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EP114 · Society · first published 2021-12-23

The Great Reset 2.0 | Tuomas Malinen | Neuvottelija 114

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 sequel to the Great Reset episode of a year earlier, watched more than 120,000 times, in which Tuomas Malinen reviews which of his forecasts came true. The frame is Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, and Malinen's assessment is that in 2021 things slipped towards the despotic state. He names the recovery fund debate as a sign of a turn, with a flood of citizen feedback that a long-serving MP said he had never seen in his career. The carrying argument is constitutional: if a level can be placed above the constitution by decree, on which the population is sorted, it will in Malinen's view certainly be used again in another context. Miettinen says he changed his own position two weeks earlier because of omicron, but disputes that vaccination is purely a political matter. The economic part covers central bank digital currency, which Malinen forecasts will arrive through a crisis, the inflation of the 1970s and the asymmetry of rising rates: the Fed's problem is leverage in financial markets, the euro area's is the government bond market. Published 23 December 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society

The Great Reset 2.0 | Tuomas Malinen

Summary: In episode 114 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Tuomas Malinen exactly a year after recording The Great Reset. That episode had drawn more than 120,000 views, and in a poll of the Neuvottelija community 57 per cent wanted the last episode of the year to be with Malinen. The structure is a checklist: was 2021 the year of struggle over individual freedoms that Malinen had forecast, and which Great Reset themes moved forward. The carrying argument is constitutional rather than medical, and Miettinen disagrees with part of it on air. The economic part covers central bank digital currency, the inflation of the 1970s and why Malinen thinks the euro area cannot withstand rate rises. Published 23 December 2021.

A note on reading this. Malinen offers assessments and forecasts in this episode, some of them about actors’ motives. Views are attributed to the speaker and forecasts marked as forecasts. Miettinen states dissenting positions on both vaccines and interest rates, and they are preserved. Malinen’s claims about the motives of individual people or party leaderships are not repeated here. This article takes no position on the underlying disputes and is not health advice.

The frame: a narrow corridor and a year on the state’s side

A year earlier Malinen had said 2021 would be a great year of struggle over individual freedoms. Miettinen asks whether it was.

Malinen says yes, and returns to the same frame as last time: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor. The book’s idea is that democracy emerges from the joint effect of a despotic state and civil society, and the corridor between them is narrow. In Malinen’s assessment, with the exception of a few US states such as Texas and Florida, “we have slipped quite far over to the despotic state’s side”.

He says he finds it “very hard any longer to regard our current government as well-intentioned towards Finns”, and calls the year’s measures destructive. Even so, in a dark year he also sees signs of a turn.

The recovery fund: a defeat that was a partial victory

The first sign is the EU recovery fund. It passed in parliament, and Miettinen asks whether the big state won. Malinen agrees, but stresses how close the vote was. In his account the leadership of Kokoomus, the National Coalition Party, played the key role in the vote.

On the fund’s terms Miettinen recalls the words one-off and strictly limited, and Malinen adds that EU economy commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said the same. Malinen’s forecast is that when the next crisis comes and “an even bigger package is brought in”, Finns will lose their patience and politicians will find their backbone.

He says he started his campaign in May with the aim of “getting the debate going in this country”. It was lonely at first, but he had support from people including Peter Nyberg and Eija-Riitta Korhola. His most important memory is from the steps of Parliament House after the vote:

He had never in his entire career as an MP seen a flood of citizen feedback like the one that came.

The speaker, Malinen says, was “a very long-serving MP”, whom he does not name. Malinen sees it as an achievement shared by all Finns: civil society was activated.

Where a good civil society comes from

Miettinen asks what makes a good civil society. Malinen’s answer is active participation at every level needed to keep the despotic state in check. He admits he has not read the whole book, but sums up its message as civil society having to respond “always with the force that comes from the despot’s side”.

The earlier the intervention, he says, the less radical the response needs to be. At this stage, in his view, what was done in the recovery fund debate is enough: writing to MPs is “at the moment the clearest means of all” of steering the state administration.

The state as investor: electricity, peat and a bee

The second theme from a year earlier was the state’s growing role through central banks and investment programmes. Malinen says he no longer goes to parliament, but according to word reaching him from the committees, expert statements on a new EU social fund have been critical, and after the recovery fund there has been “a certain stop”. He sees the EU green package as next, and worries that its money would flow to large corporations and that decision-making power would move from parliament to supranational bodies.

His basic doubt is that the state lacks the knowledge to make good investments. Miettinen offers two examples: Finland had, at least briefly, the most expensive electricity in Europe, “20 times more expensive than normal”, and Germany’s Energiewende has steered the energy economy away from nuclear power so that energy prices have multiplied.

Malinen goes further. Winding down peat production is in his words “almost criminal”, because in his view wood chips cannot produce enough district heating in hard frosts. On Finland’s role in solving climate change he says:

It is just as if a single bee were the solution to some problem in air traffic.

