The Portfolio Career Lab

For generations, our jobs offered us more than just a paycheck. They offered  a promise: show up, work hard, and in exchange, you could count on a certain measure of security: decent health insurance, a way to save for retirement, paid time off, and a clear pathway into the middle class. That social contract is  now fraying. As the safety net bundled with the traditional 9-to-5 disappears, millions of knowledge workers are now being pushed into an unfamiliar, unrecognizable job market with no map and very little floor. The Portfolio Career Lab is a podcast about this phenomenon: Why so many of us are being thrust into self-employment, the various ways people are actually making this model of work fit into the rest of their lives , and how to begin closing the gap between how people actually work and how our safety net was originally designed. Host Brie Abramowicz is a 5x Head of Product turned portfolio careerist and author of the bestselling book Polyworker. In each episode, she sits down with humans choosing to live and work differently, from fractional operators and creators to economists, researchers, policy wonks, activist, athletes, and artists. The conversations are intimate and always focused on the bigger picture. You'll leave with a sharper read on where the working world is headed and hope and the inspiration to build a portfolio career of your own. This season, we explore the strange new set of economies that has bloomed over the last year as people try to make ends meet: from sports betting and OnlyFans, to a sprawling world of cash advance apps and online coaches and influencers selling the promise of six figures and a better life. It is easy to read these trends as a story about exploitation, and often it is. But it is also a story about longing. When people stop believing that a steady job and hard work will carry them somewhere, they do not stop believing. They go looking for a new faith, and they find it wherever someone is willing to sell it to them. Some of what they find will be predatory. But some of it will also be beautiful: new forms of creative expression, of mutual care, even people organizing to fight for their basic human rights. Join us in exploring "the grift and the good" this season by following the podcast, and get every new episode when it drops on Sundays.