In this episode of Masters of MAX, host Tom Butta welcomes Christie Hefner, the esteemed former chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. As the longest serving female CEO of a U.S. publicly traded company, Christie led Playboy’s expansion from print to cable TV to online, mobile and ecommerce, massively growing revenue including global retail sales reaching nearly a billion dollars in her last year at the helm.
In this episode of Masters of MAX, host Tom Butta welcomes Christie Hefner, the esteemed former chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. As the longest serving female CEO of a U.S. publicly traded company, Christie led Playboy’s expansion from print to cable TV to online, mobile and ecommerce, massively growing revenue including global retail sales reaching nearly a billion dollars in her last year at the helm.
Throughout the interview, Christie discusses the importance of embracing change and innovation, highlighting the need for businesses to adapt in a dynamic and unpredictable market. She emphasizes the value of a diverse leadership team, sharing examples of how varied perspectives can drive creativity and problem-solving.
Christie also stresses the significance of maintaining a direct relationship with consumers in an ever-evolving marketplace, urging companies to prioritize consumer data ownership to create their own strategic advantage.
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Guest Bio
Christie Hefner is a seasoned professional with more than thirty years’ experience at executive levels in both public and private companies, as well as multiple company directorships. Presently, her portfolio includes advisory work for Newlight Technologies which patented a technology to convert methane into ocean biodegradable plastic and Public Good, an AI-driven digital platform that scalably engages consumers in a brand’s purpose. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Offutt Companies, a multi-billion-dollar agricultural conglomerate.
Previously, Christie served as Chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises for 20 years making her the longest serving female CEO of a U.S. publicly traded company. She was widely credited with developing and leading strategies that repositioned the company from its legacy domestic magazine business to a global multi-media and lifestyle company, massively growing revenue and its brand internationally.. She was on the Fortune 100 Most Powerful Women list for three years.
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Guest Quote
"There is so much research that shows companies outperform when they have diverse leadership. But it doesn't just happen. And if the only people that are working to identify talent are white men, then you're likely to play in that lane because people refer the people they know or they have an unconscious bias towards someone who seems more like them. If you're intentional about it, you'll build a diverse team, and then the question is about making sure all those voices are heard." – Christie Hefner
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Time Stamps
*(01:10) Christie's Legacy
*(04:40) Leading massive change
*(07:49) The power of diverse leadership
*(13:19) Balancing innovation and discipline
*(15:15) Playing to your strengths as a brand
*(20:17) Maintaining your consumer relationships
*(23:29) How Christie generated nearly $1B in global retail for Playboy in one year
*(25:18) The need for more women executives
*(27:56) What Christie is excited for next
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Links
[00:00:00] Christie Hefner: I was always very interested in the bigger world than just the United States, and it just seemed to me that for us to try and build publishing businesses all over the world and run them from the United States seemed like a much tougher road to go down than to find established, successful publishing companies who knew those markets, who valued what Playboy would bring in a relationship in terms of the brand and the format and even content.
[00:00:36] And we could put together a licensing agreement and build from that. And that turned out to be extremely successful.
[00:00:47] Voiceover: Welcome to Masters of MAX, a mobile app experience podcast. Please welcome your host, Tom Butta, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship.[00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Tom Butta: Welcome to another episode of Masters of Max. It is my extreme pleasure to welcome, um, the esteemed Christie Hefner to the show. Welcome, Christie.
[00:01:09] Christie Hefner: Thank you very much, Tom.
[00:01:10] Tom Butta: Um, for those of you that don't know Christie's story, it's quite amazing, and I'll give you a quick recap. So, from 1998 to 2008, Christie served as chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises.
[00:01:24] Making her the longest serving female CEO of a U. S. public company. Amazing feat. And you helped grow that company from 76 million in 1988 to over 500 million in the late 90s, then on to over a billion dollars in global retail sales in her last year as CEO. Beyond the experiences at Playboy Enterprises, Chrissy's very, very involved in a number of boards and advisory boards.
[00:01:53] So, she's a board member of organizations called CENT, uh, FILO, and [00:02:00] MetroEdge, and she's an advisory board member of the RD Offit company, um, as well as Public Good. And for the last 20 years, perhaps longer, she's been on the board of trustees for the Rush University Medical Center. So it's quite, quite a history, um, of accomplishment, Christie.
