Daniel Purington (00:00):
And so it’s got to set the ambiance.
Sevan Matossian (00:02):
Oh, nice. Oh, where are you?
Daniel Purington (00:05):
I’m in Bras Ranch. It’s east of Bend.
Sevan Matossian (00:08):
Oh, up in Oregon.
Daniel Purington (00:10):
Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (00:11):
Hey, thanks for doing this on your vacation, so it’s early for you too.
Daniel Purington (00:15):
Yeah, I’m a dad and a business owner so early. As early as the normal.
Sevan Matossian (00:22):
Yeah. I liked the way you said that I’m a dad too, because that was one of the things I realized pretty early on, having kids, you got to get up before them or else then it feels like you’re chasing them the whole day. If you can get up ahead of them and get a couple things done, the pizza from the night before, put away or pick up shoes that are around the house or read or just anything. Right. I mean, then you’re like, you’re ahead
Daniel Purington (00:47):
Of them. Said some quiet,
Sevan Matossian (00:48):
Right. That too. That too. Yeah. I heard about you through Chris Cooper and he said you were good, dude. Yeah, he is a great dude, isn’t he?
Daniel Purington (01:01):
Yeah, yeah, he is. He’s everything. Everybody thinks he is.
Sevan Matossian (01:06):
Well said. And he said that you were running your gym with a different model than a lot of people and he said, Hey, it may really interest you. So then I looked at your Instagram and I said, wow. I dunno if reinvented yourself, but I just like everything you’re doing is home for you, Oregon.
Daniel Purington (01:27):
It is not. No, I’m from rural Massachusetts.
Sevan Matossian (01:31):
Oh, okay. That’s where all this is taking place that I see on your Instagram, your gym, your training, all that stuff, your people.
Daniel Purington (01:39):
That’s in Portland, Oregon. So we’re in the south side of Portland, right down near Multnomah Village.
Sevan Matossian (01:47):
Okay, so that’s home for you now. So you are a West Coast guy now?
Daniel Purington (01:50):
Correct.
Sevan Matossian (01:52):
And were you a physician to begin with?
Daniel Purington (01:54):
No. So my background, my schooling started with education and surgery when I was really young in about 20. That evolved into being a surgical first assistant, and I did that for many years and then I kind of honed down in subspecialized into transplant medicine and I did a bunch of dissection work and then the pre-transplant work on the donation side of things. And then I did a lot of clinical work on that side. So throughout that process I got a degree in neuroscience, and so I’m not a physician. The area of expertise I have is extremely small. There’s very few people that get educated in that because there’s very few people that can be organ donors. And so that took about 20 years of my life of where I focused all my attention.
Sevan Matossian (02:54):
I think that the new chief marketing officer at CrossFit Inc. This lady named Jenna Haka, if I remember correctly, I think she got her degree in neuroscience from Princeton. I think I remember hearing that. Yeah. I think now you’re the only two people I’ve ever known or I don’t know her, but the only two people I’ve heard of have a degree in neuroscience. What a trip, right?
Daniel Purington (03:23):
Yeah. I mean it sounds real fancy, but it educates me in something that’s obsolete 10 years later. We learn more about the brain so rapidly and we realize how little we know. So I’m obsolete. Now,
Sevan Matossian (03:38):
Take me back to 19 years old that led up to what you did. You were helping with surgeries at 20. Tell me how you got to that
Daniel Purington (03:45):
Spot. Yeah, so it was actually on a bat. So I come from a blue collar family. I come from a really old dairy farm in western Massachusetts. It’s the oldest one on the East coast, believe it or not, still operating. And so we always worked with our hands and I got into a little bit of a scuffle bat with a construction guy that I worked with and he said I would never amount to anything and I just pulled up the next thing and medicine and applied and got into it. And that was the surgical first assistant program. And that’s really what spawned my medical career. And I just turned out to absolutely love it. And so I studied that and then I worked in the community hospital there for two years. And then I traveled around the country for another three and a half years, mostly working in orthopedics, so bones, muscles, tendons, trauma, things of that nature, and some pretty large institutions all the way out to Stanford and then back to the East coast at some bigger places there. And then I transitioned into being a surgical dissector for organ donation team in Boston, which is a relatively large organization, focusing a lot more on cardiovascular and cardiac dissection. And then my wife finished up. My wife’s a lot smarter than I’m my wife. Finished up her PhD when we were in Boston, and then we moved to the Bay Area, which is where she’s originally from. We lived in Walnut Creek for a while, and I took a position at the transplant organization there.
