Stuff You Should Know - How Internships Work

Episode Date: October 19, 2017

The term intern comes from the medical community, but virtually every industry now uses them. From real world training to coffee fetchers, interns can be used and misused in many different ways. Dive into the world of internships with us today. And for heaven's sake - pay them! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, and I'm Josh Clark, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Hey, intern, this coffee's too hot. You're fired even though it'll pay you. That's pretty much an average Monday for an intern. Can be. Man, when I was researching it, when I was reading this, I was like, oh, okay, this is interesting.

I like all the movie references. It's great. But then when I did some external research too, I was like, whoa, this is like a real social issue that we're facing right now. It totally is. It's like the dirty underbelly. For sure, and it sucks because it seems like there's a significant portion of millennials who are just strapped with this, who are saddled with this.

This is just the way that the career paths have kind of gone, and from doing research, it's our fault. The Gen Xers are the first ones who caved on this, and it just paved the way for it to be the new normal. Did you ever do an internship? No. Me neither. It wasn't like when I was in college 75 years ago, it wasn't that big of a thing.

Of course, it knew of internships, but nobody I knew did one. No, you were basically like a go-getter who was just looking to pad your resume a little bit. Yeah. It was definitely extracurricular. Yeah. It was not super, super common, at least among the people I knew, and we were all just normal average smart college students.

It wasn't like hanging out with the heads by the dumpster, so I didn't know about internships. Right. Well, that's why I didn't know about internships. Well, sure. I'm glad to know that I wasn't missing out though. My mom made me steer clear of guys like you. I know, and now we work together. How about that?

Our fates are intertwined. That's right. Get this check. This is a little statistic. Between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, the percentage of college graduates who'd done an internship went from 10% to 80%. Between when and when? 1980 and the mid-2000s.

Yeah. That's crazy. That underscores what we were just saying. Which is why I threw that out there. You have data to back it up. Yeah. Data, by the way, is plural. Okay.

I just want to make sure that it's set out there. If I stood up in front of my symposium and say, I have a lot of datas for this, I might get left off stage. What symposium are you talking to? The datas symposium. I want to be there. All right. I'll put you on the list.

Okay. I'll bring some pretzels. This article is just so cute because it opens with an episode of Friends, which I don't even remember and I've seen all those, but apparently Chandler got an internship and it led to wacky hijinks. Imagine that. Right. Which is also the plot of every other intern movie or film ever.

Yeah. There's one with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Didn't see it. Me either. There's one with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. I saw just a little bit, just enough of that to know I didn't want to see it. That was shot here in Atlanta, though. Oh, okay.

So you saw it being filmed and you're like, whoa, see you. And everybody on set heard you? Yeah. I think it was at Google, like real Google, not made up Google. I saw a guy the other day, I meant to tell you this, and what city were we just in? Not Lawrence, Kansas, but Austin, Texas. By the way, thank you to those cities and all the others on this most recent tour, which we're winding up here in New York and Atlanta soon.

But big shout outs to Lawrence, Kansas, especially. Love that place. All right. But anyway, I was in Austin and there was a group of tech dudes. In Austin? Yeah. At this restaurant that I was at, having drinks. And one of them, the most obnoxious of the lot, had a Hooli shirt on.

And Hooli is the fake Google-type company from what's it called, Silicon Valley, the TV show. Oh, my. Hooli shirt, and he was the one leading with all the bad jokes, and I wanted to punch him in the face. I've already listened to the show, too, so you've really made your point here. Yeah. You know, if you were in Austin and you have the Hooli shirt, you, sir, have a punch coming.

Yeah. Some of that guy's listening, he's like, well, it's not me. My jokes rock. Yeah. That couldn't be me. Bro. All right. So here's another stat for you.

A 2016 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the NACE. They said more than 72 percent, and this is where it gets a little like, this is actually good information because the whole big question is, are internships worth doing? And they found that more than 72 percent of paid internships did lead to job offers. So that's pretty good. That's a good number right there. I actually saw one from 2013, and it was at 63 percent. So there's an actual.

Getting better? Yeah. It is getting better, which is pretty interesting because that means that it's becoming, I guess, a legitimate career path then rather than just a fake career path. Right. But that is to point out very clearly, paid internships. Paid. Paid internships, which we'll get to, which is basically, to me, a very unethical, illegal

thing to do. Illegal depending on how you're doing it, you can get away with it, but I think completely unethical. You should always pay people to work. Yes. Not exposure. Yeah. Exactly.

