bst

New York in person studio visits this Saturday 9/6

Hey studio visits are 45 minute in person conversations at a bar about whatever you create.

send me an email with a link to your work and what you’d like to discuss, I’ll check out the first 10 and get back to those I’m most qualified to give feedback to

Bradtroemel@gmail.com

The next report 👀

Started storyboarding the first 20 chapters….

Madison, Wisconsin studio visits tomorrow!

Doing IRL visits tomorrow in Madison, Wisconsin.

Send me an email at bradtroemel@gmail.com with a link to your work if you'd like to chat

Please help me 🙏🏻

I’m writing a new report about the past decade of contemporary art. What subjects should i include??

New report underway 😉

Script writing has begun for a very different kind of report coming up next. Stay tuned :-)

Boston, MA studio visits today hmu to chat this afternoon

Email me at bradtroemel@gmail.com

Reykjavik, Iceland studio visits today

Doing IRL visits today, send me an email at bradtroemel@gmail.com with a link to your work if you'd like to chat

what are you waiting for?

watch the ZIRPSLOP report already!

a closer look at The Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy

Have you watched THE ZIRPSLOP REPORT yet?

The ZIRPSLOP Report

Graphic design and outro by Anson Nguyen

Song by Chrystal - The Days (NOTION Remix)

Research chemicals:

Cory Doctorow - Enshittification Is Coming For Absolutely Everything

Willy Staley - How Everyone Got Lost In Netflix's Endless Library

Andrew Dewaard - Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture

Liz Pelly - Mood Machine: The Rise of Spofity and The Cost of The Perfect Playlist

IlluminatiPirate - Dead Internet Theory: Most of The Internet is Fake

Mike Pepi - Against Platforms

Anna Wiener - Uncanny Valley

Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell - The Cult of We

Nick Srnicek - Platform Capitalism

Christopher Leonard - The Lords of Easy Money

Derek Thompson - The Rise and Fall of The Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy

Alex Parene - Consolation Prizes

Willy Staley - Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching The Sopranos?

Jacob Silverman - Welcome To Slop World - How The Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy

Vankatesh Rao - The Premium Mediocre Life of The Maya Millennial

Max Read - We're In Our Slop Era

Kevin Roose - Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy

Emily Baker-White - TikTok's Secret 'Heating' Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral

Cory Doctorow - Microincentives and Enshittification

Related reports:

The HIPSTER Report

The ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Report

Tomorrow: the ZIRPSLOP REPORT debuts!!!

NEW REPORT DROPS IN 6 DAYS

THE ZIRPSLOP REPORT IS COMING SOON

UPDATE ON THE NEW REPORT!

Hey gang, I recorded THE ZIRPSLOP REPORT on Monday.

I'm currently doing the tedious (but necessary and gratifying) job of adding hundreds of images and video clips to it.

The report will debut Monday, June 9 and I'm excited to share it.

Above are some of the books I read while writing. I'm thinking about doing an annotated bibliography for the Research Chemicals this time if yxll are interested? lmk

Have you watched KAYFABE: THE ANDY KAUFMAN REPORT?

KAYFABE: THE ANDY KAUFMAN REPORT explores the theater of violence:

Professional wrestling originated as genuine athletic competition but evolved into a unique form of theatrical performance known as kayfabe– a carefully choreographed fiction involving performers and audiences alike. Emerging from post-Civil War traveling carnivals, promoters realized staged matches could boost entertainment value and profits, gradually shifting wrestling from a legitimate sport into scripted spectacle. Matches transformed into “works,” predetermined performances with heroes (“babyfaces”) and villains (“heels”) enacting moral dramas to elicit audience reactions.

Kayfabe extended beyond the ring: wrestlers upheld their personas publicly, maintaining the illusion even at personal cost. By the 20th century, wrestling’s scripted nature was widely acknowledged yet embraced as a shared fantasy by audiences who willingly suspended disbelief.

