Twelve years of grace: how The Idiots stayed grounded

Twelve years, four hundred videos, and a misplaced archive

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Muhammad Kashan as one of the oldest YouTubers in Pakistan — not in the casual sense, but literally: someone who was making videos before Pakistan had legal access to the platform he would eventually become known on. Muzamil frames the introduction around something other than reach. “The reason why I love him and I love his team members as well is the absolute humility, the absolute grace with which they have been doing what they do,” he says. In an industry where fame and money make it “very easy for your mind to get spoiled,” The Idiots have stayed visibly grounded.

Kashan’s count of his own work is approximate by necessity. “Around four hundred fifty to five hundred videos,” he says, and then immediately qualifies the number: a lot of the early work is simply gone. They uploaded to YouTube before the ban, then to Facebook pages that were later deleted, then back to YouTube once it returned. Some files survived on local systems and were re-uploaded. Others did not. The archive of Pakistan’s earliest YouTube generation, by Kashan’s own account, is partial because no one expected the platforms to outlive the videos.

The first piece of equipment that mattered was a DSLR they did not buy. A two-minute, dialogue-free short called Message in a Bottle, made on borrowed gear and submitted to a PNCA competition in Islamabad, took first place out of around five hundred entries. The prize was a Canon 50D and a 50mm lens. That camera, plus a Boya BY-M1 lavalier, was the production stack for years.

The day the ban lifted

A central pivot in the conversation is 2016 — the year YouTube officially returned to Pakistan with monetisation enabled. Before that, The Idiots had built their own workaround. They ran a platform called Idiots Tube while at Sir Syed University, a website where they could host video when YouTube itself was unreachable. They kept publishing on Facebook, where the reach was real. Kashan remembers refreshing a post and watching the share count climb four to five hundred per refresh. “We were shaken,” he says. He and Ammad were doing internships at the time. They were watching numbers move in real time that no one in their immediate world had vocabulary for.

When YouTube returned, the calculus changed in a specific way. Kashan is precise about it: the platform shift solved an ownership problem. “Our content is ours now.” Facebook had distributed it; YouTube let them hold it. That is the shift that made everything that followed possible — better mics, better cameras, eventual monetisation, and a stable channel home that could compound over years.

Muzamil reads the period as a question that hung over every creator at the time: stay on Facebook where the audience already was, or rebuild a following from zero on a platform that had just walked back into the country. The Idiots answered both. They kept the Facebook page and built the YouTube channel in parallel.

Tier-zero creators and the parental anxiety underneath

Muzamil offers a frame midway through the conversation that is worth holding onto. He classifies Pakistan’s creator generations as tier zero, tier one, and tier two. Tier zero, in his telling, “were the ones who were there when nothing was there.” They worked for three or four years before they discovered that the work could pay. Kashan and his team are tier zero.

The cost of being tier zero is mostly borne off-camera. The conversation lingers on Kashan’s mother, who, when he eventually told her he was leaving his job to do this full-time, was disturbed in a specific way. “She had always seen that in the morning, my father goes to office,” Muzamil paraphrases the dynamic, and Kashan picks it up. The deviation from that pattern — son at home, on a camera, instead of out the door at nine — was the part that needed processing, not the income.

Kashan is matter-of-fact about why he finally quit, which he did during Ramzan, around March or April of 2021. “We could not survive inside the job.” The skits and the salaried work were drawing from the same finite pool of hours. The job lost. He describes the five or six months that followed as a different operating system — monetary benefits, yes, but also the simple fact of running his own thing. The channel under his own name, Connect Kashan, was at around three hundred thirty thousand subscribers at the time of recording. Most of that growth happened during COVID, when the lockdown forced him to talk to camera as himself rather than through a character. The audience that knew Kashan-the-actor wanted to meet Kashan-the-person. They stayed.

What Pakistan’s YouTube actually looks like now

Muzamil widens the lens. He recalls what Pakistani YouTube looked like in its earliest months: content repurposing and recycling, lifted Indian material, beauty tutorials promising to lighten skin, what he calls “hakikat TV.” Then the surprises started. Village Food Secrets emerged. Middle-class voices found audiences no one had predicted.

Kashan’s reading of the current state is sober. The constraint, he argues, is not creator capability. It is audience demand. “In Pakistan, when one thing starts to work, people say, this is what we have to make as well.” Imitation is downstream of what the audience rewards, and the audience rewards a narrow band. If a creator has a different flavour, or has no real interest in the format that is currently winning, the market still pulls them toward it.

