Well, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel — my guest today has arrived from Estonia, Petri Kajander, welcome.
Thanks.
That jaw doesn't look all that healthy, but doesn't Estonia — known as a night-watchman state — offer good dental care? So why did you come here to welfare-state Finland to get your teeth treated?
Well, there's a story to that — if you start looking at business models, a dentist makes money when they drill, but since teeth don't grow — at least I don't get any more of them — and that tooth material disappears, so the more you drill, the less there is left to drill in the future. But that... usually makes more money for the dentist, and through that, in turn, when you really know what you're doing in that mouth, a good dentist and a bad dentist differ enormously over the long run, and that's [unclear]
left. But it doesn't necessarily show until the teeth are more or less gone.
This brings us to the fact that I've had a good dentist for over 15 years, and it happens to be in Finland.
I've had bad experiences in France, I've had bad experiences in Spain, in England I didn't really need a dentist.
so this stems from exactly that.
And that kind of long-term business relationship is a good thing, and
I did an episode on this Lean philosophy earlier.
It was said there that switching costs are also a significant factor.
And if you're getting good quality from a subcontractor or otherwise, it's worth sticking with that.
This episode got started because you interviewed a mutual friend of ours,
my colleague from [unclear], Henry [unclear], and it was a really good episode.
and it was funny to hear how a former investment banker ends up having to live by his own advisor teachings, so to speak, in his own financing deals
so this Henry interview is on the show called Talks with Petri, and then you have this other, shorter podcast called Purpose and Clarity
and I kind of think we're going to end up speaking Finglish, both of us, since both of those podcasts are in English
so go ahead and subscribe to all of them, by the way — good shows
[unclear]
Sometimes you have to search for words a bit, and you don't necessarily know absolutely every word, since you don't speak the newest slang and [unclear] every day.
So yeah, the last short clip was about 'alignment' — and what the heck, in Finnish that would be something like 'linjaus' [a line/policy alignment] or something along those lines, you're looking for unified lines, but I don't know if there's really a good Finnish word for it either.
You can't really find a good meaning with the words. Last week, France was banning, on the official side, the use of 'e-sports', and you're also not allowed to use a few terms like 'streamer', for example.
The French equivalents were already 30-40 characters, several words. It's basically already a full sentence when you say 'streamer' in French.
Who uses those? Well, let's pick up on that night-watchman state then — we have another point of overlap there with the Libera foundation
you were involved in writing two books — 'The Future of the Euro, Finland's Options', that one had Elina Valtonen and Heikki Pursiainen involved as well
and then, um, 'How Finland Can Be Saved', but he was also involved in founding the whole of Libera
You apparently — you seem to have some libertarian ideology in you, at least from your youth.
Well yeah, I actually found it through that route. Then in a way the ideas were already there, and it dates back close to 20 years now.
And then at some point I actually moved to Spain, and that's when I discovered Mises and, through that, the Austrian School in a way, and then I studied them, ordered a lot of books, and read a lot.
and then I also noticed that these hadn't even been translated into Finnish.
And then since I graduated from business school after all, I wondered why nobody had ever told us anything about these, because they actually make sense.
There's already the first English term.
And from there I actually started translating a few books, just as an example for others, since everyone kept saying — well, there were a lot of projects — this was in the mid-to-late 2000s.
and I feel like a lot was happening on this front around then, and generally, and then I just got fed up with everyone talking while nobody actually did anything
and so I just went and translated a few books, and they can still be found at taloudenperusteet.com
and of course I had a bit of an advantage, since nobody had done anything yet, so then you go for the classics.
Road to Serfdom and others.
Well, that one I didn't translate.
By the way, that one is surprisingly well known among some people on the left — that's the kind of red flag I look for.
By the way, for example Tuur Demeester, well known in crypto circles, was a young guy back when I first met him
and Tuur, in turn, took on this huge project of translating a Rothbard book — I don't quite remember, [unclear].
Mises is the Old Testament, Rothbard is the New Testament
Hayek, though, has been relegated somewhere out to the periphery
Hayek was a bit muddled in his thinking, if you look at it from Mises's and Rothbard's perspective
were a bit purer, clearer, perhaps deeper thinkers as such
This was a long story — translating books,
and after that I started looking for a publisher, and I realized that Finland doesn't really have a free think tank either — [unclear], think tanks.
They were all more or less state-funded, meaning they get their money through subsidies or some other way.
and that was my thought then — I'd heard and understood that these kinds of projects had been tried a bit earlier too, and that it just can't be done in Finland, it's not possible to set up here, it doesn't work here
and this is kind of a North-Korea-Finland in a lot of ways, and from that I thought, well maybe someone should try something, since some books had already gotten translated
and that's how I got started — the first attempt was actually a registered association, and that got stuck right at the starting line,
when I realized that in Finland you can't ask for money for just any good cause without having a fundraising permit,
meaning civil-society fundraising and advancing common causes has to be done entirely through volunteer work — you're not allowed to use money for it and you have to ask someone's permission for it.
Well, that alone already tells you something about this.
a distorted, funny mindset — I'd say fundraising permits like this are very rare around the world.
Yeah, as an aside here — an interlude — I interviewed Antero Vartia, who founded this company called Compensate, whose amazing, [unclear] and sincere idea was that
that you could have a non-physical service where someone else offsets the rise in the carbon dioxide footprint you generate.
In Finland it was seen as an impossible idea, as if nothing else was legitimate except selling horse-sized machines to the export industry — so in a way, having someone else offset on your behalf, even something as abstract as the rise in the atmosphere's carbon footprint, immediately fell under police jurisdiction and the Lotteries Act, since it was flagged that this isn't allowed, that it has to be stopped by law.
That's got a long story too, back in the early 2010s — or was it still the late [2000s] — well, 'Senja Teaches Swedish' was one case, that Senja Larsson
wanted to learn Swedish, and whether it was then a Facebook group I don't quite remember exactly anymore, but in practice Senja spun that into a book and turned it into a crowdfunding campaign, and then there was a big backlash
There's a long history here. EFI has also gone to the Court of Appeal over it, and this fundraising [permit issue] has probably been going on for over ten years now.
