Pakistan's youth is in a stubborn rage — and that's dangerous

A year on the road, and a flipped answer

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Nabeel Qadeer back to TBT — a guest who had been on the show roughly a year earlier, then in the middle of building skill centres across Pakistan. Muzamil sets the framing carefully: he is not interested in another conversation about which skills to teach in the age of AI. He wants to use Nabeel’s year on the road — eighty-plus universities, dozens of cities, thousands of students — as a way to take the pulse of the country outside the Karachi-Lahore-Islamabad media bubble.

Nabeel is upfront that his answer has flipped. “You asked me this question in October 2022 and I said I am very hopeful and I’m very positive about Pakistan,” he tells Muzamil. “And I still want to say that. But the situation does not support so.” The economics, the politics, the social fabric — all of it, in his read, has produced a chaos that has scrambled the picture every Pakistani — old, young, man, woman — had built for themselves. “Sab kuch hil gaya hai,” he says. Everything has shifted.

The most concerning consequence, in Nabeel’s read, is not landing on the people you would expect. It is landing on the twenty-two-year-old.

”It is not despondence. It is a stubborn rage.”

Muzamil’s working hypothesis going in is that the country’s youth is hopeless — feeling that nothing they do will matter because the economics are stacked against them. Nabeel pushes back, and the distinction he draws is the sharpest argument of the first half of the conversation.

The previous generation’s negativity, he says, was the despondence of older people who had given up — people whose hair had greyed and who had concluded there was nothing left to try. “Negative toh woh log hote thay jinke baal safed hote thay.” Today’s youth is doing something different. They are not giving up. They are digging in. They are reacting. Patience for another person’s opinion has collapsed. Tolerance has thinned. And the energy that was supposed to be exploratory is now hardening into a kind of stubbornness.

He is explicit about why this matters: “Zinda youngster jo hota hai, that thing can go either way.” A young, angry generation is not inherently bad. But it is volatile. And when you combine it with what he sees in Pakistani households — a culture that has historically repressed the young rather than listening to them — the risk is that the energy comes out in an ugly direction. Muzamil draws the parallel to a teenager raised by surveillance rather than trust: the more often than not outcome is not a well-adjusted adult.

The advice that nobody wants to give out loud

The next stretch of the conversation produces the line that Nabeel himself admits he never expected to say on a platform like this. Muzamil asks a direct question: what should the twenty- or twenty-one-year-old in Pakistan today actually do? The Matric, the FSc, the O-levels and A-levels kid sitting through a BSc, watching the rupee collapse, watching the economics make less sense by the month — what is the advice?

“Pata hai ek combined answer kya hai?” Nabeel says. “Majority people with power and money in the country” — when you ask them privately — “kehte hain usko bahar chala jaye.” Tell him to leave. He stresses how strange this feels to say. He recounts asking a friend who runs a college and a university what to tell his own customers — the parents and students paying him fees. The answer that came back was the same. Send them abroad. They will waste themselves here.

This is not framed as defeat. It is framed as a calculation. Nabeel sets it against the Saudi Arabian transition he has been reading about — a country that, in four years, has moved meaningfully out of oil dependence, has begun manufacturing cars and phones, has put 1.5 trillion riyals behind fintech and emerging companies, and has stopped waiting for the world to validate it. The point he is making is not that Saudi Arabia is a model to copy. The point is that Pakistan is the country that has not yet decided which direction it is even facing. “Hum abhi tak yehi figure out nahin kar pa rahe ke qibla kaun sa hai.” Until that is resolved, the calculus for an individual twenty-year-old is simple: go where the system is functional.

Brain drain in reverse — and a job market that may flip

Nabeel takes the standard brain-drain conversation and inverts it. The 1980s version of brain drain — the Pakistanis who left for the United States and never came back — was a one-way street. He thinks the version now playing out will be different, and worse in the short term.

“Mujhe yeh lagta hai ke Pakistan ke andar shayad hum kehte hain naukriyan nahin hoti, ulat ulat ho jayega,” he says. The country will end up with jobs and no one willing to take them. The unskilled human resource problem will not solve itself, and the irrelevant curricula will accelerate the issue. He brings in a conversation he had just two months earlier, in Gujranwala, with four thousand students. He was teaching them content writing, graphic design, basics for Daraz storefronts — the conventional freelancing playbook. A foreign friend in the audience listened to the whole pitch, and on the drive home delivered a quiet warning: “One line of code will replace all of those 4,000 students.” He named OpenAI.

