Marc Andreessen, a legendary venture capitalist, helped shape some of the defining companies of the last two decades — Airbnb, Coinbase, Facebook, Skype — and has assumed the role of thought-leader. When Andreessen speaks about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, people listen closely and emulate.

So, naturally, his comments on David Senra’s podcast trashing “introspection” blew up online, with Elon Musk and many others applauding. Andreessen sees “introspection” as a problem, a genuine blocker to success, because it leads us to “feel guilty” and “dwell on the past,” stagnating unproductively in fear and doubt.

For accomplished entrepreneurs like Andreesen and Musk, it seems, constant action is an imperative and “introspection” just slows them down. But do we really have to choose between stagnation induced by introspection and a life of achievement without self-knowledge?

Those who think we face this choice misunderstand introspection. In fact, it is crucial for an action-oriented and productive life to understand oneself deeply.

Introspection is the “examination of one’s own thoughts and emotions.”1 It means identifying what one knows or doesn’t, what evidence one has, what assumptions one is making, etc. It also means identifying one’s emotions and their causes, allowing one to evaluate one’s motives for action. It’s a demanding task that can easily err and must be consistently practiced. Thus, it’s a much broader and more important phenomenon than Andreessen suggests.

Andreesen makes two serious errors in characterizing introspection.

First, the idea that introspection means “dwelling on the past” falsely equates introspection with rumination, i.e., obsessing over distressing thoughts. Rumination is problematic: for instance, one might obsessively dwell on having turned down a promising job at a startup because of fear of failure. In such a case, one might repeatedly think to oneself, “I wish I had chosen differently” or “I gave into failure at that moment.” But such rumination is unhealthy introspection, since it involves dwelling on one’s mistake without a clear purpose. To properly address this mistake, healthy, purposeful introspection is needed, that is, asking if and why one acted from fear, to what extent one’s fear was justified, given what one knew at the time, and so on, in order to improve one’s choices and character going forward.

Second, introspection doesn’t mean “feeling guilty” and not doing anything about it. Some introspection generates guilt one should feel, as in the above example, if one irrationally gave into fear. Here, accepting responsibility for giving into fear helps correct the mistake that generated earned guilt, allowing one to move forward in a productive career — perhaps by seeking ambitious opportunities in the future despite feeling some trepidation at doing so. In such cases, this introspective work is not done at once but requires an ongoing process of identification and revision. If one defaults on that work, one will likely continue to act from fear and miss great opportunities.

However, guilt can be “unearned,” if it results from doing no wrong. For instance, suppose that one feels guilt for pursuing a career as an engineer when one’s parents expected one to pursue medicine. In this case, it’s crucial to examine and revise the premises that generate the unearned guilt. For example, one might identify the false premise that “one should meet one’s parents’ expectations, no matter what,” or identify that one has always had an irrational fear of disappointing one’s parents. Correcting the false premise and overcoming the fear clears the way to take proper pride in one’s career, which is crucial to sustaining it. The introspective work involved here is also crucial for a healthy relationship to one’s parents, one not dictated by fear or guilt. Such work can take years to execute correctly — and many default on this task.

By characterizing introspection as obsessively dwelling on feelings of guilt, there is a danger that what Andreesen wants is to exempt entrepreneurs from judging the morality of their own actions. But no one is exempt from this responsibility. Elon Musk should think about the truth and effect of some of what he posts online. Andreesen should think about his role in the DOJ’s persecution of Microsoft in the 2000s. To do so, and to change course and make amends when necessary, is not to pointlessly dwell on the past.

And when one looks at the careers of great entrepreneurs, one characteristic that stands out is their willingness to constantly question themselves and their ideas, at least in business.

