Episode 203: Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work: AI Is Transforming Jobs

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Today Counts Show Episode 203

Preview

Preston: They think AI is like ChatGPT. So they go, “Oh, they synonymized it.” They’re like, “Well, okay, AI has been around for a long time. If you go back to probably the ’80s, even before that, part of it is super advanced forms of algorithmic decisions, which is what the earliest search engines are. Google, I would argue, has evolved into a version of AI.” One of the biggest things that people need to realize is it’s a tool. Like anything else, money is a tool.

Appreciation of our Supporters

Winston: Hey, before we jump into the podcast, we want to thank all our donors and supporters who make The Today Count Show possible. It’s through your generosity that we’re able to shape leaders through this content and this podcast. And be sure to like, subscribe, and follow wherever you find yourself coming across this content. All right, let’s get to the podcast.

Introduction

Jim: So, lately on The Today Count Show, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve actually been talking about a lot of hot topics, and we’re having a lot of fun with that.

Preston Zeller: Faith, Technology, and the Mission Behind Psalm Log

Today, I have on the show Preston Zeller. We met on social media a couple months ago, and I looked into him a little bit and was really impressed with this particular—I’m going to call it an app. I’ll let him correct me if I’m wrong about that in just a minute—called Psalm Log. You’ll hear more about that in a little bit.

But I was so impressed with it, I said, “Okay, this guy seems to know what he’s doing, and I would love to have him on the show, see how we can help him, and how he can also educate us as listeners.”

A Faith-Centered Leader in Tech and Ministry

The way I’d introduce him today is that he is a faith-centered man. When we say faith at The Today Count Show, we could mean all kinds of faith, but specifically we’re talking here about the Christian faith. Faith Tech founder. He’s an award-winning documentary filmmaker and growth executive who bridges high-growth software strategies with spiritual wellness innovation.

In fact, one of our co-hosts, Gary Harpst, would probably be interested in the work that Preston does. And if you recognize the name Gary Harpst, it’s because he’s a co-host in our Genesis Project, where we’re walking through the book of Genesis. Kind of a separate channel, same channel, but it’s packaged differently.

The Vision Behind Psalm Log

But I want to read his short bio to you all. Preston is the founder of Psalm Log, an AI-powered biblical guidance app helping believers access scripture-based wisdom for real-life challenges. With 15-plus years scaling high-growth tech companies, I’m really interested in that. Scaling is always the issue when it comes to business, including a cloud guru and ZoomInfo. I don’t even know what that is. I’m sure he’ll tell us some about that in a little bit. He now pioneers responsible AI integration in ministry, a space where 57% of Christians express skepticism about technology.

AI, Skepticism, and the Tension Between Innovation and Faith

Now, I’m going to put a shameless plug in. If you did not listen to our previous podcast, my co-host Winston Harris and myself took two different sides of this matter. I argued against AI, and he argued for AI. And it was kind of fun. We got each other chuckling and laughing a little bit, but I think we both made some good points. I would encourage you to go back and listen to that, and we might throw that one away after Preston straightens us out here.

But Preston is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Specifically, his film The Art of Grieving chronicles his year of painting 365 works following his brother’s sudden death with fentanyl overdose. The film has reached audiences in 40-plus countries, used in educational curriculum, available in international libraries, and won multiple festival awards.

Preston, I am delighted to meet you and love having you on the show.

Preston: Jim, thank you for having me on here and taking the time to read my bio. That was a wonderful intro.

Creativity and The Art of Grieving Documentary

Discovering a Creative Identity Early in Life

Jim: Yeah. So, I want to— When we were talking offline, you introduced yourself as creative. I was kind of drilling you a little bit, and you introduced yourself as creative. How far back does that go? When did you actually realize, “You know what? I kind of paint outside the lines. I’m a creative guy”?

Preston: You know, my whole life, as young as I can remember.

Jim: You knew early on.

Preston: Yeah. I was blessed to have a mom—she’s still alive—but growing up, she was also highly creative and fostered that to the best that she could. And it’s interesting because my dad’s, by his own admission, not creative at all. Not in the traditional sense. Very analytical, though. So, I had both those mindsets growing up. But I’ve done the gamut of creative endeavors, and sometimes they come back around too. It’s not just, “Oh, do a little bit here or there.” Some things are that, but yeah, I’ve always been in a creative mindset. I think probably really young, it was just like, “Man, I think a little differently,” or I just have my own way of thinking about things. So, yeah.