With Antero we also wondered which is the bigger sin there — the fact that fundraising activity happens without a permit.
In a way, is this possibly a channel to get around that permit, or is it that private individuals are supporting causes that the state apparatus finds objectionable.
In a way these are of course both big sins in Finland, that's obviously clear, but what's behind this opposition?
Well, if you want to keep things simple, according to Occam's razor, so trying to cut to a simpler explanation with a sharp razor,
and explanation — in Finland it's seen as a bit bad if there's competition.
It's of course convenient for those who already currently hold fundraising permits, and who are good at vacuuming up money, that competition is bad.
And it's of course a bit wild if everyone could just collect money and say whatever they want, and who would be supervising it — so maybe this is safer.
Soviet Finland, if...
someone supervises and keeps an eye on things, on what you can do and what you can't do
Right, and then on top of that this also gets tangled up with fundraising directly from citizens
meaning the third sector, for example, runs on Veikkaus profit funds, and the money gets circulated through whatever channels
like through the state apparatus, then through state bureaucrats or political horse-trading, and then on to the third sector
um, pet projects
yes, to whichever parties are deemed suitable
Libera didn't belong there, and probably wouldn't have wanted to either, because it corrupts the flow. I thought it was pretty hard to get it off the ground.
The first attempt went straight into the freezer — you basically couldn't do it as a civil-society [organization].
You can ask Sami for a hundred or fifty, and from Matti and Maija the same way, and that gets things moving.
I call that wholesale money — you have to go to whoever has more than that, otherwise there's no point in it,
you still need more money though if you look at think tanks, and just at what — at least at some point — these parties' think tanks had, and still have,
so those would start out in the thousands, sometimes half a million or even more, in annual funding, and you'd end up looking for that kind of wealth from Finland proportionally less.
and then elsewhere in the world, the public still gets tax benefits from it — if you donate somewhere, the tax authority gives you credit points for it — but in Finland this didn't exist.
So in that sense it really takes a true believer, someone who wants to give to something like this, where you might even end up getting branded with some label,
which could then be some association you don't necessarily want to be linked to, and that was in a way the starting point there.
but Libera's idea was indeed that we don't take any state money, we don't take it — it has to come through voluntary exchange
meaning the individual themselves wants to give — it doesn't come from taxpayers' money, that is, a bit through compulsion
What kind of partner was this Gustav von Herzen, were you two alike?
Yes and no. Back then Matti Apunen asked me to stop by EVA for a moment in 2010, and that's where I ran into Kusse.
Kusse was already over 80 when I met him. He was still a volleyball player though, and very spry.
and of course already very accomplished, and then we found ourselves in a situation where Kusse had been working on the same thing, really trying to reform EVA, and Matti had actually asked me in a way to reform EVA too — without going into the details of that now — but then Kusse and I found each other, and about half a year went by, and we walked into the PRH, was it the 11th — it's in the founding document, the 11th of May 2011,
we were there early in the morning, it was just the two of us there
and then a problem came up when we were there at the PRH
behind the counter there, guess what the problem was?
Well, too many founders
No, it was a technical problem
the problem was that on the founding document,
which we signed right there at the counter,
since it required — was it one or two witnesses
well this official wouldn't agree to it
they had to call a lawyer to ask whether they were allowed to put their name on this paper
Happy, happy — well anyway, I have warm memories of those two book projects, and somehow it feels like Heikki Pursiainen, who's been a guest here, and Elina Valtonen too, who's also been a guest, were kind of quite visible and
active, uplifting figures. Lately though, I feel it's kind of faded, that it's not really visible anymore.
And EVA — well, the Nokia chief economist went there, but Apunen, as far as I understand, is chairman of the board, so maybe he could reform it, so that
he's doing good work with Mika [unclear] Ranta — [unclear] — and we've loosely agreed that he'd come by here too to talk at some point, once our calendars line up.
but yeah, pretty rare around here — anyway, Apunen called himself Finland's only republican, which is an absolute hellish sin here in Finland too, since who could now [unclear] about imperialists
do you see things from out there in the world with a bit of a different perspective — does this Finnish 'people's home' now somehow appear in a new light?
Well yes, the perspective always ends up a bit different, and then of course if you no longer have direct ties to Finland, so to speak, you don't need to apply 'Finlandization' self-censorship in a way, or in many respects anyway — like I noticed already back in the Libera days, that even when there are smart ideas, still they...
when you ask people to put them on paper and publish them, then they just don't come.
So privately, sure, people will say them, but once they'd have to come out publicly, it gets difficult.
And this was one thing that has always astonished me about Finland — that it's a bit of a one-truth country,
you're not allowed to talk about things, and sometimes you drink coffee, and sometimes faxes come,
but in any case, in a way, that kind of discussion just doesn't exist.
I remember, in our first year, when I brought someone from the Institute of Economic Affairs over from London,
which is one of the oldest think tanks in the world, founded in the late '40s I think — brought the speaker over here.
They were up on stage, and it was of course this kind of invite-only event, a public event.
Then the idea, of course, was always that there should be a bit of debate, but in Finland people generally don't debate all that vigorously.
so then Britte said, 'hey, well, in principle I actually agree with you completely, but to make this fun, I'm going to take a completely different position.'
so it's a bit different from that discussion culture in some places around the world
but the other thing that I think shows more clearly — of course it's showing even this spring and winter
of course it's been there before too, and you can see it in the speeches of the former Estonian president, Ilves
Ilves is a very blunt speaker, and sometimes those tweets come at night, and he doesn't spare anyone in them
Halonen and Tuomioja, who in hindsight really do deserve Ilves's wrath too.