Sevan Matossian (05:21):
What’s the name of the transplant organization in Walnut Creek
Daniel Purington (05:24):
Donor Network West.
(05:27):
And then I worked in there more in a managerial role. And then I switched over to the clinical side and the clinical side is where I really took off and started learning a lot. And so in the clinical side, you do medical management of unstable potential organ donors once the family consents. And so it’s a high energy, high triage situation, which is where I really had our first child, the Bay, and just all the things that are the bay with a lot of traffic and cost of living and things of that nature. We started looking around. I took a position at OHSU, which is a big medical institution in Portland. Let’s see.
Sevan Matossian (06:13):
And she went up there with you and she went up there with you?
Daniel Purington (06:15):
Yeah, she’s always worked remote. She’s worked remote since, I mean, she took her first job out of her PhD, was as a medical director for a pharmaceutical company in Boston. And then from there she switched companies and worked remote ever since. So she has the flexibility to go wherever.
Sevan Matossian (06:37):
Did she go to Northgate? Do you know what high school she went to?
Daniel Purington (06:41):
She went to Gilroy High.
Sevan Matossian (06:44):
Oh wow. Okay. So she grew up in Gilroy and then ended up in Walnut Creek.
Daniel Purington (06:49):
Yeah, she went to Gilroy and then she went did her undergrad at San Jose State, and then she did her PhD out in Boston.
Sevan Matossian (06:56):
Interesting. Gilroy’s gone through quite a bit of changes in the last 30 years, but still pretty rural. Sure has.
Daniel Purington (07:02):
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it absolutely is.
Sevan Matossian (07:05):
Is she bilingual? Does she speak Spanish?
Daniel Purington (07:08):
She does. Her mother was born in Mexico. She’s not fluent, but mostly because she’s out of practice, but she speaks Spanish a lot better than I do, that’s for sure.
Sevan Matossian (07:18):
Her family, is her dad Mexican also?
Daniel Purington (07:21):
No, her dad’s a hundred percent German. Her. Oh, interesting. Six foot five. And her mom’s five foot three.
Sevan Matossian (07:29):
Where did they meet, just out of curiosity?
Daniel Purington (07:32):
So they met, it was either in Indiana or Norfolk. Her father was in the Navy, and I’m not sure, I think they met at Indiana University, if I remember correctly. And then they kind of went out to the military path and then came out to the Bay Area.
Sevan Matossian (07:52):
Dan, there’s this German, I think it’s German. I can’t remember who the guest was I had on, but there’s this German tribe, and I forget what, I dunno if sect is the right word, but they live south of the border or somewhere in Mexico. They’re kind of like Amish. And that’s why I was wondering if when you said her dad was German, I was like, oh, I wonder if they met through there. I wonder what that is. Maybe someone in the comments will tell us what that is. Yeah. Interesting. So were her parents first generation here? They were immigrants. They came up to work in Gilroy.
Daniel Purington (08:24):
Her mother was, yep, her, so her mother was born in Mexico. Her family went back down to Mexico when her father got sick. Both of her mother’s parents were right from Mexico. They went back down to Mexico. She was born in Mexico. Her father, her mother’s father. So her grandfather passed away in Mexico. And then her mom came back to the United States and they went to Indiana. So kind of central and kind of messed around there for a while. And then she met Greg, who’s my wife’s father in the military, and then came out to Gilroy after that.
Sevan Matossian (09:06):
Hey, congratulations. By the way, you are a beautiful human being, but you also scored an incredibly, sounds like smart and beautiful wife. And then now you guys have two beautiful kids.
Daniel Purington (09:18):
Yeah, we had a pretty great life.
Sevan Matossian (09:21):
Yeah, good job. That’s the way to do it.
