Path Found

Monica Argandoña
  • 5.0 (9)
  • Arts

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.

  1. 6d ago

    The Editor in the Chair

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast” Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities. 📅 New episodes drop every Thursday. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    The Editor in the Chair

  2. Sep 3

    The Midlife Rollercoaster

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast” Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities. 📅 New episodes drop every Thursday. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    The Midlife Rollercoaster

  3. Aug 27

    The Judgement Stays Human

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    The Judgement Stays Human

  4. Aug 20

    The Average Never Wins

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    The Average Never Wins

  5. Aug 13

    The Longway Into Hollywood with Brian DeAngelis

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    The Longway Into Hollywood with Brian DeAngelis

  6. Aug 6

    What a Career That Survived the Mac Can Teach Us About AI

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 📅 New episodes drop every Thursday. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    What a Career That Survived the Mac Can Teach Us About AI

  7. Jul 30

    Local Journalism, Legacy, and the Age of AI

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    Local Journalism, Legacy, and the Age of AI

  8. Jul 23

    Finding the Wild: How MacNeil Lyons Turned a Dream into Yellowstone Insight

    Send us Fan Mail 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. 📅 New episodes drop every Thursday. 👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast ★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route. Get Involved: 🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org 💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from! 📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

    Finding the Wild: How MacNeil Lyons Turned a Dream into Yellowstone Insight
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Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
9 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Monica Argandoña
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Path Found
  • Show Website
    Path Found