Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast: Moral Reasoning—From Machiavelli to The Bomb to AI

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Josh Lewis: We read, among other philosophers, Immanuel Kant, who talks a lot about the importance of treating people as ends in and of themselves, not just as means to your end. That person who you really didn't like working for, was it perhaps because they just cared about, you know, they treated like they thought of you as a piece of meat who needed to get a job done, and they really didn't care how you came out of the experience. Keep that in mind as you head into the workplace, as you are working for people, and even more importantly, when you have people working for you. You can agree disagree that it's the right thing to do, but I think we've just discovered that it's the powerful thing to do, right? And we just pulled that out of Immanuel Kant, of all places.

[Podcast introduction and music]

Kirk Kardashian: Hey everyone, this is Kirk Kardashian and you're listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. Today on the podcast, we're learning about a new elective at tuck that doesn't fit the mold of a standard business school course. It's called moral reasoning. From Machiavelli to the bomb to AI. The course uses fiction, autobiography, moral philosophy, documentary film, and journalistic and historical narrative, and features a diverse set of protagonists spanning centuries, cultures, and continents. The objective is to equip students with the tools to navigate complex dilemmas with moral elements in business and in life. The course is taught by my guest on the show, Josh Lewis, a 35-year veteran in venture capital and private equity who has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. Later in the episode, I also speak with two students who took Josh's course. They share their motivations for enrolling in a humanities course in the MBA program, and they talk about what will stay with them as they head back to the business world. All right. Well, Josh Lewis, welcome to Knowledge and Practice.

Josh Lewis: Pleasure to be here.

Kirk Kardashian: Thanks for making some time. Uh, so Dartmouth President Sian Beilock recently published an opinion piece in The Atlantic called Saving the Idea of the University. In it, Beilock notes, the humanities can give students the tools to think critically, to ask the right questions, improve themselves, and in turn, challenge conventional wisdom. And that was a quote. You describe your course as a humanities course engineered for a business school, which is an unusual thing. Does your course aim for the objectives President Beilock describes?

Josh Lewis: It does. It is a humanities course engineered for business school, which is an unusual thing. I think when humanities courses are executed well, they can do all those things in excellent ways. And I think all those things are really important to success in business and arguably in life beyond business. So, I sometimes describe this course. It's, you know, moral reasoning is the title, but I describe it occasionally as a Trojan horse for critical thinking, which of course is a basket of other skills that you have to have in order to think successfully, critically.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Um, well, let's go back a little bit. I remember we were on a bike ride in fall 2023, when you told me about a new course you were planning to teach the next winter term, and the title of it really hit me is something different and intriguing. So, for our listeners, the title of your new elective was Moral Reasoning From Sophocles to Machiavelli to the Bomb. I know you changed the name of the title recently, but that's what it was when we first talked about it. That's right. Um, you also mentioned that you'd be having Doctor Tony Fauci in in class, which got my attention and apparently that a lot of students thought that was intriguing, too. Um, then in the winter term of 2024, I had the privilege of attending a few of your classes during the first run of the course. And I thought it was really thought provoking and engaging. Um, but before we dive into the course itself, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to teach this course.

Josh Lewis: My background is, uh, perhaps as unconventional as this course is. I got a doctorate in philosophy after aiming for a master's degree. I was at a school where, if they liked what you're doing in the master's program, they offer you the opportunity. Sort of a free upgrade to the doctorate. Except you have to write two more chapters. At that point, I didn't know quite what I wanted to do next. I was in love with a woman who kept saying, maybe when I asked her to marry me. And so I figured, you know, might as well hang around and get this doctorate at the same time. Candidly, I did not plan to use it professionally. I don't I would not have I was not headed for academia. It was not my it was not my calling. Um, and so I started looking for a job, and, uh, I was lucky enough to find one in what was then a fairly small industry called private equity venture capital. Those two things are sometimes put together, sometimes not. It's really a spectrum of active investing. And I got a job. I was smart enough to say yes or no. And, uh, and, uh, and then hung on and survived working for other people for about ten years and then founded my own firm and did that for the next 20 years. And that's a profession where there are highs and there's lows and there's successes and there's failures. But in the end, you know, if it all works out, it all works out. And in my case, it did.

