A Coffee with all his Facebook Friends !

Hello everyone, I'm Alessandro. Welcome to Melbourne, Australia. This is the coffee capital down under. But it's not only for the coffee we are here today. We are here to meet Matthew, a student from Melbourne who decided to have a coffee with each one of his Facebook friends. More than a thousand. This is Laura. Hey Laura, how are you? Laura is about to meet Matthew right here, in this cafe. Let's go. Nice to meet you. I know you're a student, I know that you live in Melbourne. But what's your background? Can you tell us something more about yourself? So I play in a band and I do a few part-time jobs while I study. One of them being at a social media strategy company, looking after social media for different companies. And another doing a class at the School of Life, teaching how to have more meaningful conversations, which is something I've just started doing. Now, a few months ago you started this curious project. You decided to meet all of your Facebook friends for a coffee. And you have more than one thousand friends. How and why did this idea come to your mind? I think one day I was just looking at my Facebook and I realised that I had accumulated over a thousand friends. And I definitely don't think I have a thousand friends. So I started to delete people and the question I asked myself was, could I get a coffee with this person, yes or no? And then I just thought it would be an interesting project to put into practice. It was just one of those really silly ideas that popped into my brain and I didn't actually think anything of it at all. And now here I am speaking to you. I love having coffee with people. It's really enjoyable. I like writing about people. I like learning about people. I can't see myself getting sick of it, I don't think. How many Facebook friends do you actually have? And how many did you meet so far? So I've got around one thousand and forty-four. And that number sort of, I guess, fluctuates. I still add people if I meet them out or through work or whatever. So I still use Facebook. But I've done fifty catch-ups at the moment. So under a thousand to go now, which is a nice feeling. Did all of your friends so far accept to meet you? So far, so good. But now that there's some, I guess, interest in the project, I'm kind of thinking about people's privacy more. And if people aren't really wanting to be a part of the blog, then that's totally fine. I still hope to get coffee with each person and get to know them. So far, so good. I know you've lived in Japan. My question is, how are you going to meet your overseas friends? So I'm not exactly sure yet. But I've got as long as I need to finish it. So I love to travel and I love seeing the world. So I hope to revisit countries again that I've visited and people that I've met in the next however long it takes. Your project is becoming more and more popular and it's catching the attention of a few media around the world. Is that the reaction that you were expecting? No, it was never my intention at all to have any attention at all. I started the project just as a private photo album on my Facebook that was just meant to be for my Facebook friends so I thought they would maybe find it interesting, if at all. My last question is about your hairstyle. How come did you choose this dumb and dumber hairstyle? I used to have very long hair, like down to here. I had long hair for years and then when I was living in Japan I think it's just a Japanese-inspired haircut. This haircut isn't that weird in Japan. So it's not inspired by Jim Carrey at all? I like Jim Carrey. I can take that one. Alright, thank you Matt. That was a real pleasure. Yeah, you too. Enjoy this cappuccino. Okay, what am I talking about again? Thank you.