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This compilation closes out the AI & Careers series by bringing six of its guests into one room and listening for what they have in common. They could not look more different on paper — a community newspaper publisher, a brand designer, a marketing creative, a Hollywood studio operations executive, a plaintiff-side employment lawyer, and a management consultant. But asked the same anxious question everyone is asking — is AI coming for my job? — they all answered in nearly the same way.

None of them is a doomsayer, and none is a cheerleader. Every one of them already uses the tools daily in several cases. What they refuse to hand over is a specific, surprisingly small part of the work — the human middle. The reporter has to own the story. The designer's whole job is to not look average. The idea has to start with a person. The young creative needs the boring reps that build taste. The pleading needs a flesh-and-bone name on it. And someone has to translate between what a business wants and what a machine can actually do.

Said back to back, those answers sound like one sentence: the machine can do the what, but not the whether, the originating, or the being accountable. Or, as I keep hearing: it's all about people. It always was.

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Jason Dobbie never chose cooking. He was a quiet kid from Fergus, Ontario, a math whiz who lost interest in school, and at fifteen he took a dishwashing job because a friend passed it along. Over 26 years, one opportunity after another carried him into Ontario's top kitchens: an apprenticeship, a sous chef role at 24, and eventually head and executive chef positions across Niagara.

In this candid conversation, Jason talks about what he actually loved about the kitchen (the timing, the pressure, orchestrating a line in full service) and what it cost him. He shares his long, uneven road to sobriety, the group therapy and meditation practice that finally gave him awareness of his own patterns, and the day he left a dream job that left him feeling empty. With no plan beyond wanting evenings with his three kids, he took a breakfast-cook job and trusted something would come. Three weeks later, it did.

Today, Jason works in seafood sales and runs Stress Free Sobriety, a global online community focused on personal growth after sobriety. facebook.com/Jason.Dobbie.Life.Coach

jasondobbie.com

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Christina Searing didn't set out to work in AI. She set out to build "portable" business skills, inspired by her father, and let a love of travel steer her into consulting, where every three-to-eighteen months a new project felt like a new job. Over 23 years, she found her calling as a "translator" between what a business is trying to accomplish and the technology that can get it there.

In this AI & Careers conversation, Christina makes a grounded case for what AI does and doesn't change. It's a genuine game-changer as a productivity tool and accelerator, but it's not a finished work product. It hallucinates, it misses human context, and it's only as good as the context it's given. For junior professionals, that's a trap: work can look polished and accelerated while lacking richness and judgment.

Her advice to anyone entering business: don't build your identity around mastering one tool, because the tools keep changing. Build the durable skills instead. Critical thinking, communication, business judgment, curiosity, adaptability, and the human ability to connect dots across disparate threads are the skills that will matter. Get diverse experiences. Network relentlessly, because the most effective path to an early job is still a human one. And take more risks early; borrow someone else's confidence when you don't have your own, and say yes to the stretch you don't feel ready for.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
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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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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.

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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”
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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.

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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.

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