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The Hoeflinger Podcast
Welcome to the The Hoeflinger Podcast, where Dr. Brian Hoeflinger and Kevin Hoeflinger delve into riveting discussions about life as a neurosurgeon, the world of medicine, healthy living, fitness, and anything else that piques their curiosity. Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD, brings his extensive 24 years of experience as a full-time neurosurgeon to educate and inform. Get ready for engaging conversations that will broaden your understanding of the medical realm and beyond!
The Hoeflinger Podcast
#1: The Story of Dr. Brian Hoeflinger
Welcome to The Hoeflinger Podcast! In this debut episode, we delve into the captivating life story of Doctor Hoeflinger. From his early life, to becoming a neurosurgeon, to tragically losing his son, to becoming a drunk driving advocate, and eventually informing and educating through social media.
We also discuss why we started this podcast, what topics we will cover, and more. We strive to inspire and inform you on our podcasting journey. So please give it a listen and be sure to leave us a rating and review if you enjoyed the episode!
Tune in every week for new episodes of The Hoeflinger Podcast with Dr. Brian Hoeflinger and Kevin Hoeflinger.
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Hey everyone, how you doing. Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Hoeflinger Podcast. I'm here with my dad, who a lot of you may know from social media, Dr Brian Hoeflinger. How you doing today, Dad.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I'm awesome how you doing, Kevin. It's my son, Kevin, by the way. You guys probably know him too.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I'm doing pretty good today it's Monday shooting the first episode. So while we're doing this, over the last year since we started doing social media with my dad, a lot of people have constantly requested that we do a podcast or does a podcast, and it's something even a couple of years ago we used to discuss doing just to discuss ideas. So what you can expect is he's a full-time neurosurgeon. We'll talk a lot about neurosurgery and medicine. He's got a lot of subject matter expertise there. We also are very passionate about fitness, healthy living Another big cause. Is that pretty meaningful to us, including drunk driving, but yeah, anything else you want to add there.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:No, I mean, a lot of people have been requesting this. We've been putting it off for a long time and we're going to make it low-key, informative, try to make it a little bit fun and let's get going.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so bear with us. This is our very first time. We're going to try to consistently improve over time, but we also any suggestions you guys have. Any of the social medias? Please comment. Let us know Anything we could do better or any topics you'd like us to explore.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:But yeah, so I'll go ahead. No, I think one of the first things that we've been asked the most about Pry is why have we started into social media? I think that'd be a good topic to start off with.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so I think today a good beginning episode. What we wanted to talk about is why we started social media. Just kind of a life story of my dad. He's been on a couple of podcasts but I know I'm pretty intimately as a son and I think going over that would be interesting to a lot of people A life story of why you became a neurosurgeon. So yeah, why we started on social media. Why don't you kick it off with why, when you created your patient videos all those years ago.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So you know, when someone comes in to see you for surgery and you talk to them in the office, they have a lot of questions. You go over their films with them, you talk to them about surgery, but I think by the time they leave a lot of that is forgotten. When you leave the office Because you're nervous during a visit you may not be. You might be thinking other things like what am I doing with my dogs, where am I at work and how am I gonna take off work? So a lot of people. When I would go to surgery with them and I'd meet them right before surgery, I'd ask them any questions and they'd have a lot of questions because they didn't remember what I had told them in the office.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So I thought it'd be wise to create this video where it kind of recreates your office visit, right?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So when you come in for a visit to see me and we start talking about surgery, I'll kind of have a video that recreates that office visit.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:We talk about you know what your MRI may have looked like in the office and I'll talk about your specific surgery, go over all the details again, like we did in the office, and then I talk about all the aftercare and what to do at home, how to change your bandage, what activities you can do, and that's all wrapped up into one you know, 13 minute video for most of my videos and it covers most of my surgeries that I do.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So when I started doing that, I found that people didn't have questions anymore. You know, they were very comfortable. People were watching it like crazy and they really liked the videos. And so Kevin had observed that and Kevin's, you know, graduated from Fisher Business School in Ohio State and had a kind of business mindset and we were thinking, you know, this might be a good idea to do for other surgeons and have other surgeons start making videos. But then, even beyond that, I think he had an idea because people like the videos so much and they like learning about neurosurgery that I'll let him tell you about the next part.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so I started doing it for surgeons around the Toledo area. We have multiple orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, cardiologists and some others. But then the other year I was just actually last June is when we started on social media, I mean as a younger person, I'm 25. I see all these other things on social media and I wasn't really on TikTok, but I was on Instagram and YouTube. I would see all those videos and I was thinking you know, you've got a lot of interesting stuff and we had all the video content that we've already shot. So I just was thinking let's just start there and then go from it. So we created the TikTok and relatively quickly, you can kind of go up.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, I got you. Within the first month or so, we had almost 100,000 followers. It was crazy.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so we just started on TikTok, but then I started seeing it, you know, putting content and growing some other social channels so like Facebook, instagram, youtube, and we just slowly went from there and we just wanted to be. We started out with just neurosurgery, more so, and we wanted to add in more stuff about our other interests, like health, and then stuff involving Brian Matters, which is the organization our family started for my brother who died over 10 years ago. But we slowly kind of added other stuff. Where we have this platform, we wanted to spread positivity and we wanted to spread good information, wouldn't you say.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, and I think we wanted to try to make it very meaningful our TikToks. Some of them are fun, but a lot of them are pretty serious and I think we like to talk about meaningful topics that make a difference in people's lives and I think the thousands and thousands and thousands of comments we got from people indicate that people like to listen to what we have to say. So we've kind of moved on from there and we've been doing well on social media. Don't put out as much as we probably should, but we try to.
