The man who made podcasting mainstream in Pakistan

Episode 151 and the milestone that prompted the invitation

The episode opens with Muzamil sharing a set of numbers that mark where Thought Behind Things stands at its 151st episode: 1,800 GB of recordings, over 180 recorded conversations, 1,200 hours of editing man-hours, 95 million impressions, 5 million unique listeners, 650,000 watch-time hours, and more than 25 percent of listeners from outside Pakistan. The channel had also just crossed 100,000 subscribers. For a milestone of that size, Muzamil wanted a guest who represented what the show itself was trying to do — and the most-requested name on the list was Junaid Akram.

Muzamil introduces him as the person who “essentially started the concept of podcasts in Pakistan and at the very least made it mainstream enough that it becomes a commercial product — and not just a commercial product, masses جیسکو consume کر سکیں.” Junaid deflects the credit with characteristic self-awareness: “Did I really start it? I claim करके بھی نہ شرمار ہوتا — what’s there is.” But he accepts the framing that nobody mainstreamed it the way he did, and acknowledges that mainstreaming mattered precisely because it created the demand that made room for everyone who followed.

A Karachi childhood, a collapsed family fortune, and the Truman Show theory

Junaid was born in 1983 and grew up in Karachi, attending Nasra School — a private institution founded before Partition. The family had once been substantial: his grandfather was the sole supplier of coal to Pakistan Railway, bringing money home in sacks. That world collapsed through a combination of Sui gas commercialisation eating into the coal business and a second family his grandfather had kept hidden, which surfaced only on his deathbed and took most of what remained.

His father, raised in abundance, never really learned to work. He went into depression after the betrayal, and the household of six children had to manage on very little. What Junaid describes from that period is not bitterness but a peculiar, almost delusional confidence: “I always had this — for some reason despite lack of so many resources, I used to think I have a very important role in this world.” He believed, as a child, that everyone around him was an actor following a script and that his life was being watched. When Jim Carrey’s Truman Show came out years later, he took it as confirmation that the idea had leaked from his own thoughts into the world.

Muzamil connects this to what he calls the “perspective theory” — the idea that certain people are wired from early on to see themselves as the protagonist of a larger story, which functions as a kind of protection against circumstances that would otherwise be crushing.

Burger joints, police vans, and the eight years of medical transcription

After inter, Junaid spent eight months in the gap before results came out. He took a job at a burger joint to support the family — his sister, who had been financing her own studies, had just gotten married and that income stream was gone. The job lasted seventeen days. One night, after a shift running from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., police picked him up outside the restaurant, held him through the night, and let him go. They came back the next day. He read the signal and quit.

What followed was eight years of medical transcription, introduced by a childhood friend who was training to be a doctor. It paid well enough to fund his sisters’ weddings and stabilise the household. He also completed a private economics degree from Karachi University — studying the night before each paper, spending around eight thousand rupees in total. “I got a graduate degree in آٹھ ہزار روپے,” he says, with the same dry delivery he uses on camera.

By 28, with the family responsibilities largely settled, he moved to Dubai. He had already started doing stand-up comedy at open mics in Karachi — Bass Rock Cafe, T2F — but it was not going anywhere. Dubai, he thought, had a better comedy circuit.

Dubai, the selectionism problem, and the first viral video

Dubai did not deliver what he expected. Junaid describes a hierarchy he calls “selectionism” — not racism exactly, but a layered system in which white professionals came first, then Arab nationals, then Indians, and Pakistanis somewhere near the bottom. He watched a colleague receive a fake Rado watch at a farewell party after thirty-five years of service at a company run by the ruler of Sharjah. “I was there at Rainbow Steakhouse eating his thirty-five years of service as a reward, and I was like — dude, I want to be this guy. I have a much bigger role in life.”

The frustration fed directly into his videos. He had made his first video just before leaving Karachi, and it went viral. From Dubai, with zero production budget — phone camera, one take, no editing — he kept making them. “I am a very shy person. These voices I make, they come out in closed rooms.” The constraint of one-take filming, he reflects, built the skill that later made him a natural long-form host: he had to be politically correct, funny, and convincing, all within four minutes, while speaking continuously.

By 2017, he was making more money from Pakistan while sitting in Dubai than he had been making locally. He moved back. Everyone around him thought it was a mistake.

The podcast as a passion project funded by comedy

Back in Karachi, Junaid set up an office — partly because he believed that getting dressed, putting on shoes, and leaving the house told his brain it was time to produce. The podcast came out of two converging impulses: he had been listening heavily to long-form shows internationally, and he had run out of new things to try in short-form. “I had already aced it. I can rant, I can make funny videos, I can hit millions from a car with zero production quality. What else can I do?”