Successful entrepreneurs need to know their purpose. For example, consider Jeff Bezos’s “regret-minimization framework,” in which he projects himself at 80 and reflects on what he would like to have done with his life.2 Bezos employed this framework early on, when he needed to identify whether working at an established hedge fund in New York was more meaningful to him than pursuing a new vision as an entrepreneur. Was his dream of entrepreneurship just a fantasy or something he could really carry out? Did he have the right temperament to deal with the massive uncertainty in entrepreneurship? Could he really be happy staying in the hedge fund world? Answering these questions required identifying his motivations, what he knew, considering what he cared most deeply about, and projecting what kind of person he wanted to become. Ultimately, this introspective work led him to refocus his life to transforming the online customer shopping experience, and channel all his efforts to that one goal.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio practices what he calls “pain + reflection.” When painful mistakes happen, Dalio uses that pain as an opportunity for active reflection, to understand what happened and how to learn from it.3 For instance, Dalio reflected deeply when he nearly ruined himself in the early 1980s, operating on the flawed assumption that Mexican banks would default on U.S. loans. Instead of simply dwelling in shame or self-doubt, he worked to identify his flawed assumptions and better identify the state of his own knowledge. He realized that although he was right that too much money had been lent to Mexican banks, he was not in a position to predict that the outcome would be the banks defaulting on those loans. Thus, he changed his approach, carefully self-monitoring what he was actually certain of and what he wasn’t — an approach that’s impossible without introspection. His career was forever changed: He credits his masterful awareness of uncertainty in markets over time for much of his success as an investor.4

Few would consider Sam Walton (discussed in the aforementioned podcast) to be an exemplar of introspection. But if introspection is an ongoing and active self-awareness of one’s thoughts and motivations, Walton did it intensively in developing Walmart’s philosophy. He spent years studying what allowed other discount-style supermarkets to succeed or fail, and concluded that a company can lower markup while earning more with increasing volume.5 To reach this conclusion, Walton had to constantly consider whether his assumptions were warranted or not, by asking questions such as: Do I really know whether investing in distribution systems is unimportant? Do I have evidence that stores can only succeed in big cities? Am I sure that high margins are necessary for high profits? None of the answers are obvious or easy to apply. But without this introspective questioning, merely observing market conditions or taking on conventional assumptions would not have led to Walton’s distinctive approach.

There is no escape from the need to introspect. Without introspection, one consigns oneself to a life of ignorance, leaving one’s inner self a mystery. Imagine a Jeff Bezos who never asked himself what he truly wanted, a Ray Dalio who never asked himself what premise led him to his crucial error, or a Sam Walton who never questioned his (or others’) assumptions. Identifying your own knowledge and purposes, analyzing your emotions, and integrating them appropriately with action is crucial not just in business but across life. It’s through introspection that one learns from mistakes, focuses on achieving one’s deepest purposes, and builds character with integrity.

So, Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, just won a huge landslide election victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. This doesn’t mean AfD is taking over Germany — the far right is much more popular in the post-communist east than in the more populated western regions. Germany is also a parliamentary democracy, and almost everyone else hates and fears the AfD. But the statewide victory is a warning shot, and everyone in Germany — and in Europe — is taking it seriously.

AfD’s surge means two things. First, it means that the rise of far-right parties was not simply a reaction to the pandemic. Back in 2024-25, a number of pundits I respect argued that voters in the U.S. and Europe were backing rightist leaders out of anger at incumbents over Covid. That thesis now looks dead.

Second, it means that something is making many German voters so angry that they’re finally willing to overlook all of the AfD’s catastrophic flaws — its obvious ties to Vladimir Putin, the fact that the party is filled with crooks, its extreme rhetoric, its lack of governing experience, and so on.