Kevin Hoeflinger:We try to.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:we're trying to go on that we try not to put out frivolous stuff, just stuff that we think is really good content for people who watch us.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, and I think that's a thing I think some people would assume. You can't just put serious stuff for others, things like that, people won't listen. But the most viewed TikTok it's got almost 20 million views is about, in a creative way, you discussing how alcohol is metabolizing the body.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So if you get creative in different ways. It's not just dancing or silly stuff. You can really do stuff that makes an impact and I think that's what we try to do. It's hard to come up with creative ways like that sometimes, but we're constantly working on that and much more to come, hopefully, yeah, but yeah. So I wanted to dive in. That's the social media journey. I wanted to dive in and just kind of go through your life story a bit For all these people that follow you. There's a lot they don't know of your life. So just, I guess we can. If you want to talk about your early life at all through high school Only minutes you want me to talk? Well, no, I'm saying just let's just give a quick overview about what your early life was like. Just childhood, you had a pretty normal childhood.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, I mean, we were just parents. We just had, like a average, I'd say, a small house and an average neighborhood and my parents. I only have fond memories of my parents. They were loving parents and they took care of us, and early age is different than it is nowadays.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:If you wanted to make money back then, I didn't have any way of getting money from our parents to get a few dollars for allowance. But I had a paper out from. I was a fourth grade to seventh grade. I'd deliver the papers every day. I'd make $60 a month and I do creative things like shoveling snow in the winter or I had a detailed car and so things like that. So I did a lot of kind of creative stuff to make money when I was younger, because that's what I needed to do, and when I wanted a bike I bought my own bike and then I was into sports a lot in high school and then our family moved down to Florida when I was in ninth grade and we were down there for two or three years and then my family moved back to Ohio and I stayed in Florida with my grandparents because I had a job down there at a gas station, was finishing up high school, had a girlfriend and I didn't want to move back, so they said it was fine if I stayed with my grandparents.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So I just graduated high school and I was getting ready to start college at the University of South Florida to go in marine biology. Because I really wanted to go into marine biology. I loved the water, I loved scuba diving and I got a call from my mom. It was early summer. I just graduated high school and my brother Eric, who was three years older than me he was 21 at the time he was in a bad car accident and my mom said you need to come back home. He's been to surgery in the middle of the night on his brain and he's in a coma. So I flew back to Toledo. For some time I ever flew on a plane.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I was 18 years old and went to the ICU at the hospital where my brother was and he was intensive care unit and my first saw him. His didn't look like my brother. I mean he's grotesquely. His face is all swollen and his head was wrapped with a monitor metal tube coming out of his brain. He had two tubes in his chest, a tube in his abdomen and so they thought he was going to die.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:He had brain surgery the night before and then the neurosurgeon who came around. He said he's probably not going to survive, we're going to do our best. And just hanging around the environment for a couple weeks, just waiting for the neurosurgeon to come around and talk to us, and seeing that environment, I got very interested in neurosurgery and so ultimately, after two weeks, I flew back to Florida and I dropped out of my classes at the University of South Florida and decided to move home, go to college and become a neurosurgeon, and so that's why I became a neurosurgeon just because of my brother's accident. And my brother did survive. He was in a coma for six months and then he could never talk again, but he could kind of you know, mow the words and he was paralyzed on his right side of his body so he could never he was never could take care of himself anymore.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Wait to jump in here. Yeah, my memories of my uncle, eric I was. He was, you know, he was the life of a party. He made one bad decision. He was very social guy. He made a bad decision and I mean, I think the times were a lot different there, with people driving drunk.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:But it wasn't even. It was, I think, both they got hit by. Yeah, he got hit by a drunk driver and it was just a bad accident, you know.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, and I think what I remember of him and he died a couple years after Brian's like about eight years ago. But what I remember is he would always he had a keyboard, he had a cardboard box keyboard thing and he could point out words, but that he was always in a wheelchair and he couldn't talk, you know, he had to point out the words and he got a machine.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Once I was trying to speak for him, but it never worked very well, so he would just. It was very frustrating for him, you know.