Expanding Creativity Beyond Art and Into Thinking

Jim: Would you define your type of creativity as integrated with technology? I recognize that fire is technology if we go back that far, but in the terms that we typically think of technology today, the computers, the satellites, and everything in between. So when you think of creative, do you also include art, or are you thinking more in the technological realm?

Preston: It’s kind of both. I think a similar, an analogy you could pull is an engineer. We might think of an engineer as a structural engineer, that’s often times but an engineering brain is really just someone who loves to know how things work and then put things together in a certain way. So I have the stereotypical guy trait in many ways, or you see that in young boys, and I see that in my son.

But I wouldn’t limit creativity to visual art or musical art. I think people are creative in a lot more ways than they give themselves credit for. But certainly, I span the visual arts for sure, but then getting into creative thinking in general for problem-solving.

The Turning Point—Loss and Returning to Art

Jim: Before we talk about AI, because I definitely want to camp there for a little bit, I don’t think we can skip over your brother and your willingness to share that on your bio. Obviously, you put it out there with the documentary. Talk to us about how that even came about. How did the documentary come about? Maybe just give us a little bit of the backstory if you are open to that.

Preston: Yeah, sure. Well, the year prior, I’d gotten back into painting. To some degree, I’d done so much computer work, branding, design, websites, and all those kinds of things in the digital marketing world, ad creation. There’s something about that pulled me back to painting, which I did when I was younger. I did fine art all throughout high school. So the year prior, I’d done that.

My brother dies, and I just instinctively knew, because I’ve been doing arts my whole life, and music in particular, “Well, this is an opportunity for me to explore this.” I have three young kids at the time, married, working an executive mid-level role at a company that’s just doubled in size. It’s highly stressful. So, I was doing larger pieces, a series of seven larger pieces.

What the Project Revealed About Grief and People

I talk about this in the documentary a bit, but basically I had an art show with these abstract pieces hanging around a room. People start walking around. Whenever I’ve had an art show, I let people interpret that in their own way first, and then I’ll go talk to them and ask what they’re getting out of it. That’s ultimately what counts. Then I didn’t really realize this was going to happen, but I continued to share, “Hey, this abstract work, here’s what it’s really about.” It was telling pieces of this loss I had gone through just six months prior.

It was a combination of realizing people weren’t very good at talking about grief or addressing it, maybe being apathetic about it. And it felt so awkward. But also realizing so many people had deep experiences. People I considered friends or that I knew well who were then sharing their own grief, some starting to cry. You’re like, “Wow, there are unresolved things there or just hitting a really sad memory for them.”

The Decision—365 Paintings and a Documentary

I took this trip and realized I needed to work through this in a more streamlined fashion versus bigger paintings. So I wrote in a journal two things: “Paint every day for a year. Make a documentary about it.” It started out as that. I had no idea how the documentary would turn out. I just knew I was going to go through this unique process for myself. So I might as well make a documentary out of it, whatever that turns out to be. That’s what started in late 2019.

Part of that was bucking the inclination artists have to filter their process and just show the best work. I knew over that many paintings there would be many I did not like, that represented something I didn’t like. But I said, “Whatever, I’ll share them.” So all those got shared on social media. You can still see them today.

Over the course of that, the actual painting of all those, finding people to work on the film, make the firm. By the time it got put out, mid-2022, when it got on streaming platforms, there was a moment of, “Well, this is it. I’m either going to be looked at as some crazy narcissist or it’ll be really helpful.” And I’m sure it’s everything in between. But it has continued to get legs into different arenas.

Creativity as an Invitation to Process Grief

Particularly because as much as natural it is for me to gravitate towards arts in a time of grief, that’s not what most people go to. And so one of the things it’s done is show people that you can do art, and I’m sure a lot of people may look at the documentary and go, “There’s nothing particularly amazing about these individual pieces. They’re all little study pieces. Yeah, I could go do that. I could go sit down with paints and just intuitively put it on a canvas,” which is what I did. I happen to publish mine, but you don’t have to do that. Most people never will. It’s for you.

And so I think it’s served as a couple things. One is to say, hey, you can go be creative, and also this could help you maybe tap into and release some parts of your own grief journey. But then also, hey, let’s not make this such an awkward conversation either. I mean, death is happening every day. If you haven’t already, and you’re listening to this going, man, I haven’t gone through a hard death yet, you will.

It’s going to make you question life and everything in it. So that was part of the run-up to that, and it sparked this more refined process of what it means to journal in an alternative format.

The Risk of Sharing and Creating for Yourself

Jim: Really interesting. I’ve never thought of journaling through painting because I can’t even draw stickmen very well. But I have been experimenting with writing. I started when I was 35-ish when I wrote and published my first book. I’ve written three. I’m on my fourth one right now.

