One year of TBT: Muzamil on hope, slow growth, and the fear of going bitter

A one-year reflection, with the chairs swapped

The episode opens with Muzamil marking a quiet milestone. One hundred and forty-five episodes, almost ninety-four thousand subscribers, against a first-year target of fifty thousand. He notes it almost in passing — “That’s the one at the top of my head. Not more granular” — before pivoting to the actual frame for the conversation. This is not a victory lap. It is a reflection episode, with Humna Raza, founder of the planner brand Inspire Me, running the reflection exercise from her Positivity Planner on Muzamil himself.

Humna sets the rules early. The Positivity Planner’s first section is designed to cut through the noise — the opinions, the algorithms, the constant outside chatter — and force the user to sit with themselves. “We don’t get like one moment to sit with ourselves and think about ourselves,” she says. She is going to use that same set of questions on Muzamil, and she asks listeners to grab a notebook and answer alongside him. The episode, she insists, is not about her. It is about Muzamil and TBT.

Why TBT has turned down every sponsor

Before the reflection begins, Humna pushes Muzamil on the structural choice that defines TBT’s first year: it does not take sponsors. He confirms the number. Ten to fifteen offers in twelve months, all declined. The reason is not principle dressed up as strategy. It is sequencing. “I wanted that at least our own style, our own brand, becomes strong enough that even if we do — and hopefully, inshallah, we will in the future — when we bring in a brand, they know what our setup is. And they basically work around our style rather than us having to lose the authenticity.”

Humna recognises the pattern from her own work. “Even when we both started working on Instagram, it was always to build our own identity strong enough first before we took any sponsored work, so that you have a bigger say in how you want to create. Because if you don’t have a strong enough identity yourself” — the brand will dictate, and the audience will feel it. Muzamil is blunt about how often this collides with deal flow. “Almost more than half of the deals we don’t do, because we don’t agree with the way they want to do stuff.”

Where Muzamil was when he pressed record

Humna’s first reflection question is simple. Where were you in life when you decided to start this? Muzamil’s answer is the longest of the episode, and the most useful.

He had spent twenty-twenty volunteering with Tania Aidrus on the Digital Pakistan programme, running a network of roughly 250 influencers to push verified Covid information out of the Prime Minister’s office and counter fake news. It worked. It also primed him to take the next step, which was joining the government — a three-month stint he describes as the lowest point of his year. “It was a very toxic place, and at that point my self-esteem and self-confidence had completely shattered. I just thought, maybe I just need to get myself into a shell and not do anything at all.”

He credits Humna and the team with pushing him out of that shell, and singles out Shariyaaz Bhatt for restoring enough of his on-camera confidence to actually press record. Humna’s defence of the push is specific. “You were just such a conversationalist. You have excellent communication skills. I have seen you make people who cannot talk at all really talk in life — really say things they wouldn’t have said otherwise.” The point she makes next is one creators rarely hear out loud: when your work is on camera, a hit anywhere in your life shows up as a hit on camera, and getting back to the studio is harder than it looks from the outside.

The conversation that broke his stereotypes

Humna asks the question the audience always wants asked. Of one hundred and forty-five guests, who is the favourite? Muzamil edits the question on the fly. Not favourite guest — favourite conversation. The answer surprises Humna.

“Literally I had goosebumps throughout that conversation. That was the Kero Ki Dunya, Azaz Ahmad one.” He explains why. “That was the one that I truly realised the potential of the human mind. He broke a lot of stereotypes for me personally.” It is the same episode he returns to later when Humna pushes back on the idea that Pakistanis cannot afford hobbies. Azaz Ahmad, he points out, is studying insects out of pure curiosity, with no monetisation plan. Muzamil’s bet, on air, is that the money will follow anyway, because the depth of knowledge will be impossible to replicate.

He extends the frame to himself. The training he is doing in the studio — geopolitics, international relations, data, behaviour — is mind training. “You play sports, you train. I’m training my mind sitting here, listening.” This is the closest he comes in the episode to articulating TBT’s selfish utility. The audience gets the conversation. He gets the apprenticeship.