Josh Lewis: It was helped by the fact that we were this was through this. This took place through one of the great bull markets in history. So, I would argue that if you can't do if you can't be successful in that context, you really don't belong in the profession. I wrap that up and around the time I was, I was wrapping that up, um, because enough was enough. Uh, Tess and I bought a place in the upper valley here part time. Ran into Jim Foy because he teaches this great course in venture capital. He'd heard there was another venture capitalist in the Upper Valley, um, that I think. I can't quite remember the sequence but got introduced to folks at the center for business, government, Society who asked me to teach a seminar in nonprofit governance, which is something I've done some of. And I'd known Joe Hall prior to that point. I'd met him but not didn't know him well, and I noticed that he was attending this seminar in nonprofit governance. I sort of looked up and there was one of the deans, I thought, okay, so he ran this seminar. It was an hour-long thing, something like that. He came down to me after and he said, you know, you just kept my attention for one hour on a subject in which I have no interest. Huh. And I said, I think that must be a compliment. He said, we should really get you in the classroom. And I said, okay, that sounds interesting. You know, I have sort of an academic bent.

Josh Lewis: A number of things ensued. Yeah, I encountered a course at HBS. I heard of a course at HBS called The Moral Leader, called up one of the two profs who teaches it there. Sandra Sucher has taught it there for 30 years, 30 years, 20 years, 20 years. Let's say her colleague, Joe Badaracco has taught it for, let's say, 30 years. Um, called up Sandra and she said, uh, I was a bit of a cold call. And she's like, who are you? And I said, well, I'm this guy, I have this odd background, I have this doctorate in philosophy that got her attention and in venture capital for 30 years, that got her attention. And so fairly quickly, she said, you know, you might actually be able to pull this off. This is not a this is not an uncomplicated course to teach. And it's really not a specialist’s course. It's more of a generalist course in a way, but you might actually be able to pull this off. And so, at that point, she and Joe started to put the air under my wings so that I could figure out how to take this course, pick it up, and bring it to tuck and adapt it. I thought it was a brilliant course at HBS. It has gone on for a long, long time. It's got a great pedigree, very successful. Um, needed to be adapted and changed for tuck. It got a little complicated. Designed it for as a seminar for about 20 to 25 people because I asked naturally.

Josh Lewis: Okay, so how many students is this likely to attract? And the answer was, well, the first run of an elective typically attracts 20 to 25 students. So, I said great, designed it for that. And then about 20% of the school signed up. I think that was perhaps because Tony Fauci was coming had less to do with me. And I said, okay, this is a different world and so redesigned it for that larger number, frankly, didn't redesign it enough, but I didn't. This is my first run. I hadn't taught I hadn't been in the classroom for 35 years, a long time. And so, I did my best to redesign it. In retrospect, there were a number of other changes I would have made. We that that number ultimately landed at 93 students, two sections, you know, once a week, both sections. And that was that was the first run. Fauci came for the last class. We combined the sections. He was completely brilliant. He was just terrific. The topic was, uh, moral quandaries he ran into during the Aids epidemic. People think of him these days as more the face of the Covid epidemic. When you go back a couple of decades, he was the face of the nation's response to the Aids epidemic. A project in which he ran into any number of complex moral decisions. Yeah. And so, the topic that was the that was the primary topic. So that's sort of a brief history of this course. Take us up to the end of year one.

Kirk Kardashian: There are probably dozens of ways to teach more reasoning. Your approach draws on literature, philosophy, history, biography, and film. You focus on a series of protagonists, both fictional and real, who have faced tough decisions with moral elements, just to name a few. You've got Harry Truman trying to decide whether to use atomic weapons in World War Two. You have students read The Remains of the day and analyze the moral dilemmas that can arise in an agent principal relationship. You study Katharine Graham's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in the Washington Post. There's a lot of stuff there. I mean, it's very it's a wide-ranging canvas of different decisions, different people. So, I'm aware you didn't invent this approach. You just told us about how you learned about the course at HBS. And so, you adapted it for Tuck. So, I'd love to hear more about how you did that. How did you adapt it for tuck, and why do you think it works here?

