America turns 250 this year, and most of the retrospectives will miss the point entirely. This episode makes the case that the American experiment wasn't a flawed attempt at European civilization — it was never trying to be one. From the "Great Misunderstanding" of the Founding to the frontier that built a new kind of citizen, to the optimism that remains the country's most underrated natural resource, Roger traces why the disconnect between Europe and America was there from day one — and why it still shapes how the world reads America wrong today. Hosted by Roger Horn, global adventurer and lifelong student of history.

A European heat wave. A cooling system failure at EU headquarters. And one of history's most underrated inventions.

This week, Roger traces air conditioning from ancient Persian windcatchers to Willis Carrier's Brooklyn print shop to the explosive rise of Houston, Phoenix, and the American Sun Belt — and explains why a humble machine may have quietly helped make the U.S. the dominant economy on earth.

Then he turns to the headlines: why Brussels bureaucrats kept their own offices cool while cutting AC for everyone below them, and how Germany's decision to exit nuclear power left it dangerously dependent on Russian gas — a story that runs straight through Gerhard Schröder's Gazprom paycheck to the war in Ukraine.

History, current events, and a few opinions you won't hear anywhere else. That's The Roger Retrospective.

It’s happening again on social media — tourists arriving expecting hostility and finding warmth, friendliness, pride. The gap between the narrative and the reality is striking.It was also striking in 1941, when Germany’s finest military minds looked at America and saw a soft, undisciplined nation of factory workers and baseball fans.They were wrong in ways that changed the world.Episode 1 of The Roger Retrospective explores what Europeans keep missing — and what it tells us about America’s values, its industrial genius, and why it rebuilt its enemies instead of crushing them.