Pakistan's Economy

Jun 6, 2026

The illusion of Islamic finance, and a $2M CEO

Muzamil unpacks Pakistan's pre-budget mood — IMF pressure, a salaried class taxed five-fold in five years, freelancers in the crosshairs, and a 'shariah-compliant' bank paying its CEO two million dollars a year off the back of fiat rupees.

May 16, 2026

Pakistan's first giga factory bets on a new kind of rider

with Saad Farrukh

EVEE CEO Saad Farrukh on why he refuses to compete with the Honda CD 70, what 50,000 scooters on Pakistani roads have taught him about batteries and after-sales, and why a 250,000-unit giga factory in Karachi is a pitch to Chinese component makers as much as it is to consumers.

May 14, 2026

Pakistan ran a fiscal surplus on petrol — not policy

with Adeel Azhar

Radio host and finance commentator Adeel Azhar joins Muzamil to unpack the gap between the government's headline numbers and what life actually feels like in Pakistan — the petroleum development levy as a hidden tax, the squeezing of the middle class, the eighteenth amendment, Karachi's red line, and why a younger generation no longer feels the emotional bonding to Pakistan that his did.

May 12, 2026

Solar is no longer a novelty in Pakistan — it is a compulsion

with Daniyal Siddiqui

Daniyal Siddiqui, founder and CEO of DS Group, walks through the real economics of solar in Pakistan — why industrial ROIs sit at two and a half years, what the shift from net metering to net billing actually changed, and why 2027 will be the year batteries break open the residential market.

May 11, 2026

The Rs. 415 petrol price is not an international problem

Muzamil walks through the actual breakdown of Pakistan's Rs. 415 petrol price — why most of the latest hike is levy rather than international crude, which sectors are being shielded from tax, and why the only rational defence is to move savings into dollarised assets like solar and electric bikes.

May 8, 2026

Pakistan's real estate pump is coming, and it's engineered

Muzamil walks through the killing of Section 7E, the IMF agreement that preceded it, and the cheap-loan scheme being pumped in alongside it — three levers converging on a real estate pump that, in his reading, will price the average Pakistani further out of land while the asset owners offload.

May 7, 2026

A country is energy, labor, intelligence, and raw material

Muzamil lays out the four-component framework he uses to read any country — energy, labor, intelligence, and raw material — and runs Pakistan, India, China, and the US through it, number by number.

Apr 22, 2026

The oil price on your screen is not the price Pakistan pays

with Osama

Energy markets analyst Osama unpacks why the headline oil price is a paper number, why Pakistan is paying a $30-40 premium on physical barrels, and why even a ceasefire will not undo the six-to-eight-month supply disruption already baked into the global system.

Apr 14, 2026

Pakistan is energy abundant. It just runs a distribution problem.

with Farooq Tirmizi

Profit magazine's Farooq Tirmizi returns to argue that Pakistan's biggest businesses are sitting on capital with nowhere to deploy it, that the load shedding story is now distribution rather than supply, that the world is drifting into a US-versus-China war that will hit Pakistan through China's import flows, and that India-Pakistan round two is, sadly, more likely than not.

Apr 10, 2026

Pakistan finally has leverage. Can it actually use it?

with Ali Khizar

Economic journalist Ali Khizar walks Muzamil through the Islamabad accord moment — why Pakistan's brokering role between Iran and the United States is different from 1971, what middle-power status actually requires, and the worst-case scenario if the talks collapse.

Apr 9, 2026

Pakistan as a middle power in the new world order

with Faisal Aftab

Venture capitalist Faisal Aftab returns for a third conversation on geopolitics, walking through the fissure inside the Western alliance, the merger of the financial-technology and military-industrial complexes, and why he believes a Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi block is the most likely middle-power outcome of this cycle.

Apr 8, 2026

Pakistan goes crisis to crisis because it keeps printing money

with Yusuf M Farooq

Hours after the US-Iran ceasefire breaks, Yusuf M Farooq joins Muzamil to unpack what the Islamabad Accord means for Pakistan's markets, the rupee, the structural drag on growth, and why fixing Karachi is not optional.

Apr 7, 2026

Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money

with Abdul Rehman Najam

Abdul Rehman Najam, CEO of ARN Financial Advisors, argues the worst of the oil shock is already priced into the Pakistan Stock Exchange — provided the government doesn't repeat its one historical mistake: subsidising oil through the crisis.

Apr 6, 2026

The dollar at 350 is not the end of the market

with Laeeq Ahmed

Sarmaaya founder Laeeq Ahmed joins Muzamil to unpack the $4.8 billion repayment month, why a 22.5% rupee devaluation could be bullish for 60% of KSE-100 earnings, and which Pakistani companies actually win when oil spikes, solar scales, and the grid fails.