Andy Kaufman’s comedy career mirrors wrestling’s kayfabe tradition, exploiting blurred lines between reality and fiction. Kaufman crafted characters like Foreign Man and Tony Clifton, whose acts deliberately toyed with audience expectations. His controversial role as the Intergender Wrestling Champion took this further, employing wrestling’s theatrical conventions to provoke genuine outrage. Kaufman’s feud with Jerry “The King” Lawler epitomized kayfabe, creating an elaborate performance so convincing it fooled industry insiders.

Through Kaufman’s example, professional wrestling illustrates how believability makes cultural transgression powerful– inviting audiences into complicity and permanently altering their understanding of entertainment and authenticity.

watch it here!!!!

question: have you seen THE LITERALISTS?

Today’s highlighted report explores the recent history of LITERALISM –a way of willfully misinterpreting culture in the most bad-faith terms possible– as a common thread linking moral panics from the 1980s to today. It begins with the Satanic Panic, when Christian conservatives saw demons in kids’ games and pop culture, using metaphor-blind paranoia to reassert moral control during a time of social change. That same mindset reemerged decades later in the Campus Crusades of the 2010s, as liberal millennials applied the language of harm and trauma to ever-smaller infractions, redefining language itself as violence. As children of the 80s and 90s, millennials grew up during a time when it became normal to believe that all ambiguity is dangerous and that culture must explicitly affirm a moral consensus to be safe, then modernized that concern from defending Christianity to defending liberal orthodoxy.
Today, literalism functions more as kayfabe than conviction: outrage is performed knowingly, less to express earnest belief than to affirm group identity, whether you’re defending Lil Nas X or boycotting Bud Light. In this environment, provocations are strategic and reactions are scripted. Culture becomes a mirror, not a challenge, valued less for what it says than for which team it signals allegiance to.

WATCH IT HERE

Have you watched the newest report yet?

The past decade of cancel culture was as confusing as it was frustrating, so I wrote this report to make sense of it. I wanted to understand: Why did so many people stay loyal to a liberal political project that never delivered real change? Why were so many college-educated millennials in the culture industry getting cancelled, while workers like plumbers were not? What’s the difference between real abuse and everyday conflict? Why were companies so quick to validate questionable cancellations? How did the language of trauma, identity, and offense expand to justify extreme reactions to minor issues? Why has cancel culture lost its power in recent years? And most importantly, how do we move on from a culture built on fear, punishment, and status anxiety? You can now watch THE CANCELLED REPORT right here

have you seen the ART SCHOOL REPORT yet?

After doing hundreds of studio visits over the past few years, the most common topic artists asked about was art school. So I created the ART SCHOOL REPORT to answer all those questions in one place. The report combines historical research with my own experience- as a former art student and as someone who taught at four New York art schools throughout the 2010s.

You can now watch the full video here

ALERT: NEW REPORT COMING!

Hello gang, the past couple months I've been busy writing and researching for a new report set to debut next month: THE ZIRP SLOP REPORT.

In this report, I trace how the Federal Reserve’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) reshaped the American economy after 2008, shifting power from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. With interest rates held near zero, investors funneled unprecedented amounts of capital into venture-backed startups throughout the 2010s.

This era of easy money gave rise to the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy: a brief window during which startups, flush with VC funding, offered artificially low prices on goods and services in a race to acquire users and monopolize their markets.

As many of these startups achieved market control, they entered the next phase: enshittification. This is the process by which platforms gradually degrade -first prioritizing user growth, then advertisers, and finally shareholders- by jacking up prices, spamming users with ads, and gutting the teams responsible for quality and moderation.

This has led to our current landscape: a post-ZIRP internet full of slop. Streaming services are bloated, social platforms are unreadable, and once-beloved apps now exist primarily to harvest attention and extract payment. What was sold as innovation has curdled into managed decline.

COMING SOON :-)

Do you have any slop or brainrot recommendations?

Last research request!

Do you have any enshitification recommendations?

