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EP101 · Society · first published 2021-10-01

Puopolo's Weekly Wisecrack Club | Tere Sammallahti, Ivan Puopolo | Neuvottelija 101

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

A debrief recorded after the third episode of the Weekly Wisecrack Club, in which Sami Miettinen asks his guests how you actually live with free speech when your own livelihood is at stake. Miettinen admits that after more than a hundred episodes he still has a small amount of self-censorship running, and the reply is that the feeling is entirely natural but you get rid of it by building tolerance. Ivan Puopolo's line is never to apologise; Tere Sammallahti calls that the right philosophy but adds that when you are genuinely wrong, you apologise. The sharpest question is whether an entrepreneur can protect his business partners, through whom the pressure reaches his livelihood. The other sharp observation is the perspective illusion: Puopolo's tweet reached around a hundred thousand impressions, which means the vast majority of Finns never saw it. For a CEO they offer a concrete course of action when an employee is targeted, and the episode closes with why Finnish corporate communications are so cautious. Published 1 October 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society

Puopolo’s Weekly Wisecrack Club | Tere Sammallahti, Ivan Puopolo

Summary: In episode 101 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen sits down with Tere Sammallahti and Ivan Puopolo immediately after recording the third episode of the Weekly Wisecrack Club. The debrief turns quickly to a question that affects anyone who speaks publicly: what free speech actually costs when your own livelihood is at stake. The episode is unusually concrete because the three speakers occupy three different positions — an unaffiliated channel owner, a local politician appearing in a party’s colours, and an entrepreneur whose living partly comes from speaking bluntly. The strongest single contribution is the perspective illusion: the calculation of what a hundred-thousand-impression tweet actually reaches. Towards the end the conversation turns to why Finnish corporate communications are so cautious, and why humour works in politics too. Published 1 October 2021.

A note on reading this. The guests are right-of-centre commentators and the conversation proceeds from their premises. Views are attributed by speaker here, and this article takes no position on them.

Three different positions on the same question

Miettinen opens by saying he asked his Neuvottelija community whether the Weekly Wisecrack Club was worth continuing. Several hundred people voted, and only 3 per cent said stop. The guests joke that a result that strong calls for an election observer.

The structure of the episode follows from the fact that the speakers are not in the same boat, and they say so out loud.

Sami Miettinen is unaffiliated. He notes that this is precisely why nobody really attacks him: across more than a hundred episodes the guests have come from every single party — from the Left Alliance to the Greens to the National Coalition, Elina Valtonen among them. He sees a harder game on the other side: his guest and partner in stock-exchange training, Petri Roininen, had just become chair of the Blue Reform party.

Tere Sammallahti appears openly in a party’s colours, on the liberal wing of the National Coalition. That makes him an easy target: it is simple for a political opponent to point out which camp he belongs to. After the elections, he says, a few far-left voices had already demanded that the Espoo branch of the party expel him for his “wrong opinions”. His answer is trust in his own side: they will not stab him in the back at every turn.

Ivan Puopolo is in a different position from both. The sharpest question of the episode is put to him:

You can maybe protect yourself — and I have done that too — but can you protect your business partners?

Pressure does not stop when the target refuses to yield. It goes around: “whatever you say, whatever you stand behind, we go past you and go at your livelihood.”

Puopolo agrees that “preaching about growing a thicker skin” does not help when a livelihood is at stake. His own situation is the reverse, though: part of his income comes precisely from saying things bluntly, so apologising and hushing things up would harm his brand. He cannot name any remedy other than trying to make his business partners understand how he sees the matter.

Self-censorship does not disappear on its own — tolerance is built

Miettinen puts the question as an admission. Even after a hundred episodes, a little self-censorship runs in every one: the fear that someone will cut the twenty seconds where something came out awkwardly, and share it.

He assumes his guests do not feel the same. The reply corrects the assumption directly: the feeling is familiar, it has simply faded over time. It is, the reply goes, an entirely natural part of every person — but it is something to be rid of.

The method is incremental: building tolerance, a foot-in-the-door tactic. Say a little more each time, and then a little more again. The mechanism is named in the episode as widening the Overton window.

That comes with the episode’s most categorical advice, which Sammallahti shortly afterwards calls “Ivan’s maximum attack”, so the advice is Puopolo’s:

Pay no attention to objections. Never apologise. Never say you were wrong.