Apr 2, 2026

Pakistan's elite never had to deliver — that's about to change

with Javed Hassan

Javed Hassan returns from Fudan University to argue that Pakistan's real problem was never the absence of a civilizational past or the absence of foreign money. It was a vassal elite that never needed a social contract with its own people — and the Iran war may be the crisis that finally forces one.

Ep 497 · Dec 9, 2025

The West Sold Us a Lie Pakistan Is the Real Opportunity | Ft. Asfandyar Waraich | 497 | TBT

with Asfandyar Waraich

Long-form write-up coming soon. Listen in the meantime.

Oct 17, 2025

How Dipitt got onto shelves in 33 countries

with Syed Zeeshan Haider

Dipitt founder Syed Zeeshan Haider walks Muzamil through leaving Philip Morris on a hunch, selling out at Karachi Eat, building a national sauce brand from a Karachi kitchen, and using the COVID supply-chain gap to land Dipitt in Tesco, Asda and 33 other export markets.

Oct 10, 2025

Pakistan's stock market will double, but the onboarding is broken

with Ali Farid Khwaja

Ali Farid Khwaja, chairman of KTrade, returns to TBT to explain why Pakistan's stock market is the best-performing in the region, why only 400,000 Pakistanis are invested in it, and why the journey to open a brokerage account still takes a week.

Oct 3, 2025

Why Pakistan's next unicorn ships from a warehouse, not a website

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal, founder and CEO of LAM, returns to break down how a Pakistani fashion marketplace ships to 7,500 cities in 100 countries — and why the real product underneath is logistics, warehousing, and an e-commerce infrastructure called Octane that any small Pakistani business can plug into.

Sep 26, 2025

Why Pakistan's western wear market is the next $5B prize

with Muneeb Zafar

Fitted founder Muneeb Zafar walks through eight years of bootstrapping a dress-shirt brand from a 500,000-rupee start to 1,500 products a day — and why the western wear market in Pakistan is about to do something it has never done before.

Sep 24, 2025

Pakistan can add $9.8 billion to agri exports — without leaving home

with Jawwad and Salar

Jawwad of AgriLift and Salar of FFC sit down with Muzamil to dismantle the easy story about Pakistani agriculture: water isn't really the problem, the ārhti isn't really the villain, and the gap between what Pakistan grows and what its best farmers already grow is worth roughly $9.8 billion a year in additional exports.

Sep 22, 2025

Pakistan's electric scooter winner isn't selling to bike owners

with Saad Farrukh

Saad Farrukh, CEO of Evee, walks Muzamil through the journey from a 200-square-foot McLeod Road spare-parts shop to leading Pakistan's electric two-wheeler market — why scooters and not bikes, why women and the elderly are the real growth, and why every major VC in the country said no.

Jul 28, 2025

Why Pakistan needs an inclusive university, not another elite one

with Jahanzeb Burana

Jahanzeb Burana, co-founder of the National Institute of Technology — Pakistan's first university powered by Arizona State University — on why higher education here has been chasing the wrong model, what it actually takes to bring an American university to Pakistan, and why mindset will matter more than content in an AI-shaped job market.

Jun 25, 2025

What a Croatian chief people officer learned about Pakistani talent

with Ivana Bajamic

Ivana Bajamic, chief people officer at National Foods, on running HR for a fifty-five-year-old Pakistani exporter from Dubai — what the local talent actually has, what it is missing, and why the future is decided one talent-review conversation at a time.

Jun 23, 2025

Punjab's budget is finally spending on people, not just roads

with Marriyum Aurangzeb

Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb walks Muzamil through the 2025-26 provincial budget — why the headline number sits on health and education for the first time, how the eighteenth amendment changed what a province is allowed to do, and what it took to keep Pakistan out of default in 2023.

Jun 2, 2025

Why BYD priced its Pakistan launch under the hybrid competition

with Danish Khaliq

Danish Khaliq, VP of sales and strategy at Mega Motor Company, explains why BYD launched in Pakistan at 8.99 million rupees as a fully imported unit, what that does to the running-cost math against a petrol SUV, and the policy turbulence sitting on the horizon.

May 23, 2025

Half the price of a Fortuner in Pakistan is tax

with Ali Asghar Jamali

Ali Asghar Jamali, CEO of Indus Motor Company, walks through the real cost structure of a car built in Pakistan — what the government takes, what gets localised, why auto financing collapsed, and why electric vehicles are not the macroeconomic silver bullet most people assume they are.

