This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.
Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
Joy 101.
It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy 101 and listen now.
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS.
My first guest is Terrence Hilton.
Shakira.
Luke and Yerin.
We have surprises.
Many surprises.
Welcome to the Sweet 305 podcast, where the group chat comes to life.
What up?
You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst.
It's lemonade.
This is Sweet 305.
Here, oversharing is encouraged.
Listen to Suite 305 with Lele Pons on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Mungish Atigular, and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive.
This time I talk to scientists biopunks curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us.
And I get into a bit of trouble along the way.
I'd say probably start bone smashing.
That doesn't work.
Make it look more defined.
They say it works.
I don't know.
Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're going on over to foggy Copenhagen town for this episode of Stuff You Should Know.
That's right, because we are talking about a little sort of village neighborhood, anarchist commune in Copenhagen Denmark, called Freetown Christiania, which was founded in 1971 and it has a pretty interesting story.
Well, yeah.
And continues to.
You had me at anarchist squatter commune.
Yeah.
So it is.
I think there's something like 800, 900 residents there, depending on who you ask.
And they just basically showed up.
They set up shop in this former military base and they said, we're not leaving.
This is a free, free territory.
And in fact, when you walk into Christiania, I just want to say Christiana so bad.
I know.
Me too.
That extra I just throws me off.
But it doesn't matter because I'm foreign to this.
I'm foreign to the people of Denmark.
So I will say I will just deal with it.
Right.
That's right.
At any rate, when you walk into Christiania, there's a sign that says you are now leaving the European Union.
Yeah, pretty cool.
So the backstory here is in the 17th century, that's the 1600s.
By the way, in Copenhagen they built a big fortress and some ramparts there to you know, as protection obviously, because that's what ramparts are.
And in the 1830s, they built an artillery barracks there.
They grew over the course of the 19th century, but then in the 1900s, Denmark was like.
You know what?
No one's going to come after us.
We're Denmark.
Everyone pretty much likes us, so we don't need this kind of presence here.
And so in 1916 the southern part of the base was closed and actually converted by the country into a park.
And then in 1961, the ramparts on the northern end were transferred to the public.
And then about six years later, between 67 and 71, they finally, the military got out of it altogether.
And there was a completely abandoned military base there by 1971.
Yeah.
So, I mean, and it's pretty decent size.
Part of it's a park, so it's alluring.
It's in the middle of essentially downtown Copenhagen.
So it's kind of like... attractive to people.
You know, it's not out in the middle of nowhere.
It's like right there.
Let's do something with it.
And there is a neighborhood right next to it called Christianshaven.
Christian's Haven, if you anglicize it.
And they apparently the parents there kept tearing down the security fences to allow their children to go in and play in this abandoned military barracks.
You know, I actually looked up the V in Denmark and how you treated that thing.
Did I butcher it?
Is that how I. Well, I don't know, because I bet I bet you're probably right.
But what the Internet said was that the V and I'm sure someone can write in and let us know that the V is pronounced like a V when it's in the front of a word, but is treated as a W when it's in the middle or rear of a word.
Okay, so let me try this again.
Christianshawn.
Maybe that's how they pronounce it.
I don't know.
I'm actually, I'm genuinely curious because that's always thrown me.
Christianshawn, that's what I'm going with.
All right, that's what I'm going with too.
OK well anyway, it's a neighborhood and they tore down the fence and apparently the local authorities I think the military at first, and then the government kept building the fence.
They're like, this is to keep you out.
Stop tearing it down.
And the parents in the neighborhood said never.
And they kept tearing it down.
And finally, the government just gave up and just left it to them to let their children play.
Yeah.
So it became a kid's playground.
In October of 1971, there's a guy named Jacob, here's another B. I'm going to say Lugvigsen.
Sure.
If the Internet is correct.
And he is the, or was then the, editor of a.
Actually, it turns out it's the most popular kind of counterculture rag in Denmark, called the Hoedbladet.
It means new leaf.
Oh, I saw it meant the main paper.
Oh, the main leaf.
That's what I saw.
Okay.
I like new leaf too, because you can turn those over and good things happen.
That's what I thought.
So he was the editor of that thing.
He needed some content to put in there one week.
And so he and some of his buddies went and did kind of a fun little.
Hey, we're going to take over this old barracks.
And so they did an article.
They took pictures of them like having picnics and having fun and waving around air rifles.
