---
title: "What Investors Must Not Forget Right Now | Martin Paasi | Negotiator 388"
summary: "MP and long-time Rahapodi host Martin Paasi joins Sami Miettinen to unpack their talks at the Tampere investment fair. Paasi's core claim is arithmetic rather than opinion: because investor returns distribute symmetrically around the market return, costs alone shift the whole distribution left until three quarters of investors lose to the market — so zeroing costs tells you today that you will land in the top quartile. From that follow the five-thousand-euro newborn, a proposal to convert Solidium into a zero-fee national pension fund, and the question of why anyone would still own a company in Finland. Miettinen answers with the AI working group that justified an investment decision through analysis, and with an uncomfortable finding from the Hello Humans project about political bias in language models. Finally the data-centre acid test and Philip Aminoff on ownership with a face."
datePublished: 2026-06-05
dateModified: 2026-06-05
originalLang: en
section: economy
sections: ["economy","tools","society"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Neuvottelija","EP388","Martin Paasi","Indeksirahastot","Eläkejärjestelmä","Solidium","Tekoälyagentit","Kielimallit","Datakeskukset","Omistajuus","Sijoittaminen"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep388-tata-sijoittaja-ei-saa-nyt-unohtaa-martin-paasi/
---
# What Investors Must Not Forget Right Now | Martin Paasi | Negotiator 388

# What Investors Must Not Forget Right Now | Martin Paasi | Negotiator 388

> **Summary:**
> MP and long-time Rahapodi host Martin Paasi joins Sami Miettinen to unpack their talks at the Tampere investment fair. Paasi's core claim is arithmetic rather than opinion: because investor returns distribute symmetrically around the market return, costs alone shift the whole distribution left until three quarters of investors lose to the market — so zeroing costs tells you today that you will land in the top quartile. From that follow the five-thousand-euro newborn, a proposal to convert Solidium into a zero-fee national pension fund, and the question of why anyone would still own a company in Finland. Miettinen answers with the AI working group that justified an investment decision through analysis, and with an uncomfortable finding from the Hello Humans project about political bias in language models. Finally the data-centre acid test and Philip Aminoff on ownership with a face.

## A note on reading this

This episode is a conversation between two interested parties, not a neutral expert
briefing, and it should be read as one.

**Martin Paasi** is a Member of Parliament for the National Coalition Party and was
previously Nordnet's savings economist. Low-cost index investing is not one view among
others for him; it is a programme he has pushed in public for more than a decade — the same
talk he says he has given more often than any other. When he says of his central claim
*this is not an opinion, this is mathematics*, the claim is checkable, and it is checked
below. What should follow from it politically is a separate question, and there he speaks
for his party.

**Sami Miettinen** is both interviewer and interested party here. He owns Alphabet and says
he bought the Nexans position discussed in the episode; he sells access to the Neuvottelija
Sisäpiiri membership of which the AI working group is a part; and he runs the Hello Humans
language-model podcast that the episode examines. Nothing in the investment discussion is
investment advice.

The episode's **figures have been checked against the public record**, and divergences are
flagged in the text rather than quietly corrected. A divergence usually says something — and
twice in this episode it turns out to favour the speaker's own argument.

## What this episode continues

The two appeared at the Tampere investment fair the same weekend: Paasi as the main-hall
keynote speaker, Miettinen on the AI panel with his Samantha agent. The plan was laid out in
advance on Paasipodi, and this episode is the debrief — what the plan was, and what actually
happened.

The warm-up episode is written up separately:
[The Tampere investment fair warm-up | Sami Miettinen on Paasipodi #73](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-73-tampereen-sijoitusmessujen-etkot/).
The panel's actual AI demo — where the agent swarm discussed Alphabet with Nebula founder
**Ville Skogberg** and landed on Nexans — is
[a video of its own](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/708-liity-neuvottelija-sisapiiriin-ja-nae-miten-kaytan-samanthaa/).

---

## 1. The bell curve, costs, and the top quartile

The core of Paasi's talk is a single structure, and it is worth walking through step by
step, because its strength is precisely that it has no moving parts.

