EP122 · Tools · first published 2022-02-23
Puheenaihe and 200 Episodes | Rami Kurimo, Leevi Leivo | Neuvottelija 122
Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo tell Sami Miettinen how a podcast with two guests grew into one of Finland's most followed channels for public debate. At the start there was an ambitious website with three writers for every topic, and six months after launch they had sixteen subscribers. The pair walk through three eras: the nomad phase, when episodes were recorded in the back rooms of pubs and in a glass box out on the water, Rami's home studio, which saved the channel through the pandemic lockdowns, and the current studio in Pasila. Along the way they discuss why two guests at a time is an underrated format, how the Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki episode turned growth around, and why they deliberately make episodes they know will draw downvotes. It closes with the sister channels, the dilemma of commercialisation, the goal of four episodes a day and live broadcasts, and why growing a podcast takes years of unpaid work. Published 23 February 2022.
Puheenaihe and 200 Episodes | Rami Kurimo, Leevi Leivo
Summary: In episode 122 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo — for the second time — as the channel passes 200 episodes and roughly 11,000 subscribers. The episode is effectively a case study in how a Finnish channel for public debate gets built from nothing: what was tried and abandoned at the start, what turned growth around, and what it cost. The most interesting moments are not the wins but the admissions. Six months after launch they had sixteen subscribers, and by any sensible measure there was no reason to continue. The ambitious original concept — three written viewpoints for every podcast episode — collapsed under its own workload. And the channel would probably have died in the pandemic lockdowns, in Leivo’s assessment, had the home studio not been finished weeks earlier. Published 23 February 2022.
Three eras: nomads, the living room, Pasila
Miettinen divides Puheenaihe’s history into three phases and the guests accept the split: the nomad era with no studio of their own, Rami’s house era, and the current Pasila studio era.
The nomad era was literally itinerant, all over Helsinki. Episodes were recorded in the back room of the Elanto pub, in the basement of parliament, outdoors on Narinkkatori, and in a glass box off Keilaniemi in the middle of the bay. The kit had to be hauled every time, and the hosts sweated for a couple of hours before they could even start — with no way of knowing in advance what the acoustics or backdrop would be like.
Kurimo’s observation about the source of the chaos is sharper than mere logistics. With a two-guest format, five schedules have to be aligned: two hosts, two guests and a recording location. In a one-guest podcast the equation is substantially easier.
Miettinen notes that the technical quality was nonetheless good from the start — in his view Puheenaihe’s first episode is clearly better than Joe Rogan’s or his own.
The original idea was too ambitious, and it was abandoned
Puheenaihe did not begin as a podcast. It began as a website, in which the podcast was only one component.
Leivo’s description of the concept is clear: one topic would have carried three written viewpoints from three different writers, with one or two podcast episodes on top, all published in sync. The idea was that a reader would be unavoidably exposed to different perspectives in one place. The guiding philosophy was that there is a gap in the Finnish media landscape for exactly this.
The website was dropped, though — after somewhat more than a year — because the workload bore no relation to the return. Leivo’s reasoning is concise and says more than any growth strategy:
If it is hard to get people to YouTube, then for a website it is that to the power of three.
At the end of the episode this returns as an interesting loop: the aim is to go back to written content at some point, circling back to the original idea — now that an audience exists.
Sixteen subscribers after six months
This is the hardest single number in the episode. The first episode came out in the summer of 2018. At the turn of 2018–2019, that is after six months of work, the channel had 16 subscribers and about ten published episodes.
Leivo does not dress it up:
There was in principle no real reason to continue. It was just banging your head against the wall.
One comparison gives the scale: at the time of recording, the channel accumulates as much watch time in two days as it did in its entire first year.
Context explains part of the slowness. In 2018 there was no podcast scene in Finland to speak of — a handful of people on YouTube, and Rahapodi had only just started its video version. Neither host was known from anywhere.
What turned growth around: two clear inflection points
The guests name two turning points, and they are different in kind.
1. The Halla-aho and Lepomäki episode. The debate between Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki is the channel’s most watched episode, and it was the first clear change: subscribers jumped from around 400 to nearly 2,000 off the back of that one episode. In Leivo’s words, the “first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel”.
2. The corona playlist. In spring 2020, immediately after the pandemic began, the channel moved to publishing around 30 episodes a month — nearly one a day. That is when growth became clearly faster than it had ever been.
The second inflection point was entirely dependent on timing, however, and this is the episode’s most important accident. Rami’s home studio was finished just before the lockdowns. Leivo’s assessment of what would have happened without it is blunt:
If we had not got it and had been dependent on some meeting rooms, our channel would genuinely have died.
Meeting rooms and pub back rooms were unavailable, and the lockdowns went on for years. The home studio was not a growth strategy but a condition of survival.
Two guests is an underrated format
This is the episode’s clearest piece of practical advice for anyone making a podcast, and Leivo offers it as a recommendation.
