Foreign Affairs & Geopolitics

Jun 5, 2026

A 22-year-old Pakistani's road map to space by 2050

with Hassan Mossin

Hassan Mossin, a 22-year-old Pakistani astrophysicist training with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, walks Muzamil through the next twenty-five years of space — commercial stations by 2030, a lunar base by 2032, and why the bottleneck isn't food or oxygen, it's energy.

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.

May 6, 2026

Pakistan's hybrid system has run out of foreign rent

with Yasir Ahmed Soomro

Analyst Yasir Ahmed walks Muzamil through the global re-ordering reshaping Pakistan's options — why American patronage is thinning, why Arab money is no longer free, why the hybrid regime cannot be sustained by hard power alone, and what realistically happens to the federation by 2030.

Apr 30, 2026

The US-Iran war is an energy war, not an ideological one

Muzamil Hasan argues that the US-Iran conflict, like most great-power wars of the last fifty years, is fundamentally about energy — pipelines, oil prices, and a solar tipping point that threatens to hand China the next century.

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 16, 2026

Why I'm done pretending to be apolitical about Pakistan

A solo episode where Muzamil explains the two-year transition behind the camera, why he has effectively depoliticised himself, what he still believes about Imran Khan, and how he plans to cover Pakistan's politics from here on.

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 3, 2026

The strait of Hormuz toll is good politics, bad law

with Yasir Abbas

Yasir Abbas returns to Thought Behind Things to read the Iran-Israel-US conflict from the inside of international law: why the war has already expanded economically, why Iran's Hormuz toll plan won't survive a courtroom, why Pakistan's awkward middle position was actually played well, and why the UN is past repair.

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.

Jan 8, 2025

Dubai is not banning Pakistanis. Pakistanis are getting themselves banned.

with Asim Swati

Dubai-based business setup and immigration consultant Asim Swati walks Muzamil through what is actually happening to Pakistani visas in the UAE — why there is no formal ban, why families are getting rejected, why agents are 80 percent of the problem, and why the long-term fix sits inside Pakistani homes rather than inside UAE policy.

Dec 11, 2024

Inside Bangladesh's revolution, told by a Dhaka University student

with Mamunur Rashid

Mamunur Rashid, a 22-year-old psychology student at Dhaka University, walks Muzamil through the summer of 2024 in Bangladesh — from a quota reform protest to a one-point demand, an internet shutdown, an army that refused to fire, and the morning Sheikh Hasina left the country.

Sep 25, 2024

Russia, China, and the world Pakistan keeps misreading

with Dr. Muhammad Ali Ehsan

Dr. Muhammad Ali Ehsan, joining from Russia, walks Muzamil through a changing world order — the resurgence of Russia, the long bet of China, the erosion of American moral credibility, and why Pakistan keeps choosing the worst seat at every table.

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 9, 2024

Pakistan's ruling system has fire under its feet

with Adeel Malik

Oxford political economist Adeel Malik unpacks why Pakistan's elite-capture system is finally cracking — the geopolitical squeeze that keeps it on a leash, the social contract that never got written, and the eastward shift the country keeps refusing to own.

Jun 28, 2024

Pakistan is in coercive economic diplomacy — and the elite has no foresight

with Adeel Malik

Oxford political economist Adeel Malik sits with Muzamil to map the cracks in Pakistan's ruling system — why the old indirect-rule structure is breaking, why the country is being held in strategic suspension, and why the most important failure is intellectual, not economic.

Nov 24, 2023

Israel is no longer untouchable — and the world order knows it

with Jehad Zafar

Geopolitics analyst Jehad Zafar joins Muzamil to read the war on Gaza as a symptom of a larger shift: the American-led order is straining, a multipolar one is rising, and Pakistan's old establishment instinct to bet on Washington is colliding with the new map.

Nov 10, 2023

The logistics of getting aid into Gaza and flooded Pakistan

with Hafiz ur Rehman

Prof. Dr. Hafiz ur Rehman, president of Al Khidmat Foundation, walks Muzamil through the exact mechanics of moving relief into Gaza while the border stays shut — and the slower, harder work of rehabilitating the 33 million Pakistanis the 2022 floods left behind.

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 18, 2023

How the West actually rose, and why the Muslim decline is a myth

with Shershah Khan

Shershah Khan, a 20-year-old from North Waziristan who reads three to four hours a day, walks Muzamil through the books that dismantle two of Pakistan's favourite stories — that the Muslim intellectual tradition died with Al-Ghazali, and that the West rose because it was simply smarter.

Sep 29, 2023

The seventy good years might have been the aberration

with Zaigham Haque

Zaigham Haque — investment banker turned founder of Dubai's first serious culinary school — walks Muzamil through a 1960s London childhood, Pakistan's vanished sporting and banking glory, and why he fears the kind, fair world he lived in was a historical accident his grandchildren won't inherit.

Aug 25, 2023

From IT help desk to CTO of the Middle East's top coffee app

with Shahood Siddiqui

Shahood Siddiqui took an IT help-desk job in Saudi Arabia — the bottom of the food chain for a CS graduate — and six years later left as group CTO. From a Dubai studio he walks Muzamil through digitalising a forty-year-old kitchen-equipment business, building the Middle East's number-one coffee pickup app, and the uncomfortable reasons Pakistani engineers keep getting left out of the region's boom.