What is that “something”? A number of socialist types have tried to claim that AfD’s new voters are responding to economic despair, and can be won back with more socialism. But more sober voices agree that the “something” is immigration. Adam Tooze, who strongly leans to the left, tries to be gentle as he explains that there’s no getting around the immigration issue:

If you ask AfD voters what they worry about, along with their xenophobic concerns about “too many foreigners”, they will mention the cost of living and their concerns for their standard of living. They also mention climate change and the threat of external war…But if you ask them what they think about the AfD and why they voted for it, economic issues are barely mentioned. What comes first is security, foreigners, woke politics, remoteness etc…

If you are hard up and working-class it would after all be nothing short of bizarre to vote for the AfD in the hope of improved social protection…Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention. It is a vote to crackdown on foreigners[.] [emphasis mine]

Robin Brooks is more blunt:

There’s lots going on in Germany at the moment, but - when it comes to the surge in AfD popularity - you don’t need to overthink it. The AfD is relentlessly campaigning on immigration, which tells you that this is what resonates most with voters…A key driver of the recent surge in AfD popularity is that the CDU - SPD grand coalition is proving itself incapable of confronting immigration with the urgency many voters want.

In fact, anger over immigration is probably the main reason that the right is surging everywhere in Europe. Here are Konstantinou and Roumanias (2024) with some data:

We use regional data spanning over 4500 electoral outcomes…between 2000 and 2017 to assess the impact of immigration on Western European Far-Right voting. To deal with potential reverse causation, we use immigration in neighboring countries as an instrument for domestic immigration. The estimated effects of immigration are positive, significant and larger compared to those obtained by simple OLS and fixed effects regressions. Depending on the measure of immigration used, we find that a 1% increase in immigration stocks leads to a between 1.78% and 2.97% in Far-Right voting…Our estimated effects explain a large part of the observed rise in Far-Right in Western European countries that experienced high levels of immigration during the span of our sample.

2026 is hardly the beginning of the trend. Here’s Brookings in 2024:

In the European Union (EU), one election after another has demonstrated the centrality of irregular migration and border security in public discussions and forced mainstream parties to take more restrictive approaches…The results of the European Parliament election, France’s snap election, three German state elections, and the Austrian election all showed a strong rightward drift and signaled voters’ distrust in their national governments, confirming the notable shift in tone on migration in Europe toward a more securitized, hardline approach, even among mainstream parties.

Trump’s election in 2024 was also partially about immigration. Trump voters rated it as one of their top issues, along with inflation. It was the issue where Trump had the strongest lead over Kamala Harris in polls. American voters clearly soured on immigration in 2023-24.

Progressives in America and socialists in Europe still desperately claim that what angry working-class voters really want is more economic support. They keep offering more and more lavish promises of welfare supports and price controls, while staunchly opposing restrictions on immigration. The approach keeps failing, and the far right keeps rising.

Center-right and center-left politicians, on the other hand, realize the source of their voters’ anger very clearly, and are taking steps to reduce immigration. Germany’s center-right CDU has already stanched the flow with restrictive policies:

And Chancellor Friedrich Merz is responding to AfD’s gains by making it harder to get citizenship. Meanwhile, France and Italy are tightening border controls. France is making it harder to become a citizen. The EU is toughening up its asylum rules. Sweden is offering migrants large sums of money to leave the country. European countries are streamlining their infrastructure for kicking out large numbers of failed asylum-seekers. Japan is tightening its own immigration policies after a period of liberalization.

Even Canada, one of the most immigration-friendly and progressive countries on Earth, has scrambled to reduce immigration, cutting targets for permanent residents, reducing student visas, and slashing the number of temporary workers. Immigration levels are still high, but are falling quickly — all under the center-left government of Mark Carney.

And yet I’m worried that voters around the world will see these measures as superficial — tactical pauses to let populist anger simmer down before resuming the same permissive immigration policies that made voters mad in the first place. This certainly seemed to be the case in Europe, where the government stopped admitting asylum seekers from the Middle East in the late 2010s after a popular outcry, only to resume taking them in en masse in the 2020s:

And it also seems to be true in the U.S.; Biden mostly closed the border to asylum-seekers in 2024 after he saw how mad it was making Americans, but many Democrats are now calling for the abolition of ICE. This is a somewhat popular position right now, thanks to the agency’s abuses under Trump. But if Democrats actually try to abolish federal immigration enforcement instead of just reshuffling and renaming the agencies, I predict it will take just a couple of years for Americans to realize that the difference between “open borders” and “immigration laws with no one to enforce them” is largely semantic.

