EP101 · Society · first published 2021-10-01
Puopolo's Weekly Wisecrack Club | Tere Sammallahti, Ivan Puopolo | Neuvottelija 101
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 Sammallahti replies that the feeling is entirely natural but you get rid of it by building tolerance. Ivan Puopolo draws a distinction about his own position: he can protect himself, but not his business partners, through whom the pressure reaches his livelihood. The sharpest observation is the perspective illusion: Sammallahti's most widely shared 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.
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 exposure runs through his business partners. The strongest single contribution is the perspective illusion: Sammallahti’s 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
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.
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.
Ivan Puopolo is an entrepreneur, and his problem is structurally different. He puts it in the sharpest single line of the episode:
You can maybe protect yourself — 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.”
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. Sammallahti corrects the assumption directly: he recognises the feeling well, it has simply faded over time. And in his view it is 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. Sammallahti names the mechanism himself as widening the Overton window.
That comes with his most categorical advice, which Miettinen immediately identifies as a rhetorical tool rather than a claim about truth:
Pay no attention to objections. Never apologise. Never say you were wrong.
Miettinen’s disagreement here matters, because it is the episode’s clearest internal tension: if you are wrong, then you should apologise and admit it. Sammallahti’s advice applies where you do not believe you are wrong and can justify your position — not to refusing to acknowledge an error. Puopolo lands in between: 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.
Apologising as a losing strategy
Sammallahti’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.
The example is 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, and Sammallahti worked it out himself.
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.
Miettinen gives the everyday version of the same phenomenon. 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. Sammallahti’s 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:
- Customers most likely know nothing about the outrage, and even if they did, it would not interest them.
- 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.
- 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. Miettinen notes that American Super Bowl half-time commercials are studied closely by marketing people in Finland, but nobody dares to do the equivalent here.
Sammallahti’s 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 transcript contains a gap of about 30 seconds at 17:39 where audio is missing — it falls between the section on Oatly’s campaign and the section on humour in advertising, so a few sentences about marketing are absent. One controversy referred to in the episode and one personal name (Valavuori) were indistinct in the audio and have not been guessed.
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); Sammallahti regards apologising as a losing strategy in a conflict, while Miettinen holds that where you are genuinely wrong you should apologise; an entrepreneur can protect himself but not 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 — a 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.