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For our 50th episode, the person who’s quietly shaped every one of the previous forty-nine finally steps in front of the mic. David Strutt has edited Path Found from the very beginning, and in a year of working together, he and Monica had never actually spoken until this conversation.

David’s path to the editor’s chair was anything but direct. A hyperactive kid in Dublin who couldn’t sit still long enough to learn guitar, he found his footing in a countryside garage at thirteen, recording his own band on microphones he’d saved up to buy. That instinct that the recording might matter more than the stardom carried him through a music technology degree, only for the industry to shift under his feet as home recording gear got cheap and the mid-level studios disappeared. So he pivoted. To radio. Then, after meeting his partner at the Edinburgh Fringe and moving to Scotland during the pandemic, he pivoted again into podcast production, building a freelance business one client at a time.

Along the way, he learned the lessons nobody teaches in school: that the technical skills were the easy part, that charging what you’re worth is its own hard-won discipline, and that the second year of working for yourself is where you find out whether you can really do it. He also does stand-up comedy, keeps a scrappy support network of fellow freelancers, and has a refreshingly grounded take on whether AI is coming for his job.

This one’s a full-circle conversation about creative work, self-employment, and the case for building a life around people you like and work you enjoy.

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Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

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Leon Kazandjian never had a linear career, and he’d tell you that’s the point. The son of a car mechanic, he grew up taking things apart just to understand them, a habit that survived a mediocre school record and a teaching degree he abandoned almost immediately.

What followed was a reinvention marathon: an aircraft mechanic’s license earned with a 4.0 and a Golden Wrench Award, a year at Raytheon, two weeks at LAX, two and a half years running a gold-prospecting store in Pasadena, and nearly two decades inside California’s correctional system, where a job he thought was counseling turned out to be guarding a juvenile facility. He worked his way from correctional counselor to chief engineer, keeping a 1939 institution and its 8,000 residents supplied with water, power, and steam on a shoestring budget.

The last three years brought the sharpest turns: an early retirement under pressure, a chaotic startup, a hospital HVAC job, a park superintendency he loved and lost, and finally, through the same networking that carried him everywhere, a role as an MEP coordinator building data centers, reading blueprints for the first time in his fifties and thriving.

The thread running through all of it isn’t a job title. It’s the five-year-old on the floor, sticking his finger in a light socket, certain there had to be something inside worth understanding.

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Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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Chris Davis didn't know what he wanted at eighteen, and he still didn't know at twenty-one, a fact he admitted out loud, in an interview, to a partner at a law firm. That honesty got him gently shown the door and pointed him toward a year of service work in San Francisco that he now credits with shaping his values.

Three decades later, he runs his own employment law firm, and he's watching the entry rungs of his profession change under him. In this AI & Careers conversation, Chris walks through what his firm has actually automated in a thousand-client mass arbitration, where the confidentiality lines are, why he still hired a first-year associate this year, and why the parts of lawyering that matter most — persuasion, judgment, telling a client the truth they don't want — aren't going anywhere. Part of our AI & Careers series.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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Elizabeth didn't set out to be a designer. She spent the early part of her career in nonprofits, organizing, grant writing, and communications, and kept noticing that the tasks she liked best were the ones involving presentation and visuals. After two successive jobs disappeared to cutbacks, she decided she'd rather have her livelihood in her own hands. She started building websites for clients she knew she could deliver for, learned by doing (slowly, she admits), and eventually went back for a design degree that showed her the size of the gap she'd been working across.

Nearly fifteen years into running Silvermine Creative, she's watching the field change again. This isn't a Luddite position: she uses AI daily, for custom code, troubleshooting, tightening her own copy, and generating imagery for clients who can't photograph their real customers. But she's specific about where it stops. It can't see the work coming together as it goes. It can't look at a model in an unnatural pose and think "that looks painful." It can't pick between two directions because one of them grabs you.

She also walks through the ethics she's actually landed on rather than the ones that sound good: controlling inputs so she isn't laundering someone else's work, sourcing reference material from public domain and licensed sources, choosing platforms based on how they were trained and who they fund. And she's honest about the paradox — the environmental footprint, the opacity, and the fact that opting out entirely would just hand her spot to someone with fewer scruples.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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Brian DeAngelis knew by about age ten that he wanted to make movies. Getting there took a lot longer than that.

He didn't get into a single film school he applied to out of high school, so he went to UC Santa Cruz and built his own program out of whatever he could find and joined a fraternity, mostly because he was an introvert and knew he needed an obligation that would get him out of his room. That fraternity is where his first industry job came from.

A few years producing in Silicon Valley followed, then a full-court press on film school applications: cold calls to admissions offices, flights to Los Angeles, and a professor who crumpled up his resume in front of him and asked what was actually interesting about him. He landed at USC's graduate film program, then in animated comedy development at Illumination, and today he's in studio operations at Warner Bros., where he sees the part of the business most creative people never do.

