The Learning Hack podcast

In the current season of the podcast we foreground the figures helping learning people get their heads around AI. This time we particularly wanted to get a US perspective.

Josh Cavalier is founder and CEO of JoshCavalier.ai, co-founder of Talent Rewire, and author of Applying AI in Learning and Development: From Platforms to Performance (ATD Press). His book proposes a new role, the Human-Machine Performance Analyst: someone who works out how a job divides between people and AI. In this conversation he explains how the role has evolved since he wrote the book, and why he thinks instructional designers will become performance designers. He describes a 'supervision tax' that comes with letting AI take out the grunt work. He is frank about job losses, and about the danger for new hires who get the work done with AI without understanding it. And he explains why agents, for all the hype we hear, are still rare behind the corporate firewall.

Josh is speaking at DevLearn in Las Vegas, 4–6 November.

With thanks to our sponsor, iVentiv.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• JoshCavalier.ai: https://www.joshcavalier.com/
• Applying AI in Learning and Development: From Platforms to Performance (ATD Press, 2025): https://www.td.org/product/book--applying-ai-in-learning--development/112511
• "Rise of the Human-Machine Performance Analyst", ATD blog (6 Nov 2025): https://www.td.org/content/atd-blog/rise-of-the-human-machine-performance-analyst
• Talent Rewire: https://talentrewire.ai/
• Brainpower, Josh's weekly live show: https://www.joshcavalier.com/brainpower
• DevLearn 2026, Las Vegas, 4–6 November: https://devlearn.com/
• Robroy Industries: https://robroy.com/about/who-we-are
• Dana Gaines Robinson, James C. Robinson, Jack J. Phillips, Patricia Pulliam Phillips and Dick Handshaw, Performance Consulting: A Strategic Process to Improve, Measure, and Sustain Organizational Results (3rd edn, Berrett-Koehler, 2015)
• Sponsor: iVentiv, https://iventiv.com/
• Subscribe to The Learning Hack: https://linktr.ee/learninghack

Ross Stevenson is founder of Steal These Thoughts! and describes his job as AI enablement architect. Before going independent he was Head of Learning at Trainline, ran digital learning at Tesco for six years, and spent seven years in HR. If enablement sounds a lot like performance consulting, he wouldn't disagree. So is AI the thing that finally makes performance consulting happen?

Also in this episode: where people really are with AI, what Ross won't hand over to a machine, and what might be left of the learning function in three year's time.

• How HR taught him what the business really thinks of L&D
• Adoption versus enablement
• Have the people running L&D grasped how different AI is?
• The one-and-done problem
• What not to do with AI

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Steal These Thoughts!: https://stealthesethoughts.com/
• Steal These Thoughts! newsletter: https://stealthesethoughts.beehiiv.com/
• Ross Stevenson AI (training): https://rossstevensonai.com/
• L&D Global Sentiment Survey 2026, Donald H Taylor: https://donaldhtaylor.co.uk/research_base/global-sentiment-survey-2026/
• AI 2027 scenario (AI Futures Project): https://ai-2027.com/
• Filtered: https://filtered.com/
• iVentiv: https://iventiv.com/learninghack

CONNECT WITH LEARNING HACK

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer X: @johnhelmer Threads: @jphelmer Bluesky: @johnhelmer.bsky.social Website: learninghackpodcast.com Subscribe to The Learning Hack: https://linktr.ee/learninghack

With thanks to our sponsor, iVentiv.

A third of UK workers say their own organisation gets in the way of them doing good work. Four in ten managers would rather not be managers. So why does L&D keep building interventions that ignore the possible situational causes of poor performance?

Robin Hoyle is Head of Learning Innovation at Huthwaite International and has chaired the World of Learning conference for about fifteen years. In this conversation he makes the case that training doesn't stick because the system around it is broken, and that the profession measures what is easy to measure rather than what matters. His answer? Focus on transfer, not completions.

