Weekly Wiseguys and other tongue-in-cheek panels on Finnish politics, media and the economy — opinion, not reporting.
2025-11-21 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen with MPs Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila on the pre-Christmas edition of Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 21 November 2025. The central moment is the one the title does not prepare you for: the panel defends the free speech of the chair of the Left Youth against its own political position, and asks for the law to be changed rather than for a prosecution. Alongside it, an audit office report on the previous government's spending increases, and a retail group's decision to drop Israeli products. The episode's audio was damaged and machine-restored — noted here.
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2025-10-15 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen with MPs Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 15 October 2025, after a long break. It opens on Finland's cross-party debt brake, which the panel considers more significant than its modest coverage suggested — while also saying what could go wrong with it. The middle is the Gaza ceasefire and the question of who fell silent when. It closes with one guest unpicking how his proposal for open learning materials became something else in print — and what he actually proposed.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2025-03-22 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and MP Atte Kaleva — making his first appearance — on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 22 March 2025. The strongest section is foreign policy: two competing explanations for Russia's war are set side by side and left open, and the durability of treaties is assessed against historical examples rather than hopes. The middle section applies a liberal principle to cases where it is uncomfortable for the panel's own side. It closes on the dismantling of the gambling monopoly and a practical test for which games are worth playing.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloAtte Kaleva
2024-11-11 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2024, a week after the US election. It opens on a cancelled school church concert and the question of where culture ends and religious practice begins — on which the panel genuinely disagrees. The middle section works through Finnish explanations for Trump's win and checks them against the numbers. It closes on the distinction between positive and negative liberty, applied to dietary guidelines.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2024-09-27 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 27 September 2024, shortly after a climate group defaced the facade of the Finnish Parliament. The episode goes against expectation: the panel defends interviewing the activist and criticises the quality of the interview rather than its existence. The host describes his own interview request to the foundation that funded the group, and the answer he did not get. It closes on polygamy, where the panel disagrees with itself, and on inheritance tax, where it proposes a specific model.
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2024-08-15 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 15 August 2024, with Tere Sammallahti arriving late. It opens on a diversity commitment in the government programme and moves into the series' most precise media criticism: a quotation stripped of its context, the mismatch between a headline and the body of a story, and what follows when a journalist states publicly that journalism builds society. It ends on why Finnish sport is funded through the state rather than through foundations — and on who decides about phones at school.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloOnni Rostila
2024-06-03 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 3 June 2024, six days before the European election and three days after the Mannheim stabbing. It is one of the sharper episodes in the series, and it also contains its most careful request: the panel asks for shades of grey in the immigration debate and says out loud that immigration is not a monolith. The later sections cover flags on government buildings, media criticism and public broadcaster funding. This write-up separates the arguments from the unsourced figures.
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2024-04-23 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, MP Onni Rostila and — arriving late — Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 23 April 2024, just after Petteri Orpo's government had agreed €1.5 billion in tax rises including a VAT increase to 25.5 per cent. This is the exception in the series: an MP from a governing party sits and explains the decision to people who disagree with it, and the disagreement runs the whole way through. Both sides make their best case, and both are recorded here.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloOnni Rostila
2024-03-11 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 11 March 2024, the day political strikes in the transport sector began. An hour on a single subject, which is both the episode's strength and its weakness: the case against the right to political strike and against the universal applicability of collective agreements is made carefully, while the other side's best argument goes unaddressed. This write-up sorts the structural arguments from the unverified figures and the political predictions — and says what the episode leaves out.
