In this raw, thought-provoking conversation, I sit down with Preston Zeller — entrepreneur, abstract artist, documentary filmmaker, polymath, and founder of projects like PsalmLog — from Mesa, Arizona.

Preston opens up about his profound return to Christian faith after film school, his intellectual deep dive into the Bible, theology, and other belief systems (from Eastern faiths and atheism to paganism and beyond), and why he rejects the false divide between religion and reason. He explores absolute vs. relative truth, the limits of hyper-rationality, the power of awareness over pure logic, and how everyday assumptions reveal that everyone lives by a form of faith.

The discussion turns deeply personal as Preston shares the catalyst for his journey: the death of his older brother Colin from a drug overdose after years of addiction and military service. This loss shattered his assumptions about grief, exposed how ill-equipped Western culture is to handle it, and sparked a transformative year-long project — painting one abstract piece every day for 365 days while documenting the process. That creative outpouring became the acclaimed documentary The Art of Grieving (streaming on Amazon Prime), which blends Preston’s intimate story with historical insights into how artists across time have used creativity to process loss. He reflects on adolescence as our first major grief (losing childhood innocence), the therapeutic power of art as a “better journal” for complex emotions, why words often fail us, and the risks of fueling creativity through endless pain.

Together, we wrestle with big questions: Why do we grieve if death feels so unnatural? What role does creativity play in turning suffering into connection and resilience? How do we balance objective truth with subjective experience in a world full of contradictions, linguistic manipulation, and arrogant dismissals?

Blending faith, philosophy, vulnerability, and artistic insight, this episode is a moving meditation on loss, meaning, intellectual honesty, and the human need to create amid heartbreak. Whether you’re navigating grief, questioning faith, or seeking better ways to process life’s hardest seasons, Preston’s story offers hope, validation, and a reminder that art — and faith — can help us endure and relate to one another more deeply.

Stay tuned for more episodes and content!

The death of my brother made me realize there's faith in whatever you believe.

My favorite is the atheist to be like, oh, I don't live by faith at all.

I'm like, you can't just relegate that to be a sort of quote unquote religious term because you can't prove and don't prove every single thing in life.

You make assumptions that certain things are true based on evidence that you have.

I just remember being in.

Growing up in adolescence and being even in college and thinking I believed something about Jesus or about the Bible, but I had no way of understanding or believing that.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of the Breaker Boy Podcast.

Today we are here with Preston Zeller.

Preston is a entrepreneur, grief artist, which will get into polymath.

Podcast host, am I right?

Yeah.

Documentary filmmaker and all sorts of crazy things.

So, Preston, why don't you tell people where you're from and how hot it is in Arizona right now?

Yeah.

First, thanks for having me on, Ollie.

This is going to be great to talk with you.

Yeah.

I'm out of, well, Mesa, Arizona, so it's one of the biggest suburban populations in the country, so.

That's right.

Yeah.

Right Outside of Phoenix, it's.

But it's January, so it's actually getting cold for us who normally live under what feels like an oven during the summer.

What's cold for you, though?

I don't.

I don't mind the cold, but it's getting down to like, low 40s at

night, so I don't know what that means.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Sorry, everyone.

Yeah, so that's.

I. I don't know.

Is that like 10 degrees or something?

Celsius.

It's actually full.

It's like 5 degrees Celsius.

That's pretty cold.

Yeah.

I mean, but what about the daytime?

No, daytime is like, 60s, which is.

Yeah.

Again, I don't know.

I don't know the exact conversion there, but yeah.

Okay, so that's actually quite a big differentiation then.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, this area is.

It's des.

Where I live is desert.

Not all of Arizona is desert.

Most people think it's just tumbleweeds, but nah.

Phoenix, Arizona has actually like 7,000ft altitude where, you know, you can get into forests and snow and then you have like the desert areas, so.

But we have, you know, desert can get pretty cold.

What's the.

Is Death Valley in Arizona?

That's in California, but it's kind of when you're going.

When you're going between the two.

Driving.

Yeah.

You're gonna pass Death Valley, but feels like Death Valley when you're just driving through endless desert.

Yeah.

Is that your feelings?

I bet it feels like death in a lot of hot places in America.

We do not have that in England.

Yeah, for sure.

Right, let's.

Preston, there's a lot here to go off.

Why don't you tell people why you started.

Not your specific things that you like.

The art of grieving documentary, which we'll get into, and everything else that you're involved in.

But why?

What.

There's a theme of religion here.

So what role does religion play in your life then?

Start there.

Yeah, you know, so I was raised in a Christian household, kind of, you know, non denominational, just kind of evangelical, I guess.

