Pakistan's Economy

Jun 30, 2026

Simon Dixon: the US empire is being wound down by design

with Simon Dixon

Simon Dixon argues the American empire isn't collapsing — transnational capital is deliberately unwinding it, and Pakistan's military has become its leverage in the transition.

May 16, 2026

Pakistan's first giga factory bets on a new kind of rider

with Saad Farrukh

EVEE CEO Saad Farrukh on why he refuses to compete with the Honda CD 70, what 50,000 scooters on Pakistani roads have taught him about batteries and after-sales, and why a 250,000-unit giga factory in Karachi is a pitch to Chinese component makers as much as it is to consumers.

May 14, 2026

Pakistan ran a fiscal surplus on petrol — not policy

with Adeel Azhar

Radio host and finance commentator Adeel Azhar joins Muzamil to unpack the gap between the government's headline numbers and what life actually feels like in Pakistan — the petroleum development levy as a hidden tax, the squeezing of the middle class, the eighteenth amendment, Karachi's red line, and why a younger generation no longer feels the emotional bonding to Pakistan that his did.

May 12, 2026

Solar is no longer a novelty in Pakistan — it is a compulsion

with Daniyal Siddiqui

Daniyal Siddiqui, founder and CEO of DS Group, walks through the real economics of solar in Pakistan — why industrial ROIs sit at two and a half years, what the shift from net metering to net billing actually changed, and why 2027 will be the year batteries break open the residential market.

May 11, 2026

The Rs. 415 petrol price is not an international problem

Muzamil walks through the actual breakdown of Pakistan's Rs. 415 petrol price — why most of the latest hike is levy rather than international crude, which sectors are being shielded from tax, and why the only rational defence is to move savings into dollarised assets like solar and electric bikes.

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 15, 2026

Fractional reserve banking is a modern form of riba

with Qanit Khalilullah

A chartered accountant argues Pakistan's debt, inflation, and poverty all trace back to one design flaw: how banks create money out of nothing.

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 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.

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.

Mar 31, 2026

Ninety universities became 270 and the budget never moved

with Dr. Habib Bokhari

Dr. Habib Bokhari on why Pakistan's university boom hid a quality collapse, and which fields matter once AI reshapes work.

Dec 22, 2025

You can't have 32 logistics players all surviving

with Ehsan Saya

Daraz's Ehsan Saya on rebuilding Pakistan's e-commerce trust problem from scratch, and why 32 logistics players can't all survive.

Ep 497 · Dec 9, 2025

The West Sold Us a Lie Pakistan Is the Real Opportunity | Ft. Asfandyar Waraich | 497 | TBT

with Asfandyar Waraich

Long-form write-up coming soon. Listen in the meantime.

Dec 4, 2025

Pakistan's delivery riders survive on five-rupee margins

with Umer Munawar

Umer Munawar built SmartLane to fix Pakistan's e-commerce logistics chaos, only to find the deeper crisis sits with underpaid delivery riders.

Oct 17, 2025

How Dipitt got onto shelves in 33 countries

with Syed Zeeshan Haider

Dipitt founder Syed Zeeshan Haider walks Muzamil through leaving Philip Morris on a hunch, selling out at Karachi Eat, building a national sauce brand from a Karachi kitchen, and using the COVID supply-chain gap to land Dipitt in Tesco, Asda and 33 other export markets.

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.

Oct 3, 2025

Why Pakistan's next unicorn ships from a warehouse, not a website

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal, founder and CEO of LAM, returns to break down how a Pakistani fashion marketplace ships to 7,500 cities in 100 countries — and why the real product underneath is logistics, warehousing, and an e-commerce infrastructure called Octane that any small Pakistani business can plug into.

Sep 26, 2025

Why Pakistan's western wear market is the next $5B prize

with Muneeb Zafar

Fitted founder Muneeb Zafar walks through eight years of bootstrapping a dress-shirt brand from a 500,000-rupee start to 1,500 products a day — and why the western wear market in Pakistan is about to do something it has never done before.

Sep 24, 2025

Pakistan can add $9.8 billion to agri exports — without leaving home

with Jawwad and Salar

Jawwad of AgriLift and Salar of FFC sit down with Muzamil to dismantle the easy story about Pakistani agriculture: water isn't really the problem, the ārhti isn't really the villain, and the gap between what Pakistan grows and what its best farmers already grow is worth roughly $9.8 billion a year in additional exports.

Sep 22, 2025

Pakistan's electric scooter winner isn't selling to bike owners

with Saad Farrukh

Saad Farrukh, CEO of Evee, walks Muzamil through the journey from a 200-square-foot McLeod Road spare-parts shop to leading Pakistan's electric two-wheeler market — why scooters and not bikes, why women and the elderly are the real growth, and why every major VC in the country said no.

Jul 28, 2025

Why Pakistan needs an inclusive university, not another elite one

with Jahanzeb Burana

Jahanzeb Burana, co-founder of the National Institute of Technology — Pakistan's first university powered by Arizona State University — on why higher education here has been chasing the wrong model, what it actually takes to bring an American university to Pakistan, and why mindset will matter more than content in an AI-shaped job market.

Jun 25, 2025

What a Croatian chief people officer learned about Pakistani talent

with Ivana Bajamic

Ivana Bajamic, chief people officer at National Foods, on running HR for a fifty-five-year-old Pakistani exporter from Dubai — what the local talent actually has, what it is missing, and why the future is decided one talent-review conversation at a time.

Jun 23, 2025

Punjab's budget is finally spending on people, not just roads

with Marriyum Aurangzeb

Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb walks Muzamil through the 2025-26 provincial budget — why the headline number sits on health and education for the first time, how the eighteenth amendment changed what a province is allowed to do, and what it took to keep Pakistan out of default in 2023.

Jun 2, 2025

Why BYD priced its Pakistan launch under the hybrid competition

with Danish Khaliq

Danish Khaliq, VP of sales and strategy at Mega Motor Company, explains why BYD launched in Pakistan at 8.99 million rupees as a fully imported unit, what that does to the running-cost math against a petrol SUV, and the policy turbulence sitting on the horizon.

May 23, 2025

Half the price of a Fortuner in Pakistan is tax

with Ali Asghar Jamali

Ali Asghar Jamali, CEO of Indus Motor Company, walks through the real cost structure of a car built in Pakistan — what the government takes, what gets localised, why auto financing collapsed, and why electric vehicles are not the macroeconomic silver bullet most people assume they are.

May 14, 2025

South Asia will spearhead the next era — if it learns to communicate

with Shahyan Shabbir

Adelaide-based cybersecurity strategist Shahyan Shabbir on why data — not AI — is the real wedge, why South Asian talent will lead the next era of services, and what an Australian client actually needs to see before they wire money to Pakistan.

