Bananadog Theory

Religion has never worked for me. I like the idea of believing in something, but once your religion becomes exclusive, it is flawed. Work, too, is something that is appealing to me, but when I first entered the workforce after college I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

As a result, I found a job on the Internet in New Zealand. The following August I was on a plane headed for Christchurch to work for a woman I’d never met and only talked to a few times on the phone. Ten days in, I gave her the finger. She didn’t give me the time of day despite me having flown around the world to meet her.

Three months later, I started riding $35 bicycle that would take me 3200km around the country. During the ride, I figured out an explanation of life that made things easier. The theory first came to me one night about 2/3 of the way through the bike trip:

7 of the 24 hours of film from the Bananadog movie were from Yann, a friend of mine who followed me for the first 28 days of the 97-day experience. Yann was making a documentary about five travelers around New Zealand and Australia. I was the second of the five.

After four weeks and about 1300km miles together, me on my bike, him in his van, we planned to split. Yann would go up to Motueka to pick apples. We arranged a time to meet each other and copy each other’s footage to use in our respective films. A month later, I arrived in Motueka and we got down to business.

To copy the film from one tape to another, we had to playback every minute of film. For several days, we went to different cafes and reminisced over the four weeks we spent together. As the tape scrolled through each part of the trip, I noticed I could remember everything that was going through my head at the time. Because I was so focused on what I was doing, I didn’t realize the mental growth I was going through. It wasn’t until I watched the tape that I recognized the infinite number of frames of thought that make up our lives. I thought, without every one of those mental slides, each of us wouldn’t be where we are at any given moment.

Twelve months later, I thought I had put some pieces together…


The experiences we have throughout our life are stored in our mind. We refer to those memories every time we make a decision. Sometimes our decisions turn out the way we thought they would. Sometimes they don’t.
Every time we try something new, regardless of how it turns out, it serves as an opportunity to learn something we didn’t know before. When we learn something new, our brain stores that knowledge in our memory and helps us make better decisions in the future. As long as we keep trying new things, we’re in good shape.
Now, to allow many people to live among one another and continue trying new things, we have to establish order.
A long time ago, we figured out that if people agreed on a set of rules, many people could live in harmony. We then found out that not everyone always agreed with the rules. Then we had problems.
As we have evolved, we’ve had many disagreements over what our social order should be. Those disagreements have turned into conflicts and those conflicts have turned into wars. We all agree we need to set boundaries, but we’ve never been able to agree on where the lines should be drawn.
When we finally sit down and decide what our boundaries should be, we have to communicate with one another. To help us better communicate with one another, as individuals, and remind us about where we’ve been, as a society, we’ve developed things to help us remember what we have learned. What we use to document our experiences serves as a medium to convey ideas. For example, a person writes a book about his life. You read the book. You imagine the story. The book is a tangible medium that conveys an idea from the author’s mind to you, the reader. Whether or not it physically happened, is beside the point. What matters, is that the idea is communicated from one person to the next.
Over time people have become more efficient in conveying their ideas and emotions: language, music, books, television, movies, etc. Each medium of communication brought about new ways to transmit ideas between people.
As people get older, they are more likely to accept the ideas they’re familiar with as how things actually are. They are less open minded to new ways of thinking. For example,
A few hundred years ago, people thought the world was flat.
A few decades ago, people thought we’d never get to the moon.
A few years ago, people couldn’t imagine something like the Internet.
If you thought otherwise, people might have thought you were crazy.
When the Internet hit the public in the mid 90’s, it initiated one of the greatest economic boosts in history. People figured out that communicating on one network was, at the very least, a good thing for the economy.
Whereas earlier methods of communication transferred ideas from person to person, the Internet makes it possible for infinite people to contribute to both ends of an idea. Thus eliminating the communicative barrier between groups of people and individuals.
The Internet is the first perfectly democratic network of communication. Individuals can gather around a particular idea, anytime, about anything. And there is always competition for organizations to identify with clientele because they compete on the same platform.
On the flip side, the Internet gives individuals the freedom to explore anything they can imagine and document anything they want.
Perfect social order and unlimited personal freedom. Never before have both of these concepts coexisted at the same place.