And, you know, you'll have to remember this is just after the military had left it.
So it's very much like an anti-war sort of little fun piece they were doing.
And in the article, he said civilians have taken over.
The Forbidden City, except he said it in the language there.
Yeah.
And he also in this, the article that he wrote to accompany it.
He said hey, there's a bunch of different things we could do with this old military base.
But there's a housing crisis right now.
The prices of apartments and rents and all that are really, really high.
So young people are getting forced out of the city or can't move to the city.
Let's turn this into affordable housing.
And he said, and by affordable housing, I mean just free.
Come build your house here.
Let's turn this into an anarchist compound.
And I think the local colorful community answered the call pretty much immediately.
Yeah, I mean you put out a call for anarchist commune free rent and doesn't matter where you are in the world.
You're going to get some people knock on your door pretty quickly with their patchouli in their hacky sacks.
And they were all in, certainly in Denmark.
As far as the name Christiania, there's a bunch of stories.
It could have been named after the king who commissioned the barracks, or maybe a twist on that neighborhood that you talked about, the Christian Schoen.
Or maybe Oslo pre-1925.
So no one can quite pinpoint exactly why it was named Christiania, but that is what it was so dubbed.
Right.
And that's what it's still dubbed today, because it is probably the most successful anarchist squat in history.
Yeah, for sure.
It's been around for 70 years, or no, 50 years.
Hey, buddy, I was born in 71.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's been around as long as Chuck, and Chuck's been around, so it's pretty impressive.
Yeah, it's 55 years old, let's just say it.
Like you said, it was...
I don't know if you said it, but they had a pretty good start there, because you know, it was just abandoned by the military in 1971.
So it's not like it was falling apart or anything like that.
Right.
It wasn't like fancy, but the buildings were all pretty great and they had electricity and running water.
And as they got going, it wasn't.
It wasn't like, hey, let's get together and be a community.
It was just like, hey, you can come here and do whatever you want.
But one thing I love about people is when you get enough people together for a period of time.
They don't like too much chaos and they all tend to come together.
I feel like maybe it doesn't always work out, but initially they feel like they all seem to come together and say like hey, let's get like organized a little bit.
Yeah, it's very Hobbesian.
Yeah.
And the point of that is is that these, this group that started out as an anarchist commune and not even a commune, I guess, just a bunch of anarchist squatters formed an anarchist commune.
Like you said, they came together.
They started making rules because even anarchists love rules.
Sure.
The first rule was no violence, which is a pretty good first rule.
And that was the only rule for quite a long time, actually.
And the way that these anarchist squatters who lived in Christiania Enforce the rules was through like social pressure exclusion, shunning.
They they police themselves.
Right.
So if you, if you did commit violence, you would be forced out of this, this neighborhood, one way or another.
And that was essentially one of the first things they came together to do was to kind of self-police.
And then the second thing they came together to do was to take care of the trash.
Yeah.
Because there are two things that people do in any situation, especially when there are no rules.
They'll fight and they'll generate garbage and just leave it places.
Yeah.
So they said hey, you know, that was literally like the first thing they did is they formed a team, a garbage team, to deal with the waste.
Yeah.
Businesses started to open up a little bit, and it didn't take long, within a few years, kind of like by the mid 70s.
It was its own little society in there.
They had communal baths that they built.
They had cafes.
They had shop collectives.
They had a kindergarten.
They had a theater, a few theaters, I think, but the largest is the Gray Hall, which is still there today.
I think I looked up the capacity.
It looks like it seats about 1,500 people.
Oh, wow.
And they've had some like Bob Dylan played there, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine both played there.
So did NoFX, Morrissey, Prodigy.
Did Morrissey show up though?
Probably not.
Yeah.
He was scheduled.
Yeah.
And I saw Steve Ignorant from Crass played there too.
Who's that?
I don't know that.
Crass, the punk band Crass.
I've never heard of them.
Yes, you have.
I've talked about them before.
I've never heard of them.
And I know you listen to everything I say.
All right.
So Christiana was obviously.
I think they had their.
Their motto at first was black sheep from all classes unite.
And they attracted a lot of artists, obviously, early on.
And still, the place is kind of teeming with art.
You can just look up pictures or you can go on YouTube.
And there are quite a few YouTube videos of people just doing like a little walking tour.
And it's awesome.
It looks like, you know, there's murals everywhere.
They started hosting plays and musicals at the Gray Hall over the years.