[00:02:19] Christie Hefner: Thank you.
[00:02:20] Tom Butta: I'm fascinated, um, by the only thing that we actually have in common is where it all began. You and I both attended liberal arts colleges. You went to Brandeis and were a journalism major. So how did that set you up for this wonderful career that you've had?
[00:02:36] Christie Hefner: Well, I have to say in part, um, I never intended to go into business.
[00:02:41] My interests when I was at college were law, politics, and journalism. And I thought from that, my career would emerge and indeed I expected to apply to Yale for a master's in law and public policy and dreamed one day maybe to wind up in the [00:03:00] Senate or on the Supreme Court. So I wasn't focused on, on business.
[00:03:04] It was kind of a set of goals. Unexpected circumstances that got me down that path, which we can talk about later if you like. In hindsight, I actually really believe that a great liberal arts education undergraduate is the best training for a business career. I just feel that the combination of critical thinking, of Expanding your horizons with regard to what you understand, whether that's history or philosophy or political science or economics is a really critical grounding, especially given the world that, you know, you and I are operating in now, which is one of dynamic change, of unpredictability, of the need for innovative and disruptive thinking.
[00:03:59] And [00:04:00] I think that that is honed when you're studying in a liberal arts environment.
[00:04:05] Tom Butta: I certainly have, have had that experience as well. I encourage everyone, certainly at the undergraduate level, to have a cross functional, you know, liberal arts education.
[00:04:16] Christie Hefner: Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of time, either at graduate school or certainly professionally, to learn the specifics of your field.
[00:04:24] Profession. Why give up the opportunity to have this smorgasbord of, you know, art and architecture or astronomy or whatever that you might never again have the chance to study?
[00:04:37] Tom Butta: Exactly. Exactly. So, um, you talked about change. Uh, the world that we live in today is, is ripe with change on, on every level. And you have certainly been through, I would call them seismic changes, uh, in the decades that you were at, at Playboy, and maybe just my, my recap is you went from a basically a print media [00:05:00] company and you had to transition to what was the new media at the time, cable, right, and then had to transition to the next new media, which is the internet, And then transition to, you know, a digital, mobile, in mobile world.
[00:05:13] And now we have more change ahead of us. How did you manage through those critical moments and effectively enable the company to still be vital?
[00:05:24] Christie Hefner: Well, I had one advantage in that when I first became president, the company was in Financial difficulty, and it had to do with having sold its largest profit center, which was the UK gambling business, which resulted in a loss, and the banks pulling the lines of credit, and the stock price plummeting.
[00:05:44] So, call that an advantage because, as you know very well, when things are going badly, Everybody understands things have to change and change is hard for organizations, for cultures, and for individuals. And [00:06:00] when you don't feel you have the luxury of not changing, that is an advantage for leadership. But having said that, it's still not easy to create an environment in which people are encouraged to challenge the conventional wisdom of what business are we in, what business should we be in, and as you know, Tom, the Business books are rife with examples of Kodak creating, you know, digital film and then putting it on the back burner because they were worried it would cannibalize their traditional film business or Blockbuster being completely disrupted by Netflix.
[00:06:41] I think that it starts with honestly, a sense of humility about. Maybe just because what we've done before has gotten us to a place of success doesn't mean that we shouldn't be open to the possibility that the world has changed. Um, you're always basically, I think, looking for the [00:07:00] intersection of your assets and resources and the market opportunities.
[00:07:04] And that just by its nature is different at different moments in time. I think we were successful in, in effect, as you said, transforming ourselves from being Say, a railroad company to being a transportation company, you know, from being a publisher to being a creator of multimedia content. And it always interested me that my friends at much larger publishing companies had a much harder time of that.
[00:07:31] We're much slower to do it. And I think some of that was kind of fiefdoms. I think some of that was the moat that you build that when you're evaluating a company, you think of as an asset can sometimes be an obstacle to seeing the world differently. And I also think we benefited greatly from diverse leadership.
[00:07:52] I really feel that all the research has been done about diversity of thought leading to better outcomes [00:08:00] of both creative. Opportunities and problem solving. I think that really helped us.
[00:08:05] Tom Butta: Do you have examples of, just I'm going deep on that one idea of diverse leadership. It's a very interesting way to think about diversity, but apply it to actually being in a better position to manage through change because of the variety of thinking.
