What does it take to build an elite sports medicine program from scratch in one of the world’s most demanding sports?

Dr. Heather Linden is the Vice President of the UFC Performance Institute and a two-time World MMA Awards Trainer of the Year. Before joining UFC, she spent seven years at the US Olympic Training Center working across all 52 sports, attending three Olympic Games, and serving as Medical Director for the Youth Winter Olympic Games. When a recruiter called about UFC, she didn’t even know what the sport was. She said yes anyway.

In this episode, Alane Paulley and Dr. Linden dig into what it really means to put the athlete first in a sport where fighters are independent contractors, cut 10% of their body weight in a week, and will compete with bones sticking out. They also talk about how the UFC Performance Institute evaluates and integrates new modalities, the unique parallels between UFC fighters and jockeys, and why Dr. Linden believes the future of sports medicine is in keeping athletes out of surgery, not recovering from it.

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is a conversation between two Louisville entrepreneurs who have known each other long enough to tell the real story, not the polished version.

Joey Wagner is the founder of J. Wagner Group, a full-service experiential marketing and events agency that has grown over 25 years from throwing the best parties in Louisville to running national campaigns for some of the biggest spirits brands in the world. His largest client today is Beam Suntory, the parent company of Maker's Mark, which was also the first brand that ever sponsored one of his events, paying him a couple hundred dollars for a DJ and some flyers when he was 22.

Joey and Alane go deep on what that 25-year arc actually looked like from the inside: selling mortgages nine to five after college while hustling events seven nights a week, turning down the University of Louisville three or four times before finally agreeing to teach an event planning class, and building a farm system through his internship program where five of his seven current full-time employees came up through his own intern pipeline. He breaks down why he tells every incoming intern and every college class he speaks to that he hopes they fail, why saying yes too much cost him years he could have spent going deeper on the right things, and how he finally learned that the CEO's job is not to be in QuickBooks for 10 hours a week.

The conversation covers the difference between will and skill and why you can teach one but not the other, what it actually looks like behind the scenes at a major event that nobody posts about, how delegation works when your name is the brand, and the role a strong network of mentors played in helping Joey navigate his biggest year of growth without losing the plot.

Alane and Joey also share where they each landed on the same realization at roughly the same time: the dream job you build in your head while you're young almost never survives contact with reality, and the thing you end up loving is usually the one you stumbled into by accident.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. And for the debut, she brings in someone who has made Louisville City FC his home in every sense of the word: Sean Totsch, the club's all-time appearance leader.

Sean grew up playing soccer against his whole class at recess with just his brother and a neighbor, got suspended from playing for a week in third grade for breaking a classmate's leg with a shot, and never once thought about quitting. He was never the nationally recognized kid, never the one the big academies came looking for. The Chicago Fire rejected him twice. A coach once told him he wasn't strong enough to play defense and didn't have the vision to play midfield. Four weeks later he signed with another club, won the entire league, and started the final at center mid.

That story is the thread that runs through the whole conversation: what it actually takes to build a career when no one's handing it to you. Sean talks about how his parents gave him opportunity without pressure, what it means to earn your cleats rather than just receive them, and why he thinks the harder path is the one that builds roots strong enough to hold.

He and Alane also get into the habits that have kept him performing at a high level as one of the older players in the league, including his rigid sleep schedule, his pregame routine, and his monthly pedicure tradition with his mom that he has kept going all season. He shares the story behind his tucked-in, locked-in identity, how it started as a random choice before a preseason game and became the thing people now expect of him everywhere he goes.

The conversation covers how he proposed to his wife on the field during COVID, why he approaches relationships with the same single-minded focus he brings to sport, what advice he would give to a kid in eighth grade right now who wants to go pro, and why he believes the no's and the doubt are not obstacles, they're the fuel.

It closes with a lightning round, a conspiracy theory about the pyramids, and a promise to revisit that topic in a future episode.