💡 ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Preston Zeller spent 15 years scaling high-growth tech companies including A Cloud Guru and ZoomInfo. He'd gone back to painting the year before his brother died of a fentanyl overdose, wanting a medium with no undo button. A week after the loss he was back at work, still broken, and nobody knew what to say to him.
So he wrote one sentence in a journal: paint every day for a year, make a documentary about it. He did both.
The paintings became The Art of Grieving, now in 40 countries and used as educational curriculum. He talks about what that year surfaced, starting with anger, why comparing your loss to someone else's is a losing race, how much of scripture turns out to be grief once you have a reason to look for it, and how he built an AI app for spiritual guidance without letting it hand people easy answers.
🌐 Connect with Preston
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonzeller/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prestonzeller/
🎬 The film
The Art of Grieving: https://theartofgrievingfilm.com/film
Streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube TV, and Tubi
📱 Psalmlog
https://psalmlog.com
AI-powered biblical guidance, free to try
🎨 Mentioned in this episode
Lindsay Lederman, the art therapist featured in the documentary: https://lindsaylederman.com/about-lindsay
🎯 KEY TAKEAWAYS
🔹 Grief showed up as anger first, and stayed there a while before it looked like anything else.
🔹 Comparing losses is disrespectful in both directions, whether you're minimizing yours or ranking someone else's above it.
🔹 A week of bereavement leave covers a funeral. It doesn't cover being able to think.
🔹 The daily practice worked because it was daily, not because the paintings were good. The early ones weren't.
🔹 Job, and the psalms where David is mostly complaining. Preston had read those passages his whole life without reading them as grief.
🔹 An AI built for spiritual guidance should point you back toward a pastor or a counselor, not stand in for one.
🔹 Support matters most after the first two weeks, when everyone else has moved on.
TOPICS
HEALING & SELF-TRUST
LIFE TRANSITIONS
MENTAL HEALTH
I📄
Read the Full Transcript
Prefer to read? The complete episode transcript is available here.
