¶ Intro / Opening
Once you have given the bank all your money, once you've pledged all these things, the next thing that you have to give, and this is true for everyone, is you have to give up your firstborn child.
Well, guess what just happened? You just gave the bank your firstborn child because you are now going to have less children. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the family teams podcast. I'm here with my kiddos, Jackson. What's up Jackson? Hey guys. And Elisa Hope. Hey Elisa. Hi. Purveyor over at bluegrass fairy. If you want to like check out her, her, uh, little, uh, her new Instagram. We're trying it one more time. We'll see how that works.
Most of these fairy tales are going to be discussed over at my personal podcast, the Jeremy Pryor podcast, but when they hit the bullseye of family teams, I want to bring them over here and have a family teams kind of discussion around the Uh, fairy tale. So the one we're going to look at today is definitely one that I think every family needs to know about.
And so we're going to dive into who this little guy is, uh, what he means to you and to all of us is trying to build family teams. And, uh, and so again, I, the few things that have really, people that have really impacted me in terms of my understanding of fairy tales, Joseph Campbell, who says something like fairy tales are things that have never happened and are always happening.
Also, I'm very indebted to Jonathan Pegeau, who has been single handedly resurrecting fairy tales on the internet and has talked about this and many others. And so we're going to look at this one, but there's a particular lens I want to, I want to really. Study this one through with you guys. So the story of Rumpelstiltskin, I'm going to like go over the 32nd version.
And this happens three times, Rumpelstiltskin appears. And then at the very end, she's getting further and further into debt to this little guy, uh, until it really costs her her firstborn. And then when her firstborn actually is born, he comes to collect the debt. And this is the disaster that she is awaiting.
The king ordered the miller's daughter to come to the palace. He took her to a room full of straw and said to her, You must spin all this straw into gold tonight, or you shall die. Miller's daughter was locked in the room alone. She did not know what to do and began to cry. Suddenly, a dwarf came out of nowhere and asked her, Why are you crying?
And, and so. There's some incredible. True is revealed in this story about the nature of debt. So that's what the story is about. It's about how debt actually works. And it really is kind of zeroing in on how it starts, not just how it works in general. So this isn't just a Dave Ramsey course on stay out of debt.
And it's incredibly subtle lesson, but I think that where debt often starts real debt, crushing debt, things like student loans, for example, often start because a parent actually is boasting. about what they want for their child. So when I actually have conversations with, with parents, or I talk to people that have incredible amounts of debt, oftentimes they will lament, I've had these conversations many times about the fact that their parents were the ones who encouraged them, ironically, encouraged them to actually take out the debt.
I think the answer is there was something they were actually getting out of it. Their reputation was on the line. And so what happens with this father is in order to boost his reputation, he makes this claim about his daughter that forces her into debt. This is the repeated pattern of countless thousands of people that I know that get into debt.
You want to be careful. It, it looks really enticing at first. It's the easy way out. But you will probably get trapped. Why aren't fathers saying that to their children? Why is it that when you go to, uh, kids graduating from high school, that there's not a legion of fathers warning their children about the dangers of debt?
What, what are your thoughts about that? What I thought of was I saw a recent interview. There's a lot of interviews like this, but about why people in Korea aren't having children. And one of the reasons is because they're not financially stable enough to educate them, to send them to school. And it's so interesting because that's not actually true.
Until they are rolling in money, I guess, enough to send them to an academy. So that's kind of what it made me think of how it starts with parents. Yes. And as we're going to see, as we keep going into the story, I think the most brilliant thing about Rumpelstiltskin is the way it connects the reputation of those parents and actually a childbearing of the next generation.
And I think that that probably comes from a, so first of all, they're not able to financially support their child going through this, which is what gets them into debt in the first place. I think that they also think that it's best for the child to have the reputation of being able to spend strong to, uh, strong to gold, which is because they, it's more cause it's a less of reputation and more of an identity.
Yeah. I think that's, that's the, you see the status differential between the Miller. I think it's important. And this is again, another detail, the fairy tale that's often repeated virtually every time is that, that it's a, the occupation of the father is told in, in contrast to the person he's trying to ingratiate himself with the King, the Miller and the King.
The dwarf spun all the straw into gold. The next day, when the king saw this, he was astonished and pleased. He became greedier. He took the girl to a bigger room and said, Spin all this straw into gold, or you shall die. She was locked inside again, and once again, she began to cry. The tiny man came into the room once more.