What’s needed, I believe, is not just a tactical, temporary retreat. We need to stop and think why a maximal pro-immigration policy is something that we need to retreat from in the first place. We need a new concept of what a sustainable liberal immigration policy looks like.

Since I started writing, I’ve been an advocate of more immigration to the United States. This does not mean I ever favored unrestrained immigration or open borders. I’ve consistently argued that favoring skilled immigration will bring more economic benefits to native-born Americans, and be more politically palatable as well. And while I don’t hate illegal immigrants for trying to better their lot in life, I favor strong border controls, because nations have the right to decide, democratically, who gets in and out. It’s understandable when people get mad at seeing their decisions flouted.

On top of that, I’ve always remained agnostic on immigration to other countries; although I find much to admire in Canada’s points-based system, for example, I don’t think that qualifies me to decide whether more immigration is good for Canada overall. If the people of a country decide that immigration is diluting their local culture unacceptably, for instance, I think they have every right to cut it off. That’s just Westphalian sovereignty — not a perfect system, but the best system we’ve ever found for organizing humanity into geographic units. As an American, I don’t view it as my place to tell Japan, or the UK, or any other country that immigration is the right choice for them.

Despite those reservations, I’ve always thought that immigration to the U.S. is a basically good thing, and should be expanded. The economic benefits are pretty undeniable — higher tax revenue to shore up our dangerously depleted government finances, dominance in high-tech industries and innovation, and so on. And while some of the economic costs are real — local housing shortages and strains on local government finances being the two biggest ones — many of the fears are overblown. In particular, the bulk of the evidence concludes that immigrants don’t reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born Americans.

And importantly, lots of Americans share my overall positive view of immigration. If you ask Americans whether they think immigration is good or bad, most will say “good”:

And if you ask Americans whether the annual rate of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, you get a pretty even split:

So I’ve never really felt like I was going out on a limb or advocating an unpopular position when it came to this issue. Sure, rightists will direct online vitriol toward anyone who supports any immigration at all, but their energy and savagery shouldn’t be mistaken for majority support.

And yet there will always be some amount of immigration — and some types of immigration — that will arouse even the most open and welcoming people to ire and make them think about shutting the doors. We saw this in the U.S. in 2023-24, when anti-immigration sentiment spiked in response to Biden’s permissive asylum policies. Yes, that sentiment crashed again when Trump took power and started committing abuses. But if liberals don’t change how we approach immigration, the sentiment will simply rise again and again, as it has so many times throughout our history. And the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller types will be right back in power — and our country will be worse off for it.

Liberals need an immigration approach that can be sustained for long periods of time — i.e., one that doesn’t enrage the public every time it manages to get in power. What would that look like?

The first thing liberals (and progressives, and Democrats, and European lefties, etc.) need to admit is that migration is not a human right. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states, and unless we find some better way of dividing up and administering the world, we will continue to live in a world of sovereign nation-states. And nations are, necessarily, exclusive clubs; they have the right to restrict immigration for any reason whatsoever.

Liberals must therefore not view borders and citizenship as annoying obstacles to be tactically circumvented or overcome; instead, we must view them as fundamental parts of the social compact that allows nations, including liberal nations, to exist in the first place. Nation-states and their laws and their police and their courts and their armies are the fundamental guarantors of the human rights that define liberalism. And for better or for worse, the ability to decide who gets in and who has to keep out is a necessary precondition for nation-states to exist.

