The Endless Pursuit of Alkalinity
How Planetary Technologies navigates the enormous puzzle of sourcing, moving, and deploying alkaline materials for ocean carbon removal
This is a summary of episode 390 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full episode in its entirety right below this paragraph.
And a hearty thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Philip Lee LLP and Rainbow.
Quick Takeaways
Climate change can be framed as a pH problem: too much acid in the atmosphere and ocean, not enough base to cancel it out.
Alkalinity is abundantly available around the planet, but finding sources that don’t break the LCA (life cycle assessment) or the economics is where the real challenge lies.
Before investing in expensive testing, the first question is whether the volume of available material justifies the effort.
Heavy metals, transport distance, ocean efficiency, and permitting all factor into whether a source is viable—and any one of them can kill a prospect that looks perfect on paper.
Ocean efficiency varies by site: good mixing zones and water circulation matter enormously for how much carbon a given addition actually removes.
There are levers to pull—leeching technology, particle size adjustments—but ocean site selection is mostly a fixed variable.
As projects scale, capital expenditure decisions like building rail spurs start to make economic sense for moving bulk alkalinity more efficiently.
The Cornwall/St. Ives project demonstrated that OAE could be measured and that a real signal was detectable, but alkalinity sources were ultimately too far away and too expensive.
Community engagement needs to start early and begin with listening—local knowledge about ocean areas is invaluable before you start changing chemistry.
In carbon removal sales, the buyers who matter most want to know you as a person, not just hear your elevator pitch.
Trust-building with buyers like Frontier requires transparency about challenges and collaborative problem-solving, not last-minute surprises.
Omar’s background as a mental health nurse carries directly into his carbon removal work—relationship-building, listening, and repeating back what you’re hearing.
The pH Framing
There’s a way of looking at climate change that strips away a lot of complexity and gets at something almost elemental. We have too much acid in the wrong places, and we need base to cancel it out. That’s it.
It’s a reductive framing—Omar Sadoon, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Planetary Technologies, would be the first to say so. But it’s not wrong. Weathering pathways are about alkalinity. Ocean alkalinity enhancement is about alkalinity. Even parts of direct air capture involve pH swings. A surprising amount of the carbon removal industry consists of people running around the planet trying to find, move, and deploy alkaline materials.
And this is how the earth would handle the problem on its own, given enough time. Rocks would weather. Alkalinity would react with atmospheric carbon. The pH would eventually rebalance. We’re just trying to speed that process up by a few hundred thousand years.
The Sourcing Puzzle
Alkalinity is everywhere. Calcium and magnesium compounds exist in abundant forms all over the planet. The problem is not finding alkaline material—it’s finding material that works.
“Works” means several things simultaneously. The source has to be clean enough that it won’t introduce heavy metals or contaminants into the ocean. It has to be close enough to a deployment site that the emissions from transporting it don’t eat into the carbon removal you’re trying to achieve. It has to exist in sufficient volume to justify the investment in testing and qualifying it. And the testing process itself is expensive and slow.
Omar’s approach is to start with the money. Before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lab work and qualification, you want to know the economics could work—that there’s enough material at a reasonable enough cost to justify the investigation. Then comes the chemistry—screening for anything that would rule it out on safety grounds. Then the logistics: how far is it from the ocean, what transport infrastructure exists, and what would need to be built?
Each of these variables can independently kill a source that looks promising on every other dimension. You might find a massive, perfectly clean deposit of alkaline material that happens to be hundreds of kilometers from the coast with no rail access. Or a conveniently located industrial byproduct that turns out to contain trace metals above safe thresholds. The search for what Omar calls the “Goldilocks setup”—a giant pile of clean alkalinity sitting right next to the ocean, pre-permitted and ready to go—remains ongoing.
Nobody’s found it yet.
Ocean Efficiency and the Levers You Can Pull
Once you’ve identified a viable source, you still need to figure out where to put it. Not all ocean is created equal for alkalinity addition.
What Planetary’s ocean science team looks for are areas with strong mixing and water circulation—places where added alkalinity will disperse and react efficiently rather than sitting in a stagnant zone. Depth matters. The percentage of carbon actually removed per unit of alkalinity varies significantly by location.
This creates a tension at the heart of every project. You don’t want to ship material too far from its source, because transport costs and emissions add up. But you also don’t want to deploy it somewhere with poor ocean efficiency and lose removal potential on the backend. The project planning is a constant negotiation between these competing constraints.