[00:08:20] Do you have any, maybe an example or two where, you know, an idea came from perhaps a non expected source?
[00:08:27] Christie Hefner: Yeah, I mean, actually the early days of kind of digital. After we had made the transition to expanding into television and home video and satellite, but in the very, very early days, before anyone thought of the World Wide Web or the internet as a distribution means for B2C content, I had a couple of younger employees, one on the editorial art side and one in kind of a business setting, who were [00:09:00] very interested in Computers, and the possibility that computerization could change the processes by which a magazine was put together.
[00:09:12] Because before that, literally there were books that were called brown books, which were oversized craft paper on which people would, you know, cut out the expected articles and lay it out. And then. Play around with the layout and the size of the type, and it was all manual. And I think if we had not had an attitude that believed that, in this example, younger employees were as potentially rich a source of ideas as our older, more tenured employees, I think that would have just gotten shut down.
[00:09:50] And instead, What we did was create a kind of a skunk works and I gave them a little bit of money and computers and said, play around [00:10:00] and literally they developed the software that we used both to convert to digitally designing the magazine and then actually producing it digitally. Um, that kind of bottoms up was critical because other companies that.
[00:10:19] bought off the shelf systems and tried to impose it top down, found very rebellious art directors, people who said, you know, it's worked very well for me the way it's been going the last 10 years or whatever. And this was more a case of dropping breadcrumbs. So, people would wander by our office and see what they could do on a computer, you know, in the early days of Mac, and go, wow, that's really cool.
[00:10:44] Tom Butta: Yeah, desktop publishing, yeah.
[00:10:46] Christie Hefner: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Tom Butta: To me, the fundamentals that led you to having these, um, this access to insights was the very notion of the two words that you used earlier, which is to be open. Like, [00:11:00] and I think there's roots of that in, of course, liberal arts education. Like, it's sort of, be open to, All of this, whether it's historical or it's leading edge, um, and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a mindset.
[00:11:15] It doesn't necessarily apply to everything. I mean, or it could apply to everything, like, it applies to how people think, it applies to how you organize, it applies to the business that you're in, and if you actually are open, Then it allows you to try stuff on.
[00:11:28] Christie Hefner: Absolutely. And I couldn't agree more, Tom, and I came to believe that the two most valuable qualities when I was evaluating someone for a hire or a promotion were intellectual curiosity and intellectual agility.
[00:11:43] And I think that just dovetails with the point you made.
[00:11:47] Tom Butta: Yeah, and that, it's interesting because those, those have to go hand in hand to actually get anything done. Because there's people who are just ideating, right? And then there's people who have to like, okay, bring that to life. [00:12:00]
[00:12:00] Christie Hefner: Yes, and to your point, I mean, that's, to me, that's the beginning and the critical beginning, it's not the end.
[00:12:07] There is still required in, you know, developing, never mind executing a strategy, you know, the question of You know, the how, the allocation of resources, the how do you find the right balance between, you know, creativity, which by its nature is risk taking, and, uh, making sure that the risks are manageable.
[00:12:29] You know, there's the cliche expression, you know, don't bet the ranch. When I was running Playboy Enterprises, I would say, don't bet the mansion. Don't make a decision that if it turns out wrong, I have to call Hef and say, I found this lovely one bedroom apartment in Westwood for you. So it's, you know, it's, there's a complexity to it that is beyond just the, you know, creativity, openness part.
[00:12:55] But I think without that element, it just really, Difficult to [00:13:00] navigate successfully in this environment where all companies have to be technology companies, you know, all companies have competition that is international, whether it's among suppliers or customers or partners. And it's just like three dimensional chess all the time.
[00:13:18] Tom Butta: Yes. So the other thing that you talked about is this idea of speed. I want to lean into that a little bit here. As you've had to make these transitions, if in some cases, perhaps even transformations into this new world, and you've again done that multiple times, how important was it to be first as a brand?
[00:13:38] Because you talked about these larger publishing companies who are slower to move. And you were ahead of them.
[00:13:47] Christie Hefner: Yeah, just, it's a really interesting question. I don't believe I ever thought it was critical to be first. I think we were first many times for different [00:14:00] reasons. Some had to do with, I think, the kind of forced discipline of challenging ourselves to what if, why not, uh, and not.
[00:14:11] Kind of, you know, resting on our laurels, so to speak. But I think that it's not necessary to be first in most things. And indeed, as is often said, the true innovator is the one that gets the arrows in their back, and then it's the people that come afterwards that actually monetize the invention or the insight.
