The entry-level job is gone. Unpaid work is the way in.

A DM from Turkey and why the show exists

Muzamil opens by reading a message he received after Ghalib Hassam’s first appearance on the podcast. The sender, a Master’s student in Neuroscience in Turkey who had transitioned from psychology, wrote that Ghalib’s advice on cold outreach had, within roughly a month, led to two job offers — one of them tied to G20 policy work. “Brother, I want to thank you for your advice on cold outreach. It did something for me that I never thought I could work around,” the DM read.

Muzamil frames this as the whole point of the show. “Karma points bade zaroori hote hain. Karma points mil jaayein na to paisa banda phir multiplier ke saath kamata hai.” Ghalib adds his own framing: “Jo sikhaya gaya hai mujhe, jo maine sikha hai, you have to distribute it.”

Why entry-level jobs have already been erased

Ghalib is blunt about the state of the market. AI has cut the ladder at both ends. At the senior level, one VP of Marketing is now expected to run SEO, content, and design at once, with AI tools filling in for the team that used to exist beneath them. “Tanakh aapko achhi khaasi milegi, there is no doubt. Lekin kaam aap paanch chhe bandon ka karoge.”

At the entry level, the jobs are simply gone. Ghalib cites his own reading that roughly 5% of global execution-based work was replaced by AI in the initial ChatGPT and Claude wave, and that the number has climbed since. “Entry level ke jo roles the, woh to usi waqt khatam ho gaye. Kyunki AI will say ke inko paise na do, I will do it for you $5 mein mahine mein.”

The result is what Muzamil calls a strange transitional squeeze: seniors crushed under load, juniors with no doorway in, and companies running the numbers on lakhs of dollars in annual savings versus the cost of training the next generation. Ghalib doesn’t think it’s sustainable long term. He does think it is very real now.

Pakistan’s freelancing base is the layer being erased

Muzamil pushes the conversation into what this means for Pakistan specifically. India, he argues, built its outsourcing base on lower-value BPO and back-office work. Pakistan came in late, and its version of that base was freelancing — graphic design, WordPress, small-ticket execution. That is precisely the layer AI is replacing first. “Freelancing ke numbers are down globally. Freelancing platforms — unke stocks gir rahe hain.”

The uncomfortable implication is that the skill set most Pakistanis were told to invest in over the last decade is the one AI is fastest at replacing.

Become visible, or stay in the queue

Asked what a fresh graduate should actually do, Ghalib lays out three moves in order. First, become visible. “Aajkal ka zamaana unfortunately aisa aa gaya hai ke agar aap logon ke saamne nahi hoge to aap peeche rahoge. There is no other way around it.” Second, become fluent with the AI tools defining the market, whether your ego wants you to or not. Third, build an international network, because geography has stopped being a barrier and the local job market has been broken for years.

His warning to anyone still relying on the LinkedIn Apply Now button is direct: thousands of others are clicking the exact same button with equally empty profiles. It is not a strategy. It is a queue.

Muzamil’s ego-check: pitching to barber shops in Atlanta

Roughly halfway through, Muzamil uses himself as the case study. He moved to the US a year ago to be closer to his ageing father, leaving behind an upper-middle-class life in Pakistan — help staff, driver, cook, gardener — and is now paying $3,000 in rent with savings that run to December.

Instead of sending CVs, he taught himself AI over two months, then walked into ten local Atlanta businesses to pitch AI automation services in person. Nine rejected him, several harshly. “Dus mein se nau ne mujhe itna zaleel kiya, Ghalib bhai, itna zaleel kiya.”

He pivots. He walks back to his Mexican barber, Nano, and offers to automate his business processes for free in exchange for the right to document the work. Nano agrees. Muzamil now has one client, a portfolio piece, and a template he can walk into the remaining ~250 barber shops on his list. His point is not that he has figured it out — it is that the block is ego. “Yeh jo bahar banate hain na, yeh paise nahi hain. Yeh masla woh nahi. Aapko rejection se dar lagta hai.”

Senior professionals: expertise won’t carry culture fit

Muzamil turns to a group that gets talked about less — mid-career professionals in Pakistan who are, on paper, employed and safe, but who feel the ground shifting.

Ghalib splits the answer. If you plan to stay in Pakistan, ten to fifteen years of local experience still counts. If you’re targeting an international company remotely, expertise is only half of it. Culture fit is the other half, and it is the half a CV cannot carry. “Aapka 10-15 saal ka experience hai, you are a senior, aur aap chaahte ho ke international company ke saath main kaam karun — you can back up your expertise. I have no doubt. Lekin sawaal poochho khud se: kya aap culturally ek company ko khud ko dikha sakoge?”

