Remember Shuffle

The fundamentals of our economy are… present. Welcome to Remember Shuffle’s ongoing multi-part series on the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. The Shuffle Bois begin with some table setting to explain  the complex financial instruments and deregulation that led to the crisis - mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and synthetic collateralized debt obligations - and introducing the rogues gallery of characters for this story. They then go beat-by-beat through the collapsing economy of 2008 and trace the decisions that were made by those running the banks as well as by those in power. They close, as always, with some themes and big ideas - including the separation of risk from incentive and the failures of neoliberal deregulation - before turning to the echoes in the culture, which are profound for this topic.

Check out our website to search for episodes at: remembershuffle.com

Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests. And be sure to check out our Patreon!

Bibliography:

Andrew Ross Sorking, Too Big to Fail (New York: Viking), 2009

Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils are Here (New York: Penguin), 2011

George W Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers), 2010

Michael Lewis, The Big Short (San Francisco: Hyperink), 2012

Adam Tooze , Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 2018

Here is the chart Ben describes in the episode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#/media/File:Subprime_crisis_-_Foreclosures_&_Bank_Instability.png

Join us on the patreon to hear the full 67 minute episode. 

https://www.patreon.com/c/RememberShuffle

What ahre ye doin in mah slop? Remember this one folks? It’s Shrek, the 2000s postmodern fairy tale created to spite the traditional source of children’s animation. Remember Shuffle delves into all 4 of the Shrek movies, and talks about the wide swaths of memes and Shrek deconstruction that exist online for this middle-brow phenomenon. Jordan Peterson, Dada-ism, and the male id–no one has ever done Shrek analysis like this before. 
Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.

The Shuffle Bois, and returning guest Isaac, return to the well of comic book super hero fare to discuss the 2000s X-Men films. Being the pre-MCU, paleo-super hero films that they are, they can't help but be somewhat different from and more interesting than what came after. After summarizing the plots of the three main X-Men films from the decade, the Shuffle Bois talk themes - assimilation vs exclusivity, marginalization, and the LGTBQ allegory of these films, before closing out with a description of style and echoes in the culture.

Huge thanks to Isaac for guesting on this episode! Check him out @coexist.inc on instagram, as well as ⁠his podcast, Coexist Inc., here⁠, and on twitter as @⁠coexistinc⁠ 

Check out our website to search for episodes at: ⁠remembershuffle.com⁠

⁠Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.  

Do you like Remember Shuffle? Their early work was a little too derivative for my tastes, but when Epic Bacon Reddit Guy came out in '23, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole episode has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the riffs a big boost. They’ve been compared to The Rewatchables, but I think Remember Shuffle has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

Anyways, here’s the American Psycho episode on Brett Easton Ellis’ mise-en-scene satire of 80s yuppie culture.

Check out our website to search for episodes at: remembershuffle.com
Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests. 

This is a demo, check out the full episode at: ⁠patreon.com/RememberShuffle⁠

Remember Shuffle turns to one of their favourite kinds of film that we don't seem to get many of anymore: mid-budget, middle brow popcorn films, in the form of Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me If You Can." The Shuffle Bois use this film as a springboard to discuss the state of Boomer Culture and Boomer Nostalgia in 2002. After describing the plot of the film, they do a mini-book review of the "source material," the lying, bragging, horny memoir of Frank Abegnale Jr, before turning to the themes and big ideas behind the film including family dynamics, the American dream, and Boomer culture.

Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.

What happens when the exploitative and unethical world of fashion modelling meets the exploitative and unethical world of reality TV? The results may not surprise you. Remember Shuffle returns to the world of reality TV with a deep dive on America’s Next Top Model, featuring former contestant Sarah Hartshorne as expert guest correspondent. After tracing the history of the show and placing it in its particular historical moment, when every celebrity job was getting the reality show treatment, they dig into two retrospective sources on the show - Sarah’s book and a recent Netflix documentary, before turning, as always, to the major themes and big ideas behind the show and its echoes in the culture.

Give Sarah a follow on Instagram!

Find all the deets on Sarah’s book and where to buy it here. The new ANTM documentary Sarah mentions is called Dirty Rotten Scandals, and you can check it out here on the USA Network’s player if you can log in through your TV provider.

And don’t forget to give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.  

Check out our website to search for episodes at: ⁠remembershuffle.com⁠

With the campaign of Barack Obama in 2007-2008, the U.S. saw a resurgence in interest in Nelson Mandela, with Americans projecting a parallel with our own first black president. You can almost hear the gears turning in Clint Eastwood’s mind watching 2009’s Invictus–hoping to goad Obama towards symbolic reconciliation rather than expropriative redistribution. We look at Obama’s initial posturing and discuss whether or not he was doing the Mandela affect.

Bibliographical information for the books we used on this episode:John Carlin, "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation," Penguin Books 2008.Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism," Metropolitan Books, 2007

Huge thanks to Isaac for guesting on this episode! Check him out @coexist.inc on instagram, as well as his podcast, Coexist Inc., here, and on twitter as @coexistinc 

Check out our website to search for episodes at: remembershuffle.com

Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.  

Follow @Troop_hater on Twitter

Welcome to our O.C. episode, Bitch! The Shuffle Bois are joined by Dan (IG: @troop_hater ) to look at the lives of the Sun Percent and discuss an incredible piece of teen melodrama, postmodern comedy, and Trojan horse for character-driven drama, The O.C. After briefly describing the backstory of the show's creation, they analyze the show's memorable characters and do episode deep dives on three of their favourites. They then turn to the show's many themes - class conflict, race, religion, and politics. They close out with a discussion of the show's style and incredible soundtrack.

And, as always, give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.  

And don’t forget to check out our patreon!

/this is a demo, check out the full episode at: patreon.com/RememberShuffle

Another listener suggestion yields beautiful, ripe fruit for the pod as we follow up our last episode on Cyberwarfare with a movie whose plot is essentially the fictionalization of the warnings in the book “This is how they tell me the world ends”.

Much to ponder on this Intellectual Property reboot whose buddy cop pairing is…a Boomer and a Millenial. 

Give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests. 

New military industrial complex just dropped! In this spiritual sequel to our drones episode, the Shuffle Bois take you, the listener, into the exciting cloak-and-dagger world of the black market cyber weapons trade. After defining key terms - hackers, vendors, clients, and zero days - they trace the history and developments of this new field of warfare through the 2000s. They then analyze some of the themes and big ideas that underlie this topic - globalization, the lack of regulation in the tech sphere, and the role of the deep state in creating this problem. They close by looking at what it means to live in this new and exciting world of cyberweapons and cyberwarfare.

And, as always, give Remember Shuffle a follow on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠@RememberShufflePod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to interact with the show between episodes. It also makes it easier to book guests.  

And don’t forget to check out our patreon!