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So no life. I mean he had much of a life after that.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, so I mean, I think that shaped kind of some things for you and we can dive into that later, but of how, with medicine and so then.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So then I was. So I followed through and I went to college in pre-med and then I got into medical school here in Toledo and I was in my second year of medical school and my mom loved to write letters to people and she's always writing every morning and one morning I'd gotten up and she couldn't use her right hand hardly at all and I asked her how long was that going on for? And she said you know, a few days she's been having trouble, but she didn't tell anybody. So actually I called the neurosurgeon who had operated on my brother. He was a neurosurgeon where I was going to medical school and I told him about it and he had my mom coming in, did a CAT scan of her brain and she had like seven tumors in her brain and so it was cancer.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So you know, she underwent two brain surgeries radiation and chemotherapy. All her hair fell out. I remember her vomiting every morning and then you know, three years three it's from the day she was diagnosed to three months later. With all of that she ended up dying anyways, and that's kind of where I learned that you know more is not always better and sometimes you have to think more of the patient quality life and your own quality life. But that's when it solidified. I definitely knew I needed to be a neurosurgeon at that point, and so my mom, I was this really hard thing to go through. You were 25, right.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, about 25, and you know, my mom used to take care of my brother. She kept him out of a nursing home so she took care of him. That was what she devoted the rest of her life to. And then, when my mom died, then my grandmother started taking care of Eric and ultimately, when my grandmother died, my dad spent the rest of his life taking care of Eric. But, um, I finished up medical school and then I met Cindy, just before the last year. Well, I met my wife, cindy in between first and second year of medical school, but really started dating her a little bit after that. My mom only met her like three times before she died. So Cindy had said we were done with medical school and we're doing the match and you have to decide what field you want to go into. And she wanted to go into pathology and I was going into neurosurgery and we were trying to do the couples match.
Kevin Hoeflinger:This is for residency, for residency For people that don't know.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, and it's harder to get into neurosurgery. It was a little bit harder at that point. So we were going to more likely go to a program that accepted me and I remember she said I'm not going anywhere unless we're married. So we ended up getting married and then we ended up getting a couples match at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, and then she did her pathology residency, which was five years, and I did my neurosurgery residency, which was seven years, and then, after you know, during residency we had three children. We had Brian, Kevin and Julie, and that was a busy time in our lives because I was never home and you know, Cindy had her own residency to do. Plus she take care of all the kids and get them to daycare and go to residency and do her job and then come home and take care of the kids and I sometimes wouldn't get home till eight or nine o'clock at night if I got home. So I don't know how we did it through those years, but we did. And then we um.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Well, just give a tip, because I've heard you say it before, but it's pretty crazy. You guys like remember you saying to me one time you guys would meet. The one time you could meet in the day was in the cafeteria for lunch or dinner.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Like our dinners together, like she would come over the hospital sometime before, you know, before the kids came home for daycare. She would come early and we'd have dinner together in the cafeteria and then she'd go get the kids and then I wouldn't see her. It's well sometimes the next day. That was a routine, it was just busy.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:We were both very busy, had busy residencies and um, but we found time. If we had a weekend off, you know we take the kids maybe hiking somewhere up up an hour away or something. So, um, so yeah. And then then, um, and then we ended up moving back to Toledo, um, cause that's where our families were, that's where my dad still wasn't her parents we're still here. And so we came back and we um, we had Christie, uh, two years later, our fourth child, and, um, I got into practice and and got real busy starting out.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:And then you know, my dad. It's funny, I just get home and cause I never saw my dad much during residency, cause we were so busy, and and then I just get home and I become a neurosurgeon and have a good practice and start making a little bit of money, and then my dad, um, he got sick and then he he died, I think like after two years, well, two years after I got home, he died in 2001. And so I never really had a chance to to do anything with my dad or travel with him. You know, I thought we'd always, when I became a nurse, shouldn't be able to do things and take him on trips and stuff like that, and just never got the chance to do it. So you definitely have to um, enjoy your time with your parents where you can cause sometimes it doesn't end up being there and then, um, you know, cindy's Cindy's dad ended up dying shortly after that.