Founders hiring remotely, he argues, have never met you. They cannot read you from a CV or a single interview. They are deciding whether you’ll fit onto a five-person Zoom team. Visibility is what closes that gap — and on that dimension, Ghalib points out, the playing field between a Pakistani senior and a Pakistani junior is now level.

The LinkedIn mechanics: comments, connections, DMs

This is where the conversation gets tactical. Ghalib walks through the actual mechanics of getting on an international founder’s radar. Comments create exposure — the founder gets a notification and now knows you exist. Connection requests trigger a profile check — the founder visits your profile and decides in seconds whether you belong in their network. If your profile is empty, they ignore you. If it shows industry expertise and cultural context, they accept.

But the real signal is the DM. Ghalib is emphatic on this: “Aapki DMs conversation woh start ho jaaye to you will be surprised ke aahista aahista jo Pakistani audience jinke saath aapki DMs nahi ho rahe, they phase out.” The LinkedIn feed reshuffles around who you actually speak to one-on-one.

Muzamil sharpens this into a rule he returns to for the rest of the episode: vanity metrics are a race to the bottom. A thousand likes from Pakistan won’t get you hired in Atlanta. Three DM conversations with the right founders might.

What an influencer actually is

Later, Muzamil asks what an influencer really is. Ghalib is unusually pointed. Most of Pakistan’s current creator landscape, he says, doesn’t influence anything — it performs a tight-circle lifestyle that viewers can watch but not enter. “They make you feel like you can look but you cannot touch.”

He references a recent Pakistani podcast clip about genitals — crude, engagement-farming — and asks what a young creator watching that is supposed to learn about the craft. If you’re going to hold an audience’s attention, he argues, there is a moral responsibility attached: teach them something that improves their life.

For a first-time creator, his advice is the opposite of the current playbook. Don’t ask ChatGPT to write your posts — “this is slop.” Start from your lived experience: why you chose your degree, why you switched fields, why you’re still in the industry. Relatability isn’t a topic. It’s the specific shape of your story matching the specific shape of someone else’s.

Courses are dying; live projects are the only upskilling left

Muzamil raises the education question. Pakistan releases roughly 800,000 new graduates a year into a market that cannot absorb them, and the standard response — do a course, get certified — is itself under pressure.

Ghalib is sceptical of most paid courses. By the time someone finishes a month-long course, the underlying tool has shipped ten new versions. Muzamil extends the point: Andrew Ng has already put $100 million into AI-driven personalised learning at Coursera, and the static-course industry has, in his estimate, six to eight months of relevance left. “You can’t teach 100 people the same thing. Kisi ki math kharaab hai, kisi ko communication sahi nahi aati.”

Their shared conclusion is that the fastest form of upskilling in 2026 is not a course — it’s attaching yourself to a live company, even unpaid, and being forced to learn on real problems. “The moment you start karing actual practical experience,” Ghalib says, “you can no longer rely on a course.”

The community problem

Ghalib brings up the thread almost reluctantly — he doesn’t have the community he needs. He lives in Nowshera, an hour from Peshawar, and when he goes out with cousins in the evening the conversation is Imran Khan, the army, Modi. Not markets, not tools, not careers. “Mujhe kabhi kabhi bahut suffocated feel hota hai.”

Muzamil recognises the pattern from his own move. In Pakistan, evenings were politics. In Atlanta, evenings are “yaar tumne dekha vo naya robotics ka startup, LLM mein kya chal raha hai.” The environment forces the upgrade. Without it, you have to manufacture it — through podcasts, DMs, and the deliberate work of finding growth-minded people who will actually respond. Ghalib notes that most established Pakistani creators he tries to collaborate with don’t reply, because education isn’t a priority in that circle. Entertainment is.

The closing demo

Before wrapping, Muzamil shares his screen. He has just asked Claude to do deep research on the top 50 active startups in the greater Atlanta area — between five and 100 employees, ideally recently funded — with the explicit goal of identifying founders he can start interacting with on LinkedIn. Claude returns 54 companies.

The framework Ghalib spent an hour explaining — visibility, targeted networking, one-to-one conversations, unpaid entry — is being executed live, on air, by the host. Ghalib’s parting line lands the mood: “In 54 mein ek to khuda ka banda hoga na, jo aapke saath kaam karega ya aapko job dega.”

Muzamil closes with a broader warning about Pakistan’s currency — the real exchange rate is drifting well above the official one, and another devaluation wave is coming. The local market, he argues, is not a place to build a career on. The global one is. And the conversation has just spent ninety minutes explaining how to reach it.