Apr 25, 2025

Out of 100 applicants, Ibex hires two — and that is the problem

with Yasir Rafiq

Yasir Rafiq, head of recruitment at Ibex — Pakistan's largest BPO — walks Muzamil through why fifty lakh young Pakistanis enter the job market every year and almost none of them can hold a conversation in English, why COVID was the boom that finally cracked the country open to global clients, and what India did in the nineties that Pakistan still has not done.

Mar 4, 2025

Why BAT won't just stop selling cigarettes

with Johann van der Muilen

BAT's Chief Operating Officer Johann van der Muilen sits down with Muzamil to explain the company's smokeless transformation, why pulling cigarettes off the shelf would hand the market to illicit traders, and what Pakistan stands to gain from a more regulated, less risky nicotine industry.

Jan 31, 2025

Why most Pakistani real estate is a dead investment

with Fahad Lone

Fahad Lone is building Pakistan's first large-scale resort in the Galyat. He walks Muzamil through why horizontal land plots are not productive real estate, how he engineered heating and water systems for a building that has to work in snowfall, and the financial model that pays apartment owners off the entire pool of revenue — not just room rent.

Jan 29, 2025

Why brick and mortar will never bank Pakistan's other 100 million

with Irfan Wahab Khan

EasyPaisa chairman Irfan Wahab Khan joins Muzamil to explain why traditional banks cannot close Pakistan's 100-million-person banking gap, what changes now that EasyPaisa holds a digital retail banking licence, and where credit scoring, cross-border wallets and tokenisation actually fit in.

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.

Dec 24, 2024

Islamic banking in Pakistan is mostly a rebrand

with Qanit Khalilullah

Chartered accountant Qanit Khalilullah sits down with Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's push toward Islamic banking by 2028 is largely a rebrand, and to walk through what an actually Islamic economy would look like — zakat and ushr as the primary fiscal tools, cash transfers to the poor instead of bloated ministries, and a full-reserve banking system that takes money creation away from private banks.

Dec 19, 2024

Faisal Aftab: the 1971 system is over, and Pakistan is mispriced

with Faisal Aftab

Venture capitalist and Shark Tank Pakistan judge Faisal Aftab on why the post-1971 monetary order ended in 2021, why entrepreneurship has stopped being optional, and why the next decade rewards the people willing to throw out their parents' playbook.

Nov 13, 2024

Pakistan is still stuck in primary school on its economy

with Muhammad Ali Tabba

Muhammad Ali Tabba, chairman of Lucky Cement and one of the senior figures behind the Lucky Group, walks Muzamil through how a 1962 trading house in Karachi became one of the largest industrial conglomerates in Pakistan, and why he thinks the country's economic problems are simple but politically uncomfortable to fix.

Oct 14, 2024

Pakistan's IT exports won't scale on cheap labour anymore

with Ahsan Jamil

Sy Ventures managing partner Ahsan Jamil on why Pakistan's first startup wave broke on weak technology foundations, why his fund invests local rupee capital into export-focused B2B companies, and why the path to scaling IT exports runs through Fortune 1,000 problem-solving, not headcount arbitrage.

Oct 5, 2024

Pakistan is on a knife edge — and a planned default beats a forced one

with Sanjay Kathuria

Former World Bank lead economist Sanjay Kathuria argues Pakistan's debt arithmetic does not add up, that an orderly restructuring is the least painful path left, and that the crisis is the only window in which the country's elite capture can be broken.

Oct 2, 2024

Pakistan is stuck in cotton while the world has moved on

with Mussadiq Zulqarnain

Interloop chairman Mussadiq Zulqarnain on raising 9.35 million rupees in 1992 to start a socks factory, becoming the world's number one sock manufacturer, why Pakistan confuses textiles with apparel, and what a deindustrialising country still has going for it.

Sep 27, 2024

Islamic and conventional banks have the same bottom line

with Dr Humayon Dar

Dr Humayon Dar walks through the architecture of Islamic banking — what a Shariah board actually does, why the products are economically identical to conventional ones, why fiat is not the villain, and where the line between integration and surrender sits.

Sep 18, 2024

Pakistan is sliding into chaos. The only exit is a third republic.

with Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair

Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair — former chief economist of Pakistan's Planning Commission and a twenty-two-year lead economist at the Islamic Development Bank — argues that Pakistan is trapped in a deepening chaotic system, and that the only sustainable exit is a third republic built on debt restructuring, a competitive market economy, and a renegotiated social contract.

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.

Sep 11, 2024

Pakistan's problem isn't debt — it's that the inflows have dried up

with Muzammil Aslam

Muzammil Aslam — adviser to the KP chief minister on finance and inter-provincial coordination — sits with Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economy is not failing because the debt stock is too large. It is failing because the receipts that used to service that debt have stopped arriving. The diagnosis is unsentimental, and the prescriptions are uncomfortable for the federal government he is criticising.

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 30, 2024

We have killed hope: the Nishat CEO on Pakistan's broken engine

with Shahzad Saleem

Shahzad Saleem — founder and CEO of Nishat Chunian Limited, Pakistan's fourth-largest textile group — argues that the current mix of a 20 percent policy rate, a controlled rupee, revenue-based taxation and a vilified IPP sector has pushed many Pakistani businesses into irreversible decline, and that the only way out begins with simplifying tax, shrinking government, restructuring debt and giving the ninety percent a fighting chance at education.

Aug 23, 2024

Islamic economics is the polar opposite of capitalism

with Dr Asad Zaman

Dr Asad Zaman returns to argue that Islamic economics is not a shaded version of capitalism but its polar opposite — built on community rather than the individual, service rather than profit, and self-sufficiency rather than dependence.

Aug 16, 2024

Pakistan will outgrow its government, not be saved by it

with Farooq Tirmizi

Farooq Tirmizi argues Pakistan's bull case does not depend on a perfect leader, foreign bailouts, or structural reform — the math is already in motion through demographics, literacy, and household savings. Muzamil pushes back on every link in the chain.

Aug 5, 2024

Default is a choice: inside Pakistan's $26 billion debt squeeze

with Ahmed Jamal Pirzada

Economist Ahmed Jamal Pirzada walks Muzamil through the arithmetic of Pakistan's external debt — why the rollover game can only run for so long, why default is a policy choice rather than an accident, and why the country has to pick between choking the economy and changing what it produces.

Jul 8, 2024

Pakistan will outgrow its government, not fix it

with Farooq Tirmizi

Farooq Tirmizi argues Pakistan's bull case rests on indicators the government cannot break — falling fertility, rising literacy, and a banking system that will eventually refinance the foreign debt in rupees.