**Step 1.** Take a market that returns, say, 7 per cent a year over some period. Take every
investor in that market and plot the distribution of the returns they actually received. The
result is a bell curve centred on the market return: some do a little better, some a little
worse.

**Step 2.** That distribution has to be roughly symmetric around the market return. Not
everyone can beat the market, because the market *is* the aggregate of investors. This is an
identity, not an empirical finding.

**Step 3.** The bell curve describes returns **before costs**. Subtract each investor's
annual costs — one percentage point in Paasi's example, and he notes he is deliberately
using a conservative figure, since balanced funds get to 2–2.5 per cent easily — and the
whole distribution **slides left**.

**Step 4.** From the shifted distribution comes the observation: roughly **three quarters of
investors end up below the market return, purely because of costs.**

**Step 5.** Now invert it. Drive costs to zero and you receive the market return — and in
the shifted distribution the market return sits in the **top quartile**. So: *a zero-fee
equity index fund does not promise the best return; it removes the uncertainty about which
half you end up in.*

> If you pay no costs, you know today that in ten, twenty, fifty years you are in the top
> quartile. If instead you buy, sell, switch and pay high fees, you have a theoretical
> chance of doing well — but you no longer know how it ends.

**Checked.** The structure holds, and it is not Paasi's invention: it is the argument
William Sharpe set out in 1991 as *the arithmetic of active management* — before costs, the
average active euro must earn the market return; after costs, necessarily less. The
three-quarters figure, however, is the **output of an illustrative calculation**, not a
measurement: it depends on the dispersion of the distribution and the assumed cost level.
Paasi effectively says so himself when he picks the cost assumption low on purpose. The
claim *most investors lose to the market because of costs* is strongly supported; exactly
75 per cent is an illustration.

Paasi also has a structural explanation for why the point has not landed: *this is one man
against an entire establishment.* Nobody whose business is selling funds wants to sell a
zero-fee product. Miettinen asks directly why something self-evident in business school is
still not mainstream in Finland — and that is the answer.

Warren Buffett enters here: he recommends index funds to everyone and has instructed the
same for his own estate. Miettinen says he attended the Omaha annual meeting in Buffett's
94th year, the last with him as CEO before **Greg Abel** took over.

## 2. Three savers, and why ten years beats thirty-five

The second part of the talk is a compounding demonstration in which all three people earn
the same **6.9 per cent real return** and save the same **150 euros a month**. Only the
timing differs.

| Who | Saves | For how long | Pot at 65 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20-year-old | €150/month | 10 years (20→30), then nothing | about €260,000 |
| 30-year-old | €150/month | 35 years (30→65) | a few thousand less |
| Newborn | €5,400 one-off | — | about €400,000 |

The result is the whole point of the example: **the thirty-year-old never catches the
twenty-year-old**, despite shovelling in his own money for 35 years against the other's ten.
A ten-year head start at the front of the compounding curve outweighs 25 extra years of
contributions at the back.

The third row is what Paasi has been pushing for years. Five thousand euros at birth — or
150 euros a month for the child's first three years — produces a pot of roughly €400,000 at
65, while **the calculated average Finnish pension over an entire retirement is, on Paasi's
figure, about €350,000.**

> Five thousand euros buys a newborn an entire pension solution.

**Checked.** The arithmetic works: €5,400 compounding at 6.9 per cent real for 65 years is
about €400,000. Two caveats are worth holding, and neither is stated in the episode. First,
a 6.9 per cent **real** return sustained over 65 unbroken years is a top-of-range equity
assumption, not a central one; a single percentage point changes the end figure by tens of
per cent. Second, the calculation assumes zero costs and untaxed accumulation, which in
Finland is only possible through particular product structures. The €350,000 comparison is a
calculated average, not any one person's pension.

## 3. Where is my million? — the price of pay-as-you-go

A question from the fair audience is the best single moment in this episode, because it
exposes a misunderstanding that is very common in Finland. A pensioner had quickly worked
out that the sums paid over a working life ought to have left well over a million euros
somewhere, and asked **who had skimmed it.**

The answer is nobody. The money is not there because it was never set aside.