May 14, 2025

South Asia will spearhead the next era — if it learns to communicate

with Shahyan Shabbir

Adelaide-based cybersecurity strategist Shahyan Shabbir on why data — not AI — is the real wedge, why South Asian talent will lead the next era of services, and what an Australian client actually needs to see before they wire money to Pakistan.

Apr 25, 2025

Out of 100 applicants, Ibex hires two — and that is the problem

with Yasir Rafiq

Yasir Rafiq, head of recruitment at Ibex — Pakistan's largest BPO — walks Muzamil through why fifty lakh young Pakistanis enter the job market every year and almost none of them can hold a conversation in English, why COVID was the boom that finally cracked the country open to global clients, and what India did in the nineties that Pakistan still has not done.

Mar 4, 2025

Why BAT won't just stop selling cigarettes

with Johann van der Muilen

BAT's Chief Operating Officer Johann van der Muilen sits down with Muzamil to explain the company's smokeless transformation, why pulling cigarettes off the shelf would hand the market to illicit traders, and what Pakistan stands to gain from a more regulated, less risky nicotine industry.

Jan 31, 2025

Why most Pakistani real estate is a dead investment

with Fahad Lone

Fahad Lone is building Pakistan's first large-scale resort in the Galyat. He walks Muzamil through why horizontal land plots are not productive real estate, how he engineered heating and water systems for a building that has to work in snowfall, and the financial model that pays apartment owners off the entire pool of revenue — not just room rent.

Jan 29, 2025

Why brick and mortar will never bank Pakistan's other 100 million

with Irfan Wahab Khan

EasyPaisa chairman Irfan Wahab Khan joins Muzamil to explain why traditional banks cannot close Pakistan's 100-million-person banking gap, what changes now that EasyPaisa holds a digital retail banking licence, and where credit scoring, cross-border wallets and tokenisation actually fit in.

Jan 25, 2025

Why Iffi Wala is killing the BPO model for Pakistani talent

with Iffi Wala

Iffi Wala, founder of Edge, sits down with Muzamil to walk through how a non-tech hiring platform built in Northern California ended up creating close to a thousand jobs in Pakistan, why he refuses to call any of it outsourcing, and what 14 million dollars of salary inflow actually does on the ground.

Dec 24, 2024

Islamic banking in Pakistan is mostly a rebrand

with Qanit Khalilullah

Chartered accountant Qanit Khalilullah sits down with Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's push toward Islamic banking by 2028 is largely a rebrand, and to walk through what an actually Islamic economy would look like — zakat and ushr as the primary fiscal tools, cash transfers to the poor instead of bloated ministries, and a full-reserve banking system that takes money creation away from private banks.

Dec 19, 2024

Faisal Aftab: the 1971 system is over, and Pakistan is mispriced

with Faisal Aftab

Venture capitalist and Shark Tank Pakistan judge Faisal Aftab on why the post-1971 monetary order ended in 2021, why entrepreneurship has stopped being optional, and why the next decade rewards the people willing to throw out their parents' playbook.

Nov 13, 2024

Pakistan is still stuck in primary school on its economy

with Muhammad Ali Tabba

Muhammad Ali Tabba, chairman of Lucky Cement and one of the senior figures behind the Lucky Group, walks Muzamil through how a 1962 trading house in Karachi became one of the largest industrial conglomerates in Pakistan, and why he thinks the country's economic problems are simple but politically uncomfortable to fix.

Oct 14, 2024

Pakistan's IT exports won't scale on cheap labour anymore

with Ahsan Jamil

Sy Ventures managing partner Ahsan Jamil on why Pakistan's first startup wave broke on weak technology foundations, why his fund invests local rupee capital into export-focused B2B companies, and why the path to scaling IT exports runs through Fortune 1,000 problem-solving, not headcount arbitrage.

Oct 5, 2024

Pakistan is on a knife edge — and a planned default beats a forced one

with Sanjay Kathuria

Former World Bank lead economist Sanjay Kathuria argues Pakistan's debt arithmetic does not add up, that an orderly restructuring is the least painful path left, and that the crisis is the only window in which the country's elite capture can be broken.

Oct 2, 2024

Pakistan is stuck in cotton while the world has moved on

with Mussadiq Zulqarnain

Interloop chairman Mussadiq Zulqarnain on raising 9.35 million rupees in 1992 to start a socks factory, becoming the world's number one sock manufacturer, why Pakistan confuses textiles with apparel, and what a deindustrialising country still has going for it.

Sep 27, 2024

Islamic and conventional banks have the same bottom line

with Dr Humayon Dar

Dr Humayon Dar walks through the architecture of Islamic banking — what a Shariah board actually does, why the products are economically identical to conventional ones, why fiat is not the villain, and where the line between integration and surrender sits.