Jun 14, 2024

Default is a choice — and Pakistan keeps choosing to choke instead

with Ahmad Jamal Pirzada

Bristol economist Ahmad Jamal Pirzada walks through the arithmetic of Pakistan's external debt, why restructuring is effectively default with better optics, why three decades of similar reforms left Pakistan, India and Bangladesh on three different trajectories, and why the IMF's growth projections keep flattering the books.

Apr 19, 2024

Pakistan's exports lose at the shelf, not the field

with Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi

MacPac Films managing director Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi on a forty-year packaging journey, surviving a fire that wiped out thirty years of work, the patent that killed bioplastic, and why Pakistani exports keep losing on the shelf instead of the field.

Jan 5, 2024

Pakistan's IT growth is flatlining — and the policy is making it worse

with Syed Ahmad

Syed Ahmad returns to TBT — recorded at the Dubai studio — to walk through what the IT industry actually looks like from the inside: flat growth, a brain drain the country can't yet replace, a tax regime that punishes the companies trying to do things right, and a special technology zones programme he helped design that he now believes is being quietly hollowed out.

Dec 20, 2023

Pakistan's youth is in a stubborn rage — and that's dangerous

with Nabeel Qadeer

Nabeel Qadeer returns to TBT after a year on the road — eighty-plus universities, skill centres across Pakistan, and an unvarnished read on what the country's twenty-two-year-olds are actually feeling. The conversation is honest about hopelessness, sharp on why the startup-and-VC story is the wrong story for Pakistan, and ends with a case for going out, learning, and coming back.

Dec 6, 2023

Zafar Masud: the life I am living now is a borrowed heaven

with Zafar Masud

Bank of Punjab president Zafar Masud sits down with Muzamil for a three-hour conversation that moves from a Lahore middle-class childhood, to running Barclays Southern Africa at 37, to the PIA crash he survived in Karachi, and finally to a precise, sector-by-sector account of why Pakistan's fiscal problem — not its dollar problem — is the one that has to be fixed.

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 15, 2023

Why smart money came into Pakistani startups when everyone left

with Faisal Aftab

Faisal Aftab closed a large foreign-backed round into Pakistani startups at the exact moment the ecosystem was being written off as dead. He walks Muzamil through why he went bearish in early 2022, why he thinks April–June 2023 was the bottom, and why the next cycle won't look like the 2021 bubble.

Nov 3, 2023

Why Pakistan built the power and still cannot deliver it

with Naeem Shafique

Naeem Shafique spent four decades inside General Electric — from commissioning Tarbela's turbines as a fresh graduate to running GE's power business in Pakistan. He walks Muzamil through how the country ended up with surplus generation it can't deliver, a circular-debt trap of its own making, and the unglamorous fix nobody wants to fund.

Oct 27, 2023

What a metric-pass businessman taught a PhD about education

with Dr. Shahid Qureshi

Dr. Shahid Qureshi spent five degrees memorising answers before a businessman with no college admission taught him what education was for. He walks Muzamil through Taxila, Bangkok, a British power plant, LUMS, a German PhD, and twelve years at IBA — and lands on a quieter case for entrepreneurship than the one Pakistan keeps importing.

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 20, 2023

How Shaukat Khanum built world-class cancer care from nothing

with Dr Aasim Yusuf

Dr Aasim Yusuf has run the medicine at Shaukat Khanum for thirty years — from a hospital that opened in a wheat field with no electricity to the first charitable hospital in Pakistan to win US-grade accreditation. He walks Muzamil through how you build an institution that treats most patients for free, why it turns away two thirds of the people who come to it, and what the brain drain is doing to the staff who keep it running.

Oct 13, 2023

Why Pakistan's healthcare crisis is really a pricing problem

with Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan

Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan has spent nearly forty years inside Pakistani medicine, from the army to building Kulsum International Hospital. He walks Muzamil through the unglamorous economics underneath the country's healthcare — why care is underpriced, why young doctors leave, and why a 500-bed medical city only makes sense if you can wait eight years for the payback.

Oct 11, 2023

The electric car policy Pakistan's auto mafia killed

with Malik Amin Aslam

Malik Amin Aslam, Pakistan's former climate adviser, walks Muzamil through the 2019 EV policy that promised a regional head start — and the car cartel that buried it from inside government. Plus the IPP debt trap, the billion-tree project, and why water is the issue no one prices.

Oct 4, 2023

Why a Facebook engineer left Seattle to digitise Pakistani fashion

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal spent fifteen years building recommendation engines at Microsoft Bing, eBay, Pinterest and Facebook — then left a comfortable Seattle life to start LAAM, a fashion marketplace shipping Pakistani clothing to a hundred countries. He explains why South Asian fashion is a multi-billion-dollar export hiding behind broken logistics.

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 13, 2023

The AI scientist who says fundamental science already ended

with Dr. Nasir Ahsan

Dr. Nasir Ahsan went from a rebellious teenager in Saudi Arabia to the founder of Abyss Solutions, a robotics company whose perception software inspects the world's hardest-to-reach infrastructure. He makes an unfashionable case: most of what we call AI is glorified pattern recognition, and fundamental science largely stopped in the 1950s.

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 30, 2023

How Dawlance became a Pakistani engineering story

with Umar Ahsan Khan

Umar Ahsan Khan walked into Dawlance's head office for a two-and-a-half-hour meeting and never really left. He tells Muzamil how a local fridge brand built from scratch in 1980 was sold to a Turkish giant on one condition — keep the name — and what it takes to actually manufacture, not just assemble, in Pakistan.

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 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.

Aug 11, 2023

Pakistan doesn't have a water problem. It has a soil problem.

with Taimur Malik

Taimur Malik traces his path from a Lahore spinning mill to regenerative agriculture, and makes the case that Pakistan's water crisis, nutrient collapse, and broken farm economics are all downstream of one neglected asset — dead soil — and that fixing it is a national security priority, not a luxury.

Ep 354 · Aug 9, 2023

Why cheap data and a small mindset keep Pakistan offline

with Taimur Nawaz

Taimur Nawaz has built telecom careers across Telenor, China Mobile, Qualcomm and now Transworld's fixed broadband and submarine cable business. He walks Muzamil through why Pakistan keeps arriving late to every network generation, why the cheapest data market in the world has no reason to lay fibre, and why the real ceiling on the country's best businesses is mindset, not potential.

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.

Jul 19, 2023

Why Pakistan makes billions of Panadol tablets but can't make the powder

with Farhan M. Haroon

Farhan Haroon runs Haleon Pakistan — maker of Panadol, CAC-1000 and Sensodyne. He walks Muzamil through a triple-qualification sprint out of a humble Karachi home, the GSK demerger, and the uncomfortable economics of a pharma industry that mixes the tablet here but imports the molecule, and exports $200 million a year against India's $24 billion.

