At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access.

Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population.

This month’s guest, Alex Honnold, is best known for something completely different, but has spent the past decade working directly on that problem.

Most people know Alex as the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing 3,000 feet of sheer granite without ropes. It’s one of the most extraordinary feats in modern sport. But over the past decade, he’s been channeling that same focus and discipline into a different kind of work: expanding access to clean energy through the Honnold Foundation.

This conversation was recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, in a room full of founders, investors, and operators working to build the energy system of the future. And what stood out most to me was Alex’s clarity.

He doesn’t speak in industry jargon. He doesn’t overcomplicate the problem. He keeps coming back to something simple. If people don’t have their basic needs met, nothing else works.

In our conversation, we go back to Alex’s childhood in Sacramento, growing up as a shy kid climbing anything he could find, to the experiences that shaped him early on: loss, independence, and the years he spent living out of a van. We talk about what led him to free solo El Capitan, and the mindset behind it, and how those same values eventually showed up in his decision to start the Honnold Foundation. And we get into how he thinks about risk, failure, and impact today, both on the wall and in his work.

Alex is funny, candid, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable. And he brings a perspective that I think is easy to overlook, but hard to ignore once you hear it.

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