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Mo Islam

Co-founder & CEO; Host, Valley of Depth, Arkaea Media Group

Search every verified Mo Islam interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mo Islam, founder and host of The Mo Show, appeared on The Riyal Deal podcast in September 2026, where he discussed the origins and growth of his English-language podcast based in Saudi Arabia. He said the idea came to him during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, motivated by what he described as a gap between life in Saudi Arabia and its portrayal abroad. Islam stated that the show, which he said is approaching 200 episodes and has accumulated hundreds of millions of YouTube views, was inspired by the format of The Joe Rogan Experience. He also reflected on memorable guests, including an episode with Mo Gawdat that he said educated him on topics such as AI and universal basic income. During the interview, Islam addressed perceptions of Saudi Arabia in Western media and the country's transformation under Vision 2030. He said he wished critics would acknowledge accomplishments beyond giga-projects, citing an increase in female labor force participation from 6% to 36% over the past two decades as an example that he said does not receive attention. He also commented on the growth of Saudi sports, noting that international viewers now follow the domestic football league due to high-profile player investments, and mentioned his personal support for Chelsea.

Recent appearances

  • ‘Misunderstood & Misrepresented: Mo Islam on Changing the Saudi Narrative | The Riyal Deal

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 Al Arabiya English

    Mohammed Islam, founder and host of The Mo Show, joins Tom Burges Watson on The Riyal Deal to discuss how a lockdown idea grew into one of Saudi Arabia’s leading podcasts - with nearly 200 episodes and hundreds of millions of YouTube views. Islam explains why challenging misconceptions about Saudi Arabia has become central to the show, reflects on some of his most memorable guests, and discusses what he sees as persistent negative portrayals of the Kingdom in Western media. Ahead of the Kingdom’s National Day, he also shares his perspective on Saudi Arabia’s transformation under Vision 2030 -…

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  • The Flying Supply Chain, with Isaac Roberts (CSO of Skyways)

    August 13, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Skyways has spent nearly a decade working on a problem most of the drone industry largely ignored: logistics. While billions poured into drones built to see targets or strike them, Skyways focused on something less flashy but arguably just as important: moving critical supplies without putting people in harm’s way. That bet is starting to look increasingly prescient. The company has worked with the U.S. military since its earliest days and is now building its V3 aircraft to carry 100 pounds of payload up to 1,000 nautical miles. The longer-term ambition is much bigger: use defense to mature a…

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  • The Reactor Renaissance, with Jordan Bramble (CEO of Antares)

    July 29, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Antares just closed a massive $470M Series C, was welcomed to the Oval Office by President Trump to celebrate becoming the first startup to achieve reactor criticality under the Department of Energy's reactor pilot program, and is now racing toward delivering the first commercial microreactors to the U.S. military. Just three years after being founded, the company expects to surpass $1B in defense contracts while attempting to restart America's nuclear industrial base. CEO Jordan Bramble joins Valley of Depth to unpack what it actually took to build and operate a nuclear reactor in under a ye…

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  • The Spacecraft Factory, with Ian Cinnamon (CEO of Apex)

    July 15, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Ian Cinnamon didn’t set out to build a satellite company. After selling his first startup to Palantir, he became convinced the real bottleneck in space wasn’t launch or payloads, but the spacecraft itself. While rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, satellite buses were still being built like bespoke engineering projects. Apex’s answer was simple in theory and incredibly difficult in practice: turn spacecraft into products. Four years later, Apex is building standardized satellite platforms for commercial and national security customers, with a product lineup that now spans…

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  • Solving America’s Drone Problem, with Soren Monroe-Anderson (CEO of Neros)

    July 08, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Soren Monroe-Anderson grew up racing FPV drones before turning that obsession into Neros, a defense startup building low-cost, high-volume drone systems for the United States and its allies. What began with prototypes in a basement has become a 200-person company producing roughly 1,000 drones a week, with plans to build a factory capable of making one million annually. The timing is difficult to ignore. Small drones have become one of the defining weapons of the war in Ukraine, China holds a massive production advantage and the Pentagon is now trying to catch up in a category it was slow to…

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  • Fighter Jets in Space, with Eric Romo (President & COO of Impulse)

    July 01, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Eric Romo spent his early career as employee #13 at SpaceX, left for nearly two decades, and came back to one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space economy: what happens after launch. Getting things to orbit is largely figured out. Moving them once they're there is not. Impulse is now over $1B raised, embedded in the Golden Dome architecture, and with a GEO rideshare program booked out before a first flight. We get into how they got there, why Eric thinks every business model predicated on cheap Starship launch is broken, and what it actually means to be building in-space mobility at…

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  • The Global Ground Layer, with Bridgit Mendler (CEO of Northwood)