Paasi's worked example: a median salary of about €3,200 a month, an employer cost of about
€4,000, of which roughly **€1,000 a month goes into the pension system** — the employee's
own share of that about €200. That is around €12,000 a year across a forty-year career. But
the money does not go into a fund; it goes **straight out again**: from the employee's
account to today's pensioners' accounts.

> Something like eleven per cent is funded — the rest simply goes straight to payment. And
> that is why we have these four large pension institutions.

**Checked and qualified.** The order of magnitude holds; the details do not quite. The TyEL
contribution in 2026 is **24.40 per cent of salary** (employer 17.10 per cent on average,
employee 7.30 per cent), which on a €3,200 salary is about €780 a month. Paasi's €1,000
includes the other statutory employer charges, not pension alone. The funded share is
explicitly given in the episode as a recollection, and is not verified here; what matters
for the argument is that **the bulk of the contribution goes straight to current pensions**
rather than into a fund in anyone's name. That is a designed feature of the Finnish system,
not a fault — but it explains exactly why the questioner's million does not exist.

## 4. The YEL fix, funded pensions, and Solidium

Here the episode turns political, and here Paasi speaks as an MP.

**The first item has been fixed.** The mechanism introduced by the YEL reform, under which
the pension system could assess a self-employed person's notional earned income regardless
of what they actually paid themselves, and levy contributions on that assessment, is being
removed. Paasi treats this as a big deal:

> I know dozens of people who have refused to become entrepreneurs because of it, because it
> is so arbitrary.

**The second item has not.** The fix is nowhere near the funded pension model that **Tere
Sammallahti** has pushed inside the National Coalition Party and which is now the party's
stated line. Paasi thinks it should be one of next year's election themes, and his argument
is cost rather than ideology: if a newborn's pension were handled with a five-thousand-euro
initial investment, **payroll cost in Finland would fall by a quarter**, all else equal. The
employee's take-home pay would not change.

**The implementation proposal is concrete.** Turn **Solidium** into Finland's pension fund:
sell the current portfolio of Finnish companies into the market, convert it into a zero-fee
global index portfolio, place it in a foundation beyond politicians' reach, and start making
earmarked five-thousand-euro investments for every Finn born. Paasi's argument for
diversifying is political: a domestic portfolio inevitably attracts passions, a global index
does not.

Miettinen's description of the status quo is this episode at its sharpest — Solidium is to
him *an army of analysts sitting on top of Finnish shares and sending them magnificent
ownership reports* — and he notes separately that the portfolio happened to do well last
year but has not been dazzling over the long run.

*A qualification to what was said in the episode.* Paasi puts Solidium's size at seven or
eight billion. Solidium's equity holdings were worth
[about €10.6 billion at mid-2026](https://www.sttinfo.fi/uutishuone/69820427/solidium-oy/r),
clearly more than he recalled — which makes his proposal easier to fund than he presented
it.

## 5. The AI working group, and how the investment decision was actually made

Miettinen's slot at the fair was the AI panel, and the second half of the episode is about
what was shown there.

Behind it sits the **AI working group**: a WhatsApp group whose entry requirement is not
interest but evidence — *you must have your own AI worker, trained well enough that it
answers other members' questions on the group's channel.* The group worked through
Miettinen's Alphabet holding and ended up with a €4,900 investment in Nexans.

**Paasi's assessment of the method is the weightiest AI statement in the episode, and he
offers it as praise.** What he found good about the session was not the outcome but what
was **not** done:

> Nobody asked Samantha where to invest.

The reasoning is model-theoretic. A language model is a statistical, **mean-reverting**
machine: it answers roughly what the majority of humanity would answer. That, Paasi argues,
is exactly what makes it an excellent **tool** — in coding or in reading law, the rules and
the interpretive history exist, and the most commonly favoured solution is usually the right
one. The same property makes it a **useless oracle**: in an investment view, the average is
already in the price.