Daniel Purington (09:24):
Sure. Is
Sevan Matossian (09:25):
Level up. So you get into this argument with a guy, he talks shit to you at 19, basically he’s calling you a dummy who works in a dairy farm. You’re like, I’ll fucking show you. And you launch off and start filling your brain with smart stuff.
Daniel Purington (09:44):
Yeah, there’s no other story besides that.
Sevan Matossian (09:48):
Yeah. Interesting. And Jason Kpa has a similar story. It’s interesting. When he was in high school at a senior graduation, the principal cracked a joke about him, about being a dummy
Daniel Purington (10:05):
High school
Sevan Matossian (10:06):
And it stung. And he’s like, okay, I’ll show you. And as much as the ego gets a bad rap, there is a time to leverage the ego.
Daniel Purington (10:18):
Yeah. See, I love the ego in that regard. And you have to run the fine line of being like, well, you’re a dick or you’re, you’re just trying to get what you know that you’re capable of. I mean, you got to have something that’s internal that’s motivating you. So I don’t mind that. I mean, I had a similar thing there at my guidance counselor. I remember sitting down in her office when I was a senior in high school, and I still remember her name. She said, Dan, some kids just aren’t meant to go to college. It was just like, I did
Sevan Matossian (10:50):
Call professor tell me that,
Daniel Purington (10:52):
Watch this. I had no idea what I was going to do or nothing. I just knew that I could figure things out.
Sevan Matossian (11:03):
Matt soa, the guy, the executive producer of this show, he also has a similar story. I’d like to hear it in more detail sometime, but basically people saying he’s never going to amount to anything. He’s basically belongs on the yellow bus. And then he said that made him really insecure. And when he opened his first CrossFit gym and didn’t want to get caught off guard, not knowing about business, so he consumed a hundred business books and they stuck. He realized, oh, that’s actually my calling. This information is sticking.
Daniel Purington (11:34):
Yeah, it’s super cool when that happens. So we just pulled my daughter out of public school and she’s in a private school that’s a STEM-based school. So it’s much more hands-on arts focused things of that nature because the education kids get in, it just kind of ’em in pockets. This is the only way to do it. And when you have that ability to be creative and the way you learn, it doesn’t matter if you’re eight, like my oldest or 43 like me. Once you figure out how you learn, if you have the ego and the confidence that I’m going to go against conventional style and I’m still going to be successful, I think that’s super powerful.
Sevan Matossian (12:16):
Was there a specific incident that happened that had you make the switch with your daughter?
Daniel Purington (12:23):
Well, without going down the rabbit hole of Portland politics, our school, so we’re in the PPS school system, and they were on an entire month strike for the entire month of November. So our kids did not step foot in the school
Sevan Matossian (12:37):
Of 2023.
Daniel Purington (12:40):
And then they started to try to make up some difference in taking, they took out their first week of vacation, which everybody had already had stuff planned. And then we had that big ice storm somewhere in January, and my daughter’s school hasn’t been updated in forever. I don’t want to misquote it, but in excess of 30 years. And they burst some pipes and a whole bunch of asbestos went all over the school. And so they closed that school completely and my kids in second grade, and there was a hundred kids in that class and housing K through six. So simple math taught you it’s at least 600 kids that they dispersed between all the other schools. So they were already overpopulated. And then they had no idea when they were potentially going to open that school. And at that stage we were like, okay, we just cannot have this inconsistency. She’d essentially been in school six or eight weeks for the first two quarters of the school, and so needed to make the investment. And it has been the best investment. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made as a parent is putting her in this school.
Sevan Matossian (13:50):
Isn’t it fascinating? I’ve spent many hours on this show slamming the state of Oregon, especially the Portland school system and the California school system. I mean, it’s abusive. It’s almost like if you hate your kids, you leave them in school. But we pulled our kid out after one year. So basically, basically covid happened and we saw the way they were treating the kids, and then when we came back, there were all sorts that George Floyd had happened. And so all sorts of weird social policies started getting in place that were inappropriate for second graders, first graders, anyone just in school period. There were just all sorts of things being talked about that were being projected onto these kids that was completely inappropriate shit that maybe their parents should be talking about or the things that should happen naturally in a kid’s life. So whether it was the, yeah, we pulled them out and dude, a hundred percent the greatest thing we ever did. And my two youngest kids have never went to school. And there are some really, I know that they’re sort of biased narratives, but people are having kids. And then for the first 15, no 18 years of their life, sending them to be put behind chain link fences for nine hours a day. And I know that’s a pretty biased and simplistic view, but when I drive by these schools with my kids, that’s what I see. I see kids behind chain link fences and I’m like, wow. Yeah, it’s the greatest thing.