    June 24, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Bridgit Mendler took an unconventional path to founding a space infrastructure company, but it led her to one of the industry’s most overlooked bottlenecks: the ground systems connecting satellites to Earth. Now, she’s building Northwood to modernize that critical layer of the space economy, the part that doesn’t get the headlines but matters as much as anything happening above it. Northwood recently announced its new Prism product, and we get into the business model, the competitive landscape, the government bet, and one of the most critical questions: if Starlink and Kuiper have already bu…

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  • The OG Defense Check, with Ross Fubini (Managing Partner of XYZ VC)

    June 10, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    On this week's episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, for a conversation about what it actually means to be early in a market nobody believed in. Ross wrote the first check into Anduril in 2016, alongside Founders Fund, before defense tech was a category, before the term sheet wars, and before the word "primes" became a punchline on X. He did it because he'd spent years inside the Palantir network and understood something others couldn't see from the outside: that the company was an unparalleled crucible for entrepreneurial talent, c…

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  • A Firefly Future, with Jason Kim (CEO of Firefly Aerospace)

    June 03, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    On this week's episode of Valley of Depth, our first recorded in person, we sit down with Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, in the company's historic Blue Ghost mission control room in Cedar Park, Texas — the same room where 60 engineers watched their lander touch down at one meter per second last year. From there, the conversation opens into how Jason actually thinks: about the Moon, about scale, and about being a "mission CEO" rather than a hardware or software one. Firefly went public in 2025, acquired defense software company SciTec within months, and now sits inside Golden Dome. Jaso…

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  • The Speed Advantage, with Zach Shore (CEO of Hermeus)

    May 29, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    The United States hasn't flown a Mach 3-plus reusable aircraft since the SR-71 was retired in 1990. Hermeus wants to change that and they want to do it faster, cheaper, and with a fraction of the capital. This week we sit down with Zach Shore, newly appointed CEO, at the moment the company's bet is starting to pay off. Zach walks us through his evolution from VP of Growth to CEO, the company's record-breaking $219 million DIU contract, and a $350 million raise that has Hermeus entering its most consequential chapter yet. But the real conversation is about the machine behind the machine …how a…

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  • The New Ground Truth, with Dan Smoot (CEO of Vantor)

    May 20, 2026 · 📺 Arkaea Media Group

    Commercial geospatial intelligence has moved from nice-to-have imagery to core national security infrastructure. And Vantor is trying to reposition itself for that new era. On this week’s episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Dan Smoot, CEO of Vantor, to unpack the company’s transformation from a legacy satellite imagery provider into a space-based intelligence platform serving defense, intelligence, international, and enterprise customers. The shift is bigger than a rebrand. Vantor is betting that the future of geospatial intelligence is not just sharper pixels from orbit, but the abi…

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  • Arkaea Media Group CEO Mo Islam Talks Space Race Before HawkEye 360 First Trade

    May 07, 2026 · 📺 New York Stock Exchange

    Watch on YouTube ↗

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I just wish the critics would give us a little bit more credit. I guess they wouldn't be critics if they're going to give us credit for things, but be a little bit less critical of what we have accomplished, and there's a lot that has been accomplished. And away from the giga projects, if I told you that 20 years ago female participation was 6% and today it's 36%, you know, that doesn't make headlines. That's not sex”

“Because one of the things that we believe, that I believe, is I think, you know, the common knock against microreactors is the levelized cost of electricity is not competitive with the alternatives or other forms of nuclear.”

“Which I think is flawed logic, right? Like I've heard this from plenty of candidates before, which I completely understand if people don't want to work on defense. If it's not for them, that's honestly completely fine. I think a healthy society is one where a very small percentage of people choose or need to work on defense. But for the people who understand that it's important, they want to work in the space, but th”

“I think it's an interesting point, right? Because like realistically, you know, like from, and look, I'm by no means an expert on the manufacturing side, but it's relatively clear to me that in neither of our lifetimes are we going to see us match necessarily manufacturing capabilities of China on like, for example, just using drones as an example. So it feels like we're always going to be chasing like a larger and l”

“I think it has changed pretty meaningfully, right? Because you had the 2020 to 2022 sort of ZERP era financing bubble on the private side. Obviously you had the SPAC side, and at the time a lot of stuff was getting funded at very large scales. I mean, there were many launch companies that had raised close to a billion dollars apiece. And, you know, obviously they didn't work, but I think it's starting to become very ”

“I obviously agree with everything you're saying. I do think it's interesting because you look at these decks — these fundraising pictures and these decks — and you see revenue ramps, and they're all like, 'Hey, well, you know, if this becomes the program of record and if we capture X dollars of this program, then this is how much money we can make.' And it just assumes that, okay, yeah, you're going to build this gre”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →