10 Things Kumail Nanjiani Can't Live Without

I forgot to bring a lemon,

so I'm just going to hold this

and you guys can CG a lemon in later.

You have the budget for that right?

Here. Make the lemon move around.

Oh god, your budget is going up every second.

This could be the most expensive Essential Items ever.

[heavy hip-hop beat playing]

Hey, I'm Kumail Nanjiani

and I'm here with GQ to talk about my ten essentials.

The first one is not that exciting. It's a computer.

I should have cleaned it for this.

Wow, this is filthy.

And I have a little sticker on here

'cause my wife and I have the same computer

and so we have little stickers

so we know whose is who.

The sticker I used to have on the other one

was an ampersand.

That, to me, signified like Keep going, and?

What else, and?

Then, I found it was too much pressure,

so I was like, no, I'm going to go the other way,

have less pressure when I'm doing work,

and so took that off.

To me, it signifies like somebody,

like a neutral expression, like when I start my computer,

I don't want to be in any specific place.

Let's see where it goes.

[heavy hip-hop beat playing]

I always travel with a video game console,

which is very embarrassing 'cause I don't check stuff in,

so when people are like putting their laptops in the bins,

I'm pulling out my Xbox 'cause you have to pull that out.

It's a little embarrassing.

Right now, I'm replaying Mass Effect,

which is a story about, people are going to get bored,

space [censored]. Can I swear?

It's a bunch of space [censored].

You're in a space ship fighting space [censored].

I don't want anything set in the present.

I'm already in the present.

I'm trying to get away from here.

So, I used to play online a lot

and I was, [laughing] I was really good.

Almost too good.

I got to the point where, I forget which Halo it was,

but it was one of the Halo's,

I was ranked like, my level was 48,

which to you, it means nothing, but trust me,

it's very high, and I was like, okay,

I shouldn't have wireless controllers anymore

'cause if their wired, you can only throw them so far.

All right, now I'll just talk about an app

I have on my phone. It is called Calm

[smooth music playing]

and it's just a meditation app, and I use it every day.

I just plug in my headphones

and I just do 10 minutes with Tamara Levitt.

I don't know who she is,

but I hear her voice every day for 10 minutes.

I have no idea what she looks like.

I think I'd be very star struck if I ever met Tamara Levitt

and on the days I don't do it, I really feel it.

I haven't done it today and I'm really like, oh man.

All right, here we go. Let's see.

Close your eyes.

Feel the weight of gravity pulling you down.

Relax your forehead. Relax your eyes.

Let your lips curl into a small smile

and whenever you're ready, you're on a beach.

There are no piranhas on this beach.

[waves crashing]

There's no sharks

and no murders are occurring on this beach.

It's one of the good beaches,

nobody's ever, nobody's ever died on this beach.

I shouldn't focus on the bad stuff that isn't happening.

I should focus on the good stuff that is happening.

What do you think?

It's going to be good right?

In tomorrow's meditation, you're going to be riding a shark.

Here's another thing I'll talk about.

[heavy hip-hop beat playing]

If you change your socks in the middle of the day,

it changes your whole day.

I'm always telling my friends

to carry a pair of socks with you

and halfway through the day,

just put on a new pair of socks.

You're like a whole new person.

I've been doing this for like 15 years or so

and I always have an extra pair of socks on me.

I don't have particularly sweaty feet.

That's not what it is.

I don't want people to watch this video

and be like, Oh, I don't need this

'cause Kumail's got sweaty, smelly feet.

I don't have sweaty feet and honestly, my feet don't smell.

I think it's like, just whenever you think of it,

whenever you feel like you need like a little jolt

to your day, you know, I'm realizing how depressing it is

that when I want real excitement to show up in my day,

I put on a new, fresh pair of socks.

Ah, I should get out more.

I should try some drugs. I've heard those are fun.

[heavy hip-hop beat playing]

This is not that exciting. It's just a notebook.

You know, everyone has them.

I have like all sorts of stuff in it.

It's got my initials on it.

I don't know. Somebody gave them to me.

I don't always have my initials on stuff,

but I have like lists of movies I want to see

or I have seen, I have recipes for stuff I've tried,

I have notes on like basically anything,

so I always have a notebook on me

because sometimes it feels better for me

to write on something that's not a computer.

Pair with that, this is a different thing.

I'm very particular about my pens.

Now this is not fancy, but I write with fountain pens

'cause what happens is the tip,

the way you write sort of adapts to the way you write

and then it becomes your pen.

It's like it's sort of thinking what you're thinking.

If I use somebody else's fountain pen,

I wouldn't be able to write with it

'cause it doesn't like the pressure you apply,

the way you hold it, all that stuff doesn't work,

so a fountain pen, always have a fountain pen on me.

Oh my God. I could write for hours on this.

If only I had something to say. That's the best I could do.

I wrote fountain pen with a fountain pen.

I need to change my socks.

Okay, so this is something that I've recently discovered.

These are called Obleas

[smooth music playing]

and it's a, sort of a sweet wafer,

can be Spanish or a lot of Latin American countries have it,

Mexico, and I'm going to open it.

What I like about it is that it takes a long time to eat

and it makes a real mess.

[crunching]

I like the texture and there's barely any flavor

like this says chocolate,

but it's like, it tastes like the memory of chocolate.

I've never not eaten a whole one in a sitting before.

If I'd started earlier, I would have done the whole thing.

You can put jam on them.

I don't 'cause I don't want flavor. I just want texture.

If you could like bite air, that's what this is like.

[crunching]

My wife and I call them dusty rounds

'cause they're round and they just are very dusty,

as you can see.

[crunching]

I might eat these for the rest of the shoot.

[blowing]

[bright edm music playing]

I have all these things that I do in the morning

that have become part of a ritual, I guess,

and one of them is I have Emergen-C every day.

Just put it in water and drink it.

It's to the point where just drinking water

is really boring for me.

I actually like the raspberry flavor the best,

but this is the one that my wife prefers,

so we have a bunch of orange right now,

and what I have with it is a lemon.

I put hot water and I put lemon in it.

[beeping]

Here's the cup. [fake sipping] Ah, hot!

See, you could see by all the smoke that's coming out of it.

[smooth music playing]

Big fan of coffee, so I always have this on me.

This is instant coffee.

Now, I am a coffee snob

and I know a lot of coffee people

really look down on instant coffee,

but I grew up drinking instant coffee. Nescafe?

I was the only one who drank coffee in my family.

Nobody else drank coffee.

My family drank tea and I drank coffee

and I've been drinking coffee since I was eight years old,

many, many cups of coffee,

and my parents had no idea what was in it,

and if I think back on my childhood,

I remember feeling very high energy.

I would stay up all night on weekends drinking coffee.

It was a great feeling.

Anyway, so I still like instant coffee.

I think Nescafe instant coffee still tastes good to me

and then this is like Verve,

which is like a good fancy coffee roaster,

this is their version of instant coffee,

and I think it's pretty good.

Yeah. I always have coffee on me.

Of course, a mask.

[heavy hip-hop beat playing]

Always have a mask on me

and this should date how long I've had this mask for.

Remember? There was an election? So, this was for that.

It's going to be so weird when we find these things

like 10 years from now in our room

and be like, Oh yeah, remember that?

When we all wore masks all the time?

God, I hope in 10 years we're like,

Remember when we used to have to wear masks?

[groaning] Is this supposed to be devastatingly depressing

or like a fun watch?

Well, thank you so much for listening to my essentials.

These are all the things that I truly cannot live without.

Thanks for watching and remember, go see Eternals

in theaters November 5th.

It's really good.

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it's very good.