Sep 18, 2024

Pakistan is sliding into chaos. The only exit is a third republic.

with Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair

Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair — former chief economist of Pakistan's Planning Commission and a twenty-two-year lead economist at the Islamic Development Bank — argues that Pakistan is trapped in a deepening chaotic system, and that the only sustainable exit is a third republic built on debt restructuring, a competitive market economy, and a renegotiated social contract.

Sep 13, 2024

Islamic banking is an oxymoron, says Harris Irfan

with Harris Irfan

Former Deutsche Bank Islamic finance head Harris Irfan tells Muzamil why Islamic banking is a contradiction in terms, why fiat money is the great evil of the modern era, and why he now considers Bitcoin the most ethical form of money ever invented.

Sep 11, 2024

Pakistan's problem isn't debt — it's that the inflows have dried up

with Muzammil Aslam

Muzammil Aslam — adviser to the KP chief minister on finance and inter-provincial coordination — sits with Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economy is not failing because the debt stock is too large. It is failing because the receipts that used to service that debt have stopped arriving. The diagnosis is unsentimental, and the prescriptions are uncomfortable for the federal government he is criticising.

Sep 6, 2024

Pakistan is selling its crown jewels at throwaway prices

with Ali Khizar

Finance journalist Ali Khizar walks through Pakistan's debt trap, the IMF stalemate, why China and Saudi Arabia have gone quiet, and the cost of trading Reko Diq copper for short-term dollars.

Aug 30, 2024

We have killed hope: the Nishat CEO on Pakistan's broken engine

with Shahzad Saleem

Shahzad Saleem — founder and CEO of Nishat Chunian Limited, Pakistan's fourth-largest textile group — argues that the current mix of a 20 percent policy rate, a controlled rupee, revenue-based taxation and a vilified IPP sector has pushed many Pakistani businesses into irreversible decline, and that the only way out begins with simplifying tax, shrinking government, restructuring debt and giving the ninety percent a fighting chance at education.

Aug 23, 2024

Islamic economics is the polar opposite of capitalism

with Dr Asad Zaman

Dr Asad Zaman returns to argue that Islamic economics is not a shaded version of capitalism but its polar opposite — built on community rather than the individual, service rather than profit, and self-sufficiency rather than dependence.

Aug 16, 2024

Pakistan will outgrow its government, not be saved by it

with Farooq Tirmizi

Farooq Tirmizi argues Pakistan's bull case does not depend on a perfect leader, foreign bailouts, or structural reform — the math is already in motion through demographics, literacy, and household savings. Muzamil pushes back on every link in the chain.

Aug 5, 2024

Default is a choice: inside Pakistan's $26 billion debt squeeze

with Ahmed Jamal Pirzada

Economist Ahmed Jamal Pirzada walks Muzamil through the arithmetic of Pakistan's external debt — why the rollover game can only run for so long, why default is a policy choice rather than an accident, and why the country has to pick between choking the economy and changing what it produces.

Jul 8, 2024

Pakistan will outgrow its government, not fix it

with Farooq Tirmizi

Farooq Tirmizi argues Pakistan's bull case rests on indicators the government cannot break — falling fertility, rising literacy, and a banking system that will eventually refinance the foreign debt in rupees.

Jun 14, 2024

Default is a choice — and Pakistan keeps choosing to choke instead

with Ahmad Jamal Pirzada

Bristol economist Ahmad Jamal Pirzada walks through the arithmetic of Pakistan's external debt, why restructuring is effectively default with better optics, why three decades of similar reforms left Pakistan, India and Bangladesh on three different trajectories, and why the IMF's growth projections keep flattering the books.

Apr 19, 2024

Pakistan's exports lose at the shelf, not the field

with Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi

MacPac Films managing director Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi on a forty-year packaging journey, surviving a fire that wiped out thirty years of work, the patent that killed bioplastic, and why Pakistani exports keep losing on the shelf instead of the field.

Jan 5, 2024

Pakistan's IT growth is flatlining — and the policy is making it worse

with Syed Ahmad

Syed Ahmad returns to TBT — recorded at the Dubai studio — to walk through what the IT industry actually looks like from the inside: flat growth, a brain drain the country can't yet replace, a tax regime that punishes the companies trying to do things right, and a special technology zones programme he helped design that he now believes is being quietly hollowed out.

Dec 20, 2023

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

with Nabeel Qadeer

Nabeel Qadeer returns to TBT after a year on the road — eighty-plus universities, skill centres across Pakistan, and an unvarnished read on what the country's twenty-two-year-olds are actually feeling. The conversation is honest about hopelessness, sharp on why the startup-and-VC story is the wrong story for Pakistan, and ends with a case for going out, learning, and coming back.

