Can Any Country Actually Go It Alone?

My Weird Prompts · Sep 30, 2026 · 25m

Daniel wrote in with a question that sounds simple and isn't: could any country actually achieve total trade neutrality — zero imports, zero exports — and what would life there look like? The closest real-world attempts (North Korea's Juche, Hoxha's Albania, Khmer Rouge Cambodia) suggest the answer is grim, but the reasons are more interesting than the politics. This episode works through the physical constraints: rare earth processing concentrated in China, EUV lithography that no single nation can build alone, fertilizer that depends on imported natural gas, and the brutal cost curve of…