Interviews

How Aly Khalifa Became the Internet’s Most Honest Multi-Hyphenate

BYYassine Hariss

November 20, 2025

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that every individual goes through two key stages of socialization— the process through which we learn the norms, values, and habits of the society we live in. First comes what he refers to as primary socialization, which starts at home. This is where kids will absorb all the basics from language and manners to the general lens through which they’ll see and understand the world around them.

Then comes what he calls secondary socialization, which usually happens at school, with friends, at work (essentially in spaces outside the family’s reach) that either reinforce or push back against what was learned early on. Understanding this will help us understand how people become who they are— including how Aly Khalifa found his footing and came into his own by the age of 25.

MILLE caught up with the comedian, DJ, presenter, and all-around creative on the balcony of his hotel room— a breezy corner of the Sheraton, where he’s been put up after being invited (unsurprisingly) to perform at the 2025 El Gouna Film Festival. We’re running on little sleep, having spent the past few days bouncing between conversations, late-night dance floors, and any excuse to squeeze the most out of our time in the Egyptian South. Still, the intrigue remains: how exactly did this phenomenon become, well…a phenomenon? With close to a quarter of a million followers across platforms— and way more views— it’s only fair that we ask the question.

As we established, primary socialization refers to the early character building process that takes place while you’re safe inside the family bubble. For Khalifa, that stage mainly took place in the UAE, where he spent about half his life. And though the country is multicultural, able to provide an exposure to people from all over the world, it could also feel a bit rigid. It can be a place where many end up toning parts of themselves down just to be able to blend in. That’s the environment in which he shaped what he now calls the “first version” of who he thought he needed to be.

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“I lived in Dubai my whole life— well, not my whole life, more like the first half, the first 13 years.” Khalifa told MILLE lounging on a sundeck well-past midday. “Dubai is super cosmopolitan, so I met people from everywhere. But then I moved to Egypt for a little while, and suddenly everyone at school was…Egyptian. It felt like interacting with similar characters all day long. Everyone was very ecstatic, very erratic — just all over the messy book. I loved that. I remember thinking, this is where the interesting peeps are,” he added.

“Everybody’s from everywhere in Dubai,” he reminisced. “There’s so much culture, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But Egyptians had personality. There isn’t always much to do there, so your personality is what carries you through daily life. And because Egypt is so full of inconvenience— whereas Dubai has managed to erase inconvenience, which, again, is fantastic— I feel like inconvenience is what develops personality and builds character. So when I was in Dubai, looking back, I was quite boring, though I was still somehow considered the fun one! But my threshold was so low because everyone around me was quite stale. At the end of the day, you’re a mosaic of the people around you. Then I came back to Egypt, and everyone was so hilarious in their own way; everyone was on one all the time. And I was like, oh, period — I can be on one here too. And so I started being on one too,” the 25-year-old went on to explain.

“I came back (to Dubai) with a whole new personality. I stepped up the social ladder and I started doing a bunch of random stuff”, he revealed, explaining how his dad was so convinced he was surrounded by bad influences when, according to him, he was actually the so-called “bad influence.”

That said, that period of reckoning didn’t suddenly expand his sense of what he could do or become; if anything, he says, it simply normalized behaviors he once thought were impossible to own up to. And that’s where Bourdieu’s secondary socialization kicks in — the moment you leave the safety of family and start learning from the world beyond.

For him, that world came with the internet. He said he’d always wanted to be online somehow. He was a YouTube kid, not able to get enough of popular figures of the time such as Tana Mongeau and, as he puts it, “all the other Youtubers spilling tea on their channels.” Obsessed with all the video platform could offer, he explained always wanting to do it himself, but never really had the guts at first. Part of that hesitation, he explains, came from never feeling like a “regular Egyptian man.” In school, that left him feeling like there was something wrong with him, like he was, in his words, “a (redacted) weirdo.”