This episode is part of our AI & Careers series, and Brian gives one of the clearest accounts we've heard of what artificial intelligence is actually doing inside a major studio right now — not the headlines, the day-to-day. But the conversation is bigger than that. It's about how opportunity really moves, why the friend on a junior agent's desk may matter more than the executive, and why, in Brian's words, "all of the people who do so much hard work here at one point or another are successful because they had the audacity to play."

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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Pete Stiefel has adapted to more technological upheaval than almost anyone in marketing. He began his career building print artwork by hand, with T-squares, boards, and film strippers, then helped lead his company into the desktop publishing era when he convinced them a Macintosh would cut typesetting costs by 80%. He was right. He also watched that same revolution put an entire industry of film preparation specialists out of work.

Now Pete uses AI every day as a marketing creative for a home improvement company, compositing people into CGI room renders, generating campaign concepts, and drafting headlines. In this episode of our AI & Careers series, he explains what AI does brilliantly, where it falls flat, and why he believes the human idea is still the only thing that can't be automated.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

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Peter Weinberger has spent his career at the intersection of community and journalism, first as a photojournalist and, for the past two decades, as the publisher and owner of the Claremont Courier, a family institution since 1955 and one of the oldest papers still publishing in the greater LA area.

 In this episode, Peter talks about what it really means to run a local newspaper in 2025 — the economics, the ethics, and the AI bots that showed up uninvited in November and cut his website traffic in half. He shares why he believes local journalism will survive, what only a human reporter can do, and what he'd tell a journalism student walking in the door today.

 This episode is part of Path Found's AI series.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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What does it take to build a real life in Yellowstone, not as a visitor, but as someone who stays? MacNeil Lyons grew up crisscrossing the country, from Colorado to the eastern shore of Maryland, to California, and never lost his pull toward wild, open places. In this episode, he traces a career that moved through nine years of National Park Service seasonal and term positions, a stint with the Yellowstone Association Institute, and a brief private sector chapter before founding Yellowstone Insight, his own guiding company, roughly ten years ago.

We get into what it actually looks like to build a life in a place like Yellowstone — not as a visitor, but as someone who has chosen to stay when the seasonal contract ends. MacNeil talks candidly about the appeal and the limits of NPS life, the pivot to nonprofit and private work, and what it cost, financially and personally, to launch a small business in a gateway community. He also reflects on the unexpected forms mentorship took across his career, how his college major opened rather than narrowed his options, and the version of success he never anticipated but wouldn't trade.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

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Elise Barrow had it mapped out: Johns Hopkins, medical school, doctor. Her father held a PhD; college was never a question, and medicine was the destination.

Her first semester didn't change the direction so much as the certainty. She moved from biology to public health, concentrated in international health and psychology, and finished in four years, because that's simply what you did.

What came next was a career built on adaptation. Two years at the D.C. Health Department doing community health outreach through the anthrax scare and the Beltway sniper crisis. An MPH at NYU. Work at the New York City Department of Health on breastfeeding and prenatal care initiatives. Then Mount Sinai and the National Children's Study, an ambitious 21-year, NIH-funded longitudinal study tracking environmental exposures in women and children.

Today she manages interventional trials in women's oncology, doing the kind of science that finally makes sense of everything she learned at 18 but couldn't absorb yet.

In this episode, Elise reflects on the cost of rigid timelines, what she wishes she'd told her 18-year-old self, and why she's raising her own kids with an entirely different message about time, exploration, and what you're allowed to become.

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Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

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What does it actually take to build something of your own? In this compilation episode, we bring together eight voices from the Path Found archive — eight women who started businesses without a playbook, an MBA, or anyone’s permission. Their seeds were rarely what you’d expect: a friend’s move during COVID, a whisper at a niece’s birth, a bike commute in uncomfortable jeans, a journal full of sad entries, even a SWAT raid. What they share is the moment they stopped listening to everyone else and started listening to themselves.

This episode is for anyone standing at the edge of a leap — a career change, a side hustle, an idea you keep ignoring. The route may not be linear, but there’s always a way forward.

Featured Voices

•      Kristina Marler — Founder, Neat Freak SoCal. From producing high-end events in New York to discovering a professional organizing business inside a friend’s two storage units during the pandemic.

•      Melissa Romero — After nearly a decade in California environmental politics, she followed a lifelong whisper into birth work — and is now training to serve Spanish-speaking families as a doula.

•      Eleanore Guthrie — Founder of Knorts and inventor of knit denim, on creating a category, getting copied by giants, and pivoting on her own terms.

•      Kayla Andersen — Founder, Riparian Media. She did the math on her freelance income, gave a polite two weeks’ notice, and decided she deserved good things.

•      Londa Jensen — From international educator to a cannabis-industry arrest to CEO of Manifestation Babe and founder of Manifested Adventures.

•      Vikki Yaller Radow — A tech pioneer since 1989 — GeoCities, FrontBridge, and the foundations of what we now call Office 365 — on knowing your worth.

•      Macey McCallion — A horse trainer from a family of doctors and lawyers, on drowning out the naysayers and trusting her intuition.

•      Jessica Nersesian — Co-founder, Metric Design Works (Barcelona), on sustainability in consumer electronics and “following the thread” to a job that didn’t exist until she made it.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

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Get Involved:
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