Walked away from it.

I went into the film industry, the film school in Southern California.

And about a year out of film school, I just had a really profound transformation, just going back to Jesus.

And so, you know, since then, um, my life changed really dramatically.

I mean, this was 15 years ago.

And, you know, I always wanted to understand my faith in an intellectual way.

I didn't get that growing up for a variety of reasons.

And so when I really decided to take it seriously, I'm like, okay, I, I don't want to just be, I don't know, a Sunday churchgoer, for lack of a better word.

I want to really sink my teeth into what the Bible has to say about every facet of life.

So that's a for sure a prominent aspect of, of my life.

And then, you know, cascading down from that, you know, we go through lots of hardships in life and, you know, how you navigate those things is of course really critical, which is, I know, you know, one of the things we're going to talk about today and part of your theme here, but I think there's skills and talents that we have and ways of exploring, I think the kind of just the human condition in general, which I've always been fascinated by and explore as a musician, which I can see you are as well, that there's just ways of exploring that, that I think we're sort of endowed with that I, I've enjoyed going into those different kind of artistic modalities to understand kind of myself and also how to communicate what I'm going through just as a way to relating other people.

And so that's led to so many really great ways to connect with people over time as I've explored and gotten in and outs of different kinds of artistic endeavors.

You said something right at the beginning Which I thought was interesting how you wanted to understand the more intellectual side of religion.

And I was thinking we, we kind of have a societal orthodoxy that religion and intellect are antithetical.

They're at odds to one another.

Like religion is.

Falls slightly more into the category of, you know, I was speaking, I had someone on the podcast, Bishop Foreman, and we were talking about spirituality versus religion and where those two coincide and intersect.

And we don't really associate cognitive sort of processes within.

With religion.

We see it more as a.

It's more left field, more out there, more, I think.

Did you say evangelical?

It sort of falls into that category.

So what do you think, what do you mean when you wanted to understand the intellectual side of religion?

Because that's, that's quite interesting because I think if more people did that, it would probably potentially help the cause and the case.

Yeah, well, I think it's an un.

Fair and unfair label.

And what I mean by that is you do you definitely have a fair amount of people who I think in any faith really, but Christians maybe get the biggest rap for it where, you know, there's a lack of ability to provide a reasonable explanation for why you believe what you believe.

And I don't, I don't just mean like a circular logic one.

There's, there's faith in whatever you believe.

You know, if my favorite is the atheist, be like, oh, I don't live by faith at all.

I'm like, you can't just relegate that to be a sort of quote unquote religious term because you can't prove and don't prove every single thing in life.

You, you make, you make assumptions that certain things are true based on evidence that you have.

And I just remember being in.

Growing up in adolescence and then being even in college and like, thinking I believed something about Jesus or about the Bible, but I had no way of understanding or believing that.

And so when I decided to start taking that more seriously, it was like, okay, I had, you know, young twenties, I had some amount of experience in the world and my observations about things and just difficulty, I think, making sense of really what was going on or why are things a certain way.

And so, and I think everyone's kind of trying to understand that, which is why we have any kind of belief systems to begin with.

Because, you know, if you want to go down to the root of it, why are we here?

Why am I here?

What's the meaning of life?

You know, we're all, we're all kind of, you know, on that hunt in different ways.

And so if you look at something like the Bible, which has an.

So I, instead of just relying on, I think what I had been taught or told about it, I'm like, I want to go deep into every aspect I can to understand this and the more I have, the more rewarding that's been.

But I, I think the sort of, I guess labels that get put on that.

Right.

Really come from either probably an ad hominem attack or kind of a more of a maybe a lack of understanding about certain themes in Scripture, you know, and I would just, and look, I'm not a student of just like the Bible learned quite a bit about different types of, you know, theological points of view partially to understand how to connect with people in terms of what, where they're coming from.

Because I, I do enjoy having conversations with people of different kind of belief systems just to go, hey, where, where are we kind of diverging and converging in different ways.

What other theologies have you looked into?

I'd be hard pressed to find one.

I haven't.

I mean there's a lot of, like a lot of, just a lot of Eastern faiths, you know, atheism, which I, I think is a theology in and of its own.

But yeah, a lot of Eastern faiths, old, old ones, paganism, witchcraft, Satanism, it was just the whole gamut cult.

I just, I think it's all kind of interesting to see ultimately.

Why do people gravitate towards what they believe, you know, where, where it clicks for them and.

Yeah.

Why it does.

Why do you.

Because, okay, wow, there's a lot in there.

Which way, which direction to pick.

The, the, the, the logic versus wherever the opposite of logic is irrationality, but that's not quite the right term.