Aug 23, 2023

Buying a second passport is legal, and a crisis doubles the line

with Talha Bin Saleem

Talha Bin Saleem buys citizenship for the world's wealthiest for a living. He walks Muzamil through the legal mechanics of a second passport — Caribbean, Turkey, Portugal, EB-5 — why every world crisis doubles his inquiries, and how a boy who touted taxis outside a London nightclub ended up selling nationalities.

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 2, 2023

What web3 actually means once you strip out the money

with Talha Bin Afzal

Talha Bin Afzal runs a Pakistani web3 services studio building on Unity and Unreal. He takes Muzamil past the NFT hype to the part that lasts — ownership — and then explains why Pakistan keeps reskinning games instead of building them.

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.

Mar 21, 2022

What Pakistan actually wants from the OIC conference

with Asim Iftikhar Ahmad and Rizwan Saeed Sheikh

Days before the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers convenes in Islamabad, Pakistan's Foreign Office Spokesperson and Permanent Representative to the OIC lay out what is at stake — from Kashmir and Islamophobia to Afghanistan's economic collapse and a rogue Indian missile.

Jan 24, 2022

Gilgit-Baltistan is the only region fighting to integrate

with Yasir Abbas

Yasir Abbas, coordinator to the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, traces his path from a village called Yaseen to a Chevening LLM at Sussex, and lays out why the region's provincial status is a matter of months — not years — and what genuine integration would mean.

Jan 14, 2022

Reporting from inside the warzone with Sumaira Khan

with Sumaira Khan

Sumaira Khan — embedded journalist in North Waziristan at 18, first reporter on site at the Marriott blast, only Pakistani journalist inside Kabul on August 15 — walks through eighteen years of covering Pakistan and Afghanistan from the ground.

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 13, 2021

Afghanistan's $10 billion is being held by the country that signed its peace deal

with Raoof Hasan

Raoof Hasan, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information, walks through the Taliban interim cabinet, the $10 billion in frozen Afghan reserves, the contradiction at the heart of America's legitimacy demand, and why the region — not the West — will have to shoulder Afghanistan's recovery.

Aug 27, 2021

Afghanistan is a once-in-a-generation realignment, not a news cycle

with Arsalan Khan

Arsalan Khan of The Wide Side joins Muzamil days after the Taliban takeover to argue that Afghanistan is a paradigm-shift event on the scale of Partition, that the real twenty-first-century battle is economic rather than military, and that India is the one regional player still pushing for instability.

Aug 16, 2021

Why the Taliban took Afghanistan in days, not months

with Hussain Nadim

Recorded the weekend Kabul fell, Hussain Nadim walks through why the Taliban swept Afghanistan so quickly, why Washington's analysts missed it, what the #SanctionPakistan trend actually was, and what comes next for Pakistan.

Aug 4, 2021

Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the cost of seeing each other through state eyes

with Shahrzad Kofi & Asad Khosha

Shahrzad Kofi and Asad Khosha join Muzamil from Kabul to talk through the Taliban resurgence, the failure of the Afghan state to deliver, why Pakistan and Afghanistan keep misreading each other, and what the worst case actually looks like.

Jul 16, 2021

What's really at stake as the Taliban take Afghanistan

with Salman Javed

Salman Javed, Director General of the Pak Afghan Youth Forum, breaks down the Taliban's rapid territorial gains, Pakistan's strategic calculations, India's shrinking footprint, and what a post-withdrawal Afghanistan could mean for the entire region.

Jul 2, 2021

Hussain Nadim on rebuilding a think tank from inside the system, the great-game read of Afghanistan, and why Joe Biden isn't calling

with Dr. Hussain Nadim

A 33-year-old PhD running IPRI - Pakistan's national-security think tank - sits with Muzamil to argue why the US-Afghan war was never a double game, why a clean policy on Osama bin Laden is impossible in a post-colonial society, and what Pakistan actually was through twenty years of war on terror.

May 7, 2021

Peace, Polarization, and Pakistan's Turning Point: A Conversation with Dr. Adnan Rafiq

with Dr. Adnan Rafiq

Dr. Adnan Rafiq, country director for the United States Institute of Peace, joins Muzamil to discuss how inequality, information access, and political polarization shape the prospects for peace in Pakistan.

Apr 23, 2021

Afghanistan's cycle of conflict: history, power vacuums, and Pakistan's strategic dilemma

with Salman Javed

Salman Javed joins Muzamil to trace Afghanistan's recurring cycles of civil war - from the Soviet withdrawal and Najibullah's fall to the Taliban's rise - and asks whether the same dynamics are now reasserting themselves.

Ep 56 · Feb 8, 2021

What actually happened in 1971

with Farhat Hussein

A senior guest who lived through 1971 as a factory man in East Pakistan recounts the war he was caught inside: the firing, the flight through the jungle, two years of captivity in India, and the long road home.

Sep 1, 2020

Imran Khan on Pakistan's political crisis, foreign policy, and the road ahead

with Imran Khan

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan speaks candidly about the conspiracy he believes brought down his government, Pakistan's dependency on foreign powers, the justice system's failure to hold the powerful accountable, and why he sees this moment as a historic turning point for the country.