America Used to Be Cool. What Happened?

0:00Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get backroom play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful. America's global reputation is falling off a cliff.

0:34But what about our reputation for cool? American culture has been globally dominant for decades. Hollywood, blue jeans, jazz, hip-hop. How is that culture faring in a time of so much global disruption? And how has the rest of the world realigned while we were busy thinking about ourselves? I invited W. David Marks, the author of Blank Space, and Yuni Hong, the author of The Birth of Korean Cool, to talk about American cultural soft power and its impact around the world. Welcome, Yuni and David. Thank you so much for joining me. Hi.

1:09W. David Marx:Thank you, Proudness. I'm so excited to talk to you both about so many different things. The first place I want to start is you're both Americans, but you've both lived in other countries for the past 20 years or over. David, you've lived in Tokyo for over 20 years, and Yuni, you've lived in South Korea, Germany, and currently you've been in Paris for over 20 years. One thing that I noticed when I moved to Paris in my 20s was that people were really excited to reference American culture to me as this shared culture that we all had, but it was quite different from the culture I had grown up with.

1:43Everybody was really excited about Malcolm in the Middle, which was not a show that anyone I knew in America had ever watched or referenced. And so I'm curious, what surprising elements of American culture do you see around you? Not like Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Marvel films, but like surprising ways in which people embrace American culture maybe differently than they even do in America. Well, since you mentioned France, there are two recent innovations that have come over in the past, I would say, five to 10 years, and these are brunch and pastrami. I love that pastrami is really what they're into.

2:20I remember when I lived in Paris, People were really into brunch, but brunch was also something I had never experienced this way before. Like it was like a 30-course meal with like lots of little different pots of food. Yes. I think they first heard about brunch because of sex in the city, believe it or not, but it didn't travel over. And then when they introduced it, you know, French people do not have breakfast food in the middle of the day. They just don't do it. And they're very picky, as you know, about when a croissant is fresh. You do not get up at 11. Well, first of all, you don't get up on Sunday morning.

2:51You don't meet your friends and you don't have pastries afternoon. It's already bad by then. So yeah, they don't really have this in-between thing or they didn't until recently. So that was really surprising for me.

3:02W. David Marx:In the case of Tokyo, the amount of vintage stores that sell American 1980s high school gym t-shirts and all these other forgotten bits of American culture is very shocking to people when they first come here. And so you're surrounded by Americana all the time in Japan, but it's a little bit detached from the real America now. So maybe contemporary pop culture in America is slow or doesn't really catch on, but this kind of imagined version of America is everywhere. And then there are things like City Bakery and Dina DeLuca, all these institutions of New York that no longer even exist in New York are still strong in Tokyo.

3:42W. David Marx:So it kind of Tokyo feels sometimes like New York when Sex and the City was still on the air, but it's still going here in Tokyo. I'm curious how American culture is perceived where you are. And I'm also curious how that's changed. I mean, from the perspective of Japan, obviously it was occupied by the United States after World War II. And so America, jazz and American consumer goods became the reference for aspiration. So people may have had ill feelings towards the United States or may not be interested necessarily in America as a geopolitical entity, but they loved jazz and they loved American clothing and they aspired towards that.

4:24W. David Marx:And so that kind of continued. And at some point, especially, let's say, during the Vietnam War, where there was real resistance against American military presence in Asia, then you get a real split where people hate the United States, but they love this Americana that still exists. And so Americana is just a huge part of Japanese life. At this point, it almost feels Japanese. It feels completely detached from America. And so then when you kind of catch up to now, I think the question is, is the United States creating these new kinds of culture that are really inspiring people in the same way, that are aspirational in the same way?

5:01W. David Marx:And so in many cases, yes, like hip hop culture has been massively influential globally. There's no question about that. it's really fun to go to countries around the world and you hear the local music and so much of it has trap beats as if it's, you know, been directly influenced by Atlanta or something. And so there's these elements still where America has an advantage that America can make the coolest music in the world. But oftentimes other parts of American culture, kind of the way people live today doesn't get as inspiring to people, or it's the Japanese version of a thing that is more maybe interesting.

5:43W. David Marx:So the core of these American ideas still seems influential, but America may not always get the credit for the end product. That's interesting. And what about you, Yuni? How is our culture being perceived? Do people think America is cool in Paris? Well, I would say that there are two separate versions of American soft power or, you know, American pop cultural influence in France. And this is the influence of Brooklyn or Brooklyn versus mainstream America. And these, one is going up, the Brooklyn is going up, mainstream American influence, I would say, is going down. And these are on two separate axes that do not cancel each other out.