Josh Lewis: First of all, you're correct. We look at protagonists who face complex decisions with moral elements. Of course, starts with fictional protagonists. Of course, in fiction, the author has control over the story, and you can have as marvelous stories with these intricate moral dilemmas. And we learn what a moral dilemma is, and we learn how people approach moral dilemmas, the various philosophical frameworks. And then in the latter half of the course, we move on to actual, real people. So, Sir Thomas More, Katharine Graham, Harry Truman, etc. um, Fauci would be an example of that. In the second year, we, um, Tony was a one-time deal. That was we caught lightning in a bottle. We weren't going to do that again. And so, the last class had to do with, uh, ethical dilemmas, uh, raised by, by an AI implementation. Because any course in ethics, I mean any course in anything these days, really, you ought to think about having an AI element to it. So that was the so that's the basic structure of it. Um, and that structure, as I said, emerged from HBS. It was the brainchild uh, of a of a polymath whose still alive named Robert Coles, who back in, you know, 40 years ago when he had this inspiration and he and he and he and he took variants of that. He taught variants of that course across all of Harvard's schools, undergrad, many, many of its grad schools. It persisted at HBS, and it evolved over the over in the in the hands of a few very, very capable instructors. You asked me about the adaptation, um, curriculum committee had I wouldn't say an objection, but they had an idea. They said, you know, wouldn't it be great if you could add some real-world business to this thing? Because it's pretty.

Josh Lewis: It seems like a great liberal arts course, but could we attach it a little bit more to business dilemmas? And I thought, that's a really interesting idea. Let's think about how to do that. And so that's, that's that was the fundamental adaptation. Foresee would be an example of that in a way. But a better way would be by way of looking at. So, we read The Remains of the day, which is this Booker Prize winning novel by Ishiguro, who won a Nobel. He's still he's not particularly old. Still, he won a Nobel Prize early in his career because he's just a genius. Um, it's about many things because it's a great novel. But among the things it's about, uh, agent principal dilemma, as you say, and, and in some ways, the pitfalls of amorality is a central theme. So, we read this, we talk about amorality. What is it? What are its pitfalls? And then we jumped immediately to the Sacklers and then to McKinsey. And of course, the Sacklers were the family behind Purdue Pharma, the opioid epidemic. Mckinsey was an enabler of this thing. Uh, you know, just last December, McKinsey entered into a $750 million settlement around this criminal deferred prosecution. Big deal. And a lot of that was amorality. It was a morality run amok. And so, we talk about the remains of the day fiction, and then we move over to Purdue Pharma, Sacklers, McKinsey. Here it is in the real world. Wow. That being said, that would be an example. We could every week we basically do this in some form or fashion every week.

Kirk Kardashian: Wow. That sounds really powerful.

Josh Lewis: Yeah, it gets their attention.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. Um, just to make this a little bit lighter. Uh, I mean, I was at your class, and, uh, I think, you know, I noticed that the session was, like, had, like, a fun feel to it. You know, it was dynamic. It was fun. You were playing the Talking Heads song once in a lifetime in the minutes before class started. Um, I think the week before that, you had a Dixie chicks song playing, um, just before class. Uh, there's. I mean, it almost felt like a party. You know, it was it was it didn't feel like a typical course. Um, and once class gets going, you're actually not doing a whole lot of talking, but instead leading socratically soliciting comments from the students, many of whom are eager to participate. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to the classroom, and how you get so many students to actively engage?

Josh Lewis: Sure. Um, I felt it important to engagement to me was the scene, the scene quantum of this course. I explained to the students, look, the quality of your experience here will be a function of several things. Quality of the material, which is great. The quality instructor, he will do his best. That's all I can give you. But more than those two things, really, it's going to be the quality of your engagement with this, with this material, and then the quality of your engagement with each other. And that last bit is important, because what I'm fundamentally trying to do is run a seminar in a room where there are too many students to really pull off a seminar, and in stadium seating, which is also not supportive of a seminar, because if you sit in the seats, you're often looking at the back of the head of the student in the next row. And so what I'm trying to do in some fundamental way is bring the students into contact with this material, get out of the way, be the enabler, get out of the way so they can engage with this material directly, immediately walk in with one opinion, often walk out with another, and that happens by virtue of the fact that they're engaging with each other in class. So, everything else that you witness there is supportive of that objective. I try to create an atmosphere that is enjoyable, some combination between intellectually rigorous seminar, book club. You need to do the work. You need to. You need to bring your A-game and play ball in the classroom.