The logic argument is using.

Using a lack of potential logic or rationality as to detract from the validity of religion.

I think is, is quite.

We live in a hyper rational world and rationality is in the good, the highest virtue.

I guess from speaking of.

So a lot of my religious knowledge comes from Jordan Peterson because he, someone who sort of put me on the path of intrigue and he blew up around the time that I was at that age where you're looking for new information, looking to sort of cast an identity.

And I love the, the way he talks about the, the Egyptian story and the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian story.

And the idea that the, the highest good virtue wasn't rationality, it was awareness.

Their, their octopus was a being.

I can't remember what it was called.

Was it Marduk or Marduk?

Maybe it was the Mar.

Marduk is one.

I think that's a. Yeah.

Ancient Mesopotamian God.

God.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the idea was that he had eyes all around his head and he spoke magic wor.

Then he, Peterson would draw a comparison to something like Lion King with the, with what's the little bird called?

Zazu.

And the idea that the.

At which can see all sits at the top or near the top.

And anyway we don't perceive that.

We don't take that out that look in modern society we think that rationality is our highest virtue, but awareness is actually the, the key.

So when people knock religion for a lack of rationality, I think that's flawed because a.

Human beings aren't very rational.

So why do you think that we would subscribe to something that was purely rational if it wasn't?

The closer representation is not representation.

The closer it mirrors human.

The human experience, the more likely it is to align with people.

So maybe that's one of the reasons why it aligns with people so much, because there is a lack of rationality.

And the Bible is full of potential contradictions because we're full of contradictions.

And therefore it mimics what it is to be human to some degree.

But the, the.

Just the, the key before I let you talk, because I've spoken too long.

But the key, my favorite story of why rationality is flawed is the guy that discovered why women and babies were dying during childbirth and said he was looking at the scenarios and he was like, it doesn't make any logical sense why this would be happening.

But what was happening is doctors would go and deal with very, very ill people and then they would go and deal with pregnant women and babies and they were transferring germs.

And at that point they obviously didn't have any recollection of germs and pathogens, bacteria, et cetera.

And the only logically everyone went, doesn't make any logical sense.

Why would that impact that?

And he said, well, all I can think of by watching is that women go, doctors go and see patient A and then they go and see patient B.

And then patient B gets really sick.

It must be something to do with the doctors.

And he was ridiculed and hounded.

And now we obviously know that that's perfectly.

That's.

That was correct.

And we obviously have a protocol and like conventions that we use to prevent that.

But I thought that was a really interesting sort of insight into how rationality and logic isn't actually the ultimate intellectual virtue or not intellectual is the wrong term.

It's, it's awareness.

So.

Yeah.

What you, what do you think of that?

Do you get that or did I just say nothing?

No, I, I, I, I get, I get what you're saying.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I think something that dovetails into that, Ollie, is relative versus absolute truth.

Yeah.

And that's kind of a really foundational thing.

So, you know, even, you know, if I generally, if, if someone is like, oh, I really want to understand what you believe and why you believe.

And let's, let's kind of like, you know, play out our points here.

And the, one of the first places I'll often start is like, hey, do you believe in absolute truth?

And they go, what does that mean?

It's like, well, it's something that's true whether you believe it or not, and versus a relative truth, which is, you know, something that's up to interpretation.

And what I, I think we have a lot of people claiming absolute truth in something that's relative.

And so it's like, you know, if, if everyone kind of goes that route where it's all up to interpretation, but ultimately mine's the best.

It's, you're, you're not going to ever kind of like agree on something.

And then the, the sort of ultimate irony of that is if you say there's no absolute truth, you're making an absolute claim about truth, which would be an oxymoron.

So then that can't happen.

So it's just if, so then if someone can't go, well, okay, I'm willing to accept that something can be true whether I agree with it or not.

If they can agree to like sort of come to that, then everything is going to be kind of shape shifted towards the argument.

And I've, I've been in conversations with people like that and you can never really get around to establishing a point.

And I think that there's a lot of people who kind of talk past each other these days and also use, you know, logical fallacies is another one.

So, and I'm not just meaning to throw out big words, it's just there's so many cases where, and, and I want to be careful of this myself for sure, is saying like, well, you know, introducing a sort of, you know, rhetoric that uses logical fallacies and that's what prove you.

Proves your point.

Right?

So, you know, the one of very common one today is an ad hominem attack to say, you know, because, you know, you look a certain way.

Well, none of those people who look that way are ever right.

And therefore, you can't be right because of that or something like that, or know, because you're.

Because I call you stupid, then you're wrong.

You know, whatever the case is.

That's a very simple example, but we see that so much today.