The girl was locked up and once again, she began to cry. This time when the little man came to her, she said, I don't have anything to give you, sir. What will I do? He said, promise me that you will give me your firstborn child when you become the queen. The girl agreed to do so because she was not expecting to become the king's wife.
I'll give you three days. Saying this, he disappeared. All right. Oh, it's so sad what she's going through right now. So, this is, uh, this is, now we got a lot more elements of the story that need to be unpacked. And so, we want to look through some of these symbols. So we, we, the King, what does the King represent in the story?
And it's very upsetting and you're feeling very overwhelmed. And so I think this is a very common experience for. A lot of people. And so try to unpack a few elements of the story. So who is the king? So the king, I think represents sort of this system that, that really exists that, that kind of the kingdom, like in our culture, we don't have a king.
So you have the king, these sort of systems, these world systems that are filled with greed and that are threatening this poor little girl, uh, who has just become an adult, just become of age and wants, wants to find a way to squeeze her for all she's worth. Then you have Rumpelstiltskin, this, this little, this little guy.
And so you have these tensions. So you have the King or these systems that want something from you. You have the actual trap being set by the bank, by those who want to find a way to to give you something now, but they're going to throw you into a kind of debt slavery and really come after something that you absolutely will not want to give in the end.
Well, guess what just happened? You just gave the bank your firstborn child because you are now going to have less children. Now in our culture, oftentimes that's not considered necessarily a bad thing, right? Because I think part of what's occurred is that I don't think in our culture, it's just rumpled still skin coming after your firstborn child.
So we're going to see in a little bit how she tries to get out of this trap. But before we go there, yeah. What, what does this start for you guys? Any of these symbols? Need a blueprint to revise your family, to be a multi generational team on a mission. The book Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor is the book that summarizes all the big picture ideas you hear on this podcast.
Um, but really the, the banks are really just hoping that you'll get in debt to them because that's how they make money. And so it's so insane to just get acclimated to this world where everyone's out to get you pretty much they're out to get your money and in doing so it can get so serious that it robs you of having children early or other joys that could be available to you if you were more financially stable.
It's happening at night and all this whole transaction, you know, the love, her level of vulnerability and her level of naivety is really the problem. Yeah. Elisa, how about you? Yeah, I think that it's interesting. The second thing that. She gives him is her ring and how like that could also be a symbol of like people who are in debt or Pinching pennies like they can't get married either And so it's like it'll take longer like you're not only giving up your first born child later But you're giving up those years of marriage Uh, your marriage at the beginning.
So the bank wants to take it from you, but, but the, the exchange of family identity for. For all the things that these kingdoms of culture want to take from you. And then of course, how the bank wants to profit. There's a, there's a symbiotic relationship between these three elements in the story. The, the, the parents, the, the culture and the banks, these, the, they're all in league and they're not in league in any kind of way in which it's coordinated.
Yeah, I was just thinking about how it's so interesting sort of how Sidney was saying like the minimum payment trap and stuff like he's like she thought that her jewelry would be enough, like, she thought there would be no catch, like he's literally spinning straw into gold, and you offered him a tiny amount of gold.
Right. Right. Um, and then, uh, and then like suddenly they like, yeah. And the quote, like the, the, uh, even though those jewelry pieces might've been fairly early heirlooms, like there is nothing compared to the value of what they asked for in the end. You know, it's just like, they're literally, they are trinkets.
I think, I think that we have an, we have whole generations that because of the The, uh, the, the, the desires of these forces that the King, the father and the banks that, that we are seeing birth rates plummet for lots of variables. But I think this is, this is one that is so hidden that, that I think sometimes it's directly the King.
If the government were to just make everything free and we were just have, you know, a lot of taxes, but, but everything would be free, then wouldn't that cause people to want to have more children, right? And this is one of the basic misunderstandings about the nature of why people want to have children.
You know, the academy, the corporation, and the government has really stepped in to provide more meaning than the family. And so now ultimately it's, it's the government that's going to provide for you in old age. And it used to be a meaningful relationship between, uh, generations that would create that.
And now all of a sudden you are left with why, why should I have kids? Right? So, so this is much deeper. And this is one of the reasons why I love fairy tales is that they actually They show inter, interrelated, very complex concepts boiled down into symbolic form, and this is why I think this story has persevered for so long.
But he always answered, That is not my name. The next day, the Queen sent her servants all over the country to get all the possible names of the people. That night, the dwarf came to the Queen again, but she could not guess his real name. On the third day, one of the queen's servants went into the forest to find the little man.