Josh Lewis: And that's the that's the idea. So, everything else is supportive. So yeah, we have walk in music, which, you know, is just a way to set the mood. And then that goes off. The door closes. One of my colleagues in tuck faculty, came to watch this course and asked him, what do you think? After I said, you know, okay, you can come. But the price for admission is you have to give me critical feedback at the end because that's how we all get better, right? And he said, you know, this is really interesting. You close the door, you got some stuff on the whiteboards, not much. And then for two hours, it's a discussion between you and the students and the students in each other. And they yeah, they really are. They're sitting forward on their seats. Their heads are up. You ban technology from the classroom, which I do, and it really is quite engaging. Some of the students would say to me, you know, I first look up at the clock and I realize we're 90 minutes into a two-hour thing, then I know it's working right. We've got their attention. Yeah. And two hours is just about as long as we can all sustain it at a fairly high level of energy. I mean, I know I'm exhausted at the end of it. I perhaps they are as well. I think two hours seems to be about the right thing for most of the days. Some days we have other exercises, debates and other things. But that's basically how it works.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, well, it seems really successful to me as an outside observer. I enjoyed it, that's for sure.

Josh Lewis: Your reviews this year were good. It suggests we'll do it again. Um, and there's upside. There's room for improvement. Absolutely. We can get better from here.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. You've taught the course two years now, and students report that it is quite different from anything else on the curriculum, and they clearly feel it's of value to them as future business leaders. Why do you think they feel that way?

Josh Lewis: I think it raises. So, here's some things I've heard. It raises questions for them that are deep and meaningful, questions that are probably not going to get raised in other, more conventional business courses. That's not to take away from those courses. It's just not their purpose in this classroom. Whenever I see an opportunity to go at a complicated, deep question, we go right at it. We don't shy away, and we try very, very hard to create a classroom that is a safe space for everybody so that folks can feel comfortable participating and create multiple avenues for participation. So that if you're an introvert or if English is not your first language, or if you've never had liberal arts, or if you're a first-year student who's maybe a little bit intimidated by the second years. So those four factors can make students maybe a little reticent to try to create avenues for everybody to participate, because it's in that participation. I think it's engaging with the material and then engaging with each other. That's where I think the learning occurs. I think that's the physics of this. I think that that combination of what they perceive as relatively, perhaps deep and important questions and then engagement around those questions with each other. I think that's where the energy happens. That's my sense of it.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Um. All right, so to close this out, I want to circle back on something. While watching your classes, it was clear that this course is about moral reasoning, about complex problem solving, about moral leadership, but it seems to cover more than that. Um, am I correct in that observation? I mean, I assume your career informs this course, and I'm wondering how the insights you gained over a 30-year career in venture capital, venture capital, find their way into a course on moral reasoning.

Josh Lewis: Yeah, yeah. I said earlier that this course is sort of a Trojan horse for critical thinking. The truth is, it's a Trojan horse for a lot of different things. One of them is that where I can use the material to share with students, something that I learned the hard way along the way. And here we just studied some book or some protagonist, fictional, real. And then I can bring to bear something that I learned the hard way that also gets their attention. So, I'll give you an example. We read, among other philosophers, Immanuel Kant, who talks a lot about the importance of treating people as ends in and of themselves, not just as means to your end. You're allowed to treat them as means to your end. Business is, you know, ultimately based in reciprocal relationships, reciprocity, transactional relationships is fine, but you do a lot better if you can also care about the person at some level on the other side of the transaction. So that at least they're coming out neutral, if not ahead in the transaction. It's just it's a long winded, you know, Kantian way of saying look for win wins. And I asked students, okay, have you ever worked with someone who worked for someone who you just loved? You would do anything for that person. Hands up, hands up. Have you ever worked for someone who you really, really did not like working for? You know, you get a fair number of hands. I said, am I right that perhaps that person who you loved working for, you loved working for them, in part because you perceive that they actually cared about you as an end in of yourself, so to speak.

Josh Lewis: To use a fancy philosophical construction like they actually cared about you and your progress and so forth. And they're like, yeah, I think that maybe a lot of it. And then that person who you really didn't like working for, was it perhaps because they just cared about, you know, they treated like they thought of you as a piece of meat who needed to get a job done, and they really didn't care how you came out of the experience, is that perhaps you know what was at play in that other sort of relationship. They're like, yeah, that could be. I'm like, well, keep that in mind as you head into the workplace, as you are working for people, and even more importantly, when you have people working for you, you can agree, disagree that it's the right thing to do. But I think we've just discovered that it's the powerful thing to do. And we just pulled that out of Immanuel Kant of all places. Right? So, uh, so here we are using, you know, abstract Philosophy, etc. etc. and try to bolt it to. Yeah, things that I learned along the way. And for me that's enjoyable because then I think, well, maybe they won't have to learn it the hard way like I did. And wouldn't that be great?

