Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

Gladwell's book is a tour through the systematic ways humans misread strangers — defaults to truth, transparency illusions, context collapse. The argument is that we are not built to read people we do not know, and the institutional fixes we build (interviews, lie detection, face-to-face meetings) are mostly theatre. For product direction the transfer is humbling: every product interaction with a customer is a stranger-to-stranger encounter mediated by very little information, and the patterns Gladwell documents shape every interview, every support conversation, every hiring decision. Gladwell's arguments have been criticised for oversimplifying; read carefully, but read him. The audiobook version is unusually good.