Money, Investing & Career

Jun 20, 2026

The space economy's real wealth is in the startups under SpaceX

Muzamil reads the space-tech decade through one variable: the falling cost of reaching orbit. As that number drops, hundreds of companies and millions of jobs open up beneath the headline names.

Jun 16, 2026

SpaceX's IPO is a pump. The space industry is real.

Muzamil reads the SpaceX IPO line by line: a 2 trillion dollar valuation on 18 billion in revenue and a 5 billion dollar loss, the index-fund rule that forces the buy, and why the real value is the hundred startups underneath.

Jun 9, 2026

How Asad Mehmood landed Mattermost from Pakistan before A levels

with Asad Mehmood

Asad Mehmood walked into Mattermost before he had A levels, crossed two million dollars on Upwork, and now runs a design agency from Pakistan. He sat with Muzamil to lay out the framework underneath it: become undeniably good, then become visible, then sell outcomes.

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 29, 2026

Penetrate, don't apply: a Pakistani's path to a remote US job

with Ghalib Hassam

Ghalib Hassam went from an unemployed electrical engineer in Nowshera to head of content at Darkroom by refusing to apply for jobs. He cold-messaged founders, worked for free, documented everything, and let the conversation move on its own.

May 25, 2026

AI is a highway, not a slot machine — stop trading the noise

A solo essay on why the 'AI is a bubble' vs 'AI changes everything' debate is a false choice — and what the railway mania, the 1929 crash, and the dot-com bust actually teach about timelines, fear, and where the real wealth gets built.

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.

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.

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.

Jun 20, 2025

Why Pakistan's stock market is the wealth engine no one trusts

with Abdul Rehman Najam

Abdul Rehman Najam, founder of ARN Financials, walks Muzamil through a decade of teaching himself how to invest the Warren Buffett way in Pakistan — why the local stock market has outperformed almost every other asset class, why nobody believes it, and how an ordinary saver can actually use it.

May 8, 2025

Why Shajee Aijazi left Autodesk to start a design consultancy

with Shajee Aijazi

Shajee Aijazi spent a decade in UX design, most recently as a senior lead designer on Maya at Autodesk. Three weeks before this conversation he walked away to start his own consultancy. He and Muzamil work through what UX actually is, what AI is and isn't replacing, how a non-technical Pakistani should break in, and why he's spent close to eighty thousand dollars on his own learning.

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.

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.

Nov 22, 2024

Why the UAE stopped giving Pakistanis visas

with Owais Barlas

Dubai-based business setup consultant Owais Barlas explains why UAE visa approvals for Pakistanis have collapsed — banned cities, the azaad visa myth, agent-driven scams — and turns the conversation into something larger: why the people who could leave never even try.

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.

Dec 8, 2023

Nabeel Durrani: my mother told me, if you fail, don't come back

with Nabeel Durrani

Nabeel Durrani left Peshawar for Australia in 2009 with a sealed envelope, no contacts, and one semester of fees paid. Fifteen years later he holds a PhD in AI and works on autonomous drones for the Australian Defence Force. He tells the story straight.

Nov 22, 2023

The only startups worth funding solve a problem that already exists

with Aleena Nadeem

Aleena Nadeem left Goldman and London venture capital to build Edufy, Pakistan's first student-loan fintech, after a decade of family charity work convinced her giving money away would never scale. She explains why a startup only fails when there's no real demand, and why education credit is the one product she'd bet the country on.

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 1, 2023

From copy-pasted Kindle books to a $16.5M Amazon exit

with Muhammad Naeem Sikandar

Naeem Sikandar built well over $30 million selling and flipping Amazon brands — but he started by copy-pasting recipes into Kindle books from a one-room house in Peshawar. He walks Muzamil through the whole arc, then defends and dismantles Pakistan's Amazon-course industry.

Oct 6, 2023

The anger that built a Dubai hospitality business

with Mahwussh Alam

Mahwussh Alam went from a single Airbnb unit in Dubai Marina to managing hundreds of properties under One Perfect Group. She walks Muzamil through a Karachi childhood, a computer science degree she took without ever having touched a computer, a 2008 layoff, the lonely identity-loss of new motherhood, and the science she now applies to Dubai real estate.

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 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 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 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.

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.

Jun 10, 2022

Why Haseeb Khan quit fashion photography for a product brand

with Haseeb S Khan

Designer, photographer, and mytype.store founder Haseeb S Khan on leaving fashion shoots behind, building a quality-first product brand in Pakistan, and why every business needs to price in at least 20% for marketing.

May 20, 2022

How to save money when the economy is dying

with Syed Muhammad Faraz

Syed Muhammad Faraz went from losing millions in leveraged stock trades to winning a $20,000 forex contest — and then building Pakistan's most rigorous retail trading training. He sits down with Muzamil to talk about what most Pakistanis get wrong about money, why the stock market is still bearish, and why youth is Pakistan's most wasted asset.

May 9, 2022

The man who invented Pashto rap

with Mustafa Kamal Khan

Mustafa Kamal Khan of Fortitude traces how he and two schoolmates created Pashto rap from scratch — no reference, no template — and why KP's resistance to change is the very reason the genre should have exploded there first.

Mar 25, 2022

The lock in your throat isn't about English

with Noman Abid

Noman Abid went from a small town in Sohawa to becoming Pakistan's National Champion of Public Speaking. The real story is what happened in between — an army dream, a red stamp marked 'unfit', and the discovery that communication is a survival skill, not a soft one.