His warning is that dismantling self-sufficiency means “we may have really cold winters coming”. This is a forecast, not an assessment of that winter, which he did not consider dangerous.

Why vagueness is dangerous

Malinen says his company spent the whole autumn analysing the Great Reset programme and launched an online course on it at the start of December. Its central feature, in his account, is extreme vagueness: the measures refer to loose factors, and “you could drive elephants through” their frameworks.

Vagueness leaves room for arbitrary, ideology-driven decision-making. The obstacle, Malinen says, has been the constitution, and if it can be bypassed by official regulations, the constitution “gradually ceases to exist”.

The Spanish flu and omicron: Miettinen changes his mind

Miettinen asks Malinen to repeat the historical analysis of the Spanish flu from the previous year. According to Malinen there were three to four waves, depending on how you count. The worst was the second, in which the virus mutated into a highly lethal form that killed young people in particular, and within about two years (1918–1919) it was over and faded into seasonal flu. He raises a speculation from the articles he read: older people who had had an influenza at the end of the 1800s had immunity from it.

At this point Miettinen makes the episode’s most open admission:

This is a damned controversial theme, but two weeks ago I had a slightly different opinion from now.

He had thought vaccination would continue until the virus was suppressed, but early data suggested omicron got through both immunity from previous infection and vaccine immunity. “Life will find a way”, he quotes Jurassic Park.

Malinen compares two countries. South Korea, he says, went back into lockdown despite vaccination coverage of 86 or 87 per cent, while in India coverage was by his understanding around 30 per cent but more than 70 per cent of the population had antibodies, and no new wave was visible. Miettinen notes that the situation is evolving and that India probably tests less. Malinen asks why the vaccine should be forced on everyone because of a pass if it does not prevent spread, and answers himself that in his view there is no medical basis for it.

Where Miettinen disagrees

Miettinen’s change of position is limited. His irritation is aimed at a bureaucrat centrally choosing the approved vaccine combinations. He imagines a situation in which only Russia’s Sputnik worked against omicron: “you can’t exercise your civil rights unless you’ve got two Sputniks up your sleeve”, with half a year to order them. “It really annoys me if these mutants spoil this neat bureaucrat’s dream”, he says self-ironically.

When Malinen says that vaccination in his view no longer has anything to do with health and that the motive is “entirely political”, Miettinen answers directly:

I disagree with that myself.

He proposes detaching the discussion from medicine and holding it on the philosophy of the pass instead: fundamental rights should belong to everyone without a bureaucrat’s stamp.

Magna Carta and the purpose of a constitution

Malinen asks whether Miettinen knows why the first constitution was created. Miettinen identifies Magna Carta, and Malinen adds: the barons sought protection from the king, and that protection later spread to the people. The constitution’s job has been to protect first the propertied class and then the people from the tyranny rulers can produce, and Malinen calls it “perhaps humanity’s most important invention”.

From this he draws the episode’s carrying argument. Viewed purely in constitutional-technical terms, the purpose of the pass, he says, is to sort the population above the constitution, which forbids it. He is also sharply critical of parliament’s Constitutional Law Committee, which approved the pass and the vaccination requirement for health and social care staff. The core is this:

If by decrees or any trick whatsoever you can place some level above the constitution on which people can be sorted, it will quite certainly be used again in some other context.

According to his Great Reset analysis, the programme’s texts do not mention fundamental rights at all; they point to the concentration of power. The fear is a system in which fundamental rights would be “in some way conditional on whatever this bureaucrat happens to come up with”.

Digital money: the banker who had never heard of it

Miettinen notes that one of last year’s themes, central bank money, has not advanced as fast in the West as in China, where the state has broad access to citizens’ data through payments and the internet.

Malinen says he had lunch over the autumn with a banker who was “absolutely shocked” to hear about central bank digital currency for the first time. None of his banker colleagues had heard of it either, although the ECB is preparing it in the background. In Malinen’s view digital money threatens precisely the banks’ line of business.

His forecast concerns the mechanism: digital money will not be introduced by announcement; instead a crisis will shake trust in the financial system so badly that people accept the central bank’s safety. The financial market bubble is in his view so large that it will collapse at some point. The result would be Gosbankisation, the step-by-step move of the financial system under the central bank; Gosbank was the Soviet Union’s central bank and the country’s only bank. Malinen sees the Great Reset as a multi-stage process: the constitutional issues can be fixed, he says, “but then something else comes”.

The 1970s: inflation and a gift in loan form

Miettinen raises inflation. Energy prices, he says, had temporarily risen twentyfold in the Christmas frosts. Malinen says he gave Helsingin Sanomat a forecast: inflation is already a fact, but fiscal dominance, the euro area’s inability to withstand rising rates, will prevent rate rises.

Miettinen compares the situation to the 1970s: when inflation is high and the interest rate too low, granting a loan becomes a political decision. “Bank managers might give them to me, because you’ve got some rather unpleasant opinions”, he tells Malinen. The combination of high inflation and a low rate is, in his words, “a gift in loan form”.