6:24You know, it started in an area of Paris that kind of looks like Williamsburg a little bit, like warehouse-y, and then it spread to the rest of Paris. But the American mainstream soft power axis, I would say that that has diminished. I started to notice the effects radiating out of the second Gulf War. And my employer, François Nkatt, my first employer in Paris, exists because of the waning of American soft power. Because Jacques Chirac said, well, America's invading these places fine. That's just what they do. But why do they also get to tell the story? Why is CNN the narrator? Why can't we be the storyteller?

7:05And that was sort of the beginning of the end. I'm overstating it because it's not as if they hate America now. And when you think of soft power, I think of like Regina George from Mean Girls. Like everything you do is cool if you're popular, no matter how dumb it is. And if you're not cool, then everything you do is just, you know, you're a pariah, nobody wants to do it. Recently, two things have happened that have put America into the pariah category. One is when France voted that abortion would be enshrined in the Constitution. This was a direct consequence of where America was going, and France saying, we cannot stand by this.

7:46Now, if it were the case that America still had omnipotent soft power in the world, they would not have done this. Then there was the CPAC, the Conservative Convention. I forgot where it took place. And the head of the French RN, the far-right party, Jordan Bardella, was supposed to speak there. He was invited to speak. And he backed out because he was so embarrassed by what he saw. And again, if it were the case said in America were omnipotent in terms of soft power, any French politician, I can remember a time where any French politician would have jumped at the idea to appear and speak at an American political convention.

8:26Things have changed. And now, you know, he's like, no, I will lose votes. I cannot be seen with this like uncool kid with the bad skin or whatever. And that is very recent. That is very recent. I've been wondering how much has changed specifically since the second Trump administration. And I also just want to define some terms because I feel like soft power is a thing that people can use to mean a lot of different things. David, how do you define the term soft power? Where does it come from? And what is the history of this idea?

8:58W. David Marx:So the term soft power comes from the scholar Joseph Nye, who really used it in the context of international relations. And so hard power is coercion and threat and soft power is countries just liking other countries and doing things for those reasons. And there's been a long debate whether soft power actually leads to geopolitical outcomes. If you look at the Cold War, there is a case to be made that people in the Eastern Bloc started aspiring towards American pop culture, and maybe that helped create the feeling of wanting to liberate themselves from the communist regimes. But I think for other countries, let's say Japan, which has really tried to focus on the soft power question, whether they've gotten better geopolitical outcomes because of interest in Japanese pop culture has been a big question that is still unanswered.

9:46W. David Marx:I think soft power colloquially, we definitely now mean it to just a country becoming cool, becoming a bigger presence on the map because it's offering something. But I think, you know, what's interesting to me, I always think about Persian rugs because people love Persian rugs and they love, let's say, Turkish rugs, but it's not necessary that Iran's soft power has increased because of these rugs. And so there's something about especially Korea and Japan at the moment, where it's not just that the pop culture and the products are interesting to people, that there's actually something really aspirational when people around the world see a K-pop group or Japanese street fashion, that they want to be inside of that world.

10:29W. David Marx:They actually are anchoring their identity to the people, not just the products itself. And, you know, even over the last year, there's been this idea of China maxing and the China for a long time, which had left out of this conversation has now suddenly become part of it. So anyway, so soft power, there's the technical definition is the cultural definition. But I think we're just describing something very interesting, which is the rise of these places as meaningful cultural units on the global map. Yeah. And I think that we're also like for the purposes of this conversation, really interested in the cultural element, because soft power doesn't have to be about culture.

11:06But here we really want to talk about the cultural element of it and kind of focus on this idea of cool, as you were saying. But David, can you briefly walk us through when American media and pop culture really began to dominate in other countries? And then like, did it reach all parts of the world equally? Were some countries more influenced by America than others. In my lifetime, I've only known America as culturally, globally dominant. And so everywhere I go in the world, there's American music playing out of car stereos. People can reference Friends and Marvel movies. When did that start? How did that start?

11:44W. David Marx:Really in the post-World War II period where, you know, most of the world is destroyed and just has yet to really create its own cultural industries. America is pumping out all of this culture around the world. And so films are going around the world and being shown in theaters. And so before the war, obviously you had jazz and you had other exports, but really after World War II is where everything becomes just dominated by the United States. And I think especially when you get to the late 50s and the early 60s, the thing that was so appealing is you have this youth consumer, you have teenagers become a big part of culture for the first time.

12:24W. David Marx:And American culture with Elvis and the films that were coming out, and then obviously it becomes an Anglo-American thing with the Beatles, is that you have this pop culture that is revolving around the idea that young people could have high status. So before World War II, that's still really not part of the equation. And suddenly this culture is speaking to young people that, you know, you're hip and you're cool and you know what's going on and you have this advantage over adults. And so obviously that's really compelling. And so that really spreads and just it sets up everything. So even, you know, let's say in Japan or in France, these places where you have youth culture grow, it's kind of based on that American model, even if the particular styles or sounds or things are different.

