Path Found
Path Found is the podcast for anyone who’s ever asked, “What now?”
This show explores the real, messy, and inspiring journeys people take to find fulfilling work—and themselves. From pivots and side hustles to mentorship and major career changes, Path Found reveals what college never taught and counselors never said.
Episodes
51 episodes
The Editor in the Chair
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 ...
The Midlife Rollercoaster
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 ...
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The Judgement Stays Human
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 se...
The Average Never Wins
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. Af...
The Longway Into Hollywood with Brian DeAngelis
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 progra...
What a Career That Survived the Mac Can Teach Us About AI
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 er...
Local Journalism, Legacy, and the Age of AI
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...
Finding the Wild: How MacNeil Lyons Turned a Dream into Yellowstone Insight
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 wi...
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The Distance Between the Plan and the Path
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 mov...
The Leap: Women Who Built It Anyway
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 se...
He Spent 24 Years in the Wrong Job — Here's What He Did Next
Tom Miller* grew up Catholic, careful, and certain that college wasn't for him. After losing his mother to leukemia at 18, and spending that summer as her primary caregiver, he drifted into a 24-year career in commercial printing, doing skilled...
A Sports Kid Who Found His Way Back to the Field
William Combs always assumed he'd run his own business. He just didn't know it would be a Subway franchise in Orange County. In this conversation, William traces his path from a kid who scraped by as a B student, through Cal Poly Pomona's hotel...
Permission to Start Over: Five People Who Got Kicked Out, Dropped Out, or Walked Away
Five guests. Five very different lives. One thing in common: every one of them dropped out, failed out, got kicked out, or walked away, and built something meaningful anyway. In this compilation, a deputy attorney general, a congressional staff...
Going Through the Trash (On Purpose): Anna Sacks on Reinvention, Waste, and Systemic Change
What do investment banking, a Jewish farming fellowship, and New York City's trash have in common? For Anna Sacks, known to hundreds of thousands of followers as The Trash Walker, they're all stops on the winding road to her life's work....
The Winding Road: What Six Journeys Taught Us About Finding Your Way
Six guests. Two truths. There is no single right path. And you cannot do this alone. In this special compilation episode of Path Found, I weave together conversations with David Camarena, Coach Christian, Michael Harley, Taylor Rabe...
The First Principles of Being Human
Justin Rufa grew up in a small Rust Belt town on the St. Lawrence River with one clear thought: I'm leaving. What followed was nearly 24 years in the Air Force — aeronautical engineering, a master's, a PhD from Michigan, teaching calculus at th...
Denim on Her Own Terms: The Bold, Scrappy Path Behind Knorts
Eleanore Guthrie didn't set out to disrupt the fashion industry. She set out to find a pair of shorts that looked good on a bike. What followed was more than a decade of building Knorts, a brand built entirely on knit denim - from weekend photo...
From High School Dropout to Harvard Law: How Discipline, Detours, and Doing the Work Built a Career
Steven Kerns grew up in Long Beach, California, dropped out of high school at seventeen, and eventually made his way through the Army Infantry, Long Beach City College, Cal State Long Beach, Harvard Law School, and on to the California Departme...
Kitchen to Capitol: On Being First, Finding Your Way, and the Jobs Nobody Tells You About
Alex Mitchell didn’t have a plan when he graduated from high school. No one in his family had gone to college, and he didn’t apply to a single university. He started at community college, changed his major five times, and it wasn’t until a poli...
Relationships Are the Resume: Career Pivots, Tech Ethics, and Finding Your Place in Policy
Virginia Ross has one of those careers that sounds impossible until she explains exactly how each step led to the next — and even then, it barely seems planned. Because it wasn't. After getting kicked out of college twice, pi...
The Hidden Curriculum: How to Build a Career that College Never Taught You
What does it actually mean to go to college? If your honest answer is “get a degree so I can get a job,” Ned Johnson and Scott Carlson want to complicate that, in the best possible way.In this conversation, the authors of Hacking Col...
The Interview Answer That Lost Her the Job (and Set Her Up for 30 Years)
In her first round interview, Alicia Rose was asked about her dream job. She told the truth: she wanted to be an ambassador. The interviewer told her on the spot she wasn't getting the position, and explained exactly why that was the right call...
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Steve Sewell on Grief, Chaplaincy, and Why Life Really Happens in the Transitions
Steven Sewell didn’t plan on becoming a chaplain in corporate America. He thought he’d spend his life as a pastor. But after almost 30 years in ministry, he discovered something: the break room at a car dealership needs the same thing as a Sund...
From Zimbabwe to Cape Town to the World: Building a Life on Curiosity, Risk, and Reinvention
What does it look like to stumble, pivot, fail, travel, and eventually find your calling, not once, but many times? Sean Walpole's story is a master class in entrepreneurial resilience: from founding an IT company as a teenager in Zimbabwe, to ...
Ordering Off the Menu: Eric Adams on Disability, Discovery, and Designing a Life on Your Own Terms
Eric Adams spent his childhood mute in the classroom and decades as the loudest, most electric presence in Los Angeles nightlife. In between: a path that refuses every conventional menu option. In this conversation, Eric traces the through-line...