The group's way around this was to use agents to gather information and analyse numbers, let
several agents converge separately, and demand a justification from each: *on this
information, on these financial figures, this looks underpriced, and there is no known
reason why.* The difference is that the model argues the case rather than answering
"name me a stock".

On Alphabet the conclusion was **do not sell**. The reasoning: Alphabet is not a search
engine but a stack with its own chips, its own cloud, its own model and Waymo — in
Miettinen's words *it is approaching Musk's super-empire*. The identified risk was a high
cash-flow multiple.

Nexans came out of the question asked next: when you cannot buy Anthropic or OpenAI on an
exchange, what benefits from growth in AI inference? The answer produced sub-themes — cloud
services, data centres, their infrastructure — and out of them **Nexans**, an
eight-billion-euro French cable and electrical company that builds the power supply for data
halls.

### The disagreement that is left open

Here the guest criticises the host, and the criticism is not resolved.

Paasi says the one thing that bothered him was **forcing the thesis into a value-investing
frame**. In his view they should have said outright that no value prop was needed: this is
growth, *trend is my friend*, hair back and more fuel. He points out that the sector already
has Siemens-type names that have had their growth spurt, and that what makes Nexans
interesting is precisely that the market has not found it yet.

Miettinen concedes he forced the thesis into value — and justifies it by saying he is
ultimately in the same camp as the index funds, and even in his trading portfolio rarely
takes pure growth risk.

Neither gives way. It is the episode's most honest moment: two people who agree on the
method and disagree on what justifies taking the position.

## 6. Agent memories and shared skills

The most technical stretch of the conversation concerns why the working group's agents are
better than base models, and the answer is not the model but the layers on top of it.

Every member has their own named agent — Miettinen's Samantha, the others their own — and
each has **its own memory structure and its own curated truth**. They are not what comes out
of a base model; they are that plus years of work.

The key observation is that the group **trades capabilities**. Miettinen gives an example:
one member's agent had built a working research skill over Reddit sources that surfaces the
most interesting ideas daily; the file was shared in the group, and the same skill now runs
inside Samantha as a daily report. The file moves, the capability transfers.

> It is far more effective than what you get out of a base model.

Behind this is Paasi's own story, a running thread on this channel: he thanks Miettinen for
getting him hooked on vibe coding — two or three months of sleepless nights, and a finished
Android app. The arc starts in Paasipodi episodes
[61](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-61-tekoalyn-myrskyvaroitus/) and
[66](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-66-tekoalyn-myrskyvaroitus-osa-ii/).

## 7. Hello Humans and the bias in language models

The most interesting single finding in the episode is one Miettinen makes about his own
project, and does not try to dress up.

**Hello Humans** is a podcast in which five language models discuss topics round-table
style: Claude as host, ChatGPT and Grok alongside, Mistral and Qwen completing the set,
research bots in the background. Miettinen's design principle was that the models should be
purely themselves.

The result was that **the whole format leaned left.** Miettinen asked Claude to analyse the
published episodes and place them on a left-right axis. Of eighteen published episodes, four
were clearly left, several centre, some undecided — **and not one on the right.**

His own explanation has two parts, and it has to be presented as his claim rather than as a
research finding:

1. **Source material.** When an agent is instructed to ground its claims in research, it
   inherits academia's weighting. Miettinen cites US data in which the openly left-leaning
   share of professors has, he says, risen from roughly 40 per cent to roughly 80 per cent.
2. **Curation.** The raters used in reinforcement learning are mostly American and mostly
   from the west coast, and their worldview transfers into the model even when nobody
   intends it.

The fix he made is methodologically more interesting than the diagnosis: he added a
**Grok agent whose only job is to listen to the conversation and deliver a steelman
counter-argument** when the discussion starts burrowing into a groove. Not an opposing
opinion but *the most obvious steelman counter-argument* — the strongest possible statement
of the opposing case. The next step is an agent that iterates each episode several times and
pulls it towards the origin on both the left-right and the liberal-conservative axes.