Dec 6, 2023

Zafar Masud: the life I am living now is a borrowed heaven

with Zafar Masud

Bank of Punjab president Zafar Masud sits down with Muzamil for a three-hour conversation that moves from a Lahore middle-class childhood, to running Barclays Southern Africa at 37, to the PIA crash he survived in Karachi, and finally to a precise, sector-by-sector account of why Pakistan's fiscal problem — not its dollar problem — is the one that has to be fixed.

Nov 17, 2023

The $10,000 grant and why women are Pakistan's missing half

with Umar Khan & Iman Urooj

Visa's Umar Khan and Safepay's Iman Urooj walk Muzamil through Pakistan's slow digital-payments shift, the new She's Next grant for women-led businesses, and the unglamorous case that leaving half the economy on the sidelines is the most expensive mistake the country keeps making.

Nov 15, 2023

Why smart money came into Pakistani startups when everyone left

with Faisal Aftab

Faisal Aftab closed a large foreign-backed round into Pakistani startups at the exact moment the ecosystem was being written off as dead. He walks Muzamil through why he went bearish in early 2022, why he thinks April–June 2023 was the bottom, and why the next cycle won't look like the 2021 bubble.

Nov 3, 2023

Why Pakistan built the power and still cannot deliver it

with Naeem Shafique

Naeem Shafique spent four decades inside General Electric — from commissioning Tarbela's turbines as a fresh graduate to running GE's power business in Pakistan. He walks Muzamil through how the country ended up with surplus generation it can't deliver, a circular-debt trap of its own making, and the unglamorous fix nobody wants to fund.

Oct 27, 2023

What a metric-pass businessman taught a PhD about education

with Dr. Shahid Qureshi

Dr. Shahid Qureshi spent five degrees memorising answers before a businessman with no college admission taught him what education was for. He walks Muzamil through Taxila, Bangkok, a British power plant, LUMS, a German PhD, and twelve years at IBA — and lands on a quieter case for entrepreneurship than the one Pakistan keeps importing.

Oct 25, 2023

How Tecno built Pakistan's largest phone factory

with Adeel Tahir & Ali Raza

Tecno's head of sales and head of marketing explain how a brand most of upper-class Pakistan had never heard of put up the country's first smartphone factory, took a quarter of the market, and now wants a slice of a $120 billion export trade.

Oct 20, 2023

How Shaukat Khanum built world-class cancer care from nothing

with Dr Aasim Yusuf

Dr Aasim Yusuf has run the medicine at Shaukat Khanum for thirty years — from a hospital that opened in a wheat field with no electricity to the first charitable hospital in Pakistan to win US-grade accreditation. He walks Muzamil through how you build an institution that treats most patients for free, why it turns away two thirds of the people who come to it, and what the brain drain is doing to the staff who keep it running.

Oct 13, 2023

Why Pakistan's healthcare crisis is really a pricing problem

with Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan

Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan has spent nearly forty years inside Pakistani medicine, from the army to building Kulsum International Hospital. He walks Muzamil through the unglamorous economics underneath the country's healthcare — why care is underpriced, why young doctors leave, and why a 500-bed medical city only makes sense if you can wait eight years for the payback.

Oct 11, 2023

The electric car policy Pakistan's auto mafia killed

with Malik Amin Aslam

Malik Amin Aslam, Pakistan's former climate adviser, walks Muzamil through the 2019 EV policy that promised a regional head start — and the car cartel that buried it from inside government. Plus the IPP debt trap, the billion-tree project, and why water is the issue no one prices.

Oct 4, 2023

Why a Facebook engineer left Seattle to digitise Pakistani fashion

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal spent fifteen years building recommendation engines at Microsoft Bing, eBay, Pinterest and Facebook — then left a comfortable Seattle life to start LAAM, a fashion marketplace shipping Pakistani clothing to a hundred countries. He explains why South Asian fashion is a multi-billion-dollar export hiding behind broken logistics.

Sep 15, 2023

The honest case for leaving Pakistan on your skills

with Adil Ismail

Adil Ismail has processed more than 16,000 immigration cases over twenty years. He walks Muzamil through what skill-based migration to Canada, Australia, the US and Europe actually requires — and why most Pakistanis chase the hardest doors while easier ones stay empty.

Sep 13, 2023

The AI scientist who says fundamental science already ended

with Dr. Nasir Ahsan

Dr. Nasir Ahsan went from a rebellious teenager in Saudi Arabia to the founder of Abyss Solutions, a robotics company whose perception software inspects the world's hardest-to-reach infrastructure. He makes an unfashionable case: most of what we call AI is glorified pattern recognition, and fundamental science largely stopped in the 1950s.