Robin chairs the World of Learning Conference at the NEC in Birmingham on 6–7 October, closing the second day with a keynote on AI, adoption and agency.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Robin Hoyle at Huthwaite International: https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/blog/author/robin-hoyle
• Robin Hoyle on TrainingZone: https://trainingzone.co.uk/author/robinhoyle/
• "The performance illusion: why training doesn't stick" (23 July 2026): https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/blog/the-performance-illusion
• "Why isn't leadership training making leaders better?" (28 April 2026): https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/blog/why-isnt-leadership-training-making-leaders-better
• "2026 in L&D: Transfer and transferability" (6 January 2026): https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/blog/2026-learning-development-predictions
• "AI isn't coming for your job" (29 October 2025): https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/blog/ai-isnt-coming-for-your-job
• World of Learning Conference & Exhibition, NEC Birmingham, 6–7 October 2026: https://www.learnevents.com/birmingham/conference/programme/
• Robin Hoyle, Complete Training: From Recruitment to Retirement (Kogan Page, 2013)
• Robin Hoyle, Informal Learning in Organizations: How to Create a Continuous Learning Culture (Kogan Page, 2015)
• Geary Rummler and Alan Brache, Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart (Jossey-Bass, 1990)
• Ipsos Karian and Box, Work on What Matters — survey of 5,000 UK employees, May 2026: https://ipsoskarianandbox.com/report/work-on-what-matters/
• Ipsos Karian and Box, "Are we working on what matters? What 5,000 UK Employees told us" (15 May 2026): https://ipsoskarianandbox.com/insights/are-we-working-on-what-matters-what-5000-uk-employees-told-us/
• Fifty years of SPIN, Huthwaite International: https://www.huthwaiteinternational.com/fifty-years-of-spin
• Subscribe to The Learning Hack: https://linktr.ee/learninghack
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Two-thirds of HR professionals say AI is their top development priority. But only a third of organisations offer any AI training – and fewer than one in five think their leaders are equipped to lead in an AI-enabled environment. So where is the gap, and whose job is it to close it?

Erica Farmer is co-founder of Quantum Rise Talent Group, host of the AI for the Average Joe podcast and author of AI for People Professionals (Kogan Page, 2026). In this conversation she argues that organisations are rolling out AI the way they rolled out every HR system before it, treating people as tech users rather than as people. She also has a challenge for L&D, which she thinks is waiting for HR to tell it what to do. Along the way: writing a book with AI during a backlash against AI, why the tools push you to work their way, the CIPD skills gap, AI literacy and prompting, and what a self-driving Mustang says about human over-confidence.

Also:

• Are HR and L&D in the same place on AI?
• Double down on what you're great at
• Co-writing with AI, and the neurodivergent workflow
• Slop and the AI backlash
• The CIPD gap: individual capability or organisational readiness?
• Leaders as practitioner, communicator and strategist
• Stress, burnout and AI 'golden time'
• Why prompting still matters

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Erica Farmer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericafarmer/ [verify handle]
• AI for People Professionals (Kogan Page): https://www.koganpage.com/hr-learning-development/ai-for-people-professionals-9781398625990
• EricaFarmer.AI (speaking): https://ericafarmer.ai/
• L&D Global Sentiment Survey 2026 (Donald H Taylor): https://donaldhtaylor.co.uk/research_base/global-sentiment-survey-2026/
• CIPD, AI in the workplace: https://www.cipd.org/en/topics/artificial-intelligence-workplace/
• Erica's Training Journal piece on writing the book: https://www.trainingjournal.com/2025/content-type/features/my-book-ai-for-people-professionals-was-a-human-first-experiment/

CONNECT WITH LEARNING HACK

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting
• X: @johnhelmer
• Threads: @jphelmer
• Bluesky: @johnhelmer.bsky.social
• Website: learninghackpodcast.com

Did science fiction predict AirPods? Neuralink? The death of God?