Fewer than 44 percent got job offers from unpaid internships, and that is not too far above the 36.5 percent of people who get a job offer with no internship at all. Yeah. So that's about 8 percent more. That 2013 saw that climb too because it was 37 percent got a job offer versus 35 percent who hadn't interned. So it does seem to be having an impact, at least between 2013 and 2016, it's been changing. Yes.

So unpaid internships in particular, I've seen that there is like a whole mentality among millennials entering the workforce who are saying, you know what, I would rather take an unpaid internship in the field that I want to get into in the hopes of getting a good job in that field than to start down a different path in another field that I'm not feeling so hot about and end up getting trapped in there. And apparently they are so dedicated to this idea that people are starting to take like two, three, four unpaid internships in their field in the hopes of making this work. Part of the problem is, that means that you're feeding the gig economy because you're doing

whatever side hustle you can, which, oh man, I hate that term so much, to pay the bills because it just makes it so cool. It's like, no, you're being exploited. That's what it is. It's not a side hustle. It's exploitation. And you're messing up the economy to a certain degree. You're having to carry out gigs to make ends meet or you have some other, you know, a low

paying job that is not so demanding that you can't also do your internship at the same time. Or parents who will just float you. Right. That's a big one too. And so if this is the new career path where you work unpaid internships, two, three, four of them, before you finally get a paying job in your chosen field, and it makes you rely on, say, your parents or whatever, for people who can't rely on their parents, that means

that path to a chosen career is close to them. Yes. They have to just start working immediately. Yes. And that means that it's automatically unfair. So exploitation is leading to unfairness in even more sinister ways as well. Yeah. And that's something that, you know what, because of my privilege, I never thought about.

But if you're out there saying, well, what's the big deal if I want to take an unpaid internship and my parents going to float me to do that and I get the experience and I get a job, like who am I hurting? And you're screwing up the economy and you're creating an unfair system for people that cannot afford to do so. You're part of the problem. And it's not just you millennials, calm down, calm down. This has always been the case with internships, especially unpaid internships, but internships

typically come from connections. Yes. So the more connected you are or your parents are, meaning the wealthier they are, the higher chance you have of getting a plum internship and so advancing along the way. So much so that I was reading this really good article, I would recommend to everybody. It's called The Dream Hoarders, How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality. And it was basically saying that you, anytime you use your outside channel connections, outside of formal networks, your connections to get your kid or your nephew or whoever,

an internship, you are gaming the system and making sure that inequality just perpetuates on and on and on. Yeah. Chronyism, is that what it's called? Yeah, I guess so. And nepotism, both? Sure. Both theisms.

So let's look a little bit about the history of the intern. You need not look any further than the medical community as to where that comes from, that term at least. Because post-WWI, there was a consensus that like, hey, you went to medical school, that was fine. You poked around some dead bodies, you maybe cut a few open, and that's great. You know a lot. But we don't fully feel great about just releasing you into the world as a doctor just yet.

Maybe you should tag along and work as an apprentice of sorts, as a physician in training in a hospital or a physician's office or however you're going to do this. Maybe you should do that. And we're going to call them interns. And that's an internship. They'd been doing this for centuries and centuries. There have been apprentices where you would learn about a trade, and then later when politics came around, you could be an apprentice to a politician and learn about government jobs

and such. But the word intern really comes from medicine. Right. You could be a Sorcerer's Apprentice too. That's right. If your parents would float you. Right. Mickey Mouse's parents were loaded.

At some point though, some companies started to say, hey, I got a great idea. We can actually kind of formalize this informal thing of like, hey, can you get my cousin Biff's kid on this summer as an intern at your company or at your law firm or whatever. We can formalize it by using our connections with other prestigious universities. So prestigious company meet prestigious university. And we want some of your students to come work here for us for free, for free. We just want to make sure that's clear. And in return, why don't you give them like college credit for it?

How about that? And that's when the internship, at the time it was called a co-op, but that's when it really started to develop and spread and catch on. And I think the earliest one was something like 1909 at Northeastern University, which sounds made up. So like from a Jeremy Piven movie or something like that. But it wasn't until the 60s that it really started to catch on. Yeah.

It really started and then took a bit of a dive in the 1960s, 70s and obviously 80s and beyond from your stat. But again, as we said, like even as we're saying like caught on, like you were not in the norm if you got an internship in college. It was still unusual. Yeah. But between 70 and 83, the number of universities offering these co-ops or internships went from 200 to 1,000.