I'm just gonna.

In like, okay, Ollie, one of the most interesting things that I ever heard is like, if you go to, like, the creation account in the Bible, you know, which most people are kind of, you know, familiar with to some degree.

But it's like, you know, the snake deceived Eve with, you know, the fruit.

Right.

Which I don't think it was an actual snake, but that's a whole nother thing where.

And God.

Satan doesn't say in that moment, like, well, God's lying.

He doesn't say that.

He induces doubt, like sneers.

The wording there is actually sneering.

And so he says, did God really say that?

And it's sort of like, you know, your parents tell you not to do something.

Your friend goes, well, let's go do it.

And you say, well, my parents told me, told me not to.

And your friend goes, but did your parents really say that?

Are you sure?

And that's.

That even.

That in and of itself is almost like an argument that people use today to go.

It's not even an argument.

It's.

It's really just like a sort of arrogant dismissal of someone's point of view.

I think that's something else that we have going on.

Arrogant dismissal of different points of view.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

Well, instead of engaging in, hey, you know, why do you think that?

You know, like, trying to understand someone's point of view versus you just don't agree with it, and so therefore it's kind of dismissed.

Well, it's definitely what you sort of alluding to earlier.

I think it's definitely an issue.

The more and more we create a world that is found, not founded on.

Yeah, I guess the world that's founded on words and linguistics, the more dangerous that becomes.

Because some of the worst people in the world are some of the best at manipulating words and manipulating their own narratives and other people's narratives.

It's kind of like a gift that awful people often have, unfortunately.

So if you create a world that allows linguistics to Be the ultimate.

You are effectively enabling those sorts of people to gain power in places where they are unworthy and unjustified.

And it also is very complicated because words are very powerful and subjectivity is a massive, like the world, the, the scope, the, the landscape of objective reality and objective truth is probably smaller than we realize.

Most of it is subject, subjective, really.

But we can't create a world where it's entirely subjective because then we have no commonality and we have no common ground with anyone.

And if we have no common ground, then we have nothing to stand on and we would just argue and fight and cause issues.

So balancing out the objective with the subjective is very difficult and probably it's basically the fundamental issue of humanity, I think, really balancing the objective with the subjective because everyone argues that their subjective is the objective and somewhere objective is subjective.

So it's always like, my ideas are correct and yours ideas.

My ideas are correct because I view the world correctly and your ideas are wrong because you view the world incorrectly.

Yeah, that's exactly, that's going on on a massive scale, I think.

Right, right now.

Definitely.

Yeah.

It goes on all around the world and across all layers of human endeavor and human, like, I don't know, comportment behavior.

Let's talk about you because we've spoken a lot about broader topics, grief and art.

Well, first of all, if you're comfortable, it's on your Instagram.

But yeah, yeah.

Where did the concept of grief begin to impact you and why have you progressed the notion into something that you're pursuing?

Yeah, I, you know, I think grief as a topic is just, it's not, at least in Western culture.

But, you know, I'll just say we're, and I, you know, Western culture being, you know, of course, like, you know, Europe and stuff too.

But it's like we're highly individualistic and so we're not, we're not as like tapped into a sort of collective cultural identity as much as, you know, people probably were in times past.

But so I, I, I mentioned that to say, like, our understanding of what is grief, what qualifies as grief, you know, it's just like, weird and then we don't talk about it.

And then when you experience an incredible grief, that something has to be done with that.

And if we don't call it grief, I think it's easy to misdiagnose that as something else and could potentially, you know, spur on really not good habits, behavior, life changes, whatever.

And so I, you know, for me, I hate, you know, everyone experiences Grief.

And my.

My biggest one that made me kind of stop, that was sort of a rock bottom in life was, you know, I was married with three kids, and I have had a brother who about four.

Four years older, a little under that, and had been through all of his adult life, my adult life, seeing him bounce in and out of just like very intense levels of addiction and drug addiction.

And that went from like, really, you know, obvious hard stuff to, you know, heavy pharmaceutical usage.

And so he.

He died in 19.

February.

So it was almost six, seven years ago, which is kind of crazy.

And that just put a lot of breaks on what I thought I was doing in life, the what sibling loss meant.

And, you know, married with three kids, working, supporting the family, all this stuff going on and having to process that and then realizing I'm so ill equipped to process that I had a perception about how I move and get over grief and all that kind of stuff and that it would be this very temporal thing.

Man, I was so wrong.

And I.

And I was doing particularly at the time, a ton of painting abstract, although dabbled in other things.

And it just made sense to really start exploring that, which led to, of course, documentary later on.

Yeah.

God, grief.

I mean, yeah.