You said something earlier that struck a chord with me. You said, “I don’t know if people are going to see me as a narcissist or whatever.” It really is a risk to put yourself out there. I wrote a line—I’m still in the process of writing this next book—in the introduction. Sometimes I don’t write the introduction at the beginning, but I thought I needed to write it as a way to hold me accountable. Keep me moving in the direction I wanted it to go.

I wrote the introduction, then came back later and read it, and there was a line that struck me. I forgot I had written it. But I looked at it again, and I don’t know if you’ve ever written, but a lot of times when I write and then I go back over and read what I wrote, I hate it, and I want to destroy it.

Freedom in Creating Without Over-Critique

Preston: I think any creative work can be like that. And so I didn’t think about narcissism. I thought about stupidity. I’m an idiot. Who am I doing writing? But this line said, because you’re– Coaches tell you to keep the intended audience in your mind, and so I still think I wrote this unconsciously, but I said, “I am writing this book to me.” And then I think basically said, if you like to listen in, please do.”

I think where I’m at in this creative process is at, I’ll be 66 here in just a couple more weeks. And I’m writing a book about reimagining leadership. I’m writing, Preston, what I know. Now, what I know is sometimes what I don’t know, but if that’s the case, I say so. But I’ll say, “Well, what if?” And I’m actually enjoying the freedom of not being so critical of my own thoughts, not doing what ChatGPT, which we’ll get to later.

Because sometimes what I did in the past is I will put my prose out there to ChatGPT, and I’ll say, okay, now argue the other side. Sometimes I find that helpful, but I did not want to do that in this work, because to me that makes me feel like I’m trying to sell something versus trying to express. It sounds to me like that’s kind of what you did with these 365 paintings. You’re simply expressing and maybe not even knowing exactly what you’re expressing at the moment, or at least consciously.

When you looked over all those 365 and then created this documentary, did it follow the clinical phases they say we go through in grieving?

Rethinking Grief—Not Stages, But Overlapping Emotions

Preston: Yeah. Well, it’s funny because the stages of grief is a misnomer. It originally came up for terminally ill patients.

Jim: But now it’s used for everything.

Preston: There’s also the saying that perception lags reality. I think there’s this perception that we can easily bucket things. What painting does, particularly visual arts, and especially painting because you can spontaneously create in a way that is more difficult to do in other mediums.

And that’s what I was looking to do because the thing about grief is you’re experiencing a potential multitude of emotions at the same time, which you may not be used to, or you’re used to identifying, “Hey, I’m feeling sad, happy, mad,” whatever in a certain moment versus the flood of things going through your brain and your heart in grief.

Painting, and its intuitive abstract, would be one of the categories for it. But that was basically what I did and have done in other paintings too outside of that project, allows you to do that. Again, part of the goal being you’re doing it in a way very specifically where you have zero expectation of the outcome. Versus I think it’s hard if you’re really intentionally producing some professional work that you do intend to publish. Getting that out of your head, that here’s what the audience expects, that changes the dynamic of it quite a bit.

The Mosaic—Seeing the Full Picture of Grief

And the final result of it, which you see in the documentary, is I took those 365 paintings, which represented a moment in time on that day, but I took those 365 paintings and rearranged them into a separate image. And the goal there was to rearrange it into something that felt like what it was to move through grief.

Jim: Interesting.

Preston: And I think you can find that image online too if you just search the documentary name. But that was what was so special about it in the end because–

Jim: Which is the art of grieving, right?

Preston: Yeah. So you should be able to pull it up. But that was part of what was so special about it is that it was the whole of the work together. I mean, it is a mosaic at the end of the day. The whole of the work together, standing back from it, was really—

Jim: Well, you meant that literally. It is a mosaic.

Preston: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it was 10 feet by 20 feet, hung up in my house.

Jim: Wow. Yeah. I just pulled it up online, and it’s beautiful.

Preston: Yeah, thanks. So, that process was—there’s just a lot of catharsis in that. But again, like any creative work, I think the closest thing in the writing world is probably just stream-of-consciousness writing, where you’re not judging every single word you type in the sentence. You just put it out there.

Jim: Thanks for sharing that. If I can ask, how old was your brother?

Preston: Yeah, he was 36, I believe. So, it’s a weird thing to outlive an older sibling, or a parent for that matter.

Defining AI and its Ubiquitous Role as a Tool

Jim: But yeah, let’s talk about Psalm… Well, I tell you what. We’ll come back to Psalm Log. I do want us to spend some time on Psalm Log. I want people to hear a little bit more of this, because in my initial looking around, it’s something that is worthy of us talking about.