Malinen corrects him: in the United States the Fed responded to the inflation of the oil crises immediately with strong rate rises. In Finland inflation was allowed to gallop, because the country’s growth model recycled domestic savings into industry at low rates. Inflation ate many people’s mortgages, but according to Malinen only for those in sectors where wages were raised. Instability is not wanted, which is why, for example, the ECB’s only mandate is price stability. If inflation really takes off, there is in his view no alternative to raising rates.

The euro area as a house of cards: a disagreement on rates

Miettinen suggests another alternative: Italy leaves the euro. Malinen offers a third: inflation runs away and Germany leaves, because Germans remember Weimar hyperinflation.

Here Miettinen disagrees again. He does not find the idea that central banks cannot raise rates very realistic. He says he had checked the day before that the market-implied probability of a US rate rise before the Fed’s March meeting was 55.9 per cent, and estimates that while three rises are being talked about for the coming year, there could be six.

Malinen concedes the United States, since the federal government will not go bankrupt, “but the euro area is the problem”. His distinction is the sharpest point in the economic part:

In his view central banks seriously overstepped their mandates after the financial crisis, and the bill is now coming due. He forecasts media operations presenting central banks as rescuers: “The ones who ruined our economy can actually save it.”

Bretton Woods II and the grassroots

Miettinen notes that one quiet signal did not come true: the IMF raised its lending capacity, but a Bretton Woods II system did not advance. Malinen thinks it could still come about as a combination of central bank digital currencies, depending on how the crisis unfolds. His conclusion is political: a financial system free from central bank control should start being built now, and civil society must take back control at the grassroots. “I don’t believe these globalists will stop pushing their agenda whatever happens”, he forecasts.

Woke, smokescreens and the mainstream media

At the end Miettinen brings in free speech. He says he has discussed it at length with Ivan Puopolo. Puopolo had interviewed the American writer James Lindsay, who had taken part in an experiment in which fabricated scientific papers passed peer review at sociology journals. According to that interviewee, woke ideology is an institutional means of control that compels people to speak in a certain way and punishes deviation with cancelling.

Malinen says he has grown used to marginalisation. His interpretation is that the “fussing” he sees as remnants of cultural Marxism draws attention away from important matters, and he calls it a classic smokescreen operation. As an example he cites Donald Trump’s presidency, when by his observation a controversy was often arranged while a difficult legislative package was going through. He regards these as “precision operations” that break down social cohesion. “The more confused you are, the easier you are to govern”, he says, urging people to look behind the brand. Miettinen sums it up: divide and rule.

Malinen says he regards his exclusion from the mainstream media as “quite an honour”, given its current standard. Miettinen points out that his episode has 120,000 views on Neuvottelija and his appearances more than a million on YouTube. They close on Malinen’s large Instagram following and the fact that he does not yet have the resources for a YouTube channel of his own.

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context: Miettinen’s change of position over omicron is his own (he returns to it with “I strongly disagreed two weeks ago”), and the South Korea–India comparison is read as Malinen’s because it continues his comment on omicron. A rumour Malinen relays about a minister’s remark at Ecofin and his claims about party leaderships’ motives are left out because they cannot be checked. The transcript’s “joku linssi” is James Lindsay. The channel Malinen says he last appeared on is not named. The episode opens with about a minute of preview clips that recur later in it.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 114, published 23 December 2021, running time 39 minutes 29 seconds. Guest Tuomas Malinen (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 114 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 23 December 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews Tuomas Malinen as a sequel to the Great Reset episode of a year earlier, watched more than 120,000 times. Key findings: the frame is Acemoglu and Robinson’s narrow corridor, and in Malinen’s assessment 2021 slipped towards the despotic state; he names the recovery fund debate as a sign of a turn, in which a long-serving MP told him he had never seen such a flood of citizen feedback, and mentions Peter Nyberg and Eija-Riitta Korhola as supporters; writing to MPs is in his view the clearest means of influence; examples of the state’s investment record are a twentyfold electricity price, Germany’s Energiewende and the winding-down of peat production, which Malinen calls almost criminal; the carrying argument is constitutional rather than medical — if a population-sorting level can be placed above the constitution by decree, it will in Malinen’s forecast be used again in another context, with Magna Carta as the comparison; Miettinen says he changed his position because of omicron but disagrees that vaccination is purely political; the Spanish flu waves, South Korea and India serve as comparisons; central bank digital currency will, per Malinen, arrive through a crisis rather than an announcement, leading to Gosbankisation; in the 1970s the Fed raised rates immediately while Finland let inflation gallop; on rising rates the Fed’s problem is financial market leverage and the euro area’s the government bond market, while Miettinen expects as many as six US rate rises; other themes are Bretton Woods II, the IMF, woke ideology and smokescreen operations. Related episodes: The Great Reset | Tuomas Malinen and Let’s vote down the EU package in parliament | Tuomas Malinen.

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