Sep 8, 2023

Why solar is the dollar-pegged investment most Pakistanis can buy

with Bilal Naeem

Bilal Naeem of Beyond Green Solar walks Muzamil through the economics of taking a Pakistani electricity bill to zero — why a rooftop system pays back in three years, how net metering actually settles, and why solar is the closest thing most households have to a dollar-denominated asset.

Sep 1, 2023

What Pakistanis get wrong about saving and investing money

with Wali Khan

Wali Khan is an RF engineer by day and a personal-finance creator by night. He walks Muzamil through why Pakistan's savings rate is half of India's, why every graduate pumps the same broken real-estate market, and why the FIRE number that works in the West falls apart the moment the rupee devalues.

Aug 30, 2023

How Dawlance became a Pakistani engineering story

with Umar Ahsan Khan

Umar Ahsan Khan walked into Dawlance's head office for a two-and-a-half-hour meeting and never really left. He tells Muzamil how a local fridge brand built from scratch in 1980 was sold to a Turkish giant on one condition — keep the name — and what it takes to actually manufacture, not just assemble, in Pakistan.

Aug 18, 2023

Pakistan can fix its own fundamentals — the reason it won't

with Junaid Iqbal

Junaid Iqbal — ex-MD of Careem Pakistan and Careem Pay — walks Muzamil through Pakistan's actual fiscal arithmetic: a $50bn federal budget that spends $38bn just to stay alive, and four structural fixes nobody with a vote bank will touch.

Aug 16, 2023

Why price caps are quietly strangling Pakistan's farms

with Zeeshan Hasib Baig

Zeeshan Hasib Baig left a partner-track Deloitte salary in dollars to run Careem Pakistan, then walked into agriculture knowing nothing about it. He makes the case that Pakistan's $70 billion farm sector is being held back less by soil or water than by price caps, missing strategy, and capital that never reaches rural land.

Aug 11, 2023

Pakistan doesn't have a water problem. It has a soil problem.

with Taimur Malik

Taimur Malik traces his path from a Lahore spinning mill to regenerative agriculture, and makes the case that Pakistan's water crisis, nutrient collapse, and broken farm economics are all downstream of one neglected asset — dead soil — and that fixing it is a national security priority, not a luxury.

Ep 354 · Aug 9, 2023

Why cheap data and a small mindset keep Pakistan offline

with Taimur Nawaz

Taimur Nawaz has built telecom careers across Telenor, China Mobile, Qualcomm and now Transworld's fixed broadband and submarine cable business. He walks Muzamil through why Pakistan keeps arriving late to every network generation, why the cheapest data market in the world has no reason to lay fibre, and why the real ceiling on the country's best businesses is mindset, not potential.

Jul 26, 2023

Why the dollar isn't going anywhere, and Pakistan isn't defaulting

with Farooq Tirmizi

Farooq Tirmizi — former managing editor of Profit and founder of Elphinstone — walks Muzamil through why Pakistan keeps refusing to default, why the rupee can't do what the dollar does, and why he is structuring his whole life as a one-way bet on Pakistan by 2050.

Jul 19, 2023

Why Pakistan makes billions of Panadol tablets but can't make the powder

with Farhan M. Haroon

Farhan Haroon runs Haleon Pakistan — maker of Panadol, CAC-1000 and Sensodyne. He walks Muzamil through a triple-qualification sprint out of a humble Karachi home, the GSK demerger, and the uncomfortable economics of a pharma industry that mixes the tablet here but imports the molecule, and exports $200 million a year against India's $24 billion.

Jul 12, 2023

The global degree most Pakistani students never consider

with Shanza N. Khan

Shanza N. Khan spent 22 years in development economics before she started counselling families one at a time. She walks Muzamil through why Pakistani students fixate on a handful of American universities, how to negotiate a scholarship, why the education system is flawed rather than merely inefficient, and a live mock counselling session built around a 2.3 GPA.

Ep 309 · Mar 10, 2023

Asad Umar: Pakistan cannot grow without deep reform

with Asad Umar

Asad Umar joins Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economic crisis is structural, not a bad ten months: real estate as a black-money sink, an import bill larger than its exports can ever retire, and reforms the country's most powerful interests keep blocking.

Feb 16, 2023

Imran Khan on the cipher, the economy, and refusing to quit

with Imran Khan

A special sit-down with former Prime Minister Imran Khan, recorded from the room he was confined to after his leg injury. He lays out his account of the cipher and his removal, contrasts Pakistan's economic indicators ten months apart, and argues that rule of law, not a single genius economic plan, is the only reform that matters.

