Back talk: with Al Roker.

As weatherman and co-host of NBC's Today show, Al Roker, 50, wakes up America with his gregarious personality and charismatic weather predictions every morning. At the prestigious Studio 1-A in New York City's Rockefeller Center, he has interviewed celebrities, newsmakers, and people from all walks of life. But Roker, a 10-time Emmy award winner, has a second career that most people don't know about. He is also a successful entrepreneur. For the past 11 years, he has slowly built Al Roker Productions Inc. into a multimedia company that creates programming for network, cable, and public television.

BLACK ENTERPRISE caught up with Roker to get a sense of how America's favorite weatherman and television host parlayed a 35-year career in television into a multimillion-dollar entrepreneurial venture.

With your success at NBC, why did you form Al Roker Productions Inc. in 1994? I started it because I wanted to launch a Website, so I incorporated it. Then, we produced a television show in 1995 for the Food Network, and then, we produced another one. And it snowballed [from there]. Now we're producing series for different cable companies. Through the production company, I've written three books, and I have a small line of T-shirts, umbrellas, kids clothes, and bibs. And we're having a good time.

You have a great on-air sense of humor. Is it hard to do something serious? No, because everyone has more than one side to them. I'm grateful that the audience knows that and can sense that. The concern was will people accept Al Roker doing a serious topic. Well, sure! Why not? I have serious interests. I have kids. I have the same interests and the same concerns as anybody else.

Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur or a journalist? I think of myself as a guy with a lot of interests.

Are you a Renaissance man? No, I hate that term. It sounds so hoity-toity.

If you weren't successful in television, what career would you be in? If you look around [my office,] you'll see a lot of animation. My first love is animation, I'm a cartoonist. There are cartoons on my Website, and I did the cartooning. So I enjoy that stuff. If I had my choice of a dream job, I would have liked to have been the next Walt Disney or Hanna-Barbera. The guys who produce The Proud Family are heroes of mine. The irony is, with kids 17 and younger, they are much more impressed that I am [a cartoon character] on The Proud Family than

BLACK ENTERPRISE uses revenue figures to measure the success of a company. How successful is your company? We're a small company. Last year, we had revenues of $10 million. We're not, by any stretch of the imagination, the largest production company out there, but we're growing. Every year we add productions. So I consider us a small success. I don't think I'm going to get rich off of doing this, but I'm having a good time. And as long as I'm not losing money, I'm happy.

You brought comedy to being a weatherman. No, I have to give props to Willard Scott. Willard Scott was really the grandfather of the funny weatherman. He mentored me. And he said, "Look, two things: Never give up your day job"-meaning weather is a wonderful platform from which to do other things, don't give that up. And I don't plan to. And the other [thing he said] is to be yourself. You can be a character, but eventually it gets tiring. But if you just be yourself-for better or for worse--that's who you are, and you don't have to worry about playing that.

What was your biggest challenge? I think not being put in a box: "OK, you're the weatherman and this is all you do." And I've been lucky to work with people who allow me to expand. So, if you watch the Today show, I host segments, especially in the third hour. I haven't accepted what the weatherman is supposed to be.

You graduated from SUNY Oswego in upstate New York where the minority population was very small. The college was 6,000 people, and maybe there were 200 African American students when I was going there. It didn't affect me in a negative way. You had two types of African American students: The ones who felt you should be "power to the people," and then there were others who felt: "Look, this isn't the real world. You have to be out there." There were some who criticized me because I was at the TV station. But you know what? That's where I was going to work. I wasn't going to get a job hanging out with other students. I got along with everybody. I did what I needed to do. I don't think I abdicated my African American citizenship. But if I was going to be a television newsperson, that's where I had to be, not hanging out in the student union.

With all the weather-related disasters, what would be your predictions for the future? I think everybody wants to look at [a disaster] and say, "Oh my God, it's the end of the world." The fact of the matter is, when you look at climate change, you have to look over 50, 60, 75 years. Is our climate getting warmer? Yes. Are the things we see happening a result of that warming? Nobody knows. And the problem is that we're not going to know until after it's happened.