So a big increase to be sure. For sure. Some people still say co-op, although they're probably like in their 70s if they're saying that. Right. They're trying to sound hip. Well, and there's a bit of a difference actually, co-ops, I think usually you would just stop going to school and take a full-time job for a little bit, like up to a year.

It's almost like a work abroad, but you don't leave or guess you could leave. Whereas internships usually, like you said, it's like a summer thing or I'm going to take a semester off and do this kind of deal. Right. Is that right? I believe so. So, well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about whether or not internships are really necessary right after this.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard tree house and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. But yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show HeyDude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so under the banner of this article, do we need internships? They can be super useful. Here's my take on it. If you're going for a science-based job in the STEM field, if you want to be a chemist or a biotechnologist or a neuroscientist or something, you want to work in AI, data analysis,

you might benefit pretty well from doing an internship. Same goes with psychology, political science, economics. A lot of those fields, it can be a good way to get your foot in the door and really learn as a research intern or a laboratory intern. Yeah, because when you enter a profession, there's a lot of stuff that are really peculiar to that profession. It has certain jargon, people tend to work in certain types of groups. They use certain types of software.

And you're making good connections. They use certain types of equipment, that kind of stuff. And so through a formal internship, a real internship, you can learn quite a bit and a lot. So much so that even people who are generally against unpaid internships would say, if that's the type of internship you're talking about, then yes, technically an unpaid internship is acceptable because what you're getting is such unrecreated, real-world experience. Real job training.

That's worth at least as much as you would be paid for doing whatever work they're having you do as well. And this is just me talking here, but my sense and my experience of talking to people and reading about this stuff is that internships with like, and this is not across the board because we have had interns here, not for stuff you should know, but here at How Stuff Works and by all accounts, they obviously were paid and paid well. But I think in every case, I really enjoyed their time and learned a lot. But generally, I think media and entertainment companies are where you are most likely to

be exploited and abused and get less real-world training out of your internship. Yeah, because it's a broad statement, but generally true. They're the ones that are always getting sued by former interns, which is true. We'll talk about it later. And I think one of the reasons why is because some of these, especially like the STEM professions or architecture is a really good example. It has such a long history of internships that there's like a formal process that has been established over the years.

So it would be very obvious to any intern very quickly if they were being exploited instead of actually being trained in the field that they're looking to go into. You're probably not going to go to a science laboratory and have them say, hey, I need you to take my personal laundry to the cleaners after work. Probably not. You'll probably get that from a producer. Right. Exactly.

Or go sit in Selena Gomez's front row seats at this concert because she's going to be a little late. Seriously, I read that. I wanted an article for her. So that means I get to watch the opening band? Pretty much. They're like, yeah, if that's how you want to look at it, sure. I'll look your attitude.

Where'd it go? You're going to go places. That's funny. But yes, with media companies, they're kind of like, hey, we want that too. So I think that they kind of picked up the slack and started twisting what was initially a good thing into something exploitive. Correct. Well, why does Selena Gomez, what's her name?

Selena. You know Selena Gomez, don't you? I take it she's someone famous, but why would she need someone to hold her seat? I wonder that myself. Would she have a sign seat? I, you would think so. But let's say that there's some riffraff who are like, I'm going to sit wherever I want. Sure.

Selena doesn't want to deal with that. Oh, okay. She doesn't want to have to come and be like, excuse me, this is very nice. Excuse me. Gotcha. You're in my seat. So intern, you just go sit there. Yeah, because she can walk up and be like, intern, you can go now.

Yeah, you better not fart. I would fart all over that seat. She'd have the fartiest seat in the joint. She'd have like those cartoon like green like wisps of air coming off of it. All right. So all kidding aside, what you want to do when you get that internship though, if you're looking like some people are just looking for experience. Some people are looking for a job at that company.

Make yourself invaluable like that's true with whatever, whether it's an internship or whether it's your job. Yeah, sure. Always make yourself invaluable. But what you want as an intern is for when you leave for them to go, crap, Sam's gone. Right. Like, where did Sam go? We had Sam doing all this great stuff for us.

Sam's the real intern, remember? I know. Well, it was reminding everybody else. I knew you knew. Yeah. Well, I think people, we might have said this on the air, Sam, who used to send us our podcast topic ideas that one summer, Summer of Sam. And was the bat boy in one episode, the softball episode of our short-lived TV show.