Sammallahti’s qualification here matters, because it is the episode’s clearest internal tension. He reads the advice as a rhetorical and propagandistic tool, but if you are wrong, then you should apologise and admit it; the advice applies where you do not believe you are wrong and can justify your position. He does not say everything either, and does not set out to offend; the coarser material stays in the sauna. The point is not to let yourself be frightened into silence, “and in that sense Ivan’s maximum attack, a bit like Valavuori’s, is the right philosophy in my view”.

Apologising as a losing strategy

Puopolo’s analysis of why apologising does not work is framed as the logic of a conflict. In his view this is a political or partly cultural struggle in which the other side exploits every opening:

As long as you submit by apologising and by proving you are not this or that, the barrage keeps coming. But when you shoot back for long enough, the opponent concludes this one will not turn — and moves to the next target.

Sammallahti calls the analysis “really sharp” and gives an example: the rows before the parliamentary elections, where provocation from a few National Coalition figures produced weeks of uproar and demands to drop candidates from the list. According to Sammallahti, the Helsinki branch submitted to a demand that came from outside, and that remains a stain on its history; in Espoo, he says, the demands moved nobody. His conclusion is that deference invites further demands for deference — and that the same campaign will repeat before the next elections.

It is worth noting what the episode does and does not do here: the speakers offer a prediction about an opponent’s intentions, not an observation. The prediction is part of the argument, not evidence for it.

Identity politics: individual or representative

Miettinen links the discussion to his earlier episode Extremes in Finland (EP67), which went through identity politics with Matti Virtanen on the basis of his book.

The mechanism, in Miettinen’s account, is exactly what Sammallahti describes: what an individual says is always read as representing their identity. When three men make a comedy programme, opponents first classify them as types, after which everything they say confirms the classification — and the labels attached to them are unflattering.

Miettinen’s answer is a matter of principle: do not play the game. “I am an individual, I am not an identity.”

Sammallahti adds the episode’s most realistic observation: as visibility grows, being labelled becomes impossible to avoid. The only way to escape it is to remain wallpaper. Which makes labelling, in fact, a sign that the message got through.

The perspective illusion: what a hundred thousand impressions really means

This is the measurable core of the episode. Just before it, Sammallahti recalls that the “perspective illusion” is something Ivan Puopolo talked about long ago, and the calculation that follows is, judging by the teller’s “I have probably told this before”, Puopolo’s own.

He had a tweet with roughly 1,600 likes and 200 retweets — a reasonably large number on Finnish Twitter. It accumulated 100,000 impressions. Which sounds like a lot, until you set it in proportion: it means the vast majority of Finns over 15 had not seen the tweet at all.

The percentage is actually corrected mid-conversation in the episode — first 99 per cent is said, then it is recalculated to around 95 per cent to stay on safe ground. A small detail, but it says something about the care being taken.

The everyday version of the same phenomenon comes from a guest addressing Miettinen’s business audience directly, from the context Puopolo. When a company’s communications or customer service team notices the firm has been tagged into a Twitter thread with six participants, 25 likes and a couple of retweets, it feels like a storm. The comparison of scale is the episode’s most quotable line:

It is the equivalent of an argument at the smoking spot at the office Christmas party.

A course of action for the CEO

The episode offers unusually concrete guidance for the situation where an employee is targeted and the CEO is pressured — “how can you have someone like that on your payroll, a phobe or a denialist”.

For Puopolo this is an opportunity for the CEO to position as a defender of freedom, not a crisis:

In our workplace, freedom of speech and opinion prevails. We give our employees that possibility and we are not giving it up. Go and lose someone else next time.

Sammallahti adds the other half: at the same time you defend the employee — they are a good employee, their contribution is valued, and they may hold whatever opinion they like.

Three reasons why this also makes commercial sense:

  1. Customers most likely know nothing about the outrage, and even if they did, it would not interest them.
  2. A customer is more likely to value a company whose employees are at work rather than serving as political hostages — as long as the work is done well, private life is their own business.
  3. The best way to manage an outrage is not to react at all. Puopolo’s parallel: the same advice as in investing — do nothing.

As a practical protective measure Sammallahti recommends something simple: take your employer out of your Twitter bio. That avoids 99 per cent of the problems, in his estimate, though the most determined will still find it on LinkedIn.

The climate has changed

One of the episode’s more optimistic observations concerns change. Puopolo and Sammallahti have actively argued that reporting and tagging other people’s employers is contemptible — and in their view the climate has shifted considerably.