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 16, 2023

When you look after people, they look after you

with Amir Paracha & Shehzad Roy

Unilever Pakistan's CEO and education reformer Shehzad Roy argue that paying workers more than the minimum wage is a commercial decision, not charity.

Jun 14, 2023

A bank account doesn't change your life

with Kabeer Naqvi

Kabeer Naqvi, CEO of U Microfinance Bank, on why branches, gold-backed loans, and human judgment reach Pakistan's unbanked majority better than apps do.

Jun 12, 2023

Eighty percent of Pakistan's remittances still move illegally

with Naqqash Hafiz

Naqqash Hafiz of ACE Money Transfer explains why most money sent home still evades legal channels, and how his app moves it in seven seconds.

Jun 9, 2023

Pakistan's economy has never been this dark

with Asad Umar

Former Finance Minister Asad Umar sits down with Muzamil on budget day to deliver a stark diagnosis: Pakistan is in its worst economic crisis ever, it is entirely man-made, and the path out is three to five years of pain — at minimum.

Jun 7, 2023

The self-taught cheese maker feeding Pakistan's restaurants

with Imran Saleh

Imran Saleh taught himself to make artisan cheese from a shop in Lahore, with no training, no formal education in food science, and a tablet of rennet ordered from England. Thirteen years later he runs Farmers Cheese Making, produces 60-plus varieties, and is targeting export by 2025.

Jun 5, 2023

The digital bank built from scratch in nine months

with Noman Azhar

Noman Azhar, Chief Officer of Zindigi, traces his path from a financial crisis in his family to building a fully digital banking experience on a commercial banking license — and explains why Pakistan's cashless revolution is a generational, not a technological, problem.

Jun 2, 2023

Pakistan could be a manufacturing powerhouse by 2050

with Yousuf M. Farooq

Yousuf M. Farooq — Director of Research at Topline Securities and co-founder of Elite Lighting — traces his path from value investing in distressed cement stocks to building a PCB manufacturing business in Pakistan, then makes the case for why labour-intensive manufacturing is the country's most credible long-term bet.

May 29, 2023

The kid who wouldn't have finished tenth grade

with Nadeem Hussain

Nadeem Hussain grew up in a Karachi slum, attended a TCF school that didn't exist before he was born, and went on to MIT and Oxford University Press. In this conversation he traces that journey and turns it into a lens on Pakistan's broken public school system, Sindh's political economy, and whether the country can survive its current fiscal crisis.

May 24, 2023

The tax office that resolves cases in 37 days for free

with Almas Ali Jovindah

Almas Ali Jovindah, Advisor Legal at the Federal Tax Ombudsman, explains how a largely unknown institution is resolving tax harassment cases in 37 days at zero cost — and why Pakistan's cyber crime laws are far broader than anyone realises.

May 19, 2023

Is America a diminishing power?

with Faisal Aftab

Faisal Aftab, founder of Zayn.VC and Pakistan's largest early-stage fund, traces the arc of American monetary dominance from Bretton Woods to its current unraveling — and explains why that cycle is the single most important thing to understand about Pakistan's economic future.

May 17, 2023

Pakistan's rural network reaches 56 million — and nobody knows

with Shandana Khan & Meena Iqbal

Shandana Khan and Meena Iqbal of RSPN explain how a 40-year-old community mobilization model has organized 8.6 million households across Pakistan — and why the government keeps forgetting it exists.

May 15, 2023

The startup building loyalty tech for restaurants

with Yahya Humayun

Yahya Humayun, co-founder and CEO of Pattern App, walks through his journey from EY to Airlift to Dastgyr — and why he left a rocket-ship B2B startup to build loyalty and discovery technology for brick-and-mortar restaurants in Pakistan.

May 8, 2023

Why Islamic economics is neither capitalism nor communism

with Dr. Asad Zaman

Dr. Asad Zaman — economist, former Vice Chancellor of PIDE, and scholar of Islamic economics — sits down with Muzamil to trace a life that moved from MIT at 16 to a full break with Western academic ambition. The conversation covers Eurocentric education, Pakistan's import crisis, the one-party state debate, fiat money, and why Islamic economics is a fundamentally different civilizational project.

May 5, 2023

Pakistan's exports problem has one easy fix: IT

with Dr. Sohail Naqvi

Dr. Sohail Naqvi — former HEC executive director and LUMS vice chancellor — argues that Pakistan's youth is its only real asset, that academia has failed to connect with industry, and that a three-month boot camp can do what four years of university often cannot.

May 3, 2023

Pakistan is a sleeping giant — Ammar Yaseen on investing in a crisis

with Ammar Yaseen

Ammar Yaseen, VP Investments at Sarmaaya.pk, walks through economic cycles, Pakistan's debt profile, quantitative easing, and why a stock market at all-time lows is exactly when you should be investing.

May 1, 2023

The Pakistani who fixed a broken denim factory in Mexico

with A. Rauf Razzak Ganatra

A. Rauf Razzak Ganatra traces 150 years of his family's textile history — from cotton fields in Gujarat to nationalization in Pakistan to running a 2.3-billion-dollar denim plant in Mexico — and explains why Pakistan keeps exporting raw value instead of finished wealth.

Apr 28, 2023

The man quietly connecting rural Pakistan to the internet

with Haaris Mahmood Chaudhary

Haaris Mahmood Chaudhary, CEO of Universal Service Fund Pakistan, explains how a decade-old telecom levy is being used to bring fiber, 4G, and eventually 5G to the most underserved corners of the country — and why connectivity is only the beginning.

Apr 17, 2023

Pakistan's universities are producing toilet paper degrees

with Zia Khan

Zia Khan has spent three decades trying to build a tech-skilled Pakistan — from teaching Java in borrowed offices to running a presidential initiative with 10,000 graduates. His diagnosis of what went wrong is blunt: HEC created a mafia of incompetent PhDs, private universities pass students who learned nothing, and the entire system is fiction.

Apr 14, 2023

Pakistan's politicians aren't incompetent — they're not trying

with Hussain Nadim

Hussain Nadim returns to Thought Behind Things to argue that Pakistan's crisis is not economic at its core — it's a collapse of human spirit, a failure to define national interest, and a political class that is smart enough to know exactly what it is doing.

Apr 12, 2023

Why Pakistan's milk problem is really a policy problem

with Qammar Nawaz

Farmer and engineer Qammar Nawaz breaks down why milk adulteration, sugar regulation, and water misuse are not agricultural problems — they are economic ones that government keeps trying to solve administratively.