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Wow. It sounds like, uh, Immanuel Kant was talking about empathy back then, uh.

Josh Lewis: Among other, among many other things. Yeah. But absolutely, we in fact, we talk about we we, you know, some of the on the whiteboards, there are words occasionally, not a lot. You were in the room you saw, you know, we talk about the power of empathy, the power. We talk about the power of humility. We talk about this thing called epistemic humility. They're like, what the hell is that? Like, well, that's like Mark Twain, who said, uh, I might get this slightly off. I'll try to get it right. Um, it ain't what you know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know. That just ain't so.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah.

Josh Lewis: Right. Yeah. And then I. And I remind us, you know, in business, we are often making decisions in the context of huge uncertainty. And we're making our best judgments, particularly in my trade, venture capital, private equity. We're making long term bets in the conditions of enormous ambiguity. And. You have to bear in mind that what your mind is going to do is to try to fill in those blank spaces with facts and conclusions. The facts just aren't there. And you probably ought not to be reaching the conclusions. But that's what the human mind does, because that makes life more comfortable. What are the books we read is called Trifles by Susan Glaspell. It's a really spare murder mystery. It's really sparsely. It's very, very short. It has very few facts. And she introduces the reader very slyly to reach conclusions about whodunit. And then after we debate whodunit, and did they really do it and all that, we go, I say, well, let's go back and just actually look at the facts that are in the book and look at the facts that are not in the book that some of you have just all asserted. What what's going on here is you filling in the facts in a situation of great ambiguity, that's perfectly natural. It's because we're human. We do this. You will be better in making business decisions if you try to remember what you don't know. Figure out what you do know and then be clear about what you actually don't know. Which, by the way, is uncomfortable. It's called epistemic humility. Again, a fancy philosophy term, but it turns out it applies to my business, and I would argue to most all of business. So that's another example of using these concepts and bolting them to business and then trying to give students these tools that they can then use in the future when they go out to the world.

Speaker3: To hear some perspectives from the other side of the lectern. I spoke with Lynn Ajlouni T25 and Ryan Montgomery T-26.

Speaker4: My name is Lynn Ajlouni and I'm currently a second year, so T25.

Kirk Kardashian: Great. Well, nice to meet you, Lynn.

Speaker4: Nice to meet you as well.

Kirk Kardashian: Thanks for making some time for the podcast. We're talking. Yeah. Thank you. We're talking about the moral reasoning course that you took with Josh Lewis this winter. Um, so tell me why you decided to take a humanities type course at business school?

Speaker4: Exactly. It's a very different type, of course. Right. Uh, very unlike any other course that the MBA curriculum offers. A lot of our other classes equip us with business frameworks and tools to be able to make informed business decisions. Moore asks you to step back and look at ethical situations that are mostly non-business in nature, but very relevant for business leaders today. So, in class, we would each week cover a different piece of literature, from philosophy to biographies to real history fiction. And as we consume that piece of literature, we would identify the ethical dilemma and then evaluate it using different ethical frameworks. And typically, those kinds of situations don't have right or wrong answers. So, your ability to really critically think and put yourself in the shoes of the actor and see the merits of, you know, different perspectives, I think was a really unique skill that came out of that class that I didn't necessarily experience in any other class.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, no, it sounds really fun and thought provoking. Uh, when you saw the course, um, in the, I guess in the curriculum as, as an option, where were you thinking this is really going to help me in the career that I hope to, uh, you know, have in a couple of years?

Speaker4: Yeah. You know, I think any aspiring business leader today, as we look at news headlines, we can predict that at some point we'll be faced with a situation that's really tricky and ethical in nature. And that's when your values are really tested. And I think what makes these situations really tricky is that it depends on who you're most loyal to, that you take a certain action, right. The stakeholders can have different interests. So, I think your ability to make a decision that caters to a particular stakeholder says a lot about you and who you prioritize. And so, I think in preparation for that, and I'll be pursuing a consulting career after tuck, talk. I don't think there will be a shortage of ethical dilemmas to navigate. Um, hopefully I'll be, uh, you know, prepared and equipped with the tools to make the right one, um, that aligns with my values and aligns with the stakeholders that I care the most about.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. No, that sounds like a good plan. Um, speaking of consulting, you mentioned that during the course you had an opportunity to, um, to meet with a pretty famous person in the consulting industry. Tell me about that.