Kevin Hoeflinger:And then, um, yeah, but also with mom. At that time my mom had been working too, right up until Christie was born. And then you guys made the decision together that you didn't want all of us to just be raised by yeah, you know, we had a nanny for a while.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:We don't want the kids to be raised by a nanny, so we decided to get um to have Cindy retire, and then she took care of the kids, and so that was a great decision, mom.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, it's two, like a lot of people since I've grown up and you know a lot of people won't know that about my mom, but my mom he's an MD. My mom's actually an MD PhD. We got to get her on We'll get her to tell some stories. She's a pathologist, she's got very interesting.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:She's a forensic pathologist. She's kind of like CSI, just what you watch on TV CSI. That's what she used to do, yeah, so she has a lot of good stories.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But yeah, so she. But I'm always eternally grateful. She decided, she took it up and she raised us and she was an excellent mom. She's always provided us with so much love and support and helped us with so much stuff. So shout out to you, Cindy, I love you. So, yeah, what do you think about and I can recount some stuff too like, but childhood. I think it's a lot different now with your work, compared to when you were really in the grind of it, when you were starting out in your career.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Well, it's interesting too, because I always say how busy I was, but I was in my. You know, you're kind of in your own world a little bit when you're that busy. But what would you think? Like not being at home.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I know Well, I just know, with a lot of stuff and obviously you're working and you're doing hard stuff. You have a lot of medical school debt and stuff like that, because you guys both had taken a lot of debt to go through stuff and so you were, you know, and you were trying to establish yourself in Toledo, I would imagine. But yeah, I remember when I was a kid my I mean mom would come to everything but like sporting events and other like school events, a lot of stuff like that. I mean I think you made them when you could, but I remember you had to miss a lot of those. I remember we never had. If we had dinners as a family together, we would have them. Let you at work, usually from like five to like seven. I feel like a lot of days?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, you get home at seven or eight sometimes.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But I mean, you weren't on a trauma call and everything at that time. That's the time if people, if we were doing stuff back then, you had anything.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:What's some good stories to tell.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Well, yeah, because I mean you were doing all this stuff. I mean you're doing that again now, you're starting to back up, but you were doing a lot more brain surgery back then. Yeah.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I mean it's when you do a trauma call I do probably a lot more brain surgery than normal and then later years I've been doing more spine surgery and now now I'm back in the trauma again.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So I'm seeing more, more injuries, more more brain injuries and for people who don't know maybe like so let's go through trauma call versus non-trauma call and different stuff. So you have your, your routine practice. You're seeing new patients who might come in with back pain or other pain, so a lot of time you're doing a spine surgery. So then you know neck or spine, but then you have you rotate with your partners through non-trauma call, which is any of you have done surgery?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, so you have the difference between you know so. So our regular call would just be you know, practice call. So if you do surgery on a patient and they call the office to say they're having increased back pain or they're having drainage from their incision, then you have to have somebody on call in your practice who can take that call, help them, have them come into the office, take a look at them and things like that. So that's one call. And then there's trauma call, where you're on call for the hospital. So if somebody gets in a car accident and has a head injury or breaks their back or something or comes in with a brain tumor, then you're on call to see them and and take care of them.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So it's just two different types of call and that's the. I mean that's the, that's the stressful one. The trauma are obviously both stress. But the trauma call is much more stressful and that's I mean I can remember my entire life when you get your pager goes off, the beep, beep, beep, or you had to go wake up in the middle of the night and go in and do a life saving surgery. So I think that's definitely got to be one of the harder parts of your job.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I think it is the most stressful part. But you know, I mean any surgery can be stressful. But you know, the more you do, the more you get used to doing surgery and then things just kind of fall into place. So it's really just you got to get experience and the more surgeries to do, the more comfortable you are. Yeah.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So but moving on, I think a huge thing, I would say you really got established in Toledo. It's been about 15 years We'd been raising your family, or 12, 15 years raising your family, and life was pretty good. What do you say we? We had every year.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, we had the perfect family and the perfect life. And then, and then my son, brian, you know, when he was 18, he got into a car accident. He was drinking and driving and hit a tree head on and he and he died that night and that kind of changed our life. It changed everybody's life.