Daniel Purington (15:30):
Yeah, we’re really grateful that we have the financial means to be able to do it, and the wherewithal and the timing was great.
Sevan Matossian (15:41):
Did you have to give anything up? When you say you had the financial means, did you have to give anything up? Did you have to change things or?
Daniel Purington (15:48):
I gave up coaching a little bit so that we could make sure that we have to drop her off at school now. And that drop off is a little larger, but as far as I still get my coffee in the morning, if that’s what you’re talking about. We we’re pretty frugal with our money in the sense of we don’t buy a lot of things outside of experiences. So my house isn’t full of a bunch of junk. We buy experiences. So for that, when that happened, we were placed, and to be honest, I mean, we were been paying daycare for the last year. It’s already, it’s like, all right, well, it’s just going to go in perpetuity or at least for the next eight years.
Sevan Matossian (16:26):
And you have a younger son also?
Daniel Purington (16:28):
I do, yeah. My son Cole is about four and a half. Well, he’ll correct me, four, nine months.
Sevan Matossian (16:34):
And what are you going to do? What’s the plan for him to go to the same school as the daughter? Yeah,
Daniel Purington (16:40):
He’s already submitted. Our 60 day notice is given, so we’ll transition him in June or July, so he won’t come into the PPS school system. And it’s just the right thing for our family. We recognize that and we’re so, so happy that we’re able to provide that for our kids in this situation.
Sevan Matossian (17:05):
Hey, this notion that you said where you and your wife buy experiences, that’s cool that you see eye to eye on that, right?
Daniel Purington (17:15):
Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (17:16):
That’s what makes relationships work.
Daniel Purington (17:18):
It’s the best relationship I’ve ever had in my entire life. Our relationship was very fast tracked. I mean, we were living together within a couple of months, and then we were married shortly thereafter. I mean, we both are not so great with important dates like that, but we’ve been married for, I think it’s 13 years this year, 13 or 14 years. And we don’t have disagreements about money. We’ve always had the same bank account, even back when we were just dating. And we’ve always invested in experiences. And really, to be honest, that’s it. It’s just continued once we had kids. So once we had kids, instead of traveling all over the world, we bought a camper van. And so now we travel all over the place. We don’t ever fly to California anymore. We just drive. So my kids and my wife are going to Martinez.
(18:19):
I’m headed to Vegas for a business conference with two Brain on Wednesday. They’re going to drive down to California in the camper van, and then I’ll fly in to meet them after the conference for the weekend, and then we’ll drive back mean. So we just invested in a vessel that allows us to take everything in our puppy and their bikes, and that’s just what we do. So we spend most weekends out at the mountain or up in Washington or out at the coast. We just continue to do that instead of by some people like material things. We like experiences.
Sevan Matossian (18:56):
I grew up in Martinez. I grew up in Pacheco, the city right next to it, Pacheco cousin, and my mom was an attorney. Martinez is the county seat for Contra Costa County, so she worked in Martinez for years. What’s your wife doing down there?
Daniel Purington (19:12):
So her sister lives in Martinez. Her sister and their family live in Martinez. And then she’s got another sister, and her parents live down in Losano down near, I’ve been to the Weightlifter’s gym a few times.
Sevan Matossian (19:29):
Oh, anos.
Daniel Purington (19:30):
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve chatted with him a couple times. So we go down to the Bay area four or five times a year.
Sevan Matossian (19:39):
Wow. What a small world hang
Daniel Purington (19:40):
Out. Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (19:43):
This career you had as a so dairy farmer and then fast track through school and then into neuroscience, and then specifically around transplants. You did that for, how many years were you in that business for 20 years?
