We Love You

The dynamic duo on the pod PLUS an excerpt from their new book 🌎

Greetings Beloved Soul Boomlets!

This week, Rainn sits down with the We Love You duo—Thomas Sullivan and Andy Min.

Thomas and Andy are lifelong best friends, filmmakers, and the creative force behind We Love You—a multimedia project devoted to spreading hope, empathy, and emotional honesty in an often anxious and disconnected world.

The poetry and wonder of their micro-masterpieces is on full display in their conversation with Rainn—you will indeed feel like they love you and are connected to everything that is, not just as an idea, but as an experience.

Raised in the Bay Area and shaped as much by the forests and mountains of Northern California as by the early internet, Thomas and Andy began creating together as kids and found their voice during the stillness of the COVID years. What emerged was something deceptively simple: short films built from real conversations, rooted in nature, and animated by a quiet but radical optimism. Their work doesn’t deny the anxiety of modern life—it meets it head-on, offering an alternative to the noise and pressure of the digital landscape. So much of the online world feeds a sense of not being enough; their work is an attempt to push back against that—to make it not just acceptable, but compelling, to be hopeful, to be kind, to see the good.

There’s a universality to what they’ve created. Their audience spans ages, backgrounds, and belief systems—because what they’re tapping into isn’t niche. It’s something fundamental: the longing to feel connected, to feel grounded.

To accompany their appearance on the Soul Boom podcast, we’re also sharing an excerpt from their book, the eponymously titled We Love You. The premise of the book begins with a truth both obvious and startling: you are on a rock floating through the vastness of space. Everything you know—every person you love, every fear you carry, every moment you’ve lived—exists on this tiny speck drifting through something unimaginably large. And that while this can feel overwhelming, frightening even, it is also an invitation to look closer, think bigger and recognize that even in a world that can feel confusing, loud, and difficult, there is still kindness to be found.

The excerpt we’re sharing, points to another fundamental and startline reality: Nothing is Individual.

Enjoy!

And remember,

We Love You,

The Soul Boom Team

Excerpted from We Love You: an optimistic guide to life on a rock floating through space

By Andy Min & Thomas Sullivan

We’ve been focusing on the individual elements that make up our world. Our goal has been to see what we might learn from each thing while trying to take absolutely nothing for granted. By looking at each isolated part of our world with this sense of wonder, it’s possible to learn quite a lot: from the tender simplicity of a newt, to the stunning power of a redwood tree, to the determination of a fish swimming upstream. When you really try to see things individually, you start to notice something.

Everything—from the ants to the mountain lions, from the moss along the river to the lichen growing on a branch a hundred feet in the air—is connected to the world around it. Nothing in this world is truly singular.

When we think about a tiny plant growing in the dirt, we can’t help but wonder where that dirt came from. And what about the carbon dioxide it takes in to photosynthesize and build its cell walls? What about the fungus in the ground that affixes nitrogen to make it accessible to plant life? And don’t forget about the insects that pollinate seeds. Wouldn’t we be missing something if we were to consider only the plant itself without factoring in the wide web of living and nonliving things that give the plant its very life? Maybe, like its own roots or leaves, these elements shouldn’t be thought of as loosely connected to the plant, but should instead be understood as common parts of something larger, as parts of the same whole.

We’re not just talking about plants either. Surrounding each individual person is an endless web of interrelatedness, of cause and effect, of questions asked and answered spreading out in every direction. Each person is a part of something so much greater than themselves, extending to their family, their friends, their community, and the entire human world. To understand each other—to understand ourselves—we can’t think of people merely as disconnected individuals. We have to consider every single person as a part of an interconnected community of being, a community with a shared history, a shared future, and most urgently of all, a shared present.

This might feel like grasping at straws or some far-fetched philosophical way to compare the human world with the natural world. But let us remind you: The human world is part of the natural world, and it is just one part of it. And everything that connects to us branches in every direction. We are one tiny part of something much bigger.

When you pay attention to each thing individually, you can’t help but notice: Nothing is individual.

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Excerpted from WE LOVE YOU: An Optimistic Guide to Life on a Rock Floating Through Space by Thomas Sullivan and Andy Min. Copyright © 2025 by Andy Min & Thomas Sullivan. Published by DK, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Thomas Sullivan and Andy Min are filmmakers, writers, and lifelong best friends, and the creative duo behind We Love You—a multimedia project dedicated to spreading hope, empathy, and emotional honesty in an often anxious and disconnected world. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they were shaped by both the natural landscapes of Northern California and the early internet, they began collaborating creatively as children and have continued ever since. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they launched We Love You as a response to the growing anxiety, disconnection, and pressure of the digital age, creating short-form videos rooted in real conversations, nature, and a quietly radical optimism. Their work has since resonated with millions across platforms, offering an alternative vision of what it means to live with curiosity, kindness, and hope. Now based in Los Angeles, they are expanding their work into long-form storytelling across books, film, and audio, including their podcast Hey Man.

We’d love to know — what does connection with all things feel like to you?