TI06 Three Predictions from SF That Came True ... And Three That Didn't.
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI06 Three Predictions from SF That Came True ... And Three That Didn't.
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI05 Frankenstein: Man Made Man
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI04 Asimov 2: Foundation
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI03 Asimov 1: The Robot Laws
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI02 5 Foundational SF Authors You've Never Heard Of
The Learning Hack podcast
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....
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TI01 Amazing Stories Is 100!
The Learning Hack podcast
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...
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TI00 Welcome to The Tech Imaginarium
The Learning Hack podcast
In 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that computers would let every person learn what they wanted, in their own time, at their own speed. Forty years on, that vision is more or less the world we live in. So what else might science fiction have to tell us about the future we're already inside? Welcome to The Tech Imaginarium — a new six-part series exploring how science fiction made the modern world. Co-hosts John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach introduce the season ahead, the texts and authors they'll be reading as "skewed mirrors" of our technological present, and why now is exactly the right moment...
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LH130 Learning Technologies London 2026 Show Special
The Learning Hack podcast
Augmented Workforce, Learning at the Frontline and the Destiny of L&D. For a long stretch, you could skip Learning Technologies for a year and miss almost nothing. Not this year. AI has stopped being something L&D is piloting and started being something the field is rebuilding around — and the conversation at LT26 had a sharper edge for it. In this season finale, John brings back five voices from the show floor and the studio to map what's actually changing: the augmented workforce, the 80% of workers L&D has long ignored, the readiness question nobody wants a straight answer to,...
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LH129 Ripping Scorm with Mike Alcock
The Learning Hack podcast
Your organisation has probably spent years building a learning library. Courses, videos, SCORM files, PDFs — hundreds of them, living in the LMS or scattered across SharePoint. You can enrol in them. You can sit through them. What you can't do is ask them a question and get an answer in seconds, at the moment you actually need one. The knowledge is there. It just isn't retrievable. That's the problem Mike Alcock, founder of Talvi, has set out to solve. In this episode, Mike takes John through how Talvi works. They also cover Mike's own unlikely route into learntech: a Civil Engineering...
info_outlineWhat does it take to change how an industry works — and what happens when it doesn’t change fast enough? Lars Hyland has been asking that question for thirty years, from the early days of interactive multimedia through nearly a decade leading EMEA for Totara Learning, and now at Enlytning, an AI-powered platform helping small businesses close the gap between policy and practice. In this conversation, John and Lars go back to the beginning — to the Epic days, when the e-learning model that now dominates the industry was taking shape around them — and trace a career-long argument about the one thing L&D keeps getting wrong.
They cover the founding of Retenda in 2010 — a learning reinforcement platform built on spaced repetition, a decade before the category existed — and why good timing isn’t enough if the market isn’t ready. They get into the Totara years, open source as a power relationship, and the honest tension in spending nearly a decade championing infrastructure you know is being misused. And they dig into AI: not the conference version, but the harder question of whether the industry is using it to fix a broken model or just to run the broken model faster. Lars’s phrase for the latter — faster garbage in, garbage out — is both a provocation and a diagnosis.
Lars has a view on what he thinks good actually looks like. The question is whether the industry is willing to build it.
TIMESTAMPS
02:12 - Intro
05:05 - The formative years of elearning
17:59 - Why did he found Retenda?
21:35 - The Totara years
25:53 - What happens to open source tech when it goes commercial?
30:21 - Enlytning
40:26 - Compliance & HR
52:17 - Does the SaaS model still have a future?
57:51 - A way to cut down duplication in course catalogues?
01:08:51 - End
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