Neuvottelija · Articles

Sisäpiiri 126 · Society · first published 2025-08-19

The future of Viikon viisastelu | Ivan Puopolo | Negotiator Insider 126

Two years after Ivan Puopolo explained the origins of the Weekly Wiseguys Club in Negotiator 204, he explains the same programme's problem: Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila are both MPs for governing parties, and he does not want the channel to become a mouthpiece for the government. The episode also covers why bringing a left-wing guest into the format does not work, what a 'woke right' might mean in Finland, and why, in the host's view, Trump fandom does not travel to Finland. This is the programme's own makers assessing their own programme, and that is disclosed.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society + Political Satire

The future of Viikon viisastelu | Ivan Puopolo | Negotiator Insider 126

Summary: Two years after Ivan Puopolo explained the origins of the Weekly Wiseguys Club in Negotiator 204, he explains the same programme’s problem: Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila are both MPs for governing parties, and he does not want the channel to become a mouthpiece for the government. The episode also covers why bringing a left-wing guest into the format does not work, what a “woke right” might mean in Finland, and why, in the host’s view, Trump fandom does not travel to Finland. This is the programme’s own makers assessing their own programme, and that is disclosed.

A note on reading this, and on interests

The recording is from 19 August 2025, and it is the subscriber-side continuation of the episode Media’s Batman (Negotiator 334). Four caveats:

1. A problem that did not exist in 2023

When Puopolo explained the programme’s origins in Negotiator 204 in July 2023, the host asked him exactly the right question: does the format survive now that its regular guests sit in government? At the time Puopolo answered that politician guests are inevitably advocates for the government but that he also brings out the right’s own follies.

Two years later the same question has an answer, and it is more negative than that one:

I do not want to turn that channel into any kind of mouthpiece for the government. And now that Tere and Onni both happen to be in government, that is a problem of a sort.

The mechanism is precise and it is the episode’s best single observation, because it is not about opinions but about structure:

This, then, is the price the programme paid for its guests’ success: the format broke because its regulars won. The episode does not put it that way, but that is its content.

2. Why not a left-wing guest

Miettinen offers the obvious fix: could the format not be replaced by bringing someone left-wing to the table? Puopolo’s answer has two parts, and only one of them is comfortable.

The first part is an accusation he levels at himself. He knows what would be said:

You are always criticising the lack of a plurality of voices, and then you wheel in these like-minded people to talk in your own Wiseguys Club.

The second part is an empirical claim about viewers, and it is the episode’s most cynical passage:

If I bring left-wingers in there, nobody watches. People do want it at the level of the idea, because it sounds lofty and fine.

The comparison he uses is familiar from media research and well put: people tell surveys they watch only documentaries, nature programmes and the news — and then watch The Bold and the Beautiful and porn. Stated preferences are not the same thing as revealed behaviour.

His own explanation of the cause is about supply: left-wing ideas do not draw on YouTube because there is an oversupply of them everywhere else. That is his assessment of the Finnish media landscape, not a measurement.

Miettinen offers an alternative that requires no politics at all: talk about world affairs and investing, and the same banter could still be interesting. He says he himself liked it best when the programme started widening into economic subjects. Puopolo concedes the programme was a fairly political one.

3. The blind-spot thesis — and what in it is a claim

This is the episode’s most explicitly ideological passage, and it is worth reading exactly as presented. Puopolo draws a square in the air: everything one could talk about fits in it.

In Finland public debate leans 80 per cent to the left, which leaves an absolutely enormous blind spot over here on the right. Thoughts and arguments nobody ever says out loud. They exist, but nobody says them, because this is such a left-hegemonic country.

And from that, his own role: he fills that corner either by saying those things himself or by bringing into the studio people who will.

Two things are honest to mark. First, 80 per cent is a rhetorical figure, not a measurement, and no source for it is offered in the episode. Second, the thesis is circular with respect to section 2: if left-wing ideas are in oversupply everywhere, then filling the blind spot and caring about viewing figures point the same way — which makes the claim hard to falsify. The episode does not address that tension.

The series has covered the same territory with other people at the table, for instance in The left in horror at Twitter and Equality and free speech.

4. The woke right — a concept invented mid-episode

The most entertaining and most usable part of the episode, and it arises from a comparison with Britain: Miettinen raises the Triggernometry channel, where a guest had brought along a new concept, the woke right.

The idea is a flip. For years the programme has laughed at how lost the woke left can be — and Miettinen’s suggestion is to turn the same measure on their own side:

Not a Nazi right, but a dopey right: somewhat lost, and as detached from reality as the woke left is.

Puopolo immediately asks the right question — does it exist in Finland? — and offers candidates himself: a cult-like quality in which Trump’s tariffs always work however dopey they are, or purging the universities under the banner of education.