A side note that Paasi makes and Miettinen did not expect: **Qwen is by far the most
right-leaning of the five.** A Chinese model, more clearly market-friendly than the American
ones. Paasi simultaneously takes back his earlier dismissal of Qwen: having run it himself,
he rates it. Neither is happy with Mistral.

Hello Humans now also has podcast on demand: three euros buys you a bespoke 15-minute
episode. Miettinen's assessment of where it stands is honest — *it is not as badly left as
it was, but the work continues.*

## 8. The pain of ownership — the episode's real argument

Here the episode turns, and Miettinen turns it by making a case against his own interest.

His observation is experiential. The Nexans decision took the AI working group, human
intelligence, agent intelligence, an Excel run, multiple analyses and a couple of iteration
rounds — *work, time, cigarettes and tokens.* Paasi's alternative is to put the money in a
zero-fee index fund and close your eyes. Preferably for the baby, and you need not even tell
them.

From that comes a question about something much larger than one portfolio:

> When owning is a business of costs and effort, and you could simply buy a global index
> fund at zero cost — how have we in Finland got it into our heads that the person who is
> willing to do the work here locally, to own, to hire and to build, is the one who should
> be punished?

Miettinen lists what an owner deals with every year: inflation, logistics disruption in the
Strait of Hormuz, energy shocks. And what he gets: 25 per cent in tax-like charges, taxes at
the ceiling, regulation, and a public conversation in which owners are the problem.

**Paasi's answer is not denial but concession.** He says his own work has been to make Finns
wealthier and to increase the domestic share of equity capital — *and that Miettinen is
right*: without entrepreneurship, without this kind of masochism, nothing gets built.

His political read:

- The Orpo government has made **601 decisions to accelerate growth** — deregulation, tax
  cuts, the YEL fix, local bargaining. That is **one step in the right direction**, and at
  least fifteen more would be needed.
- His reading of the Social Democrats' programme is two things: **more public spending and
  more taxes**. This is Paasi's characterisation of an opponent's programme, not a neutral
  summary.
- If the election goes that way, he hopes his own party stays out of government — while
  noting himself that there are **two schools of thought**: keep your hands clean, or go in
  and save what you can.

**Entrepreneurs, in his view, deserve golden statues in the market squares of Finnish
towns.** The justification is a list: you solve problems daily, you carry debt, you create
jobs, you create exports, you create Finnish prosperity.

Miettinen's criticism of the public sector and the press goes sharper: the wish, as he sees
it, is for someone else to create the value that is then taxed, and
*public-sector productivity cannot be measured.*

**And here the episode does something worth recording.** Miettinen ends up saying of the
press and the left *be quiet now and die off* — and corrects himself in the same breath:
*okay, maybe that could be softened a little.* Paasi joins the softening, and the final
formulation is: **if you have nothing constructive to say, you can perfectly well stay
quiet.** The softening is part of the argument rather than damage control, which is why both
forms appear here.

Migration is the one point in this episode where a stated figure is clearly on the high
side.

*A qualification to what was said in the episode.* Paasi says three to four times as many
people move to Finland as leave it. According to Statistics Finland there were
[51,121 immigrations and 19,888 emigrations in 2025](https://stat.fi/fi/uutinen/Maahanmuutto-vaeheni-reilusti-vuonna-2025-syntyvyys-nousi-hieman),
a ratio of about **2.6**. The direction is as he says; the multiple is larger than the
statistics allow.

## 9. The AI megatrend and Finland's starting position

Here Paasi explains why he went into politics — *people do not grasp the scale of the
problems we have in Finland* — and immediately turns it positive. He does not want to be
gloomy: the lost growth can be taken back, and what is under way is, in his view, **the most
significant megatrend in human history, one in which Finland has exceptionally good
conditions.**

**Checked.** The comparison holds and is if anything favourable to him: since 2008 Sweden's
GDP has grown about 30 per cent and Finland's
[only a few per cent](https://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/marko-joensuu/suomen-talous-nollakasvua-jo-18-vuotta/),
and per capita, Finnish living standards have not risen in fifteen years.

