Deepening Your Connection

Eric Puro’s Call To Rebuild Our Bond With Nature, Community, And Meaning

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Eric Puro did not offer the audience another brisk tour through the medicinal promise of mushrooms. Others had already covered the science. His presentation, "Deepening Your Connection," reached for something more elusive and, in the end, more urgent: the fracture beneath the symptoms.

Puro, the co-founder and chief executive of Kääpä and a member of the executive committee of the International Medicinal Mushroom Society, stood before the Amsterdam crowd on 14 October 2023 and made an argument that was at once personal, philosophical and commercial. The crises of modern life, he suggested, do not begin with carbon, chronic disease or industrial inefficiency. They begin with disconnection.

"Every single time we look for the root cause of our problems, the answer is disconnection," Puro said. "We are disconnected from ourselves, others, and nature. Connection is not an option; our DNA craves it."

It was a line that served as both diagnosis and manifesto.

From Corporate Precision To Existential Doubt

Puro’s authority on stage did not come wrapped in the conventional language of biotech triumphalism. He traced his journey back to a previous life in corporate consulting, working for a Big Four firm in cities such as Chicago, New York and Hong Kong, helping large public companies streamline data and manufacturing systems in pursuit of greater profit.

It was successful work by the metrics that modern economies tend to reward. Yet he described it as spiritually vacant, a discipline of optimisation without meaning.

Rather than endure that emptiness, he stepped away. He bicycled across the United States, sleeping in a tent, chopping firewood to cook, and moving through the country at a human pace. It was less a career pivot than a shedding of skin. Later, he moved to Oregon, where he immersed himself in mountain climbing, backcountry skiing and wilderness guiding, leading others into alpine spaces where perspective came not from productivity charts but from altitude, silence and exposure.

The story mattered because it framed the rest of his thesis. Before he could build a fungi business, he had to rebuild a relationship with the living world.

The Whiteboard Test Of Modern Life

One of the most arresting moments in Puro’s talk came not from the lab but from the classroom. Recalling his years teaching permaculture design courses in the United States, he described an exercise used to map the world’s problems.

Participants would fill a whiteboard with the familiar litany: ecological collapse, loneliness, poisoned groundwater, war, divorce, chronic illness, dependence on pharmaceuticals, social fragmentation. Then they would begin to strip the list back, asking what caused each problem, and what lay beneath those causes.

Again and again, he said, the process ended in the same place.

Disconnection.

The power of that word, in Puro’s telling, was its breadth. It included alienation from the self, from one’s own trauma, needs and bodily signals. It included estrangement from neighbours, family and community. And it included the rupture between human systems and the natural systems they continue to depend on while pretending otherwise.

"Connection to our community and our family is a crucial piece to a good life," he said. "In every blue zone where people live over one hundred years, the community aspect is massively important. We are not meant to struggle alone."

In a culture that often recasts endurance as virtue, his point landed with particular force. Longevity, he implied, is not simply a nutritional puzzle. It is social architecture.

Permaculture As A Design Ethic, Not A Lifestyle Accessory

Puro’s turn toward permaculture came after marriage and fatherhood sharpened his sense of responsibility. He no longer wanted simply to reject the old world. He wanted to help build a better one.

In his account, permaculture offered more than an environmental toolkit. It provided a design science rooted in observation of natural systems and committed not merely to sustaining what exists, but to regenerating it. That distinction mattered. Sustainability can imply holding the line. Regeneration asks whether human activity can repair, enrich and renew.

That philosophy, he said, now drives Kääpä, the Finnish company best known for producing functional mushroom extracts such as Lion’s Mane and Reishi.

"In biotech, we look to nature for answers and inspiration," Puro said. "We look at natural systems that have existed for millions of years to learn how to solve humanity's biggest problems in regenerative and efficient ways."

This was not nature worship in vague terms. It was biomimicry as business method.

What Fungi Taught Him About Better Industry

The mushroom boom has become, in recent years, one of wellness culture’s most crowded frontiers. But Puro presented fungi not as trend material, but as teachers.

He argued that the dominant global system remains heavily industrial, with China accounting for roughly 92% of mushroom production. Against that backdrop, Kääpä sought to rethink not only cultivation but extraction, efficacy and value chains.