He also says why the idea appeals to him, and it is the episode’s most general insight:

Whenever somebody manages to flip a concept — the classic example is The Wizard of Oz, out of which Wicked was made, where the witches turned out to be the good guys. The opposite of a great truth is often also a great truth.

What is notable is that this is a programme looking for a new target in its own direction — an answer to the format problem of section 1, though it is not said so there.

5. Fandom, and why the host thinks it does not travel

The section is psychological rather than political, which is why it survives reading regardless of what one thinks about Trump.

The observation. Puopolo describes fandom as a phenomenon that begins for some people in their teens and never goes away: the object changes, the fandom continues. Politics seems to supply objects. He says he has never been a fan of anyone — the closest was a Kiss phase, with a Gene Simmons poster on the wall and Ozzy Osbourne up there too — but does not count even that as fandom.

The parallel. Politics and religion are close to each other here: God is worshipped entirely blindly, everything said is always right. The same mentality shows, in his view, in how some people relate to politicians.

Why it is understandable in the United States. This is the best part of the section, because it is an empathetic explanation rather than a verdict. If you live in the Bible Belt and follow a public debate whose performers are incomprehensibly far from your own values, and you have not in twenty-five years seen anyone say your thoughts out loud on a large stage — and then one man comes along who says them straight, never apologises to anyone and keeps his foot flat on the accelerator — then you hold on to that by every means available.

And why it does not transfer here. Puopolo’s conclusion is short: what does any of that matter here in Finland? Finland does not have the blind spot the phenomenon grew against.

Miettinen adds his own, self-ironic observation, the most honest thing in the episode: his feelings about the US administration depend quite a lot on the colour of his American equity portfolio. On a green day it feels tolerable; after a run of red days he starts wishing they would do traditional Republican policy over there.

6. Trump’s method as the host reads it

This is interpretation, not observation, and it is marked as such. Miettinen says outright that he does not like Trump, and then sets out a model that is analytically tidy:

  1. He has individual goals he is pursuing — peace in Ukraine, migrants away from the southern border, the woke nonsense gone.
  2. Whoever stands against that goal gets the full force every single time.
  3. Whoever advances it is tremendous, great, best possible.
  4. Once the goal is achieved, or he moves to the next one, what went before carries no weight at all. No grudges, no particular favour.
  5. Enemy and ally are redefined in every moment; there is no memory of the previous one.

From which follows a conclusion presented conditionally, and therefore usable: if you agree with the goals, the politics looks good, because it advances towards them at any price — even if the methods are brazen.

And the reminder attached to it, which is the section’s point:

He is not the president of Finland. He was elected president of America. If we in Finland elected someone who started advancing the interests of foreign powers, would that be very good for us?

As an aside it is noted that Alexander Stubb has managed to worm his way onto Trump’s call list thanks to his golf.

7. The dictatorship talk, and what a real test would be

The end of the episode is media criticism, and it contains one analytically sound passage and one clearly opinionated one.

The opinionated part. Miettinen describes attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and finding that “everything is still quite all right” over there; he thought a full sports arena watching an American listed company’s AGM and its Q&A was a fine sight. The attendance figure is indistinct in the transcript and is not given here. Both criticise Helsingin Sanomat for proclaiming the arrival of dictatorship and fascism after Trump’s election, and, in Puopolo’s account, repeating it in a way that makes it always “real this time”.

The analytically sound part is Miettinen’s formulation, and it is worth reading because it is falsifiable:

Dictator except for today. On the first day there was some fairly crude counter-play, part of it executive orders that had no chance at all. After that it has been rather more normal.

And the same on free speech: words being scrutinised at a university is not the abolition of free speech. Miettinen’s test is named and checkable:

If he managed to criminalise the New York Times and CNN, then we could start saying free speech is going.

That is the episode’s methodologically best sentence regardless of whether the reader agrees: it converts a rhetorical claim into a condition whose fulfilment can be observed. The Harvard case is left unfinished in the episode, and is noted as open.

The Weekly Wiseguys Club in this series

This episode is the programme’s status report two years after its backstory, and it is best read in that chain:

Claims presented as claims

What stays with you

  1. The format broke because its regulars succeeded. When two mates become two MPs for governing parties, the same speech takes on a different meaning — and a programme that does not want to be a mouthpiece loses its line-up.
  2. A stated preference is not revealed behaviour. Plurality of voices is wanted at the level of the idea; something else gets watched. This holds well beyond this programme.
  3. The flip is a tool, not a joke. “Woke right” turns the same measure on one’s own side, and it is the only point where the programme aims the criticism inwards.
  4. Convert a rhetorical claim into a condition. The New York Times and CNN criminalised is a test whose fulfilment can be observed; “dictatorship is coming” is not.

How the episode runs

Markdown: index.md · Suomeksi