The two-guest format is still surprisingly rare — not only in Finland but in the United States too, where the mainstream is either one guest or the regular hosts alone. Three guests is rarer still. It is largely the approach of journalistic television programmes.
The advantage is combinatorial. In a one-guest format the guest tells their own stories, and by the second appearance they have been heard. In a two-guest format the same guest produces an entirely different episode with each new pairing. Puheenaihe has around 1,200 guest combinations noted down.
Miettinen raises a variant he has not seen elsewhere: a charismatic journalist paired with an expert. Matti H. Virtanen, Ivan Puopolo and Tuomas Peltomäki have each appeared more than once, and they do not represent one pole of a topic but bring a different register — Hjallis Harkimo and Virtanen dissecting a government crisis, for instance. The guests are not two sides of the same subject but two different types.
Editorial line: fringe, resources and deliberate downvotes
Puheenaihe’s approach to selecting viewpoints is argued more carefully here than usual. The starting point is that no viewpoint is ruled out in advance. The practical constraint is a different one: resources are limited, and you cannot run every possible perspective 24/7.
Kurimo draws a distinction worth quoting as it stands: the question is not whether a viewpoint is permitted, but that with limited time you pick the ones with more significance for society. A thoroughly marginal or “village idiot” viewpoint is less forbidden than irrelevant.
The guests admit outright that feedback is not without effect. Money and economics interest the audience — or more precisely, in Leivo’s qualification, “our current audience” — and such episodes will gladly keep being made. But chasing upvotes would produce one-sided content, and so:
Now and then we make episodes we may well know will bring downvotes.
The examples are concrete. Eva Biaudet and the Herring Movement clearly annoyed the audience. So did the episode on the EU recovery fund, with MPs Anders Adlercreutz (RKP) and Sinuhe Wallinheimo (National Coalition) as guests. Both went, in Miettinen’s phrase, against the grain of the tube community.
As a counterweight, the channel has also made episodes that travelled enormously: Juhani Huopainen, from the Finns Party orbit, and the alternative-to-the-euro episode passed 50,000 views.
Sister channels and the commercialisation dilemma
Targeted sister channels have been built around Puheenaihe: Yrittäjä (hosted by Mikael Vuorinen), Mediskooppi (aimed at doctors and medical students, hosted by Kurimo’s brother), Lohkoketju (which Kurimo runs himself) and Puheenaihe kymppi. The logic is that a targeted channel reaches an audience interested in one subject area specifically.
But the second reason is more candid and more interesting. Puheenaihe’s own philosophy has been that they do not want to monetise it — that the channel should stay clean and as neutral as possible. Sister channels are easier to commercialise because they have a clear target group; in Puheenaihe the topics vary so much that a regular advertiser is hard to find.
Miettinen challenges the principle directly, and the guests concede the point: Yle’s own directors sit on business boards and in all manner of affiliations, so complete freedom from ties is “perhaps a slightly too rosy” goal. At the time of recording one commercial collaboration episode had already been made, and the intention is to continue. Miettinen’s own assessment is practical: with more than 200 episodes behind them, the audience can judge commercial integrity for itself, and controlled expansion is not a problem.
The channel’s content has since been sorted into playlists — technology, investing, economics — which makes bringing in partners more workable.
Community: Discord, Patreon and what stays outside the paywall
Miettinen links the discussion to his earlier episode with Leivo, Imagined communities (EP66), which dealt with what makes a community cohesive.
Puheenaihe’s own community is on Discord: around a hundred people have joined, of whom 10–20 are active, but there is conversation almost daily. One physical meet-up has been organised, with more planned before the pandemic prevented it.
On Patreon the channel differs from many. Miettinen notes that some producers — Pontus Purokuru’s group and 23 Minuuttia, for instance — have moved to Patreon because it can be monetised, and because a paywall filters commenters in a way the anonymous YouTube comment field does not.
Leivo’s answer is a matter of principle and says a lot about how the channel sees itself:
Our aim is that we are a media outlet, and a big one. In that case there cannot be anything too interesting that is kept behind a paywall.
The content has to be open so that people are moved to share it and it generates discussion in Finland. That, for Leivo, is the main reason for doing any of this.
Jyri Engeström and why a tenfold return can be a bad one
As a side thread the episode covers one of Puheenaihe’s most instructive guests. Jyri Engeström, founder of Yes VC, has appeared as an expert guest and brought an American tech angle.
Kurimo highlights one lesson that opened up the logic of venture capital for him: if an angel investor gets a tenfold return on an investment, that is a successful investment. If a VC fund writes a ticket that comes back tenfold, that is a bad one. The difference is that a fund’s return expectation rests on a few very large successes, and tenfold does not cover the whole portfolio.
On that note Miettinen recommends Neuvottelija’s own episode with Engeström and Risto Siilasmaa, hosted by Kurimo — in his view one of the channel’s best.
