Watch 10 Things Jerry Seinfeld Can't Live Without | 10 Essentials | GQ

Released on 05/01/2024

[Interviewer] Do you think of yourself in this way?

No.

[Interviewer] A style icon?

Are you kidding?

I just wanna be comfortable

and get out of the goddamn house.

Hello, I'm Jerry Seinfeld, and these are my essentials.

[upbeat music]

This is the Swiss Army Knife executive, discontinued model.

You know how you're always trying to get into things

and fix things, and there's strings and someone's got a tag?

This, a very close friend of mine, Ronnie Shakes,

one night we were eating at the Green Kitchen

on First Avenue, and there was no knife,

and he took out his Swiss Army Knife and he opened it

and ate his pie with the Swiss Army Knife.

And he said to me, Never ever go anywhere

without a Swiss Army Knife,

and from that day, I haven't.

I never go anywhere without one.

I love things that embody a word

that I learned many years ago, quintessence.

Quintessence is something that is perfectly itself.

There was a book about that in the '70s,

and it was filled with all these objects.

I learned from that book that that's what I want.

That is the thing that I want in my objects, quintessence.

[upbeat music]

I love Patagonia.

I've loved Patagonia since the '80s in Seattle,

when I found the company.

I love their colors, I love their functionality.

I've had this backpack probably 15 years.

It's got a little Superman key chain.

You know, when you get this going, you get this,

it's like a move, and you're just gone,

and I'm out the door.

When I went to buy this, I had another backpack

that I had used of theirs, and I said,

I have this backpack, but I want a new one.

And they said, Why?

What's wrong with the one you have?

I go, Nothing.

Don't you wanna sell me a new one?

They go, If you want.

They don't want you to ever want another one.

That's my kind of company.

[funky music]

I've always written on Yellow pads.

I wrote the entire Seinfeld TV series,

every single episode, like this.

I like to write more than Larry did,

so I would keep the notes, and I always use these.

Even if you're writing comedy,

a legal pad, it says, I'm taking this seriously.

I love pens.

I think pens are a very important creative tool.

Keyboards really crush your freedom,

and it's too corporate.

To be creative,

you wanna feel like you're getting away with something.

I'm like the only person you know, I finish them.

I don't lose them.

I don't lose anything.

And I will take this pen

and that ink all the way down to the bottom,

and then it runs out of ink.

Can you imagine how satisfying that is

to finish a BIC pen?

I've done it thousands of times.

There's a hole in the top of cap,

'cause someone, a kid swallowed a cap and died.

So these idiot lawyers said,

Well, we'll put a hole in the cap,

which really disturbed me aesthetically,

and I called the president of BIC.

This is the reason why you get your own TV series.

I called the president of BIC, Bruno Bich,

and he took the call, 'cause I had my own TV series.

And I said, Why did you put a hole in there?

Why did you change it?

And he explained to me this story with the lawyers.

And they said, To keep kids from choking on the cap,

we'll put a hole in it

and they can breathe through the hole.

I think this is happening a lot.

You wanna talk about quintessence, this thing has it.

[funky music]

I have been wearing the Nike Shox for many, many years.

I'll tell you right now, I don't have great feet,

so I always like the Shox, 'cause if you live in Manhattan

and you walk around Manhattan, like, Manhattan is,

it's a hard pavement.

So these, obviously, are little shock absorbers.

And I think they're cool looking

because if you look at them in plan,

as we say in architecture, they kind of Coke bottle

in the middle, which is like a track flat.

All other sneakers, they don't pinch in the middle,

which is the coolest look for a sneaker.

Coolest sneaker in the world is a track flat.

Nobody wears them anymore,

and people do make fun of me for wearing them,

and that only makes me like them more.

And they're tough as hell.

They're car-like, you know, I have shock absorbers.

It's car-y, so I feel like they're little cars.

[gentle music]

Breitling Cosmonaute, 24-hour watch

that was designed by Breitling

for Scott Carpenter to orbit the Earth.

Astronauts cannot tell if it's am or pm

because they're orbiting the Earth, like, every few minutes,

so they don't know.

Obviously, there's no day or night in space,

so he wanted a watch that only goes around once,

so you know if it's am or pm.

You don't have to wonder.

It's hard to tell what time it is with this watch,

and I like that because I get to stare

at this fantastic face longer.

It's got a slide rule bezel,

obviously, a chronograph function.

I would never go anywhere without a stopwatch.

I time everything.

I go into a restaurant, and the table's not ready,

and the maitre d' says,

We'll have it for you in five minutes,

I go, Great.

[upbeat music]

When I'm home or in my office

and I'm making coffee, I use this pot.

It's quite complex.

You gotta know what you're doing.

It is time consuming.

It's a great thing to waste time.

The secret of life is to waste time

in ways that you like.

You spend all your life trying to save time,

but when you get to the end of your life,

there is no time left, and you'll go to heaven,

and you go, But wait, I had VELCRO sneakers,

no-iron shirt, clip-on tie.

What about all that time?

It's gone.

It's fun to make.

I'm not gonna explain it.

It's a whole procedure.

You gotta, you know, you gotta learn it.

So then you put it on your stove and then you wait.

