January 3rd has a habit of being a rough day for Latin American strongmen. In 1990, Manuel Noriega walked out of the Vatican embassy in Panama City after ten days of nonstop rock music and surrendered to U.S. forces. In 2026, on the same date, helicopters hit Caracas and Nicolás Maduro ended up aboard the USS *Iwo Jima*.

This week on *The Roger Retrospective*, we follow Maduro into a Manhattan courtroom—beige prison clothes, new torture charges, and a pending fight over whether a sitting head of state can be tried in a foreign court at all. To make sense of it, we look at four different doors into the courtroom: Noriega (the template), Saddam Hussein (the one we handed back), Juan Orlando Hernández (the clean extradition that ended in a pardon), and Maduro (the sequel).

Along the way: head-of-state immunity, the strange Ker-Frisbie rule that U.S. courts mostly don’t care how you got there, the power of non-recognition, and the uncomfortable question of what happens when the rule we wrote gets used by someone else. Same night, same helicopters—three different words for what happened.

A president gets to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The Senate confirms them. And then something remarkable happens: the justice never has to answer to that president again.

Donald Trump has publicly expressed frustration with Supreme Court justices he appointed after they ruled against positions he supported. But presidential disappointment with “their” justices is hardly new.

More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was furious when his own appointee, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., went against him in one of the great trust-busting battles of the Progressive Era. Dwight Eisenhower would later regret two of the most consequential appointments of his presidency. Richard Nixon discovered that even a Court reshaped by Republican presidents could ultimately help bring down a Republican president.

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, we travel from Teddy Roosevelt to Eisenhower, Nixon and Trump to explore one of the ingenious—and occasionally infuriating—features of the American constitutional system: presidents choose Supreme Court justices, but once those justices put on the robe, the president loses control.

And that may be exactly what the Founders intended.

Today’s world, through the lens of history.

Inflation isn't just a number. Eventually, it can become a way of life.

In Episode 18 of The Roger Retrospective, we go back to the Great Inflation of the 1970s — when Americans waited in gas lines, wore “Whip Inflation Now” buttons, rushed into gold, assumed old mortgages because new ones carried double-digit rates, and watched supermarket prices seemingly change before their eyes.

The deeper story isn't simply about Paul Volcker raising interest rates to nearly 20%. It's about how America gradually learned to expect inflation — and how extraordinarily painful it became to change those expectations.

From Lyndon Johnson and William McChesney Martin to Nixon and Arthur Burns, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and finally Volcker's dramatic Saturday-night policy shift, we trace how a series of understandable decisions helped turn rising prices into something embedded in American psychology.

And with energy prices again putting pressure on inflation today, the question from 1979 suddenly feels relevant again:

How much pain should a country accept today to prevent potentially greater pain tomorrow?

🎙️ Episode 18 of The Roger Retrospective.

Today’s world, through the lens of history.

Diesel has hit a record high — and most Americans may not realize how much that matters.

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, we look beyond the price of gasoline to the fuel that quietly powers the American economy: diesel.

From Rudolf Diesel’s mysterious disappearance in 1913, to Eisenhower’s interstate highways, Malcolm McLean’s shipping container revolution, the 1973 oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution, and the Tanker War of the 1980s, this episode traces how diesel became the invisible engine behind modern commerce.

Today, seven months into the Iran conflict, disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz are colliding with attacks on Russian refineries and tight global supplies of refined products. The result is showing up not just at truck stops, but eventually in food, freight, construction, farming and the price of almost everything that has to move.

The larger question is an old one: how can a country that produces so much of its own oil still find itself vulnerable to a war thousands of miles away?

Because crude oil is only part of the story. Refining, shipping and geography still matter.

The war is in the Gulf. The bill arrives in America.

🎙️ The Roger Retrospective — Today’s world, through the lens of history.

🏠 Who Killed the Starter Home?

In the 1970s, a modest three-bedroom house was an attainable path to family life—not a luxury. So what changed?

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, we trace the history from the New Deal mortgage and GI Bill to Levittown, Co-op City, zoning, supersized homes, Wall Street’s mortgage machine and the 2008 crash.

How did the country that pioneered mass homeownership make the starter home so unaffordable?

The answer may point back to something America once built remarkably well: a small, simple, affordable place to start.

🎙️ The Roger Retrospective — Today’s world, through the lens of history.

For decades, America told its young people the path to success was simple: go to college, get a degree, and find a white-collar job.

Then artificial intelligence arrived — and suddenly some of the most future-proof workers in America may be electricians, plumbers, welders, machinists and HVAC technicians.

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, we trace how America went from a nation of apprentices and craftsmen to the industrial powerhouse that became the Arsenal of Democracy — and then gradually came to regard skilled trades as a second-tier career path. From Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford to the GI Bill, the China Shock, globalization and today's massive AI data-center boom, it's the story of how America stopped teaching people to build things just as it discovered it desperately needs them again.

Perhaps AI's greatest irony is that the technology designed to replace human work may restore the value of some of America's oldest skills.

Today's world, through the lens of history.

From Concorde flights and a Moody’s Aaa rating to one of the deepest collapses in modern history. Roger Horn sits down with RVX CIO Ray Zucaro to examine how Venezuela went from “Dame dos” prosperity to crisis — and what the reversal still teaches investors and policymakers. Despite the profound challenges and economic destruction, Venezuela retains substantial natural resources beyond crude oil, and many investors are now exploring how to participate in potential growth opportunities.

For 2,500 years, rulers have tried to defeat their enemies without firing a shot.

From Athens sanctioning Megara, to Napoleon trying to strangle British trade, to Britain’s blockade of Germany, the League of Nations confronting Mussolini, America’s oil embargo on Japan, apartheid South Africa, Iraq, and today’s sanctions on Russia, economic warfare has repeatedly promised a cleaner alternative to military conflict.

But history shows something much messier.

Sanctions can work. They can fail. They can hurt civilians more than governments. They can create black markets and smuggling networks. And sometimes, as in Japan in 1941, they can push a country toward escalation rather than compromise.

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, Roger Horn looks at the long, strange history of economic warfare and asks a deceptively simple question:

Can you really defeat a country without firing a shot?