“I felt like I was allowed to be a little louder but that’s not to say I was what I am now,” Khalifa reflected. “There were still things where I’d be like, ‘oh, maybe don’t say that, they’ll think you’re weird’. ‘Don’t make that joke, people will think you’re a bully’. Then I went to uni — and that’s when everything started changing. I went to the UK, and I was like, damn, I can do and say whatever the hell I want,” he said, remembering how that move cracked something open in him.

But then COVID-19 hit, cutting that chapter short. Overnight, he was back home, in Egypt, trapped in between four walls, trying to keep himself busy at a time when no one knew what tomorrow would or even could bring. “I had a plan: stay in the UK after third year, get an internship, and just stay there. And then the universe was like, absolutely not— go back. So I went back to Egypt and started making videos on TikTok,” he explained, revealing how quick he was to encounter success.

He recalls that one of the videos he made “got like 20 million views and like 5 million likes — something crazy like that.” At that moment, he thought, I’m an influencer now. He laughed, explaining that, of course, with memes, nobody actually cares who’s behind them. But he was naïve enough to convince himself that it could be his bread and butter and did the most to turn the delusion into a fully fledged reality.

“I did a TikTok dance that turned into a trend— even Mia Khalifa did it. I literally did the dance as a joke and then, next thing you a bunch of celebrities are doing it too. That period (of creating content) lasted for about a year and by that point I was like, ‘okay, I don’t want to just make TikToks anymore.’ It doesn’t pay and you only get money if you have brand deals, which is a whole different thing.

“I wanted people to stop watching me for the meme and start watching me for me. Like, Emma Chamberlain will literally rock up in front of a camera and make soup, and 10 million people will watch it just because it’s Emma Chamberlain. It’s not about what she’s doing— it’s about her. That’s what I wanted too. I wanted to be able to get up and literally do anything on camera, and people would binge it,” the Cairo-based multi-hyphenate laughs, admitting that what started as a joke quickly turned into a quest for something a little more lasting.

He pinpoints that moment as the true beginning of his career as a professional content creator, though it wasn’t without its challenges. It also marked the birth of Koshary Shop Date, his spin-off of Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, the quirky cult series where British celebrities are interviewed over a fried chicken meal— a considered staple in contemporary British culture. Never short on ideas, he figured he could adapt the concept for Egypt: similar formula, but make it local. So he swapped the chicken shop for a koshary shop, a setting just as iconic, and arguably even more relatable, to the Egyptian experience.

“I stumbled across Chicken Shop Date and I was like, that’s so cool. And as horrible as it might sound, I was like, I know it’s her idea, but I can do this better. Then I thought, ‘we have koshary shops in Egypt — there’s a whole concept right in front of me.’”

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He remembers shooting the first four episodes on his phone, managing to secure local rapper Perry as well as three other TikTokers. The next day, he and a friend went to a koshary shop, where he tried to pitch himself. The owner told him to get lost, to which he replied, “No, I won’t. I’m going to come film at your store on a Friday, before prayer, when it’s completely empty. Nobody’s losing anything.” Eventually, the owner agreed. He went and filmed the first episode, “which was great, but horrible… production-value-wise, truly terrible,” he says.

He kept going — episodes one, two, three — until a production company sponsored one, which, looking back, he still calls pretty terrible. Regardless of the past or present levels of disappointment, the short-lived dream of becoming a content creator started looking a little less in reach as they asked him for money if he wanted to continue. “I was like, ‘oh wow, I need to go get a job.’”

He joined MO4, a renowned media company based in Cairo, and found himself, as he puts it, completely overwhelmed by the workload— not in a bad way, but simply because he suddenly had no time, and no energy left to work on anything else than his responsibilities there.

Still, he’s quick to note the upside: that job gave him almost every connection he has today. “Literally everyone on my team from Koshary is from MO4 in one way or another,” he says. Most of the guests he books, he knows because of his time there, it got him “in all the rooms.” He eventually left, did a stint at Forbes, and then started thinking about his own projects.

