Stuff You Should Know
Stuff You Should Know

Freetown Christiania

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The sort of commune of Freetown Christiania in Denmark may not be what it used to be, but it's still true to many of its original values. Learn all about this unique neighborhood today.See omnystudio....

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Welcome to "Stuff You Should Know" a production

of "I Heart Radio." Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. We're going on over at a foggy Copenhagen town. Yeah, for this episode of "Stuff You Should Know."

That's right, because we were talking about a little sort of village neighborhood anarchist commune in Copenhagen, Denmark called "Streetown, Christiania," which was founded in 1971, and it has a pretty interesting story. Well, yeah, you have me an anarchist squatter

of commune, 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 territory." And in fact, when you walk into Christiania, I just want to say, "Christiana, so bad."

I know, me too. The extra eye 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 this. 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, parts of 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 all together

and there was a completely abandoned military base there by 1971. Yeah. So I mean, 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 and nowhere. It's like right there. Let's do something with it.

And there is a neighborhood right next to it, called Christian's Havana, Christians 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 the abandoned military barracks. And you know, I actually looked up the V in Denmark and how you treated that thing. Did I, but you're it, is that how I--

Well, I don't know, because 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,

Is treated as a W when it's in the middle or rear of a word.

OK, so let me try this again.

Christian's Havana. Maybe that's how they pronounce it.

I don't know. I'm genuinely curious because that's always thrown me.

Christian's Havana, 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 and the neighborhoods had 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, Luke Wigsen. 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 Hoid Bloddut.

It means a new leaf. Oh, I saw it meant the main paper.

Oh, the main leaf. That's what I saw. OK.

Like new leaf, too, because you can turn those over and get this happened. That's what I thought. So he was the editor of that thing. He needed some, you know, some content to put in there one week. And so he and some of his buddies went and did, you know,

kind of a fun little, hey, we're going to take over this old barrack. And so they did article, they took pictures of them like having techniques 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 through a company, 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 they 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 knocking on your door pretty quickly with their patrulean, their hacky sex. And they were all in, certainly in Denmark. And as far as the name, Christiania, there's a bunch of stories that could have been named after the king who commissioned the barracks or maybe a twist on that neighborhood

that you talked about, the Christian shone 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, how was born in 70 coin? 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, they don't know if you said it. But they had a pretty good start there because it was just abandoned by the military in 1971.

So it's not like it was falling a part 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 it maybe it doesn't always work out.

But initially, they feel like they all seem to come together and say, hey, let's get organized a little bit. Yeah, it's very Hobbsian. Yeah. And the point of that is that this group that started out as an anarchist commune, or 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. It was a pretty good first rule.

And that was the only rule for quite a long time, actually. And the way that these anarchists squatters who lived in Christianity enforce the rules was through like social pressure, exclusion, shunning, they police themselves, right?

If you, if you did commit violence, you would be forced out of this neighborh...

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, 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 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, you know, 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 it looked up the capacity, it looks like it seats about 1500 people. No, wow. And they've had some like Bob Dylan played there, Metallica, and Rage gets a machine both played there. So did no effects, Morrissey, prodigy, did Morrissey show up though.

Probably not. Yeah. He was scheduled. Yeah. And I saw Steve Ignorant from Cras played there, too.

Uh, who's that? I don't know that.

Cras, the punk band, Cras, the never kiss, yes you have.

I have never heard of them. And I know you listened to everything I say.

All right, so, uh, Cristiano was obviously, I think they had their,

their motto at Versus Black sheep from all classes unite. And, um, they attracted a lot of artists, obviously, early on and still. The place is is kind of teaming with art if you, um, you can just look up pictures or you can, uh, go on YouTube and there are quite a few YouTube videos of people just doing like a little walking tour of free time, Cristiano.

And it's, it's awesome, it looks like, uh, you know, there's murals everywhere. Um, they, uh, started hosting plays and musicals at, at the gray hall over the years. And it's just sort of a, a lovely place if you're into art, you know, any kind of visual or, or musical art. Yeah, well, 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 kindergarten's there. Um, and there's a guy named Lucas Forschhammer. Uh, he's, uh, the lead singer of a group of band called Lucas Graham, uh, and they sing in English.

I think they're big-ish, uh, from what I saw at the kind of pop country, almost.

