Why I'm done pretending to be apolitical about Pakistan

The two-year transition the audience only half-saw

The episode opens with Muzamil naming something most of his viewers have sensed but never heard him say out loud: the last few years have been a transition, and a difficult one. He is candid that the status quo “I feel like the majority of people were not happy with,” and that he counts himself among the ninety-nine percent of people whose worldview has been forced to evolve.

Evolution, he argues, is not the betrayal it is often framed as. The pressure on a public figure is to hold a consistent line — to never u-turn — because the moment you contradict your old self, “you would be lying to your audience.” His response is the opposite. The lie, for him, is to keep performing a belief system he no longer holds. “It’s very difficult to show up as a job and keep on showing up and saying things that you may not believe in.”

He walks the listener through what that period actually looked like physically. He was, he says, “literally hopping from place to place,” setting up a studio in someone else’s house, then another studio in Pakistan, recording cross-platform conversations that the audience saw as the Endeavor series without knowing he was rarely in the room with his guest. “My knees gave out,” he admits — a rare moment of cost-of-business honesty from a host who usually keeps the wiring hidden. He is careful to add that he is not asking for sympathy. “It’s my decision.”

The new studio, the single button, the reset

By the time he is recording this episode, the wilderness phase is over. He gestures around the room and tells viewers, “this is my office” — a purpose-built room with what he describes as a “single button operation.” He walks in, presses a button, and the entire production stack comes up.

It is a small detail and it carries a lot of weight. The whole arc of the last two years — losing an old self, fragmenting an audience, recording in borrowed corners — terminates in a room he controls. He frames it as the precondition for everything that comes next on the channel.

”I’ve become fairly depoliticised”

The heart of the episode is a position he has clearly been thinking about for a long time. Muzamil tells his audience plainly that he is “personally not interested at all” in Pakistan’s politics, “not invested at all,” and not willing to “take a stray arrow” for any side. He goes further: “I’ve become fairly deep and I don’t know what the word is — unpolitical, depoliticised, or whatever.”

His reasoning is structural, not emotional. He argues that the transitions now underway in Pakistan, in the region, and in the world are happening at a scale that dwarfs domestic politics. He references the Musharraf and Zia eras as smaller versions of the same pattern, and says the changes now are bigger. The conclusion he draws is uncomfortable for the political content economy he helped build: Pakistan’s internal politics “doesn’t have much weightage left, because external variables are impacting Pakistan a lot.”

This reframes how he intends to cover anything political from here. If he praises a government decision, he wants it understood as a decision being praised, not a government. If he criticises one, the same. “I will look at it through an objective lens, keeping Pakistan in mind.”

What he still believes about Imran Khan

He does not perform neutrality where he does not feel it. Having spent significant time with the PTI government and with Imran Khan personally — “off camera, I had the chance to meet Imran Khan two or three times” — he says the conversations were about foreign policy and “overall imperialism,” and that “a lot of the things he said have panned out exactly as he said it.”

He is careful to separate the analysis from the affiliation. “I have a soft corner for Imran Khan because I think, you know, when I listen to him, the things he said were right. He had the right vision, he had the right mindset — but that’s the extent of it.” If Imran Khan were free and back in politics tomorrow, Muzamil would still vote for him. He says it directly. And in the same breath, he tells his viewers that the current federal government is “doing a lot of things fine” and that he is not going to pretend otherwise to keep one side of his audience comfortable.

”I am not telling you to support this government”

The line he draws for the viewer is sharp. He is not asking anyone to change their political affiliation. “Your political affiliations are whatever they are.” What he is asking for is permission — really, notice — to call a good call a good call. “Where it is right, I will say it is right. I will put myself out there and I will be a bit more vulnerable.”

He links this back to the version of himself the audience first fell for. The pre-2022 Muzamil, he says, was the one people loved, the one they first subscribed to. The years in between, by his own account, were “vanilla” and “all over the place.” He thanks the viewers who stayed through that and acknowledges, without bitterness, that he understands why some left.

A new TBT format: twenty minutes, data, no fluff

Then he tells the audience what the channel is going to do differently. He has, in his words, “fully immersed” himself in AI again — not as a topic to interview people about, but as infrastructure. He mentions running Google’s Gemma locally on his main editing machine, hosting another local model on an always-on MacBook Air, and building “different workflows and skills” on top of them for the business.

The output of that, applied to the show, is a new format. Instead of a ninety-minute guest conversation, he wants to deliver “to-the-point, value-driven, purpose-driven, backed with news and data” episodes around twenty minutes long — research, analysis, his own read of what is happening, condensed. He is explicit that this is why he has rolled back the volume of AI-as-topic content on this specific channel: the AI conversations now live on his Instagram, while TBT becomes the place where AI-assisted research shows up as finished argument.

The exit: thank you, and stay around

The episode closes the way many of the best solo TBT episodes have: with Muzamil speaking directly to the people who have stuck around. He thanks the regular viewers, and reserves particular thanks for those who, in his words, have stuck around through “the last two years of me being all over the place.” He tells them, plainly, “you mean the world to me.” The strength to keep going through the hard stretch, he says, has always come from them.

By the end of the conversation, the proposition on the table is simple. Muzamil is no longer pretending to be politically neutral by being politically silent. He is being politically honest by being mostly depoliticised, openly soft on one figure, openly willing to credit a government he never campaigned for, and openly ready to change the show’s format to match the way he now thinks. The viewer is invited to come along — or not. Either way, he is going to keep showing up.