NICK HARAMIS: Before we get into the movie and how the world is essentially over, I’m curious: Have you ever watched Veep?

AL GORE: [laughs] I have. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a friend, and I’m in awe of her talent. She actually came with one of the show’s writers and spent several hours with me to collect ideas before the first season.

HARAMIS: Get out!

GORE: When she was getting ready to do the second season, she came back and we repeated the experience. I’m not suggesting I deserve any credit—or blame—for some of their more outrageous scenes, but we did have lots of laughs.

HARAMIS: She should give you one of her Emmys—not that you need any more awards. Where do you keep your Oscar and your Nobel Peace Prize?

GORE: Well, the Oscar actually belongs to Davis Guggenheim, the director of An Inconvenient Truth, but I like to say that I have visiting rights. As for the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s in a super-secure, secret location.

HARAMIS: Growing up with a senator father and a mother who went to law school, was public service a forgone conclusion for you? I suppose it seems unlikely you’d have become a rock star.

GORE: The full story, as usual, is a little more complicated, but it’s certainly true that when I was a very young boy, I wanted to do what my father did. My parents were true believers in the efficacy of American constitutional democracy, and I was thoroughly inculcated with reverence for what we the people are capable of doing. The complication in that simple narrative is that as I got older, the Vietnam War shook my confidence in how our democracy was working. I ended up serving in that war, but it started with a lie, and I was very proud of my father for being one of its earliest opponents.

HARAMIS: Your father served as a senator from Tennessee for 18 years until 1971.

GORE: He was defeated for reelection largely because of his position on the war and his support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and various other social issues that were driven into prominence by the resurgence of the right wing following the back-to-back presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. Those things discouraged me from a career in politics, so I became a journalist. I was in the Army for two years and then I was a journalist for five years and slowly came back to the idea of running for elected office. When I eventually did come back to that path, I was thrilled—a word I don’t use lightly. I could almost hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” being hummed in the background. [laughs]

HARAMIS: For years now, you’ve traveled the world leading seminars about the climate crisis for other activists. How do you keep from feeling like a touring comedian delivering the same set night after night?