Ep 288 · Nov 28, 2022

Abdul Razak Dawood: a Memon village, Columbia, and building DESCON

with Abdul Razak Dawood

Abdul Razak Dawood traces a life from a Memon village with no electricity to Columbia, the Lawrencepur mill, the loss of East Pakistan, and the founding of DESCON, then explains his bet on Africa, exports, and sports.

Jun 20, 2022

Pakistan's farms are top 10 in output, bottom 50 in yield

with Muhammed Bukhari

Muhammed Bukhari left a GM role at British Telecom to build Farmdar, a GeoAI startup using satellite imagery to fix Pakistan's agriculture from the inside. The conversation covers why supply chain is not the answer, how 21 bands of light can replace soil sensors, and why Pakistan's unfair advantage is farming.

Jun 17, 2022

Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert on building things

with Saad Hamid

Saad Hamid — Google's Regional Lead for Developer Community Programs and Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert — traces a winding path from a cadet college in Skardu to Singapore, through blogging, nonprofits, accelerators, and a career app called Jadu. The conversation covers discipline, curiosity, Pakistan's IT talent gap, and what coherence would actually take.

Jun 15, 2022

Jazz's CEO on why 4G for all beats 5G for a few

with Aamir Ibrahim

Aamir Ibrahim, CEO of Jazz, and Saif Ali of Dastgyr join Muzamil to unpack Pakistan's largest Series A equity round, the real barriers to fintech adoption, and why the telecom industry may be heading toward digital dark ages if ARPU doesn't rise.

Jun 13, 2022

How Pakistan's socio-economic classes are actually measured

with Kashif Hafeez Siddiqui

Kashif Hafeez Siddiqui, CEO of Pulse Consultant, breaks down how Pakistan is divided into 16 cultural belts, why only 2.5% of the country is truly upper class, and what media and marketing get wrong about the society they claim to understand.

Jun 8, 2022

Why Krave Mart won't lay off anyone for 18 months

with Haziq Ahmed

Haziq Ahmed, COO of Krave Mart, traces a winding path from Karachi's army schools to Manchester's textile program to food delivery logistics — and explains why quick commerce's real product is warehousing infrastructure, not groceries.

May 27, 2022

Who really destroyed Karachi?

with Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman

Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, president of Jamaat-e-Islami Karachi, walks through the structural failures behind the city's decline — from a rigged census and gutted transport to water shortages and a feudal mindset that has outlasted the feudal countryside.

May 23, 2022

Pakistan has three to four weeks before it defaults

with Javed Hassan

Economist Javed Hassan walks through Pakistan's reserve crisis, the structural flaws that keep producing balance-of-payments emergencies, and why the country's only real path out is to stop protecting industries that have never learned to compete.

May 13, 2022

The man building Pakistan's electric mobility revolution

with Mohammad Hadi

Mohammad Hadi left fifteen years at Credit Suisse and Citibank to return to Pakistan and build EzBike — the country's first electric scooter-sharing startup. He talks about Wall Street's cowboy culture, why ride-hailing is fundamentally broken, and what it will take to put 22 million motorcycles on electric power.

Apr 29, 2022

Why Pakistan's BPO industry never scaled like India's

with Salman Wajid Mian

Salman Wajid Mian, Chief Process Outsourcing Officer at Systems Limited, traces his journey from genetic engineering at Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to building 2,700-seat contact centers — and explains why Pakistan's BPO sector squandered its early lead while India and the Philippines pulled ahead.

Apr 25, 2022

Pakistan's cash economy and the fintech fixing it

with Omar Moeen Malik, Omar Aftab, Huzaifa Ahmed

Omar Moeen Malik of Easypaisa, Omar Aftab of Pink Ribbon, and Huzaifa Ahmed of RIZQ sit down with Muzamil to talk mobile wallets, breast cancer taboos, food wastage, and why Pakistan's next decade might be its most transformative.

Apr 15, 2022

Pakistan has no worthy number two to Systems Limited

with Kashif Manzoor

Kashif Manzoor — SVP at Systems Limited and former head of Confiz — traces a career that ran from Schlumberger oil fields in Qatar to setting up an offshore center in Beijing, and explains why Pakistan's IT services boom could stall without a credible second player.

Apr 4, 2022

PakWheels wasn't revenue positive until 2022

with Suneel Sarfraz Munj

Suneel Munj built Pakistan's dominant automotive marketplace over nearly two decades without turning a profit — and he's fine with that. A conversation about classified platforms, car inspections, electric vehicles, and what success actually means.

Feb 21, 2022

The CEO who took a demotion to join Unilever

with Amir R. Paracha

Amir Paracha, CEO of Unilever Pakistan, traces a winding path from a failed air force medical, a ditched engineering degree, and a deliberate step down in title to eventually leading one of Pakistan's largest companies through its first weeks of COVID-19.