Right, and Ilves said this a while back, was it in some tweet, that if he doesn't bring these things up, how are younger generations supposed to know that these things exist?
yeah, right now we have, well, Turkey stalling that membership, but you could think that it removes one big bogeyman from our discussion culture — that oppressive 'you can't talk about this so you have to stay silent about it', that Soviet-era bogeyman, under whose cover all sorts of other mental suffocation has been carried out in Finland
yeah, it showed, it showed, I noticed it myself, that in a way the president said that
'the masks came off' or whatever it was
and I think the clearest, most concrete thing was
that earlier the enemy was basically never named
that now it was clearly Russia
Russia was named quite officially, in official circles
that in a way this hadn't existed before, and it came after the so-called application
so in a way if everything was fine before that
and we were free
then why is it being talked about differently now than before — and I think that's pretty good evidence
[unclear]
I think I myself have spoken pretty directly about this before, over more than 140 episodes here
can assure you it's not that hard to go and speak a bit at the edge of the Overton window there,
meaning what's generally accepted.
at the edges of the ideological discussion, and if you otherwise can't manage it, you say it a bit playfully — that this is your British guest, that I'm taking a debate position here — and that's allowed too, meaning you don't always have to speak from one monolithic position, but you can actually practice, play at being a radical leftist for instance, and that's totally fine, or even a libertarian
and that's the best way to learn — if you take all of your opponent's arguments and pick them apart there, that's the best way to learn, but also to understand.
As for this classical liberalism — well, we've moved past it a bit now, but earlier it was endless, that neoclassical economics is basically
liberalism, too, for god's sake, is basically right-wing Nazism, a completely ridiculous identity-political lumping-together of what are actually pretty simple concepts.
You could kind of taste-test the word 'Libera' — it somehow bothers me in English though, I looked at a lot of American usage.
the liberal, conservative understanding has required me to sort of clean up this word 'libertarian', so that people understand we're really talking here about individual-level freedoms, and not, say, the Democrats' goals, which the Americans call 'liberal', but
do you think these concepts — Libera, liberalism, libertarianism — have kind of lived on in Finland, or could something interesting be made out of it?
Well, it's of course taken on those American influences in a way, since that's already a kind of left-wing term, and naturally that ties into the politics and the politicization of it, but I don't know, we can change the words, but the meanings always stay the same in a way, so that in a certain sense 'liberal' here means the same as left-wing, and of course the whole Finnish political field is entirely to the left compared to other countries.
or if there isn't some sense of freedom people are willing to grant, then it's just those kinds of external individual-freedom matters, like whether you're allowed to have sexual freedom or something like...
freedom to pursue hobbies, but if you want to mix in even a bit of economic freedom, or god forbid even freedom from the state, then it already goes too far and gets ruined.
Well, this quickly gets into ethical questions of course, since everyone probably has some agenda behind it, as to why one thing is better than another.
But you could think about it — the Austrian School has undergone some kind of, or libertarianism has had a kind of light uptick from a subculture called the crypto money scene, where it fits in fairly naturally in a way — I think there was some Rothbard book that talked about money, and some crypto enthusiast said they took the word 'gold' out of it and replaced it with 'bitcoin.'
and it matched one to one. In a certain way it's acceptable, since at least there's this crypto-industry culture out there where the Austrian School is totally cool.
Well, if we go back a bit — if you want a bit of a side-track — if you go to the early days of the internet, that was also very much about individual rights and freedoms, but also a certain responsibility there.
and in a way this same kind of decentralization, a distributed governance and model, existed back then in the original internet.
That was a product of its own particular time, and then we moved away from it.
And of course this freedom and the things related to it travel just as well, of course, in crypto,
and that showed in Bitcoin, which of course was 2008, when the financial system was in a bit of a weak state, so it was in a way a culmination of all the technological progress that had managed to accumulate by then, and from there these things naturally go straight to the core — what is money, what is exchange — and whenever there are turning points like this, it's good to ask what we're doing, why do we have middlemen, 'middleman', what's that in Finnish,
meaning some party acting on your behalf, why do we have banks, why do we have central banks, why do we do things a certain way
This is in a way the transformation that the internet keeps making all the time — we get to move away from a lot of these intermediary parties that aren't necessarily needed anymore
Earlier they were
necessary, because there wasn't a better way to do things, but nowadays there are better ways, meaning everyone can now have a YouTube channel or a broadcast channel, you don't have to just listen to Yle
and so through that everyone has freedom of choice, but then of course this is also a curse — now you have to choose, now you have to make your own decisions, and now you have to be a bit responsible
and that's of course a bit painful — freedom is a two-sided thing, one side is freedom, but then there's also responsibility on the other side
and property rights without states, whether peer-to-peer or as a bilateral transfer, still require someone else's trust — in the crypto money scene, for example, that's the consensus algorithm — but it's also interesting whether you can have property rights without nation-states.
the nation-state is of course a later thing, just as the state originally had nothing to do with money — if you go back into the history of money, this is actually the book I keep going through, 'What Is Money' — part of it is covered there too, you can also find it in The Bitcoin Standard, that one's actually extremely good if you're even slightly interested in Bitcoin, but also just in the history of money and
and what money is, and central banks, this whole monetary system — it's extremely good, I think it's even been translated into Finnish
Yeah, I've read that — Taleb's from over there, from Lebanon — they're basically enemies with each other these days
which is interesting in itself, since Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the one who, well, came up with the — the black swan concept
resistance to a fragile system, and the fiat system too — he also had in mind this idea of a fragile system at some point,
but then over some kind of eco-related dispute they became enemies — I think Taleb hates the crypto scene, which is interesting.
Well yeah, you always find these — some people have big egos and some have ideological issues, and this of course happens in a lot of
small circles, which is a marginal thing altogether, and they even fight among themselves and are at odds with each other.
That's of course often unfortunate.
But to briefly come back to the matter without going too deep, it started with just gold, for example.
With gold coinage and gold coins in your pocket, you could travel around just fine, without even needing a passport.
[unclear]
advantage generally, since for that king in power, or whoever, since everyone had a need to get more money out of the treasury, so you have to cheat.
So these traditions go back quite far in that sense too, but in order for the state to actually get involved in banking and money, then
it has to go to these private bankers and borrow their trust — the people's trust — the people didn't trust
the state at all initially, it had to be obtained from private individuals, and this in a way leads to dollars and through that to these.
national currencies later on. Of course China had paper money much earlier, and they also practiced
counterfeiting, copying, quite successfully, and those patterns still continue today.