13:15W. David Marx:It's just still that concept that young people are in charge of everything. And so if you look at the specific outcomes, like everybody watching Friends all the time versus the format of the sitcom, or the one I think about a lot is Jersey Shore. So Jersey Shore is so American. It's about these New Jersey working class kids. I'm standing here by myself. Everybody else is a ricky. What the f***? Are you delusional? Are you delusional? And maybe Jersey Shore is not big, but they made spinoffs of Jersey Shore in all these different places. There was one in Poland called Warsaw Shore. And so this format of let's do a show like this goes around the world.

14:00W. David Marx:And so the American values exist in the format. Even if kids aren't watching Jersey Shore, they're watching something that was based on that. And so America has been so dominant for this entire post-World War II period of setting the standard of what pop culture and what youth culture is supposed to feel like. So even when it changes just a little bit, there's still something very American in the DNA of all of it. I think it's interesting also that it starts, I mean, it starts with World War II in this moment when America has ended the war and won over the fascists. And we had this really positive, idealistic idea of exporting American culture as culture that could contain our values that we hold dear, the value of individualism, of democracy, of equality, of freedom.

14:51Are we asking too much from culture that is mainly entertainment to hope that when we are exporting something as silly as Jersey Shore to have it become Warsaw's shore that contains the values of individualism, democracy, equality, and freedom? No, I think there are a lot of examples of things like what you're describing becoming vectors for American values, sort of the larger values with a V. And one example I can think of is if you look at anti-government protests in Thailand from about 2014 till approximately 2020, you see a lot of people in the crowd going like this. In Thailand, where they're demanding full democracy.

15:38This is from The Hunger Games. This is a symbol of protest against the government of Panem, which isn't even a real country. And yes, it's a movie, but they're doing it completely unironically. I mean, because to David's point, there's something synonymous with soft power, American soft power, and youth culture, youth empowerment, independence, having a voice. And I think that, you know, sort of this is a really good example of that, you know, embodying all of those things, all of those things that, you know, arguably America's best gifts to the world.

16:10W. David Marx:I mean, just to extend to that, you know, what's so strong about American culture has been that this liberal value of at least that people who are marginalized or oppressed can work hard and struggle and fight off the oppressor. And, you know, obviously something like Star Wars, that's, you know, core to that. So you have, you know, the parallels in Star Wars between the U.S. and the British forces and the Revolutionary War are really, really clear. They have all these people in uniforms and you have this ragtag group of, you know, rebels on the side. Count me in. I'm with you, too. It always complicates it when you talk about America and American pop culture because, you know, the state and the regime who's in power may not have the same values that's represented in the pop culture.

17:01W. David Marx:And it's also very clear that marginalized groups in the United States and the culture they have created has been probably the most effective American pop culture, not the culture that represents maybe the values of the dominant group or the group that holds political power. And so obviously the history of black music has been massively influential around the globe with hip hop being the most recent example. So gay culture has spread around the world, I think, through American pop culture. I think that value of the good guy in a movie is the underdog. It's the oppressed person who's fighting back.

17:45W. David Marx:I think that value does hold. And so for every movement that is trying to fight and struggle, there's something in American pop culture they can latch onto, whether it's a giant propaganda scheme or not. Here in America, we have this so-called crisis of liberalism. Our government certainly does not have fully liberal values, but dominant American culture that's exported globally is still largely liberal in its values. And so what values is America selling to the world right now, given that we have this crisis of liberalism in this country? I do think that pop culture, the pop culture that spreads, regardless of whether it's from, you know, Japan or the United States or South Korea, does tend to be left-leaning culture.

18:32And just simply because that's where the fresh ideas are. And one example I can think of is Black Panther, the movie, which isn't ideological, but it does promote values that, in my opinion, were very necessary in Korea. and I saw like a sort of on the street interview with people who had just seen Black Panther and every single one of them said that it had changed their views about Black people in a very positive way, you know and I think that that, well first of all it's wonderful but second it is the example of something that I can't imagine a movie with taking the like a racist point of view or you know a far right wing point of view becoming viral or popular or, you know, there's no moral of the movie that I can think of that has a right wing agenda.

19:22I just don't think it would work.