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Brian was a senior in high school. He was 18 years old. He turned 18 actually in like a month, in a couple of days before, but he had transferred to Ottawa Hills for his senior of high school from another local high school. But yeah, he was just at a party with some friends and he, he, he was actually. They actually had a DD that night, but a lot of people.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:He was in the air driver.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But things happened and then you know someone else's stuff was going on. He ended up leaving. But yeah, unfortunately, out of so many people that probably driven drunk and you never, you never know one choice, he probably Brian was known to make a lot of good choices in his life. He was a straight A student. He was on the Division I golf. He was on the, not the. He was Division I at St John's. He was on the varsity golf team for Ottawa Hills. He was the second player.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:He's a good golfer. He was almost scratched, not quite yeah.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But he made all the. He made a lot of good choices. He made all the right choices, honestly, except that you know he made a bad decision then, that you can't really make it when you're drinking alcohol.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:You can't make good decisions when you're drunk.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But that was. I mean. I think that's kind of shaped the last 10 plus years of all of our lives after a tragedy.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah Cause when Brian died. You know, I just couldn't. You know you could do. One thing you could do is you could just say that Brian died in your barium and that's the end of it and you don't do anything about it. But there's no reason somebody like him should die the way he did.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Drunk driving is such a preventable thing, and so we knew that we had to do something with it and we, you know, we went to the local media because there was a lot of things being talked about how drunk he was and we're bad parents and all kinds of things. You know, he was on the news and they're talking about how his alcohol level was so high and I just had set the record straight. So we went to our local news and did an interview and really kind of talked about Brian and his life. And, yeah, he made a mistake, he was the drunk driver, but it doesn't mean that you can't learn from his mistake. And we've really taken that stance and we got onto Facebook, which was social media at that time, and got in the news and it just took off.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I don't know what it was about Brian, but something that the nation and even the world was intrigued by, what happened to him and our point to try to stop drunk driving. But you know we were on the Katie Kirk show and a lot of other talk shows and then we started Brian Matters, which was a foundation we started to help educate about drunk driving and my wife and I and Kevin talks now and my daughter Christy will go to high schools and talk about drinking and driving and the dangers and how to prevent it. And I think we don't really try to tell kids not to drink. I mean, we're not out there telling people what to do. We're just trying to educate them about the dangers of drinking and especially driving and we use Brian as the example and we show our wonderful life that we used to have and all the accomplishments that Brian had and how that all disappeared after he died.
Kevin Hoeflinger:And to jump in here too, like the one thing that I know. I think something that resonates is how open you guys are about it, and I mean you. Obviously you guys are both doctors and I remember you guys always are very strict about not drinking, making smart decisions, so you guys always communicated that. So it's not as if you guys didn't do that. Everyone can easily point the finger when it happens to someone else but I think it was your willingness to open up your life so much to potentially save at least one other. I know you guys used to say that, just so you can save by talking, and it was uncomfortable for you guys.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Well, it's not easy to sit up there and talk about your son drinking and driving and thank God he didn't kill anybody else other than himself. But a lot of parents would want to bury that, probably because it's embarrassing and I was never embarrassed by it. It's life and Brian was a good kid. He just made a bad decision, like a lot of kids do, and so there's not anything embarrassing about it, it's just we should use it to help other people.
Kevin Hoeflinger:And one decision doesn't define you A lifetime of him Everyone. I think that's something else that was with Brian At the funeral home when he was the showings. They had the most showings they've ever had. People who came through. There's so many out point of just people who only barely ever interacted with Brian, but they had positive experiences about him, so he had a special light inside him and he's not defined by one bad decision.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Well in his story.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I mean you can look it up. I mean, when this first happened, we wrote a letter to the graduating class of 2013. That's the year he died, because Brian never graduated high school because he died before graduate and we realized how people were really listening, because I mean, this letter was shared like 220,000 times on Facebook, which it reached like 24 million people around the world, and 20,000, 30,000 comments came in. And that's when we really knew that it mattered to people and parents would read this letter to their kids and I remember a hairdresser everybody who came in for prom, the hairdresser would make them read the letter before they went out to prom, just things like that, and it's kind of stuck through the years. But then, when Kevin started the social media with us, we've done some of that work about drinking and stuff like that, and those are some of our biggest TikToks that are watched are the ones that talk about education, about alcohol and the dangers of alcohol, and I think when you used to do that, you barely even knew how to use Facebook.