Apr 10, 2023

From a village with no electricity to Silicon Valley CEO

with Amin Sukhera

Amin Sukhera grew up in a remote South Punjab village where his mother sold her jewellery to buy him a bicycle for school. He taught himself mathematics, cold-approached a Sun Microsystems engineer at a university seminar, and ended up as VP of Engineering at FireEye — a company that went public with nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue. He came back to Pakistan to run SkyElectric, a solar-plus-cloud-plus-cybersecurity platform he believes is the future of energy distribution.

Apr 5, 2023

Why Pakistan's tourism problem isn't K2

with Azam Jamil

Azam Jamil has spent nearly five decades in hospitality — running hotels, advising prime ministers, and training over 200,000 young Pakistanis. In this conversation he explains why Pakistan's tourism crisis has nothing to do with its mountains, why PIA became a seventies airline trying to survive in 2023, and why the school system's biggest failure is that it never taught children how to lose.

Apr 3, 2023

Why Pakistan's justice system isn't ready for the tsunami ahead

with Shayyan Qaiser

Shayyan Qaiser — barrister, Harvard LLM, former Supreme Court law clerk — traces her journey from Brunei to Lincoln's Inn to the Asia Bibi judgment, then turns to the question Pakistan isn't asking: are we building a justice system for the population that's coming, not just the backlog we already have?

Mar 29, 2023

Pakistan is stuck in history while the world moves on

with Mohammad Zubair Umar

Former Governor of Sindh Mohammad Zubair Umar sits down with Muzamil to trace a career from IBM to the cabinet, dissect the structural failures behind Pakistan's 23rd IMF programme, and make the case for regional trade, electoral continuity, and reforms that no government has yet had the courage to finish.

Mar 27, 2023

The man who gave away an empire and started over

with Chaudhry Junaid Afzaal

Chaudhry Junaid Afzaal built a twelve-year real estate empire, handed it all over without taking a rupee, and started Nova Group from scratch. This conversation covers that decision, Pakistan's broken housing model, why IB beats O-levels, and what it takes to teach character to a five-year-old.

Mar 24, 2023

The logistics startup that solved payments first

with Muhammad Hassan Khan

Hassan Khan built two logistics companies before raising $4 million. The insight that started it all had nothing to do with trucks — it was about why small sellers waited thirty days to get paid.

Mar 20, 2023

Pakistan's IT exports vs one Tata subsidiary

with Qasim Asad Salam

Qasim Asad Salam built Remotebase out of a San Francisco garage with 45 days of runway left. He talks talent pipelines, the buddy system, generative AI, and why Pakistan's political collapse might not matter.

Mar 17, 2023

How foodpanda became an innovation lab for delivery hero

with Ibad ur Rehman Ahmed & Syed Maz Hashmi

Ibad ur Rehman and Syed Maz Hashmi — the heads of Q-Commerce and Finance at foodpanda Pakistan — walk through how Panda Mart was built from scratch, why quick commerce is still a real business despite the global pullback, and how Pakistan became one of Delivery Hero's top-performing markets in Asia.

Mar 15, 2023

The EU Ambassador who grew up translating for her refugee grandmother

with Dr. Riina Kionka

Dr. Riina Kionka — EU Ambassador to Pakistan — on growing up as a child of Estonian refugees in Michigan, how the European Union was built as a peace project, Russia's war on Ukraine, climate finance, and what legal migration between Pakistan and Europe could look like.

Mar 13, 2023

Why Pakistan needs dollars, not remittances

with Laeeq Ahmed

Laeeq Ahmed returns for his fourth appearance on TBT to talk about dollarized portfolios, the real estate trap, Pakistan's IT opportunity, and why the country needs business from its diaspora — not just money sent home.

Ep 309 · Mar 10, 2023

Asad Umar: Pakistan cannot grow without deep reform

with Asad Umar

Asad Umar joins Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economic crisis is structural, not a bad ten months: real estate as a black-money sink, an import bill larger than its exports can ever retire, and reforms the country's most powerful interests keep blocking.

Mar 8, 2023

The engineer who built Pakistan's first fiber network

with Wahaj Siraj

Wahaj Siraj, CEO of Nayatel, traces his path from a government engineer who couldn't write a proper letter to the man who laid Pakistan's first fiber-to-the-home network — and explains why the country's telecom industry is being strangled by the very regulators meant to grow it.

Mar 6, 2023

Why freelancing alone will never make you rich

with Saddam Hasan

Saddam Hasan built a 150-person Amazon creative agency from a side hustle while working a corporate job at DHL. He breaks down why Pakistan's freelancing boom created more damage than wealth, and what it actually takes to go from zero to a million-dollar agency.

Mar 3, 2023

Pakistan's pension system will collapse in ten years

with Taimur Khan Jhagra

Former KP Finance Minister Taimur Khan Jhagra walks through Pakistan's fiscal crisis, the IMF controversy, the Sehat Card, and the pension reform that every government before him refused to touch.

Mar 1, 2023

Pakistan's real estate is a lottery, not an investment

with Zeeshan Akram Qureshi

Zeeshan Akram Qureshi, CEO of ZEM Builders, makes the case that Pakistan's plot-buying culture is a gambling habit dressed up as investment — and that the country's future depends on vertical construction, not sprawling land speculation.

Feb 27, 2023

Why Pakistan keeps choosing real estate over growth

with Gonzalo Varela

World Bank economist Gonzalo Varela explains how Pakistan's tax distortions, import duties, and underbanked economy trap the country in a cycle of boom, bust, and low productivity — and what a realistic road map out looks like.

Feb 24, 2023

All roads lead to restructuring

with Javed Hassan

Economist and former NAVTTC chair Javed Hassan returns to map Pakistan's debt spiral in unflinching detail — and argues that default, devaluation, and IMF programs are all just detours on the road to the same destination: structural reform.

Feb 22, 2023

Suleman Sharif: 'Pakistan treated wealth creation as a sin'

with Suleman Shehbaz Sharif

Suleman Shehbaz Sharif — businessman, son of the prime minister — walks through the Sharif family's industrial history, his nineteen-month money-laundering investigation in the UK, and why he believes Pakistan's economic crises trace back to a single engineered regime change in 2017.

Feb 20, 2023

Muzamil Hasan on going global and Pakistan's reform moment

with Syed Muzamil Hasan Zaidi

In a role reversal, Muzamil Hasan sits in the guest chair and talks through Season 3's biggest firsts, Pakistan's structural economic crisis, the rise of centrist thinking, and why he has registered a media company in Dubai.

Feb 16, 2023

Imran Khan on the cipher, the economy, and refusing to quit

with Imran Khan

A special sit-down with former Prime Minister Imran Khan, recorded from the room he was confined to after his leg injury. He lays out his account of the cipher and his removal, contrasts Pakistan's economic indicators ten months apart, and argues that rule of law, not a single genius economic plan, is the only reform that matters.