Sammallahti’s assessment is that practically all of the rest of social media agrees fairly unanimously that other people’s employers are left out of political disputes. He regards part of the left as an exception, for whom the tactic has instrumental value. This is clearly the speaker’s own interpretation of an opponent’s motives, not an observation.

As an aside, Miettinen offers his own theory about algorithms: it is not worth worrying about whose channel you appear on as a guest, because the algorithm ensures a disagreeing audience will not see the content anyway. Channels sort themselves into compartments.

Why Finnish corporate communications are so cautious

The final section is the episode’s most unexpected, because it has nothing to do with outrage.

Sammallahti’s verdict is harsh: Finnish companies cannot communicate at all. The only body that has bought competent communications, in his view, is the Tax Administration — and that, he thinks, is precisely the agency that should communicate only through its official channels. “We do not need a taxman clowning around for people.”

The lost opportunity is informational. Company executives and employees hold a great deal of knowledge the general public does not have: what the world looks like from the perspective of forestry, steel, or ICT exports. Politicians, Sammallahti argues, ought to be very interested in that, because it says what the future looks like and what needs preparing for.

As an example of bold communications, Miettinen raises Oatly’s direct attack on milk. The campaign generated public debate and spoke to Oatly’s buyers — and ended up under investigation by the Council of Ethics in Advertising. Miettinen says he partly disagrees with the substance but considers it a fine campaign.

Sammallahti nonetheless warns a company executive against diving deep into party politics. The distinction is useful: sharing sector expertise is a different thing from taking a party position.

Humour is a tool, not decoration

The episode ends with a defence of humour. After the Oatly example the speakers note that Finnish companies very rarely dare to be funny, although funny is what people remember. The examples are the 1990s classic ad line “never have I drunk milk and never will” and the stereotypically dry engineer of a Helsingin Energia campaign, who appealed to the speaker as an engineer “enormously”. American Super Bowl half-time commercials are studied closely by marketing people in Finland, but nobody dares to do the equivalent here, “which puzzles me a bit”.

The example from politics is Obama, whose best speeches are in his view half stand-up comedy — including the famous mockery of Trump and its mic drop. He concedes the speaker has writers behind him, but adds the essential point: delivery is a skill in itself, even when someone else wrote the script.

The programme’s own rules, which Miettinen reads out at the end, are a self-ironic summary of the whole episode: always laugh at your own jokes, quote your own tweets, and always be right.

A note on the source: the article was updated on 9 October 2026 from a fresh MacWhisper transcription of the episode and the publisher’s own chapter list. The new transcription fills the earlier gap of about half a minute at 17:39 (humour in advertising). The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context: for example, Sammallahti calls the never-apologise line “Ivan’s maximum attack” and recalls that the perspective illusion is Puopolo’s idea. The earlier version of this article had given some of these passages to the wrong speaker. One controversy referred to in the episode (“kisunletit”) and one personal name (Valavuori) were indistinct in the audio and have not been guessed.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 101, published 1 October 2021, running time 19 minutes 43 seconds. Guests Tere Sammallahti and Ivan Puopolo (guest pages and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 101 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 1 October 2021) Sami Miettinen discusses free speech, self-censorship and targeting with Tere Sammallahti and Ivan Puopolo, in a debrief after the third episode of the Weekly Wisecrack Club. Key findings: self-censorship is natural but can be shed by incrementally building tolerance (widening the Overton window); Puopolo regards apologising as a losing strategy in a conflict (maximum attack), while Sammallahti holds that where you are genuinely wrong you should apologise; the episode asks whether an entrepreneur can protect his business partners, through whom pressure reaches his livelihood; in identity politics an individual’s statement is always read as representing their identity, and as visibility grows labelling becomes unavoidable; the perspective illusion is the episode’s central measured finding — Puopolo’s tweet with roughly 1,600 likes and 200 retweets drew 100,000 impressions, meaning the vast majority of Finns over 15 never saw it, and a hundred-like outrage is equivalent in scale to an argument at the office Christmas party smoking spot; when an employee is targeted, a CEO’s best move is to defend the employee and position as a defender of free speech, and the best way to manage an outrage is not to react at all; a practical protective step is removing your employer from your Twitter bio; the speakers consider Finnish corporate communications exceptionally cautious, citing Oatly’s campaign against milk, which ended up before the Council of Ethics in Advertising, as a bold counter-example; humour is a tool in politics, illustrated by the stand-up character of Obama’s speeches. Related episodes: Extremes in Finland | Matti Virtanen and New season, new party leader | Petri Roininen.

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