His list of Finnish advantages runs as follows, and it should be read in two parts:

**What is checkable.** Europe's fastest supercomputer is in Kajaani and a faster one is
being built beside it. Chip design expertise is world class. Electricity transmission is in
relatively good shape, the electricity is clean, and there is a roadmap to double clean
generation. Tens of billions of euros of data-centre investment are on offer.

**What is not.** The claim that **30 per cent of the world's quantum computing expertise is
in Finland** does not appear in public sources in any form. Finland's own
[quantum technology strategy for 2025–2035](https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/items/74f50aa5-8b60-4441-af1f-41ff5718e147)
describes the country as a strong player among the leaders, but states no one-third share.
It is flagged here as a claim because it is the episode's most striking single figure and
because checking it is easy.

The conditions on which data centres should be accepted matter, in Paasi's view: *the smart
way, not the stupid way.* Two concrete requirements: every data centre should have
**flexible generation capacity beside the hall** (a Wärtsilä plant is his example) so it
takes part in keeping the grid adequate — and an obligation to **fund professorships in AI
computation and quantum expertise at Aalto University**.

Miettinen agrees on the goal and disagrees on the mechanism: he would do it through the
private sector, citing OpenAI handing out free tokens to Y Combinator companies. Neither
claims this is settled.

## 10. The acid test: 80 terawatt-hours and €3.5 billion

This is Paasi's counter-argument to those — he names **Risto Siilasmaa** as an example,
noting that he has since partly reversed his position — who have said data centres bring
nothing to Finland.

The argument is built as a concession. **Assume the critics are right.** Assume the data
centres invest ten billion euros on Finnish soil and leave nothing behind: no tax revenue,
no jobs, nothing.

One thing still remains, and it cannot be argued away: **they are buyers of electricity.**

Finland's roadmap for doubling clean generation means an increase of roughly **80
terawatt-hours**. That does not get built without buyers — nobody invests in generation
for which there is no demand. If data centres make it possible to sell 80 TWh more
electricity a year in Finland, that is on Paasi's calculation **worth about €3.5 billion a
year** — purely from their buying it.

> Mic drop.

The calculation is transparent: €3.5 billion divided by 80 TWh is about €44 per MWh, an
ordinary Nordic wholesale price. The figure is therefore the value of the electricity sold,
not the net gain to the national economy — but the logic of the argument survives that,
because the claim is precisely that **the investment is worth having anyway**, even with
every other benefit zeroed out.

And there are other benefits: jobs in remote regions, clusters of expertise, tax revenue,
resilience, grid capacity.

Behind it sits a broader claim that Paasi offers as approximate rather than exact: **a
country's GDP is roughly one-to-one dependent on the energy available inside its borders.**
If Finland's energy can be taken from just under a hundred terawatt-hours to a thousand, the
economy has in practice grown by as much. This is an order-of-magnitude argument and should
be read as one: the energy-GDP link is real but not a fixed coefficient, and it has weakened
in developed economies.

## 11. The proportions the episode wants to correct

Paasi's final observation is a correction to a public impression, and it is the most
practically useful single fact in the episode.

Data centres currently take **2–3 per cent of Finland's electricity**, not eighty. By 2030
the share rises to an estimated **7–8 per cent**.

> London has more data centres than the whole of Finland. That game is already over.

**Checked.** The current share matches public estimates: operating data centres account for
roughly 2–3 per cent. Forecasts for 2030
[range from 3–4 per cent to 7–8 per cent](https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/a/datakeskusten-sahkonkulutus-kasvaa-nopeasti-suomi-ei-ole-irlanti/)
depending on how many planned projects are actually built. Paasi's figure is from the top of
the range — that is, he makes his proportionality argument on the assumption least
favourable to himself, which strengthens it.

## 12. Philip Aminoff and ownership with a face

The closing stretch is Paasi's account of how his own view changed during Paasipodi episode
64, whose guest was **Philip Aminoff**, a long-standing figure in the family-business
association.