And it's just sort of a lovely place.
If you're into art, you know any kind of visual or musical art.
Yeah, I think I said there were about 800 to 900 residents.
I saw about 150 of those are kids.
And there are children who are raised, like you said, they've established kindergartens there.
And there's a guy named Lucas Forshamer.
He's the lead singer of a group, a band called Lucas Graham.
And they sing in English.
I think they're biggish.
From what I saw, it's kind of pop country almost.
Okay.
He was born and raised in Christiania and I was reading a Rolling Stone article with him and it was really interesting.
Because he seems very mellow and nice and open.
But one of his quotes was that he learned how to mix a Molotov cocktail before he learned how to mix a Long Island iced tea.
Wow.
Which is interesting because they generally I mean we'll talk about when things got a little violent, but they're a peaceful people.
They are.
But they also, you know, the cops show up whenever they want.
And this is like a group of anarchist squatters and they don't really like police presences.
And yeah.
Yeah.
So it's a there's this real undercurrent under this whole story because the.
It's a generally positive story, but you also can't forget we're talking about anarchists squatting in the middle of a modern city and being pressured from outside and pushing back on that pressure in ways that you know you can't forget.
Yeah, for sure.
So I think we sort of teased a bit of a dark side.
And why don't we take a break and we'll talk about another type of person who moved to Christiania right after this?
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
Okay, if you know me, you know this.
I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.
So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
We're with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
We just have to find it.
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
My first guest is Paris Houghton, Shakira, Luke and Yerin, Samira and Gracie.
I'm so excited.
On the bouncy bed.
You have surprises.
Many surprises.
Welcome to Suite 305, where the group chat comes to life.
What up?
It's like a way of saying, hello, friend.
Hello, best friend.
Hello, sister.
What up?
What up?
Mira, nunca lo había hablado con nadie.
Excepto con mis hijos.
Mis hijos sí saben.
Yes.
Sé mi amante.
Uf.
Punch.
Qué increíble.
Ya, la telenovela.
You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst.
It's limited.
¿No hay alguien que te falta?
Como que tú dices, me gustaría colaborar con esta persona.
This is Suite 305.
Listen to Suite 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Manga Shatigular and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive.
This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us.
I learned about some rad science.
I can make a brain for you and then we can test what drug is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain.
Here's some hard truths.
I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration.
And get myself into a world of trouble.
I'd say probably start bone smashing.
That doesn't work.
Make it look more defined.
They say it works.
I don't know.
Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right.
So we mentioned that lots of like cool, free spirited artists moved to Christiania and put on plays and musicals and painted walls and did all kinds of fun stuff open shops and cafes.
But also that became the what was known as the Greenlight District where, even though marijuana was illegal in Denmark, they would sell drugs there, mainly pot.
And it was called Pusher Street.
They sold the street where they sold the drugs was ended up being called Pusher Street.
It was generally, like I said, selling weed and hash, not the biggest deal.
But anytime you have that kind of thing, you know somebody will come in wanting heroin or acid or you know whatever you name a drug.
And harder drugs did kind of come in and it got pretty out of hand.
And they had a lot of problems with the cops and eventually gangs over the years.
Yeah, they did.
Because, I mean, marijuana is not recreational.
Marijuana was not and I think still is not legal in Denmark.
So this is like flagrant open selling of hash in particular.
And because this is a black market, the people who are willing to kind of step up and, you know, offer those services or those products are criminal elements.
So those gangs in particular, how are we going to say this?
The BS Motorcycle Club?
Yeah, I mean, everyone knows what that is.
We don't cuss on this show, but that was one of their names.
And then the world-famous Hells Angels.
I think you mean the H-E double hockey sticks angels.
That's right.
Thank you.
They, those two gangs, ended up trying to take over Pusher Street.
And there was actually a gang war from 1983 to 1986 between those two gangs.
And a lot of it played out on Pusher Street.
Now, like you said, the people who live there are pretty much peace-loving.
They're self-governing.
They're just generally mellow people and all of a sudden there's motorcycle gangs at a war in the middle of your town.
And I saw there was an article by, I think, a guy in Vanity Fair, of all places, about this And he said if you want to imagine Pusher Street, imagine a quaint little small town with a strip mall going right through the middle down Main Street with 40 liquor stores on it.
Yeah.
That's essentially what he said this is like.
So this just basically developed.
