Meet The Team
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James Tolley
Founder and CTO
Shared Reality is my way of contributing to the re-stabilization of our republic and creating a more sane, safe, and fulfilling world for everyone. I am intensely interested in stories, what we agree about and call the truth, and how we can skillfully navigate conflict, both in interpersonal dialogue and in mass media. I am interested in the tensions within and between systems on every level. Being a couples communication coach, Concordis is a way for me to take what I've learned about negotiating interpersonal conversational stresses and applying that understanding to online, mass communications. I'm also a long-time meditator and skeptic.
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Steve Patterson
SME in Argumentation and Consulting COO
Steve is a career professional in higher education with experience both inside and outside of the academy. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Wayne State University in Detroit in 2003. From 2004 to 2017, Steve was a Professor of Philosophy at Marygrove College where he created and taught courses in critical thinking, ethics, social and political philosophy, and East Asian philosophy, receiving tenure in 2010. During his time at Marygrove he won the President’s Award for Excellence in Research, conducted multiple workshops on critical thinking pedagogy and assessment, and worked to increase utilization of instructional technology and hybrid and online teaching modalities. From 2012 to 2017 he also served as Chair of the Division of Letters while pursuing his research in argumentation and interpersonal reasoning. He has over a dozen publications in this area, and has traveled the world giving presentations at argumentation conferences. He was thrice awarded Visiting Research Fellowships with the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor in Canada, and has served in reviewing and editorial capacities for many conferences and journals with a critical thinking and argumentation focus. Conferences include ISSA, the Ontario Society of the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) and the European Conference on Argumentation (ECA). The journals Informal Logic, Argumentation, Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, Cogency, and the Windsor Studies in Argumentation monograph series are among those Steve has worked with as an editor or reviewer. More recently Steve's career has taken him beyond the academy to the ed tech industry, where he combines his knowledge of program development and online teaching and learning with his business experience in operations management to build public-private partnerships for the creation and delivery of highly effective online programs.
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Guinevere Nell
Programmer
Guinevere Nell is an author of three books on Soviet economic history and post-Austrian economics, analyzing the free market and issues with central planning. She worked for five years at the Heritage Foundation, studying the free market and analyzing and comparing individual income tax policy and working with macroeconomists to determine the potential effects of policy changes on the economy. Nell has also produced several essay collections, including one on the Basic Income and how it might be better for markets than other kinds of redistribution (from an Austrian economics perspective), and essay collections aimed at bringing Austrian economists together with other heterodox economists. A programmer for many years by trade, she also created an agent-based model of the market economy based upon simple assumptions of individual choice. Nell has co-hosted a podcast on Star Trek and economics, a subject to which she hopes to return, she has a course on Marginal Revolution University on Soviet economics, and she is actively producing a podcast on the Trump era and other issues. Nell resides in London and works full-time for Shared Reality. She has a Masters degree in Modern European History (Soviet Union) from the University of Warwick.
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Brad Haskell
Video production
With more than a decade and a half of experience as a director of photography and camera operator, Brad Haskell is always looking for new challenges and new stories to tell. Balancing technical precision with a unique creative sensibility, Brad prides himself on being a visual stylist capable of taking on projects as diverse as the many filmmakers and clients he's been fortunate to have worked alongside. From independent narratives to music videos, high-end fashion to run-and-gun documentaries, on local sound stages and around the world, Brad has proven himself as a skilled and multifaceted cinematographer, treating each and every shoot as an exciting opportunity to tell stories and express ideas through lighting and camerawork. Brad is currently working to develop scripts and videos to show Shared Reality is its best light.