AI Is Everywhere—Even When You Don’t Notice It

But let’s talk about artificial intelligence in general and educate us. I have this really broad question for you. I think that if you’re even somewhat engaged in this world today, you really can’t avoid AI, I could be wrong. I’m pretty sure my navigational tools on my phone and in my car are infused with some sort of AI.

The other day, I was calling a fancy restaurant that my wife and I were heading to for Valentine’s Day, and I wanted to see if I could get in earlier. I got on the phone with an AI virtual assistant, which failed miserably, I might say.

I think a lot of chat rooms at least start with AI attempts. And of course, I think most people—I don’t know if that’s even true—you would know—but there are various versions of ChatGPT. But there’s ChatGPT, which I find as a blessing and a curse. How else do normal people engage with AI and maybe not even be aware of it, besides the ones I already threw out?

AI Is an Umbrella, Not Just ChatGPT

Preston: One of the examples I go back to sometimes, especially when people go, “AI”—people who aren’t technologically inclined don’t truly understand that AI is an umbrella category of technology. They think AI is like ChatGPT. So they go, “Oh, they synonymized it.”

They’re like, “Well, okay, AI has been around for a long time. If you go back to probably the ’80s, even before that, part of it is super advanced forms of algorithmic decisions, which is what the earliest search engines are.” Google, I would argue, has evolved into a version of AI.

But we’ve been buying things online for quite a while now, and the fraud detection behind an online purchase uses a form of AI to determine, “Is this a stolen credit card? Are you actually going to pay this?” That’s where the 3DS verification can trigger and make you put in an additional code because maybe you’re a more risky purchase. That’s a version of that.

I think maps—you could throw that in there. Some people would say, “That’s not AI,” but routing, the ability to reroute you, all sorts of stuff uses these benign versions of AI.

AI as a Neutral Tool—Like Money or a Spoon

And I think one of the biggest things people need to realize is it’s a tool, like anything else. Money is a tool. People use it to buy good and bad things. They use it for good and bad motivation. A spoon—you can feed yourself into oblivion and gluttony, or you can feed yourself properly. There are all sorts of analogies.

In terms of the technology today—so we’re mid-February 26, 2026, when we’re recording this—even since the beginning of this year, and this is something I’ve been following very closely, there is this strange sense of shift after the holidays. It’s like people took a couple weeks off. OpenAI released Codex, or a new version of Codex, their version of code that helps you generate code quicker.

Then this other product, now open as Open Claude—an open-source project—came online. The capabilities of all these things started to accelerate this year. What you could really do with it.

The Gap Between Everyday Users and Advanced AI

I don’t think a lot of people realize—especially if ChatGPT is your frame of reference and you’re just on a free plan, which there’s a lot of—that’s why they’re starting to include ads. I liken it to having a garage full of cars. You could choose any model car in there, but if you’re on these free plans, you’re limited to the older version. You’ve got the ’95 Corolla, and you’re like, “This is AI.”

Meanwhile, there are people using the latest models that get released. You’re in a Ferrari. One day you’re in the Ferrari, you’re like, “It’s a thousand horsepower.” The next day, you get in what looks the same Ferrari and it’s 5,000 horsepower. Some of these jumps are happening in really fascinating ways.

You start to see the inevitability of this changing the kind of commerce that’s possible, the kind of businesses that are possible. But then you ask, “What’s work going to look like?” I don’t agree with the idea that jobs are just going to disappear. But will they change to something else? Yeah, I have no doubt that would be the case.

AI as a Multiplier of Capacity and Creativity

Jim: It might even create jobs. I don’t have examples, but usually when you scale, you end up creating more capacity. That’s the idea, right? If I can leverage AI to reduce some of the burdensome, hands-on necessary things, it frees me to either sit on the beach and get fat or continue to get creative and do new things.

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The Opportunity Behind AI

What History Teaches Us About Disruption and Job Creation

Preston: Yeah. So, here are a few examples. I had to look this up because I know they exist. I just couldn’t think of them either. So, digital revolution: computers and the internet eliminated clerical jobs but created millions of positions in software development, cybersecurity, digital marketing.

Internet and mobile era: the explosion of smartphones and social media created roles that didn’t exist 10–20 years ago—app developers, social media managers, cloud computing specialists.

Industrial and service automation (1940s to present): automation replaced manual tasks, but it simultaneously generated demand for engineers, technical managers, specialized maintenance workers. There are other examples in there as well, but I think that’s one of the best summations of a recent article that came out.