You open the top and then you wait, you gotta wait.

And again, use your stopwatch to see how long it takes,

but once it starts to bubble out of there,

you gotta close that right away,

'cause otherwise it'll go all over.

It's a giant mess.

This thing was invented in 1938, by the way,

and it's flawless.

Every home in Italy has one,

and they still somehow figured out how to go bankrupt.

That's Italy, that's what I love about Italy.

Make the greatest thing in the world and still screw it up.

[upbeat music]

It's called Meditations.

It's by Marcus Aurelius.

So this guy, emperor of Rome,

leader of the entire world at the time,

150 AD, every night,

he would write his thoughts about his life

and how to do things in life.

It's really about perspective,

how to look at things in life,

especially things that bother you.

It's not a real book.

It's just a series of thoughts that he has.

So, you know, you pick it up

and you read like two pages, is all you gotta read.

When you're reading it,

just imagine the absolute peak of the Roman Empire.

Think of this guy's life,

trying to envision his bedroom.

What did he write with?

Not a BIC pen.

He wrote how annoying people are,

don't be surprised by how difficult things are.

He says, What in ourselves should we prize?

An audience clapping? No.

How funny is that for me as a comedian to read that.

No more than the clacking of their tongues,

which is all that public praise amounts to,

a clacking of tongues.

So he tells you do not pursue other people's recognition

as an end-goal in itself.

What you pursue is the quality of the work

that you're doing, not the result

of people liking it, hating it.

To hell with that.

Likes, what are likes?

Other people liked it.

If you're pursuing that, your train's off the track.

Two sentences I read, genius.

So I've got this movie coming out, Unfrosted.

I'm going to seek the most vicious, negative,

hostile, cheap, backstabbing reviews I can find.

You know why? I got this guy.

I'm gonna just laugh my ass off

because whatever your opinion is of the movie,

that's your opinion.

[upbeat music]

This is my team.

When I look at this logo,

when I look at these colors, I'm five years old,

in my den and I'm watching baseball on TV,

and I'm eating a Pop-Tart.

The Mets are never not watchable.

All these teams have no idea what they're doing.

No one really succeeds according to plan.

It's all random, it's all meaningless.

That's the joy of it.

If you don't embrace randomness and meaninglessness,

forget watching baseball.

I like the dad hat because you can make it tighter

if you're in a convertible, and you can hang it on things.

There's some use for this hole.

You know, you can hold it, spin it.

[upbeat music]

These two things, this thing and this thing,

this is cinnamon, this is peanut butter,

clinically proven to make you happier.

I recently discovered this brand, WOODSTOCK,

very simple peanut butter.

This is gonna gross you out a little bit.

I will put peanut butter on a hard-boiled egg, sorry.

Go ahead, try it, I dare you.

Why is almond just forcing its way into everything?

Almond milk, almond butter, eh, peanut butter,

George Washington Carver.

This is a jar of honey.

I'm the guy who made a movie about bees because I love bees.

The bees are the most elegant

societal structure ever created.

Bee society works perfectly.

No bee looks at any other bee and goes,

How did he get that job?

Why aren't I doing that?

How much does that bee make?

[upbeat music]

Levi's Made & Crafted,

they try and make them a little more quality to it, maybe.

Why does every pair of Levi's fit differently?

I don't know.

I don't really know about the quality control

of this company.

I really don't.

This is called arcuate stitching.

That's the little V of Levi's, brilliant graphic.

When jeans don't have it,

it's just like, it disturbs you, right?

It's like just a plain-pocket jean looks so weird to me.

That book Quintessence Levi's 501s were in that book

because they're considered one of the most perfect objects

ever made by man.

You can't add or subtract anything to it without ruining it.

I bought a bunch of them.

I don't know if they'll ever make them again.

511, I'm not gonna tell you the waist or the length.

Remember that episode?

[funky music]

I found out about this guy Brunello Cucinelli recently.

He seems to be out of his mind.

He lives in Solomeo, Italy, where he grew up,

and he transformed this town into this insane brand

where they charge prices that make no sense at all,

but the quality, the quality is there.

I would say quality is the word

that pulls me through life by the nose.

I just look for it, I seek it.

If I see it all to go up or down in any way with anything,

I'm very attentive to that.

I don't really care about much else.

So this guy is very good quality,

and I don't think men wear enough sport jackets, women too.

It just pulls anything you're wearing together.

The scarf is the greatest garment of all clothing

because of how it enables you

to adjust to a range of temperatures.

I live in New York.

I would never live any place

that does not have four seasons.

I find that to be a pathetic way of life.

If you don't have four seasons,

it's like you don't have all the colors.

I like freezing, I like sweating,

I like, Oh my God, this season's over.

We're gonna get a new one.

If you're wearing a T-shirt and jeans

and you throw on a blazer and a scarf,

people think you look nice, but you don't.

[Interviewer] And then the last item

is your Star of David Necklace, Jerry.

Ah, well, I'm not gonna show you that,

but I can talk about it.

Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace

because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel

that I feel close to, and that's why I wear it.

[gentle music]

Thanks for checking out My Essentials.

Make your life more essential

and more quiescent, and you'll be happier.

[gentle music]