He was born and raised in Cristiano, and I was reading a Rolling Stone article with him, um, and it was really interesting, and because he seems very mellow and nice and open. But, um, one of his quotes was that he learned how to mix a malletov cocktail before he learned how to mix a long island iced tea. Wow, which is interesting because they generally, uh, I mean, we'll talk about things when things got a little violent, but they're a piece of full of 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, um, yeah. So it's, uh, there's this real undercurrent under this whole story, because it's a, 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, um, being pressured from outside and pushing back on that pressure in ways that, um, you know,

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, uh, another type of person who moved to Christianity right after this. Hey, I'm Hota Cotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hota Cotby, together. We're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges,

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What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to here's the thing. On the iHeart Radio App Appal Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we mentioned that lots of like cool, free-spirited artists moved to Christianity and put on plays and musicals and painted walls and did all kinds of fun stuff open shops and cafes. But also, that became what was known as the Greenlight District where even though marijuana was

illegal in Denmark, they would sell drugs there. Mainly Pat, and it was called push-a-street. They sold the street where they sold the drugs was ended up being called push-a-street. It was generally like I said, selling weed and hash, not the biggest deal. But anytime you have that kind of thing, 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 offer those services or those products are criminal elements. So those gangs in in particular, how are we going to say this, the BS motorcycle club? Yeah, I mean everybody knows what that is. We don't cut on the show, but that's sure that was one of their names. And then the world famous Hell's Angels. I think you mean the H.E. Double hockey sticks. 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. Yeah. And now 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 like plan Pusher Street. It just started to happen and then it got out of hand, certainly out of their hands because they're anarchists. 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 Christianity 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 hash eesh.

And the cops in 2016 estimated that the drug trade on Pusher Street was worth

About a hundred million American dollars a year or one billion crooner.

way for decades and decades that 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 gangs hangouts. And it was just a lot of push and pull over the ears with the police trying to rid that scene from there. And certainly the people, you know, most of the people on the inside wanting it gone. Yeah. I mean,

there were like, there were, I think that the Hell's Angels eventually overpowered the BS murder

cycle club to the point where they folded because they kept carrying out broad daylight hits on the BS murder cycle clubs leaders. And one of those took place at Christianity 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 if there's certain liberal vanguard of Danish society there, let them live, let them stay. This is an

socio-experiment. The cops in Copenhagen hate Christianity 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 and brought 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's 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. The fourth district police department wrote a song about the dealers that had the line clear out Christianity.

Take the S down, they will never, never smoke a joint again. That's right. That's when cops

write songs by the way. Right, I know. They also in 2022 alone, they rated 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 their bone of feet is 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 Christianity

essentially baited a police raid as how they put it. They, I'm not quite sure, but they did something that they knew were to track the police. They knew it was coming. And so they warned everybody who lived in Christianity 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, they also, themselves would go

disassemble these stalls. They, they would as a group stand up to the Hell's Angels in the BS Motorcycle Club and, and push them out. But even if the cops are doing it, if the residents of Christianity are 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 lived there. That's right. And they

even said, never mind, that was the terrible joke I'm going to say it. But in 2024, they finally,

finally, there's just a couple of years ago, dug up pusher street. They literally dug up and got rid of that street all together and got everyone out of there. And they think Copenhagen announced plans to build a pump 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 are actually two other things that Christianity, a resident, stayed 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 repair. 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, 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 was like I looked into how they did then. Apparently there was a resident who could detect heroin in urine with just one tiny sip. Is it? Are there any rate they really did drug test people?

That was the first time they did it.

"Hope save Christianity by your hash somewhere else." So they were actually actively trying to

keep people from buying hash on Christianity. Which apparently supposedly not actually cool to do, but it's such a tourist spot and tourists 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 like

vacation summertime. They get like as many as 10,000 people touristing that area every day. For sure. So it's very busy area, but it seems like they've eradicated the drugs at least for now. So the relationship with the government over the years is that's sort of been up and down and we'll talk about all that right after this. Hey, I'm Hota-Katby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hota-Katby, together. We're going to have

meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. 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 post-partner question. I was not prepared for post-partner anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota-Katby on the IHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Harry Sulton,

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with. Robin Eye was always a great hang. We would sit in kibits for hours and then eventually get

around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together, laughing.

Lawyer, Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes, and I say to if you bring the right case at the right time and energy quality. Yeah, when there's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentaries all about your ear. What do you

hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to hear the thing on the IHeart Radio 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 Christianity 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, okay, you can live there and you know, I think 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 this alone. Now, 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 Christianity did not take that

sitting down. They sued the Danish government. They protested the course rule against Christianity 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 an...

Yeah. I mean, they've threatened a vision 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 fam, like literal families out of there.

That we're 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 the heat on the residents of Christianity. That, 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 Christianity 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 Christianity Act. As I 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 Christianity. There's just more involvement that the government insisted on. Yeah, a couple of 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's the 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. But then I think they saw the writing on the wall, which is like, well, this is

would allow us to stay at least. Right. So they raised the money. They didn't, you know, 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, they raised the dough. They raised 12 and a half million Corona. 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 you see them like showing up with like their hair kind of parted and like, style, as best as they can, but they're still wearing like their leather vest with the anarchy symbol painted on the back. Oh, I mean, that's the very version. Right. So the way that they got around that private ownership thing was they pulled everything together and they bought it

collectively. So Christianity itself owns the land that people live on, the people pay rent to the community. They also pay essentially a HOA fee of something like 176 Corona, I think, or $1,000 worth a month. Well, 1350 Corona, we'll see that's the trade off. Is the rent is about $4 and 67 cents 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's 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 work around.