Kevin Hoeflinger:You just managed to get it on there, and it just was going viral.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, just went viral.
Kevin Hoeflinger:He got on all they were on the Katie Kirk. They were on national television. I was on for a second with you guys.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:But, as I'm saying, there was something about Brian and his story that people resonated with him more than other people, I don't know why?
Kevin Hoeflinger:Well, I know and I think just how you put it in your willingness to be open and share uncomfortable things like that, but you weren't optimizing anything. So I always think about that. And then we never had a social media strategy after that. And then we only recently once last year, when we started doing that we're like let's incorporate some of stuff. See it does it all resonates, I think the combination of a lot of things and I think it's making it's very meaningful to us If it helps other people. We get messages sometimes from people that say it's made a big difference to them, and that's always it keeps you going wanting to do that.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Even like, I think, one of the most recent ones that we did a video on. Oh, I actually read the letter. So the letter I was talking about this year is the first time I ever did it. I read the letter on social media instead of sending the letter out by letter. But I talked it and I spoke to people and somebody had watched it and he wrote a comment and he said that you know, I watched the pain in your eyes as you were reading this letter and I could see the pain as a father losing a son, how bad it was. And he said that I realized that I could never do that to my father. And he said I just want you to know that you saved a life, at least one life tonight, because I was getting ready to kill myself. And after I watched this, he said I could never do that to my dad, cause the pain that you're going through, and it's stuff like that. There's no monetary amount you can put on that.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So we get a lot of comments about how this has really affected people in parental context, about how it's changed their child's life and viewpoint on alcohol, but so, anyways, that's something we're ongoing. We're going to continue to do that in the future and talk a little bit about stuff like that.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Um, we'll definitely yeah, we'll definitely do deep dives, talk about more stuff like that, cause there's a lot from the talks we give that we can incorporate. What last thing I would want to touch on is what was it a year after Brian died? With all that going on, brian matters. You guys started a couple months after you guys started the golf tournament foundation. Everything but a year after I think in a huge part is you wrote the book, your book, your only book.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Well, yeah, so I wrote so about a month after Brian died it was actually a four month. I just couldn't sleep at night. So I get on my cell phone and I started writing a book and I just, I swear to God, I just woke up one night and I knew exactly the title of the book, what I wanted to write in the book, every chapter. I knew and I wrote it all down really quickly, the outline, and then every night I'd get up and within a month every night I would write and within a month or two I had the whole book written and then from that point then I got somebody to edit it and do the grammar for me and stuff like that, and then I self-published it. So it's been a pretty meaningful book. I mean, we give it out to high schools and it's been on the internet.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I mean it sold a lot of copies, but that was just something. I could never rewrite. That book, it's very raw and emotional and you'll cry if you read it, definitely in the first couple of chapters.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But it's pretty quick. You can read it in a couple of like two, four hours, yeah, three hours, you can Three hours four hours, but so many I mean a couple of schools have read it and then we've spoken at those schools school in Texas, a school in Ohio.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:In Tennessee. We just had them read the book.
Kevin Hoeflinger:But the book is called the Night he Died, turning Tragedy and the Hope, and I think it's a combination of Brian, your lives and neurosurgeon part of your life story and kind of just advocacy and trying to raise awareness.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So it's really kind of we describe exactly what happened that night and everything that led up to it and all the aftermath after he died and what we went through as a family and how horrible it was. And then we talk about what we started doing on social media and alcohol and we tried to change the laws. My wife and I went down to Columbus and talked to senators and lawmakers about changing law about certain things. So there's a lot of stuff in the book.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, and I think with the book too. Oh sorry, you can find it on bryanmatterscom. That's our website. You can buy it there. It's currently on Amazon. So when you published it it was just a small-time publisher and after late last year the publisher the small-time publisher and COVID was really hard for the publishing business so he actually closed down his shop. So we're currently in the process of looking for a new publisher.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So if anybody knows a publisher, really a new publisher for our book, so we have some copies at home that we still have, that we can.
