Fungi to Finance: Mycelial Patterns in Governance

In this episode, Jeff Emmett, author of Exploring MyCofi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond, shares insights on how fungi can inspire the redesign of governance and economic systems. As a co-founder of the Common Stack and token engineering researcher at BlockScience, Jeff has developed tools and blueprints for communities to tackle collective action problems. Drawing on natural patterns, he explores how mycelium-inspired frameworks can increase institutional resilience, enable regenerative economies, and foster mutuality.

The conversation touches on the intersections of ecology, distributed technologies, and governance. Jeff discusses how lessons from fungi—such as resource allocation, fractal structures, and adaptogenic resilience—can be applied to human systems. He also examines experiments in decentralized finance, governance models like conviction voting, and the potential for nested economies.

Jeff explores:

• How mycelial principles inspire new governance and resource allocation systems
• Why diverse, local, and fractalized economies are more resilient
• What regenerative finance can learn from ecological cycles

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Themes

• Mycelial Design Principles – How fungi’s resource allocation and coherence can inform economic and governance systems.
• Fractal and Nested Economies – Building resilient, decentralized economies that scale from local to global.
• Alternative Governance Models – Exploring conviction voting, bonding curves, and trust-based signaling.
• Mutual Credit and Generosity – Lessons from ecological support networks for economic cooperation.
• Adaptogenic Principles – Translating resilience and adaptability from biology into organizational design.
• Decentralized Finance and Inclusion – How distributed ledgers and offline transactions can enable bottom-up economies.

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Institutional neuroplasticity and Mycofi principles
• 02:06 — Introducing Jeff Emmett and his work
• 03:07 — Background: from distributed systems to fungi
• 05:45 — Fungal coherence and resource allocation
• 07:34 — Six design principles inspired by fungi
• 09:41 — Beyond money: multidimensional value systems
• 12:35 — Lessons from fungi for governance in times of abundance and decay
• 15:21 — Underground networks and mutual credit
• 17:57 — Governance mechanisms and biomimicry
• 18:35 — Streaming trust and adaptive governance models
• 22:12 — Global experiments in governance: Taiwan, Ethereum, and beyond
• 26:33 — Conviction voting explained
• 29:54 — Bonding curves as economic membranes
• 32:35 — Distributed ledger tech and shifts in power
• 37:29 — Nested economies and ecological parallels
• 40:19 — Stable currencies without violence-based enforcement
• 42:09 — Wealth Defense Industry and resource distribution
• 45:23 — Arbitrage and mushrooms as natural equilibrators
• 47:01 — Gradients of mutualism and economic incentives
• 49:53 — Subsidiarity and supersediarity in governance
• 52:24 — Adaptogenic principles and psilocybinetics
• 54:59 — Trophic levels and upcycling of energy
• 56:53 — DeFi and resilient bottom-up economies
• 59:01 — Offline transactions and financial inclusion
• 1:00:28 — Designing ideal bottom-up economies
• 1:03:46 — Validated data, experimentation, and the future of governance
• 1:04:13 — Closing reflections

Resources

• Exploring MyCofi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond – Jeff Emmett
• Paul Stamets
• Merlin Sheldrake – Entangled Life
• Toby Kiers – Research on fungal markets
• Michael Zargham
• Bernard Lietaer – Community currencies
• Elinor Ostrom – Principles for managing commons
• Donella Meadows – Thinking in Systems
• Astrid Scholz - Tackling the Wealth Defense Industry
• Audrey Tang
• Michel Bauwens

Transcript:

Jeff Emmett (00:00)

If these adaptogenic mushrooms help our brains grow new neural pathways as individuals, maybe if we apply these Mycofi principles in organizations, they can increase institutional neuroplasticity. They can allow for new ways to sense things, new ways to cohere around what's important and new ways to act by creating these sensing governance pathways and these acting funding pathways and allow them to proliferate in new organizational forms.

Lucas Tauil (00:32)

Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil where we explore mutuality in conversations towards a world that works for everyone.

Lucas Tauil (00:50)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information, and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.

During my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend Hailey Cooperider pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (02:06)

Today we welcome Jeff Emmett, the author of Exploring MyCofi, Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond. Observing natural patterns, Jeff has been modeling novel governance and economic patterns. Co-founder of the Common Stack and token engineering researcher at BlockScience, Jeff designed tools and blueprints for communities to solve collective action problems. By targeting governance and incentives alignment, his work supports communities towards economic sustainability.

Welcome, Jeff. It is a pleasure to have you with us.

Jeff Emmett (02:50)

Thanks very much. Happy to be here. Always enjoy our conversations.

Lucas Tauil (02:52)

Nice, nice.

Yeah it's always a pleasure to be with you Jeff. Jeff shall we start with your background? What led you to distributed technologies and the world of fungi?

Jeff Emmett (03:07)

Good question. ⁓ a succinct version of that. I mean, they didn't come at the same time. They kind of, ⁓ myciliated together at some point, ⁓ along my journey. ⁓ I, wasn't necessarily looking at distributed systems necessarily in the beginning. I was, I was wondering why, why the world seemed to be falling apart. ⁓ that, you know, these, we, we seem to be rolling backwards all of these, ⁓ sort of advancements that, that we kept talking about, you know, and we were having narcissists in the White House and economic trade wars and Brexit you know, not that there aren't a lot of reasons for these kind of failures of coordination. It really led me down the rabbit hole of blockchain technologies as sort of the, at least at the time, what I understood to be a way to be, to rethink those coordinative structures as protocols rather than as say corporations or nation states.

And that kept leading me down the rabbit hole. Actually the first blockchain conference that I went to, I stood outside the whole time and learned about Holochain and the agent centric as opposed to data centric ontology really, really sung true to me. I mean, on a parallel track, I had been very interested in mycelium. I was reading, you know, Paul Stamets’ work Merlin Sheldrake and Alona Hapsing, a lot of these sort of researchers, ⁓ Toby Kier's, her work is fascinating, looking at the sort of the market structures of fungi. So I mean, this was kind of a parallel track of interest that at some point, they merged actually, I think it was at a, it was at a collaborative finance conference. ⁓ Cofi is, one of the, you know, defy refi, Cofi is a new, ⁓ meme in the, mean, I wouldn't even call it the web three space in the monetary theory space.

And while we were at the Cofi conference, you know, it was an unconference. So everyone was encouraged to speak if they had topics. ⁓ the topic that we came up with, for my talk was, was Mycofi, was just a play on, on the COFI ⁓ but that really kind of got the sparks, going about how actually there are very, you know, stable long-term resilient patterns of positive,