Speaker4: Yeah. So, professor, uh, Louis invited one of the founders of Oliver Wyman to our class. Um, Bill Wyman, who came to class to judge, uh, our presentations of an ethical situation in one of the readings that we had to do. It was a very tricky, difficult presentation. And it was kind of related to consulting. But to have Bill Wyman there to give feedback, give his perspective was really unique. And then I actually got the chance to have dinner with Bill through the class as well, later to talk about his career and just different situations he's experienced. Experience. So, um, great person to learn from and really unique opportunity for Professor Lewis to bring someone like that to class.

Kirk Kardashian: Wow, wow, that must have been pretty amazing. Um, did it confirm your decision to go into consulting? Has the right thing to do.

Speaker5: You know, I think I'm more realistic now.

Speaker4: Definitely. Um, any career you pursue will have its draws and drawbacks, but I think your ability to talk to someone who's gone through a spectrum of experiences kind of prepares you and gives you some shortcuts that you can hopefully pull from as you go through that experience. But I'm excited. We'll see how that goes. Yeah. Um, but yes, I'll be I'll be doing consulting after tech.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Uh, I know that there's a lot in the course. It covered a lot of, um, kind of cultural and historical, uh, events and fictional, uh, you know, works of creative fiction. Um, tell me about some of your highlights, some of your takeaways from the course and what you think is going to stick with you the most.

Josh Lewis: Yeah, I think what actually stuck with me the most is the ability to look at a situation from different vantage points. You know, often when we try to put ourselves in the shoes of someone, we ask ourselves, what would we have done? Or what would I have done if I were them? But more had us ask ourselves, what did that person see that I might not be seeing, or what propels that person to make that decision? You know what makes them act that way? And what are the costs of their choice? And I think those kinds of questions are very different than how we traditionally try to put ourselves in people's shoes. But that experience taught me that good people can land on different ends of a good of a, of a moral question. And it's not because there's one right or wrong answer, but because they have different values, loyalties and lived experiences that really kind of shape the way they navigate those kinds of decisions. Um, so getting more comfortable with questions that have no right or wrong answer in general and then being able to see them through the eyes of people that I may not connect with or see, uh, or justify their actions, but kind of try to understand what propels them and motivates them.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. It seems like a really important thing to be able to do. Um, as you say, there's lots of instances where there's not a right or wrong answer. People can disagree about what the right thing to do is. Um, so I wonder if you could talk a bit about the classroom experience. What was it like being in Josh's class? And, uh, kind of give us a give us a feel for it. What was it like to be in the class?

Josh Lewis: You know, it was a bit of a different experience than a traditional business class. Um, there was a good mix of first years and second years, which was always good to have people who come from all sorts of backgrounds. It was a very safe space because again, we're discussing kind of tricky, vulnerable situations, right? And I really appreciated how people were able to bring their own personal experiences to the room. Um, it was a pretty intimate class. We were around 40 people, which sounds big, but actually, I think we got to know each other really well, and it kind of felt like a small, big class. Us. Um, but I really appreciated Professor Louis. You know, he wants to invite everybody to engage in the conversation. And instead of just cold calling, like a lot of other professors do, which is also effective in some contexts, he would warm call and what that means before every class, he would reach out to a few students and say, you know, be prepared to talk about what this book means to you. I think that ability to be invited to the class, you know, have a little bit of time to prepare ahead of time, but to come and talk about what this piece of literature means to you personally was a really welcoming kind of safe environment to not only talk about your intellectual thoughts, but bring your personal experiences to the room as well. So very much enjoyed it.

Josh Lewis: I like to think of myself as a curious person, and I like to ask myself big questions, and I'm a pretty large, reflective person. I am Ryan Montgomery and I'm a t26. As I kind of reflect on my upbringing and my childhood, I grew up in a world that really valued binary thinking and a world where there's very clear, right and wrong. And I'm just realizing operating that way is just not a productive way to invite nuance and to have better critical thinking skills. And so, for me, when I saw moral reasoning, I thought it was a perfect way for me to flex my or strengthen my critical thinking skills, especially in today's business world, which requires extreme nuance, thinking, and the ability to sometimes acknowledge that two truths can coexist.

