Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business.
For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now, let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Kristen Scholer.
Kristen Scholer:
Each month on the Inside the ICE House podcast, we engage in insightful conversations with business leaders, CEOs of NYSE-listed companies, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. We explore their journeys, the challenges that they've overcome, and their aspirations to shape the future. You can tune in every Monday on all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel.
Inside the ICE House in April we aired four new episodes covering a diverse range of topics, including the industrial tools industry, inspiring innovation, energy, and health and wellness. We kicked off with episode 465 featuring Paul Sternlieb, president and CEO of Enerpac. That's NYSE ticker symbol EPAC.
For over a century, Enerpac has been at the forefront of innovation, delivering superior solutions that are safe, long-lasting, and readily accessible. He goes Inside the ICE House to discuss the company's legacy and how they're on a mission to make complex jobs safer and smarter.
Paul Sternlieb:
Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's always a balance, right? We do have to deliver on near-term commitments in our guidance expectations in any given fiscal year or quarter, and we work hard to do that, but we're also here for the long term, right?
Most of our shareholder base are long-term investors and they want us to deliver over a multi-year timeframe, and some may be even decades or longer, right? And so our job is to invest behind that appropriately and make sure that even for the next generation, we're leaving this a better place not just for our shareholders, but the next folks who will run this company.
And so we balance that appropriately. We do make, I think, appropriate investments, whether it's OpEx or capital investments in the business, and we're looking for good returns, but we allow reasonable timeframe to achieve those, whether those are organic investments or inorganic acquisitions like DTA that we recently completed.
So again, we're extremely bullish, I think, around the potential and the opportunities for our company just given the markets that we're participating in, given all the key competitive advantages I talked about, the playbook and the growth strategy that we're executing, the strength of our balance sheet and the things that we can do and organically to grow and create more value for our shareholders and be a better partner and supplier to our end customers, and ultimately fulfill our mission at the end of the day, which is making our complex and often hazardous jobs possible safely and efficiently for our customers. And that's why we're here, for them.
So we're investing behind that. It's never a perfect science, but we try our best and we work as a management team with our board to choose those investments wisely and make sure that we have really strong kind of confidence and conviction behind the business model and the investment choices we're making, that we can generate those returns and improve the overall performance of the business over the long term.
Kristen Scholer:
Episode 466 from ICE Experience 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada featured Not Impossible Labs founder and CEO, Mick Ebeling. Innovation took center stage throughout ICE Experience, and Ebeling spoke to the challenges he and his team are tackling. Inside the ICE House, he joined to discuss what inspires Not Impossible Labs and how they're working to change the course of humanity.
Mick Ebeling:
I think that humans constantly think that the shiniest thing in front of them is the most revolutionary thing that they've ever seen. So the printing press, the Henry Ford's horseless carriage, the computer, the mainframe and the personal computer, then cell phones.
I think that in the general scheme of things, if you look, if you take a million-year view on society, on our species, you have some really fundamental shifts that have happened, and I think AI is one of those shifts. I don't think it's going to be the thing that transforms us any more than some of the other things that have transformed us, but for the fact that right now the people that are alive for this chunk of time that we're alive, it's one of the most important things that we will experience, but in 50 to 100 years there's going to be something else.
So with that kind of preface, I think AI is incredibly important. I think that what I have witnessed, because we use it a lot at Not Impossible, is that what makes me very hopeful is that AI left to its own device, left to its own kind of uninfluenced execution is so recognizable as not a human solution. And humanity and creativity will always prevail because you cannot replace that.
And it gives me a lot of hope that we'll be able to channel this incredible technological solution, this incredible thing that's going to be able to harness and digest and process and pose potential solves and potential questions, but it will always still have to go through the human, and that human creativity will, I think, always be paramount.
Kristen Scholer:
In 2022, Chris Wright, then CEO of Liberty Energy, that's NYSE ticker symbol LBRT, stepped Inside the ICE House to share his vision for the sector.
Three years later, with right now serving as US Secretary of Energy in the Trump administration, Liberty's new CEO, Ron Gusek, joined us Inside the ICE House for episode 467 to reflect on the company's journey and his bold outlook for the future of American energy.
Ron Gusek:
I'm excited. There's tremendous opportunity for the industry to continue to excel over this coming timeframe. We need a few things to be able to do that. One of those is certainty. You need to have an understanding as to what the future is going to hold from a regulatory standpoint.
And we have an administration that is, I think, quite focused on that today, that not only wants to remove some of the red tape and maybe impediments that have been in the road of getting infrastructure built, whether that's a pipeline or a power line or LNG export, getting a permit to drill a new well on federal land, they're working to make some changes there to put in place the structure within which we can work and then to ensure that we have stability in that such that we can make investment decisions.
When Liberty decides to deploy a new asset, that's an asset with a 10-year life or maybe more. And so it's important to us as we think about deploying that capital to have confidence that that business opportunity is going to be there, and while it may have some ups and downs, we're going to have the opportunity to participate in that business for a decade or more.
And I think we're seeing that from this administration and I think you're feeling that in the confidence of the market. You're starting to see that on the natural gas side of things. Right now we've had a number of E&Ps announce incremental dollars being deployed in their budgets this year, additional rigs coming back to work, and so that gives me excitement for the future and what that ultimately means for Liberty down the road.
Kristen Scholer:
For episode 468, our last of April, AG1 CEO Kat Cole joined us Inside the ICE House from ICE Experience 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The health and wellness industry has transformed over the years to functional science-backed drinks, powders, and supplements designed to fuel the body and mind. Over the course of our conversation, Kat discussed her three-decade career in the food industry and how she is setting up AG1 for sustained success in the years to come.
Kat Cole:
There are actually a few, and they're all under the bucket of quality. Now, any brand can say, "We're high-quality." It's an often used term in marketing, but what does that mean and how do you know?
So for many years, we've been NSF for Sport third-party certified, which is rare in the supplement space. That is a third party that we pay a tremendous amount of money to to hold us accountable to what is on that label is what is in the bag, to test for over 500 herbicides and pesticides, to validate any label claims that we make.
And if I change one thing in that formula, which we've talked about, we've made many changes, we have to start all over again to get that third-party certification that what we say is in there is in there, that what we say is not in there is not, and that any claims are substantiated. Third-party certification and the investment in that is differentiator number one.
Now, we're not the only ones, thank goodness, anymore who do this. We were one of a, you could count them on one hand. Now, it's growing, but it is expensive and it's difficult to do that. The second way we're differentiated is human clinical trials, not just research on ingredients. Most supplements, at least the supplement space of health and wellness, most supplements are formulated by well-researched ingredients, and then people put them together in a powder or a pill and then make claims off of the research that those ingredients at that dose unlocks.
We take it a step further and have layered on layers of additional clinical trials of the finished formula. So not just the individual ingredients, what is this doing when it's in your body together? Four times the presence of beneficial gut bacteria, over twice, over 200% the amount of short-chain fatty acid improvement markers of a healthy gut microbiome, and many other proof points, because sometimes, especially with a supplement, it's like eating broccoli. Do I feel healthy when I eat broccoli? I mean, in my head I do. But do I feel the broccoli? No. But do I know it's good for me? Of course I do, because there's a tremendous amount of research that proves what that type of food does in my body.
So there are some benefits that I and our customers feel with AG1 because of the quality of the ingredients and the formulation.
Kristen Scholer:
You can listen to these episodes along with all past and future Inside the ICE House episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes are also available on tv.nyse.com and the NYSE YouTube channel. Be sure to join us every Monday for inspiring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen, and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House.
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes.
Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
