Fareed Zakaria

This episode was produced by Pete Madden and edited by Ellen Frankman.

It was mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston.

The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Delvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ilaria Montenacourt, Mandy Gorenstein, and Tao Jacobs.

One name you didn't just hear for the first time in about nine years is Zach Lipinski.

Zach produced dozens of Freakonomics Radio episodes, some of our very best, and now he is going off to be a novelist.

I'd like to thank him for being a great producer, colleague, and friend.

We will miss him, but he does plan to do some freelance work for us.

I hope he does.

Thanks for everything, Zach.

Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.

As always, thanks for listening.

Oh, I did just want to ask you, did you know Ted Turner?

I was horrified, but it goes beyond that.

It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while, which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning

the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.

I mean, not to sound too corny about it, because of course we made mistakes and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance,

The U.S.

had been different.

You know, after 1945, it said, we're not going to be another imperial hegemon.

We're not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated.