Edmund ZhengThe American Hypnotist 🇺🇸, The American Hypnotist · American Hypnotist 🇺🇸 | #1 Hypnotist

📍NYC

20 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this commentary, the speaker reacts to Darren Walker’s remarks on American soft power at an Axios Media Trends Live event. While acknowledging the traditional view that Hollywood and legacy media project American culture abroad, the speaker argues that genuine soft power stems from Americans physically present in foreign societies. He illustrates this with a personal anecdote about performing Portuguese-language hypnosis shows in Brazil, which challenged common stereotypes of Americans as monolingual and white, thereby reshaping Brazilian audiences’ perceptions of the United States. The speaker contends that although legacy media will continue to influence global views, the burgeoning creator economy—streamers, translators, educators, and on‑the‑ground cultural producers—will become the primary driver of American soft power in the coming years.

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So Darren Walker just got off stage at Axios Media Trends Live, and I had to step out actually just to comment on one thing that he was talking about, which is American soft power. The talk mostly focused on one angle of American soft power, which is legacy media, as we all know, Hollywood showing off America to the outside foreign world. But the real soft power, in my opinion, is actually from the Americans who are on the ground in foreign countries. Like when I performed my hypnosis shows, in Portuguese in Brazil, that was the purest form of soft power possible because we have the stereotype that as Americans we don't speak in other languages and that we're all white. And I just show up and I totally break those stereotypes to a Brazilian audience. And because I performed that show, forever, all those people who viewed that show, their view of America will be fundamentally different than if they just watched some TV show or movie about America. And so we can expect that, yes, the legacy media will continue to control American soft power in a sense, But the creator economy, streamers, as we have already seen, they have a lot of international fans as well as Americans actually on the ground translating, teaching, making stuff happen. That is going to be the crux of our soft power for the years to come.