Dexter Filkins
speaker
521 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Dexter Filkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, they used to be really strict about it. You know, you just couldn't have any kind of visible tattoo on your body, but also you As it was explained to me, there's a whole range of prohibited tattoos. So you can't have a gang tattoo. You can't have like a white supremacist tattoo. You have these, you're gone. And so they've had to modify those, not as regards—
gang tattoos or white supremacist tattoos, but you can have, and you know, just because so many people have tattoos now, but like you can have a, I think you're allowed to have like a small tattoo in your neck, like behind your ear. You can have one on your hand that's kind of visible. So to me, what was interesting about the tattoo question is that
Now Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has a couple of tattoos, which I think he might have been – it's very hard to track this down, but he was in the Army and the Army Reserves and the National Guard for a long time. So it's not exactly clear when he got his tattoos, but he's got two tattoos that I think if you tried to get in now with those tattoos, they wouldn't let you in.
Or if you got them when you're in, they'd throw you out because they're associated with – white supremacist groups. And so, for instance, when I think Hegseth was going to be present, his unit was going to help kind of keep order at President Biden's inauguration, one of his fellow soldiers complained about those tattoos and Hegseth was ordered to stay home.
So he's like right on the edge on those, you know, our own secretary of defense.
One is the Jerusalem cross and the other is this kind of saying, Deuce Vault, which the latter I think was popular in the – the saying was popular in the Crusades. But they're associated – they've been associated with kind of Christian nationalist and or white supremacist groups.
Yeah, I think he said they're just Christian symbols. You know, they're harmless.
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's see how far Exeth gets down that road. I think he'll probably fail. But yeah, like I talked in the story. She's quoted in the story. I talked to this woman. female F-18 pilot. And, you know, boy, she was impressive. You know, an F-18, they're based on an aircraft carrier, and she was like a top gun. And really impressive.
You definitely want her with you if you're flying into battle. But I think the Look, I think the military wants everybody they can get. I think there's a debate about – and this is kind of – this is normal and natural. But it's like we'll take women if we don't have to relax our physical standards to do it.
Like if you can do the push-ups and you can do the pull-ups and you're a female, we don't care. You can come into the combat unit. But if you can't, you can't. Most women can't. But I think, yeah, Hesketh has basically said, yeah, I want them all out. My guess is he's going to fly right into a storm if he tries to do that.
There's a lot on offer. It's, you know, they'll... In most cases or in many cases, they'll pay your student loans off. If you join, they will send you to college if you want to go. They'll send you to med school. They'll send you to dental school. 20 years in the military and then you can retire. So imagine that if you're 39 years old or 38 years old, you can retire at half salary.
You can qualify for subsidized mortgages. You can qualify for subsidized child care. It's a good system. I mean, it really is. I mean, you got to give up a lot of your freedom to join the military. But if you're willing to do that, they will definitely take care of you.
I don't think they can. I mean, I don't think they can because so they're, you know, they're paying to pay a lot more than they used to. And they they're paying really big bonuses. I mean, I think I talked to and this is how hard it is for the military. So I had a long conversation with. a submarine commander, a nuclear submarine commander. He runs a nuclear reactor that's on board the submarine.
And I can't remember if the missiles that were on that submarine were also nuclear, but he's running a nuclear reactor. He can go out in the private sector and make way more than he's making in the military. And I interviewed him. He was interesting because he decided to stay in. They gave him...
The Navy, to keep him, to reenlist for, you know, five or six years, they gave him, I think, a $200,000 or $250,000 signing bonus, like spread out over. It was like $50,000 a year for five years extra, like on top of his pay. So it's like, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like the NFL, but it's, if you get a signing bonus.
So, and they're paying, you know, you can be 18 years old or 17 years old, sign up for the military, right? And you get $50,000 cash in hand. And if you're 17 years old, that's a lot of money. So they're laying out the money to get people to join. And that's why personnel costs are so expensive, because there's no draft. And so the military is in the private sector competing for talent.
And so when the military is getting more complicated every day, I mentioned the example of nuclear reactors that you have to be able to run. And then there's cyber warfare, there's cyber defense, there's radar systems. Stuff is super complicated. And those are smart people and they have to be really smart. And so the military literally goes to places like MIT to recruit people.
And so they're competing with companies that can pay a ton of money. And so they try to offer, you know, like various, you know, we'll give you a bonus. Well, you know, you can retire in 20 years and all that. But I think it's fair to say the one thing they can offer that no one else can offer is adventure.
And so, you know, like I was talking to the F-18 pilot and she was saying, yeah, I love my job. You know, I'm a carrier pilot. And I fly an F-18 and I can fly, you know, 1,500 miles an hour and can't get that anywhere else. You know, or the submarine commander I talked to, he said, look, I'm working with some of the smartest people in the world that are running this submarine force.
And he's like, I'm not a cubicle guy. You know, I want... I want to be out there. And that's what the Army and the Navy and the Air Force can do for it.
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