So as such, if you really get down to the basics, what money is — it's just a medium of exchange
and in principle anything can serve as money.
But gold has traditionally been hard to counterfeit, and there's a sufficiently limited supply of it
and many have accepted it, and it has worked.
There's an interesting book — Ray Dalio, he wrote it, the founder of Bridgewater and that sort of thing, not quite Elon Musk, but a 20-billion-dollar man nonetheless.
A tycoon too, he wrote that book of principles, 'Principles', and his newer book here, on the principles of the changing world order.
and in it he tries to analytically think through what in a way causes...
the new world order — so even though America has held the hegemonic position for a hundred years, what could then bring about the next shift, for example to China — one factor is significant over-indebtedness and the resulting internal and external conflict caused by money printing and currency debasement, which then becomes so painful that the world order changes — and that's a pretty interesting piece of speculation.
all [unclear] currencies — it's always the case that in the end it has collapsed
Germany practiced that back in its day, just under a hundred years ago
and back in the day it was England that was the leading one
and then the Americans took over
and before that it was Holland, so Holland was also
the Guilder was the first world currency
The Dutch also invented capitalism
and they had a pretty good merchant fleet, and a navy too
changed this — the scepter passed to the British and then it passed in practice to the Americans, and at some point, for a very long time, China would have had the chance to play that game, and now there's speculation about whether the scepter might return to China, but on the other hand now this Russian war of aggression
has kind of shown the weakness of totalitarianism too, so I myself wouldn't fully bet on China there
Yeah, I feel like there have already been signs of that around here, like the UAE not taking 5G from China
and it's clearly become the case now that you also have to take moral considerations into account
that in a way, in the short term it's easy to build gas pipelines and take the benefits
but then in the long term, as we're now seeing in Germany, that position is terribly hard
to spin around quickly in the other direction — you can't just do that with some kind of server reboot; if German industry runs on cheap gas and the gas gets shut off, then the factories stop running.
and now if, with this NATO thing, Finland joins the Western hegemony, which then traditionally means for us the somewhat unpleasant business of following America's models,
then it's in a way fascinating to see whether that changes our nation's thinking a bit after all, in a more liberal, libertarian direction,
whether we also pick up other lessons from there now that we've broken away from this [unclear] mindset.
Yeah, I'm very skeptical about that — I mean, what would even stop it — but what I've seen, and I did see it, and it was one reason why in a way my straw to grasp at was that Libera can, and tries to, do some small part of the work, and of course those books I translated earlier, but hardly anyone reads them anymore, only a very few, and mistakes of course keep getting made all the time, and if you look at Finland's economy and so on, then
structural changes really haven't been made, and this is in a way because there's a lack of will, there isn't really any national direction, which is actually clearly visible — but if you take another example, say housing like in Estonia, then in a way these Eastern European countries, which are of course still rising and where living standards are rising, there's clearly a different can-do attitude there, there's clearly construction going on in a way, and that of course also shows up
in the streetscape. You can see it — new buildings go up there, and things actually get built.
There's a can-do spirit there. And there's a certain pride, in a way, in getting things done.
and here in Finland, on the other hand, the pace is a bit slower.
Yeah, I mostly share the pessimism there, because there isn't really much literacy or economic understanding here,
or, well, people don't really have even a basic economics education to speak of.
Pretty much only the business sector is the one that has any understanding of that at all these days.
these are really hard, but still, these aren't taboo anymore — in a way, now that even the NATO [debate] has passed, you actually can talk about things like the fact that Finland's tax rate is higher than 97 percent of the world's countries, that's not really such a taboo anymore.
It's always been talked about, but the Swedes did something about it, since over there it started — was it the late '70s — when this famous book came out, and there were these artists who pushed back a bit.
Yeah, Astrid Lindgren, the children's author, had a 102 percent [marginal] tax, and she actually wrote a book about how that hit her.
and not long after that, the Beatles wrote 'Taxman'.
Yeah, but now similarly — well no — now people have kind of woken up to the fact that Finland is one of the poorest countries in Northern Europe, and it wasn't...
and it's by no means inevitable that we'd stay ahead of Estonia in private wealth
and back in the day, before the Soviet Union came, Estonia's GDP, gross domestic product, was higher per capita than Finland's
yeah, but separate from GDP, private wealth is very low in Finland
so people don't understand that our net 600 billion is actually really little
that if we were at Sweden's level it would be 1,000 billion then
and that we have relatively little private wealth, and the rich are almost entirely absent
Well yeah, that's some doom and gloom, but there's certainly some hope here, and the next government will be led by the National Coalition Party, which is in a completely dominant position right now. There's a backlash coming here against the left-wing government experiment.
If they're all on the left, then what does that change?
The National Coalition has, to some extent, some [unclear] drivers on the right who can shift that focus.
Let's talk about these facts, bring them to the table, instead of just settling for humming along about Finland being a model country for the world just because it has a high GDP,
but not realizing that the tax rate is really high, debt keeps growing like that, wealth is low, and the public sector is really big.
Well, can you name a few big structural changes that have been made over the past 50 years? Which ones have significantly improved things?
Well, the equity savings account was a significant change, which we got ten years after the other Nordic countries, but it has still brought a million Finns into being shareholders.
and that's a significant change.
And was that the only big one?
Well, no.
Yeah, and then of course, like
these themes that Libera brought up
are now, for instance, quite
a constitutional court, and the lack of one
that we have a parliament
the members of parliament's own
conclave, which filters its own laws
well that's just kicking up dust, really, and
then the trade union movement is completely cemented in
randomly, over there,
with universal applicability, which came about by accident
into binding law, and this can't be removed now, and everything else, and the healthcare reform was a structural change that only made the situation worse and added one more layer of bureaucracy, without fixing the incentives
so there's still a lot that would need cleaning up here, and this isn't where you'd have wanted to start
Let me throw one thought at you — I think I wrote this on my own blog many years ago
Which one is actually, like, more patriotic, if we use a term like that just to provoke a little?
to keep funding this
or you leave, go elsewhere, and wait it out, and grow your own personal wealth elsewhere, and then once these things have either been sorted out or have collapsed, and you've in a way gotten some [unclear] on the situation, then come back
[unclear]
The question is, they obviously don't belong to me, but do my own fund investments and pension funds belong to the British or to Finns — well, to me they don't belong.
