Usually, people in the Islamic world set aside one-third or one-fourth of their wealth for endowment, and that will be effective only after their death. But in my case, I decided to implement this decision in my lifetime itself.

I distributed my wealth among my children and set aside a portion for endowment to run charity projects.

In the past, I never gave money to my children when they were young in return for nothing. When one of them approached me to give them cash, I asked them to do some work in exchange for it.

My experiment in money exchange was the temptation to set up a bank. The absence of any Islamic banking was also another factor in establishing Al-Rajhi Bank, which is now the world's biggest Islamic lender by market value.

Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.

I grew up knowing my grandfather had served our country for decades in the Navy, buried in his whites in Arlington; I have family members who are veterans.

I have recommended cutting the tax on cell phones and TVs for every Florida family so they can save around $43 a year for spending as little as $100 a month on cell phone and TV bills combined.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.