Did you cry at any of the lunches or at any of the lunches? Which ones did you think about for the days or the weeks following?

I didn't cry in any of them, maybe because I'm a repressed man.

Just wondering.

There were... a lot of lunches that have stayed with me some of them because we just got on so well uh some of them because the person was doing something so fascinating some of them because i learned a particular thing from from the person i had lunch with some of them because of the information they revealed to me uh so just to give you an idea of of some of the ones that that come to mind apart from some of the lunches I've already disclosed.

I had lunch with someone, uh, his name is Martin and he had set himself the goal of, uh, he'd recently started boxing, not in a competitive sense.

He'd just taken up boxing as a, as a fitness thing and self-defense thing.

And he'd fallen in love with the sport and he decided he was going to enter the gay games as a boxer.

What have you learned most about yourself and your capacity for discomfort through these 500 and nearly 20 legends?

What was the catalyst? So what was happening in your life that you sort of felt like you needed to have lunch with strangers? And why did this feel like the challenge that you needed to set yourself?

Ah, well, so those are two really good questions.

And For the vast majority of my life, I never would have contemplated doing something like this because I'm an introvert.

I like to be at home on my own.

My idea of a good time is staying home, reading a good book, having a cup of tea.

Meeting strangers was not something that would have appealed to me for the overwhelming majority of my life.

But the reason it seemed like the right idea at the right time, not long before starting The Lunches, I'd started a business.

So what, What does that mean? And at the start, do you feel like you didn't have the social courage or was it built over time?

Were you surprised by how many declared that that was indeed the case, that they had this idea that maybe the internal conversation is, I'm not good enough or I don't want to get into trouble or I don't want to upset people, whatever the case may be? That internal conversation that often runs people's lives...

Tony, I not only met 500 people, but I very deliberately met people from all different walks of life, all different ages, backgrounds, professions, and I met a lot of people who were very successful, had high salaries, kind of high-powered jobs, a lot of social status.

And these people were just as insecure as the rest of us.

And initially, that really surprised me.

But as I began to see it more and more, I ceased to be surprised.

And I discovered that all of us have these moments of hesitation.

We're all so worried about what other people think.

The glaring question is, A, what did you learn? B, were you surprised by anything in particular?

First and foremost, I've got to ask, what actually inspired that concept and that period of time to do something so incredibly interesting in this part of the cycle?

Oh, well, that is a key question, Evan.

I had lunch with 500 strangers from August 2019 to August 2025.

And the reason I did it, not long before starting the lunches, I had started a business and I was desperate for the business to succeed because I saw the business as my future.

But I was also quite uncertain and had quite a bit of anxiety connected to the business because I'd never had a business before and I didn't know what I needed to do to succeed with business.

And over the course of thinking constantly about it over a few months, I came to a realization which was if I stayed in as the person I was at the time.

And the person I was at the time was someone who liked to be at home on his own with a cup of tea and a good book, didn't like to socialize, didn't like to put himself out there.

What would you find and what did you feel was different once you went through the social barrier and into the offline that allowed better outcomes for everything?

Can you recall those very first lunches? And what were you most nervous about before that lunch number one? And then what actually happened?

Ah, okay.

Well, lunch number one is an interesting story because this idea of having lunch with 500 strangers, I actually stole the idea off a woman in Melbourne named Kaylee Chu who had 100 lunches and she published a book about it in 2019.

And I discovered the book actually just before she published it and I pre-ordered a copy.

And I read the book and I was really impressed.

And I was inspired by...

the positive changes that had come into her life as a result of the 100 lunches that she'd had.

But what did the experience teach you about being interesting or interested in people?