This season has mostly been about AI. When Erica Farmer came on the show in September, she named Liggy Webb as the person she turns to when she wants “a non-AI view on things”. So we asked her on.
Liggy Webb is founding director of The Learning Architect, a consortium of behavioural skills specialists, and has worked for many years as a consultant to the United Nations. She has written around forty books, many of them bite-sized, on resilience, wellbeing and life skills. The latest is a trilogy on being human. In this conversation she explains why she calls herself a life sceptic rather than an AI sceptic, and why critical thinking may be the one skill everyone needs now. She defends bite-sized learning against the charge of superficiality, answers the criticism that resilience training asks people to put up with a broken system, and argues that our imperfections are where our originality comes from. And we disagree, a little, about empathy.
With thanks to our sponsor, iVentiv.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
- Liggy Webb: https://www.liggywebb.com/
- The Being Human series (Authentically Human, Curiously Human, Socially Human): https://www.liggywebb.com/being-human-series/
- Liggy’s bite-sized books: https://www.liggywebb.com/bookshop/
- Liggy Webb, Resilience: How to cope when everything around you keeps changing (Capstone, 2013)
- Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, “AI as Normal Technology” (Knight First Amendment Institute, 2025): https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
- Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
- James Wallman, Stuffocation: Living More with Less (Penguin, 2015)
- Robert A. Bjork and Elizabeth L. Bjork, “Desirable difficulties in theory and practice” (2020): https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2021/01/RABjorkELBjorkJARMAC2020ForPostingSingleSpaced.pdf
- LH131 AI for People People with Erica Farmer: https://learninghack.libsyn.com/lh131-ai-for-people-people-with-erica-farmer
- LH132 Your People Are Fine: It’s The System That’s Broken with Robin Hoyle: https://learninghack.libsyn.com/lh132-your-people-are-fine-its-the-system-thats-broken-with-robin-hoyle
- Sponsor: iVentiv, https://iventiv.com/
- Subscribe to The Learning Hack: https://linktr.ee/learninghack
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction 03:54 AI as a bicycle: what it does to our minds 05:48 Liggy’s story: L&D, the UN and human resilience 08:29 Forty books, and why bite-sized? 13:14 A life sceptic, not an AI sceptic 17:52 Friction, automation and confidence 20:21 What humans bring: imperfection and originality 22:42 Creative writing: where does it come from? 25:07 A word from our sponsor 25:52 Is resilience training just coping with a broken system? 30:05 Core skills for the AI era 32:17 Hope, and planting a cherry tree 33:54 End-of-the-world talk and transhumanism 35:35 Work, leisure and purpose 37:12 What should we automate? Over-choice and the bandwagon 40:30 Looking ahead: the skill we’ll be glad we kept 41:30 Is empathy overrated? 45:38 Liggy’s novel 46:35 The book she’d hand her younger self 48:58 Wrap-up
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