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.

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is a conversation between two women who have both spent careers believing in something before the mainstream caught up, and who have both paid the price for it.

Dr. Allison Marshall is the owner of Full Circle Vet, an equine veterinary practice in the Richmond, Virginia area built entirely around chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and fascial release. She started as a conventional equine vet, spent nine years in traditional practice, then made the leap to holistic medicine in 2005, the same year she was pregnant with her third child, training in chiropractic and acupuncture across 18 weekend intensives while managing a young family. She has been teaching at the Chi University since 2010 and is currently building out the Equine Wellness Network, an advanced training program for veterinarians who want to go deeper into manual therapy.

Alane and Dr. Marshall go deep on the crossover between what they each do, how PMF and acupuncture address many of the same systems through different doors, and why the horses that benefit the most are the ones whose owners actually pay attention. They talk about the role of fascia as a communication system in the body, how horses take significantly less electromagnetic field than humans do, and the clinical research currently underway looking at how PMF interacts with fascia in horses, pigs, and dogs.

They also take on some harder questions. What happens when regulatory bodies like FEI and HISA write rules about modalities they don't fully understand? Who pays the price when fear of overreach causes practitioners to pull back from animals that need care? And what does it actually mean to be an expert in a field where no one person can know everything?

The conversation moves through motherhood and career, the guilt of trying to do both, what it looks like to raise kids who can take care of themselves, how energy and vibration shape who shows up at your barn door, and why the best practitioners are the ones who are still surprised by what they see every week.

Dr. Marshall closes with three things every horse owner should start doing tomorrow and the one thing she believes now that she would have laughed at 10 years ago.

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is a conversation Alane has wanted to have for a while, with the person who helped guide her own journey into AI, her friend and fellow entrepreneur Todd Schmiedeler.Todd spent 15 years in healthcare, first as a senior executive in acute care, then as Chief Innovations and Engagement Officer for a large long-term care company, before launching his own businesses about five years ago. In the last two and a half years, AI has been at the center of almost everything he builds. He travels nationally and internationally speaking about it, and his thesis is one that most people don't expect: AI doesn't make us less human. Used right, it makes us more human to each other.The conversation covers a lot of ground. Todd breaks down the difference between using AI as a glorified search engine versus using it as a genuine thought partner, and why that shift changes everything about how a leader operates. He shares how he built Todd.ai, a version of himself trained on three years of his emails, meetings, and writing, so his teams could get answers without always having to wait for him. After running a two-week time study, he found that 70% of the questions people brought to him were ones they already knew the answer to. They just wanted assurance. Now his AI gives them that, and 95% of the time it responds exactly as he would, sometimes better.Todd also walks through his AI dossier system, a tool he built to research everyone he meets with before they sit down together, then shares that dossier with the person it's about. He talks about what it was like to navigate dyslexia as a business leader before AI existed, how he uses NotebookLM to convert research into audio so he can actually absorb it, and why he believes AI has created a new class of people inside companies he calls intrapreneurs.Alane brings her own experience into the conversation too, including how she used Todd's advice to get started, what happened when she let AI interview her one question at a time to learn who she was, and how she has used it to free up her customer support team from reactive one-off chats and move them into looking at the full customer journey instead.They also get into data privacy, AI guardrails, why the people most afraid of AI already have an Alexa in their kitchen, and whether AI might eventually do to social media what social media did to the evening news.

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is with Ryan Cecil of Pursuit Spirits.

Ryan Cecil is the co-founder and master blender of Pursuit Spirits, a brand he built alongside his podcasting partner Kenny Coleman after a decade of running the world's largest whiskey podcast, Bourbon Pursuit. What started in a basement with two guys who openly admitted they weren't the experts turned into a platform with hundreds of thousands of followers, a lineup of award-winning spirits, and a downtown Louisville tasting room and cocktail bar called Trial and Error.

Ryan breaks down how Pursuit became one of the only bourbon brands to source from multiple distilleries across multiple states, blending mash bills from Kentucky, Tennessee, and New York into a single bottle, and why being transparent about that process has set them apart in an industry full of brands that hide it. He explains the ABCs of bourbon, the difference between a single barrel and a small batch, why 60 to 80 percent of flavor comes from the oak, and what he's actually tasting for when he sits down with 50 barrel samples on a Monday morning with nothing but eggs and green tea.

Then Alane brings in MagnaWave. While the two were talking, her team was quietly running one of Ryan's bourbons through a PMF session. Ryan, a master blender who has tasted thousands of barrels, did a blind comparison on camera. He found a difference and had a clear preference. What he said about which one he chose and why is worth watching the episode to hear.

The conversation also covers the challenges of building a consumer brand inside a three-tier distribution system, what Ryan learned from Napa wine country about going direct to consumer, the work-life balance realities of running a third startup with 10-year-old twins at home, and what he tells people never to say when they want to sound like they know bourbon.

Welcome to a special live edition of The Energy Exchange with Alane Paulley, COO of MagnaWave and AuraWell. This one starts inside a bourbon distillery, and it only gets better from there.

Alane kicks things off by revealing one of the most unexpected experiments MagnaWave has ever run: MagnaWaving an entire barrel of bourbon. After a blind taste test with the master distiller himself confirmed that the MagnaWaved bourbon came out on top, MagnaWave bought the barrel. The whole thing will be at MagnaCon, free with the purchase of a special shirt, and yes, virtual attendees can get in on it too.

From there, Alane walks through everything you need to know about MagnaCon 2026, the 10th annual event and the 20th anniversary of MagnaWave as a company, taking place June 10th through 12th in Louisville, Kentucky. She covers the expanded agenda, which has tripled the content from previous years, the seven doctors presenting original research, Pat and Kat Parelli on natural horsemanship, the groundbreaking mitochondrial clinical trial results, hands-on training with horses, livestock, and humans, the Monte Carlo Friday night celebration, and a technology announcement that Alane calls an industry disruption she has spent her entire career working toward.

Alane also gets into the AuraWell practitioner map, the new education portal launching at MagnaCon, the referral contest where top ticket sellers win machines, and why she believes buying a virtual ticket is one of the smartest business decisions a practitioner can make right now.

The episode closes with a live giveaway of three virtual tickets and one full VIP experience, and a reminder that the hotel room block is sold out.

Virtual and in-person tickets are available at magnacon.com.

Welcome back to Energy Exchange Live with host Alane Paulley. This episode opens the way the best conversations do: over food, a little nostalgia, and zero small talk. Alane brings a German-American butter cake, Christine brings Italian red sauce energy, and from there the two dive into everything that actually shapes who you become as a leader.

Christine Rogers is the owner of M3 Learning, a sales training company built on a methodology that has worked inside some of the biggest companies in the world. But her path to owning it is unlike almost any entrepreneurship story you've heard. Christine didn't start the company. She inherited it, unexpectedly, from her mentor Skip Miller, just ten days before he passed away from cancer. She shares the full story of that phone call, what she said yes to before she had any idea how to pull it off, and what it has meant to carry someone else's life's work forward.

From there, Alane and Christine go deep on what it really looks like to sell without pushing people, why your native genius is often the hardest thing to teach, and how to build a team that can execute the work even when the founder is the one who does it best. They also talk about parenting, resilience, raising kids who can handle discomfort, and why small T trauma might actually be doing your children a favor.

If you are building a business, leading a sales team, or trying to figure out how to grow something that does not fall apart the moment you step back, this episode is for you.