[00:14:30] I think you want to be an early, you know, you want to be on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge. So, I never aspired to be the first, even when we were the first.
[00:14:44] Tom Butta: That was just a natural outcome. Yeah, I think we just,
[00:14:47] Christie Hefner: we were more nimble. Um, and I think that's a challenge for companies as they get bigger, as you know very well, is just to maintain that nimbleness, um, because you just, I don't want to say you get sclerotic, [00:15:00] that's unfair, but certainly systems get baked in and checks and balances, and that's not a bad thing at all, but it's, again, the balance between, you know, innovation on the one hand and discipline on the other.
[00:15:14] Tom Butta: Great. So I'm going to ask a related question about these transitions and it has to do with this idea of how you decided to maybe classically build versus like license, which has a lot to do with, I think, control of the brand, right? How did you navigate that?
[00:15:33] Christie Hefner: Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, in part, I was influenced by the fact that when I took over the company, it had an extraordinarily broad array of businesses it had gone into, and I mean was operating the businesses.
[00:15:49] hotels, clubs, casinos, an insurance business, a products business, a limousine business, a travel agency, a modeling [00:16:00] agency, a book publishing, a book club, a record business, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. And when I took over, And, we had to restore the company to just cashflow positive and a strong balance sheet.
[00:16:15] You know, one of the things we did, obviously, was assess, you know, which of these businesses do we actually have the competitive advantage and ability to be successful in? And if the answer is not in some of them, then we need to either sell them, which we did in some cases, or close them, which we did in other cases.
[00:16:31] So, I carried that memory with me when we were poised for growth. And I think it shaped my view that the brand had, to use the expression, permission to play or trademark equity in a number of different industries, but that was not the same thing as saying that the company So we had the core competence to manage in those industries, in part because if you [00:17:00] can't get to some scale in an industry, it's very hard to attract and retain the best talent in that industry.
[00:17:07] And so that led to saying, well, if we think there's an opportunity in the music business, but we don't want to be in the record business, how would that work? So we struck a deal with Concord Records because one of the strong brand. Uh, extensions for Playboy has always been jazz. Going back to the very first interview was with Miles Davis.
[00:17:30] We started the Playboy Jazz Festival, etc, etc. So that let us be in a business where consumers would be drawn to the idea of, you know, Playboy After Dark music. Playboy Jazz Festival Music, but we were trying to assume we could build the competence to manufacture and distribute. When it came to publishing, where we obviously had a lot of competence, even with that, I was always very [00:18:00] interested in kind of the bigger world than just the United States and the company had launched a couple of editions outside the U.
[00:18:07] S. in both Japan and Germany before I took it over. And I had done some traveling for the company and had tried very much to again be a student of learning about different countries, cultures. Business environment, politics, economies. And it just seemed to me that for us to try and build, to your point about, you know, build or not, publishing businesses all over the world and run them from, you know, the United States seemed like a much tougher road to.
[00:18:42] To go down, then to find established, successful publishing companies who knew those markets, who valued what Playboy would bring in a relationship in terms of the brand and the format and even content. And we could put together [00:19:00] a licensing agreement and build from that. And that turned out to be extremely successful.
[00:19:06] Having said that, I believe that if you do want to do that, It's really important if you have the brand that you don't think of yourself as a passive licensor that's just collecting royalty checks. We invested a lot in talent of people that worked with our licensing partners, whether they were our magazine partners or our apparel partners that did design work and marketing work and brought together the different partners.
[00:19:35] So we were a very active licensor.
[00:19:39] Tom Butta: At the core, it was the brand, and then you understood that the brand had extensibility, right? And then it's like, okay, there's lots of ways in which we can leverage this brand, and then there's the decision tree of, is this a business where we have operating competence to capitalize on the brand in that business, [00:20:00] and is it a good economic move?
[00:20:02] Or is this a business that we do not have operating competence? Competence and, but we can build relationships that can, uh, enable us to capitalize on the opportunity without actually having to own that operation.
[00:20:14] Christie Hefner: Exactly.
[00:20:15] Tom Butta: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:16] Christie Hefner: Exactly.
[00:20:17] Tom Butta: So, do you see any parallels today? Where brands maybe have become very dependent, and maybe it's the right move on these platforms or marketplaces.
