ALY & MO
ALY & MO

First episode, late October 2026.

Two students who don’t pretend to know.

We ask until it makes sense.

Aly and Mo, drawn as cartoons, bumping fists.

Aly Bazzi

First year at Penn, from Lebanon.

  • TEDx speaker.
  • Founded a water bottle company with a temperature display, heating and a built-in filter.
  • Started the first investment club at his school.
  • Hosts Grey Matters, a Penn podcast.
  • Sits on the conference committee of the Wharton Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Club.
  • The first intern under 18 at Ashi Studio, a couture house that shows at Paris Fashion Week, where he learned how a business runs and how people behave.

On camera. Aly asks the blunt question. He asks what nobody else will, and he’s funny while he does it. He gets answers out of people that a polite interviewer never would.

Mo Alkhayyat

First year at Penn, from Dubai.

  • Founded ThermaLabs, a wearable cooling company, patent pending, in Penn’s Venture Lab incubator.
  • Ran a podcast before this one, so he’s done the hours. His speaking has got a lot better since.
  • Played semi-professional football in the UAE Second Division, and for the UAE under-20 national team.

On camera. Mo asks the simple one. If a ten-year-old couldn’t follow the answer, he asks it again.

Why the two of us

Our two profiles fit together. Aly makes it fun and pushes, and Mo makes it make sense. We also get along, and we work hard, which matters more than it sounds when you’re putting out episode after episode.

We both want to spend our lives on work that improves how people live, through business, NGOs and government. That kind of work only spreads when someone can explain it simply. That’s what we do for our guests: we take their work to people who would never read the paper, and make sure it sticks.

Podcasts are usually one of three things.

Most of them also hand you the conclusion. We’d rather give you the evidence, and let you decide for yourself.

For people who want to learn complicated things in a simple way.

People who are curious and already watch hour-long interviews on YouTube. They want to feel like they learned something real.

People who read, and who want the research without reading a journal.

Where it goes

  1. Pennwe’re here

    We start here, because the research here is some of the best in the world.

  2. Other universities

    Then we go wider, to the people doing the best work everywhere else.

  3. Anyone

    And then to anyone whose work most people never get to see.

We want an audience that argues with us in the comments, and then tells us what they actually did with it.

Aly and Mo at a podcast desk with microphones, a laptop and headphones.

Where we film

The Hechtman Recording Studio, room 322 in Van Pelt Library. It has proper cameras, a green screen, a podcast desk and microphones.

Full episodes go on YouTube and Spotify.

Work with us