AlGore's diving deeper into the business world. The Nobel laureate -already the chairman of investment firm Generation, chairman of CurrentTV, special advisor to Google, board member at Apple and lecturer at upto $175,00-per-gig - is taking on a new role as a partner at KleinerPerkins Caulfield and Byers, the preeminent Silicon Valley venturecapital firm. His goal is to spur the development of clean technologyand make a little money, too. My friend and colleague Adam Lashinskyand I tell the story in the new issue of FORTUNE, cover date Nov. 26.You can read it online but it will look a lot better in print.

It was an enjoyable story towork on. John Doerr, a lead partner at Kleiner, invited FORTUNE behindthe scenes to see how the deal with Gore was done and watch the new VCin action. Gore's role at Kleiner is part of a broader alliance betweenKleiner and Generation that includes David Blood, an impressive formerGoldman Sachs exec who is now managing partner at Generation. Wewatched Gore in action in Silicon Valley, Adam visited Generation inLondon and all of us gathered for a three-hour interview at Gore’shome in Nashville, followed by lunch, al fresco, with Al and Tipper.This was four days after Gore won the Nobel Prize, the first timehe’d talked to the press since then.

I came away from my reportingwith some strong impressions of Al Gore. First of all, he isintellectually formidable. It's hard to convey the breadth of hisknowledge and interests in a business story, so we didn't really try,but I saw him give a speech at a startup company in Silicon Valley thatfocused on climate change but ranged across an array of political,scientific, historical issues. He drew an interesting, if strained,analogy around the theme of the breakdown of centralized power.Communism, he said, had given way to democracy, which is distributedpolitical power. Command-and-control economies had been supplanted bycapitalism, which uses distributed decision-making to shape an economy.The Internet took the control of information out of the hands of a fewand gave it to the many. And centralized power in the form of big coaland nuclear plants, he predicted, would give way to distributed,renewable power like fuel cells (he was talking to a fuel cell company)and solar. Maybe you had to be there, but it was quite a talk. I alsospoke to a scientist named Ted Scambos at the National Snow and IceData Center, which Gore visited recently to get an extensive briefingon the cryosphere. Scambos described an engaged, well-informed andintensely curious Gore who spent more than half a day trying tounderstand what was happening to the melting ice at the North Pole thispast summer. Most politicians, if they cared at all, would have askedfor a paper summarizing the data, but Gore wanted to dig in deeply.

Another takeway: I can'timagine Gore returning to politics, although you never know. He struckme as someone who has found his calling, to use a word that thisSouthern Baptist would understand. He is genuinely alarmed by theclimate crisis, and can devote all of his considerable clout, energyand intelligence to doing something about it. This fall, for example,he has met with the heads of Mexico, France, Germany and Austria totalk about global warming. He's very engaged with the group he startedcalled the Alliance for Climate Protection which will use mass media todrive public opinion on the issue. He sees his work at Kleiner as a wayto spur green innovation. Plus, he gets to live in Nashville, spendtime with Tipper, his daughters and grandchildren, make a good living,and deal with pesky journalists only on his terms.

Of course, he could have moreimpact as president, as he knows. "I want to be clear about the factthat I'm not making the mistake of assuming I could do more this waythan I could as president," he told us in Nashville. He also will notdefinitively take himself out of the political game.

"I am not going to give the so-called Sherman statement: If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."

Then he smiled.

"You know, I know what it's like to be elected and not serve." He laughed louder than anyone at that line and then said, "I wouldn't want to do that again."

And, then, when Adam pressed him to explain why, he turned reflective, saying:

"Because, well, you know, casting about for words to describe this with precision is less productive than just saying what I'm doing feels like the right thing to do. It just feels like the right thing to do."

That was one of the very fewmoments when I felt like I glimpsed the unguarded Al Gore. All thoseyears in Washington, I'm sorry to say, have turned him into the kind ofperson who chooses all his words carefully and makes a long speech whena short answer will do. I'm sure this isn't the case when he's withTipper or friends, or at least I hope it isn't. But the public Al Gorestill comes across, much of the time, as formal and stilted and a tadself-important. That's a shame because I have a feeling that theprivate Al Gore would be a lot more interesting, and more fun, to bearound. Maybe his guardedness is an understandable reaction to thewhipping he took, much of it unfair, from the press during the 2000presidential campaign.

That morning in Nashville,Adam and I turned off our tape recorders at one point so everyone couldtake a "bio break." I mentioned to Gore that our paths had before - atWal-Mart when he spoke there, at the Washington premiere of AnInconvenient Truth and, a decade earlier, when we had both run the 1997Marine Corps Marathon in a four-hour downpour.

He lit up, and told a long,very funny story about how his daughters had talked him into running,how he'd been stuck at a Democratic Party event in Iowa the nightbefore where bad weather had kept him out until the wee hours of themorning, about how after the marathon - when all he'd wanted to do wascollapse - he had to host a Halloween party dressed as a wolf. Then,that night, Tipper dragged him to the Kennedy Center in black tie. "Itwas the longest day of my life," he said, laughing at himself. It wasthe only moment when I felt a human connection to Gore.

Later this week, I'll havemore to say about Generation, a fascinating investment firm that wewere able to cover only briefly in the magazine.