[00:20:30] And what happens is, in capitalizing on a very large marketplace, that can sell your stuff, your brand, and the assets under that brand. You give up the relationship with the consumer, right, in that case.
[00:20:45] Christie Hefner: Or you structure it in a way in which you don't. I'm a big believer, you know, I've talked about this, of being close to the consumer, and, and having that relationship as the brand, I think it's invaluable.
[00:20:57] So, if you have a partnership [00:21:00] for, distribution, uh, say, or for the, even the creation of product and distribution. I always operated on the assumption that I wanted to co own that data. Um, because I wanted the ability to mine that data, whether it was to upsell other products or just honestly for, you know, R& D, Uh, advantage, because I think where you were going, and I completely agree with you, is if you get too removed from the customer, then you run the risk of simply being out of touch with the marketplace.
[00:21:33] And then it's hard to catch up if you've already lost that relevance.
[00:21:39] Tom Butta: Yeah, I had personal experience of working very closely with a major athletic wear, sporting goods, um, company that, that certainly could have gained hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars of revenue through this one massive marketplace as a distribution vehicle, [00:22:00] but would have lost 100 percent of the relationship with the customer because the marketplace on that relationship with the customer and instead I felt the threat of that, really, and, and pivoted in an aggressive way into a direct to consumer playbook, where they built out, um, lots and lots of, of digital assets, in fact, many apps were part of that.
[00:22:24] Um, that direct to consumer playbook.
[00:22:27] Christie Hefner: You know, the very first business trade association that I got involved with was, um, I went on the board of the Direct Marketing Association before I was even running the company. I was a vice president. In fact, it's forged a lifelong friendship with Ken Chenault because he was the vice president of American Express and I was vice president of Playboy.
[00:22:47] We were the only non white guys on the board. But I had inherited a big subscriber file, a big key holder file, a big catalog purchaser file, and I always have been very [00:23:00] interested in direct marketing and DTC relationships, and very much share your view that, um, It's, it's something to always keep front of mind, even if in the value chain, you may not be the, you know, the proverbial last mile, you know, you may not be, you know, the person's actually delivering the product to the consumer.
[00:23:26] And I actually think often when industries slash companies have kept kind of gone off the rails, it's because they've not stayed connected to their consumers as well as they should have.
[00:23:39] Tom Butta: Yep. So, um, I want to just move, um, a little bit into, into, into something you just talked about, which is that you found yourself and Ken to be, you know, the only non white guys in the room.
[00:23:52] And, um, correct me if I'm wrong, that in your last year as CEO, I may have mentioned this before, you generated close to a billion dollars in [00:24:00] global retail sales. And the statistic that I have in front of me is that 80 percent of the sales were to women.
[00:24:06] Christie Hefner: Yes, that's correct. It came out of, you know, back to what we were talking about earlier, Tom, in terms of, you know, asking questions, being curious.
[00:24:14] So we did some, some brand trademark research early on. And one of the things that was revealed, because honestly it was not something that I thought of, was that while the word playboy was very much associated with the magazine and therefore with the men's market, The rabbit head was not seen as being singularly representative of men's products, that the rabbit head had all of the personality of Playboy, the sexiness, the fun, the sense of freedom and, uh, sophistication and all of that, and was equally representative of Relatable for women as well as men.
[00:24:57] And then that, so that opened up an opportunity for [00:25:00] us that otherwise we might not have explored, which ultimately led to the statistic that you quoted in terms of being able to produce, whether it was apparel or jewelry, products all over the world that were women's products, as well as products for men.
[00:25:14] Tom Butta: That's really paying attention to the market. Um, the other statistic is, as I understand it, in your last year, 40 percent of your executive team were women.
[00:25:25] Christie Hefner: Yes.
[00:25:25] Tom Butta: So, first of all, that's wonderful. What do you think other businesses can learn from that?
[00:25:31] Christie Hefner: I would say that the necessary predecessor to What you can gain from being open is being intentional about building a diverse team.
[00:25:46] Simply being open will not get you that, is my experience. And I, I work with a group called Women Corporate Directors that works to get more women on boards. I have helped a lot of, of women and people [00:26:00] of color get on boards, built some women's business organizations like the Committee of 200. Um, What I see over and over again is the companies whose boards or whose CEOs say, we know that having a more diverse C suite, board, executive team is going to be good for the company because there is so much research that shows companies outperform when they have diverse leadership, they navigate challenges and risk management better, they're more innovative, but it doesn't just happen.