Kevin Hoeflinger:We still have hundreds and hundreds of copies and we fulfill our own orders, but it's really just about spreading awareness. You can see a lot of stuff. We have some articles and other things on bryanmatters and we speak to a lot of schools and it's just like he said. It's about if you can save one person at a time. The power of one person surviving has ripple effects throughout the world. But I think that's a good introductory episode. Well, and then I think yeah.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I mean, so that's part of what we wanna do. And then I think the other thing is our lifestyle. I mean, I think as a family we've always been pretty healthy. And then I know, after bryan died I don't know Kevin can speak for himself. I mean, for me it's like bryan lost all this opportunity to do things that he can never do again, and I was thinking I wanted to try to do something challenging, and I've always been active and so I started running, and then I did a half marathon and then a marathon, and then I decided I wanted to do an Ironman, and so I spent years probably two or three years in all this training.
Kevin Hoeflinger:If you wanna talk, let's slow down. Let's tell people what each one is. So you started off with the Disney marathon right?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Well, first I started off just doing some small runs, right? So I just started doing five Ks and 10 Ks, which are smaller runs, and then I moved up to a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles 13.1 miles. Then I wanted to try a marathon. So then I trained for the marathon and I got a plan offline and I just did what they told me to do every day.
Kevin Hoeflinger:And then I did the Disney marathon and the kids and my wife came down with me that was the beginning of 2017, I remember it was when I was a sophomore in Ohio State, so you did the Disney marathon and it was super cold that morning. I remember, yeah, it was freezing.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I was like I'd get up like a two or three in the morning and you sit out there waiting for hours to start it. But then after that I thought I'd try a triathlon.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So then they have, there's different triathlons, there's a sprint, an Olympic a half and a full Triathlon is you swim first, then you bike, then you run.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So when I started doing this, actually I had asked Kevin, do you want to think about doing an Ironman with me? And he was in college in Ohio State and busy, and I don't think he had the time, and so I just started trying.
Kevin Hoeflinger:It was completely different to me too. You jumped into that I think I know. No, I'm not saying that like that. I'm saying it's really cool, but it's the world of the unknown before you do it. Now, I love, like I, run in marathons. I do triathlons too, but I remember when you first said it to me I was super busy and it was just easy not to and it feels, thinking about it, it seems very weird. I've never who swam, biked and ran before.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:So then that. So I did a few of the small ones first, and then I did a half Ironman and then ultimately I did the full Ironman, which is 2.4 miles of swimming. So almost 2.5 miles of swimming, and then you hop on your bike for 112 miles and then you get off your bike and you run a full marathon. And that's what an Ironman is, and we started like at seven in the morning, right at sunrise, and I finished at 9.25 or something. So it was like 14 hours and 25 minutes and that's like an average time.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I mean that's not great, it's not horrible, but More so about just doing it, because it's not about just the day. I think a lot of people it's not just about the day of the race. You show up on the day of the race and you're cashing in all the training you've done, because that's where I always think.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I always would think about that is if someone says they're too busy to do something, you were in full practice as a neurosurgeon full trauma calling you've dedicated your life no matter when I got home, whether it was at five or eight o'clock at night, whatever I had to do that day, I went out and did it, no matter how long it took, and weekends I was off, I would just run and ride. I could never. I don't know if I could ever do that again, but it's a big time commitment. But the point of it is I just wanted to challenge myself but in the process I got really healthy eating and exercising. And my wife she's really into health. She's tried so many different health programs but she's actually I think she did her nutritionist she got nutrition certification and my wife could talk to you guys about macros and micros and all that kind of stuff.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:But then I kind of died out of that stuff and got busy again and then Kevin took over. Then Kevin got into health and fitness really big and now he's doing the triathlons and marathons.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Well, I know, but that's not, that's not solely true, like I did a little stuff before, but you're not. You're not. He's not out of the race. We both just did an Olympic triathlon. We did the Tzito Olympic triathlon, yes. And one other thing I wanted to shout out here is his coach his coach when he was doing the triathlon training and she's coaching me now I'm doing the Chattanooga Ironman, my first one in a couple months. Is Renee Small here in? Or is Renee Small signing? I think it's Small. I think it's Renee Small. She's. She's in Tzito, the greater Tzito Ohio area. If you ever are surprised, I think she does online coaching too.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Anyway, she's a great coach. She's done a lot of Ironmans and they're very active constantly. It's a way of life.
