Evan M Rose.

If you want kids to come to your class, you want em to get excited for this? You gotta come in here, you gotta make them excited.

You gotta take this job serious. This is the future of this nation.

This is my country’s future and my education.

‘Fat’ is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her.
I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain…

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’

‘Well,’ I said, slightly nonplussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’

What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.

Marc Andreessen: …Education — there is actually going to be more and more. So actually companies are going to get a lot more interested in education for two reasons.

Number one is, a lot of companies need to actually educate their customers or their partners, and a lot of that has to happen online.

And then the other thing is companies are having — if you talk to anybody running a company, they are having real trouble hiring enough qualified people. So companies are going to have to take a more direct role in educating the candidates or educating their current employees.

So the sort of model of employees just show up and they are either educated or they are not is not working very well. There’s lots of mismatches. It’s one of the reasons unemployment is running as high as it is, is people just don’t have the skills they need for the jobs.

So I think employers are going to have to get a lot more actively involved in making sure that the supply of candidates is actually educated and that they can hire somebody who doesn’t yet know what they need to know and actually educate and train them, and a lot of that is going to happen with the new technology.

So we have this company Udacity as an example, that’s going to be, I think, important in all of that.

Alexia Tsotsis: I think the model there is if someone shows up and they have got 80 percent of the skills.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, let’s teach them — right, exactly, the employer says let’s teach them the other 20 percent. And it’s like, well, instead of literally sending them to college, which presumably didn’t work the first time around or whatever, let’s just go ahead and provide them with the online training. Let’s set them up with their tablet at home with high-definition video. They can develop their remaining skills, or be able to retrain people once they are in the jobs.

The other is there is this real issue, like for some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe.

So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t, and so then they have got sort of two choices.

One is, do they start to basically be a lot rougher with their — they start to do a lot more layoffs, a lot more restructurings. I remember IBM — I don’t think IBM had a layoff for 50 years. And I was actually at IBM — I was an intern at IBM when they were ramping up for their first layoff I think they had ever done, and, like, the level of freak out in the company was beyond belief. And people had no idea what to do if they got laid off from IBM. And it turns out their skills weren’t actually very useful to work for any other company, because IBM was so unique in how it ran.

So I think the companies have a real question about how do they develop their workforces, how do they make sure that their employees stay relevant for the purpose of staying inside a company for a longer period of time? And then how do you get the workforce over time to be a lot more flexible and adaptable, so that if you have to layoff a ton of people, or if you have to get out of a line of business, or if you have to expand into a new business, how do you get your current employees to adapt better to that?

Alexia Tsotsis: Do you think that’s the most ripe-for-disruption area in the enterprise currently?

Marc Andreessen: I don’t know if it’s the most, but it’s a big issue for every company. It’s a big issue for companies, because companies have hundreds and thousands of employees, it’s like, yeah.