There are some levers available. You can alter the material itself through leaching or particle size changes to improve its reactivity. You can gather measurements over time to reduce uncertainty in the ocean models. But you can’t move the ocean. Site selection is largely a fixed variable—you work with what the geography gives you.
As Planetary scales up, the capital expenditure decisions get more interesting. At what point does it make sense to build a rail spur to cut down on trucking? When do you invest in infrastructure that changes the fundamental economics of a project? These are the conversations happening now.
What Cornwall Taught Them
Planetary’s project in Cornwall—specifically in St. Ives—was an early and important proof point. Working with a wastewater treatment facility and funded by BEIS (the UK government’s business and industrial arm), the team demonstrated something that matters: OAE could be measured. You could detect a real signal from alkalinity addition.
The material they used was familiar to the wastewater industry, certified and safe. The science worked. The results were published through Plymouth Marine Labs.
But the project also surfaced the economic reality that haunts every alkalinity-based venture. The sources they needed were too far away and too expensive to make the project viable at that location long-term.
And then there was the community experience. Some locals were enthusiastic. Others were vocal in their opposition. Planetary took that feedback seriously and built out a dedicated community engagement function led by Diana Phillips, whose approach starts with listening. Before you talk about changing the chemistry of someone’s local ocean, you need to understand what they know about it and what they value about it.
That lesson has carried forward into every project since.
Relationships Over Transactions
The conversation took a turn that might surprise people who think of carbon removal as purely a technical and scientific endeavor.
Omar spent a significant portion of our discussion talking about relationships—with alkalinity suppliers, with buyers, with community members. The carbon removal market is small enough that reputation travels fast. And the deals that matter most, like Planetary’s work with Frontier, are built on trust developed over years of transparent communication.
Buyers know there’s uncertainty in scaling plans. They know the economics might shift. What they’re evaluating is whether you’ll bring them along honestly when things change, or whether you’ll show up at the last minute with bad news. The difference between those two approaches determines whether a contract leads to future contracts or becomes a cautionary tale.
Omar connects this directly to his seven+ years as a mental health nurse. Nurses are among the most trusted professions precisely because they invest in bedside manner—listening carefully, repeating back what they hear, making sure everyone is on the same page about what’s expected. Those skills, he says, transfer directly.
It’s a reminder that carbon removal, for all its scientific complexity, is ultimately a human enterprise. The relationships make it work. And occasionally, they make it fun—whether that means talking baseball, debating whether OAE companies can survive being turned into memes, or workshopping whether “I drop base” is an acceptable thing for an ocean alkalinity enhancement professional to say about themselves.
(It is.)
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Omar.
Omar Sadoon: Thanks, Ross. Glad to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Omar, is all of carbon removal just about alkalinity. I’ve been saying this lately, it’s not always true, but it’s often true. How much of carbon removal is just the same people running around many of the same places on the planet trying to find alkalinity?
Omar Sadoon: I would say, I don’t know that carbon removal’s all about alkalinity, but I would frame it as, you know, there is a point where you can view climate change as an asset based problem. You’ve got too much acid in one location and you need to commit a lot of base to cancel it out or move it where it is. So it’s not a completely bad framing. I think some people will definitely view it that way, and I think I’m in that group.
Ross Kenyon: The pH framing. Anything that’s weathering related is alkalinity. There’s parts of direct air capture that are alkalinity swings, and also manipulate pH trying to get us to negativity. It seems like a lot of this is where’s the rock getting spread and why, and where’s it going? But it’s mostly about moving alkalinity around, at least for several of the major pathways in carbon removal.
Omar Sadoon: I think one good way to back up and think about it too is like this is the way the earth would naturally do it if we weren’t around. So that’s why I think it’s not a bad framing to use. Because absent human interventions, it would just take a long time. But yes, those rocks would weather, that alkalinity would react with what’s in the atmosphere. And eventually you cancel out a lot of that acid that we’ve put in the atmosphere. So yeah, there’s truth to that.
Ross Kenyon: You spent about five years in carbon removal. We’ve known each other for a fairly long time here. How much of your working life has been chasing down alkalinity and making sure it doesn’t break the LCA to get it to where it needs to be?
