Ben Legg and I talk about what it actually takes to build a portfolio career and why the people drawn to it tend to share a particular kind of independent bloody mindedness. Ben brings his own journey from the Royal Engineers to McKinsey to Google to founding the Portfolio Collective, a 16,000-strong global community for portfolio professionals. He's a pragmatic optimist about the trade-offs: the freedom, the loneliness, the accountability and the discipline of thinking of yourself as a business of one. We get into what makes work fun, what the army taught him about staying calm when no one's actually dying and why he thinks the biggest shift ahead isn't AI itself but the move from doing to orchestrating. We close with one eye on the future of work, of education, of what a good life might look like when the drudgery falls away and human ingenuity gets to do what it does best.

Ben Legg  is the former COO of Google Europe. As a board member and advisor across multiple industries, he is heavily involved in building disruptive businesses, as well as advising Wall Street investors and governments on AI strategy, realities and digital disruption. Ben’s career has been defined by high-stakes leadership, turnarounds and hypergrowth. From serving as a British Army Officer during the Siege of Sarajevo to running the turnaround of Coca-Cola India to defining and leading hypergrowth at Google, he brings a unique "warrior-to-boardroom" perspective.