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2024-02-07 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and the journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 7 February 2024, ahead of the second round of the Finnish presidential election. The main subject is a column by Professor Heikki Hiilamo accusing the Etla research institute and his own former employer of agenda-driven research. The panel takes the claim apart — and then says the column was useful, because it forces the same question in the other direction. Virtanen has known the columnist for thirty years and says so. The most durable stretch is a distinction between questions of fact and questions of opinion, put in a way that cuts against the panel too.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloMatti Virtanen
2023-12-08 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 8 December 2023, two days after Finland's Independence Day ball and three days after the PISA results. It opens on what the ball costs — and the panel, which sells "taxation is theft" T-shirts, ends up defending it. The main section is the PISA fall: incentives, inclusion, holding pupils back a year, two decades of rising per-pupil spending and the language question. It closes somewhere unexpected, with a case for an ordinary life.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2023-11-20 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023 — the Monday crossing points on Finland's south-eastern border were being closed and razor wire was going up. The episode works through the mechanics of the border situation at the level of an individual asylum claim, makes its most durable argument — that treaties written in the 1950s cannot be followed to the letter once everyone else has stopped — and ends in Argentina, where a self-described anarcho-capitalist had been elected president the day before. The panel's harshest passages on the Middle East are summarised here only as far as they can be checked.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2023-07-27 · Society · Satire · EN
Ivan Puopolo joins Sami Miettinen in July 2023, in the middle of the press storm that followed the new right-wing government taking office. This is the Weekly Wiseguys club’s own backstory: why the programme started, whether its format survives now that its guests sit in government, and what separates a video column from news journalism. The weightiest section asks whether a columnist may be criticised by name — and this write-up separates the media-ethics argument in it from what the panel leaves out. The transcript is YouTube auto-captioning, which limits quotation; that is disclosed.
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2023-06-08 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and the writer and journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 8 June 2023. The episode works through Matt Walsh's documentary What is a Woman and the definitional fight around it, the first instalment of Tucker Carlson's show after its move to Twitter — whose media criticism the panel accepts and whose author it dismisses in the same breath — and the public funding of Helsinki Pride, on which the panel genuinely disagrees with itself. It closes on its most ambitious idea: that the legitimacy of Finland's state monopolies and of universally binding collective agreements is pinned to majority support, and that the majority is going.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2023-05-26 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 26 May 2023 — recorded in the middle of Petteri Orpo's coalition negotiations, on the day the Finns Party had set a deadline on immigration policy. Three items: Helsinki Pride's decision to end its partnership with the National Coalition Party, Sammallahti's own deliberation about filing a criminal complaint over being called a Nazi online and the proposal that follows from it — move defamation out of criminal law and into the civil courts — and Miettinen's reasoning for why he does not expect the talks to collapse. Two places where the panel openly disagrees with itself are left in.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2023-02-21 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 21 February 2023, six weeks before the Finnish parliamentary election. Three stories, all of them about the same question: who decides which numbers a citizen gets to see. Helsingin Sanomat's election compass gave one question double weight, the paper conceded the error — and, the panel argues, the arithmetic still fails to reconcile after the fix. A public-broadcaster tool comparing schools was demanded taken down, and Yle kept it up. A claim that taxation has quietly fallen is taken apart on the choice of base year. The episode is tongue-in-cheek, sharp-edged and sometimes overshoots — those passages are marked too.
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2023-02-15 · Satire · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Seida Sohrabi, a National Coalition parliamentary candidate, on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 15 February 2023. Sohrabi is the strongest voice in the episode and also its most moderate: she gives a first-hand account of working as a classroom support teacher, corrects the panel's generalisations with her own counter-example, and describes defending at university the right of a candidate she disagrees with to stand for election. On a minister's claim that his messaging account was hijacked the panel builds a logical case — and then dismantles part of its own reasoning. It closes on the objects shot down over North America and the question of where airspace ends.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloSeida Sohrabi
2023-01-31 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Joakim Vigelius, chair of the Finns Party youth organisation, on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 31 January 2023. The two best passages are disagreements. The first is about a left-wing youth organisation's Erdoğan cartoon competition: two speakers treat it as a free-speech question, Miettinen treats it as a question of national interest and reaches for a wartime precedent — and neither side moves. The second is about tax, where three right-of-centre speakers arrive at three different positions, from abolishing progression to conceding that there is no public mandate for dismantling the welfare state. It opens with Vigelius's first-hand account of being removed from a university lecture.