Jan 11, 2023

Pakistan is on the precipice — and holding itself back

with Asif Aziz

Asif Aziz, Chief Commercial Officer of Jazz, on why 90 million internet users still isn't enough, why 5G spectrum pricing is killing the future before it starts, and why Pakistan in 2050 will be either formidable or finished — with no middle ground.

Dec 21, 2022

How inDrive became Pakistan's no.1 ride-hailing app

with Hasan Ali Khureshi, Petrov Afinasé, Sidra Kiran

inDrive expanded into 47 countries on just $140 million in total funding, no VC conditions attached. The team behind Pakistan's fastest-growing ride-hailing app explains how they did it — and why the model works here.

Dec 19, 2022

Why Pakistan has less than 1% of merchants digitized

with Fawad Abdul Kader

Fawad Abdul Kader, Founding CEO of Contrivus and former Country Head of Paymob Pakistan, breaks down why digital payments have stalled in Pakistan, what it actually takes to onboard a small merchant, and why he believes the next decade will look nothing like the last.

Dec 16, 2022

The physicist who came back to build Pakistan's science

with Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar

Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar left UC Berkeley to become the first faculty member of LUMS's School of Science and Engineering. Fifteen years later, he reflects on quantum computing, science in Urdu, and why Pakistan's problems are large but not unsolvable.

Dec 14, 2022

Why Pakistan's economy can't be fixed by the free market

with Dr. Taimur Rahman

Dr. Taimur Rahman traces Pakistan's political economy from the Mughal era through colonial capitalism, the 22-families boom, OPEC, and the neoliberal decades — and argues that the market alone cannot fix what ails the country.

Dec 2, 2022

History doesn't repeat — it rhymes

with Faisal Warraich

Faisal Warraich — historian, documentary filmmaker, and creator of Pakistan's largest educational YouTube channel — sits down with Muzamil to trace his journey from a government school in Okara to building Dekho Suno Jano, and to make a sweeping argument about why Pakistan's problems are rooted in identity, not ideology.

Nov 30, 2022

The VC who came back to fix Pakistan's universities

with Dr. Arshad Ahmad

Dr. Arshad Ahmad, Vice Chancellor of LUMS, traces a career built on failure, curiosity, and the slow craft of learning how to teach — then explains what he is trying to do about Pakistan's broken education system.

Ep 288 · Nov 28, 2022

Abdul Razak Dawood: a Memon village, Columbia, and building DESCON

with Abdul Razak Dawood

Abdul Razak Dawood traces a life from a Memon village with no electricity to Columbia, the Lawrencepur mill, the loss of East Pakistan, and the founding of DESCON, then explains his bet on Africa, exports, and sports.

Nov 21, 2022

Pakistan's politics won't change until the economy is fixed

with Moonis Elahi

Moonis Elahi — politician, former Federal Minister for Water Resources, and scion of the Chaudhry political family — sits down with Muzamil to talk about election rigging, dynasty politics, the case for a national economic roadmap, and why delaying elections will only make PTI stronger.

Nov 18, 2022

The man who built Pakistan's tourism startup through COVID

with Muhammad Komail Abbas

Muhammad Komail Abbas built FindMyAdventure from a Facebook status asking if anyone could build a website, survived COVID with a skeleton team, and eventually merged with GoZayaan. He talks about co-founder equity, the limits of tech-first thinking in tourism, and what Jack Ma told him about success.

Nov 16, 2022

Why Pakistan's fintechs are failing the masses

with Atyab Tahir

Atyab Tahir — former CEO of JazzCash and country head of Mastercard Pakistan — sits down with Muzamil to diagnose why Pakistan's fintech revolution has stalled, who is really to blame, and what a genuinely inclusive digital financial system would look like.

Nov 14, 2022

The industrialist betting on South Punjab's future

with Anees Khawaja

Anees Khawaja of Mahmood Group on building textile and apparel operations in Multan, the case for a South Punjab province, energy policy blind spots, organic cotton, and why he still sees Pakistan prospering by 2050.

Nov 11, 2022

Pakistan's first female-founded VC fund on what's broken

with Kalsoom Lakhani and Misbah Naqvi

Kalsoom Lakhani and Misbah Naqvi of i2i Ventures trace their unlikely paths from defense contracting and Citibank to building Pakistan's first female-founded venture capital fund — and make the case that good founders will always find money, even when the market dries up.

Nov 9, 2022

Pakistan's freelancers built this industry themselves

with Mohsin Muzaffar

Mohsin Muzaffar, Payoneer's country head for Pakistan, traces his path from a failed job search in 2009 to building the country's freelancing ecosystem — and makes a blunt case for what Pakistan must fix before 2050.

Nov 7, 2022

Why skill always comes before money in digital marketing

with Ali Khan Swati

Ali Khan Swati built three companies across digital marketing, e-commerce, and cosmetics — and he has a sharp critique of how Pakistan's tech influencer culture is selling dreams instead of discipline.

Nov 4, 2022

The engineer who wrote to Pakistan's president about stents

with Prof. Dr. Murtaza Najabat Ali

Dr. Murtaza Najabat Ali built Pakistan's first research-driven cardiac stent facility from scratch — twice. A conversation about medical device manufacturing, the triple helix model, and what a cancer diagnosis clarified about purpose.

Nov 2, 2022

The man trying to fix Pakistan's broken food supply chain

with Rafael Llerena

Rafael Llerena, CEO of Easy Fresh, walks through the broken economics of Pakistan's agriculture supply chain — the arhtis, the mandis, the 35% post-harvest losses — and explains why fixing it starts with the farmer, not the retailer.

Oct 28, 2022

Why Pakistan cricket is stuck in 1992

with Taimoor Ali Khan

Pakistan's first and only sports psychologist for the national cricket team, Taimoor Ali Khan, breaks down why the team keeps choking, why the PCB operates like a charity case, and what a two-tier PSL with promotion and relegation could do for the sport.

Oct 26, 2022

Why Karachi's housing crisis is a governance problem

with Humza Yaqoob Tabani

Humza Tabani — CEO of Tabani Group, former airline operator, and construction developer — walks through what it actually takes to build in Karachi: 17 agencies, political interference, and a land market pumped full of black money.

Oct 24, 2022

The American who saw Pakistan before the VCs did

with Brandon Temensky

Brandon Temensky, CEO and founder of SadaPay, traces the unlikely path from selling Twitter followers as a teenager in Miami to building one of Pakistan's most talked-about fintech products — and explains why the country's payments revolution is not a matter of if, but when.

