Introducing Omar Samra

- [Instructor] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Dana] I'm Dana Ballout. - [Hebah] And I'm Hebah Fisher. - [Dana] And you're listening to Al Empire. (soft music) - It went viral. It was everywhere. - I used to tell my father, you will see one day, I will make a film and I will go to Cannes. (laughing) - I felt insulted. - I was like, where is my audience? - I didn't go to therapy, I think I should. (soft music) - [Dana] This is Al Empire. Stories of exceptional Arabs around the world and their journey to the top. Today, we're speaking to the exceptional adventurer and entrepreneur, Omar Samra. - [Hebah] Okay. So, what are all of the impressive accomplishments that you've done? So you've summited the highest mountain on every continent. You have skied the North and South Poles. - [Omar] To the North and South Poles. - [Hebah] To the... I don't know. Are they not like... okay. Yeah, you've skied to the North and the South Pole. - [Omar] So there's two separate journeys. Skiing to the North Pole and then skiing to the South Pole. - [Hebah] Okay. And then you did the Atlantic row. - [Omar] I attempted to row across the Atlantic Ocean. I rowed about a thousand kilometers with my teammate before capsizing in a massive storm. The boat not self-righting, the life raft not opening and spending 13 hours not knowing whether we would live or die. - [Hebah] He says casually. (both laughing) - [Omar] Which is now actually being made into a movie. So that's really exciting. - [Dana] Omar is the first Egyptian to climb Mount Everest. He's completed the seven summits, where he climbed the tallest mountains on each of the seven continents. He skied to both the North and South Poles, rode across parts of the Atlantic and has traveled to Antarctica. Climbing mountains no other person has before. Omar started his own in business, Wild Guanabana out of Cairo in 2009. The company is a different kind of travel company that hosts adventure trips around the region and globally. - [Hebah] So I first heard about Omar Samra probably back in 2013. I actually met him at a co-working space here in Dubai. He was the first Arab adventurer that I had heard of and that as a chosen profession is very unique, right? I know we used to be explorers but today we're just, you know. We don't do this kind of stuff anymore. You don't really scale mountains and you don't journey into the forests and Omar has done all of that. And I wanted to know his story.