Kevin Hoeflinger:We were talking to her yesterday, but if anyone ever wants to jump into triathlons, I think hit her up, she's got. I think it's multi sport, but she's a great person.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:But I mean so. I think you know we really always wanted as a family to get into fitness and advocate fitness and talk about healthy eating and you know my wife was a vegan for a year and I was a vegan for like six months and it's a lot of work, it's great food. Some of the best meals she makes are vegan and we've tried, you know, pescatarian, which is just fish, or is it no fish?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:You can have no meat, you can have this fish, yeah, fish and then vegetarian and so, and now we're back to just eating healthy and normal meat, but Kevin's kind of a vegetarian though.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, I mean I eat plant based about like 80% of the time because I kind of the label is, I think, all or nothing. On some of these things especially, I just read out live by Dr Peter Atilla. I've read a bunch of stuff, read the Whole Foods diet by John Mackey started Whole Foods, but I think there's just so many different things. Such an insanely complex thing is diet. Everyone's so personalized and I think finding what works for you and constantly changing your opinion as new research comes out and definitely definitely.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:I mean, over the years that I've been doing this and Cindy's been reading about, we've all I mean I definitely think plant based it's definitely heart healthy, it's going to extend your life. There's just no doubt. I think the data supports that completely.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I think just not. Yeah, so plant based, and I think just the one thing you can't argue about. You can argue about meat and these other things, but you can't argue that processed food, not any processed food is probably the number one thing that I think it's pretty.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Because there's so many chemicals in processed food and things. That's the problem, yeah, and that's the problem.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I've always said you can be a vegan and sit there and eat Oreos, Right, you know what I'm saying? That's what, and I think it is. It's diet and nutrition. Diet and just exercise can have. As a doctor, I think it's always cool we put so much emphasis and I'm especially in the United States with medicine on once someone has a problem, trying to fix them, and insurance will pay all this money.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Instead of being preventative, we wait to have it, and then we fix it. But so I think down the road we're going to do podcasts, definitely on healthy eating and healthy living and maybe some triathlon stuff, and I'd like to have my wife, cindy, and she'll talk your ear off about health stuff and she knows all the research.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, I think there's just tons of stuff beyond just neurosurgery medicine. We'll definitely have tons of that. We'll have. I guess we just did the triathlon with Bob Baxter yesterday and it'd be interesting to talk to a healthcare administrator.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, so Bob's the regional CEO of Mercy Health System, which is a big healthcare system. It's Bonsicor too, it's a big healthcare system in Ohio and five other states, so it was fun to have him doing that. That was his first triathlon. He does a lot of marathons, but yeah, we'd like to have different guests on. That are interesting people that maybe you won't meet out on the streets every day and pick their.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Also, the cool thing is I mean me and my dad spent a lot of time together and I think we both have completely different backgrounds. Clearly I'm in business, obviously, and I've always done that entrepreneurial lifestyle, and you in medicine. You can pick someone's brain the way I could never pick someone's brain in place first. So I think that's a really cool thing to be able to do. But basically we kind of want to talk about anything that's meaningful to us or peaks our curiosity and hopefully you guys enjoy, and we want to obviously keep anything you guys are interested in?
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:Yeah, definitely the comments. I mean, if you have certain topics that you think we could cover, you know realistically, we'd be happy to talk about it. Can't talk way outside what we know, but the stuff that we do know we can talk about.
Kevin Hoeflinger:And one thing there I would say is we read a lot of the comments between my dad, myself, my mother and our other family members. We read as many comments as we can. We try to reply. One thing is same with the direct messages people send to us as well. One issue is you know and I think we get this a ton is my dad can't answer because of how the United States medical and legal system are. You can't answer when people ask you for treatment.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:You can't prescribe, I can't really give you advice. You know I'd have to see you as a patient in my office to actually give you any advice. I just can't give out advice on social media.
Kevin Hoeflinger:I mean as much as I'd like to Personalize advice. So I mean, that's why we want we can give general situations and we try to create a lot of reforms.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:We can talk about topics I just can't talk about. I can't. If you ask me a question about your particular health problem, I can't really answer that for you.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, I just want to address that. I can just give you general general ideas Sorry. I just wanted to address that quick because, if you think we're ignoring you or not, we read so many of these messages. We look through every single one, but the problem is we can't do anything, can't provide treatment options, can't say anything, can't provide medical advice specifically for you.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:That's all.
Kevin Hoeflinger:So yeah, but we're excited. This was episode number one.
Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD:It's got to be a one. This was it.
Kevin Hoeflinger:Yeah, this is the first one. Bear with us. We did our best to make it sound and look good and we'll try to keep going and keep improving as we go. All right, thanks, all right. Peace out everyone. Have a good one.