Losing a sibling.

I can't imagine how.

How awful that that would be and especially under the circumstances.

And you're.

You're right.

Grief is a.

You know, when I look at my life, if I sort of lay out all the emotions that you can feel, grief is probably something that I've probably felt the least as terms of negative emotion, other than, you know, I. I've.

I've lost three grandparents and.

But that's.

That's.

It really.

It's not quite.

It's not.

But that's sort of part of life, really.

It's.

And it's baked into the average.

Well, pretty much every young person's life is that.

That eventually those milestones will come at some point.

It's not like losing a parent or losing.

Losing a.

But obviously losing a sibling at any age is exceptionally jarring and difficult.

So have you always been into art?

Has always been a relief release for you?

Yeah, and I, you know, so I think if you.

I had this notion.

I forget if I came up with it or I heard someone say it.

I think it was actually talking with my wife at some point.

But just this realization.

I think adolescence is probably the first time you go through a real serious form of grieving, barring something other kind of crazy going on in your life.

But if, you know, you're kind of having a typical childhood.

And what I mean by that is, you know, during adolescence, like not only are you hormone hormonally changing at a rapid pace, the people around you are changing.

You're also losing childhood, the innocence and expectations and all that kind of stuff.

You're.

You're like losing that ability to be that.

And so I think for me, I was always been in music to some degree.

Really started taking it seriously, junior high, high school.

And that led to like performing and stuff a lot later on.

But other than kind of dabbling in things, that was the first sort of like artistic practice that I really took to in a. I'd say somewhat of a, you know, extreme degree.

Did it, you know, semi professionally.

And it was always a way to.

And I was singing and playing guitar for clarity.

Eventually got into producing more.

But writing.

I started out writing poetry and guitar separate and eventually said, you know, why aren't I combining these?

I was, you know, I wasn't a kind of naturally gifted singer.

I certainly worked at it and got to, you know, decent point.

But just the ability to communicate helped me understand what I was going through through the form of song and you know, the me, the musical aspect of it just.

Or the instrumentation, the words, putting all that together has always been a tool for me.

And I think that that started this whole notion of creative expression to better understand myself.

And then of course you share that.

You share that stuff, share those creative works and you have somewhat of a feedback loop.

And if, you know, if you're creating out of the right place, it.

When people are like critical of your work, it just doesn't hit you as much.

You're just like, okay, well you may not like this, that's fine.

But it really speaks to me.

And that's kind of why.

That's why I created it, you know, versus like I'm creating for just like commercial consumption, which actually takes a lot of the fun out of making music in general.

But yeah, so I've always been creative and then yeah, of course transform that into.

To other, you know, endeavors.

And why.

I suppose it's kind of an obvious question, but why do you think how would you use creativity to express and to channel your pain?

What was it about?

Was it the.

Was it the viewing things coming together, so to speak, as you were creating that created a sense of satisfaction and that was relieving or what was it about it?

I mean, I think in general, it's an output that allows you to translate complex emotions in a way where other things fail you know, I think words, that words, words actually often fail.

You know, we talk.

The therapist in my documentary, Lindsay, Lindsay Letterman talked about this where it's like even if you go to therapy, you talk and then you forget what you talked about.

You know, you may go back a week to four weeks later, whatever.

But when you have this, this, this record of.

At a time and place when you, when you were going through something and you're able to reflect on it, it just kind of gives you this like timestamp.

It's, it's a better journal.

I mean I was actually going through and pulling up some old recordings recently to go put into, just kind of improve them.

And when I, when I listened to them, it just took me back to that, that place and I, you know, talking to, you know, I think something you said earlier about grief.

I think, you know, one of the, the interesting thing about grief is it's not like anger or sadness or anxiety or a lot of things that are, I think easier to put a finger on what it is.

It's.

It could be five, six, seven different emotions that you're kind of just bouncing around between.

And that's what makes it confusing and probably harder for maybe society to kind of to want to even acknowledge that it's happening because it's like uncomfortable too.

I mean most people don't want to delve into, you know, really troubling emotions like that with somebody else and being vulnerable.

I mean that's none of that are things that our culture is taught.

Especially as a man, you're not like, hey, let me be some, you know, really emotional person.

And I'm not even saying that, that we, you know, that's the extreme end of that.

Ollie is maybe the opposite of stoicness is being emotionally unstable like willfully instead of volatile, pursuing improvement.

Yeah, volatile for sure.

I can only control myself.

And so that's where I've been like, okay, you know, I want to, I want to just try to understand why am I feeling these things.

And, and I've, you know, fortunately had creative outputs to be able to do that.