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2022-12-30 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
The last episode of the year, with four people: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 30 December 2022. The best passage in the first half is a distinction the panel draws against its own headline: lying requires knowledge, a false statement does not — and for accountability purposes the difference changes nothing. The host also flags his own choice of words in his own video as a mistake. The second half is the year in figures: excess mortality, borrowing set against Denmark's, Finland's rank among taxing countries, and the Credit Suisse finding that Finland was the only Nordic country where average wealth fell in 2021.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti
2022-12-15 · Satire · Society · EN
This episode is about a single study: a justice-ministry commission on hate speech directed at government ministers, in which one researcher hand-coded 10,000 tweets. The panel's criticism is methodological rather than political, and it holds up: there was no control group, follower counts were given in absolute terms without any denominator, and accusations of corruption and of lying were classified as hate speech. The strongest single observation is that the government's own appointed expert on criminalising "targeting" had reached the opposite conclusion to the one in the government programme. It closes on the conflation of humanitarian and work-based immigration — which the panel says happens on their own side too.
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2022-11-11 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and the journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2022. The single best observation is about expertise: two Finnish specialists on the United States gave diametrically opposite forecasts on the same question, and the panel's explanation is that an expert's liking for a foreign politician colours their prediction of his success. On the day Finland publishes everyone's tax records, Norway's model is put forward as a concrete alternative. At the end Matti Virtanen explains the background to the Sámi Parliament Act dispute — who counts as an Inari Sámi, where the reindeer-herding families came from, and why the argument is also about livelihoods — and the panel falls out over whether small wealth differences mean poverty or a functioning welfare state.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloMatti H. Virtanen
2022-10-22 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022. The episode opens with the panel taking a newspaper's "woke test" live on air and conceding two things to the other side while doing it — that the experience of being a visible minority is real, and that labour markets are not perfect. The middle section takes apart a single English sentence and how it became a headline. The last third is the strongest: the panel argues against compensating households for electricity prices, a policy that would be easy to support, and grounds the argument in the energy balance.
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2022-10-14 · Satire · Society · EN
A four-handed special: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 14 October 2022. The episode is unusual in that a free-speech programme ends up defending the basis of the Alex Jones verdict and arguing only about the size of it — and in that it sets out the difference between the US and Finnish thresholds for defamation with real precision. The last third supplies two concrete examples of official discretion: a library that refused a venue to someone who had been acquitted, and two word-for-word identical appeals that produced opposite decisions at the same employment office.
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2022-09-23 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 23 September 2022, the week Russia declared partial mobilisation. The most durable passage is conceptual: the panel separates biological sex from gender identity and argues that collapsing the two is a change in language rather than in science. On Ukraine the panel openly disagrees about two things — whether Finland should open its border to Russian conscripts, and whether a negotiated settlement is acceptable at all. On the economics Miettinen puts Fortum's 5.6-billion Uniper loss into scale: it is worth about 15 per cent of all direct share holdings of Finnish private individuals combined.
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2022-09-16 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 16 September 2022. The strongest passage is about a principle of legislative design: should a law be written assuming the best or the worst of whoever holds power, and does Finland's proposed "targeting" law survive a proportionality test when the interest being protected is an official's peace of mind rather than the prevention of genocide. On the economics Miettinen takes apart the nationalisation of Uniper, the backstop that evaporated, and why Fortum's original bid was made in a hurry. Also the nurse-staffing law, the Swedish election and the arithmetic of the debt.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloOnni Rostila
2022-08-26 · Satire · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 26 August 2022, in the middle of the Sanna Marin party-video row and Fortum's Uniper disaster. The panel splits the row into two separate questions: what a prime minister's private time is, and what the office itself demands. On the economics Miettinen takes apart the Fortum–Uniper structure — the eight-billion capital injection in January, the twelve-billion write-down, KfW's nine billion — and asks whether due diligence was ever properly done. It closes on a genuine free-speech case: the Helsingin Sanomat signals-intelligence trial and the state's incentive to over-classify.
Media-vierailuViikon viisasteluWeekly WiseguysIvan PuopoloTere Sammallahti