Your Monday survival kit: Seinfeld, life tips, and introducing a new planet

🧘‍♂️ The most anxious man in sneakers found inner peace

Jerry Seinfeld credits this daily 20-minute ritual with surviving peak fame and clearing his skin.

Transcendental Meditation might conjure images of serene monks or incense-filled ashrams, but for Jerry Seinfeld, it looked like skipping lunch to sit silently in a production trailer. The man was stressed! The high-octane comic has practiced TM since he was 18, after a college friend turned him onto it during a post-’60s self-exploration phase. “I had terrible acne…and it all just went away,” he joked. “And I became a world-famous comedian. That’s the story. That’s the entire story of my life.”

But beneath the punchline is a serious endorsement. At the height of Seinfeld mania, when Jerry was juggling starring, writing, producing, and editing a mega-hit show, TM wasn’t a luxury, it was survival. “That 20 minutes in the middle of the day would save me,” he said. “It was all great, but I never could have accomplished it without TM.”

📘 The best advice people wish they got at 20

Reddit delivers a masterclass in hindsight, some hilarious, some hauntingly wise.

Your twenties are chaotic, thrilling, occasionally cringey, and deeply formative. Whether you're in the thick of them or remembering them like an emotionally confusing montage, it’s a decade built for mistakes and makeovers (the internal kind). One Redditor posed the golden question: What advice do you wish someone had given you at 20? The internet did not disappoint.

We’ve got some bangers. #7 reminds us that mental health days are legit, not luxuries ("Money comes back, but breaking your brain? Not worth it"). Over at #12, someone urges us to start investing now, even if it’s just lunch money, because adulting meltdowns are real and rent waits for no one.

Then there’s #4 with a gut-punch of truth: being alone is better than being with the wrong people (bonus Robin Williams quote that’ll hit you right in the feels). And #1 flips the script, suggesting that some of the best lessons in life come not from role models but from watching other people crash and burn.

Even if 20 is a speck in your rearview or still on the horizon, good advice is good advice. And this list? It's packed.

🪐 This planet shouldn’t exist, but there it is

Astronomers just found a giant planet orbiting a tiny star, and it’s bending the rules of how planets are supposed to work.

Here’s the space oddity: a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a star so small it barely counts as one, orbiting at speeds that are hard to get your head around. (My wife finds the entire concept of gas giants utterly mystifying! “There has to be something in there, right?!”) The planet circles this red dwarf named TOI-6894 in just three days. Technically, that’s two-and-a-bit years a week. And somehow, the place is shockingly cold. Scientists are puzzled, and not in a cute “space is cool” kind of way, but in a “this messes with everything we thought we knew” way.

Typically, stars that small don’t have the juice to form planets this big. So, how did this one manage it? Nobody’s sure. But the discovery is already forcing researchers to rethink their models for how planets form and what kinds of stars can host them.

No, it’s not part of our solar system. No, Pluto doesn’t get to gloat. But this rogue planet does suggest there might be a lot more gas giants lurking in unexpected places—and maybe a lot more for us to learn.

💬From the friends group text…

Some more cultural learning from the friendly text-chain fire-hose of content that keeps awkwardly pinging my phone during meetings. Turns out they measure distance differently down-under, and I don’t mean kilometers. “It’s a bit of a mission…”

montyfranklin

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