Marc Horowitz is convinced that everybody needs someone to talk to. What convinced him were the thousands of dinner invitations he received as a result of simply writing his cell phone number on a whiteboard when he was working on a photo shoot for Crate & Barrel. The board, with his number on it, showed up in a recent Crate & Barrel magazine, and that’s when the calls started rolling in.

As an aspiring artist, Horowitz decided to turn the calls into a project so he planned a nationwide road trip to have dinner with any caller who wanted. He has had invitations for “a mean lasagna” in Georgia, coffee in Wisconsin, and Shabbat dinner in Maryland—all from complete strangers. Horowitz has concluded that “a lot of people are lonely and they just want to talk to somebody—to reach out and connect with somebody.”