Daniel Purington (20:03):
40. Yeah. So let’s see. I started in the OR when I was 22, that was my first clinical, and then I was specifically focused in trans or organ donation into transplantation from 27 to about 40. I still do some consulting with the local company, more around operations, not surgical operations, but operations and systems. But right up till I was 40, the latter part of my career there, I spent building education criteria and educating a lot of the new clinical staff coming in for the company. So yeah, long time. So 13 years in organ donations specifically,
Sevan Matossian (20:54):
Hey, okay, organ donations, but basically you can transplant anything, right? I mean, I don’t hear about the brain being transplanted, but
Daniel Purington (21:06):
Yeah, I mean,
Sevan Matossian (21:07):
They’ll try anything now, right?
Daniel Purington (21:10):
Yeah. And it depends what they’re transplanting it for. But as far as solid organs, some solid organs are not going to transplant. They’re not going to transplant a spleen, for instance, and
Sevan Matossian (21:22):
The deal organ’s with the spleen, why not a spleen? What’s the spleen mean?
Daniel Purington (21:25):
You don’t need it nearly, it’s not a vital organ per se. Now, that doesn’t mean that you want to go messing around with it hypervascular. So crazy things can happen. And there are other physiological things that can happen with it, but you don’t necessarily need it to live just like you only need one kidney to live. You only need one lung. You can live with half a liver, things of that nature. And so it kind of depends if you’re talking about whole organ or if you’re talking about an ACL graft or a skin graft or a corneal graft, or you can
Sevan Matossian (22:01):
Do all things sorts of things. What about eyeballs? Has an eyeball ever been transplanted?
Daniel Purington (22:05):
Yeah, so that’s the corneal graph where you’ll take the cornea out of the eye. It’s the most common, it’s probably the most common asystolic recovery. So once the patient has passed and there’s no longer a heartbeat, whether it be medically stabilized or on their own, stabilized corneas are definitely the most common thing. Recovered.
Sevan Matossian (22:31):
What about a tongue? Tongue transplant?
Daniel Purington (22:37):
That’d probably be kind of hard just because of all the sensation and the mucus membranes. I mean, you could do it, but it’d probably be a piece of leather in your mouth and not functioning.
Sevan Matossian (22:46):
And it’s interesting too, because I guess the tongue and the penis, and there’s just certain things that just don’t get chopped off or need transplanting. I’m trying. How often do you hear someone bit off their tongue or head their penis chopped off and they need a new one? So I guess those aren’t even in high demand. I guess just based on the economics and capitalism, I’m not struggling at all. I’m not struggling. Whatcha are talking about? I’m fully enjoying this. I’m struggling. I want to talk about CrossFit, but I’m so fascinated by the transplant thing. Don’t ever tell me I’m struggling. I guess by capitalism and by demand, it’s the things that are going to be in the highest demand that they’re going to transplant the most.
Daniel Purington (23:39):
Yeah, I mean, a lot
Sevan Matossian (23:40):
Of times. And that’s the most experience and success would be, or failure.
Daniel Purington (23:43):
Yeah. I mean, insurance obviously going to play a big role in that in the sense of you can also, it’s the ability to increase that person’s quality of life quicker. And so insurance can help out with that regard. For instance, someone can live on dialysis if their kidneys aren’t working. It sucks, but they can do that. It doesn’t work with the liver. That way you can with a heart and a lung, but the perfusion side of that thing isn’t awesome, and success rate isn’t awesome. So it kind of depends where that is and what challenges the patient has.
Sevan Matossian (24:26):
When did you get into fitness in your own health and moving? Did you play sports as a kid?
Daniel Purington (24:31):
Yeah. Yeah. I played sports as long as I’ve known. I was a really small kid in high school, tall in gangly, and I played sports all through high school. And then I played relatively competitive football for a good bit out of high school, excuse me, while I was in college. And then after that, I kind of had a little bit of a void. And so I started doing a lot of ultra running, so bigger mountain distance, which I really enjoyed. And then I stumbled into a CrossFit gym in the Bay area of all places in a rock climbing gym.
Sevan Matossian (25:13):
Oh, was it in Emeryville or Albany? That one?
Daniel Purington (25:17):
Nope. So it was the one, I think the person in Emeryville had started the one. So it’s with Diablo Rock Gym.