[00:26:33] And if the only people that are. Working to identify talent are candidly, you know, white men, then you're likely to play in that lane because that's what happens. People refer the people they know or they have an unconscious bias towards someone who seems more like them. And if conversely you say, not because you set up a quota, but [00:27:00] because you say, I know there's a huge amount of talent out there.
[00:27:03] That is diverse and we want to fish in all those pools. If you're intentional about it, you'll build a diverse team. And then the question to our conversation is about making sure all those voices are heard. Like one of the things I used to do in meetings, whether it was the boardroom or my executive team, is I always made sure everyone spoke to the point being discussed because not everybody is as, The person who raises their hand, you know, like I was the kid that always raised my hand in class.
[00:27:32] Okay. But not everybody does. And the people who don't are not necessarily people who don't have something really interesting to say. So you need to make sure that they are also being brought into the conversation. So you're getting the benefit of the diversity.
[00:27:48] Tom Butta: That's great. I love that idea. Every voice needs to be heard.
[00:27:52] If you're in the room, you're on the meeting. I completely agree with that. So we're, we're, We're running out of time here, but I wanted to just [00:28:00] say that, you know, you've done a lot of incredible things since leaving, as I mentioned at the beginning, since leaving Playboy. What are you most excited about right now?
[00:28:10] Christie Hefner: Well, I have the luxury of only working with people in companies I really like and respect and am excited about. So, I'm deeply appreciative of that. Um, Oh, I don't know. It's, it's like, you know, choosing a favorite child, but, um, I work with a company called New Light Technologies that has developed a way to extract methane from the atmosphere and convert it to ocean biodegradable plastic.
[00:28:35] And that is just uber cool. So that's very, very exciting. And then I work with this company Metro Edge. That's going to put data centers in underserved communities in concert with training programs for people in those communities for careers into that field. And I'm, I'm excited about that. As I say, truthfully, I say no if I wouldn't be excited about the [00:29:00] business and I wouldn't want to have a long dinner with the people.
[00:29:02] Tom Butta: Last question, are there big shifts that you are, like, I mean, AI is everywhere. Yeah. It's the first two letters in airship. Uh,
[00:29:10] Christie Hefner: Ha
[00:29:11] Tom Butta: ha, very
[00:29:11] Christie Hefner: good.
[00:29:13] Tom Butta: It's core, it's core to our, it's core to our business as well, but are there big shifts that you've got your eyes on?
[00:29:18] Christie Hefner: Yeah, I mean, for sure you would have to. I, I have been a skeptic's too strong a word, but I, um, to use a sports betting term, I've always bet the under on the metaverse, not that augmented reality didn't have a metaverse.
[00:29:34] Real value, frankly, in areas like training medical professionals. It's astonishing, but the kind of vision, and I respect him hugely, but the kind of vision that you know, Mark Zuckerberg and others had about that seemed like maybe an overreach of what that would ever be. Now, we'll see. Time will tell. In contrast, I think it's hard to overstate the potential game changing nature of AI.[00:30:00]
[00:30:00] across virtually all businesses and all industries. And the question is, what form does that take? And how do we as a society manage the risks of it? while capitalizing on the opportunities of it. But I would certainly say to all companies and all boards, you need to start thinking about it and, and frankly, start, and I'll use a kind of colloquial casual phrase intentionally, kind of playing around with it, you know, kind of seeing what.
[00:30:33] You know, copilot would do if you gave it an assignment. So I think that's that. And then in, in certain other fields, you mentioned rush. I just think where we're going in the combination of sort of nanotechnologies and our DNA and genetics for the life sciences and for, Living longer, younger, which is kind of what we all want to do.
[00:30:56] I think in 10 years, we're going to look back and go, my [00:31:00] gosh, look at how different that world is.
[00:31:02] Tom Butta: So we have a chance. Well, um, Christie, it's been an amazing, um, time with you. Thank you for sharing, uh, all of your experiences. And, um, I'm really glad to know you and I hope, um, our listeners get to know you a little bit better cause you've done some great things and are continuing to.
[00:31:22] Christie Hefner: Well, I appreciate that. And I very much enjoyed the conversation.
[00:31:25] Tom Butta: Thank you.
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