Nabeel says it took him forty-five minutes to digest. He had done the job he was paid to do that day. He had taught what he was meant to teach. But he was now selling a skill stack with an expiry date stamped on it, and the four thousand kids in front of him did not yet know.

The Philippines model, and why brain drain shouldn’t exist on paper

Muzamil pushes the conversation toward what should be the policy alternative. He cites the example he has been thinking about — the Philippines, where the third-largest nationality presence in many host countries is built on a government-managed quota of nurses, drivers, hospitality workers, and house staff, each remitting a defined sum back home each month. India did its own version in the 1990s — a forced opening of the economy under Manmohan Singh that sent Indians out into the world and brought capability, capital and a diaspora identity back.

Muzamil’s theoretical point is that brain drain, in today’s world, should not exist if the policy machine works. “Educating people should be fairly easy. Quickly educating people and upskilling them. Ek chhod ke ja rahe hain, agle ko educate karo, aage le jao.” Nabeel agrees, and adds the harder honesty underneath. The reason it does not work in Pakistan is not just policy. It is that the basic economics of staying are no longer rational for the capable person. “Jab main usko teen lakh tankhwah dunga to usko ghar to do lakh mushkil se pahunchega.” Why would anyone stay?

The deeper layer comes from Nabeel’s experience hiring. The organisation he is currently helping has sixty percent women — engineers in their twenties and early thirties. “The way they code better, the way they clock in their times, ins and outs, discipline better. I’m talking data here. I’m talking facts.” And then he ties it back to what is keeping that half of the economy out of the workforce — not just the safety question on the streets, but the dual standard at home, where a daughter is told to go to university but then return to make rotis. “Iss social aur economic collapse,” he calls it. Both Nabeel and Muzamil are firm on a related point: this mindset should not be packaged in the language of Islam. “Sharm ki baat hai jo karte hain. Islam kahin par aisi baatein nahin karta. Islam dono genders ko barabar rakhta hai.”

The boundary the Middle East quietly proves

Muzamil makes an observation that pulls together a thread running through the episode. The blue-collar Pakistani who lands in Dubai upgrades within minutes. The same labourer who, in Karachi or in his home village, seemed unskilled and ungovernable becomes courteous, disciplined and competent the moment he steps into a working system. “Give them a conducive environment and even the most uneducated will actually thrive.”

The implication is not flattering for Pakistan. The behaviours that Pakistanis routinely blame on Pakistanis are not, in fact, traits. They are responses to a system. The pressure cooker that Muzamil describes — where “everybody is going through so much they’re just throwing their garbage on the next person” — is what produces them. It is also what disappears the moment the same person is placed inside infrastructure that works.

Why the startup-and-VC story is the wrong story

The middle of the conversation is the most operationally specific stretch, and it is where Nabeel is most direct. He has been close to Pakistan’s startup ecosystem since the Plan 9 days. His critique is not that the ecosystem is small. It is that the model has been imported wholesale from Silicon Valley and does not actually map onto the country’s economics.

“Pakistan mein ek venture capitalist ko main poochhta hoon — kya aapne kabhi khud bees se pachees logon ki tankhwah nikali?” The question is whether the people writing the cheques have ever, themselves, met a payroll. He thinks the next generation of Pakistani investors will have to be operators — ex-entrepreneurs who built their own businesses, made some good and bad bets, and earned the right to mentor. Not finance professionals running a flip-the-next-chump game.

His specific objection to the VC playbook in the Pakistan context is the consumption-driven, total-addressable-market model that startups pitch into. Muzamil sharpens the point. In an economy with a real dollar crisis, building startups that depend on imported inputs and pitch decks built around future middle-class consumption is “backed by dollar” — which means the VC liability eventually walks back out of the country, while the local economy keeps the burn. The contrast he draws is with IT services. A billion-dollar Pakistani software services business puts something like nine hundred and fifty million of that revenue back into Pakistani middle-class households. A billion-dollar consumption-driven startup employs fifty people and exports the equity gain. “It makes no sense.”

Nabeel agrees. “Venture capital means liability,” he says. “Jab tak aap iss baat ko samjhenge nahin ke yeh woh paise hain jo aapne bahut multiply karke wapas dene hain.” Unit economics is a factor most VCs do not need to take seriously elsewhere in the world. In Pakistan, where unit economics and macro economics do not yet merge, ignoring it is fatal.

Three solutions, in order

When Muzamil asks the direct question — if not consumption startups, then what — Nabeel lays out the three sectors he keeps coming back to.

The first is IT services. Not product startups. Services. Sell the hours, build operational excellence, optimise for export earnings rather than for valuations. The model works in India and it can work here.

