Jerry Seinfeld’s episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Barack Obama is predictably great. I highly recommend watching the whole 20 minutes.

I particularly enjoyed the exchanges on maintaining perspective. Seinfeld teased Obama about this throughout, asking him questions about his underwear, emotional eating, raising the heat in the White House, and other stuff that normal people have to worry about.

At the 00:14:35 mark, they started talking about how privilege and power changes you. Seinfeld said, “Privilege is toxic, sadly. Things that people struggle to achieve, they get to positions of power, influence, money, can do things… it has a toxic effect on their judgment.”

Then, Obama turned the tables on him. “Has it happened to you yet?” Obama asked.

“No,” Seinfeld replied immediately and definitively.

Obama kept pushing. He mentioned Seinfeld’s sudden and extreme success — the fame, the money — and he asked, “How did you calibrate dealing with that?”

Seinfeld responded:

I fell in love with the work. And the work was joyful and difficult and interesting. And that was my focus.

Very reminiscent of what Obama himself said earlier this year in an interview with Humans of New York, although in that case, Obama was referring to how you recover from massive failure.