Passport Podcast

At age 11, Keith Breitbach delivered newspapers through the quiet streets of Dubuque, Iowa, past freshly built homes, union workers, and a corner where men waited each morning for the yellow bus to the John Deere plant. Decades later, he’d watch another kind of worker, young tech professionals gathered at a different corner in San Francisco, bound for Silicon Valley on sleek commuter shuttles. In this reflective episode of The Passport Podcast, Keith reflects on the subtle, yet powerful parallels between two generations of workers - one shaped by labor, the other by code. Through personal memory and cultural observation, he explores how economic value shifts, how obsolescence creeps in, and what we can learn from the corners we’ve stood on. As AI and automation reshape today’s workforce and our society, this story presents a quiet but urgent question: What happens to those the system no longer needs?