How Universities Keep Building the People Who Tear Everything Down (Episode 6)

In June 2026, New York's Democratic primaries handed a clean sweep to a slate of democratic-socialist challengers — the latest chapter in a pattern that's far older and far stranger than this week's headlines suggest. From Ho Chi Minh washing dishes in Paris to the Chicago Boys remaking Chile's economy from the ground up, Roger traces a two-hundred-year habit of empires and institutions accidentally training the very people who go on to dismantle them. Along the way: Hayek's "secondhand dealers in ideas," Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs, a Soviet university built explicitly to export revolution, and a hard look at why Latin America proves this pattern cuts both left and right. Personal reflections from twenty-plus years in emerging markets and travels through more than fifty countries. This is The Roger Retrospective.