And remember, these people didn't plan Pusher Street.
It just started to happen.
And then it got out of hand, certainly out of their hands, because they're anarchists.
And they can't call the cops because they don't believe that kind of stuff.
They can't stick the government on these people.
They don't believe in that kind of stuff.
So they had to do whatever they could to kind of try to keep this element out as much as possible.
And they really had a hard time with it for decades.
Yeah, I mean.
One of the other rules that they eventually brought in was that you can't wear gang colors.
I think by 2004, supposedly or reportedly, up to 25% of Christiania was reliant on the drug economy.
And that same Vanity Fair article said that Pusher Street had the biggest hash market on the planet and said it basically had 40 different stalls selling 40 different brands of hashish.
And the cops in 2016 estimated that the drug trade on Pusher Street was worth about 100 million American dollars a year, or one billion kroner.
So it was like that way for decades and decades.
There was violence.
There was at least one killing.
I think the cops in 1987 found a dismembered body under the floor of one of the gang's hangouts.
And there was just a lot of push and pull over the years with the police trying to rid that scene from there.
And certainly the people, you know, like most of the people on the inside wanting it gone.
Yeah, I mean there were, like there were, I think the Hells Angels eventually overpowered the BS Motorcycle Club to the point where they folded because they kept carrying out broad daylight hits on the BS Motorcycle Club's leaders.
And one of those took place at Christiania.
As recently as 2023, there was a fatal stabbing, fatal shootings in 2021 and 2022.
There was a shooting that injured three people, one of whom was a cop.
So you can imagine like if there are certain liberal vanguards of Danish society, they're like let them live, let them stay.
This is a social experiment.
The cops in Copenhagen hate Christiania and are just, I get the impression pull their hair out over the idea that this is just allowed to continue, especially when cops start getting shot and other people get murdered in broad daylight in this place.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, they had in 1992 like an 18-month campaign to get all the drugs out of there.
That didn't work.
At one point, they were patrolling 24-7.
There is.
In 2004 they had built The cops had built a Pusher Street replica at their training facility so they could literally train for like exactly how to handle that area.
And there was a song, even that the 4th District Police Department wrote a song about the dealers that had the line clear out Christiania, take the S down.
They will never, never smoke a joint again.
That's what happens when cops write songs, by the way.
Right, I know.
They also, in 2022 alone, they raided Pusher Street 100 times.
Yeah.
And they kept bouncing back.
It kept bouncing back.
I saw that, even though they didn't call the police, this was somebody who was explaining it on Quora.
I'm not quite sure what their bona fides are.
Yeah, so take this with a grain of salt, but they seem to not be quite sensationalist.
They said that at one point the residents of christiania essentially baited a police raid, is how they put it.
They i'm not quite sure, but they did something that they knew would attract the police.
They knew it was coming and so they warned everybody who lived in christiania about it, And they didn't warn any of the dealers on Pusher Street to basically use the cops to get these guys out of Pusher Street.
So that's, I guess, one tactic you could possibly use if you're not willing to call the cops.
But they also themselves would go disassemble these stalls.
They would, as a group, stand up to the Hells Angels in the BS Motorcycle Club and push them out.
But even if the cops were doing it, if the residents of Christiania were doing it, it did not matter.
For decades.
They would come back and they would sell hash and make money and essentially intimidate the people who live there.
That's right.
And they even said, never mind.
That was a terrible joke.
I'm not even going to say it.
But in 2024, they finally, finally, this was just a couple of years ago, dug up Pusher Street.
They literally dug up and got rid of that street altogether and got everyone out of there.
And they I think Copenhagen announced plans to build some public housing on where Pusher Street used to be.
So, you know, there's like local crafts and stuff being sold on Pusher Street now.
It remains to be seen if the drug trade is going to come back, but hopefully that did the trick and it's out of there.
And one of the other things I saw, or actually two other things that Christiania residents did over the years to keep drugs out as best they could.
The first one I think came in the late 70s when heroin started to make a real appearance.
And they were like, you know what?
We don't want heroin here.
We don't want hard drugs.
You want to drink.
You want to smoke hash.
You want to smoke pot.
Whatever.
That's fine.
But we as a group are going to say we don't want heroin here.
So they essentially forced out the heroin dealers and they said you heroin addicts, if you want to stay, stay.
But you have to quit heroin.
You have to go into treatment and get this.