19:23W. David Marx:In the 21st century, you know, one of the cultural issues has been that for the 20th century, there was still so much patriarchy, there's so much procuralism, there's so much obvious racism and sexism and homophobia that was in the top echelons of power that was so clear that pop culture could always find a transgressiveness in left wing ideas in liberalism. And so polite society has much more aligned with liberalism than it used to 50 years before. And so the transgressive power of pop culture becomes more associated with the right wing throughout the 21st century in the United States. And so Vice magazine starts mixing drugs and sex and all of that with this kind of oblique right wing politics and being racist and sexist and homophobic as a joke and being ironic.

20:12W. David Marx:And the founder of that then goes on to found the Proud Boys. And so there's this direct connection between kind of downtown hipsterism to the 4chan and this kind of alt-right that develops later. And so transgressiveness becomes a bit right-wing in the 21st century. But that culture, as Yunyi said, is just not as exportable that people around the world were not electrified by it. I mean, I think in the United States. People weren't even that electrified by it. It just happened to have a small cult of people behind it. And so much American pop culture has not even an oblique political line to it.

20:53W. David Marx:It's just an explicit kind of, you know, our politics are this. And I think that has not necessarily translated particularly well to the rest of the world. And so sometimes when the American, specific American political context gets too dominant in the culture itself, it just makes it way less appealing than having these broad values be the thing that it represents.

21:4053 ,500 puzzles. I use a different starting word every day. 25 ,000 recipes. And I love a one-pan recipe because I don't love washing pans. The New York Times, celebrating 175 years of helping you understand the world and make the most of each day. Subscribe now for a special offer at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

22:05As much as it feels like perhaps America is less cool than it used to be in its age of denim and hip-hop and Hollywood at its peak, our culture is still very dominant around the world. U.S. films captured an estimated 52 % of global cinema ambitions in 2025, but still that's down from 63 % in 2019. And Asian films shares rose from 27 % to 36%. So I'm curious how things are shifting. And Uni, in your book, The Birth of Korean Cool, you talk a bit about this. How are things shifting in the rise of a more globally dominant Asian culture, even if it's still quite far behind America's? Sure. I mean, to your point about American box office, if I could just expand on that a little bit.

22:58I think Marvel is a really good metaphor for what's happening with American soft power in general. Because yes, Marvel, you know, does get goes, it does really well in every single country. But every time a Marvel movie comes out, there's an op-ed in Le Monde or something about how, oh, this is America making itself into the superheroes of the world. I mean, so yeah, so Marvel giveth and Marvel taketh away, you know, is this sort of what's happening, this push-pull. You know, in terms of other countries becoming more dominant, I mean, I don't think that America will ever be not number one. It's just, you know, what's new is that they're now sharing.

23:35And yeah, Koreans did a lot of things right, but Netflix also had a lot to do with it. You know, the democratization of content, the fact that Gen Z is now used to reading, watching everything in subtitles, even if it's their own language, means that it's easy for them to watch, you know, Korean content, Japanese content, without it being this pretentious form. film or whatever. So, yeah, I think that what we're seeing with Japan and Korea is something that France has had for hundreds of years, which is a soft power without a hard power. Well, because in Korea, it was a very organized government effort to export its global culture into a financial, to create a new financial market, which they were seeing as like just behind semiconductors in terms of what Korea could export globally.

24:24And I think the current government has a target to build a$265 billion K culture market by 2030, which I am really interested in, like, because one of the things that we all know about cool in general is that it is really hard to simply decide to be cool and become cool by trying. Like, that's something that any middle school kid knows. So I'm curious how Korea succeeded. And I'm also curious secondarily, David, after like Japan in 2013 literally created a cool Japan fund to export Japanese culture to the rest of the world. And in 2027, it's going to wind that down after substantial financial losses.

25:10And yet, obviously, Japanese culture is cool. Not only is American tourism to Japan reaching record-breaking levels over the past couple of years, but also most people know about Studio Ghibli, Pokemon, anime, Nintendo. Those are all familiar to Americans. Why in Korea did this state-funded project succeed financially, and why in Japan did it not? To speak to the Korean part of that question. Well, just as necessity is the mother of invention, bankruptcy was the mother of the Korean pop culture wave. They fell victim to the Asian financial crisis in 1997. And the government realized they were overly relying on these massive companies like Samsung and so forth.

25:55And they found out in the 90s what every sort of 20-something knows now, which is that content creation is something that anybody can do cheaply and quickly with no skills and no money and no infrastructure and you don't have to build factories. So that is how South Korea decided to do that. And then for any kind of like the sort of open secret about soft power is that you do need hard power, but I don't mean military power. I mean, boring infrastructure. Can you like really define this? What is soft power without hard power? What do you mean by those two different categories? Soft power without hard power would be, well, a country like South Korea, which I think in its history has literally never invaded any country unlike any other country that we've just mentioned, by definition doesn't have any hard power.