Unlocking Nature’s Code Through Functional Mushrooms

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Maximilian Endter Cast Mushrooms Not As Wellness Fashion But As Biological Kin, Ecological Intelligence, And Everyday Tools For Energy, Immunity, Sleep, And Repair

In a conference culture crowded with cold plunges, wearable metrics, and promises of human optimization, Maximilian Endter arrived at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam with a stranger, older proposition. The future of biohacking, he suggested, might lie not in silicon or stimulants, but in fungi.

Speaking on Saturday 14 October 2023 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during his presentation, The Powers of Functional Mushrooms for Everyday Life, Endter, founder of Smaints, certified mycotherapist, and self-described biohacker, framed mushrooms as more than supplements. He presented them as relatives, regulators, and a forgotten technology of nature.

“We share a large part of our DNA with mushrooms,” Endter told the audience, “making them our ancestors and cousins with powers that are very different from plants.”

It was the kind of claim that could sound mystical in lesser hands. Yet Endter’s talk lived in the fertile borderland between ancient medicine, personal experimentation, and modern wellness science, arguing that functional mushrooms could serve as daily instruments for restoring what modern life had steadily eroded: balance.

A Biohacker’s Origin Story

Endter’s route into the fungal world began, fittingly, with exhaustion. He described the years before Smaints as a period of overextension: work, side projects, study, and ambition all piling onto a diminishing reserve of energy. Like many in the biohacking world, he and his co-founder searched widely for leverage, testing supplements, breathwork, and performance routines in pursuit of more stamina and clearer focus.

The turning point, he said, came through a familiar voice in optimization circles: Tim Ferriss. Ferriss had described taking cordyceps and feeling “lit like a Christmas tree”, a phrase Endter recalled with amusement and disbelief. The image was outlandish enough to provoke curiosity, and curiosity led to immersion.

What he found, he said, was not a niche health trend but an entire kingdom of life with startling implications for human biology.

The Case For Fungi As Family

Again and again, Endter returned to one central idea: mushrooms are uniquely relevant to human beings because of biological proximity. Unlike herbs or plants more commonly grouped under the wellness umbrella, fungi occupy their own kingdom, and in his telling, that difference mattered.

He portrayed mushrooms as ancient co-inhabitants of Earth, a primordial force that preceded much of life as we know it. Their compounds, he argued, resonate with human systems precisely because the relationship is not incidental. It is evolutionary.

This was not just a semantic flourish. It was the foundation of his broader thesis that mushrooms can support homeostasis, the body’s capacity to regulate and rebalance itself.

“Functional mushrooms are the kings of the adaptogens,” Endter said, “because they have effects on every human system in the body simultaneously and in both directions.”

The appeal of that argument was obvious in a room full of people seeking edge and resilience. Endter was not merely promising more energy or better sleep. He was offering a framework in which nature had already built multidirectional intelligence into the compounds themselves.

The Forest As A Nervous System

If the biological argument gave the talk its structure, the ecological one gave it its poetry.

Endter drew on a now popular but still awe-inspiring image of mycelium, the underground network through which fungi spread and communicate. He described it in terms that were both scientific and spiritual, invoking experiments in which mycelium appeared to find efficient pathways and facilitate information exchange across ecosystems.

“The mycelium is the consciousness of the forest,” he said, “an information network that feels and communicates just like the nervous system in our brain.”

This was not presented as metaphor alone. For Endter, mycelium suggested that intelligence in nature does not always wear the face humans expect. No brain, no visible sensory organs, yet problem-solving, signaling, and adaptation.

In the context of a biohacking summit, the point landed with unusual force. Human beings had spent decades trying to engineer connection, feedback loops, and optimization systems into their technologies. Fungi, Endter implied, had been running a version of that experiment underground for millions of years.

Cordyceps And The Pursuit Of Performance

No mushroom in Endter’s presentation captured the summit’s performance ethos more neatly than cordyceps. If there was a fungal equivalent of an energy protocol, this was it.

Cordyceps, he argued, could support oxygen uptake, stamina, blood flow, libido, and testosterone. It was, in his words, the “power mushroom”, a natural performance aid with appeal both for elite athletes and for ordinary people navigating modern fatigue.

He linked its effects to the environments in which it evolved, especially high-altitude conditions that may help explain its association with oxygen efficiency. In that framing, cordyceps became more than a supplement. It became an inherited strategy from nature, adapted to scarcity and exertion.

Endter also used anecdote to sharpen the point, describing how a colleague who had struggled with post-Covid lung limitations had turned to cordyceps and later returned to competitive running. The story carried the familiar caveats of the wellness world, but it underscored the emotional gravity of his message: for some people, performance is not vanity. It is recovery.

Mushrooms For The Immune System And The Gut

If cordyceps answered the culture of striving, chaga and agaricus answered the culture of breakdown.