Omar Sadoon: It’s been at least the last four years of being really diligent about what are the sources of alkalinity we can use, where do they exist in an abundant enough form that it’s worthwhile to pursue them and to do all this contracting and supply chain and figuring out how to get it there efficiently. And then backtracking to make sure that we’re not having upstream effects or we’re changing the way that operations may act that could force us as a company to start having to take account for those emissions. So thinking about those upstream effects we have when we make a purchase and finding it and qualifying it, it’s been a long road. It’s been at least the last four years.
Ross Kenyon: I know people are sometimes reticent to share too much about where they source alkalinity from. I know there’s competitive and trade secret reasons for being close to the vest on that and would not wanna ask you to disclose any of that. But I am hoping we can talk about some general principles here about how to think about alkalinity, where people are looking for it. Why is this so hard to get right? I hear my friends who work in alkalinity based carbon removal gripe about it sometimes about how difficult it is to find it, move it, and make sure the chemistry is even the right fit for their application. And sometimes you’ll get one part of that that is totally perfect, and one part that will totally kill a source that you would otherwise be dreaming about as this thing that you are so looking forward to. And then it just broke everything. But please tell me, how accurate is that?
Omar Sadoon: What I’d say is that alkalinity broadly is abundantly available all around the planet. There’s all kinds of it in different forms. There’s calcium, magnesium are the two primaries that we look for and utilize in Planetary’s process. But finding sources that don’t break the LCA and the economics of the project is sort of the secret sauce. And also don’t do any damage or harm to the spaces where we utilize it. So in broad terms, the way to go about that is to determine what’s the relationship between your alkalinity source and your host site, where you plan to use it. How do you plan to move that stuff in a way? And what are the efficiencies of the different transport methods? You really gotta think about how was it produced in the first place? What was the intended use case? If you’re going after a primary source, and what kind of energy goes into producing that stuff? If similar to Planetary, you start to look at byproducts and other non-intended products, you really wanna test for anything else that could be in them. So there’s a lot of ways you need to ensure that what you’re doing is first and foremost, safe for the ocean to be utilized. And then you wanna think about the economics and scale—is this a one-time or one-stop shop where this is all that’s left? And this pile only exists for a limited time, or is this something that’s ongoing that supports the project for decades onwards?
Ross Kenyon: When you’re approaching this, sounds like an enormous calculation with so many different variables, where do you even start to make sense of does this source of alkalinity make sense for me or not?
Omar Sadoon: My approach is to look at the volume of material that we’re talking about. So before you start investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into testing these sources, you really want to ensure there’s enough there to make it worthwhile. Because that testing process is not just expensive, but it’s long. And so you probably wanna start there. Just, is this worthwhile to even start the investigation?
Ross Kenyon: Assuming that it is a sufficient quantity to make it worth your while, what’s the flow of how you invalidate a source and how do you do that as early as possible? It would be terrible to go through quite a lot of this and find out that there’s enough heavy metal in the rock that you’re just like, cool, this is actually a contaminant and is above safe or legal or ethical limits or something like that. You probably wanna know that pretty quickly, right?
Omar Sadoon: You wanna know quickly. And that’s where you need to have some sort of set of criteria for how the host site’s permitted. At the same time as you’re looking at things like what are the transport chains that exist and what’s gonna be new infrastructure that you need to build out? So if you start getting into sources that are really far away distance from the ocean, it’s not always gonna be worth it, even if you can build a relatively efficient supply chain. Just because if you can overcome the initial cost of the transport, you still have to overcome then the energy you’d spend doing it. So then you get into LCA and TEA calculations. So that’s probably the next step after you can ensure that there’s no heavy metals that would rule it out. In Planetary’s process, we’re also looking at things like ocean efficiency, so how much carbon does it actually uptake? And it is, you’re right, a really big calculation to make and it takes a lot of people on the team to ensure that we’re doing it in a way that we’re not over-investing. But at the same time, we’re not rolling things out too early that have potential. Because it’s probably one of the single biggest and most important decisions that we’ll make as a company—what’s the source? And then where do we want to go invest into putting it, and how do we ensure that that’s safe and economic.
Ross Kenyon: Tell me more about ocean efficiency. Are there certain sites where this is super powered in some places that render it impotent?