Yeah. I ended up writing a letter of recommendation for Sam for college. He went there and ended up coming back and interning with How Stuff Works this year. And he was shoved by Neri, a How Stuff Works staff member. No. I think Sam had a good time. He had a great time. And I could see Sam coming to work here full-time.

Yep. I mean, that's not a job offer, Sam. I'm not the decider. But it's one of those things, like when Sam or any of our interns, when they leave, you want people to say, oh, well, what do we do now? Because that means that they have a good chance at coming back and working, you know? What does this have to do with Selena Gomez, though? I don't know, because she's probably never an intern, but you know who was an intern?

Bill Gates. Was he really where? I don't know. Oprah? Okay. Oh, you just got a list, huh? Tom Hanks. Yeah.

Brooke Shields. Steven Spielberg. Tom Ford. Yeah. Spike Lee. Tom Ford, huh? Yeah. The fashion industry is like notorious for exploiting its interns.

Yeah. I could see that. So much so that there was a, I can't remember the name of the organization, but it grew out of Occupy Wall Street and they were handing out buttons at Fashion Week that was saying like, pay your interns. Yeah. I don't think it went over all that well. I said, venti, venti.

Right. I wonder how many times that's been screamed. A lot. In a fashion office. A lot. Yeah. A fashion office. Well, yeah.

A fashion office, cow farm. That's my understanding. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit more about paid versus unpaid and get real with some stats. So the NACE that I was telling you about earlier in 2016, they did a internship and co-op survey report and they said the hourly wage average for interns undergrad has been close to the same for about seven years at a pretty good $17.69 an hour. That is not bad for an average for a paid internship.

I was surprised by that. I have never made that much an hour. I wonder what industry is driving that up. I don't know. Because that just doesn't seem, that seems high to me. Maybe us. Well, I mean, you were never paid that because the cost of living was like a third of what it is now.

Yeah, true. When you were at intern age. I think my first job, I was a busboy at JJ's barbecue in Stone Mountain when I was 13. That's awesome. I think it was like $3.35 or $3.75 an hour was the minimum wage. Isn't that crazy? That is so low. That's gross.

You're like, I'm 13 and I live with my parents and I can't even live on this. No, it was pretty great. Like what 13-year-old was making, you know, $60 a week. That's a lot for a 13-year-old. Yeah. In 1983? Man, you could have bought a car for $60 in 1983. Yeah.

I had all the Van Halen albums I could buy. I'll bet you did. I was buying doubles just so I could play Frisbee with them. Nice. So that's paid internships, but as we have been saying, you can get away still with not paying internships. There is a six-point bullet-point list from the Fair Labor Standards Act for private sector for-profit businesses.

Yeah, because we should point out that if you're an intern at a nonprofit, they have no problems with this legally. You're just a volunteer. Right. Exactly. Okay. That's the distinction. Yeah.

Good pointing that out. Thank you. So you can technically not pay, or here are the qualifications to meet for unpaid internship. Number one is internship is similar to training that would be given in an educational environment. Boom. Right there. That's all you need. To learn.

Right there. Yeah. That's the one that's not met, I think, most of the time. What's another one? Another one is that the experience has to be for the benefit of the intern. That's a big one. Yeah, that is a big one. These are all pretty big.

Number three, the intern does not displace regular employees. That is big, but works under close supervision of existing staff. Right. Not like, go make these knock-off Gucci wallets. Right. Here's how you do it, and then we'll see you at the end of the summer. Make 500 of them. Yeah.

You know how to run a sewing machine? Well, too bad because you have to stitch this by hand. What's number four? The employer that provides the training, this is weird, doesn't get any immediate advantage from the activities of the intern, and this is my favorite part. On occasion, its operations may actually be impeded, which is the one that's probably never adhered to. That's the intern rule.

Yeah. No immediate advantage. In other words, it 100% has to be about you giving of yourself to teach the intern. And you're actually putting yourself out by having an intern. Apparently, Gomer Pyle is your intern or something like that. Yeah. Because your operations are impeded. I don't even know if I fully agree with that one, to be honest.

I love that one, though. Number five, the intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the end of the internship. Easy enough. And finally, the employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages. So it's just got to be clear. It's not like after two weeks, you're like, so where's my paycheck? Right. Like, oh, we didn't tell you.

And this is the way that things have been for years and years and years. But then there is something that happened in 2011, and it changed everything. And we're going to talk about that right after this message. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb

her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb, too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So I was saying that in 2011, things changed a little bit, because for years and years, everybody's just like, whatever, everyone knows interns are exploited free labor. Who cares if they want to do it, whatever?