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, that'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, the government now uses over Christianity 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 Christianity 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 they're 14 different neighborhood groups

There now.

went on. Like there has to be consensus for changing even very minor things, like changing out the windows of the building. I think the New York Times did a 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've 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 collections been there a long time. They have recycling centers. They have the gray haul. There's a cafes, bees' shows. There's just a lot, there's like a, 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, the loon, L-O, with the slash through it, the metal, L-O, and which means the wage. It's apparently equal to about 50 Danish croner. And it's a minted coin, made of copper. It could not find where they have it minted, but they have minted currency in, um, in Christianity. There's a pot leaf in a snail on one side. Nice. On the other side, it says free town of Christianity and live and let others live.

Well, that's pretty nice. But they have minted coins. How?

Yeah, 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. They're like podcasts and people do like challenge coins and stuff all the time. So it's a service you can have.

Well, or my eyes open now, you've never gotten a challenge coin from someone or I don't even know what

that means. Well, it's like, not even, uh, I think there are other names form too, but you can get like a coin made, uh, like been an atom. I think for greatest generation had coins made. Well, it didn't give me one. And you could give them to people. My, my brother-in-law in the Marines, they got a coin minted for his, um, that was about say graduation. His retirement. And so he gave me one of those coins. So it's a thing. That's awesome. Um, will you give me a coin? Sure.

I'll just hop on over to coins are us and input my, what do you want to have Momo on one side and you me on the other? Perfect. And maybe like a, like a palm tree and a Georgia peach. Can you put them both in profile and make them look like coins? Well, they already do. Okay. Great. Should be too hard. That's a great coin, man. Thank you. Uh, let's see, what else? Oh, um, I talked about how they were only a couple of rules to

start in the first one was violence. The second one was no hard drugs. Uh, as the gangs got, um,

more, became more and more of a problem. Uh, you couldn't wear gang colors. Yeah. No stealing, no bulletproof vest. And that's actually a pretty grim rule. Yeah. You get shot. You're going to die. Exactly. Take it like a man. Uh, and guns and knives that was all part of one rule. It was no running. No running. That's right. Why? Uh, they said that running causes chaos or panic or something. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And they, 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 and just walk. Yeah. Life guard rules. Exactly. So the, the current state of Christianity is exactly the same. They manage to get, um, push or street, close down or at least they got the pushers out of

a push or street. Uh, that public housing is still on the offing. I think it's supposed to start in

2029. And the, the neighborhoods 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. Yeah. Um, and we don't want, you know, 300 public houses built in the middle. I think they were going to build it in the middle like

right down push or street to kind of make it so push or street never comes back. The other, um,

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, and allow people to kind of move in and we need that kind of new blood to, yeah, for sure. So I talked about different factions, right? There's this, um, author who I think back in 1981, he's a Christianity resident, but also a scholar and he wrote a book, um, Borg's Madson,

is how I'm going to say his name. And he essentially divided the, um, the, the population of Christianity into three socioeconomic or essentially three cultural strata. One was the top

Where the activists who he calls the holy ones, the bottom stratum was the, h...

And then the middle stratum was the liberalists. And he essentially said that the liberalists

came from the middle class outside of Christianity, moved to Christianity 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 Christianity that makes it a little less radical than it originally was. I thought you're going to say hash users, hash makers, hash dealers, and hash haters.

And the hash itself. It has rights in Christianity. Oh, that's right. That's a group into itself.

So yeah, that's the future of Christianity. Uh, you got anything else?

I got nothing else. It's on my list of is it if I ever get over that way. Oh, I can't wait to go to Copenhagen someday. I wanted to just go to all of Scandinavia. Yeah, Oslo. Oslo, um, Stockholm. Everything I've heard is just great. It's just like, if you like, nice people to just ride in their bikes everywhere, then it's for you. Yeah, for sure. I think monical 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 write all 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 in station 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 learned 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

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. I'll keep up the great work and that

is from Troy but thanks a lot Troy. That's a great story and if you want to be like Troy

and tell us a personal story especially as we want about your dad that has to do with one of our episodes we want to hear from you. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iheart radio. For more podcasts my heart radio visit the iheart radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 Kopy. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Open your free iheart radio app search. Joy 101. And listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kopy is presented by CVS. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed.

And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. I'm a Kila Hughes and rebel spirits season two is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more omages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to rebel spirits season two on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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