Omar Sadoon: Yeah, so there are definitely regions of the world, and this is more the expertise of the ocean science team. They basically try to determine where is it most efficient to add that alkalinity. The things you’re looking for typically are a really good mixing zone, where you’re getting a lot of circulation of water. So it’s not stagnant areas. You’re looking for a particular depth. And those areas will determine basically on a percentage basis where’s the most efficient to do that addition. So it’s this interplay between, okay, we don’t want to go too far away from our alkalinity source. Because then you’re racking up those costs of transport. But you don’t want to lose a lot of points on the backend of ocean efficiency. So it’s a conversation between the teams to make up where is the best place to do an addition. When you’re working through the LCA-TEA dynamics here and trying to figure out how do you maximize your net removals calculation to make sure that you’re not just losing removals you could otherwise sell due to emissions that are built into moving alkalinity around.
Ross Kenyon: Are there things you can do that change that equation besides selection of site and source? Are there improvements that you have to game out, like the capital expenditure of building a spur line on a railroad that brings it closer to the source? Are there things that you can do that change that, or do you kind of have to take the world as a given?
Omar Sadoon: No, there’s definitely levers you can pull on. In some cases, it’s changing aspects of the alkalinity, whether it’s through things like leaching technology or changes to particle size. You can change the material efficiency. With ocean efficiency, you’re probably more stuck with what you get. Like once you select a site, you can reduce the uncertainty over time by gathering samples and a lot of the work that the ocean sciences team does to go ensure that what we’re seeing in the model is confirmed by what we’re seeing on the ground or in the ocean. That changes the uncertainty bounds on any of our verification work. And then at the plant level, to a degree, you’re stuck with what you have. You’re not going to change the operations of a power generation plant or a wastewater treatment plant or any of the places where we look for alkalinity. To a degree we can take up some land, make changes to the site to some point. But yeah, those are probably the areas in which we try to pull levers.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It seems like it’s mostly around, can you alter the material that’s going in the ocean more so than fixed geographical issues or high CapEx issues.
Omar Sadoon: Yeah, and those are the conversations we’re getting into now as we scale up, right? Like, where is the point to make those investments? When do we build a rail spur and when do we start to do more?
Ross Kenyon: Dang, that sounds fun. Are you working on that too?
Omar Sadoon: I’m part of a team that works on that. So there’s a lot of smart people on the team and then I add my little LCA piece in. But yeah, we definitely talk through it quite a bit.
Ross Kenyon: Are you able to speak generally about some of the projects that one might consider for doing this in alkalinity broadly?
Omar Sadoon: Yeah, so the probably the best example is just what we’re doing—the first rail spur, that’s part of what we’re evaluating for the next evolution of the Tufts Cove project. So for those folks that are interested, I think one of the best places to go to dig into some of these things is the Isometric website where all of our verified credits kind of live, or the verification steps we took and the specifics about how that project is performing. I encourage anyone to go look at those documents and get an idea of what goes into the credit generation for Tufts Cove and Planetary. When it comes to new projects or evolutions of the Tufts Cove project, it really is about scaling up our capacity to efficiently move that alkalinity and the sources we look for being more abundant and available. And so that’s where things like rail spurs come into play—how do we cut down on the number of trucks we’re moving? How do we cut down on these big ocean transport steps that we have to take today? Railways are really efficient relative to some other transport methods. And so if you can move a lot more bulk over larger distances without as many emissions or costs, it starts to make a lot of sense for the project to grow.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any place in the world that’s parallel to the Guano trade, that you could just like bring a tanker up, load some equivalent of bird shit? Is there like a cliff side you could just mine and throw a bunch of alkaline rocks into a barge and then stick it right off of Peru and then you have a nice upwelling zone and something like that could just take place? Does that exist anywhere?
Omar Sadoon: If somebody knows about it, where there’s basically a giant pile of alkalinity sitting beside the ocean and it is already pre-permitted and it’s super clean, you call me up. I’d love to know. I haven’t found that Goldilocks setup yet.
Ross Kenyon: They used to, and then they mined it all, and it was a pretty destructive process. Actually, that framing is probably not the best framing for OAE.
Omar Sadoon: The opposite direction of what we want to tell about OAE.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Pull up to either a remote island that has a bunch of beautiful pelagic species and like Galapagos or wherever, or on the coastal Peru, and you just carve up a cliff and dump it in the ocean. It also sounds politically unpopular. I said it in a very cavalier way, but yeah, that sounds rough. Your experience with community engagement leads you to believe this would be a tremendous failure and you don’t wanna work on that.
Omar Sadoon: Not just community engagement. My love for all things ocean and safety and my environmental streak in me just says, let’s not do that.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s not do that. Are you able to talk much about the Cornwall experience? The St. Ives experience?
