Lost in America quite famously and frequently references the iconic counter-culture movie Easy Rider (1969), including the ironic use of that film's theme song, "Born to Be Wild," over the scene of Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty leaving Los Angeles in a large and well-equipped motor home. When the couple is pulled over for speeding, Hagerty manages to get the state trooper to rip up their ticket by appealing to his memories of Easy Rider, which the motorcycle cop declares his favorite movie.

There is an award-winning 2009 documentary called Lost in America about a poet and musician battling mental illness in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

There is a 1999 TV documentary entitled Lost in Middle America (and What Happened Next) about the struggling town of Lima, Ohio.

Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey is a 2011 non-fiction book by Colby Buzzell about his travels across the country in the wake of the Iraq war and economic downturn.

Lost in America: A Journey with My Father is a 2003 autobiography by Sherwin B. Nuland, MD about his experiences as the son of Jewish immigrants.

A November 2011 review in Filmmaker magazine of Kelly Reichardt's film Meek's Cutoff (2010), about a group of 19th century pioneers trying to find their way west after a disastrous wrong turn, was titled "Lost in America."

Nicolas Winding Refn, director of the crime thriller Drive (2011), said he cast Albert Brooks in the role of a ruthless mobster because when Refn was a young teenager watching Lost in America, he was frightened by Brooks in the scene where he yells at Julie Hagerty. "Albert was like a volcano of emotions," Refn told Karina Longworth of LA Weekly in September 2011. "There was something really unique-and threatening. I felt that this guy, eventually, he will kill somebody-so let's make it in a movie."

In the mid-90s, Seinfeld creator Larry David said in an interview with Laugh Factory magazine that he had to keep working on the sitcom because when he and his wife first got married, they went to Vegas and blew all their money gambling "like in that Albert Brooks movie."

When Brooks released his first movie, Real Life (1979), the story of a documentary filmmaker who invades an ordinary family's daily life, critic Rex Reed wrote, "Why would a studio give this idiot the money to do this kind of nutty experiment?" In the opening of Lost in America, Brooks included Reed's voice expounding on comedy during Reed's appearance on Larry King's talk show. Reed had once compared Brooks's face to "an open-faced club sandwich." In a Playboy article years later, Brooks claimed to have been delighted with Reed's remark, saying, "I don't know, it's just a thing of mine. I've always wanted to be compared to deli food."

A 2006 television documentary about American road movies, Wanderlust, includes clips from Lost in America. A feature film entitled Wanderlust (2012) is also about a yuppie couple who loses everything and heads out on the road. A review of the movie for the online publication Huffington Post called it "Lost in America by way of Wet Hot American Summer" (2001), a comedy that featured Paul Rudd, one of the stars of Wanderlust.

A number of bloggers have used the scene of David trying to talk the Desert Inn manager into giving him his nest egg back as a metaphor for the Wall Street bankers pleading with Congress for a bailout (the obvious difference being that David's approach is unsuccessful).

by Rob Nixon