Paasi says he has known him his whole life and expected less: *I thought he was an heir to a
few hundred million, maybe a billion, and that it is easy for him.* His assessment after the
episode is different: **an owner of Buffett's calibre.**

What changed his mind is a claim about the mechanism of ownership with a face:

When an owner has a name, a face and their own money heavily committed, **bolder decisions
get made than in a listed company**. The mechanism is not courage but process: first the
matter is investigated to the root, then the risks are identified, then it is assessed
whether they can be managed — and only when that gets a green light is the decision taken.
From outside the decision looks risky. To the owner it no longer is, because the risk has
been handled. In dispersed listed ownership the same process dies in politics before the
decision.

The Aminoff families own, among others, **Veho, Mercantile and Helvar** — all comparable in
scale to mid-cap listed companies. Aminoff has, Paasi says, written a paper with **Juha
Sipilä** on how Finnish legislation should change so that this kind of ownership can grow.

## 13. An ending that is in fact the main point

The episode closes on Paasi's self-deprecation, which is worth taking seriously precisely
because it is not performed modesty.

> Sami has done everything right. I have done everything wrong. I am in debt up to my ears
> and have bungled these things completely. If you are badly annoyed at yourself, trust me —
> I am the expert by experience.

He points out the obvious himself: he studied finance and understands long-term, cost-
efficient saving better than most — and it has not stopped him doing the opposite. It is the
best single argument in this episode for why a mechanical, automated solution beats good
knowledge.

And finally the conclusion both reach, which Miettinen offers as a proposition: **you are
the sum of your five closest people, so choose those five well.** Paasi is grateful that his
life has contained people who nudged him in the right direction now and then. Both end on
the same advice: spend your time with people smarter than you.

As the episode ends on a *When I'm Sixty-Four* reference, both note that at their age €150 a
month would be a lost game — it would now take €1,500.

---

## Claims presented as claims

These are stated in the episode as facts, but are the speaker's estimate, a figure given
from memory, or a view not sourced in the episode. They are collected here so the reader
knows what not to rely on without checking.

- **30 per cent of the world's quantum computing expertise is in Finland.** Not found in
  public sources. See section 9.
- **About 11 per cent of the pension contribution is funded.** Explicitly given from memory
  in the episode.
- **US professors going from 40 per cent to 80 per cent left-leaning.** Miettinen's
  reference to a study not named in the episode.
- **Three quarters losing to the market return.** Output of an illustrative calculation with
  chosen cost assumptions, not a measurement.
- **A 6.9 per cent real return over 65 years.** A calculation assumption, not a forecast.
- **Three to four times as many immigrants as emigrants.** The recorded 2025 ratio was about
  2.6. See section 8.
- **Solidium at 7–8 billion.** Equity holdings were worth about €10.6 billion at mid-2026.
  See section 4.
- **The Social Democrats' programme is more public spending and more taxes.** Paasi's
  characterisation of a political opponent's programme.
- **Public-sector productivity cannot be measured.** Miettinen's position, not argued in the
  episode.
- **GDP is one-to-one dependent on available energy.** An order-of-magnitude argument the
  speaker himself marks as rough.

## What to take away

1. **Zero cost does not buy the best return, it buys certainty.** That is a different
   promise from the one index funds are usually sold on, and it is a stronger one — because
   it requires no assumption about future returns, only the arithmetic of costs.
2. **Ten years at the start beats thirty-five at the end.** Same euro, different year,
   completely different outcome.
3. **A language model is a mean-reverting machine, and that determines what it may be used
   for.** Excellent where the most commonly favoured answer is the right one; useless where
   you need to disagree with the majority. Investing is the latter.
4. **The bias is not in the model but in the sources and the curation** — and it is fixable
   with structure, not prompting. A separate steelman agent is a transferable solution for
   anyone building multi-model conversations.
5. **The effort of ownership is real, and it is the whole question.** If the index fund is
   rational for the individual, and if ownership is punished, the economy loses precisely
   the activity without which there is eventually nothing in the index.
6. **An owner with a face does not take more risk, they process it.** The mechanism is a
   process, not a personality trait — and it transfers.
7. **The strongest form of the data-centre argument is a concession.** Give the critic
   everything and look at what is left. What is left is a buyer of electricity, without whom
   the generation investment is not made.