They said, we're going to test your urine randomly to make sure that you're staying clean.
And if you're not, we're going to force you out.
And I looked into how they did that.
And apparently there was a resident who could detect heroin in urine with just one tiny sip.
At any rate, they really did drug test people.
That was the first time they did it.
The second time they appealed to the public and they said, help save Christiania, buy your hash somewhere else.
So they were actually actively trying to keep people from buying hash in Christiania, which apparently is supposedly not actually cool to do, but it's such a tourist spot and tourists just will go by hash whenever they can, out in broad daylight, that it was just thriving for decades.
Yeah, I mean I think they said they get in the peak vacation summertime.
They get as many as 10000 people touristing that area every day.
For sure.
So it's a very busy area, but it seems like they've eradicated the drugs, at least for now.
So their relationship with the government over the years has sort of been up and down, and we'll talk about all that right after this.
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
Okay, if you know me, you know this.
I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.
So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
We're gonna have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
We just have to find it.
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
My first guest is Paris Houghton, Shakira, Luke and Yerin, Samira and Gracie.
I'm so excited.
On the bouncy bed.
You have surprises.
Many surprises.
Welcome to Suite 305, where the group chat comes to life.
What up?
It's like a way of saying, like, hello, friend.
Hello, best friend.
Hello, sister.
What up?
What up?
Mira, nunca lo había hablado con nadie.
Excepto con mis hijos.
Mis hijos sí saben.
Yes.
Sé mi amante.
Uf.
Uf.
Qué increíble.
Ya, la telenovela.
You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst.
It's limited.
¿No hay alguien que te falta?
Como que tú dices, me gustaría colaborar con esta persona.
This is Suite 305.
Listen to Suite 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Mungisha Tegeler and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive.
This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us.
I learned about some rad science.
I can make a brain for you and then we can test what drug is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain.
Here's some hard truths.
I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration.
And get myself into a world of trouble.
I'd say probably start bone smashing.
That doesn't work.
Make it look more defined.
They say it works.
I don't know.
Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So Chuck, you were saying that the government has had a love-hate or lenient, not-so-lenient relationship with Christiania over the years?
Right,
That's right.
How?
Well, I mean, you know, they came in and took over a military base.
They were building fences and they were getting torn down and sort of like yeah, you can have a playground.
And then, OK, you can live there.
And you know, I think as it started to build there was just some raised eyebrows, but they weren't causing a lot of trouble.
So they let them go.
And by 1972, the government's official stance was like, all right, this is a social experiment.
Let's see how it goes.
Right.
So you think, oh, that's great.
They're going to leave us alone.
Nope.
The next year, the government was saying, like, we're not sure about this social experiment thing.
Everybody needs to leave by April 1st, 1976.
And the people of Christiania did not take that sitting down.
They sued the Danish government.
They protested.
The courts ruled against Christiania over and over again.
But despite you know, legally being able to go in and clear everybody out, the Danish government just would never go that far.
They threatened to, they came up with plans, they came up with compromises, but they never went so far as to just go in and remove everybody.
Yeah.
I mean, they've threatened eviction and like had official eviction decrees and then revoked.
But yeah, like you said, they I think it would be it was so well known by that point.
It would be a really bad look for the government to go in and, you know, rip like literal families out of there that were basically doing pretty good.
I mean, from what I saw, the only kind of downside was the hash trade that went on there for so long.
And that was just in one localized area.
Yeah, and that seems to be how the government, and the police in particular, really kept the heat on the residents of Christiania.
Like you said, that seemed to be the only real problem with it.
I've seen if you remove that whole drug trade, the crime in Christiania is very, very low.
So regardless, because nobody could get a handle on the drug trade.
In 1989 the government actually passed what they called the Christiania Act.
They said you guys can stay, but you're going to have to work with us a little more.
Pub owners are going to have to start getting liquor licenses.
We're going to need to certify your kindergarten teachers, stuff like that, right?
Like there had to be some sort of governmental intervention.
Their kids have to actually go to government schools outside of Christiania.
There was just more involvement that the government insisted on.
Yeah, a couple years before that, in 1987, they said, all right, the new plan is...
You can stay here, but we're going to divide up this area and the neighborhood is going to be rezoned into two areas.
The military ramparts where a lot of your homes are is going to be a conservation zone.
And you're going to have to move out eventually.
And then the second area is what we're going to call the urban zone.
And you can basically stay there.