Mar 11, 2022

The digital road to property ownership in Pakistan

with Jawad Nayyar & Abdullah Khan

Jawad Nayyar and Abdullah Khan of DAO PropTech walk through why Pakistan's real estate market is broken, how blockchain can fix it, and what it actually costs to buy a flat through their platform.

Mar 9, 2022

The eBay trainer building Pakistan's e-commerce future from Multan

with Qasim Sana Ramay

Qasim Sana Ramay built Pakistan's largest eBay-focused training organisation not from Karachi or Lahore, but from Multan — and his students generated over one billion rupees in sales in 2021 alone.

Jan 31, 2022

Why Pakistani designers chase technique and skip the idea

with Sarmad Ahsan

Motion designer Sarmad Ahsan on the long detour from accountancy to CSS to motion graphics, why Pakistani creative work over-indexes on execution at the cost of the idea, and what freelancers should actually be learning if they want to survive the next wave of automation.

Dec 31, 2021

Stock market is not a casino. Treat it like a business

with Laeeq Ahmad

On the last episode of 2021, Laeeq Ahmad returns for a third appearance to walk through his journey from Teradata to founding Sarmaaya, the Avanceon trade that funded a startup, and why most Pakistanis lose money in the market for the same reason every time: they treat it as a lottery, not a business.

Dec 29, 2021

Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure

with Fahad Khan

Pakistani-Canadian entrepreneur Fahad Khan, CEO of Canada Prime Marketing, on selling credit cards in minus-40 weather, getting stiffed on commissions, why 98% of people shouldn't be entrepreneurs, and the line he wrote with Tony Robbins that reset his definition of winning.

Dec 17, 2021

Freelancing is a business, not a passive income

with Qasim Umer

Qasim Umer walks through the path from five Fs in first year to 10,000 dollars a month — and argues that freelancers who treat their work like a passive gig will burn out by 40 unless they build a product on top of it.

Dec 10, 2021

A 19-year-old freelancer's case for skipping the government job

with Sheryar Baloch

Sheryar Baloch grew up in Kharan, Balochistan, where a grade-four government peon's job sells for fifteen lakh rupees. At nineteen, he is an Amazon consultant earning in dollars from a desert town with patchy electricity and intermittent internet — and he has a plan for what to do about the people around him who still don't believe it is possible.

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 1, 2021

How to own a piece of an F-6 plot for one lakh rupees

with Asif and Altamash

The co-founders of Xstate explain how fractional ownership and an in-house property exchange could let an average Pakistani buy into premium Islamabad real estate, why the holding problem matters more than the price problem, and why blockchain is on the roadmap but not yet.

Oct 13, 2021

Why only 0.1% of Pakistan invests in stocks

with Ali Farid Khwaja

Ali Farid Khwaja, chairman of KTrade and a former top-ranked European technology analyst, explains why Pakistan's capital markets were built for institutions and the rich, what it takes to open up that game to the rest of the country, and why he treats unregulated crypto as his real competition.

Sep 27, 2021

Why Shehzeen Siddique started freelancing at 15 in secret

with Shehzeen Siddique

Shehzeen Siddique started freelancing at 15, got scammed seven times learning the trade, lost her first social media manager job, and built Learn to Earn into a course for Pakistani students. She talks about average grades, online hate, and why she now teaches mostly girls.

Sep 3, 2021

Why Finja lends to the kiryana store the banks won't touch

with Umer Munawar and Zain Bhatti

Finja's Umer Munawar and Zain Bhatti walk through how a fintech licensed three times over decided that the most underserved part of Pakistan's economy was not the unbanked saver but the kiryana store with no access to credit — and how a co-lending model with banks scales that bet.

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.

Jun 28, 2021

Is Bitcoin the new gold?

with Haroon Baig

Haroon Baig breaks down what Bitcoin actually is, why volatility is a feature not a flaw, and why banks — not crypto — are the world's biggest money-laundering facilitators.

Jun 25, 2021

How Bitcoin actually works, explained from scratch

with Haroon Baig

Haroon Baig walks through the full architecture of Bitcoin — from mempool to mining, Lightning Network to proof-of-work — in one of the most technically grounded conversations on the show.

Jun 7, 2021

Why Bitcoin alone won't fix Pakistan's economy

with Ahmad Manzoor

Ahmad Manzoor, founder of Pakistan Blockchain Institute, sits down with Muzamil to separate the speculative frenzy around Bitcoin from the deeper promise of blockchain technology - and explains why Pakistan is not as far behind as people think.

May 3, 2021

Finding Opportunities in Crisis: A Conversation with Zeenat Ahmad

with Zeenat Ahmad

Zeenat Ahmad traces her path from a government school scholarship to chartered accountancy, reflecting on how clarity of thought - not convention - shaped her choices.

Apr 30, 2021

Career choices, content creation, and the cost of comparison

with Hamza Bhatti

Hamza Bhatti traces his path from a BBA graduate eyeing Dubai to building one of Pakistan's first dedicated content production houses - and argues that the absence of career counselling, the pressure of parental expectations, and the habit of comparing yourself to others are the three forces most likely to derail a young person's working life.

Apr 21, 2021

How to get a job as a web developer, with Ehmad Zubair

with Ehmad Zubair

Ehmad Zubair, CEO of Cogent Labs, joins Muzamil to talk through the web development landscape in Pakistan - from frontend frameworks to freelancing traps, the value of a first boss, and why universities have become job factories instead of research institutions.