So here's the kind of problem that comes up — that it's not yours.
As an answer to the question, there's this exit tax coming next year too, so this is the last chance to flee the country before it's made unbearably expensive for you.
Welcome to Estonia.
Yeah, and then there's the export of educated people too — right now it's going such that the educated leave and the uneducated don't come in their place, so this isn't really on a sustainable track.
Yeah, and this is, I think — I think I've pondered this out loud publicly before too — if you look at these highly educated people around the world.
and they get to decide where they want to go, so give me three good arguments why they should come to Finland — even just one good argument — and if we take family out of it, since that's the common one, that...
Well, there's safety
Well, is it even safe anymore, right next to Russia — you say, well yeah, but other people are already there
In a way, it hasn't been made all that easy to come here. Then there's also, of course, Migri involved, which causes pain. You might not get your first work permit for actually a year or two, unless you're some [unclear] you won't get it.
brought [unclear] here, so what do you get for a smaller company?
Or [unclear], the billionaire from [unclear] Ventures, can't get in here — it's completely bizarre that there's some Migri bureaucrat who just runs everyone through the same lane as refugees.
Well, but I've heard that's being worked on behind the scenes now too — like, Migri, just split it into two now, I mean this doesn't need to have everyone processed through the same pipeline.
but we could go into these Talks with Petri podcast [episodes] — that episode with Henri [unclear], there was indeed an interesting reflection there, knowing his background — like the story of [unclear], and then there was the story of that payday-loan company Credit24, and then Henri's angel-investing period, and we have quite a few mutual acquaintances, like there's Alio [unclear] with him, who's also been a guest here, who does investments together with him
you do a fair amount of angel investing, but you're also, um, a management sparring partner, but also sometimes an investor.
How does this work? Do you have interesting companies or people to spar with?
yeah, my model really is that
Playfully — right now there's Arctic15 going on, and there I've said that I used to be a serial entrepreneur and now I'm a parallel entrepreneur, so in a way I've had to change my model, but I've always been relatively good at these [unclear] models and at seeing the big picture in a way, but if I want to concretely be involved in doing things, then in that sense I haven't felt like I want to be on some board, but I want to be right there where decisions get made and where you're at the core of things.
and then at some point I in a way realized, hey, the nicest model really is to be right there doing the work together with these CEOs, founders
and helping them, being in a way that creative guy — kind of like how Kusse was for me back when I was running Libera, Kusse was the chairman of the board,
he had been chairman of the board at Hartwall and other companies, and in a way then you see things from a bit further away,
you're able to bring things to it too, and then also in a way a relationship of trust develops there, with the help of which you can then work through these different situations, which sometimes happen many times within just a few days, and then of course there are funding rounds and you're supposed to grow, and crises and problems come up.
and these are all a bit different in each company — if you're doing new things, it's a very challenging and interesting field, and in a way, years ago, I concluded that this is what I'm good at, this is what I want to do.
And then if you're a normal angel investor, meaning you give money and you give advice, then in a way you're actually paying for the privilege of giving advice, and I felt that wasn't really a nice model, so I flipped that model around the other way.
forward, meaning I take a stake in the company and I'm out there with the CEOs pushing it forward, and I've been doing this for several years now, and some have apparently hoped for that model.
I have serial entrepreneurs and first-timers, and they're spread around — there's some fintech on the Africa side, and then there's AR too, and I'm actually pretty omnivorous, I mostly just look for challenging, interesting cases, and they don't have to be in Finland, they can be anywhere in the world.
and I honestly haven't come up with anything better to do.
If someone out there has some good ideas or thoughts, I'll take them,
but in a way, creating something new, building something new.
I experienced this too, after Libera, or during the Libera days — that you can talk about things, but that's a bit like politics, you're trying to push others, versus actually really building something, which is much stronger if you bring an actual new solution to something — well, if we take a somewhat older example, but like what Uber obviously did — there was the taxi medallion, you were in New York, for a million,
a taxi license, and then it took years, maybe even a decade, to pay off the loan just to get the permit for this taxi business, and then Uber came and in a way changed the whole game — Airbnb did the same from the other side.
So in a way the idea is that if you want to change the world, the best way is probably, if it works like it does with startups, to go and build a fresh solution to it, do it so well that others adopt it and pay for it.
and it's also a direct feedback process — what works, what doesn't work.
and that's what makes it very challenging.
Yeah, so you have this kind of sweat-equity model, where your advisory contribution is exchanged for equity, so that
yeah, sounds pretty reasonable. So, do you have similar kinds of trusted contacts, like
just like this Henry [unclear] was with Omar, there's some third guy too who often does investments together with them, so it's kind of the same crowd
doing new cases, so to speak.
Well, I know quite a lot of people, of course over time I've done rounds in different places with different people.
Then I've also just come to realize that these days, now that we've gotten past COVID, I'm looking more again, and new good entrepreneurs, and maybe serial entrepreneurs too, have come back to the surface again.
Or, well, they've of course been doing things all along, but now they're coming to these events and you get to meet them and talk with them, and I just notice that each case is so much its own thing.
and this was actually one thing that Henri [unclear] talked about — Henry [unclear] had this kind of venture studio model.
So in a way that path, since I've interviewed quite a few successful people and entrepreneurs here on Talks with Petri,
and the whole idea really started from the fact that in 2020 COVID hit, and I knew I had good [people].
good people, who weren't necessarily — we have good stories which are extremely interesting, a lot of very smart people, but they haven't necessarily ever brought those things forward, they're not the ones you see in some magazine headlines and out in public — and then I just started calling up these people and we recorded them, and of course at some point my good contacts started running out — I know a lot of people, but in terms of the stories I want to tell — and my idea was the whole time
of course to bring out these things that matter to entrepreneurs, meaning things that aren't necessarily talked about.