But then in 2011, two interns stood up and said, no, no, and end to this, Eric Glott and Alex Footman both worked for Fox Searchlight Pictures. And I believe they both interned on the film Black Swan in particular, in New York. And they said, you know what, this is total BS, we're employees, we're being worked like employees, this is not an internship, we're going to sue Fox for back wages. And they did, they filed suit against them. And their whole case was based on the idea that everything that they had gotten out of it was the same thing that any entry level employee would have gotten from it.

There was no formal internship whatsoever. They weren't taught anything. There wasn't like any kind of vocational training, nothing like that. They were just basically exploited grunt work, and like I said, they sued Fox and they actually won. Yeah, I mean, I read an article called work is work colon, why free internships are immoral from the Atlantic. And the author said basically, this is a good quote, we accept that they are not salaried

because they are temporary because the work is done by students and not insignificantly for the simple reason that we choose to call them internships, a position we've come to consider unpaid. Like by all accounts, these dudes were PAs. Right exactly. And they thought so too. And a judge actually in 2013 said, you know what, I agree with you. It was in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

The judge said, yep, these guys are right, they were employees, you exploited them, you need to pay them. And he actually came up with a different set of rules, his own test, which is basically like the exact same thing as the other test. Yeah. Well, we'll read through it quickly just because it is a little different. The intern and the employee understand there's no expectation of compensation or job guarantee. Provide similar training to the educational environment.

This one's a little bit different. It's tied to the interns formal education program through integrated coursework or academic credit. Right. That is different. That is significant too. This is aligned with the academic calendar. That's a little different.

And the interns work complements rather than displaces paid employees. Yeah. Right. But he also took out something which was that the employer does not benefit from the internship. Right. Which I guess in some ways at the very least clarifies it or takes out what the judge considered was an impossibility.

Yeah. And made it harder for interns to point to that and say, no, this is, they clearly benefited from it. But they're going to anyway. I think was the judge's point. Yeah. So with ultimately Fox settled in 2016 with these two guys and they have been awarded 400, no, I'm sorry.

One of them was awarded $7,500 and the other one was awarded $6,000 in back pay. And then like I think 98 other interns from Fox Searchlight at the time who joined the class action are getting $495 in back pay each. Good for them. Yeah. It's the point. And they actually, there were huge ripples that went through the industry, all industries that involve interns and just changed things quite a bit.

Well, I saw where one of them, I don't know if it was this case, but one of them was appealing the decision. And I read that and I was just like, are you serious? Yeah. The fact that Fox went for five years arguing against this and they had to pay out $13,500 plus another, I don't know, $5,000, $50,000 even. For paying these kids to work and do a good job. Yeah.

Unbelievable. Yeah. It was a little unbelievable. But again, I think what they were fighting was, no, we really like having free interns. We don't want any of the rules to change. That's ultimately what I think they were fighting. And because of this lawsuit, the rules did change, not with this test that the judge came up with.

Most states still use the original one that we went over. But a lot of companies said, their legal counsel said, hey, your legal exposure has changed now. So you need to reconsider your internship programs. Yeah. And that was just one suit. And in 2014 against Condé Nast, where they paid $5.8 million to settle a class action suit, 7,500 interns got together.

And this is like in the fashion world, like you were saying, they worked for Vogue and Vanity Fair and other magazines like that. And they refused to pay them, like at least minimum wage. And so they, and what was the other one, Viacom, yeah, Viacom, MTV, BET, they agreed to pay about $7.2 million in 2013, MGM paid about $232,000 earlier this year. So again, like I was saying, it's like media and entertainment companies are the ones that seem to take the most advantage. So all of these lawsuits, it was a huge ripple.

And a lot of places like Condé Nast said, we're not doing interns anymore. It's too much legal exposure. Because like some places, like I think NBC News said, we're gonna pay our interns now. And that just kind of was, it's just like flipping a switch, you know, you basically have to do one or another, or there's actually three things that you could do. You could set up a formal internship program that like works with, you know, universities. You can start paying your unpaid interns, or you can just stop your internship program. But the fact that like these two interns like just changed the entire intern economy with

that initial lawsuit in 2011, it's surprising. Yeah, I mean, they're just now they're, if they get, do away with internships, they're just calling them entry level jobs. And so I guess the difference is you can't do that as a student probably, right? What do you mean? Well, do that entry level job, you would have to quit your college probably to do that in most cases. Uh, yeah, I guess so.