A traditional republic is structured such that elected officials represent the interests of a larger group of people. They do this by creating boundaries that ideally best suit the people they govern.
This system is naturally flawed.
It is impossible for a small group of people to accurately address the needs of a large group of people. A consensus of a group of people can’t be made without representation from every person.
On the Internet, people have the ability to freely and fairly share their ideas on websites. Conversely, people choose to visit whatever idea/website they please. People can speak for themselves and listen to whom they please. No authority, no bureaucracy.
The Internet embodies what a government is supposed to do: facilitate ideas to provide structure for a group of people. The structure of an Internet political system would be built on ideas. Whoever comes up with the best idea would ‘win the popular vote’, so to speak. In other words, people would be rewarded solely for their ideas.
If the Internet could potentially provide a governmental-type structure to a group of people, where would we start?
Well, what do people want?
Identification seems to be pretty consistent anywhere you go. Since we started creating order, we’ve organized things by association using names and symbols. As we’ve become more advanced, we’ve come up with things like Passports, ID badges, and ringtones to identify ourselves with our nationalities, affiliations and favorite songs.
Identification is the root of organization. As we pummel through time, we continue to invent ways to establish our individual identity.
‘Social networks’ deserve more credit than we give them. Professional networking, connections, hookups, favors, friends, friends of friends, even dating… Networking is essentially the fundamental basis of social structure. Within social networks, we break down elements of our persona to further categorize and define our identities.
Online social networks have quickly become an industry worth 10-figures. In a very short time, many young people with access to the Internet, have made it a habit to explore the increasing number of facets within social networks. The ability to create a personal profile allows people to further explore their own identity and easily share it with friends. Furthermore, right now social networks are tapping into cell phones and email accounts making them an even better point of communication among friends. Young people can’t get enough of it.
Sure, people can create false identities or lie. But as the Internet world is becoming more transparent, our false identities are becoming increasingly difficult to hide.
The user-generated content comprising online social networks probably define its users more accurately and thoroughly than any form of identification we’ve ever come up with.
Now, people can create an identity for themselves and are willfully sharing that information with other people, all over the world. The only disconnection is between those with the Internet and those without the Internet.

The utter simplicity of microfinance has rocked the way people think about poverty. Everyone wants to ‘help the poor’ but the problem is that when people donate to large humanitarian institutions, they have no idea where their money goes. Just like any organization, there is a percentage of money that is wasted through the inefficiency of business. Not to mention corruption.
Microfinance institutions, such as Kiva.org, send field partners into impoverished areas seeking people with ideas for business whom are just short the money to get started. The partners create online profiles for the entrepreneurs on the microfinance website. Lenders, internet users who visit the website, can lend all or part of the money the entrepreneurs need to get their idea off the ground. Once enough money has been lent and the loan is fullfilled, the microfinance institution pays the entrepreneur through a local microfinance bank. The entrepreneur starts the business and pays off the loan, normally within 24 months. Then the money gets funneled back through the line and ends up in the bank account of the lender.
At each step, the field partner writes a short summary of what is going on and notifies the lender through email.
The only liability is that the entrepreneurs will pay off the loan. In my research, I haven’t found a microfinance website with less than a 96% payback rate.
A long-term goal of microfinance institutions is to offer interest on the loan, similar to a savings account. I believe this money would come from convincing the local microfinance bank for a share of the interest.
With microfinance institutions climbing up the backside of the financial world, modern business practice looks like it might meet them halfway.

Capitalism worked well for the West. The idea built solid communities, a well-rounded education system, tons of businesses, even Professional Wrestling. Through capitalism, individuals develop and implement ideas into a group of people. When an idea works, the person is rewarded with money so he may perpetuate his idea and his lifestyle.
Money is important in building a society, but only to a certain point:
Below this point, money = opportunity,
Above this point, money = trouble.
When a person has an idea, he needs money to be able to turn it into something. His focus should remain on expanding the idea and figuring out how to sustain it within a community. Once he values the money more than the idea, bad things happen.
In recent months, the media seems to be discussing two major types of business. Let’s call them ‘old’ and ‘new’. Old business sticks with its rigid bureaucratic hierarchy and rewards tenure. New business tries to identify new ways to think about things and rewards creativity.
When I think of the two, two things come to mind: Enron and Google. (Of course, I’m biased, but I don’t think I’m wrong.) Old business constantly feels pressure from investors to report profits. Businesses, like Enron, are doing anything they can to do this, even lying. Google, on the other hand, came out of nowhere and has quickly amassed unbelievable amounts of money by implementing their own style of marketing.
In short, old business values money and new business values new ideas.
We’re realizing the bad things money can do to society at the same time we’re recognizing the value of new ideas. The developed world has reached the peak of capitalism and is in a state of transition.
What does this mean?
We discussed two ideas that can further explain: microfinance and new business.
First, microfinance does more than help the poor. When a lender provides an opportunity to someone less fortunate, he receives an intangible emotional gain.
From an economic standpoint, emotional gain counts for nothing. As microfinance institutions try to make their idea financially profitable, people are realizing the finite value of money. People want what’s best for themselves. New business philosophy (essentially not selling out) is an example that people are starting to comprehend the value of emotional gain. If this continues, the intrigue of microfinance could potentially erase the dichotomy between the rich and poor.
Second, new business is about new ideas. It’s about discovering new ways to think about things.
If money talks, as the saying goes, and the value of money may be under reevaluation, what else is it trying to say?