And as I've shared those things and the, in the, the painting and the documentary, which we can get to if you want was like an incredible light bulb for under understanding that how much this has the potential to resonate with people.

Yeah, well, I think creativity is a, is a double edged sword.

Double edged sword when it's coupled with negative emotion.

Because I feel like it's both the tunnel that you fall, the cave that you fall into and the rope that you can pull yourself out with.

So if your brain is capable of thinking in a myriad of different ways and different directions, and potentially that could be channeled and funneled in a negative way, probably unconsciously and take you down paths of self defeat and self sabotage and nihilism and pessimism.

But on the contrary, it also has the potential, when applied correctly, probably through a channel of a creative outlet, not potentially, not purely just cognitive machinations and thinking has the potential to take you out and to allow you to fortify yourself and to go to different places and take from different.

Exactly as you've done, take from different doctrines and ideologies to fortify yourself and find an avenue in which you can express.

And that's why great singers and songwriters, I guess, write about painful times because they have that negative emotion coupled with that creativity which can give rise to.

It's like a.

The can, the.

What's the word?

The, the.

The concept of the muse kind of is like that.

It's like using a device, a metaphorical device to channel your.

I've said channel way too much to facilitate your creativity flow and, and find a avenue in which to put it down.

So yeah, that, that, that makes, that makes complete sense.

And then the documentary, like what, what is.

Why did you.

Well, you mentioned film producing, didn't you?

I've seen stuff about that.

So where's that come from?

Other than the fact that you're just a generally creative person?

Yeah, I mean I like, you know, I mentioned I went to film school.

I mean I, I didn't spend, spend a crazy amount of time there, but, but I think the thing that was most interesting to me about the filmmaking process was being able to like see it end to end, you know, and that's.

Producers are mostly involved in that aspect where it's like, you know, you're depending on the type of producer, but there's always at least like probably one or two who are sourcing the project, seeing through the financing, the production, post production, the release.

I mean you got a.

Most people want a bunch of people to see their movie at the end of the day.

So I actually I, I talk about this in documentary a little bit, but it was interesting because when, when I, I took took a little trip down to see my folks after my brother had passed, I was just like, I think it was like a month after two months?

No, no, no, it's probably like three or four months after that.

I, I took this trip down cause I was still just head feeling about the whole thing.

But I was trying to figure out, I was doing larger canvases, a lot of large, larger canvases.

So I did this series right after my brother passed, but I, it didn't sufficiently address what I was going through because you're just, you're feeling this flood of emotions on a regular basis.

And so I, I have, I had an art show where I, I had these pieces all around about my loss, but they're all abstract, right?

So I, I let people kind of interpret on their own.

And you know, some people kind of felt that other people, they, you know, got something else out of the paintings and then they ask.

And so for like two or three hours, I was explaining to people that this had to do with, you know, the death of my brother that had just happened.

And I start seeing other people open up, share their own stories.

Some people I knew really well, I'm like, wow, I never knew that happened to you.

A lot of stories of loss, people crying on the spot.

I'm like, this is, this is interesting.

Not the.

I was just like, you know, trying to, you know, have an art show and maybe sell a piece or two and, and that would have been success for me.

And so that stuck with me.

And I kind of combined this, this aspect of.

I want to make this really in depth project because I, I have a lot to work through.

So I committed to painting every day for a year, you know, documenting that as, as you probably saw on my Instagram, and then, yeah, eventually turning that into a documentary.

I wrote this in like one line in a notebook.

It was paint every day for a year, make a documentary out of it.

I'm like, okay, well this is going to take a long time.

And so it was just, it was really encouraging over the course of that, of posting those paintings to see like people kind of like tuning into everyday, making these paintings.

But then I think the documentary itself, once that was able to finally come out, there's a tremendous amount of validation and it's been out for about three and a half years now of how much it's resonated with people in a way.

Like, honestly, I didn't really expect.

I, I thought there's some insecurity, you know, when you make a creative work and then you push it out there that you just.

Something in the back of your mind goes, who's gonna want this?

Who's gonna like this?

And I had just enough nudging along the way when I'd share my project of people, like just little bits of encouragement and great people I worked with on that and I think ultimately driven by this notion of.

In my grief experience, it was like a couple things.

One, people sucked at talking about it.

So if I wanted to feel open and go, hey, dad, not doing great today.

This is kind of what I'm dealing with.

So just so you know.

And people go, okay.

And they're just like kind of turn into a robot.

And then there are people too, like, yeah, I'm still really struggling with something, some loss I went through.

And they're just, they don't know what to do with it.

So I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe all this that I'm going through could be of help.

And I happen to have this filmmaking background, so that's of course what maybe can I have the confidence to do it?