Writing a new report, any recommendations on this topic?

Do you have any recommendations about the millennial lifestyle subsidy?

Hey I’m writing a new report, do you have any essays/books/movies/tv shows that come to mind about this topic?

Do you have any ZIRP recommendations?

I’m writing a new report and looking for any book/essay/film/TV recommendations you have about Zero Interest Rate Policy? 👀

reminder: ill be doing studio visits in ny tomorrow

Hey, I'm doing in person studio visits in New York City on Tuesday March 25. I'll check out the first batch of emails (please include a link or folder of your work) and choose 3 whose work I'm most capable of discussing.

For those who aren't familiar, studio visits are 45 minute discussions about your work– which could be art, film, comedy, writing, a board game, invention, new company, whatever you make. Studio visits happen in a public place, typically a bar or cafe. Unlike the critical tone of my reports, studio visits are meant to be positive, in-depth discussions aimed at helping patrons organize their thoughts and find productive ways forward in their work. Of the ~500 I've done, people tend to describe these conversations as existing somewhere on the spectrum between a therapy session and a hustlepreneur motivational talk.

send emails to bradtroemel@gmail.com

notice about the this tier

this tier doesn't actually let you watch any full videos, if you want to watch the full reports try a free 7 day trial– you can watch every video you want risk free

in person NYC studio visits tuesday march 25

Hey, I'm doing in person studio visits in New York City on Tuesday March 25. I'll check out the first batch of emails (please include a link or folder of your work) and choose 3 whose work I'm most capable of discussing.

For those who aren't familiar, studio visits are 45 minute discussions about your work– which could be art, film, comedy, writing, a board game, invention, new company, whatever you make. Studio visits happen in a public place, typically a bar or cafe. Unlike the critical tone of my reports, studio visits are meant to be positive, in-depth discussions aimed at helping patrons organize their thoughts and find productive ways forward in their work. Of the ~500 I've done, people tend to describe these conversations as existing somewhere on the spectrum between a therapy session and a hustlepreneur motivational talk.

send emails to bradtroemel@gmail.com

“Cancel culture isn’t even real!!”

“Erm, why are you even talking about this now?! Cancel culture isn’t even real! And if it was real it was a good thing!! But we also shouldn’t acknowledge it happened.. even though it was good!! ..plus it didn’t happen!!” 🫠

Watch the full video here

Burlington, Vermont in person studio visits today

Hey, I'm doing studio visits in Burlington tonight. I'll check out the first batch of emails (please include a link or folder of your work) and choose 3 whose work I'm most capable of discussing.

For those who aren't familiar, studio visits are 45 minute discussions about your work– which could be art, film, comedy, writing, a board game, invention, new company, whatever you make. Unlike the critical tone of my reports, studio visits are meant to be positive, in-depth discussions aimed at helping patrons organize their thoughts and find productive ways forward in their work. Of the ~500 I've done, people tend to describe these conversations as existing somewhere on the spectrum between a therapy session and a hustlepreneur motivational talk.

send emails to bradtroemel@gmail.com

just a heads up

this tier doesn't let you watch any videos, if you want to watch the full reports try a free 7 day trial– you can watch every video you want risk free

have you seen the latest report?

watch the CANCELLED REPORT for free here

UPSTATE NY irl studio visits tonight

Hey, I'm doing studio visits in Hudson tonight. I'll check out the first batch of emails (please include a link or folder of your work) and choose 3 whose work I'm most capable of discussing.

For those who aren't familiar, studio visits are 45 minute discussions about your work– which could be art, film, comedy, writing, a board game, invention, new company, whatever you make. Unlike the critical tone of my reports, studio visits are meant to be positive, in-depth discussions aimed at helping patrons organize their thoughts and find productive ways forward in their work. Of the ~500 I've done, people tend to describe these conversations as existing somewhere on the spectrum between a therapy session and a hustlepreneur motivational talk.

send emails to bradtroemel@gmail.com