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, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

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 they've overcome, and their aspirations to shape the future. You can tune in every week on all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. We kicked off the month with episode 494 and Shane Hostetter, CFO of Chemours. That's NYSE ticker symbol CC. Chemours is reshaping leadership in the chemical industry through innovation, sustainability, and responsible growth. He goes Inside the ICE House to discuss how the company's pathway to thrive, strategy, and investments in next gen technologies are driving operational excellence and long-term value.

Shane Hostetter:

I think it goes to us looking at where the emerging trends are in the world and how can we adapt to such to create value for our company and our shareholders. And electric vehicles are here to stay. I mean, let's be honest.

Lance Glinn:

Totally.

Shane Hostetter:

So we felt it very comfortable to say, okay, how can we play in this market? And there was an interesting technology, whether it's a dry coding for binding on the actual [inaudible 00:01:59] cap of technologies in that side. And it really was a full spectrum. It allows our customers to reduce costs. It also is a sustainable effort as we think about that. So it replaces a solvent technology. So it's really a long play there on that side. And then it also helps resolve a problem, which is it improves the life of the battery as well. I think that kind of threefold was an interesting prospect for us as we look ahead of us of just the overall EV market growth.

Lance Glinn:

Episode 495, featured Brent Saunders, CEO of Bausch + Lomb. That's NYSE ticker symbol BLCO. He goes Inside the ICE House to share how his return to the company after a decade long hiatus is fueling a transformation focused on talent, agility, and breakthrough science.

Brent Saunders:

Look, I think being the first is part of being the best. And so if your goal is to raise the standard of care, by definition, you're almost always going to be first. Because what we had before I arrived were incremental improvements on existing therapies, so second, third, or fourth to market with a slight improvement. I don't want to do that anymore. I don't think payers want to pay for it, and I don't think investing our money to make a small difference to a patient is worth the time and investment. I think our obligation is to be first, to create new pathways to treat disease, to create new products that change the game for customers, if you're talking about a contact lens wearer or a consumer, or even for a patient going into eye surgery, to have the best technology with that surgeon to provide the best outcome.

Lance Glinn:

In this month's installment of Markets in Focus, in partnership with Opening Bell Daily, Phil Rosen joined me at the New York Stock Exchange to unpack the forces driving the US labor market slowdown. He explains how Fed rate hikes, the post-pandemic hiring reversal, and AI adoption are reshaping employment trends.

Phil Rosen:

I think right now, the thing that companies will point to will be AI, and it is a convenient and also a fitting excuse because in many reasons they're not incorrect to say that. And if you see Amazon and Starbucks and Target announcing thousands of layoffs, a lot of that is probably due to potential productivity gains we're about to see from AI. So a lot of these AI tools, they're the worst that they'll ever be right now, and they're already incredibly effective. So if we extrapolate that to the next one or two or three years, then you could say, okay, these companies really do have a reason to shrink their headcounts right now because they're betting on those productivity gains, which are maybe not here entirely today, but they should be coming down the line. So when you take the labor market, let's say those three factors, the Fed, the pandemic boom, and AI all at once, everyone just wants to talk about AI, which I think it's not incorrect, but again, I think we might be, it's almost overcompensating for the two other factors I mentioned.

But then again, I think about my own day-to-day work. I produce a newsletter, I produce a lot of content and video and research, and I can do all of this with a very small team because of AI. So I've seen the productivity gains in my own life as an individual, and I know that if I was trying to do the exact same business and content and research in let's say 2021, I would've had to hire multiple more people to have a much bigger team to produce all the work I'm producing. So I do think, and I observe it anecdotally in my own life and among friends' lives, AI has true impact and it's really making people more productive and at a company level, making companies more productive. But at the same time, does it justify hundreds of thousands of layoffs? I don't know. But it's a bet on the future that AI is going to be so much better that it does justify it.

Lance Glinn:

On episode 496, Jim Mintern, CEO of NYSE listed CRH, yes, that's ticker symbol CRH, joined us Inside the ICE House. During our conversation, he shared how the company's connected portfolio, entrepreneurial culture, and recent acquisitions are strengthening his leadership and advancing long-term growth across America's built environment.