The second is agriculture. Nabeel is firm that the country has not yet cashed in on its single biggest natural advantage. “Hum basically ek agricultural economy hain.” Empower the farmer, fix the policy, layer in selective automation, and Pakistan becomes an export economy in agriculture. It is unglamorous. It is also the largest underused lever in the country.

The third is vocational export. Europe is ageing. Japan is ageing. The Middle East has structural demand for skilled blue-collar labour that cannot be automated. The Philippines model — disciplined, government-supported placement of trained workers — is the obvious template. “Har woh jagah aapko pata hai Spain, Portugal, this freestand economy — they are dying to have people who are skilled.”

The startup conversation, in his framing, should come after these three are working. And when it does come, it should be invested in by founders who have lived through operating cycles — not by professional fund managers running spreadsheets.

”We don’t have talent. We have passion.”

One of the sharpest reframes in the conversation comes from Muzamil, and Nabeel does not push back. The Pakistani talking point that the country is full of talent, he says, is largely false. “Pakistan mein capital hai, human capital hai. Us capital ko train karke talent mein convert kiya ja sakta hai.” What gets celebrated as talent is really passion plus untrained potential — a framing that is politically convenient because it lets the state and the universities off the hook for not having built the training and development layer that converts one into the other.

Nabeel extends the point to higher education. The Pakistani university system is producing graduates that industry cannot use. He has been a guest speaker at eighty-four universities. He has spent enough time in front of vice-chancellors to use the word “dinosaurs” without apologising for it. There is no honest short-term fix. He has tried the three-month vocational sprint himself, and the conversion rates are depressing. The real fix is structural — curriculum, teacher training, faculty selection, the social respect for the profession — and it is at least a decade-long project. The short-term workaround is for universities to formalise the export pathway: process the kid’s visa, onboard the parents, get him out to a second-grade job abroad rather than letting him rot in domestic underemployment.

Reflect, focus, execute — and a thermostat for the phone

Late in the conversation, Nabeel offers something closer to a personal manifesto. “You start with thinking. Reflection kehte hain isko, self reflection.” Reflection produces focus. Focus produces execution. Execution produces results. Repeat the triangle.

The problem, in his read, is that the current information environment has broken the reflection step. “Yeh aaj ka bachcha ek ungli ke flip par har cheez janna chahta hai. Aur janta kuch bhi nahin.” He pulls a self-coined line out: “The best thing to know is to know what not to know.” The mistake is consuming eighteen things on the phone in a day and acting on none of them. The correction is a thermostat — a deliberate filter on what is allowed to take attention. It is, he says, the upbringing question parents will have to grapple with, since you cannot keep a kid off the internet.

The generational handover

Muzamil closes the conversation with the most forward-looking question of the episode, and it is the one Nabeel says has given him a genuine flicker of hope. The question is structural rather than ideological. Over the next decade, the cohort currently aged fifty and above will cycle out of power — not just political power, but the quieter household and institutional power that actually drives the country’s culture. A more globally exposed, post-internet generation takes over. What does that change?

Nabeel’s answer is that the elite — meaning not just business elite, but the whole intertwined cluster of politicians, bureaucrats, judges and businessmen — has built a system around itself, and that system has now reached its expiry date. “Every system has an expiry. And somehow Pakistan, like it or not, has reached its vantage point.” He is direct about the implication for overseas Pakistanis. The question he used to ask them — why are you sitting in the US or Canada — he no longer asks. He is glad they are out. A reset is coming. They will be called back. “Some forces of nature will call them again.”

Muzamil reflects this back into his own three-year cycle. The argument he made to himself when he left Pakistan was that the country was in a bear market, and that fighting the waves in a bear market wastes the swimmer. Bear markets are when you build foundations. The overseas Pakistani whose heart says it is over but whose mind has not yet given up will, when the switch flips, return thirstier than they left. They will not be as complacent. They will work three times as hard.

Nabeel closes the episode with a clean summary of what he has been saying for ninety minutes. “Go out, learn, educate yourself, get exposed to. As I said do cheezein — big money is nothing. Big money ke saath big value addition bhi to aani hai na?” Productivity. Three things power the comeback: financial push, motivational push, and skill. Take all three out of the country. Bring all three back. “Aapka mulk uthega aur jab yeh thok mein hoga to mulk teeknay uthega.”

Muzamil ends on the same note he started with — a quiet acknowledgement that the environment has been hard, that the conversation has produced a small return of positivity, and a hope that the flip comes soon.