Oct 19, 2022

Going from 700 employees to 7,000: Umar Javed's plan

with Umar Javed

Umar Javed, founder and CEO of tkxel, traces his path from running a tuition academy in Lahore to building a $20M+ IT services company — and explains why demand generation, not load-shedding, was always the real problem.

Oct 14, 2022

Food Panda's bet on Pakistan as its biggest market

with Muntaqa Peracha & Waqas Asar

Muntaqa Peracha and Waqas Asar walk through Food Panda's evolution from a restaurant order-forwarder to a multi-vertical platform with 50,000 listed riders, dark stores, virtual brands, and ambitions that look a lot like Amazon — all inside a company that insists it is not a startup.

Oct 12, 2022

The doctor you couldn't find in three days

with Ehsan Imam & Asma Salman Omar

Ehsan Imam and Asma Salman Omar, co-founders of MARHAM, trace how a personal medical crisis, a 40-page document, and a nine-minute Facebook conversation became a platform serving over 1.5 million patients across 121 Pakistani cities.

Oct 10, 2022

Pakistan's tennis players are winning without support

with Muhammad Shoaib & Abdullah Adnan

Two of Pakistan's top tennis players — Muhammad Shoaib and Abdullah Adnan — sit down with Muzamil to talk about what it actually takes to compete internationally when your country gives you almost nothing to work with.

Oct 7, 2022

The trucker's son who raised $17.5M to fix freight

with Muhammad Sarmad Farooq

Muhammad Sarmad Farooq grew up watching his family's trucking business run on landline calls and handwritten slips. He spent five years at Careem, moved to Dubai, and came back to Pakistan to digitise the industry from the inside. This is how he did it.

Oct 5, 2022

The VC who writes the first check in Pakistan

with Shehryar Hydri

Shehryar Hydri built a game studio, ran a SaaS company, led Pakistan's largest software association, and then started writing early-stage checks when nobody else would. This is the story of why — and what he found on the other side.

Oct 3, 2022

Pakistan is near the cusp of disaster

with Javed Hassan

Economic analyst Javed Hassan returns to Thought Behind Things to explain why Pakistan's political instability triggered a financial crisis, why a strong mandate matters more than technocrats, and what Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea can teach Pakistan about surviving collapse.

Sep 28, 2022

Pakistan's houses are built to be resold, not to be lived in

with Wahaaj Nauman Qureshi

Wahaaj Nauman Qureshi, CEO of Beau Monde Estates, traces his path from bank sales floors to real estate, then dismantles the industry's core dysfunction: a system where developers, dealers, and investors all profit while the end user is left holding a depreciating file.

Sep 19, 2022

Three bankruptcies before building a million-member community

with Sunny Ali

Sunny Ali, founder of Extreme Commerce, traces three bankruptcies across Australia and Malaysia, the accidental birth of Pakistan's largest e-commerce community, and the hard questions about trust, cult behaviour, and whether the industry is actually delivering on its promises.

Jul 18, 2022

Why Pakistan won't just buy gas from Russia

with Syed Ali Zia Jaffery

Syed Ali Zia Jaffery joins Muzamil to map Pakistan's foreign policy choices — from the Ukraine war's ripple effects to the India-Pakistan deadlock and why taking cheap Russian oil is harder than it sounds.

Jul 8, 2022

Pakistan is a carbon gold mine. Here's the plan.

with Talha Khan & Hassan Anwar

Talha Khan and Hassan Anwar of Pakistan Environment Trust make the case that climate change is not just a crisis for Pakistan — it is the country's single biggest economic opportunity. From carbon credits to rhino rewilding, this is the most ambitious green vision for Pakistan you will hear.

Jul 6, 2022

Pakistan's first premium pet food brand, made in Karachi

with Rafae Dossal

Rafae Dossal launched Waggles in January 2020 from a home kitchen, building Pakistan's first premium natural pet food brand. With five crore rupees in revenue, a donation platform for animal shelters, and exports to Dubai launching next month, he joins TV personality Anoushey Ashraf to talk about import substitution, animal welfare, and what it takes to manufacture locally.

Jul 4, 2022

Can 5G save Pakistan's economy?

with Yang Gu, Kashif Junaidi (Pasha), Akram Ali

A panel of three guests — OPPO's brand director for South Asia, the chairman of Pasha, and the head of business at Pro Pakistani — sit down with Muzamil to map out what 5G could actually mean for Pakistan: not faster YouTube, but autonomous farm drones, remote surgery, and a $60 billion new economy.

Jul 1, 2022

The BNPL startup targeting Pakistan's unbanked majority

with Arif Lakhani

Arif Lakhani built a buy-now-pay-later marketplace for people earning 25,000 to 50,000 rupees a month — the customers Pakistani banks won't serve. Eight months in, NPL is under 0.5% and monthly orders have grown from 250 to 2,000.

Jun 27, 2022

Can consuming less tea solve Pakistan's forex crisis?

with Fahad Yousaf

Fahad Yousaf, head of business at Nescafe Pakistan, talks about switching careers three times before finding his footing, why processed milk still holds less than 10% of Pakistan's dairy market, and what it actually takes to shift a nation of tea drinkers toward coffee.

Jun 24, 2022

Pakistan's fintech gap: one in twenty unbanked people

with M. Mudassar Aqil

Mudassar Aqil, CEO of Telenor Microfinance Bank and Easypaisa, walks through why 70% of Pakistanis still lack basic banking, why cash will not die without government intervention, and why the next four years could change everything.

Jun 20, 2022

Pakistan's farms are top 10 in output, bottom 50 in yield

with Muhammed Bukhari

Muhammed Bukhari left a GM role at British Telecom to build Farmdar, a GeoAI startup using satellite imagery to fix Pakistan's agriculture from the inside. The conversation covers why supply chain is not the answer, how 21 bands of light can replace soil sensors, and why Pakistan's unfair advantage is farming.

Jun 17, 2022

Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert on building things

with Saad Hamid

Saad Hamid — Google's Regional Lead for Developer Community Programs and Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert — traces a winding path from a cadet college in Skardu to Singapore, through blogging, nonprofits, accelerators, and a career app called Jadu. The conversation covers discipline, curiosity, Pakistan's IT talent gap, and what coherence would actually take.

Jun 15, 2022

Jazz's CEO on why 4G for all beats 5G for a few

with Aamir Ibrahim

Aamir Ibrahim, CEO of Jazz, and Saif Ali of Dastgyr join Muzamil to unpack Pakistan's largest Series A equity round, the real barriers to fintech adoption, and why the telecom industry may be heading toward digital dark ages if ARPU doesn't rise.