And then, in a couple of years, they announced all the plans, just to make things a little more official.
Right.
And it stayed that way for a couple of decades.
And then 2001, the government's like, just forget that.
Forget it again.
We're going to evict you guys.
So finally, in 2011, the government in Denmark said all right, you guys can keep doing your thing, but you got to buy this land.
Like, we got to get something out of it.
And that was a tough nut to crack for the residents there because, first of all, like They didn't have that kind of dough.
And second of all, that was like not what they were all about.
Like individual property ownership wasn't their jam.
And so a lot of them were turned off by the whole idea of kind of owning that property.
But then I think they saw the writing on the wall which is like well, this is what allows to stay at least.
So they raised the money.
They didn't go out and buy individual parcels of land.
They set up a foundation that would cover all of the land that they needed.
And they raised the dough.
They raised 12 and a half million kroner.
And that was enough to buy about a quarter of that land and then pay rent for the rest of it.
Yeah, get this.
They also took out bank loans, which can't you see them like showing up with, like their hair kind of parted and like styled as best as they can, but they're still wearing like their leather vest with the anarchy symbol painted on the back.
I mean, that's the movie version.
Yeah, right.
So the way that they got around that private ownership thing was they pooled everything together and they bought it collectively.
So Christiania itself owns the land that these people live on.
The people pay rent to the community.
They also pay essentially a HOA fee.
Right. of something like 176 kroner, I think, or dollars worth a month.
Well, 1,350 kroner.
Well, see, that's the tradeoff is the rent is about $4.67 a month American.
Right.
But the maintenance fees are 196 a month.
So they're basically saying like hey, you can live here for almost nothing, but it still costs money to run this place and you're all going to pitch in for that.
Exactly, right?
So that's actually a pretty good workaround.
If you're an anarchist and you need to make a deal with the capitalist devil, that's about the best you can hope for.
So the government was like, well, it's your land now.
Okay, we can't do anything.
But that's about a quarter of the land.
There's still a bunch of land left.
And if you don't buy this, we're going to build public housing.
That seems to be the threat ironically, that the government now uses over Christiania is we're going to build housing that is open to the public and you're not going to have any say about who moves in, because over the years,
In another great stroke of irony, the people of Christiania have gotten extremely selective of who moves in.
Yeah, I mean, you have to do an interview now to move in.
It used to be like they would just accept anybody.
But, you know, they got more organized.
I think there are 14 different neighborhood groups there now.
And, you know, there's a lot of I think it just got a little more complicated as time went on.
Like there has to be consensus for changing even very minor things like changing out the windows of a building.
I think the New York Times did an article on it that said it was like an out-of-control condo association.
And, you know, like I said, you have to go through an interview process just to live there now.
So I think sort of the idyllic days have come and gone.
But from what I read about just contemporary articles now, it seems to still be kind of a great thing for people who live there.
Yeah, for sure.
Like there's a sewer system.
Like we said, Garbage Collection's been there a long time.
They have recycling centers.
They have the Gray Hall.
There's cafes, bistros.
There's just a lot.
It's a city.
It's like a little city that was self-built and also self-governed.
They also Chuck, have their own currency, the lund L-O-O, with a slash through it, the metal O N, which means the wage.
It's apparently equal to about 50 Danish kroner, and it's a minted coin.
Made of copper.
I could not find where they have it minted, but they have minted currency in Christiania.
There's a pot leaf and a snail on one side.
Nice.
On the other side, it says Freetown of Christiania and live and let others live.
Wow.
That's pretty nice.
But they have minted coins.
How?
How?
You just get a coin minted.
I can't.
I have no idea where to go get a coin minted.
And I don't even know how to begin to find out.
We could get a coin minted.
There's like podcasts and people do like challenge coins and stuff all the time.
So it's a service you can have.
Well, are my eyes open now?
You've never gotten a challenge coin from someone?
I don't even know what that means.
Well, it's like not even.
I think there are other names for them too, but you can get like a coin made.
Like Ben and Adam, I think, for Greatest Generation had coins made.
Well, they didn't give me one.
You could give them to people.
My brother-in-law in the Marines.
They got a coin minted for his I was about to say graduation, his retirement.
And so he gave me one of those coins.
So it's a thing.
That's awesome.
Will you give me a coin?
Sure.
I'll just hop on over to Coins R Us and input my, what do you want?
I'll have Momo on one side and Yumi on the other.
