Talking to Strangers summary

Ana Montes was an intelligence analyst and a model employee at the US Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA. She was also a Cuban spy, who handed over damaging US defense and intelligence secrets to Havana. 

In hindsight, there had been red flags. Her fellow intelligence analysts might have noticed that her reports parroted Cuban viewpoints, or that she sometimes took phone calls during crises. But there had never been enough to go on beyond a vague sense of suspicion. After all, what’s more likely? That the analyst sitting in front of you is one of the most damaging spies in US history, or that she’s just slightly odd? 

Perhaps society would be better off if we were better at spotting fraud and deception. In the early twenty-first century, a New York financier named Bernie Madoff defrauded thousands of investors of over $60 billion dollars, while claiming to be earning them stellar profits. And for a time, he got away with it. As one investor later commented, if Madoff had simply been making things up, surely someone would have noticed. Everyone assumed that someone else had their eye on the ball. 

Everyone, that is, but Harry Markopolos. An independent fraud investigator, Markopolos wasn’t fooled by Madoff’s deception. He saw right through it because he doesn’t assume that everyone tells the truth. Growing up, he saw his parents’ restaurant business impacted by small-scale fraud and theft, and the experience affected him. 

Watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off, and you can still follow the action pretty closely. What’s happening is written all over the actors’ faces. When Joey is shocked, his jaw drops and his eyes widen. An angry Ross furrows his brow and narrows his eyes. And all of the characters show off broad, authentic smiles – and perfect teeth – when happy. You can read their faces like a book. 

The performances in Friends are transparent. Transparency is the idea that someone’s demeanor reveals an authentic picture of their feelings. It’s one of the primary expectations we have when judging strangers. The problem is that transparency is often completely misleading.

On November 1, 2007, a British student called Meredith Kercher was murdered by local criminal, Rudy Guede. The case against Guede was damning – he had a criminal record and his DNA was scattered all over the crime scene. Yet, for a long time, Meredith's roommate and fellow student Amanda Knox was the chief suspect, not Guede. 

Knox found Kercher’s body and called the police, who came to believe that Kercher was killed in a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong between Kercher, Knox and Knox’s boyfriend. It was a bizarre conclusion. There was no physical evidence tying or even linking Knox to the crime, nor any evidence that Knox was interested in drug-fueled, dangerous sex games. 

Around midnight on January 18, 2015, two Swedish students spotted a man and woman on the ground outside a Stanford University fraternity house. Something seemed wrong. When the students approached the interlocked pair, the man, freshman Brock Turner, got up and ran away. Turner had sexually assaulted the woman, who was unconscious. 

Encounters like this happen all too often. Why? 

On July 10, 2015, a 28-year-old African-American woman, Sandra Bland, was pulled over by a Texas State Trooper, Brian Encinia, for failing to signal a lane change. As Bland pointed out, however, she’d only changed lanes because Encinia had aggressively driven up behind her. She’d simply tried to get out of his way as quickly as possible. 

Bland made her irritation clear. When Encinia then asked ‘Are you done?’ it must have felt, to Bland, like a provocation. Encinia later claimed not to have meant it that way.