For example the Jaakko [unclear] episode, 'founder non grata' — what happens when you've been there from almost the very start,
but you're a founder, co-founder, meaning there are other founders too, and then you're running things as CEO,
and then at some point you get wiped out of the history entirely.
they don't all have to be dark stories — there's also an online pizza one, Eerik's story, which I think is extremely — it's an interesting episode.
So didn't that end up going to Kotipizza then?
it actually wasn't Kotipizza, it went to the international side instead
but they were three friends, they were still studying, still at university
I remember how much they put in — was it 2.5 dollars, or maybe it was 100 dollars per person
for three years, so each of these students invested money into the company every month
so they were [unclear] in it still
they actually had an ordering system for pizza, this was in the early 2000s
at pizzerias. And they built that network and got the whole system working, and Erik tells the story of how it then became a significant, leading player in Northern Europe, in the sense that it was apparently the only one among these competitors that was able to turn a profit, and there were also these bigger competitors who had much more money, venture money, behind them, and how they ended up becoming investors in his company,
and you have your competitors right there inside your own company, and I won't reveal any more than that, but it's worth listening also just because Erik told how he managed to turn that around — there are investment agreements and shareholder agreements
and Erik told how then, when he did his exit from it — meaning one of the investors in his company, one of the bigger competitors, made an acquisition offer — and how these technical clauses then made it a good deal for him.
Yeah.
And in a way there are quite a lot of stories like that.
Many are very interesting, but if we go back to this venture studio thing, this path is also that once you've done a clear exit,
you start doing a few investments, then you notice you could do a bit more, and then maybe you start doing syndicate deals.
The Hampus episode is also very interesting — a Swedish super-angel, made a lot of money, a significant amount of money, made an Android user interface and sold it off at the time, and then started doing these investments.
he's already a fund, and [unclear] was kind of the same thing — at some point you start thinking about what the smart way to do it is.
he's put that money into all sorts of ventures — you probably believe each time you put money in, but not all of them turn into successes
and then time is limited, there's a limited amount of money, so what's the best way to make an impact, to get something done
and Henry tried this venture studio model again, meaning what if he started making them himself
so in a way you do the development, if it's a software thing, inside the studio, and then an outside entrepreneur comes in, and then you start driving it forward that way, to see if you can get good ones out of it that way, and
unfortunately we ran out of time, so we didn't get very deep into it, but this model has certain problems too
and now coming back to your original question, if you still remember it yourself — yeah, you can have a circle of these people.
But on the other hand all the cases are also very different, and they may need very different amounts of money.
So what I've actually noticed just recently too, is that good cases — I mean extremely good cases — don't want to take VC money at all.
and that's kind of a habit too — Slush and all these events, of course naturally
well they kind of live off VC money, or that's a good target group there, and with that you naturally get startups to show up, and startups of course are chasing money
but the best cases are the ones that start out cash-flow positive
they don't take outside investors, they can't get in there
and those are interesting cases, and they're usually the best cases, but they're the kind that stay hidden away somewhere under the rug
and then once they do their exit, maybe you hear about them, and that might show up in Finland through the tax calendar, and not necessarily anywhere else.
Yeah, rarely is a case fully bootstrapped these days, but then maybe among the interesting episodes, I liked the one you had with the Danish guy, who also tried it — his first company was with some friend of his, some company he'd been through legal troubles with for a while, and nowadays he lives
summers on a boat and winters over in the Swiss Alps, and then he invites, like, management teams from investment companies and other interesting collaboration partners onto his boat
surfing and waterskiing, and then in winter skiing, and he said that it's actually a really efficient model for getting the best collaborative output out of smart people
out of the system, by having fun.
Yeah, Lars Tvede, an extremely successful Dane, but probably less well known in Finland.
That's maybe well-known — it's my most downloaded episode. We had fun together there with Lars.
Did we have some fifteen-to-thirty-minute prep call before that, a preparation call?
But I didn't know Lars before that.
In a way we just clicked well there. Lars was actually on his own yacht, a yacht of some size, if you invite the management team there. There's already his daughter [unclear] and who knows how many other people in that crowd on the boat, so it really must already be a big boat, and we did the interview there then. There were also a few technical problems with it.
But it was an extremely fun episode, and Lars has actually written — it was something like 18 books.
this kind of multi-talent, and of course he's a fun challenge, it's nice to talk with him since he's thought things through, he has a lot to say, he also actually talks about business cycles
and he's also been quite knowledgeable about marketing too, and this was actually kind of the thing too, when he said, in a way, that variation
doesn't that bring the crowd together in one place, and I think Lars said at some point, maybe privately, that workdays can even be 14-16 hours long
but it doesn't feel like work when you vary it, and here he uses the Hemingway Bridge, the Hemingway bridge technique
meaning, in a way, when Hemingway got into a good flow and had written some chapter, he wouldn't stop right at the end of that chapter
but instead, while still on a roll, he'd let it carry him a couple or three pages further into the next one
and then he'd stop, once in a way the momentum ran out, or otherwise the coffee's power started to fade
and then the next time he started again, he wouldn't get writer's block, since he was already in a way moving along in a good groove
and this is in a way what Lars was also referring to there, that in a way when you're surfing
and then suddenly you jump again, and you might have had some conversation about something and it's left in the middle — if you're writing several books, it's probably just some chapter further along, a section further along, and after that again
jumps to some other discussions. This is in a way natural.
another thing was that it's not worth hoarding those ideas — unless they're really super unique, in which case you can maybe be a bit careful, at least not tell absolutely everyone right away — but otherwise, ideas do come and go, and if you don't in a way share them, then you won't get the optimal partners for them either
That's Lars's thinking, but I can fully agree with this — it really depends on the person. If you can't find good people to work with and actually execute those things, then they often just stay at the idea stage. That's in a way the limiting resource.
yeah, 'good idea, won't work' — there was a book like that in Finland at some point, but two more things stood out to me as well — if you're just surrounded by pessimists, like you sometimes find in Finland, they'll say, 'good idea, won't work'
but also that a good idea doesn't work on its own, that it requires someone...
