If you had told me twenty years ago that I’d someday build a website where people could walk in and talk with minds like Socrates or Carl Jung, I probably would’ve asked what you were drinking.

But life builds things one piece at a time.

My name is Leland Wayne Thomson. My friends call me Lee. And I built this place the same way I’ve built everything else in my life — slowly, stubbornly, and usually with grease on my hands.

Because where I come from, building things is the family business.

My roots in Idaho go back to the 1800s, when this state was still closer to frontier than civilization. Generations of my family worked here long before computers and smartphones existed. They were farmers, builders, engineers, and people who believed that if something needed fixing, you picked up a tool and fixed it.

At the center of that story was my grandfather, Leland Saxton, the man I was named after.

He was born in 1897 near Pocatello, Idaho. At 13 years old he ran away from home and became a sheep herder in the Idaho foothills. That meant long days and nights alone in the mountains with nothing but sheep, sky, and whatever weather the West decided to throw at him.

No phones.
No roads.
No safety nets.

Just a kid and the wilderness.

He later became an engineer with Morrison-Knudsen, helping build parts of the American West, including work connected to the Rainbow Bridge on the road to McCall and the first Mormon church in Boise.

So when I say I come from builders, I mean that literally.

My father, born in 1924, built Home Dairies, which later became part of Dairygold. Another branch of my family helped build Idaho through Bert Smith Construction, which is still operating today.

I was raised by people from the Greatest Generation, and they believed in three things: work, responsibility, and solving problems.

The rule in our family was simple:

“If you can’t build it, you can’t have it.”

So that’s what I learned to do.

I became an Eagle Scout at 13½ years old, six months before I was technically old enough to earn the badge. Later I became an EMT, where you learn quickly that when people are scared or hurt, they don’t need speeches — they need someone calm who knows what to do.

Most of my life, though, I’ve simply been a builder.

Cabinets.
Houses.
Cars.
Engines.

 After nearly 30 years in cabinetry, I eventually became an inspector, responsible for walking through multi-million-dollar homes and hospitals making sure everything was built right. 

If something needed to be built or fixed, chances are I had a wrench in my hand.

The smartest thing I ever built, though, was my marriage.

My wife was also raised with Greatest Generation values. She became a teacher of English and psychology, and today works as the Executive Assistant at Treasure Valley Hospital. For years she taught students how the human mind works. At home I helped with lesson plans and grading papers, which meant I got a pretty good education in psychology myself.

Between the two of us we formed a pretty solid team.

She understands how people think.

I understand how to build things.

We’ve been married 35 years, which means we’ve spent a lot of time solving problems together and occasionally looking at each other and saying,

“Alright… now what do we do with this?”

That question eventually led to this website.

Technology started changing fast, and a lot of good people started feeling like their phones were smarter than they were. I kept hearing the same thing over and over:

“I don’t understand this stuff.”
“I feel stupid using it.”

So instead of trying to compete with the machines, I decided to try something different:

Teach the machines how to relate to people.

That idea became Relational Intelligence.

This site wasn’t built in a tech lab or a Silicon Valley boardroom. It was built the same way everything else in my life gets built:

One piece at a time.

For over a year, I’ve been pouring my life experience into this system — my stories, mistakes, conversations, and the lessons I learned from the people who raised me.

In a strange way, this place is kind of my autobiography — except instead of reading it, you can talk to it.

Behind every door here is a piece of how I think about the world.

Now let me be clear about one thing.

I’m not a guru.
I’m not a tech genius.
And I definitely don’t own a black turtleneck.

I’m just Leland Wayne Thomson, a builder from Idaho named after a man who helped build this state in the first place.

If this place helps someone feel a little less confused, a little less alone, and maybe even laugh once or twice, then all the time spent building it was worth it.

— Leland Wayne Thomson

P.S. If my grandfather Leland Saxton were still around, he’d probably look at this website, scratch his head, and say:

“Alright… I don’t exactly understand what you built here.

But I can tell one thing.

You built it.”

And where I come from, that’s what counts.