Endter spoke personally here, recounting his own history of leaky gut and allergies, and the frustration of trying for years to restore digestive health with limited success. Functional mushrooms, he said, became a decisive part of that process.

He presented chaga and agaricus as “immune mushrooms”, useful for modulating inflammation, supporting gut integrity, and calming immune overreaction. Chaga, in particular, was described as an antioxidant powerhouse.

“For every illness we have, there is a mushroom growing,” Endter said, offering perhaps the boldest line of the session, “allowing us to use the superpowers of nature to regulate and nourish our own bodies.”

The statement was expansive, even sweeping, but its emotional logic was clear. In an era of autoimmune dysfunction, food sensitivities, and chronic low-grade inflammation, the fantasy of one substance that could soothe rather than merely suppress remains powerful. Endter positioned mushrooms as precisely that kind of ally, not by overpowering the body, but by helping it remember equilibrium.

Stress, Hormones, And The Politics Of Recovery

One of the more compelling passages in the talk came when Endter shifted from performance to recovery. In a culture obsessed with doing more, he argued, regeneration had become the neglected half of human potential.

“Your performance level is dependent on your regeneration level,” he said, “and mushrooms are the masters of restoring hormonal and metabolic balance.”

It was here that reishi and maitake entered the story. Reishi, long revered in East Asian traditions, was described as a calming, restorative mushroom, one that appears to act along pathways associated with stress reduction and systemic balance. Maitake, by contrast, was framed as a metabolic support, particularly relevant to blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity.

Endter connected these mushrooms to a broader crisis in contemporary health: rising hormonal disruption, chronic stress, fertility struggles, and the ambient burden of modern life, from toxins to relentless overstimulation. His argument was that the body under siege does not merely need more fuel. It needs better regulation.

The appeal of reishi in particular lay in its gentleness. Rather than amplifying output, it was presented as a biological cue for the nervous system to stand down.

Lion’s Mane And The Dream Of Repair

If one mushroom captured the imagination of the room, it was Lion’s Mane. Endter saved it for the final stretch of his presentation, introducing it as a tool not only for brain health but for sleep, nerve repair, and even lucid dreaming.

He spoke about the mushroom’s association with neuroregeneration and its capacity to support the growth and restoration of brain and nerve cells. In the logic of the talk, Lion’s Mane was not simply a nootropic. It was a repair mechanism.

Paired with reishi, he suggested, it could support deeper sleep and clearer dream states, an unusual but evocative combination in a summit often focused on measurable performance markers. Here, Endter invited the audience to consider sleep not as passive downtime but as one of the body’s most advanced regenerative technologies.

The message was strikingly simple beneath the biochemical claims: before chasing the outer edges of productivity, protect the inner architecture that makes any of it possible.

More Than A Supplement Pitch

It would have been easy for a presentation like this to collapse into product evangelism. Endter did, inevitably, point listeners toward the Smaints booth and a range of mushroom formulations, from cacao blends to teas and extracts. But the talk’s stronger impression was philosophical rather than commercial.

At its heart was a challenge to the dominant biohacking instinct. The body, Endter seemed to argue, is not a machine to be bullied into higher output. It is an ecosystem, and ecosystems respond best to relationship, rhythm, and regulation.

That idea gave the session a resonance beyond fungi themselves. In a world increasingly built on speed, intensity, and extraction, mushrooms stood in as symbols of another order of intelligence: quiet, connective, adaptive, and ancient.

Remembering What Nature Already Knows

By the end of The Powers of Functional Mushrooms for Everyday Life at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Maximilian Endter had done more than praise a class of supplements. He had offered a worldview in which the search for better energy, calmer hormones, stronger immunity, and deeper sleep was not a quest to transcend nature, but to re-enter it more intelligently.

His language sometimes soared toward the mythic, but that was part of the point. Mushrooms, in Endter’s telling, occupied a space where folklore, biology, and self-experimentation met. They were both ancient medicine and contemporary biohack.

For an audience accustomed to optimization through force, the fungal proposition was quietly radical: balance first, performance second. Not domination of the body, but cooperation with it. Not escape from nature, but a return to its code.

Frequently asked questions

How did Maximilian Endter come to fungi?

Through exhaustion. He described the years before Smaints as a period of overextension, with work, side projects, study and ambition piling onto a diminishing reserve of energy, which sent him and his co-founder searching widely for leverage through supplements, breathwork and performance routines.

Why does he say we are mushrooms?

It was the talk's most memorable line, and he meant biological proximity rather than metaphor. Fungi occupy their own kingdom, unlike the herbs usually grouped under the wellness umbrella, and Endter pointed to shared biological traits and overlapping DNA to argue they are closer kin than we assume.

What is the ecological argument?

Endter drew on the image of mycelium, the underground network through which fungi spread and communicate, describing it in terms both scientific and spiritual and invoking experiments in which mycelium appeared to find efficient routes through a space.

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.