Omar Sadoon: To the degree that I can, because I never actually spent any time personally in Cornwall. And there’s a lot of really hardworking team members that helped get that first dosing project off the ground. But broadly speaking, it demonstrated that OAE could be measured, that you could really see a signal. That project was funded by BEIS, the business industrial portion of the UK government. And we worked very closely with the wastewater treatment facility and with an alkalinity partner to ensure that what we were adding was something that’s traditionally been added to wastewater treatment. So it was nothing new. It was something very familiar and very safe and certified to be done that way. And there was some portion of the community that was very excited about that, that wanted to see that project exist. And then there was a portion as well that spoke out very loudly against what we were doing and felt it went against their values. Ultimately the reason that project didn’t go forward was because of everything we just talked about, that the alkalinity sources that we were looking for were just too far away and too expensive and didn’t make a lot of economic sense for us to move forward. So the results of that work we’re very proud of. It’s published work through Plymouth Marine Labs. But the community experience certainly was something that we took on board very seriously because at the time we needed to do a better job of community engagement and working with the community to make sure it’s something that they wanted to. That we’ve taken that forward in not just Tufts Cove, but any project we do in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any advice you could share with people for how to best manage the community experience, the engagement? Just making sure that there’s enough buy-in locally, that this is a project that they desire and maybe not merely tolerate, let alone oppose.
Omar Sadoon: My advice would be start early and do it often. We have a wonderful team now, led by Diana Phillips at Planetary who really has a structure and a framework for how you engage the community. And they’ve done a number of indigenous engagements. They’ve done a number of efforts in wherever we’ve deployed or tested, whether it’s in the US, in Canada, in Europe, that make an effort to listen. It really begins with listening because there’s so much local knowledge about that local ocean area that you wanna take on board before you start talking about how you’re going to play with the chemistry of that area. So I would really just kind of defer to Diana’s knowledge because we’ve had much better success with her on board and with her approach, which is collaborative first and foremost.
Ross Kenyon: Are you sick of people saying that OAE is antacid for the earth?
Omar Sadoon: I think it’s—I heard someone say, you guys should just name the company Hydroxydump.
Ross Kenyon: Hydroxydump. Is this like a Canadian medicine that I’m missing the connection to?
Omar Sadoon: No, it was just like a casual way of saying, oh, that’s what you’re doing. You’re adding hydroxides to the ocean. Similar to the bad guano thing. I was like, if that’s what makes sense for you.
Ross Kenyon: I thought this was maybe like a, oh yeah, everyone has milk in a bag. Everyone knows Hydroxydump. That’s what we—you know that, right?
Omar Sadoon: Fancy ketchup, chips, milk in a bag, Smarties, all those things.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Go out for a rip and all that. Cool.
Omar Sadoon: And I think—I’ve heard people tell me that all I do is drop base.
Ross Kenyon: Now see, that one I like. Yeah, I am very supportive of that. Do you think—a lot of the brands in carbon removal don’t have enough humor. Whenever we’re doing memes, sometimes we even think, I don’t think this company has a sense of humor. I think if we made a joke about it, they’re not gonna respond and play along with it. They might be like, what the hell do we do with this?
Omar Sadoon: I say go for it. If you wanna rip on Planetary once in a while, I’m sure we can take it. A good sense of humor in the company, whether it’s dropping the base or dropping the guano or dropping the Hydroxydump.
Ross Kenyon: Challenge accepted. What do you think is funny about your space? Is there anything that you think is a recurring issue or something that if was referenced, your peers and different OAE companies would recognize?
Omar Sadoon: I think the peers would probably say like the confusion between the biological and chemical pathways. There’s like, oh, we don’t know what’s gonna happen if you add stuff to the ocean. And a lot of things get mixed up in reports. It’s just a gripe that I hear pretty often. Confusing the biological pathways that you’re growing seaweed and the risks around that with the chemical pathways like Planetary where we’re changing the pH and canceling out carbonic acid in the ocean. Different set of risks than what you’d see in those seaweed growing pathways. So a lot of stuff tends to clump us together, and that’s where I hear our ocean sciences team start to get frustrated because they’re different approaches.
Ross Kenyon: The first meme I thought of for this would be the one of Pam from the office where corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures. And it’s the same picture. So I would just do like one that’s biology and the other one’s ocean chemistry and be like, how to drive an OAE professional insane.
