Hello, David Brancaccio here. This morning, I signed off “Marketplace Morning Report” for the last time, after 13 years and 16,925 broadcasts.

That’s a lot of days that started with my alarm going off in the middle of the night; Four White House administrations, Brexit, pandemic, and the reversals of globalization. I have been honored to work with an amazing reporting and production team, and to spend a few minutes with you over breakfast, in the car or in your earbuds all these mornings. But I think we all have got to change it up every so often.

But make no mistake, I will keep turning up like a bad penny on Marketplace programs and podcasts across all the hours of the day. I’ll give you a sneak preview of what I’m working on below, but before that, I’m taking over this week’s newsletter to tell you what I’ve been up to for my final morning shows.  — David Brancaccio

On this 100th anniversary year of what’s called the “Mother Road,” I wanted a more immersive, updated view of the U.S. economy by traveling a length of historic Route 66, linking Chicago to Southern California. That’s where I started.

For road-tripping Route 66 in 2026, I went for a couple different vehicles with a couple of friends. We started at the more futuristic end of the spectrum — in a Waymo robot taxi by the pier in Santa Monica, California.

We made our way down a stretch of 66 called Santa Monica Boulevard, in a city at the sharp end of the coming economic transformation: headquartered here are some of the entertainment companies which could soon to be amped up or wiped out by artificial intelligence. This includes Skydance, which recently bought Paramount, and the gaming company Activision Blizzard . But Santa Monica, with its elevated coefficient of economic inequality, is not all fancy studios.

The next leg of the trip is just 25 miles in a carbon-intensive 1966 vintage Oldsmobile 442, for a throwback vibe. And then it’s onto my plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt. But the bulk of the 900-mile journey ends up being done with a spiffy 2026 all-electric Rivian SUV.

By the time we’ve made it two hours east to San Bernardino, we’re fully immersed in the “oldies” vibe of so much of modern Route 66. It looks like this: a mix of kitschy nostalgia and T-shirts on full display. But we should also remember this roadway as the route of the 1930s mass migration, carrying desperate families fleeing the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl who collected in camps in San Bernardino.

We stayed one night in one of the concrete cones for rooms at the Wigwam Motel on Route 66, and then it’s back to the recharged Rivian for a rapid climb into the economy of the high desert, where I found a man up a ladder.

“The patina on this building is for real,” Matt Parker explained to me. “It's earned. It's not painted on. It's not fake.”

Parker is a jack of all trades, including photography, and here he’s working on the weathered wooden sign at the Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, California. Matt said there are so few jobs along this sandy stretch of Route 66 that employment is not even a topic of friendly conversation.

“When I give rides home from church or something like that, and a passenger will get in, I've never said these words: ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ Those are just words I've never put together,” Parker said.

Lidar technology creates 3D maps of an environment by bouncing light off of objects. It’s what self-driving cars like the Waymo robot taxi in which I started my Route 66 journey use.

It’s also what students at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff use to make 3D maps of forests. Students like Keegan Line, a second-year in the Ph.D. program at NAU’s School of Forestry.

“The main technology I use is aerial lidar,” Line said. “We're using it to look at the forest in, like, a 3D sense, as opposed to 2D data.”

Line uses lidar for habitat identification. Also, it’s good for understanding wildfires. But to tell a pinyon from a juniper from a quaking aspen takes more than lidar. It takes machine learning — artificial intelligence — to help humans like Keegan make sense of it all. That means Line is also a kind of shepherd for his AI flock.

“You have to definitely tailor it to the problem itself,” he said. “You need a lot of refinement. And you have to then look at the output and say, “Does this make sense? Is this something that's actually useful, and how can we use this in making decisions?”

One of Line’s faculty advisors, Andrew Sánchez Meador, has been using AI in his research since the early ‘90s, before it was cool. He finds the tech indispensable. But he’s also careful.

“The big thing to watch out for is a model that seems better, but you don't really know why it's better,” he said. “And then when you apply that model in new place or in a new scenario, or give it new data, it may not perform the way you thought it was going to perform.”

It’s not just AI in the department of forestry. Northern Arizona University is in the spring of what it’s declared as “The Year of AI Empowerment .” José Luis Cruz Rivera is NAU’s president.

“When manufacturing went away and mining went away, everybody was asked to code,” he said. “Just get a coding certificate, and that will resolve your issues. But now we're in the era of AI, where a lot of the things that we thought we needed to do, and the ways we needed to prepare and to be able to have careers of consequence, have totally been challenged.”

I hate to break it to you: We humans stink at considering anything beyond two weeks from now. 

This affects our personal finances, it affects innovation, it affects government policy. We get too caught up in the here and now. We’re fascinated with the minute-by-minute fluctuations of the S&P 500 or Nasdaq.

Lately, I’ve been thinking. What are we missing by only looking at the short term? That’s the idea behind my new role at Marketplace. Call me Senior Correspondent for Future Effects.

Business geeks would call my new beat not “2nd Order thinking,” but “Nth Order Thinking.” That’s a little too close to “business speak” for my tastes, so how about this? From now on, you can start calling me Marketplace’s “Sleuth for Consequences.” 

It’s an idea that first came to me via the author Kurt Vonnegut. He looked at me during a public TV interview and observed “What no country has ever had is a Secretary of the Future and there are no plans for our children and grandchildren.” 

So you might also start calling me Marketplace’s “Secretary of the Future.” It isn’t so weird: I found one country that had one: Sweden, a senior official who looked out for policies that might come back to bite the country in the future. I plan to do the same, and I hope you’ll join me.

An early “future effects” project I’m working on explores the consequences of AI hype and automated everything.

If fewer humans are needed to get the job done, fewer people will pay taxes. This would come at the same time the population is getting older, with more and more people entering their low-tax season of life. It could be a recipe for disaster if we fail to plan. 

I’m talking with some smart people about it right now, and I can’t wait to bring you that reporting in the coming weeks.