Jim Mintern:

Our mission, our purpose, as you know, is we stand together to reinvent the way our world is built. And I always look at it, it's almost split in two parts. The first bit is who we are as a company. We're 55 years a company. We have a strong culture, but it's based on people. It's based on relationships, whether that's our own employees, our customers, from that perspective. That matters to us. We're sitting here down on Wall Street. If you look very close to us here, the whole reinforcement in the Lower East Side, that's all our product that goes into that. So we connect communities, we protect communities. You yourself today have probably already interacted with CRH in some way, whether you came by the subway, whether you came by road, the supply of the infrastructure, the water and energy into your own home as well. That's what we do. And if you look, we're here in New York, it's really at the heart of some of the most connected assets we have in CRH. Our products have built well over half of Manhattan over the last century. So we are a very important and part of the fabric of the community here in New York.

Lance Glinn:

Grant Kvalheim, CEO of Athene, a subsidiary of NYSE listed Apollo Global Management, joined us for episode 497. Athene is redefining retirement security through innovation, scale, and long-term vision. He discusses how the company's five-year growth plan is expanding its market leadership and helping millions of Americans build more confident retirements.

Grant Kvalheim:

A lot of people used to have the comfort that they had a defined benefit pension plan, and they knew they were going to get a guaranteed income from that in addition to Social Security. The products that we offer, fixed indexed annuities, replicate a lot of the things that people used to get out of those DB plans, principal protection, tax-deferred accumulation, and the ability to turn that accumulated savings into a guaranteed paycheck whenever they choose to do so. So that's how we help people get the comfort that they have a guaranteed income stream. And what we see is that when people have that comfort, when they have guaranteed incomes, they can spend more of their other nest egg. There's two things that are a challenge when people don't have guaranteed income. They worry that they might run out of their money and so maybe they underspend their retirement savings, and they don't have the life in retirement that they could if they had that confidence that they could spend. And then the other real challenge is there is the risk that you'll run out of money, particularly given the longevity that you talked about. And the advice that people often give that, okay, when you get to retirement, you can take out 4% a year, if you live long, you'll run out of money.

Lance Glinn:

Realty Income, that's NYSE ticker symbol O, is redefining net lease leadership through growth, global expansion, and a commitment to dependable income. On episode 498, CEO Sumit Roy details how the company's scale, diversification, and strategic international moves are strengthening long-term value.

Sumit Roy:

Realty Income is the monthly dividend company. Our founders trademarked that slogan. We were, I believe, the first company to distribute our dividends on a monthly basis, and we've started doing this since our founding in 1969. So we've done over 600 months of continuous dividend distribution. And since our public listing in 1994, if you look at our track record, we've grown our dividend north of 4% annually. And every quarter since we've gone public, we've grown our dividend, regardless of the economic cycle. So again, this income generation thesis runs very much through the core of everything that we do, and capital preservation. If you look at how our stock has performed from a total shareholder perspective, it's north of 13% annually since our listing in 1994. And so everything that we do, every channel, new channel that we pursue is about diversification, it's about creating scale. Today, our EBITDA margin is 95%. It's one of the ways we measure scale. And the fact that we have been able to establish ourselves as the go-to net lease name in Europe within such a short duration, since 2019, is again a testament to our reputation, how we conduct ourselves, and the business that we've formed.

Lance Glinn:

As the month came to a close, Felipe Bayon, CEO of NYSE listed GeoPark, joined us for episode 499. Still young in his tenure as CEO, starting earlier in 2025, he goes Inside the ICE House to share how his first months at the helm are shaping the company's strategic vision and operational priorities.

Felipe Bayon:

It's better when you have more ideas than money because then you need to choose, you need to prioritize, you need to be very disciplined. So being very disciplined in terms of the strategy and the direction, the investment plans' deployment or allocation of capital is fundamental to what we do. So we will continue to do that. And in the case of our recent investment in Argentina, or entry into Argentina, country entry into Argentina, a unconventional [inaudible 00:11:57] and formation that's called Vaca Muerta, it's an area that experiencing an investment of north of 10 billion US dollars per year. Production has grown five or six-fold in the last few years. It's producing north of 500,000 barrels a day from fracking. And in gas it's three and a half BCF per day. So it's an industry, or it's an area where industry, the oil and gas industry can actually develop a lot of activity.

Lance Glinn:

You can listen to these episodes along with all past and future Inside the ICE House episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Remember that we also have ETF Central podcast episodes that release every two weeks on Wednesdays and Market Storylines that release every Friday. Full video episodes of all our podcasts are also available on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. Be sure to join us every week for 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, express 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.