Episode · Lenny's Podcast · 2025-09-14
Lenny Rachitsky & Ethan Smith: books mentioned on Lenny's Podcast (Sep 2025)
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
Ethan Smith is the CEO of Graphite—the leading SEO growth agency—and my go-to expert on SEO. After 18 years of mastering traditional SEO, Ethan has been at the forefront of what is called AEO: answer engine optimization, or, more simply, getting your product to show up in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity answers.
Ethan Smith recommended Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard, and discussed Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Emotional Intelligence
Recommended“Number one is emotional intelligence. And uh people talk about the concept of emotional intelligence, but there's actual research in psychology around that. I believe it was published in the '8s, but there's a really good book that summarizes the foundational research around emotional intelligence”
Where to get it
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Influence
Recommended“which brings me to my second book which is Chelini's persuasion book. uh Robert Galdini does a bunch of books around persuasion, but again there's frameworks for how to persuade somebody to sign up, buy something.”
Where to get it
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Recommended“And I think especially in growth, there's all kinds of psychology research and behavioral economics research to inform tests. And if you just read thinking fast and slow, persuasion, emotional intelligence, you can basically take those frameworks and apply it to growth”
Where to get it
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How to Measure Anything
Recommended“And then the last is how to measure anything. So how to measure anything is about measuring things that are not immediately obvious to to measure. They give this example of they wanted to measure how good an orchestra conductor was”
Where to get it
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Outliers
Discussed“I uh there's a there's the outliers book about 10,000 hours and the themes there are you don't have to be the smartest, you have to be sufficiently smart, number one. Number two is focused practice. So it's not just trying hard, it's doing it in a in an intentional focused way.”
Where to get it