For this final episode of Season One, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach give you what hacks call a listicle: three transcendently significant things prefigured in science fiction that definitely came true — and three that didn't. Or haven't yet. Prediction, as Niels Bohr said, is very hard.

Along the way:

• Thirteenth-century flying machines
• Victorians watching live war coverage on flat-screen TV
• elearning before there was elearning
• Verne, Wells, jetpacks, flying cars, prediction markets, transporter beams, universal nudism and Octavia Butler's uncannily detailed vision of the Age of Trump.

That's a wrap on season one. Let us know what you've enjoyed — and what you'd like to hear in future episodes. All suggestions considered.

Connect with The Learning Hack:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer X: @johnhelmer Threads: @jphelmer Substack: @learninghack Instagram: @tech.imaginarium Website: learninghackpodcast.com

Listen and watch: https://linktr.ee/learninghack

Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

How a teenage girl's waking dream birthed what is (probably) the first science fiction novel – and in the process gave the world its most enduring image of technology gone wrong. This time we're coming for the myth, the curse, the cliche that is Frankenstein. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach climb up the tower, point the lightning conductor to the heart of the storm, and attach electrical cables to the neck-bolts of that fearful thing on the slab. Yes, it may be 200-years old but ... it's alive! They walk through the original 1818 plot — stranger and bleaker than the films — weigh the long-running argument over whether it really counts as science fiction, and trace the monster's afterlife from the 1910 Edison short and James Whale's 1931 classic to Boris Karloff, Mel Brooks, Eddie Van Halen's "Frankenstrat", Guillermo del Toro ... and beyond. In this episode:

• What really happened at the Villa Diodati in 1816?
• The radical parents and a childhood shadowed by death that made Mary Shelley
• Born in the age of revolutions: Enlightenment values battles alchemy and the occult
• How two Brits, James Whale and Boris Karloff, created a look for the creature in their famous 1931 film that resonated through a thousand sequels, rip-offs and pisstakes
• Did Mary Shelley predict the death of God?

Connect with The Learning Hack: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer X: @johnhelmer Threads: @jphelmer Substack: @learninghack Instagram: @tech.imaginarium Website: learninghackpodcast.com Listen and watch: https://linktr.ee/learninghack Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

Can the future of an entire civilisation be calculated like the behaviour of gas molecules? In the second of two episodes on Isaac Asimov, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach turn from his robots to his other great franchise — the Foundation saga — and the seductive idea at its heart: psychohistory, a fictional science that claims to predict the fate of galactic empires. From a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto opened at random to Apple TV's billion-dollar adaptation, this is a conversation about how one pulp idea grew into a cornerstone of science fiction and why its questions about prediction, determinism and power feel uncomfortably current.

In this episode:

• The origins of Foundation — Asimov, his editor John W. Campbell, and the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that inspired a galactic empire
• The original trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation), Hari Seldon, psychohistory and the Mule
• How Asimov was pushed by Doubleday into the prequels and sequels — and how he retrofitted Foundation into his robot universe
• Two adaptations compared: the 1973 BBC Radio dramatization and Apple TV's contemporary series
• The ideas behind the saga — Gibbon, Spengler, Toynbee, and the long-running argument over Marx and Hegel
• Prediction as power — from Carissa Véliz's work to prediction markets and accelerationism
• Asimov the man: his later fame, his legacy, and his failings

Connect with The Learning Hack:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer
• X: @johnhelmer
• Threads: @jphelmer
• Bluesky: @johnhelmer.bsky.social
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Website: learninghackpodcast.com

Listen and watch:

• All links: https://linktr.ee/learninghack

Next time: Frankenstein — Mary Shelley's fever dream and the most enduring image in tech

In 1942, a 22-year-old chemistry student and part-time writer set down three short rules for how a fictional robot ought to behave. His aim was to kill off the lazy "robot-as-Frankenstein-monster" cliché. More than eighty years later, real engineers, real ethicists and real lawmakers are still arguing about them.