The Urgency to Adapt and Upskill

So, this guy wrote a post on X that sounded like there was a sense of urgency around it. He was an AI practitioner like myself, basically saying, “Here’s my letter to everyone who’s wondering what’s the deal with AI and writing it off,” and had a sense of urgency to say, “Hey, don’t ignore what’s going on. Take some time to educate yourself, to upskill in a way that maybe is uncomfortable or you haven’t been used to. Go beyond the free version of these plans.”

But there is a different X post that I think summed it up better, basically saying, “Hey, more of the issue is people get so hyperfixated on the now, maybe initial carnage.” There were a bunch of stock market drops two to three weeks ago for a variety of reasons, some of it attributed to AI. So you look at that and then you just extrapolate it.

Why Negativity Dominates the AI Conversation

So that’s kind of the nearsighted problem versus saying, “Hey, what’s the sort of optimistic standpoint of this creating new possibilities for people and ultimately being a net benefit?”

There’s that as well. Looking at the near term and just extrapolating that. Oftentimes, things are painted in a negative way anyway because that’s what sells on social media.

So, I think there are those competing mindsets. But the more you get into understanding it to a degree, then it becomes easier to go, “There’s a lot of potential here, and it’s not as scary as maybe I thought.”

Now, there are certainly arguments for this being used in a nefarious way. That’s happening. You’re going to have scammers—always—people wanting to defraud others because of whatever evil ways are driving them.

Psalm Log: An AI-Powered Biblical Guidance App

Jim: And so, you’ve used this creativity to create Psalm Log. Would you go into a dissertation about Psalm Log? Tell us what it does, how it does that, and why that would be something that folks would be interested in having.

What Psalm Log Is—A 24/7 Biblical Life Coach

Preston: Yeah. So, most simply put, it’s a way to get 24/7 personalized biblical advice. Think about it as a tool that’s like a biblical life coach. It’s another way to think about it.

Now, it started off with this notion of journaling. Kind of what I was talking about earlier with my background—the documentary film and what I did with myself—I actually, in a separate side project, didn’t put this in the documentary. I was trying to find color patterns. By color patterns, I mean shifts in changes of color, weightings of color, all these kinds of things over time because I had this visual data set.

That’s always kind of stuck with me. I’m big on personal growth and self-awareness because I don’t ever want to think I know it all or think I’ve just capped out. We’ve got this whole life to live.

So, about a year ago, in January, I had just come off a sort of failed transaction. I was going to buy another AI tool and learned a lot in that process. I was trying to find another application for it.

The Problem—Journals We Never Revisit

I’m very familiar with the problem in Christianity that people keep journals. This is probably just across the board. They keep journals, rack up notebooks, and never go back and read them. That’s a prime opportunity for, in a large language model context, being able to understand what’s going on with you. You have all these intimate thoughts—why wouldn’t you want to understand how you’re changing over time?

So, it started out simply as journaling with this AI component behind it so you can understand trends. As you first release a product, you pivot and all that. I really wanted to get more concrete research done, so I commissioned a study of 200 Christians. It was about 40 questions, just to understand their demographic background, how they view the problems they want to solve, their major roadblocks, all this kind of stuff.

There was a pricing survey in there as well, but the net of that was this major realization: people know the Bible has answers—they just don’t know where to look often times. And if they do look, it’s often just a verse or some devotional that’s not geared toward their specific situation.

Filling the Gap Between Weekly Guidance and Daily Struggles

Even if they’re going to biblical counseling, pastoral meetings, or chaplain meetings, that’s maybe once a week on a really peak end. What happens in between?

We’re going through lives that are getting more fast-paced. We’re increasingly connected, but also not as connected in many ways. So I go, “Okay, well, I’m in a time and a place in my life and in the course of history for a reason. What is that?” And starting to realize that Psalm Log is answering a much bigger problem and filling a much bigger gap than I originally realized.

That the issue isn’t that people are sitting around going, “I really wish I could keep a journal.” They’re sitting around saying, “I have a relational issue, and it’s keeping me up at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I need to get some clarity on this, and I either don’t know where to go, or I’m reading scripture and nothing is really connecting with me.”

How Psalm Log Actually Works Behind the Scenes

And so that’s really one of the bigger things that it’s addressing.

The other is the younger generation, Gen Z, is a lot more skeptical of church, and there are a variety of good reasons for that.

Jim: Sure.