The risk was real. His audience at the time would not reliably click on a five-minute video. He was now proposing hour-long conversations. “Left hand, every single person told me — bhai, long format, why are you wasting your money and time?” The early episodes had two cameras — one Canon, one Sony — with mismatched colour grading. He learned post-production as he went.

His method for handling the discouragement is precise: “I take advice, but I don’t let anyone’s opinion affect me — not because I think I’m infallible, but because you can tell the difference between someone giving you a creative angle and someone speaking from jealousy.” He describes the podcast as a passion project, funded by the comedy videos and brand content. His informative shorts channel — science, history, animation — made nine dollars on one video that took six days to produce. He keeps making them anyway.

“That’s my passion project,” Junaid says. “These are the things I want children to watch on TV. But they’re not there.”

Why TV channels said no — and why they all have YouTube channels now

Every major mainstream television channel reached out to Junaid when he returned from Dubai. Every one of them told him the same thing: TV is the real thing, come do a show. He asked to do a quiz show — something in the tradition of Bond Vita Quiz Contest, Neelam Ghar, Tariq Aziz Show, the programmes he credits with most of his actual education. They said it would not work. He asked to do inter-school competitions. They passed.

“I told them — it won’t work because you’ve never tried it.” He has not appeared on a mainstream channel since, except for interviews. “Those same people who in 2011 and 2012 used to say ‘what are you doing, TV is the real thing’ — today all of them have channels.” The arrogance, he notes, has not entirely disappeared: some still reach out and tell him that satellite television is where the real audience lives.

Muzamil pushes on the broader question of why substantive content struggles to find an audience in Pakistan. Junaid’s answer is structural: “Narratives should come from the state or from educational institutions. They should create hunger. That hunger only develops when you’ve seen something. If you’ve never seen it, you can’t want it.” He uses the example of suggesting to a minister that the Ministry of Science run unskippable videos on TikTok — forcing exposure rather than waiting for demand to materialise organically. “You have to push it. You can’t just say people don’t want it. You never created the demand.”

The teacup theory and the origin of things

One of the more unexpected passages in the conversation is Junaid’s account of how he learns. He has no research team. He uses the same Google everyone else uses. The difference, he says, is that he goes deep: “I go in, and you don’t — which is why I am where I am and you are where you are. No disrespect.”

He illustrates this with a story about teacups. China invented the teacup centuries before Europe. Because tea is opaque, it could be drunk from ceramic. Europeans drank wine, which is translucent and appealing — so they needed glass. Glass led to microscopes, telescopes, and spectacles. Spectacles extended the productive lives of philosophers and mathematicians by ten to fifteen years. “Europe went from where it was to where it went, and China’s progress stalled until not very long ago — we were alive for that.” The point is not the history lesson. The point is that every object in your room has a chain of causation behind it, and following that chain is how you build a mind.

Gen Z, political illiteracy, and the brain drain that keeps accelerating

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of political awareness among younger Pakistanis. Junaid’s assessment is blunt. There is enormous noise on social media, but no ground-level impact. Nobody comes out. “Individualism has been so thoroughly installed in people that they don’t understand their own collective power.” He describes Karachi — a city of 25 to 30 million — where five thousand people cannot be mobilised to stand on a street, where a small rain event kills people and cuts electricity and makes Zoom calls impossible.

The irony he keeps returning to is that the Gen Z cohort that will define Pakistan’s next elections is the least politically informed generation in recent memory — not because they are stupid, but because no institution ever built that literacy in them. Television, which at least delivered some political content to previous generations, has been replaced by platforms that deliver none. “Our parents learned things from newspapers and PTV. These kids don’t know anything.”

On the question of what Pakistan looks like in 2050, Muzamil presses Junaid for a direct answer. He gives two frames. The cautious optimism: young blood may arrive with new ideas that challenge entrenched norms. The darker read: “Talent is being exported at scale. Pakistan’s biggest export is human capital. And the person sitting across from that talent in an office is using government internet to fill out Australian immigration forms.” The system does not just fail to retain talent — it actively pushes it out, and the people running the system are too ego-driven and short-sighted to notice or care.

“Our country is very big,” Junaid says. “The people running it are very small.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil notes they are at one hour and twenty-four minutes. Junaid has not given a clean answer on 2050 Pakistan, and he acknowledges it. His honest position is that hope exists — the talent is real, the young people he meets while travelling are extraordinary — but the structural rot is deep enough that no individual, however capable, can fix it by walking in and snapping their fingers. The gutter gets replaced and breaks again because the organisational structure underneath it was never repaired.