Kirk Kardashian: Mm. Wow. That's interesting. Uh, so thinking back on the on the course, what were your sort of highlights from, you know, from it taking. What did you take away from it. What do you think you'll remember kind of forever.

Josh Lewis: Yeah, I think it was interesting because in the class, in the first couple sessions, I wanted to gravitate towards like very clear decisions and I wanted to say a definitive answer of oh, this character in this book was wrong because of X, Y, and Z, or actually they were right because of X and y. But what I'm realizing is that I felt like that was the wrong approach, and I think it did not allow me to understand all of the pressures, the nuances that were developing in some of the books that we read. I think as humans and as business leaders, we are very quick to adhere to a very strict framework of, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, but I'm trying to welcome more ambiguity. And I think this class helped me explore that in more detail. Um, one of the takeaways that I took from the course is I read this book about Never Let Me Go. Um, and I think one of my key takeaways from reading this book, as I wrote in my paper, is that it's not so much about us having this moral framework all the time, but it's having moral consistency as you continue to continue to operate throughout this world. Sometimes you're going to say yes to a specific moral framework, and other times you're going to disagree with that based on the context. And so as long as we're morally consistent, as we make our decisions, I think that's a huge moment of success as we operate in a very complex world.

Kirk Kardashian: Um, let's go back a little bit. Actually, I think it would be nice for people to learn a little bit about your background. Um, what did you do before tuck, and why did you decide to come to tuck?

Josh Lewis: So, I have a very interesting background. So professionally, I've been a strategy consultant, and I've had a career in tech in sales. Um, but I also had still have a fun job, which is professional running. So, there's always these competing interests in my day-to-day life. I'm trying to show up to work and meeting with clients, selling software and then between work or even between meetings. I'm running, you know, 20 mile runs and trying to perform at the top of my sport in this crazy sport of ultra trail running. Um, and so coming to tuck and making the decision to come to business school, I realized that I don't have to make the decision to do either one. I can do both. And I think that's kind of a key takeaway of this course, is like, we don't have to make these binary decisions. We can have flexibility and welcome multiple conflicting priorities at once. If we can find the frameworks to balance those two things. And so, when I made the decision that I'm still going to pursue my running career while also investing in my professional career, I needed a business school that would allow me to do both of those things.

Josh Lewis: And Tuck, because we're in the middle of the woods, um, it was very conducive for me to be able to do my trail running. Um, and yeah, I would say that's like 50% of the reason why I wanted to come to Hanover, New Hampshire. And yeah, and it's been such a great decision because, um, not only have I been able to actually accelerate and amplify my training while here at tuck, but I feel like I'm really investing in my professional development, and I've secured a really awesome internship this summer at Google where I'm going to be doing sales strategy, which is pretty aligned to where I'm interested going professionally. So, I think acknowledging that there can be conflicting things that can coexist, um, has been so proven in like my personal life that I can do both of these things at the same time. It's going to come at, um, it's going to come at cost. It's going to come at tradeoffs. But if those are two things that I want, then I can make that happen.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Wow. So, you're sort of proving your own thesis in a way.

Josh Lewis: I mean, I can attest that life is messy and it's rare that you have an A or a B, and you can pick one or the other, you know.

Josh Lewis: Um, but, you know, it's interesting because I think we it's so life is so much easier when you can choose A or B. Yeah. And that's not necessarily wrong or bad, but you might be missing out on more color. You might be missing out a more detail which could actually add value to your life. Um, and if there's like one thing I can take from Josh Lewis class, it's like if multiple truths can coexist, like, what more can you gain from that reality than seeing the world as one is wrong and one is true? Um, especially like growing up quite religious. And, you know, some religions have that dichotomy framework. It's like, well, what if there can be multiple truths and like, what can that unlock if we operate in that world? And, you know, thinking about this in a business context, like if we can acknowledge that multiple employees are right or multiple business options are right, maybe we can pick and choose elements of both things that are right in a decision. And I think that's like so cool to like, operate in a world like that.

Kirk Kardashian: I'd like to thank my guests Josh Lewis, Leon Ajluni, and Ryan Montgomery. You have been listening to Knowledge in Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show and if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk Kardashian. It was produced and sound designed by Tom Whalley. See you next time.