That means we need to recognize that immigration law is legitimate and needs to be upheld. Some progressives have tried to advance the notion that being undocumented is a marginalized identity that needs to be protected and supported by the state. But this is absurd; it’s like if progressives decided that people who drive over the speed limit are a minority group.

Illegal immigrants chose to break U.S. law when they came to this country. Our democratically elected leaders made those laws, and they should be honored. We should treat illegal immigrants humanely, of course, and we should not tear local communities apart just to hunt down a few people. But there has to be some way of enforcing the law, because a law without enforcement is no law at all.

A third principle that liberals should embrace is that the purpose of immigration is to benefit the people who already live in the country that is receiving the immigrants. Immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans. We must flatly reject any concept of immigration that sees it as a necessary sacrifice on the part of American citizens.

For example, the book This Land is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta, argues that immigration is a form of reparations for colonialism — a sacrifice that Western nations owe to other nations, even at their own expense. This idea has found some purchase in progressive circles, but liberals must reject it as wholly illegitimate.

Instead, liberals need to promote immigration because of the benefits it brings to the American citizenry. This includes economic benefits — the tax revenue, the investment, the eldercare, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, the expanded market size. But it also includes cultural benefits — the constant reinvigoration of this nation of immigrants by new waves of people with the gumption and bravery to pick up and move across the world in search of opportunity and freedom.

America has always been the country of the frontier; in order to maintain that ethos in the modern age, we need people for whom America itself is the frontier. And our founding ideals — which are very liberal ideals, of liberty and opportunity and the rights of the individual — are strengthened by people who make the conscious choice to move to a country that represents those ideals.

These are the kinds of arguments liberals made in the past. We can — we should — make them again.

And if this requires us to be selective about which immigrants we bring in, then so be it. Skilled immigrants bring far more economic benefits per capita than others — so by all means, let us tilt our system toward them, as American voters of both parties want. Immigrants who don’t love and embrace American culture will probably invigorate our nation less — so by all means, let us bar immigrants who have been part of groups that see America as evil, using the law with which we once banned immigration by members of communist parties.

These are the kinds of decisions that nation-states, including liberal nation-states, are inherently entitled to make. And we should expect Europe to make different decisions than America makes. That’s perfectly OK. Because immigration is fundamentally the decision of each sovereign nation-state, it’s inevitable that we’ll make different decisions. JD Vance wants us to think that France’s immigration policy, or Germany’s, is inextricably tied to America’s. But it’s not, and we shouldn’t let him get away with conflating the two.

A liberal immigration program based on these three principles could defuse the anti-immigration sentiment now sweeping the developed world — not just now, but permanently. But it will only do so if liberal leaders explicitly articulate and avow these principles. That’s what’s required in order to convince the electorate that liberals are trustworthy on immigration — that embracing the kind of immigration policies Americans demand represents a principled stand rather than a tactical retreat from a hidden agenda of open borders.

For America, the kind of immigration agenda I’ve sketched out — which all the polls show Americans favor by substantial margins — would not be a “far right” policy, even though some progressives and leftists will inevitably try to label it as such. In fact, it would allow in far more immigration than the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman. It won’t satisfy progressives who dream of a borderless world, or leftists who salivate over the chance to make the West pay for colonialism. But I believe it will preserve America as the kind of liberal nation-state that we knew it as in the days before Trump.

As for the rest of the world, countries like Germany and Canada and Japan have to make their own decisions. I can’t tell them what kind of nation to build; I can only try to promise that as an American, I’ll respect their decision. If they want to shut their doors in order to slow the pace of cultural change, it’s not my job to lecture them otherwise. All I can say is that I hope they do what they need to do in order to avoid getting taken over by parties that take their marching orders from the Kremlin.

But speaking only for my own country, I believe that if America gives up immigration, it will lose one of the key things that has made it great. With the GOP in the hands of a xenophobic rightist movement that sees immigration as an invasion, it’s up to the Democrats to craft a system that can be preserved for the long term.

Subscribe now

Share