That night when the little man came to the queen, she was already prepared. The tiny man challenged, Do you give up? Shall I take your child away? The queen smiled and replied, Is your name Harry? Is it Conrad? Oh, perhaps it is Rumpelstiltskin. Hearing his name, the tiny man screamed, Rumpelstiltskin. How could ye possibly know my name?
Wasn't it? Oh man. Okay. You want to go back and see some cool, uh, cool, uh, animation. I'm not quite sure exactly how they pulled that off, but the servants had some awesome horses. Ooh, what do you got there, Lisa? This is mine. Version of Rumble Silken, that cool illustration too. Nice, that's uh, is that in the Grimm's Fairytale book?
But there is a possibility and it's always interesting that it's in again, the symbolism of the name trying to unveil. There's something about the name. Now there's, there's. In a lot of fairy tales, when you know the name of something, especially something hidden or a spell or some word like this, it really represents you, you are able to sort of turn the tables as she is and gain power over that person.
We're going to tell you the name of Rumpelstiltskin so that you don't, you're not, you're not enslaved for the rest of your life and it's not going to be easy. It's going to be close. It's going to be, you know, some painful moments now. And part of the story is too, there's almost like a revenge motif.
You know, that basically the servant goes out, finds the secret knowledge around a fire, which is oftentimes sort of like, you know, this place of wisdom brings it back to, uh, to the, the queen. I think that part of what is happening there, there's, there often needs to be a messenger to deliver the secret code to the unwitting, naive young adult who is trapped.
I think one thought I was having a little bit ago was like, uh, sort of like a more, a broader question of how many people could actually give financial independence? Like how many people like, is that, is that actually, I mean, is there enough money in the world for everybody to be debt free for everybody to know the name of Ripple Stillskin?
And somehow it is worth it for the accounting firm keeping a lot of this payroll, managing just 10 accounts, which means that they're making more on 10 accounts a year. So that the business owner is always like this middleman. And I was kind of thinking like, what if everything went down to like one person manages these five people's fill in the blank, you know what I mean?
And so it's like, But instead, so few people think that way, so they'd stay in debt and they work for the corporation. Well, they make way more money than in that prison. Yeah, that could be. You're right. I think there's a lot of people who basically are being taught that it's their lot in life to be working for Rumpelstiltskin.
And what it says at the end of Micah 4 is every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree and no one will make him afraid. In other words, he owns these things. And there's no fear that they're going to be taken away. And that this is somehow a picture of sort of the, uh, the, the new heavens and the new earth or, or this, the kingdom of God, and it's in a much more advanced form.
And in the new world really created this opportunity that, that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington dreamed of a, of a world in which. In which every family could own their, their own, their own business, their own economic engine so that they could experience freedom and not live constantly at the behest of others or from paycheck to paycheck, or certainly just endlessly trying to pay off debt, which, oh man, that is so miserable.
So yeah, anything else that this is starting up for you, you guys? I'm just really grateful to have parents that are telling us the code in some way or another, telling us the name of Rumpelstiltskin so we don't go into this blind like that girl did in the story. So yeah, it makes me really grateful. I feel lucky.
I have debt. I'm like, Oh my gosh, there are people literally sacrificing their child to rumpelstiltskin in those cases potentially. So yeah. Alyssa, anything else? Uh, this is straight up for you. I liked something you posted today. I can't like quote it, but you said something about like the trend of not being able to use like free speech because you're afraid of like your job.
Yeah. Yeah, I've, I've never seen, I didn't, I never saw this growing up that, that there was a connection between financial independence and free speech. Like I didn't, I never, I don't think that it really existed when I was growing up, but that exists today. I mean, I posted that and I literally got messages from people saying, I have been quiet for decades now.
And since is that now becoming a luxury belief of people with financial independence, the rest really have to essentially sell their, their, their children to, to the king, to whatever would ingratiate their family to the king, is that really what's happening? Again, this is, these are the kinds of questions that I think when you begin to explore the symbolism of a story, you can, you can really begin to think about because it gives you the language.
All of those things I think are at play in our lives today that we need to be thinking about. Fortunately, that life is this complicated, but that's why I think fairytales can come along and simplify, simplify the connections and clarify what these things are all about. So. Awesome. Thank you guys for listening today. So thank you guys so much for listening and thank you, Sydney and Elisa and Jackson for joining me today. Yeah. Thanks, dad. Oh yeah. Thank you.