Episode · Lenny's Podcast · 2025-08-03
Lenny Rachitsky & Chip Conley: books mentioned on Lenny's Podcast
Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA)
Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre hotels, the second-largest boutique hotel brand in the world. At age 52, he joined Airbnb as Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, reporting to CEO Brian Chesky, who was 21 years younger.
Chip Conley recommended Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, and discussed Range by David J. Epstein.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Range
Discussed“I think we're moving into there's a there's a book that David Epste wrote called range and the whole premise of range is that we are moving out of the era of the specialists and into the era of the generalists”
Where to get it
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Man's Search for Meaning
Recommended“My favorite book of all time, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankle, uh in a concentration camp in World uh World War II. when someone's going through a hard time in their life, I say, "Read that book.”
Where to get it
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Eat Pray Love
Recommended“Um I you know I love uh any book by Liz Gilbert. Um sort of the opposite. So Elizabeth Gilbert wrote E Pray Love. Her her book she's a she's on faculty at MEA.”
Where to get it
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Big Magic
Recommended“Her her book she's a she's on faculty at MEA. She teaches here. Um uh Big Magic is just a beautiful book about sort of like how do you get in the flow to allow the genie to come through you.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (5) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Plugged Wisdom@work
“I wrote a book called Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder after my Airbnb experience and um I did a lot of research.”
Plugged Peak
“I write books. have written seven or eight books and I had written a book called Peak uh how great companies get their mojo from Maslo and it was a book that Brian really liked”
Plugged Wisdom@work
“And I love education and my book wisdom at work the making of a modern elder gave me a curriculum in which we've expanded quite a bit with uh Harvard, Yale, Stanford and UC Berkeley professors”
Plugged Learning to Love Midlife
“I wrote a book called Learning to Love Midlife. The subtitle says it all. 12 reasons why life gets better with age. And what I really wanted to do with that book, which is really it it summarizes the MEA curriculum.”
Plugged Emotional Equations
“I wrote a book uh called Emotional Equations that was a New York Times bestseller that spoke to this idea that what if you could take all of your emotions and turn them into equations.”