Jun 13, 2022

How Pakistan's socio-economic classes are actually measured

with Kashif Hafeez Siddiqui

Kashif Hafeez Siddiqui, CEO of Pulse Consultant, breaks down how Pakistan is divided into 16 cultural belts, why only 2.5% of the country is truly upper class, and what media and marketing get wrong about the society they claim to understand.

Jun 8, 2022

Why Krave Mart won't lay off anyone for 18 months

with Haziq Ahmed

Haziq Ahmed, COO of Krave Mart, traces a winding path from Karachi's army schools to Manchester's textile program to food delivery logistics — and explains why quick commerce's real product is warehousing infrastructure, not groceries.

May 27, 2022

Who really destroyed Karachi?

with Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman

Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, president of Jamaat-e-Islami Karachi, walks through the structural failures behind the city's decline — from a rigged census and gutted transport to water shortages and a feudal mindset that has outlasted the feudal countryside.

May 23, 2022

Pakistan has three to four weeks before it defaults

with Javed Hassan

Economist Javed Hassan walks through Pakistan's reserve crisis, the structural flaws that keep producing balance-of-payments emergencies, and why the country's only real path out is to stop protecting industries that have never learned to compete.

May 13, 2022

The man building Pakistan's electric mobility revolution

with Mohammad Hadi

Mohammad Hadi left fifteen years at Credit Suisse and Citibank to return to Pakistan and build EzBike — the country's first electric scooter-sharing startup. He talks about Wall Street's cowboy culture, why ride-hailing is fundamentally broken, and what it will take to put 22 million motorcycles on electric power.

Apr 29, 2022

Why Pakistan's BPO industry never scaled like India's

with Salman Wajid Mian

Salman Wajid Mian, Chief Process Outsourcing Officer at Systems Limited, traces his journey from genetic engineering at Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to building 2,700-seat contact centers — and explains why Pakistan's BPO sector squandered its early lead while India and the Philippines pulled ahead.

Apr 25, 2022

Pakistan's cash economy and the fintech fixing it

with Omar Moeen Malik, Omar Aftab, Huzaifa Ahmed

Omar Moeen Malik of Easypaisa, Omar Aftab of Pink Ribbon, and Huzaifa Ahmed of RIZQ sit down with Muzamil to talk mobile wallets, breast cancer taboos, food wastage, and why Pakistan's next decade might be its most transformative.

Apr 15, 2022

Pakistan has no worthy number two to Systems Limited

with Kashif Manzoor

Kashif Manzoor — SVP at Systems Limited and former head of Confiz — traces a career that ran from Schlumberger oil fields in Qatar to setting up an offshore center in Beijing, and explains why Pakistan's IT services boom could stall without a credible second player.

Apr 4, 2022

PakWheels wasn't revenue positive until 2022

with Suneel Sarfraz Munj

Suneel Munj built Pakistan's dominant automotive marketplace over nearly two decades without turning a profit — and he's fine with that. A conversation about classified platforms, car inspections, electric vehicles, and what success actually means.

Feb 21, 2022

The CEO who took a demotion to join Unilever

with Amir R. Paracha

Amir Paracha, CEO of Unilever Pakistan, traces a winding path from a failed air force medical, a ditched engineering degree, and a deliberate step down in title to eventually leading one of Pakistan's largest companies through its first weeks of COVID-19.

Jan 19, 2022

Pakistan's IT problem is disconnection, not potential

with Mashroor Hussain

Mashroor Hussain, founder of CXO Global Forum and Dynamic Folio, sits with Muzamil to dissect why Pakistan's IT exports keep missing their targets — the institutional disconnection at the top, the talent pipeline that does not exist at the bottom, and the self-centric mindset that stops good ideas from scaling.

Jan 3, 2022

Why Pakistan's factories still push, when the world has moved to pull

with Badar Khushnood

Badar Khushnood — Bramerz co-founder, P@SHA chairman, and an architect of Pakistan's first national e-commerce policy — walks Muzamil through the country's first B2B portal in 2002, the nine years he spent building Google's Pakistan presence, why Fishry is built around brand-conscious SMEs, and why a $4B domestic e-commerce market still struggles to export.

Dec 24, 2021

Pakistan's farmland is a science problem, not a land problem

with Saad Tamman

Saad Tamman — actuarial scientist turned farmer turned PM's strategic reforms unit lead — walks Muzamil through how a tomato farm went bankrupt because of a one-day price control, why 70% of agricultural technology is the seed itself, and what really happened inside the room when PTI's hundred-day plan was being written.

Dec 20, 2021

Pakistan has the largest Muslim diaspora in Silicon Valley

with Arzish Azam

Arzish Azam — CEO of Ijad Labs and country manager for Startup Grind — on why a software engineer is worth more to Pakistan than a textile worker, the case for a national emergency on digital skills, and why remote work, not freelancing, is the wave the country cannot afford to miss.

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 19, 2021

The obvious is the hardest thing to discover in Pakistan's economy

with Muzzammil Aslam

Muzzammil Aslam, spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, walks through what the rupee, the auto sector, the agriculture base, and Pakistan's habit of protecting the wrong people actually mean — and why the policies that hurt today are the ones that stop a bigger fall in 2023.

Nov 5, 2021

Pakistan is the largest underserved retail market in the world

with Kamran Shaukat

Kamran Shaukat walks through a career that ran from Alcatel and McDonald's to Shell, Walmart and finally EZBuy Pakistan — and explains why a former global sourcing director walked away from corporate security to bet on a country with 220 million underserved consumers.

Nov 3, 2021

Pakistan's import duties are, in effect, export taxes

with Gonzalo Varela

World Bank senior economist Gonzalo Varela walks Muzamil through why Pakistan's export sector has eroded for two decades — a real exchange rate held artificially strong, one of the world's most protected tariff structures, and a policy posture that quietly punishes anyone who tries to sell abroad.

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 10, 2021

Pakistan's regulations are built to punish, not to enable

with Ammar Habib Khan

Karandaaz Chief Risk Officer Ammar Habib Khan walks through what risk management actually means in Pakistan, why financial inclusion stalls at the mindset layer, what Raast could unlock if banks let it, and the only two scenarios he sees for the country in 2050.

Aug 6, 2021

Why Pakistan drew a border around technology

with Hamza Saeed

Hamza Saeed, Director of Planning at Pakistan's Special Technology Zones Authority, walks through how China's Shenzhen model is being adapted for Pakistan's knowledge workers — and why this time the incentives are written into law instead of an SRO that can be cancelled overnight.

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.

Jul 14, 2021

Why the car scheme was the wrong gift for overseas Pakistanis

with Ariba Shahid

Reuters correspondent Ariba Shahid talks about stumbling into journalism, what a week of reporting actually looks like, why the overseas Pakistani car scheme picked the wrong sector, and where the line between trolling and harassment sits.