So did you get people just as you were talking?

I was like, I would have interviewed some of the people who were coming up to you talking about their grief as part of the documentary.

Did you do that?

I wasn't.

You're talking about at the art show or the.

For the document?

For the.

Was it during.

Was it whilst you were making the documentary?

That's when people were coming to you and saying.

Or you were saying to them, I'm struggling today.

And then they would say, yeah, I'm also struggling with this, you know.

Oh, they were.

Those were a lot of like in passing conversations, but a lot of those, A lot of the early ones were like when I was really in.

I felt like rough shape trying to try to understand this.

I.

And then made.

So just like logistically even getting people to do stuff, which is kind of awkward at the time.

So I also didn't want to make it too fragmented.

No, that's fair.

You know, I think one of the.

Actually I hired a really talented Emmy award winning producer to help me like extract out my own story and lay this out in a.

As best a way as possible and kind of fig, you know, I had to figure out what story do I roughly want to tell.

I didn't, I didn't.

I didn't have the luxury of some crew that I could just have follow me around for two years and then make a documentary out of it.

You know, it was like we had to be really, really Intentional about what the.

What.

What the heck it is we were trying to make.

So.

So, yeah, it's.

It's pretty centered around myself, the other documentary filmmaker, my.

My wife a little bit.

And then I do a historical look into it, into.

Into how other artists have kind of used art to process grief.

Which part of that, Ollie, I had this realization when I was doing all this, like, art history stuff is that I had to kind of say this in documentary, but having to be careful about not wanting to stay in this cycle of painful thoughts just out of the desire to fuel creativity.

Yeah, that goes back to the.

Right.

You know.

Yeah, right.

Right.

So it's.

And I. I wonder that about, like, Vincent Van Gogh, who I bring up, because, you know, he was definitely.

He.

He actually kind of telegraphs his.

His own suicide.

It's one of his last paintings.

I think it was the last painting maybe publicly added.

I think it's at Eternity's Gate.

But yeah, it's funny because I just.

As your.

It.

It literally has just dawned on me, but I've literally just written my university dissertation on documentary and how.

What.

How do documentary filmmakers portray reality?

How do.

How do you.

How does a documentary filmmaker justify their version of reality?

Is there such a thing?

It's literally what we talked about earlier, objectively, is always.

We've gone full sync.

Objectivity is subjectivity.

How does the.

The subject that is the documentary filmmaker do their best to accurately depict the objective?

Is there such a thing as an objective?

So I guess with you, you.

You.

Your purpose would have been to outline the correlation between grief and art or the.

The relationship between grief and art.

But yeah, it's.

It's an interesting topic.

It's not really relevant.

Well, it is very relevant, but it's not, you know, documentary.

We're more talking about the.

This is the concept documentary as opposed to the topic of the documentary.

But yeah, it's.

It's an interesting thing because it, you know, sort of perpetrates.

Perpetrates.

Pervades.

Human rights.

Pervades.

Yeah, pervades.

Yeah, sort of.

Sort of human life in general.

Yeah.

Right.

Preston, I think on that note, I was going to say real quick, documentaries are interesting in that, like, it depends on what the person's agenda is ultimately.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

That's the key.

How do they can.

Will.

Are they willing to distort truth to achieve a desired outcome, which was something that definitely is.

A lot of people claim is something that people do, obviously.

Right.

Preston, you've probably already answered this to Be fair.

But throughout the podcast, but it's called the Breaking Point Podcast.

Within, within for part, because I'm interested in people's lowest moments that they felt that they needed to make a change or they needed to, or even their highest moments.

You've had a couple of people mention a highest moment where they thought that they needed to do something different.

So do you have a, is there a standout moment that, that comes to mind that maybe catalyzed this whole journey that you're on?

I imagine what the answer is going to be, to be fair.

Well, I, I think aside from, I mean, I lost my brother's an incredible one, of course.

You know, I, I think actually in many ways that made me just a lot more resilient to the things that do come across.

Yeah, I mean, look, I, I, I've had, you know, anywhere from man.

I, I remember my, we had our two really young kids.

My kids are like three years apart, all three of them.

So they're consecutive ages.

We had two girls, we had two girls and a boy on the way.

And we like lost our housing basically due to some weird circumstances, was barely making any money.

So we, you know, my, my in laws graciously took us in and I was like, okay, what, what am I doing?

You know, and so, you know, we, we've had, you know, stuff like that.

But, you know, compared to, I think what a, what a death can do to catalyze purpose, it, it's, it kind of trivial, trivializes other issues.

You know, I, I, I've certainly, I've never, I've never like broken the law or in such a way where I've been in prison or anything like that.

