Balancing medical school and YouTube as a creator

The Vlogger From Peshawar

Muzamil opens the conversation by reframing Abdullah Khattak as a pioneer. In the early vlogging era of Pakistan, Khattak was one of the first to experiment with the format. Peshawar, his hometown, was not an obvious place for this ambition, yet he persisted.

Khattak explains how he found the format. “I saw this YouTuber from Hollywood named Lance Stewart. He makes pranks. I saw this video about a car, and it showed so many things in a small part of the car. I said, well, what do you say? It’s called a vlog. So I started that as well. I started in English, because that copy would kill a rope,” he recalls, describing his early choice to film in English despite living in Peshawar. Facing cultural resistance was inevitable. “Being in Peshawar, I got a lot of hate. You do something different, you get hate. Different people comparing me to different people within Pakistan.”

Muzamil observes that Khattak was indeed pioneering a new style. “You were definitely one of the first people who got into this entire new age style of vlogging. In Pakistan, if vlogging started to popularize at that time, but after that, when it was mainstream, it was a sort of cinematic vlogging.” The difference, Muzamil suggests, is that Khattak stayed raw. He developed his own style with time rather than copying the cinematic approach that dominated later.

Losing Everything Twice

The conversation shifts to the painful moments Khattak endured early on. He had to rebuild his channel three times. The first loss came when his account had just 100 subscribers, a milestone that took him months to reach. The problem was his own mistake. “I did something wrong with the monetization thing in the beginning when I was making that channel. I had to make a new one, but that was not that big of a loss,” he explains. Still, the sting of rebuilding was real.

The second channel reached 15,000 subscribers, a far more devastating loss. Khattak was underage when he tried to withdraw his AdSense earnings. “I wasn’t 18 back then. And in my AdSense, I was getting greedy for 100 dollars. I tried to withdraw the money. They asked me for a CNIC. I didn’t have rules and regulations. I gave them a smart card. I was 16. So they said, you can’t do business with Google. You’re not 18. They terminated my monetization.” This time, he had no choice but to restart entirely.

The third channel’s loss was the cruelest. By the time he had rebuilt to 70,000 subscribers, Khattak received an email from “Creature VPN” offering payment to feature their app. He created the segment, clicked the download link they sent, and ran the executable file. The next day, his channel was live-streaming Bitcoin scams without his knowledge. “The next day, there’s a Bitcoin on my channel, a live stream on my channel. And I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it. There were messages. There were DMs on Instagram. I tried to recover it. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t try much,” he says. The demotivation was complete. A month later, Khattak rebuilt again, reaching 70,000 subscribers a second time.

Medical School Reframes Everything

The conversation turns toward his pursuit of medicine. Khattak had always known he would become a doctor. In Pakistan, the cultural script was clear. “In Pakistan, I’m not going to say I was shocked. When my admission was also done in AKU, I wasn’t shocked. My father said that you’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be a doctor.” Yet when he actually began medical school, his perception shifted. “When I joined, it’s really amazing. You learn about them, how they act on your body. You learn about different diseases. What is this happening. What is happening in it basically. I find it really fascinating.”

Medicine, he realized, is problem-solving. Every patient is a puzzle. Khattak describes the intellectual appeal that high schoolers miss when they study pre-med biology. “There is that whole concept of what you have to learn and what you have to keep in mind. But there is a huge element of problem solving there as well. Like how do you come to the conclusion that this person is sick. So you will take a lot of different variables. It’s like a puzzle. Absolutely. And that’s a lot of fun as well.”

The Responsibility Weight

As he advances in medical school, Khattak is acutely aware of the weight he carries. “When you have such a huge responsibility, it’s really scary. It brings a lot of self doubt in it as well. I don’t know if I’m going to be good enough. I can’t trust that the other person like trust me with his life.”

Muzamil draws a parallel to successful medical creators like Dr. Mike, who make medicine accessible to a global audience while maintaining rigorous expertise. “He’s mainstreaming public health. Even if you’re not like in the medical field, you have nothing to do with it. Just like a video for example about a certain disease and you want to know about it. Yeah. You just watch it. And it’s interesting right.”

Why Educational Content Matters Differently

Khattak made a deliberate choice. He created a separate YouTube channel called “Study with Khattak” specifically for educational content. His main channel focuses on vlogging, but he knew educational videos do not perform as well in YouTube’s algorithm. “Educational content does not do very well. So I’m not doing it for money, fame, or whatever. My educational videos do not do as good as the other videos.”

Yet the impact has been profound. He receives messages from students crediting his study-with-me videos with exam success. “Heartfelt messages. I was not able to focus. I was so depressed. My exams. I started watching your videos. I studied with you study with me videos. And I actually got a good grade.” This form of reach is qualitatively different from viral entertainment. “Knowing that you can help someone so much. I told you that entertaining content, a lot of people are doing it. But very few people impact people to this extent.”

The Industry Now

Muzamil probes deeper on the YouTube landscape. The early days were wild and unsaturated. Now, every teenager with a phone sees YouTube as a career path. Khattak is honest about the challenge. “The industry right now, I think it looks good. People should focus more on doing something unique. Because vloggers are a lot more, everybody is a vlogger.”

He points to emerging trends that excite him. One 14-year-old creator combines Ducky Bhai meme energy with late-Gen Z editing, producing 200 words per minute clips stuffed with text overlays and visual jokes. Another creator films a woman in a village simply milking cows, and the content goes viral because it represents an unexplored perspective. “There is a lot of creativity missing. What do you think, you watch a lot of international creators, right? Who do you see generally on YouTube?” Khattak reflects that the next wave of success will go to those who find white space and execute first, not copy.

Pakistan’s Path Forward

Near the end, Muzamil asks how Khattak sees Pakistan itself. At 20, his outlook is cautiously optimistic. He acknowledges the inflation crushing the economy and the fact that he will likely pursue his specialization abroad. Yet he insists this is not abandonment. “I don’t want to run from Pakistan. I mean, I will come back. I love Pakistan and everything about it.”

What gives him hope is cultural change happening visibly. “If I compare Peshawar to what Peshawar was 5 years ago, they’re changing. People are changing. Societal norms change. Cultural norms change.” His peers at AKU, drawn from across Pakistan and abroad, represent a generation more open to diversity than the previous one. “The diversity is a lot. If a place has one kind of people all over it, so it’s not that fun. But you get different from our junk. And he’s so talented. Everyone in AQ is so talented. Different things.”

Khattak is hopeful. “I think we have a good outlook. I think so, yeah. We’re going in the right direction.”