Right, and ideas are free in a way, that's another one of those sayings — that the execution is so much more, and it's so much more significant, and...
Right, or [unclear] with this philosophy too, [unclear], so just [unclear] and...
Right, nobody really uses them anyway — it's in the execution after all, the same way that even if someone copied exactly what you're doing, the underlying way of thinking still wouldn't be the same.
yeah, well, we could still think about this a bit more — you've actually been quite intensively focused, like, in terms of mindfulness, [unclear], quite unusually often people kind of, in a way, ruminate a bit
for example, I once took an NLP course in London, and people kind of go inside their heads, looking upward, and kind of reflect on thoughts inside their own head
it's a fairly engaged kind of gaze, so you've thought about that too — how living in the moment, in a way, works
and how, in a way, channeling your sense-perception channels so that you don't have internal disruption works — so you've got some thoughts on this.
and about this whole thing — didn't we [unclear]?
Well yeah, I think I put something down on paper, I believe some of it has been published at some point.
There's 'Palasia todellisuudesta' [Fragments of Reality], which I translated, but there's a better version,
it's the English version that I made, Fragments of Reality.
So a book like that got written at some point, but in a way that too just came from
my own thoughts, it was actually in blog form in 2004,
when it was, I think — or would it have been the foreword,
so it was in the early 2000s, when blogging came along,
the early days of it, so back then I used to write things down every day at a certain moment, but really my mind has always been fairly quiet, and if I were honest I'd hope it's not necessarily entirely — I don't know if there's any such thing as normal, but not everyone necessarily has this.
So even before going to sleep, do you already get that kind of inner reel running that would keep you from falling asleep?
I actually, from a young age, I don't remember ever having dreams.
And then I was good at sleeping, like, a few minutes and then on and off, or off and on.
So in that sense there wasn't anything, and then similarly, however you can describe it, well...
and if nothing's running through your head, it's a bit like a security camera, or a camera with no sound
you see everything, and you maybe have more capacity available, and then it's also terribly boring in a certain way, since you don't have any other reels running in there
you're really just in this moment
and in a way it's liberating, since then you have more bandwidth available
and on the other hand there isn't that kind of self-talk
but that's, well, because for example I talked with Antero Vartia about this through meditation, that kind of, like, Carpe Diem idea, or there was this [unclear] 'The Power of Now'
in a certain way it's like, it's incredibly noble that you're able to just live through your senses in the moment, that some people always kind of bomb their way into that inner reflective state
is this some kind of waking meditation, where you're kind of constantly in a real-time meditative state, or, like, am I getting that right?
Well yeah, that's kind of how it is — if you think about what you're trying to do with meditation, it's in a way that you focus on one thing, that's really just the beginning, in the early stage it's a concentration exercise
so in a way, one method in Vipassana meditation, for instance, is that you should focus on the airflow of your breath as it passes through your nose
and it can also come from, like, when I wave my hand around like this, that there's airflow other than from breathing too
but you don't notice it, because you're actually not focused on it, you're focused somewhere else
in a way you can't keep your focus there the whole time, and nowhere else
and this is in a way just the first warm-up round, but it's already extremely hard just to be able to hold that
a bit like the tractor beam in Star Trek — for as long as it takes, hours, if it comes to that.
This is in a way meditation — being able to concentrate — and there are quite a few ways of doing that meditation, some people use some kind of mantra,
even mentally, saying some words, walking, or hitting your fingers with a hammer, any kind of pain or whatever,
but the idea being that you try, in a certain way, to numb out everything else, but the fastest way, and I haven't come up with anything else,
is actually this Vipassana meditation, where in a way...
you just focus on that, and then you guide the mind back so that you don't get stuck on it, and then you get further along in this exercise, and of course it takes a longer time, and you have to practice this regularly
and then you start noticing when these sensations come, when they start coming, or when the thoughts come, since thoughts are a bit like
if you're at a train station, then there have to be a lot of people. People come, and then they're in front of your field of view, and then they go away.
And in the same way, thoughts come, they go, sensations come and go.
You don't grab onto them. Then in a way their meaning disappears, their power disappears, because you get to decide yourself whether you do anything about that thing or not.
And in a way through that you get — if you also start becoming aware of where your hands are, what it feels like in your body.
All these things, these senses — in a way you don't have to be inside that sensation, you just become aware of where everything is.
and if you could bring that into business life, that's extremely nice, since you can...
listen to everything that's coming through, not just what's being said, but what isn't said, how it's said, what kinds of gestures are made, at what point anything happens
and then when you're able to also take in all these other people too, if there are several people at this table, since of course you also have peripheral vision, you see things a bit off to the sides too
things. If you still have all this capacity available, you're still bored. You basically just have a screensaver running.
Yeah, that's in a way what it enables — since you're not listening to that internal radio that keeps droning on with some weather report from some outer archipelago.
Yeah, so for me it works — I have a fairly friendly inner voice when it does show up, it doesn't bother me, like for example in the evening I don't have the problem of my inner voice scolding me for the day's actions or mistakes or worrying about tomorrow, that's not a problem for me, which in itself is already half the battle, but that then requires some kind of, maybe, flow state or concentration, or then some kind of capacity shift, I remember
in London, when I took the tube to work, I used to play Brick Breaker on my BlackBerry just so that I could listen to an audiobook at the same time.
Because if I just listen to an audiobook, my mind starts wandering off into some dumb thought that has no productive benefit.
But by playing that Brick Breaker mechanically, I was able to listen to that book with full intensity for even two hours without my attention breaking.
that kind of bandwidth, in a way. Sometimes I need that bandwidth for a secondary task.
So if you're walking, or doing something physical in a way. For example one thing I do a lot is when I run on the treadmill, for instance.