The physical world is a place where many people try to learn new things and try to live in harmony. The virtual world is where they can.
I believe when we are born, we become conscious of two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. The physical world is what we see and the mental world is what we think.
For all of human history, we have been trying to live together in our physical world. The physical world is the science, the order, the government, the ideas of life.
At the same time, we have been trying to explore our mental world. The mental world is the art, the expression, the religion, the emotions of life.
The two worlds have always coexisted together: art and science, social order and personal expression, government and religion, ideas and emotions. Each can’t exist without the other.
The two coexist through time.
Over time, we’ve continued to share ideas, concerning, to some degree, a combination of both worlds.
Over time, one entity from each world has clearly become a frontrunner of plausible social structure: government and organized religion.
They are equal and opposite.
Governments manage social order and follow, to some degree, a moral code. Organized religion follows a moral code, and has, to some degree, structure.
Right now, the world is in transition: the two major players are at odds and our two worlds are coalescing on a virtual platform.
The open platform of the Internet is revolutionizing business as we speak. Social networks are reshaping the way we observe a group of people. Microfinance is bringing new value to money.
As far as security goes, all problems stem from some combination of social and personal restriction. The more we use the Internet to identify with what we need, the less reason people have to make trouble.
Over time, our two worlds could potentially coexist in peace.

Over time… hmm.
Where is the Internet? Can we touch it? Is it a thing? A computer is tangible, but like a book, its influence can’t be physically touched. The computer is just the medium between you and the thoughts of another.
If books can convey a story, and computers house the Internet, what then are people? Are they not a conveyance of thoughts as well? They are tangible. They can be used for many things.
Just like a book, just like a computer.
The mere presence of everything in the physical world, including the human form, is a product of our imagination.
As we’ve cruised into the 21st century, technical communication and the Internet have continued to be more of an influence in our lives. Aside from the impact the Internet has made on the economy, just observing the amount of time I personally spend on a computer is worth noting:
10 years ago, I only used computers for typing papers at school. Say maybe 4 hours a week. Now, if I had it my way, I’d probably spend no less than 4 hours a day on a computer.
So, 10 years ago, computers took up less than 3% of my life. Now, they take up almost 17% of my life.
In other words, 17% of my life I spend sitting in one place, exploring my thoughts and the thoughts of other people using my fingers, my eyes and my mind.
Other than using my fingers to type and my eyes to interpret what’s on the screen, what other purpose does my body serve when I surf the Internet? The more time we spend exploring our mental world, the less we depend on the physical world.
17% of my life sitting in the same place.
That’s a significant change in lifestyle. Will this percentage continue to increase?
Over time, we could strike a peaceful balance between our two worlds.
Over time, we could decide one world is better than two. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen.
With each of us spending increasing amounts of time in the virtual world, will our physical world one day become obsolete?
If we are in fact living in two separate worlds and it is possible they will coalesce, what should we do?
Well, our natural resources are drying up, most of the planet is still underdeveloped and the boundaries we’ve drawn in the developed world are dangerously tight. Since order is the one thing we never seem to have gotten right, it’s likely the best idea would prevail if we were to put our faith in an open source democracy.
What is in store for us next, we can’t be sure. What we can do, is hypothesize:
There are four perpetual beings of life in our physical world: earth, virus, species and intelligence.
There are four possible threats to our physical world: natural disaster, disease, ego and a new world existing only in our mind perhaps a completion of the physical world.
How will our story end?
Well, how did it begin?
I guess first it was the earth. Then maybe some water. Then virus’s and organism’s came together. Shortly after, humans stumbled into the picture.
The earth has been around a long time. We’re at a point right now where we may have figured out why it is we’re here. This is the most exciting thing ever. Ever… in the history of the world. It would be a shame to see billions of years of evolution wasted on civil dispute.
Over time, we will have no time.
So this story will end as it began. With a statement as simple to understand as it is to follow through when you believe in something,
Everything boils down to this: the things we know and the things we don’t know. To figure out the things we don’t know, we have to try new things.