Muzamil illustrates the absence with a specific example from elsewhere on YouTube: a creator who films ants. Different colonies, different cameras, a spider dropped into the tank, commentary that treats the colony like a thinking organism. “Millions and millions of views. No one would have imagined such content could be anything.” Pakistan, by Kashan’s account, is not yet a market where an experiment that strange would find its audience. The newer generation, he says, is using YouTube differently and “something different will emerge from Pakistan” — but he is careful not to oversell the timeline.

TikTok, the slow-mo walk, and the demand-side ceiling

The conversation moves to TikTok, where Muzamil has twenty-three million followers across platforms and twenty-nine million on TikTok specifically, and where he openly admits he does not understand the format. “I don’t want to call it cringe,” he says, “but at the very least I can’t connect to it. That slow-mo walk is still running.” He is not dismissive — he believes TikTok is becoming a very powerful platform, with creators sitting on fifteen million followers — but he cannot bring himself to operate inside it.

Kashan offers the structural read. When he installed TikTok in Turkey, the location-based feed surfaced an entirely different product: the Turkish version of TikTok looked nothing like the Pakistani one. The conclusion both men converge on is that the platform is a vessel and the audience fills it. American TikTok and Turkish TikTok carry better content because their masses come from “a very different environment, with different understanding, different humour, different aspirational value.”

The implication is uncomfortable but honest: Pakistan’s TikTok ceiling is set by Pakistan’s TikTok audience, not by the creators on it. “Everything is a matter of demand,” Kashan says. The question of whether the platform evolves toward better content here is downstream of whether the audience pulls for it. Neither man predicts that it will happen quickly.

Humility as a system, not a posture

Muzamil asks the question that the introduction had been pointing toward the entire time. This is an industry where fame and money usually break people. The Idiots have been scandal-free for over a decade. How? “Did you ever just feel like, bhai, I am the man, I am big? Where does that come from?”

Kashan’s answer is short and almost anti-climactic. The starting point, he says, is the desire for a smooth life. “It is just that a smooth life should keep running. There is no issue in it.” He is not offering a philosophy. He is describing a default. The team did not arrive at humility through a strategy meeting. They were raised inside it, kept their circle small, kept their content the work, and let everything else stay quiet.

Muzamil, who frames the same instinct in his own language, treats the answer as the actual answer. He does not push for more drama than is there. Some of the best content in the conversation is the part where neither man pretends the explanation is more complex than it is.

Exit strategy, and the ten-year question

The last substantive movement in the conversation is about time. Muzamil introduces a frame he calls exit strategy — the idea, borrowed from how friends-era television actors moved into directing and production, that any on-camera career has a clock on it. “It’s never going to last forever. The next step should always be in your mind, and subconsciously I should be building toward that next step.” He is careful: exit strategy does not mean leaving the camera. It means having the next platform already partly built before the current one ends.

He asks Kashan the direct version: where are you in ten years?

Kashan’s answer is concrete. He wants to explore different categories. He points to BB Ki Vines’ web series as the reference — “it has the full film feel. It is a film.” The Idiots have their own web series, Pappa, with what Kashan describes as crazy fans, especially among children, and he wants to take that property to a bigger level with improved production. He is also explicit about the constraint that forces the move. “I know a time will come when you cannot play the role of a college boy in your video. You cannot be a kid anymore. The content will have to mature with you. You have to shape it up.”

Alongside that, he wants to take courses — Blender, After Effects — and add skills that he can fold back into the videos. He is making the bet that the production stack, the property catalogue, and the personal craft all need to grow at the same time, because the on-camera years are the years to build the rest of it under.

The audience profile, twelve years in

A short, useful exchange near the end: Kashan breaks down the demographic. The biggest audience block is eighteen to twenty-four, then twenty-five to thirty-five, then children, with older audiences smaller. Almost entirely Pakistani, which keeps CPM modest and makes brand integrations the meaningful revenue line. Gender is roughly seventy-thirty male-skewed, which Kashan attributes to the content itself leaning toward “boys-type” comedy. The profile, he notes almost in passing, has been stable from the beginning. Twelve years of work, and the shape of who shows up has not moved.

That detail lands quietly, but it earns its weight. It says something about the underlying truth of an audience-creator fit — that once a creator finds their people, the relationship is more durable than the format, the platform, or the era.

Closing

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil is not interviewing so much as acknowledging. “I am proud of what you have achieved. I am proud of what you have been able to do over the last twelve years, your consistency. But most of all, what I appreciate the most is your personality, and your humility and your grace. I hope you stay with that forever.” The closing is a creator wishing another creator the one thing that the industry rarely protects.

Kashan thanks him. The episode ends without a forced takeaway, which is itself in keeping with the temperament of the guest. The work continues. The job is gone. The next phase, on Kashan’s own terms, is already under construction.