This is the first of two episodes on Isaac Asimov — one of the "big dogs" of science fiction whose output ran to some five hundred books. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach take on the most enduring part of that legacy: the Three Laws of Robotics. The Laws went on to power nine linked short stories in I, Robot, several films, hundreds of academic papers, and an argument about AI safety that shows no sign of ending any time soon.

In this episode:

• The man and the output
• Robots before Asimov
• I, Robot as nine thought experiments
• Susan Calvin — one of SF's first great female scientists
• The Three Laws and the trolley problem
• Coming next: Foundation

Links and resources:

• Website: techimaginarium.co.uk
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

Every genre has a shadow canon — the writers who don't make the syllabus, don't sell out on Amazon, and rarely get the Netflix series. In science fiction, that shadow canon is where some of the most intellectually adventurous, politically serious and formally daring work of the twentieth century was done.

Having opened the series with the big names — Wells, Verne, Poe, the Mount Rushmore of the genre — John and Ezri jump forward to the late 1960s and 1970s and turn to five authors most listeners won't know: Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, John Sladek, John Brunner and Christopher Priest. Feminist SF, satirical SF, dystopian SF set in a Britain going to the dogs. The thread that connects them is "prescience", a word that keeps coming up. Were these writers really predicting the future – or just paying close enough attention to the present?

In this episode:

• Why 1969 makes such a strange hinge point — Apollo 11 and the realisation of Goddard's cherry-tree dream, set against the assassinations of 1968, Vietnam, Prague, Altamont, and the first wave of environmental science
• Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell, and the New Wave: Moorcock's New Worlds, Ballard's "inner space", and SF's discovery that it could not avoid politics
• Kate Wilhelm — Hugo, Nebula and Locus winner for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, a co-founder of the Clarion Writers' Workshop who is now better known as a mystery writer
• Joanna Russ — The Female Man, written in 1970 but unpublished until 1975, and How to Suppress Women's Writing; a Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist who chose literature as her weapon
• John Sladek — the satirist whose robot in Tik-Tok has had its "asimov circuits" go on the blink, and whose hoax book on a thirteenth sign of the zodiac proved people will believe anything stated with enough confidence
• John Brunner — the "Club of Rome Quartet", the novel that coined "worm" for self-replicating code, and Stand on Zanzibar, set in 2010 and unsettlingly familiar by the time we got there
• Christopher Priest — Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex, the racial framing Priest himself later grappled with, and The Prestige (with David Bowie as Tesla)
• The big question under all of it: what is the difference between prescience and prediction — and is it significant that "prescience" contains the word "science"?

Links and resources:

• Website: techimaginarium.co.uk
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

A hundred years ago this spring, a magazine called Amazing Stories hit the newsstands and — almost by accident — gave a name and a shape to the genre we now call science fiction. Its publisher, Hugo Gernsback, was an immigrant electrical engineer, visionary and relentless self-promoter. He wanted his magazine to delight and enthrall – but also to educate.

In this opening episode of The Tech Imaginarium, John and Ezri go back to 1926 to ask why this peculiar pulp magazine matters — and why its mix of techno-optimism, prophetic vision and dystopic warnings still echoes through the way we talk about technology today.

In this episode:

• Hugo Gernsback: Luxembourg-born inventor, publisher of Amazing Stories, and author of stories under at least seven anagrams of his own name
• The strange scientific weather of 1926 — electrification, mustard gas, Einstein, Schrödinger and Hubble — and why it primed the public for "scientifiction"
• The first issue's contributors: Wells, Verne and Poe in one corner; George Allan England, G. Peyton Wertenbaker and Austin Hall in the other
• Robert Goddard, H.G. Wells and the through-line from pulp magazines to the Apollo Moon launches
• Why Gernsback's reputation was contraversial — paying writers poorly, exaggerating circulation, etc.
• The tropes Amazing Stories planted that we're still living with

Links and resources:

• Website: learninghackpodcast.com
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer and Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.