Its technical edge, he said, came through ultrasonication, a process that uses high-energy sound waves to rupture fungal cell walls and release bioactive compounds. According to Puro, this doubled bioavailability compared with conventional extraction methods reliant on alcohol or water. If true, it suggested a practical advantage for food and beverage makers, who could use smaller doses while delivering the same effect.

Yet the more important point was philosophical. Puro’s company had looked at why fungi produce these compounds in the first place. Lion’s Mane, Reishi and other species do not exist for human optimisation. Their chemistry evolved in response to stress, adaptation and survival. To understand potency, then, one has to understand ecology.

That logic also extended to testing. Puro criticised a market in which brands often fail to standardise for the secondary metabolites that actually drive medicinal effects. Kääpä, he said, adopted batch-specific testing to verify those compounds rather than merely trading on mushroom names and marketing glow.

In a crowded supplement market, it was an argument for seriousness.

The Chaga Lesson In Regeneration

If there was a single example that captured Puro’s wider vision, it was chaga.

He described the species, known in Finnish as pakuri, as biologically untidy in a way that nature often is and commerce often dislikes. Chaga is not easily boxed. It consists of roughly 90% birch wood cells and only about 10% fungal cells. It must grow on living birch. That fact alone demands a different relationship to extraction, forestry and time.

Rather than forcing chaga into a purely industrial model, Puro said Kääpä worked with the rhythms of Finnish forest management. Chaga was cultivated on birch trees that would in any case be felled years later. The result, he argued, was a system that created stronger returns for forest owners, improved biodiversity, reduced runoff and significantly increased carbon sequestration.

He claimed the company sequestered 150 times more carbon dioxide than it produced.

There was a wider moral embedded in the example. Regenerative design, at its best, is not about grand gestures but about seeing whole systems clearly enough to intervene lightly and effectively.

"When you start to really connect with nature, you start to design that way," Puro said. "You start to reflect those natural patterns in your being and in your business. Step back and look at how natural cycles happen to make a positive impact."

Meaning In An Age Of Exhaustion

For all the discussion of fungi, forests and extraction technologies, the emotional centre of Puro’s talk arrived in his invocation of Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus.

The reference was telling. Camus’s answer to absurdity was not surrender but self-created meaning. Puro took that frame and made it practical. The universe may not hand anyone a coherent purpose. A meaningful life still has to be made, and then inhabited.

"We all strive to find our connection with nature and our place in the world," he said. "When you ask yourself what gives you a sense of meaning that you can really resonate with, it opens up a very interesting path for your life."

For him, that meaning was clear: to deepen his connection with nature, then allow that commitment to shape his family life, his community and his company.

It was a striking proposition in a summit often associated with metrics, protocols and self-optimisation. Puro offered something harder to quantify and perhaps harder to sell: the suggestion that no supplement stack can compensate for a life built against one’s own values.

A Biohacking Speech That Reached Beyond Biohacking

By the close of "Deepening Your Connection" at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Puro had done something unusual. He had taken a stage devoted to performance and redirected attention toward belonging, humility and design ethics.

His message was not anti-technology. It was anti-amnesia. Use supercomputers, he seemed to say. Use advanced manufacturing. Use extraction systems and lab testing. But do not forget where the answers begin.

They begin in living systems older than us, more patient than us, and less interested in our categories than our industries would like.

In that sense, Puro’s presentation was not simply about fungi. It was about the cost of forgetting that humans are not separate from the world they are trying so frantically to improve.

Frequently asked questions

What did Eric Puro offer instead of mushroom science?

The fracture beneath the symptoms. Others had already covered the science, so the co-founder and chief executive of Kääpä reached for something more elusive: the broken relationship with nature, community and meaning that he argues sits under the conditions biohacking tries to treat.

What was his route into this work?

Corporate consulting. Puro worked for a Big Four firm in cities including Chicago, New York and Hong Kong, helping large public companies streamline data and manufacturing systems in pursuit of greater profit, work that succeeded by the metrics modern business uses and left him doubting them.

What was the whiteboard exercise?

A teaching device from his years running permaculture design courses in the United States, in which participants filled a whiteboard with the world's problems: ecological collapse, loneliness, poisoned groundwater, war, divorce, chronic illness and dependence on pharmaceuticals.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam series, recorded in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 October 2023. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.