Seth Hart, welcome to the Empire Files.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, I recently finished your book, the new book, The Fort Bride Cartel, amazing read.

It's, you know, not just this important feat of journalism, but I highly recommend it to everyone because it's just a really exciting read.

Like, I find at times it reads like a spy novel or crime fiction,

but also has some really bigger picture stuff, I think, is very important.

So congratulations on finishing it and publishing it.

You know, there is a, there's a lot of really sensational stuff in this book, right?

You got lots of cocaine. You got murder of soldiers and even

a beheading of a soldier. You have like soldier run illegal clubs run out of a warehouse with a

vibrator seat used for drugs and for rape. You have dogs with titanium denture implants given the brains of enemy combatants as a treat

when they've been a good boy, not coming from the loser regular army, but the most elite and

well-funded unit of the entire Department of Defense. It's all a really wild ride and, like I said,

a really massive feat of journalism. But for me, this book,

like on an equal level is a story about U.S. foreign policy and the new reality the War on

Terror has created. You know, there's so many ways that the world was left a worse place

by the global war on terror. And this story is just one of those ways.

Thousands of men turned into heartless assassins or a safe space for people who joined

because they already were, who are given the money, the skills, and really total freedom

to live out whatever fantasies they wanted abroad, which they unleashed first on people of Iraq and Afghanistan,

but then on the people of Fayetteville, North Carolina, including their own families.

And throughout the story, you know, I saw the parallels you made with the growth of J-Soc units

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