nahi hai.” The government will do what governments have always done: shrug. The worker who refused to retrain will starve.

Migration windows close in five years

When Muzamil flips to the upside — the ageing populations of Europe, Japan, China, and the corresponding demand for Pakistani human capital — Nabeel agrees the demand exists but warns that the supply criteria are tightening fast. Western countries, he argues, are no longer interested in admitting software engineers who arrive on PR and immediately drive Ubers. They count, with research teams, exactly how many cyber security analysts and engineers they actually need. When the imported PR holders don’t fill those quotas, the rules get stricter the next round.

His advice to Pakistanis planning to migrate: “Mark my words, in the next five years all these Western countries will start changing their immigration.” Global warming, overpopulation, and the over-supply of soon-to-be-redundant skills will compress the window. Compete on the right skills now — cyber security, advanced AI, specialised technical roles — or do not compete at all.

Robots, the Dajjal, and a conversation Muzamil rarely has

Towards the end of the two-hour mark, Muzamil — by his own admission unusually for the show — asks Nabeel a religious question. Does Nabeel see any echo of the Dajjal, the antichrist of Islamic and Christian eschatology, in the central, all-seeing intelligence that AI is being marketed as?

Nabeel is careful. “Obviously, main scholar nahi hoon. But I listen to a lot of scholars, and the combined thought of the majority is: the time is near.” He does not believe AI is the Dajjal itself — the texts describe a physical being — but he believes it is “definitely one of the biggest tool sets” of the Dajjal. He uses the smartphone as a parallel: invited into every home for its positive uses, now something most users cannot eliminate from their lives even when they want to. Virtual worlds — Earth 2.0, virtual property, virtual luxury — are the next layer of the same dynamic. “Aap jo cheez duniya mein afford nahi kar paate, wo aap virtually afford kar paate hain.” A mind satisfied virtually keeps a body docile physically. He sees that, more than any single autonomous weapon, as the actual risk.

On autonomous weapons specifically, he describes a thought experiment that has clearly come out of his own research: an environment-protection robot deployed near airports or bushfires, armed, programmed to eliminate threats. A human deliberately starts a bushfire. The robot’s mission statement is environment protection. The robot has no feeling, no family, no precaution. “That robot will shoot that human and it has no repercussions.” This, more than Hollywood’s hub-and-spoke superintelligence, is where he expects the first real harm.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes the conversation with the question he asks all guests: what does Pakistan look like in twenty-seven years, with the data you have, no ifs and buts?

Nabeel’s forecast is unsparing. People will be more materialistic, more performatively wealthy and more hollow inside — he reaches for the Overcoat story to make the point. Jobs will be scarcer. Fake degrees will multiply. Education will become a credential arms race: master’s, then doctorate, then multiple PhDs, none of which will mean the holder is educated. The middle class, in his prediction, will not exist. There will be the elite who enjoy Pakistan, and everyone else who is trying to leave it — within a window that, by his estimate, is closing.

By the end of the conversation it is clear why Muzamil spent so much of the runway on Nabeel’s early years. The economic forecast and the AI thesis only make sense once you understand the kind of person delivering them — a 17-year-old who walked through an airport gate with a sealed envelope, an instruction not to come back, and twenty-two and a half thousand dollars between him and the rest of his life.