But again, there's like, there's another way to do it, which is to actually set up a formal internship program. Right. Which is I think what we have here, right? I would guess so. I actually don't know. I'm just, I would guess just because we're one of the top 100 ethic, most ethical companies in the world.

Yeah. Is that a real ranking? Yeah, I can't remember where it's, I think I saw it on like the side of a Delta jet maybe. Oh, really? Yeah. I saw it somewhere. Nice. Or no, like coffee.

I've seen it somewhere. It's definitely a real thing and how stuff works deserves if you ask me. Yeah, for sure. Uh, so if you do want to take part in an internship because it can lead to jobs, we're not pooping internships, we're pooping non-paid ones. I'm pooping the non-ideal internships where you are learning real stuff that is going to apply to your real career. And that you got based on your merit rather than your parents' connections.

Yeah, that's what we're celebrating here. Yes. So one way to get these internships is to use your parents' connections. Well, it is true though, friends and family and networking, like that's how you get jobs. It's just sort of the reality of life. You know? Yeah. Um, your university professor might can help out, contact the business themselves.

I remember Sam sent an email to us and I said, great, and I sent Sam to, uh, uh, Tamika here in the office who handles that stuff and said, I recommend Sam and he got the gig. So it was through a connection in a way, but it was through a connection he made by being a go-getter and emailing us. Sure. Uh, what else? You can, uh, LinkedIn is a place you can look. Um, there's something called intern tips, intern tips.

That's a great website name. I don't think that's it. Internships.com. There it is. Um, that they call the e-harmony of, uh, internships and media, media bistro. Did you ever look on media bistro for jobs? No, I never heard of that one. Oh, it's all like, all things like writing and movies and, um, oh, like cool jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of internships on there and on our beloved zip recruiter, Chuck, post internship jobs too. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Go out and get one, get, get, get a good one, get it in the right way.

You can learn a lot. There's also, I also ran across some stuff, um, there's like a whole community of unpaid interns, the intern nation, um, and they've kind of come up with like blogs to just commiserate with one another. To vent. I think an intern problems is one of them anonymous production assistant blog and intern anonymous. Those are three, three good ones to start.

I think the last two are mostly associated with like, um, production stuff out in Hollywood. Yeah. But in all seriousness, if you're being exploited for real or taking advantage of for real, I know it's probably hard to speak up because you think like you're in there, you don't want to cause trouble, but, uh, be brave and blow that whistle. That's what I say. You just ruined like five kids lives or made them better. Yeah.

Well, thanks for listening, everybody. This was a tough one. I know, right? Uh, let's see. If you want to know more about internships, you can type that word into the search bar at house.works.com. And since I said that, it's time for listening to me. I'm going to call this secret service is a good one.

Just listen to secret service. Guys want to fill you in on a missing piece. You're joking a little bit about why there weren't younger, more agile secret service agents out there protecting the president, but that's a really important, there's a really important reason for that, uh, that you would need to be older and more experienced in a former job. I used to interact with a security team who had been the presidential protective detail in the white house.

They were the most stoic and tight lipped people I've ever met. Uh, I can imagine, you know, sure. But one of them did occasionally tell the story, uh, about a time where there was a credible threat when their team had to respond quickly. The upshot of the story was that in order to do their jobs, they had to take charge of the president, which meant getting him in a car, rerouting the motorcade against his will. Uh, it's basically like it doesn't matter what the president's saying.

Right. He's superseded that. Wow. Uh, the president was furious and tried to order him to change course, but it later came out that the threat had been real, the decisive action had probably saved the president's life. I don't know, many 27 year olds who would have the Cajones. This is what, uh, anonymous says, did they use J. Yeah. Oh, good.

Go and anonymous instead of what an H. Yeah. Yeah. No, spelled correctly. All right. The Cajones to stand up to a direct order from a sitting president or who would have enough experience to be able to convince the leader of the free world to shut up and get in the car. Don't forget the presidential protective detail is responsible to save the president's

life, which sometimes means saving it from his or her own bad judgment or ignorance. Wow. Uh, love to all anonymous way to go anonymous and also way to go with that or her edition. Yeah. This person, this person's right up our alley. Uh, if you want to get in touch with us like anonymous did, you can join us and Twitter at S Y S K podcast or Josh home Clark. You can check her both, uh, on Facebook and at facebook.com slash stuff.

You should know. You can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works.com. And as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

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