Sevan Matossian (25:25):
Okay. Is that in Oakland or where is that?
Daniel Purington (25:28):
That one is in Concord.
Sevan Matossian (25:31):
Okay. I don’t know that one.
Daniel Purington (25:35):
We just walked in there looking, just looking at the gym, and it was really, really small. My wife and I, we met rock climbing, so we’re big rock climbers, and I just stumbled out. And Matt, who turned out to be a good buddy of mine, Chris, and he’s like, Hey, why don’t you just try this thing’s CrossFit? And it’s like, sure. And I showed up the next day and your typical story where I did a Curtis P complex with maybe some burpees and running or something like that. And I was really, I’m in the pinnacle of shape and it just crushed me. And then a couple days later I did Cindy and I was like, whatever, this is going to be fine. And it wasn’t fine, and that was it. That was like, all right, this is what I’m doing for the rest of my fitness world,
Sevan Matossian (26:19):
Curtis, 105 pounds for men, 70 pounds for women. Curtis complex is compromise of one power clean, one lunge each leg and one push press. Wow. I never even heard of that workout. Okay.
Daniel Purington (26:29):
Yeah, we were doing the Curtis, so we didn’t do the full thing. We did, I remember it was like four Curtis P, so it was the power clean lunge, lunge, push press, then it was some burpees, and then it was a hundred meter run. And then you came back and did it. And again, I think it was like an 18 minute am wrap. It was a while ago.
Sevan Matossian (26:46):
Crush it. You do the lunge in the front rack, you do the lunge in the front rack. Yeah,
Daniel Purington (26:49):
Yeah, yeah. That’s the hard part. That lunge gets heavy. Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (26:55):
I
Daniel Purington (26:55):
Bet. Like real heavy.
Sevan Matossian (26:58):
What did your wife think when you started that, when you did that? Did she like it?
Daniel Purington (27:03):
Yeah. I mean, my wife is super, just a wonderful human, and anything that puts a smile on my face, she’s like, go get it. So it was awesome. She didn’t actually get into CrossFit, believe it or not, until she was postpartum with our first child. She went to that cross the gym and didn’t have a great experience. The coaching was pretty terrible. And to really fast forward, I was training a bunch of clinical staff in my garage just because most, I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of people in medicine don’t prioritize their health the way they should. And so I just started training a bunch of people in my garage just six o’clock, a couple mornings a week, and we just started training. And then my wife started training with us postpartum, and then she really liked it. And then I pulled the trigger and decided to resign from a full-time position at the hospital and open up the gym. And then she really started training. And she’s a way better athlete than I’m, even though she started significantly later in her fitness endeavors, but she
Sevan Matossian (28:12):
Loves it. Now. You were living in Portland at the time that happened? Southern Portland. Interesting. Okay. So you get introduced to CrossFit. You didn’t have kids, you were at a rock climbing gym. And then from there you just start incorporating regularly into your training. But at that time, you’re also doing long runs, 50 K runs, and you’re training as a runner. Tell me about how this group started in your garage. You started working out in your garage, and where were you getting your programming from? Were you getting it from.com or programming it yourself?
Daniel Purington (28:46):
I was programming myself. So I did my L one shortly after I started CrossFit in the Bay. I did it in Sacramento. Adrian Bosman was the flow master, I think. And then Katie Hogan was one of the coaches up there.
Sevan Matossian (29:01):
Do you remember the year, Dan?
Daniel Purington (29:09):
It’s either 2013 or 2014. Okay. And so I started coaching at that gym in the bay just briefly. And then we came to Portland when I took that position up at OHSU, and I was in the hospital one night. So with donation call, you’re on call for 24 hours, and if you’re on first call, you’re going to be in the hospital. And the way that works is we cover every hospital in Oregon’s, southwest Washington and the Boise area. So you have a huge service area. So you get to know your counterpart because there’s a clinical person and then there’s a family support person. And I was sitting in a hospital in Southern Washington talking to someone who was just like, my fitness and my health has gone to garbage. I’m 36 or 37 years old. I’m not into bootcamps, and I’m not into this, I’m not into that. I was like.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
Check out our other posts.