Then I listen to podcasts. That's actually about the only place I listen to podcasts. I set them to double or triple speed.
speed. That's why, of course — this is a tip by the way too — if certain mannerisms, not in Sami or anyone else, or in anybody at all,
or an accent isn't really to your liking, set it from one-and-a-half to double, or even faster if you can tolerate it, those surprisingly
kind of disappear, all these...
long pauses start to flatten out, and that also in a way makes it so you can absorb the material faster, and then it also stays more interesting
yeah, and I think my clock speed is just such that I can't listen at just a plain
speed anymore, it needs
at least one and a half times, I'm thinking two times
because I also think I naturally speak fairly fast
so I have to slow my speech down
so that I have maybe some kind of slightly faster clock speed
then there, which also requires that communication
yeah but that's a good point, so that fast sensory stream
maybe takes up enough bandwidth that the mind doesn't wander off
escape into that damn inefficient slow talk
yeah, but that's interesting
yeah, I've now started trying out these control exercises a bit
and then in a way there's nothing mystical attached to it for me
I don't experience any kind of oneness with the universe
like some people experience
you don't need to attach any deeper meaning to it than that
you can keep it entirely just as, like
observation, and observe through that — but if you do it, your quality of life probably improves — one of the things, which is also common, is emotional regulation.
Then maybe breaking routines. It can come through boredom too, but then sometimes these compulsive needs come up to check some status on your phone, which is the kind of routine I'd gladly break, but it's pretty hard to unlearn, or generally this kind of behavioral reprogramming — same thing with snacking or whatever.
and so on.
Right, and here's the thing again — if you can catch it, when you notice your hand is already heading for your pocket, you catch it right there, like it's already in the pocket.
And that in a way also takes practice — that at some point you realize you're about to unlock the keypad, so to speak, and sometimes the thought has already come but the hand hasn't moved yet.
This is in a way the point where you get to nip it earlier, and through that you get away from the whole thing entirely.
Yeah, you have to decide on those again, in a way.
put those behavioral reprogrammings into use now.
So in a way your whole life is meditation. You don't have to sit cross-legged somewhere,
but it's of course easier if you do that at first, in a way focus on it there,
and then you can maybe mentally return to it, if you're stuck in some traffic jam.
and it feels like you're tearing your hair out, since you're a bit late and the pressure builds
then if you mentally kind of go back to that, if it's the same place at home for example
then that in a way maybe resets the situation faster
but in principle your whole life is meditation in that sense
that if you focus and are present
we really don't have anything but this moment right here
I called it in my own book — that we have a History channel and then we have a Sci-Fi channel
but even those happen in this moment — like when you stream whatever show, you're still watching that only in this moment too, and in a way it's escapism in a certain sense, you leave this present moment and you block it out so that you're somewhere else
yeah, that's a good point. Are you taking a summer break, or is there new stuff coming out over the summer?
I went through some of the old episodes a bit, since it was, like, what are we going to talk about today. I got a bit of an idea — should we do some kind of summer-school-style solution here, meaning dig into some specific topic.
Then I noticed there've really been some very interesting guests here, and with a lot of them things were left hanging — for example with Pär [unclear], we talked for probably two hours, I mean just what made it into the released episode.
'Consumer is King', or whatever that episode was called, we really didn't get past the beginning, and actually the topics we talked about, in 2020 for example — we talked about inflation,
we talked about exactly these things, which are completely spot on, so to speak, right now, and I actually remember, I asked — I read it there this morning,
and I came here and asked, like, what do professors even do in the summer?
Pär answered that everyone probably assumes we just sit around loafing and don't do anything at all.
But actually it's part of research time.
And so it's already been almost two years since I talked with Pär at all.
Maybe it could be that kind of retro thing, but then continue and dig a bit deeper into certain things.
The other one I talked with was Razeen Sally, about geopolitics and China.
and this was, if I remember right, about a year and a half ago, when I talked with Razeen a bit, around Singapore
and he brings a completely different, um, British education — he's taught at the London School of Economics
and through that, in a way, China, Hong Kong
I think I binged that episode a couple of weeks, when the war got more intense earlier this year
I binged him and asked whether we should go take another look at the China situation again
these are the kinds of thoughts I have right now
if you have any other nice ideas
yeah, that sounds good for now, you can combine these
so in a way inflation — now it's really interesting since Shanghai's totalitarian COVID experiment is ending
the COVID situation in China, that they're now taking that same hit from COVID infections that other countries already took earlier this year,
which then causes interesting effects on China's domestic production and demand, and how much that then matters for these supply chains,
There aren't supply-side bottlenecks in that, since China is a major producing country.
At the same time we have a lot of supply-driven inflation finally coming through with a delay,
when those combine, and on top of that there's a global war conflict, which causes all sorts of things.
[unclear]
to subcontractors, since new goods have to be produced for Ukraine, so in a completely traditional way you can't get the same — for computing power you can't get a share the same way from AWS, from Amazon, and these big cloud providers.
At least in part, if I've understood correctly now, Nvidia, this graphics-card maker, is supposed to have new cards coming out, but they haven't been able to get them out, and this is where China and all these other things come in.
and through that, there are these kinds of things on so many fronts, when you start tracing the threads and the correlations, then...
green coding, capacity, and energy use
[unclear]. There could be a business idea in that.
Right, and then we also have these completely traditional problems too, as I understand it, for example
at Manchester Airport, goods were moving there, and people are running late and a lot of flights are being cancelled.
Or here at Arlanda it's the same thing — we have a lot of even quite simple things that used to work before.
And now that you have to remember again how to get your carry-on bag, push it onto the plane's
overhead shelf or whatever, those things aren't necessarily quite in my muscle memory anymore.
yeah, don't scare me while we're filming this, I'm heading to Arlanda tomorrow, so I don't know about this, whether I need to leave now
well apparently the Helsinki airport is working fine, but coming through Arlanda you'll probably have to budget three hours
of [unclear] time, it really is exhausting
better to just take the ferry
Okay, well I'm not backing out now, the money's already spent, so we'll go with this.
Yeah, thank you — our guest has been Petri Kajander, and we've talked about the Talks with Petri show.
So go ahead and subscribe to it, and we also talked about meditation and libertarianism, among other things.
Thanks for being a guest.
And since you've watched and listened this far, go ahead and subscribe to this channel too. Thanks.