Preston: But the point there is, okay, so where are people going? You hopefully maybe have a friend who’s well informed, or you’re googling the problem you have, or what’s also happening is people are just going into ChatGPT. That’s not really what it’s designed for, though. So in the background, conceptually what’s happening is you’re sharing your journal, and when you go do this journal entry, you’re actually pre-selecting what you’re wanting to journal about. So you’re needing wisdom, you have anxiety, and there’s going to be a relevant Bible verse and question to prompt you into just sharing whatever your thoughts are.

Building a Living Archive of Personal Growth

And so then once you finish your journal, in the background there’s a number of things happening, whether it’s classification to understand the severity, your age range, and stuff. So we do some onboarding—your age range, where you’re at spiritually. Are you seeking? Have you been a believer for 10-plus years? That’s a very different frame of mind. Why are you even using the app? And then using your journal entry with the context of that verse you shared and a lot of other prompt engineering in the background, it gives you a six-point breakdown.

It includes your emotional keywords, your personal summary of what you just shared, the scripture connection, the next steps, an encouragement. And so it’s compiling all of this into basically a personalized devotional. So over time, what you’re getting, you’re building a library of reflections that then starts to become this ongoing reflective archive.

Jim: And so that’s where the journal comes in. It keeps an ongoing chronological record of what your entries and what its output has produced.

Voice, Writing, and Adapting to Modern Habits

Preston: Yeah. And so it’ll help you find those through threads that would otherwise be lost in a written journal. Let’s be honest, how many of us are sitting down writing anymore? Unless you romanticize writing on paper, but I’ve stopped so many journals because I’m like, “I don’t really want to sit there and write.”

Jim: Are you making fun of me right now?

Preston: No, I think it’s great.

Jim: You know why I do it? I do the old school journaling because I don’t know when was the last time that– Well, let’s see if you would agree with me. So if I got a pen right now, I got a journal here on my right side. When I start writing something, I find that it’s too slow. Because our world has sped up so fast, and so my penmanship is just horrible. So I’m doing it for two reasons now. One is to say it’s okay to be slow, and two to work on my penmanship.

Preston: Well, it’s interesting because–

Jim: We probably won’t even write 50 years from now. Who knows?

Preston: So I’m 38, right? But I still grew up in that early part of the older millennial crowd, but writing was still—we still learned cursive. But it’s funny now, and I don’t know if you’re using this, but some of these tools help you. You’re not just texting, but you’re talking into your mic like this, and you’re just having it type for you.

Jim: Does it get rid of all your ums and stuff like that, or repeating yourself?

Addressing Isolation and Guiding People Back to Community

Preston: I don’t know. Some of these apps might, but that was actually a key point in making Psalm Log. In fact, when I first made it, it was only voice. Then at some point, I’m like, “Okay, that’s silly. You may be in a place where you can’t talk,” right? You’re in the middle of a coffee shop. You don’t want to be talking about something you’re going through.

Jim: And we are breeding the world’s fastest texters. It’s amazing watching young people text. They can literally be talking to a friend—looking to my left, pretending I’m talking to a friend—but at the same time, I’m texting somebody else. I don’t even know how they do that. That’s crazy.

The Deeper Problem—Modern Isolation

Preston: Well, yeah, when you’re on that from a young age.

But one of the other key things for me is that isolationism is, of course, still a problem. There are a couple of things within that. You could feel isolated because of a changing mindset compared to who you’ve surrounded yourself with, or you may just be totally isolated.

But you’re like, “Okay, where do I go?”

So, a goal I have this year is to proactively slingshot people back into community. With people’s consent, we can recommend getting into a group in person. Let’s say you are going through a loss—GriefShare is one of the largest faith-based grief programs in the country. Celebrate Recovery for addiction, and there are all sorts of other groups out there from a faith-based perspective.

So, part of that goal is not just to say, “Hey, you need to go to church.” That’s not the point unless someone wants that. It’s to say, “Hey, you’re going through a loss. Here’s a recommendation on places around you that you could go and engage with,” but get people back into community.

Not Replacing People—Filling the Gap

I hone in on that because some people try to misinterpret the purpose of the app and say, “Oh, it’s replacing X, Y, Z person.” No, it’s not replacing any person. It’s filling the gap where people want input and reflection but may not have access to a person, may not know where to go, or don’t want to tell a person yet. They’re not ready to share that thing. That’s part of it as well.

Jim: So, how does a person try out your app?

Preston: Yeah, so actually, just today—I soft-launched this—you can go to psalmlog.com. In the top right, and there are a number of buttons around the site, you can click “Get Started.” You can start for free today. It’ll give you one free journal without ever having to log in. It literally takes you right to that page.