Jan 19, 2022

Pakistan's IT problem is disconnection, not potential

with Mashroor Hussain

Mashroor Hussain, founder of CXO Global Forum and Dynamic Folio, sits with Muzamil to dissect why Pakistan's IT exports keep missing their targets — the institutional disconnection at the top, the talent pipeline that does not exist at the bottom, and the self-centric mindset that stops good ideas from scaling.

Jan 3, 2022

Why Pakistan's factories still push, when the world has moved to pull

with Badar Khushnood

Badar Khushnood — Bramerz co-founder, P@SHA chairman, and an architect of Pakistan's first national e-commerce policy — walks Muzamil through the country's first B2B portal in 2002, the nine years he spent building Google's Pakistan presence, why Fishry is built around brand-conscious SMEs, and why a $4B domestic e-commerce market still struggles to export.

Dec 24, 2021

Pakistan's farmland is a science problem, not a land problem

with Saad Tamman

Saad Tamman — actuarial scientist turned farmer turned PM's strategic reforms unit lead — walks Muzamil through how a tomato farm went bankrupt because of a one-day price control, why 70% of agricultural technology is the seed itself, and what really happened inside the room when PTI's hundred-day plan was being written.

Dec 20, 2021

Pakistan has the largest Muslim diaspora in Silicon Valley

with Arzish Azam

Arzish Azam — CEO of Ijad Labs and country manager for Startup Grind — on why a software engineer is worth more to Pakistan than a textile worker, the case for a national emergency on digital skills, and why remote work, not freelancing, is the wave the country cannot afford to miss.

Nov 29, 2021

Pakistan saves seven rupees out of a hundred. India saves thirty.

with Mohammad Shoaib

Al Meezan Investments CEO Mohammad Shoaib walks through the actual menu of investment products available to a Pakistani saver — mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs — and the structural reasons most people never use any of them.

Nov 19, 2021

The obvious is the hardest thing to discover in Pakistan's economy

with Muzzammil Aslam

Muzzammil Aslam, spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, walks through what the rupee, the auto sector, the agriculture base, and Pakistan's habit of protecting the wrong people actually mean — and why the policies that hurt today are the ones that stop a bigger fall in 2023.

Nov 5, 2021

Pakistan is the largest underserved retail market in the world

with Kamran Shaukat

Kamran Shaukat walks through a career that ran from Alcatel and McDonald's to Shell, Walmart and finally EZBuy Pakistan — and explains why a former global sourcing director walked away from corporate security to bet on a country with 220 million underserved consumers.

Nov 3, 2021

Pakistan's import duties are, in effect, export taxes

with Gonzalo Varela

World Bank senior economist Gonzalo Varela walks Muzamil through why Pakistan's export sector has eroded for two decades — a real exchange rate held artificially strong, one of the world's most protected tariff structures, and a policy posture that quietly punishes anyone who tries to sell abroad.

Oct 22, 2021

Why the next world order will be won on economy, not military

with Hamza

Hamza, vice president of macro rates sales at Goldman Sachs and founder of the clean-water charity Bondh e Shams, walks Muzamil through the pivots that have shaped the global political economy since 9/11 — and why Pakistan's path forward is internal, not external.

Sep 10, 2021

Pakistan's regulations are built to punish, not to enable

with Ammar Habib Khan

Karandaaz Chief Risk Officer Ammar Habib Khan walks through what risk management actually means in Pakistan, why financial inclusion stalls at the mindset layer, what Raast could unlock if banks let it, and the only two scenarios he sees for the country in 2050.

Aug 6, 2021

Why Pakistan drew a border around technology

with Hamza Saeed

Hamza Saeed, Director of Planning at Pakistan's Special Technology Zones Authority, walks through how China's Shenzhen model is being adapted for Pakistan's knowledge workers — and why this time the incentives are written into law instead of an SRO that can be cancelled overnight.

Jul 30, 2021

Why Pakistan's debt cycle quietly blocks you from investing

with Laeeq Ahmad

Laeeq Ahmad returns to Thought Behind Things to break down why ordinary Pakistanis aren't investing — and how the government's own borrowing makes it rational for banks to ignore small businesses, why brokers won't guide you, and what a working investment platform should actually do.

Jul 14, 2021

Why the car scheme was the wrong gift for overseas Pakistanis

with Ariba Shahid

Reuters correspondent Ariba Shahid talks about stumbling into journalism, what a week of reporting actually looks like, why the overseas Pakistani car scheme picked the wrong sector, and where the line between trolling and harassment sits.