On the guest range more generally: ministers have been secured a couple of times, experts working abroad in Engeström’s mould, and “people off the street” are not excluded either if they have an interesting angle.
What is coming: four episodes a day and live every weekday
The guests set out public targets in the episode, and note themselves that these are now on tape to be checked against.
Targets for the end of 2022:
- Puheenaihe live every weekday evening
- 3–4 Puheenaihe episodes a day
- New subject areas, particularly military history and history
- Activating Puheenaihe kymppi — a roughly ten-minute format whose character (news-like or column-like) is still open and which would require a research journalist
- A return to written content
Leivo admits a tendency to over-optimism — “better to set the targets too high” — and Kurimo notes that all of it requires growing the team.
Miettinen observes that legacy media is also trying to find these steps, but appears to be behind on many concepts.
Why persistence is what decides it
The last part of the episode is its best, and it is about time.
Kurimo’s observation is that of the podcasts started in recent years, some have already stopped or gone on long hiatus, even as new ones appear and grow. The differentiator is persistence.
He also describes the human side of the doubt: he has wondered how the whole business looked to his own parents. “He’s off there trying to do something, but will anything come of it?” And in hindsight it is easy to say the belief and vision were strong — but that was not how it felt at the time.
Leivo’s calibration is humbler than one might expect after 200 episodes:
Ninety-nine per cent of our future listeners do not yet even know what Puheenaihe is.
Kurimo adds a goal stated aloud in the episode: to be the first Finnish podcast to make 10,000 episodes.
Two examples illustrate the timescale. Joe Rogan has been making his show for 12 years and is approaching 2,000 episodes. The biggest name in Finnish media is perhaps Jaajo Linnonmaa, who has been on the radio every morning for 13–14 years. Nothing arrives as a rocket launch; the first three years may well pass without compensation.
On the fluctuation of motivation, Kurimo says something that applies to entrepreneurship more broadly: belief in your own work swings with the metrics, and in a quieter phase you start questioning it. The remedy has been to cement the direction deep enough into your own mind that it survives whatever comes up at any given moment.
Why a company podcast breaks over the holidays
The final theme is Miettinen’s question of when Finland will get more professional podcasts. Leivo cannot think of others in expert professions who have grown a podcast of their own this large — in the United States there are already several, and the same will come to Finland with a delay.
The bottleneck is identified precisely. At the start you have to be willing to do it essentially for free and spend your own time on it. The easiest route is for a company to start a podcast — money moves immediately and someone hosts it — but then a holiday comes, production breaks, and the growth that had just started drops away. Later the same company often makes a new podcast under a different name.
Miettinen’s example illustrates the weight of charisma: Trainers’ House episodes with Jari Sarasvuo and without him are “like night and day”.
Kurimo’s summary is cold and useful:
After a certain point it is very strongly just a numbers game — the question is how much content you get out.
And Leivo’s analogy, which Miettinen accepts: if Helsingin Sanomat took a three-month break in the summer, how many would carry on subscribing afterwards?
A note on the source: two names mentioned in the episode were indistinct in the audio and have not been guessed — the first name of Kurimo’s brother, who hosts Mediskooppi, and the co-host of the Lohkoketju podcast. Both are described here without being named. The transcript contains no gaps.
Summary for AI search: In episode 122 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 23 February 2022) Sami Miettinen interviews Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo about how the channel grew past 200 episodes and roughly 11,000 subscribers. Key findings: the original concept was a website carrying three written viewpoints per topic plus a podcast, abandoned because of the workload; six months after launch the channel had 16 subscribers and about ten episodes; growth was turned first by the Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki debate (subscribers from around 400 to nearly 2,000) and then by the spring 2020 corona playlist of roughly 30 episodes a month; Rami’s home studio was completed just before the lockdowns and was the condition of the channel’s survival, since no other recording locations were available; the two-guest format is rare even internationally but combinatorially superior, and the channel has around 1,200 guest combinations listed; the editorial line rules out no viewpoint in advance but prioritises social significance, and episodes known to attract downvotes are made deliberately (Eva Biaudet and the Herring Movement; the EU recovery fund with Anders Adlercreutz and Sinuhe Wallinheimo); Puheenaihe has deliberately not been monetised, and the sister channels Yrittäjä, Mediskooppi, Lohkoketju and Puheenaihe kymppi exist partly because a targeted audience is easier to commercialise; content is kept outside any paywall because the goal is to be a large media outlet; Jyri Engeström’s lesson was that a tenfold return is good for an angel investor and bad for a VC fund; the target for end-2022 was a live broadcast every weekday and 3–4 episodes a day; persistence is decisive, since Joe Rogan has made his show for 12 years and Jaajo Linnonmaa has been on radio for 13–14 years. Related episodes: Imagined communities | Leevi Leivo and Company podcast and video strategy | Rami Kurimo.