50: What Slavoj Žižek Would Say About Poker and the Peso

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Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal, Managing Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

And I'm Tracy Alloway, Executive Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Joe Weisenthal (0:36)

So Tracy, remember our episode a few weeks ago with Emanuel Derman, the quant guy who wrote, who used to work at Goldman Sachs, the physicist?

Tracy Alloway (0:48)

I do indeed, I love that episode. Is he on again?

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

No, not quite, but he has a new book out. It's a textbook on modeling options.

And it's a textbook, so it's like massively over my head. Like I can't get past page 30 without not understanding it. But I was reading through it and I noticed a footnote in the book that really intrigued me.

Yeah, very intriguing footnote. He was sort of explaining what options were and what derivatives were.

And he mentioned the work of a Danish professor who sort of operating in the sort of philosophical framework explained how a company was real and the option was symbolic. And so sort of going back to things you might learn in philosophy or psychology school.

Tracy Alloway (1:43)

I mean, I can kind of see it. It's a derivative, right? Something synthetic based on something real.

Joe Weisenthal (1:49)

Exactly. So you have a company that produces cash flows that is a business that theoretically sells something.

And then the financial world has created, right, a derivative that's sort of fake and exists in our imagination based on this company. So then I got really interested in this professor and I was Googling him and I was like, oh, this sounds really intriguing.

Tracy Alloway (2:15)

Cyberstalking.

Joe Weisenthal (2:17)

Cyberstalking, exactly. And I saw that he had written a book about poker, which is a game that I love, called Poker, The Parody of Capitalism. And then I was like, oh, this is just amazing. I gotta read more by this guy. He has this whole framework about poker being this combination of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary and what it says about capitalism and sort of modern financial capitalism.

And it just totally blew my mind. Like it was one of the most amazing things I ever read.

Tracy Alloway (2:50)

This is where I start to get a little bit nervous because I know nothing about poker. I probably don't know that much about capitalism either.

So this conversation could well be over my head.

Joe Weisenthal (3:01)

Well, I think this conversation is gonna be pretty far over my head too, because I know a little bit about poker and maybe a little bit about capitalism, probably less than you do. And I certainly don't know much about this sort of philosophy, this professor. He's a disciple of the professor Žižek, who a lot of like hipsters are really into. And anyway, all this like academic, sort of post-modern seeming stuff, it's typically way over my head and I don't get it, but we have the professor on our podcast today. His name is Ola Bjerg, he's a professor at the Copenhagen Business School in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy.

And I want to talk to him about financial markets, poker and the gap between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. And, you know, we'll just see where it goes.

Tracy Alloway (3:59)

It sounds good. Let's try it.

Joe Weisenthal (4:12)

Ola, thank you very much for joining us.

Ole Bjerg (4:14)

Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Joe Weisenthal (4:17)

I read your book on a recent flight to Los Angeles, your book about poker. And I actually played poker when I was there because there are casinos out there. So I wanna talk about my poker experience at the end of it because I had a very interesting realization. But let's just start from the beginning. So why did you write a book about poker? You're a professor in a business school.

Tell us a little bit about the philosophical framework that you study and why you thought poker was an interesting entryway into studying capitalism.

Ole Bjerg (4:50)

Well, first of all, I wrote the book because I like poker. I'm not a very good poker player, but I can certainly appreciate the charm and the excitement of the game. So that was one thing. And I had previously, I had studied compulsive gambling. And a lot of the stuff that was written about gambling in that field is written by people who don't really care about gambling. So I wanted to write a book about gambling that actually appreciated the game. So that was the one part.