If you want to save the journal, then you create an account. Then you get a couple more free journals beyond that. If you want to continue, you start a trial for one of our paid accounts.

Scaling Businesses and the AI-Native Future

Jim: Well, that’s awesome. I’m going to check that out myself. I’ve got some grandpa questions to ask and see what comes out.

Do you want to talk about the way you help businesses scaling businesses? I’m really interested in that. What is that all about?

Inside High-Growth Companies and What They Teach

Preston: Well, I’ve found myself at some point being in a string of different software companies. Especially prior to the whole ZIRP era—zero interest rate era—the come-up there.

ZoomInfo, some people may be familiar with that. I was there for about three and a half years. Prior to that was a lot of related work. ZoomInfo is interesting because they went from about $30 million to $300 million while I was there. I ran digital marketing and a lot of other internal projects—rebrands—as part of how ZoomInfo got its branding today. They’re a huge sales intelligence company. They’re publicly traded now.

Learning Through Different Growth Stages and Exits

When you’re inside those kinds of movements, it’s fascinating to see how it works, what’s required, how you handle M&As, or navigate those. Not that I was negotiating any of that, but the pre-public launch and expectations—how do you translate lofty goals into actionable projects?

I ended there as chief of staff for the CMO. It was interesting, not a great fit, but I got to act as the proxy for the CMO. Then I went on to A Cloud Guru. They were a huge edtech company, sold for about $2 billion in 2021. They hit peak COVID stuff, a great way for them.

Most recently, I was a chief growth officer at a real estate data and software company.

Jim: Is that BatchService?

Applying Experience to Help Businesses Break Plateaus

Preston: Yeah. We had multiple products serving investors, and the data side in particular—serving different datasets to businesses depending on what they need. Like Kubota was an interesting one. I don’t remember if they actually signed, but they saw that their typical buyer, their ICP changing over time, so we’re starting to gather data on what the actual owners of large properties look like, so they could go to their dealers and say, “Hey, here’s actually the demographics of your buyer now. It’s not an old farmer. It’s a young, multigenerational farmer or something like that.”

But through all those experiences that have been invaluable and painful a lot of times, you’re seeing the inner workings of how these different phases of a company go—what not to do, what to do. Most people want to get acquired at some point. What does that look like? How do you even prepare yourself for that? What is an investor going to care about? So I think, depending on what your goal is, those are things I can help with, but I’m primarily focused on my own products. Where it makes sense, I’ll go consult with other business owners.

Real-World Data and Market Shifts in Action

The other one that comes up is people that are stagnant. “Hey, I’ve hit this level of revenue growth, and what worked then doesn’t work now, and I have no idea where to go from here.” Because I have worked across that gamut of zero to much higher, I’ve problem-solved across a lot of these things.

I think, in particular, what’s going to be interesting to see in the coming years is, if you look at a legacy company model—which, of course, big established companies use—part of that structure is based around the ability to replace people a little easier, creating promotion ladders for people so there’s career advancement and all that.

But what happens when you have AI-native companies come in where, instead of building a traditional IC, supervisor, manager, director, all those layers within an organization, what happens when you’re hiring people, especially early on, who are like the power of five or ten people because they have these AI tools?

The One-Person Company and the Future of Scale

That’s where this whole idea of the one-person billion-dollar company comes into play. When do we see that? When will we see multiple of that, maybe? Who knows? Or when will we see many one-person $10 million companies because of AI? I’m not saying any of that’s easy in any regard, but the way in which people can be productive—and not just productive, but innovate—the pace of that today as a single person is insane.

That goes back to what we were talking about offline, which is just that since the beginning of this year, these new models are changing the game as well. So my thing, working with any company and certainly looking at my own, is going, “Hey, what are the practical uses of AI?” Not just moonshotting something. If you want to do that, that’s cool—that’s a moonshot for a reason.

Marketing, Final Thoughts, and Documentary Streaming

Jim: Yeah. How do you plan on marketing Psalm Log?

Preston: Yeah, right now it’s partially these kinds of conversations. I realized late last year that I want people to know who I am—who’s the mind behind this—that I’m not just some random person in the middle of nowhere. Not that that would matter, but that this is something I’m deeply passionate about from a technology perspective, but also as a believer, as theology goes, I want to be hands-on with this. This is not an easy problem to solve.

I was on one podcast, and he said, “You’re taking religion and technology and merging the two.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Why? You picked two of the hardest problems you could go after to try to tackle.” I didn’t do it necessarily because it was hard problem, but because I think it’s a worthwhile problem to tackle. I think AI is going to fill the gaps or the voids in a lot of different things that we don’t fully understand yet.

