Podbit · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
John Coogan's advice for young people: move to the vortex of your industry early, burn the ships, live cheap and be in the mix. He lived in a one-bedroom Tenderloin apartment with three people for $1,500 a month. Then leave — because distance from the vortex gives you a perspective that people inside it can never have.
Where this was said
At 59:54 · chapter starts 58:40
Asked directly for advice to young men, Coogan recounts years of solitary skill-building: every piece of camera and lighting equipment, programming fluency, enough domain knowledge to follow a software company's technical conversation. None of it felt like it was converging at the time. Then TBPN happened and it all clicked. The second piece of advice is geographic: San Francisco is an AGI vortex right now, just as it was a startup vortex when Coogan moved there post-college and lived in a $1,500-a-month three-person Tenderloin apartment. Being in the mix, even in squalor, exposed him to things he could not have encountered anywhere else. [1] — John Coogan "John Coogan's advice for young people: move to the vortex of your industry early, burn the ships, live cheap and be in the mix. He lived in…" 59:54 But staying too long is also a trap — leaving the vortex is what gave him the outside perspective that eventually made him successful within tech from the outside. The same logic applies to New York for finance, or any other industry with a clear geographic centre of gravity.
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