I mean, there's just all sorts of tragedies.

I think actually, interestingly enough, the death of my brother made me realize, I think, how many like kind of traumatic things I had gone through with him.

Because although there are great times I had with my brother, he was still a drug addict at the end of the day.

And that kind of term carries a lot of connotations to it, you know, but I mean, he had those tendencies.

So it's like I grew up with, you know, I had a fair amount of verbal abuse that came from him.

I had knowing when someone was him in particular, but was like on drugs.

Like, I just know it, I, you know, just so those kind of things.

It just was like a normality to me.

Like, I knew it wasn't normal, but it was normal for me.

Yeah, of course.

And so it, I think, and death, I think makes you do that, kind of reflect on that relationship if it was good, bad, or otherwise.

And there's a lot to unpack there, too, because I think even right after someone dies, you can.

You, like, miss them.

So you don't want to think about the bad things.

You want to.

You want to think about those good parts of the relationship.

But because of who he was in my life, I. I kind of.

I wanted to be really honest with myself and go, what were the other.

You know, what I am the way I am.

And I think, you know, siblings impact this more than anything in many ways.

How, how.

How you're shaped growing up.

And, and so when.

When that, like, isn't there anymore, there's, like, an identity in you that's just gone.

And you're like, why is that?

It's not like I wanted to be that person.

I want.

I didn't want to.

I don't want to be him.

But you're inextricably linked.

You know, who are you?

In light of that loss?

And that.

That's kind of.

We talk about this in the documentary, but there's the idea of, like, a broken attachment, and you're.

You're trying to reconcile what you do with that attachment being gone.

So.

Yeah, anyways, I guess, you know, sum that up.

It's just, I. I don't.

I don't want to bring up, like, hardship just for the sake of it.

It's truly.

I think everyone's going to go through a loss that really makes you go, whoa, you know?

Cause I, I had to.

Had, like, Graham, you know, relatives die or people die.

That's really sad.

But it just.

And, and not to say a grandparent couldn't do this, you know, but you're gonna have some death that just, like, rocks your world.

Yeah.

And.

And my wife and I have talked about this.

Cause she has eight siblings.

They're all still alive.

And she's like, man, I, you know, haven't been through that yet.

Not a sibling loss, but a loss that makes you go, whoa.

Just stops you.

And it's.

I, you know, it's just.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, part of that, the, the human experience.

Where do you think.

I know we probably should stop.

But final, Final question.

Genuinely, what do you think?

Why do you think we grieve?

Because I was watching a podcast years ago, and this guy was talking about grief, and his theory was, there's no biological reason for grief.

It doesn't serve any purpose for us to long for someone that is no longer alive.

So what is that Purpose.

There must be a reason why we still maintain emotion for someone that is no longer here.

Is it to carry us forward into the next realm that we.

I don't know.

Is it, do you have any, have you, Is that something you've delved into?

What the.

I mean you, maybe you just say it's, it's obvious is that it's a loss of something that you cared about.

But what do you think?

Is there a deeper analysis of grief that maybe we don't, we haven't got to yet.

We, people are just on the edge of grasping.

Yeah, I'll, I, yeah, I can tell you exactly what I think that is.

Well, I, okay, first of all, I think a lot of people are going to approach these questions from a hyper rationalistic evolutionary standpoint.

Of course, I don't personally believe we came here by a bunch of single cell organisms transforming a complex life.

I think we're intentionally made by a designer, by a God who's a designer.

But with that.

And this speaks to, I think why we're not, we're reluctant to acknowledge grief for what it is is that death is not natural.

And that goes back to the creation account.

Adam and Eve were created to be eternal beings.

They brought death into life, into the circle of life.

And that's, I think the beauty of what Christ represents is that, and you know, if you know, anyone listening wants to go read Revelation is that he already defeated death, but in the end he will actually literally destroy death, which is a wild concept to think about.

And just this, I think if you just ponder on that idea that death is not a natural thing and it was not intended to be part of our lives.

To me that makes a lot more sense as to why we just don't feel good about it and why it strikes us so much.

So does that mean that.

So do you think that it's potentially possible that one day we'll create a society where people don't die?

And that is kind of what we're, that is the true way of living.

That is the correct way of living almost.

I don't think we're going to create that.

I think that's what life with Jesus in the afterlife is.

I don't think, I don't think humans are create capable of creating a kind of altruistic utopia where we're just, you know, eternal.

And I think the flip side of that is you could have a promised version of eternity, but is that really eternity?

And I mean promised from like a human aspect, you know, versus God saying I'LL give you eternity through you know different means than what you might think it.