From there—with more time, connection, and financial means— Koshary Shop Date eventually exploded, and so did his personal accounts and other side hustles. He became a regular sight across timelines, his skits and appearances popping up everywhere, usually quick to go viral. Naturally, we had to ask: with that kind of reach, how does anyone stay sane?

“I didn’t. At first it was really jarring. I told myself, ‘I just won’t look at the comments, I’ll keep posting but I won’t read anything.’ But then people started leaving TikTok and coming to text me on Instagram just to tear me down. So that was a little jarring as well.”
Sadly enough, his coping mechanism didn’t work well for long as soon after, people began calling him out in the street, unable to separate the person on screen from the person in front of them.

He adds that the criticism likely came from the mix he embodies: someone who’ll get up and dance, throw a party, wear whatever he wants, but also make videos about Islam and talk openly about rediscovering his relationship with religion. That duality, he says, is what probably made him such an easy target to shoot at for many of his haters.

“I’m pretty haram, but I’m pretty halal too. I feel like I do them together,” he confessed. “I’m so unsubscribing to the idea that I have to either be this or that in anything. Work, religion…why can’t I be both? What’s the problem? As long as I’m doing my best before God. If I’m going to a nightclub, inshAllah, I’ll go back home and pray. I know it sounds contradictory, but I’m sure that’s better than just going to the nightclub and not praying at all,” he continued.

He admits the balance isn’t always clean or easy, but to him, something is always better than nothing. For him, the core of Islam is simple: peace and love. “As cringe as it sounds,” he laughs, “I doubt that I’ll being going to hell just because I had a drink but I think it’d make more sense if I did if I’m a horrible person and not doing right by others,” probably thinking of those that went against him in his earlier days.

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But while he doesn’t do everything to stay in God’s good books, when it comes to his ambitions, he goes all in. His discipline, he says, comes from two things: being naturally restless and working in an industry that never lets you pause. In this line of work, if you’re not doing something, you start to feel like you’re slipping behind, or worse, like you’re not enough.

“I DJ with the International A** Shaking Committee; I do stand-up, business development, content creation — for myself and for brands — and then, technically, I’m also a lawyer, but I don’t practice. Oh, and I dance too,” he laughed, “but you know what’s crazy? I actually never feel like I’m doing enough. I’m always like, I’m not doing enough. That’s because of social media, my friend — it makes you feel like you always have to do more.”

He’s the first to admit that the industry’s pace, mixed with social media’s hold over the youth, can leave even the most grounded person feeling like they’re running on a treadmill that’s stuck in a loop of comparisons. It’s something he’s come to accept: your mental health will dip now and then, and that’s okay. What matters, he says, is not mistaking the struggle for something unhealthy. Because most of the time, the things that truly move you forward don’t feel good — they feel uncomfortable, inconvenient, and exhausting. But it’s, according to him at least, also part of the game many have chosen to play.

“It’s kind of a blessing and a curse, because if you use (social media and hustle culture) right, it can push you to do more. I feel like we’ve become so used to not feeling bad that we actually stop doing things that are good for us — just because they make us feel bad. Usually, the things that are good for you are uncomfortable. If you want to lose weight: uncomfortable. If you want to stop consuming sugar: uncomfortable. If you want to become more athletic, get a better job, get good grades: all of it is uncomfortable.

“If you’re not willing to do that,” he continues, “then it becomes really hard to achieve anything, especially now, when there are people in every field waking up at 5 a.m. saying, I’m gonna be the best at this. So maybe that’s the other side of it — that people might have taken the whole ‘protect your mental well-being’ thing a little bit too far at time. As long as you know where to draw the line between hustling and an unhealthy workload, you’re fine,” he says, before hopping into his car and driving out of town— no one quite sure when he’ll be back.

How Aly Khalifa Became the Internet’s Most Honest Multi-Hyphenate

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How Aly Khalifa Became the Internet’s Most Honest Multi-Hyphenate

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