Slow and steady, and the article-entrepreneurship trap

Humna names a tension that runs under most of the episode. Both of them are slow-and-steady operators in a market that rewards leaps. Muzamil’s framing of the alternative is sharp. “There’s this sort of article-entrepreneurship mentality — you make an idea, and six months later it’s like, a million-dollar seed fund came in, somebody invested, your net worth is five hundred million dollars.” The number was never the point. “What mattered was the impact. And I think impact cannot be generated in” — he stops, corrects himself — “it can be. The people who are doing it are doing it very well. I’m not doubting them at all. But for me, certain things take time to build that brand, to build that space where people understand: okay, this is a space for intellectual discourse, and there is not going to be any drama.”

Humna picks up the thread from her own business. People constantly tell her to add this feature, launch that product, take the bigger cheque. She knows the advice is technically right. “It will be at the cost of a vision, or at the cost of the brand. It’s about what you want to compromise on.” Some founders are fine compromising on brand. She is not. Neither is Muzamil. He extends the principle to investor offers he has turned down for Pakistan Now. The vision gets compromised first, and the vision is the only thing he is not willing to spend.

His working belief, stated plainly: “Good karma attracts good karma. As long as the value is there for the consumer, the day the value runs out, that’s the day there’s a problem. But as long as there is value, we’ll reap the reward.”

A completely imbalanced life, slowly coming back

Halfway through the episode, Humna moves into the personal reflection. How balanced is your life right now? Muzamil does not soften the answer. “Completely imbalanced. Completely all over the place.” Within a single window he has had a baby, launched Pakistan Now with a team of fifteen to twenty new hires, and renovated the family house for his parents returning after two years. The pressure is not the hours. It is that twenty households now depend on his ship steering correctly. “It’s a lot of tension — making sure commercial delivery keeps happening.”

What makes him happy at this point, he says, is time with his son Rafael and conversations with strangers. What makes him unhappy is the absence of sleep — he needs eight hours and does not negotiate on it — and watching people fail to live up to their potential. He is candid that this is a transitional season. “A lot of the ideas of what makes one happy are now beginning to change. A lot of those things are being achieved, and you realise, okay, that’s not where happiness is. So you begin to realign.”

When Humna asks what traits he admires, the list is short and grown-up: humility, patience, security, honesty, the willingness to change your mind. He spends extra time on the last one. “There’s nothing written in stone. The world is so complicated. Whatever we’re hearing is just somebody’s agendas at the end of the day. Only the Lord knows.”

What it means to live with a purpose

Humna’s next question lands the deepest answer of the episode. What does living with a purpose mean to you?

Muzamil declares the bias upfront. His answer comes from the religious side, not the social side. “When you were sent to this world, you were sent to this world for a purpose. If you locked yourself in a room and ate infinite food and had a comfortable life and you’re done — I don’t think that’s doing justice to the intellect you were granted.” His example is unexpected. A PhD mathematician working on equations that will eventually help humanity reach the stars is, in his frame, performing a religious duty, not a scientific one.

He extends the same standard downward, to the ordinary. The teacher shaping a generation. The banker stabilising the economy. The road that does not crumble. “Am I doing it to the best of my ability, or am I doing it just enough so that I can sell it and make enough money? Am I using my intellect to help humanity reach its potential, or not?” Living with purpose, in his definition, is the ongoing audit of what you give the world versus what you take from it.

The Coca-Cola moment, and the philosophy of hope

Asked what he wants to give the world, Muzamil answers in one word: hope. The rest of the section is the origin story for why.

He traces it back to 2010, when he first set up a Facebook page and wrote in the description: “Where art meets LOLs, and LOLs meet hope, and hope meets a better world for all of us.” Growing up in Pakistan, he had assumed success only lived abroad, because he had watched his brothers grow faster after leaving. The script in his head was: graduate, get out. Then in 2012, he made a viral video — “22 Random Acts of Kindness” — that Coca-Cola picked up. He found himself flying, not bussing, to Lahore, staying at the PC, his face on the DHA billboard past Cavalry, his face on half-page newspaper ads. “Anything can happen got embedded in my head. Literally anything can happen. It was a monumental moment.”