## Episode timeline

- **00:00** — The Tampere trip and the investment fair
- **02:00** — Finland as Europe's second most investing nation
- **03:30** — The bell curve and investor returns
- **05:00** — Costs push returns below the market
- **06:00** — Zero fees guarantee the top quartile
- **08:00** — Buffett recommends index funds
- **09:30** — Compounding and saver profiles
- **11:00** — A savings plan for a newborn
- **12:40** — Five thousand euros for an entire pension
- **14:30** — Where the promised million went
- **16:00** — The YEL reform and the end of assessed income
- **18:00** — Turning Solidium into a zero-fee pension fund
- **19:40** — Sami and Samantha's AI presentation
- **20:50** — AI as a mean-reverting model
- **22:30** — Alphabet and AI inference
- **23:40** — Nexans as a value buy
- **25:30** — Thanks for the vibe coding
- **27:30** — Agent memories and shared skills
- **28:50** — Hello Humans and bias in language models
- **30:30** — The Grok agent as counter-argument
- **32:00** — How academia shapes the models
- **34:30** — Qwen, the most right-leaning model
- **37:30** — The pain and effort of ownership
- **39:30** — Why own anything in Finland
- **42:00** — The value of ownership to the economy
- **45:00** — The AI megatrend and Finland's advantages
- **47:00** — Data centres and electricity transmission
- **48:40** — Acid test: doubling electricity generation
- **52:00** — What data centres actually consume
- **53:30** — Philip Aminoff and ownership with a face
- **57:40** — The influence of five people, and closing

## Sources

Pensions and the pension system

- [Finnish Centre for Pensions: company pension contributions](https://www.etk.fi/tutkimus-tilastot-ja-ennusteet/tilastot/tyoelakkeiden-rahoitus/yritysten-tyoelakemaksut/)
- [TELA: where pension money comes from and how it is paid](https://www.tela.fi/2019/10/30/mista-tulevat-rahat-elakkeisiin-ja-miten-ne-maksetaan/)

Solidium

- [Solidium Oy press releases and interim reports](https://www.sttinfo.fi/uutishuone/69820427/solidium-oy/r)

Growth and government measures

- [Finland's economy: eighteen years of zero growth](https://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/marko-joensuu/suomen-talous-nollakasvua-jo-18-vuotta/)
- [Sitra: Finland's economic challenge in numbers](https://www.sitra.fi/julkaisut/suomen-talouden-haaste-numeroiden-valossa/)
- [The government has made 601 decisions for growth](https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/a/hallitus-tehnyt-601-paatosta-kasvun-eteen/)

Data centres and electricity

- [Data centre electricity consumption is growing fast — Finland is not Ireland](https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/a/datakeskusten-sahkonkulutus-kasvaa-nopeasti-suomi-ei-ole-irlanti/)
- [Korkia: data centres in Finland — burden or saviour of the power system](https://korkia.fi/fi/datakeskukset-suomessa-sahkojarjestelman-painolasti-vai-pelastaja/)

Quantum technology

- [Finland's quantum technology strategy 2025–2035](https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/items/74f50aa5-8b60-4441-af1f-41ff5718e147)

Migration

- [Statistics Finland: immigration fell sharply in 2025](https://stat.fi/fi/uutinen/Maahanmuutto-vaeheni-reilusti-vuonna-2025-syntyvyys-nousi-hieman)

Other parts of the same conversation

- [The Tampere investment fair warm-up | Sami Miettinen on Paasipodi #73](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-73-tampereen-sijoitusmessujen-etkot/)
- [An AI storm warning | Paasipodi 61](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-61-tekoalyn-myrskyvaroitus/)
- [An AI storm warning part II | Paasipodi 66](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/paasipodi-66-tekoalyn-myrskyvaroitus-osa-ii/)

---

*This article was written from the episode's own Finnish subtitle track, uploaded by the
channel itself (788 cues), and from the publisher's own chapter list. Figures have been
checked against public sources and divergences flagged in the text. Nothing here is
investment advice.*