Maybe that’s a message for someone listening: there’s going to be a lot of opportunity, and taking that opportunity seriously is not an opportunity you get in every generation. If you were in the late ’90s during the first dot-com run-up, that was an opportunity in a moment in time. Like the whole PayPal mafia, how many people came out of that, including Elon Musk—and have gone on to do wild things.

I think this is an opportunity, in many ways, to be attentive to the shifts that are going to happen across a variety of industries.

Building Psalm Log and Organic Growth

But to wrap around your question, one of the things we just put out on Psalm Log is a nationwide church directory for the United States. I’d like to do that for other countries as well. We have over 285,000 churches on our website and tools to research churches, find a denomination that’s right for you, compare denominations, and all that. Building quality organic content is part of that as well. Paid ads will probably come at some point, but it’s easy to light money on fire.

Jim: Yeah, of course. Well, I pulled Psalm Log up on my laptop here, and it looks really great. psalmlog.com. To land this plane, Preston, I came into the conversation branding you as a creative AI practitioner. I know the word “consultant” is kind of tired and is a vague and broad term, but you have a bit of an eclectic background where maybe it’s “creative/AI practitioner/ consultant.”

It sounds like you would have a lot to offer, particularly for those who are looking to take whatever their offering is and as my cohost said last week, “How can I amplify my work, my offerings, my voice through AI?” That’s frankly a question I’m now asking myself after meeting with you.

Amplifying Leadership, Faith, and Voice Through AI

I wonder how the Lead Today Community—the Today Counts is a product of the Lead Today Community. The Lead Today Community is a group of leaders around the United States where we provide coaching, workshops, retreats, and those kinds of things.

Our core belief is that leadership is an inside-out proposition, and that our relationship with God informs our soul, and our soul informs our senses—versus the other way. Obviously, our senses can penetrate our soul, but if our soul can interpret those things, being informed by a relationship with God, then we have a better chance of not just staying sane, but thriving as God would want us to thrive.

My temperament type is actually called the technology temperament. I was just born in the wrong time frame.

Preston: Took a little while to catch up to where technology is at.

Jim: I’m more of an application guy—show me how to use it, show me how it helps me, and I’m interested.

Just to date myself, I remember my software writing– I think computer programming is what it was called back in day—there was a language called BASIC. It was really easy to do. I remember that if I could do it, it must have been easy to do. But we had to create a program where kids—little leaguers—could put in how many hits they had, at-bats, whatever, and it would give you their batting average. And then, of course, they would print it on a dot matrix printer that took half an hour to get done.

So, me and the dinosaurs, we were out there paving the way for you modern guys to do what you’re doing today. I took an actual typing class in college. Typing class in college. Funny stuff.

The Art of Grieving: Documentary Overview and Where to Watch

Preston, is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Preston: You know, I would just appreciate—go try out Psalm Log. Again, you can try out your first journal without having to log in. If the documentary appeals to you, just look up The Art of Grieving on Google and you can find all the streaming spots. It’s on Apple TV and Amazon Prime and those kinds of places.

The one thing I didn’t mention is that it’s not just about me. I bring in an art therapist who’s a clinical art therapist, and she talks about art therapy from a clinical standpoint—overarching, grief-related subjects. Then we go through a historical survey on what other artists have done throughout history when they experienced loss. So it’s a pretty multidimensional documentary. I think you get a lot out of it.

Jim: How long is the documentary?

Preston: It’s about 70 minutes.

Jim: Oh wow, that’s great.

Preston: But yeah, if you want to connect with me, LinkedIn’s probably the best place to do that.

Jim: Yeah, and I have you up here. Where would we find that documentary?

Preston: Amazon Prime, Apple TV, it’s on YouTube on their official streaming channel, and a ton of others too. But those first two are mostly where people go. It’s international as well, so it depends on the country where you’ll find it.

Jim: Preston, I’m really glad I had you on the show. Let’s not become strangers. I’m going to be watching Psalm Log, and feel free to reach out to me. Maybe we can double back after some time and see how things are going.

Preston: That’d be wonderful. I appreciate you having me on, Jim.

Jim: All right, well, bless you.

Preston: You, too.

Outro

Winston: Thanks for spending part of your day with us on The Today Counts Show. If today’s conversation encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you grow, share it with someone in your circle—because we’re better when we grow together.

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And remember: real change doesn’t happen someday—it happens today. Until next time, keep showing up, keep building, keep making today count.
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