Omar Sadoon: Yeah, I think they would get that. But what are other funny things about our space? I have to think about that one.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think is funny about your space?
Omar Sadoon: Tell you one that did make us laugh was this experience we had at a buyer event. Someone on our team basically was talking to one of these big buyers, and then as soon as the word “models” came up, it was the same effect of being friendzoned. Like, oh, you guys use models. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: I thought for ocean stuff, models are fairly supported. I followed the discussions around bicarb work and the desire for direct measurement rather than modeling in ocean spaces, and it ruffled a lot of feathers. And I saw people pushing back and saying that ocean models are basically the way to go. I come from soil. We’ve all been traumatized by models to some extent, and so everyone was pushing towards direct measurement, even though it’s expensive. But it was funny to see that kind of inverted for oceans. Where are the fault lines for that right now?
Omar Sadoon: What I can say is there’s multiple levels of this. The models really just contain to some degree of uncertainty. You’re essentially just correcting for that broadly understood uncertainty, whether it’s an IPCC model you’re borrowing from, or some publicly available, generally accepted ocean model for that region. What you’re doing is you’re saying we’re still gonna go take direct measurements. That’s very much part of our process. It’s part of our regulatory steps to ensure that we’re not breaking TSS or pH limits. We’re not doing anything that would harm the ocean in any other way. And part of taking those measurements means that you’re gathering data that can reduce the uncertainty in that publicly available model. And you’re saying, are these two things in agreement? And that’s where a lot of the work lies in getting people to trust that the models are always gonna be wrong. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not useful. There’s always gonna be some degree of uncertainty, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use them to make a strong determination with a tremendous amount of certainty that that is carbon that’s been removed.
Ross Kenyon: How important is relationship management in this process? I’ve been told diligence for those big deals takes between a year and two in many cases.
Omar Sadoon: What my take on it is—I wasn’t leading on the initial Frontier deal, I was part of the due diligence process. So I got to know Frontier and others on the team a little bit better as we were working through it. And what I recognize is it’s about trust. Any buyer’s gonna recognize that there’s only so much we can know in 2025 or 2026 when we were starting to write the deal about what the economics of these things was a hundred percent gonna look like. There’s a degree of certainty that you can have and then there’s the unknown of that scaling plan. How much is it gonna cost to upgrade the system? How much is it gonna cost to switch to a new material? What’s the efficiency of all these things gonna be? And so they know that there’s some risk involved. What you’re doing in those quarterly or regular conversations is taking them on the journey with you and ensuring that you are being as transparent as you can be. If you’re doing things that start to erode trust, and you’re coming to them in the last minute when things have changed, that’s not going to set you up for future years in that contract. It’s not going to set you up for maybe another contract that you wanna do. And it’s a small industry and people are gonna talk to each other. But if you approach it with, hey, this is a team effort to collaboratively problem solve, and we may need things from Frontier—advice, contacts—then I think we can get somewhere. There’s this old adage, I think it’s an African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. And we really are trying to build this industry together, whether it’s what you do with Reversing Climate Change, or what we do as a supplier at Planetary, or what Frontier’s trying to do as a market maker. We have to work collaboratively and just say, put my hand up when I think something isn’t going right. And say, I don’t know exactly how to do this, but I would love your advice on it.
Ross Kenyon: How much continuity do you perceive between your current career and your former career as a nurse?
Omar Sadoon: I was a nurse for roughly seven or eight years. I technically still hold a license as a registered nurse, and the biggest thing that I take away from that that kind of spans both is that relationship building and humanity piece of it. I was a mental health nurse, and I worked in a few different hospitals in that capacity. And I was a unit manager for a while, so I managed a team as well where I had to learn how to work collaboratively across different disciplines. Nurses are one of the most trusted professions and that’s because they invest heavily in that bedside manner. And that aspect of it is something that carries over—how can I be a better listener and talk less in these situations? How can I repeat back what I’m hearing so that we’re both on the same page about what’s expected here? Those are just lessons that I find incredibly useful in my day-to-day work. And yeah, it’s led me this far and let’s see how much further I can go.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on the show, Omar. I’m so happy we were able to help you cross over from being a listener to now a documented participant for your first podcast ever, actually.
Omar Sadoon: Yes. Thank you so much. I’ve been nervous about doing a podcast at all, but I’m glad I had a good friend to do it with.