He then admits, with some hesitation, to a more personal philosophy he played with in seventh and eighth grade. A version of the simulation argument, applied to optimism. The only consciousness he can confirm is his own. Everyone else is, for all he can prove, an NPC serving a purpose in his story — and in a parallel world, he is the NPC in yours. The point is not narcissism. The point is agency. “I’m not saying the world revolves around me. But in a sense that I can make anything happen around me.”

This is what he means by hope. Not optimism. Control, paired with patience. “If you fail and you still have hope — okay, maybe not this, but something else, because hope is always there — you find another way to achieve what you want.”

Invest in yourself, then send the bill

Humna takes the hope thread and connects it to the practical problem she keeps watching people lose to. Most people will not invest in themselves. They will keep doing whatever already pays their bills. Muzamil sharpens her point into a rule. “Raw talent and commercial talent are very different. Raw talent shows potential. But that needs to be polished before it can be commercialised.”

He has watched this play out in Pakistan repeatedly. Someone gets praised for raw talent on day one. By day two they are demanding a lakh of rupees, and complaining that Pakistan does not lift its talent. His counter is direct: if you do not have paid commercial work yet, do unpaid work, accumulate the reps, polish the skill, and the demand-supply curve will reset around you. He describes how he did it himself by setting a bare-minimum rate. The half of his prospects expecting free work disappeared overnight. The ones who could pay started paying. He focused on quality, the quality outran the price, and demand grew. “If you are going to ask for more and deliver less, nobody will come for you in the long run. Under-commit and over-deliver. That is when your demand grows.”

Humna pushes the corollary — Pakistanis do not pursue hobbies. Muzamil agrees, and refuses the easy excuse. Even the people who have the privilege, the money, the space, and the time are not pursuing curiosity for its own sake. “That is why our discourse is around politics, around social issues, around very mass-market concepts. Because on any other level, we as humans are not connecting.”

The fear of going bitter

The last reflection question is the one that produces the cleanest line of the conversation. What are your fears?

Humna goes first. She is afraid of turning into a bitter, hard, envious person. Muzamil pauses, looks for a different answer to justify the airtime, and then concedes she has named his. “I’m a dreamer. And the fear will be that I will be grown up, and every dream of mine — which is very public — of a future Pakistan, of a future world, is not there. And in my head there is a future Muzamil who is very disappointed.” Humna names it back at him. The fear of losing hope. “Yes. That I stop dreaming. That I become bitter. That I end up handing my children a worse world than the one I was given.”

It is the load-bearing fear. Everything else in the episode — the refusal to take sponsors that compromise the show, the slow-growth doctrine, the religious framing of purpose, the under-commit-over-deliver rule, the favourite conversation being the one that expanded what he thought a mind was capable of — all of it points back to the same root. Hope is the asset he is protecting. Bitterness is the only loss he genuinely fears.

The year ahead: balance, structure, and getting out of the studio

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil sets goals out loud. Personally: the gym, a real routine, sleep he respects. Professionally: another year of TBT without missed weeks, plus at least one tour that takes the show outside the four walls of the studio so guests who cannot come to him can be reached on their ground. Pakistan Now, currently in proof-of-concept, needs to move into standardisation over the next three months. He also wants to McDonaldise the ad-hoc parts of his operation — turn one-off effort into repeatable structure — because digital media defaults to chaos and chaos does not scale.

On relationships, he is most specific about his son. He has been reading the science on early-childhood trust. If you say you are coming back, you come back. Small gestures — saying goodbye properly when you leave the house — compound into the security a child carries for life. With Humna, he names the obvious post-baby disconnect of the first six months and the ritual they have rebuilt around it: an hour-long conversation every night, deconstructing the previous twenty-four hours, before sleep. “We can’t go to sleep without it.”

On creativity, he is honest. He has been operational for too long, and he wants to be creative again. The plan is to put more of it back into his personal Instagram, and to keep pushing the kind of bet he is most proud of from Pakistan Now: sending a twenty-one and twenty-two-year-old to Tajikistan to cover one of the most powerful conferences of the year, on the grounds that Gen Z eyes will see what mainstream journalists have stopped seeing.

By the end of the conversation, an hour and twenty-two minutes have passed. Muzamil closes the way he opened — quietly, without theatre. The first year is done. The next one is about balance.