Supreme self-confidence and my wife.

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

I wanted my children to grow up in Australia, and if I have anything to pass on to them as a parent as a mentor, it is my own experiences of having grown up there, and shaped a career there.

I’d like them to inherit my optimism.

Oh, all the time. We have a fear all the time. But that’s what keeps us going, that’s what keeps us focused. You have to have a fear. People who say, “I have no fear. I’m not afraid of ever failing,” are kidding themselves. Sometimes it’s the fear of failure, of not wanting to fail, that makes people as great as they are. I know that’s what pushes me, a lot.

I also developed an unhelpful aversion to asking for favors. Frankly, if I had sought help from others, I would have made far fewer mistakes.

So, it was hard to fathom letting go. Age was part of the reason. We were both 77 at that time.

What I would do differently? When I went through school, I was in a hurry. I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I was a finance major in graduate school. I was in a hurry to succeed when I got out in the business world. I’m sorry I didn’t take more courses in the humanities and in history and in the arts.

We have made many investments in our history. Not all have succeeded. As entrepreneurs willing to take some risk, we have made many mistakes. But when we are successful, we leave the company better than we found it.

I’m very proud of that and I started a drug and substance abuse program in middle schools in New York to help the worst performing schools.