Perfect.
And maybe like a palm tree and a Georgia peach.
Can you put them both in profile and make them look like queens?
Well, they already do.
Okay, great.
Shouldn't be too hard.
That's a great coin, man.
Thank you.
Let's see.
What else?
Oh, I talked about how there are only a couple of rules to start, and the first one was violence.
The second one was no hard drugs.
As the gangs became more and more of a problem, you couldn't wear gang colors.
No stealing.
No bulletproof vest.
That's actually a pretty grim rule.
Yeah.
You get shot, you're going to die.
Exactly.
Take it like a man.
And guns and knives.
That was all part of one rule.
And no running.
No running.
That's right.
Why?
They said that running causes chaos or panic or something.
Panic, yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
And they were saying that that usually indicates that it's a police raid.
And so other people are going to start running, too.
So don't run.
Just walk.
Yeah.
Lifeguard rules.
Exactly.
So the current state of Christiania is exactly the same.
They managed to get Pusher Street closed down, or at least they got the pushers out of Pusher Street.
That public housing is still on the offing.
I think it's supposed to start in 2029.
And the neighborhood's very divided about it.
Some people are like, no, we want to know who's moving in here.
We want to vet who moves in here.
And we don't want, you know, 300 public houses built in the middle.
I think they were gonna build it in the middle, like right down Pusher Street, to kind of make it so Pusher Street never comes back.
The other faction, I guess, is like, no, this is actually great because we need affordable housing.
Copenhagen is very, very expensive still.
So this is going to bring like younger people and artists and allow people to kind of move in.
And we need that kind of new blood, too.
Yeah, for sure.
So I talked about different factions, right?
There's this author who, I think back in 1981 he was a Christiania resident but also a scholar, and he wrote a book.
Burgs Madsen is how I'm going to say his name.
And he essentially divided the population of Christiania into three socioeconomic or essentially three cultural strata.
One was the top were the activists who he calls the holy ones.
The bottom stratum was the, he called them trash.
And then the middle stratum was the liberalists.
And he essentially said that the liberalists came from the middle class outside of Christiania, moved to Christiania.
And I get the impression we're like the least radical, the least anarchistic.
And he essentially asserts all the way back in 1981.
He points to the liberalists as the ones who led to this kind of normalizing, compromising of Christiania.
That makes it a little less radical than it originally was.
I thought you were going to say hash users, hash makers, hash dealers, and hash haters.
And the hash itself.
It has rights in Christiania.
Oh, that's right.
That's a group into itself.
So, yeah, that's the future of Christiania.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
It's on my list to visit if I ever get over that way.
Oh, I can't wait to go to Copenhagen someday.
I want to just go to all of Scandinavia.
Yeah, Oslo.
Oslo, Stockholm.
Everything I've heard is just great.
It's just like if you like nice people just riding their bikes everywhere, then it's for you.
Yeah, for sure.
I think Monocle magazine called Copenhagen the world's most livable city.
Nice.
All right.
We'll go there someday, Chuck.
All right.
And I need to go figure out some other Scandinavian cities to visit, too, so I can rattle them off.
That's right.
Chuck said that's right.
So it's time for listener mail.
This is from Troy.
Hey guys, been enjoying the show for a few years and I saw the Camp David episode and I had to listen right away because my dad was a captain in the Marines and stationed at Camp David from 1971 to 1973.
We lived down the hill from the camp in military housing and When the president Nixon at the time was not there, we were generally able to use the facilities on the camp.
Everyone that was allowed on the camp or in the camp had their profile with picture in the guard post and you could drive right up to the gate.
At the time I was five to seven years old and actually learn to swim in that figure eight pool.
There's a picture out there of Gerald Ford and his dog by the pool at the exact spot.
I remember just going for it and jumping in.
My dad passed away in 2019, and while going through his stuff, I found his short autobiography.
I was really surprised at how candidly he described some of this, because he never really talked about it that much.
Below is an excerpt of his memories.
There and he included a really nice page from his dad that I read and it was awesome.
I still have some memorabilia from the time there as well, including Camp David playing cards and a Russian clock given by some dignitaries that visited.
Awesome.
Keep up the great work.
And that is from Troy Buescher.
Well, thanks a lot, Troy.
That's a great story.
And if you want to be like Troy and tell us a personal story, especially a sweet one about your dad that has to do with one of our episodes, we want to hear from you.
Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
