America: Now Streaming Everywhere

As a red-blooded American, I love slapping “Made in the USA” on anything and everything.

Hollywood, superheroes, social media, microprocessors, planes. You name it, we’re on it. Usually.

Gotta say, we do crush it.

And most of the world free rides off our good shit.

So why are we suddenly importing something as un-American as a Soviet-style military parade?

Context: On Saturday, Trump will roll in tanks and helicopters to commemorate the Army’s 250th anniversary _{(and coincidentally, his birthday..)} .

But we don’t do this crap!

We fly B-2 Stealth Bombers over baseball stadiums. Or let the Blue Angels tear it up.

Not corny military parades.

For better or worse, cultural exchange cuts both ways. While we’re busy borrowing bad optics from autocrats, the rest of the planet keeps main-lining our strangest exports.

The Asphalt Gospel

We paved paradise, put up a parking lot, and shot out the blueprint overseas.

U.S. cities sacrificed walkability for car culture. Everybody knows this. But what’s wild is how much the world copied us.

Tokyo, Paris, NYC, Florence, Buenos Aires — everyone’s favorite cities have one thing in common: options. Subways, trains, bikes, sidewalks. Then there’s us.

You can blame the Boomers like everyone else, sure. But go to Tokyo and you’ll want to yeet yourself out a Shinkansen after realizing what the car fanatics took from us.

Unfortunately, tons of countries around the world have followed our mistakes and sewn eight-lane highways into their cities’ fabric.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and China, despite having no prior infrastructure obsession with cars, modeled entire city plans around the American highway sprawl fantasy.

We’re a few decades into this madness, so now they’re discovering the joys of billions in government subsidies, endless maintenance, and “just one more lane” until you die.

Not only is car dependence expensive. It’s also deadly.

Even cities built from scratch, like Dubai, repeat our worst design choices.

Don’t even get me started on one of the worst offenders of them all — Egypt. In the name of the God of Highways, nothing stands in the way.

The good news is that these are all choices made by people.

They can be reversed. It may just take some time.

Influencer Culture

Ask a kid want they want to be when they grow up, and here’s what they’ll tell you:

You bet your ass it’s not just an American thing though.

Ask a kid in São Paulo, Nairobi, or Hanoi, and they’ll probably tell you something similar.

Out of all of our cultural exports, it seems like American influencer culture is easily one of the biggest.

All across the world, it’s the same: the clothes, the makeup, the language, the products, the dances, the videography, the shots, the poses, the smiles. The American algorithms set the angles, the aspirations, and the vibes.

From Tunisia to Brazil to China. It doesn’t matter. The only real variable is the backdrop.

Evangelical Megachurches

Stadium seating. Smoke machines. Laser lights. Pastors flying through the air like it’s Coachella for Christ.

Exported via televangelism and missionary movements since the 80s, American-style megachurches now pop up all over the world in countries like South Korea, Brazil, and Nigeria.

Someone probably told you years ago that it’d be a great idea to learn Mandarin. Yeah, China’s a competing superpower. But the thing is that people don’t emulate much of what comes out of China.

The truth is, you can’t always trace culture to one source. Influence is messy, but one thing’s clear: America still has the sauce.

But it’s a double-edged bottle. We export Big Macs and ugly mansions, rap and highway sprawl. And sometimes, like this weekend, we even import ideas we used to mock.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}