I am fascinated by Spencer Pratt. It may be fair to say that the breakout reality TV star of The Hills and I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here is famous primarily for being a rich asshole with a questionable grip on reality. It's fair, but an oversimplification; Pratt has built a wildly successful career around just being a rich asshole with a questionable grip on reality.

Pratt—a sports promoter, among other things—talked to the Mercury in support of his client, MMA fighter Kevin Casey, who was in town last week in a match against Olympic silver medalist and Republican House of Representatives nominee Matt "The Law" Lindland. To my delight, Pratt was more than happy to talk about anything I threw at him, from his spirituality to his political aspirations, as well as his bizarre behavior on TV. Below are some of the choicest moments.

ON HIS OWN RISE TO FAME:

SPENCER PRATT: [I] decided college was not meshing well with me and I needed to get my own TV series and the best way to do that was to go get on a boring TV show and show how entertaining I could be. At that time the boring TV show was called The Hills on MTV, so I energetically put myself into all the nightclubs on The Hills and tried to make the best TV I could.

ON HIS EXPRESSED INTEREST IN CYBER SECURITY:

To me, cyber security is like getting to go back to the gold rush. Everything we have in the whole world that we live and breathe is all connected to computers, and the Chinese are hacking us every day. And people don't even realize this—[they're hacking things] as big as our nuclear weapons, as small as our Twitter accounts.

MERCURY: It's like that movie Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard.

Oh, I love Die Hard 4! With the fire sale! Exactly Die Hard 4. That's so real, people couldn't even comprehend.

ON HIS EXPERIENCE ON THE SHOW I'M A CELEBRITY... GET ME OUT OF HERE:

It was a hustle! They told me I could quit the day I got there and that's why I freaked out so crazy! They totally lied to me. You think I'm gonna go live in a jungle for frickin' 30K? Yeah right! But I'll quit the show in five minutes for 30K! So what they did is they knew I was gonna do that, so they dropped me off in the jungle, literally, with no credit card, no wallet, no ID, nothing, and when I quit they said, "You can't quit 'til Wednesday." It's Thursday! I'm like, "My contract says when I quit I can leave," and they're like, "Yeah, well we can't get you out of here, duh-duh-duh-duh." And I'm like, "This shit is kid-nap-ping!" I told the network, I told the producers, I said I'm quitting the second I get to the fricking camp site and I see that there's no five-star accommodations!

So you literally said, "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here."

I wrote [a hiphop track entitled "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here" in which Pratt attacks the show] so they really got the message. I'm a celebrity. For real, I'ma be outta here or there's gonna be a problem in here. They didn't show all the good footage! I was climbing all the palm trees, covering all the cameras with sleeping bags, shutting down production for, like, two days....

Do you ever want to say "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here," in other situations?

I'm so hated that wherever I go it's pretty damn entertaining. Being hated has paid my bills for the last five years. If someone wants to pay me to be liked, then call me up—but right now no one is paying me to be the likeable guy.

ON HIS BURGEONING HIPHOP CAREER:

I just do that for fun because I feel there's no one in hiphop that deserves to get this money I get.

ON HIS POLITICAL AMBITIONS:

I want to be a secretary of defense, director of the CIA, director of NSA... I'm all about war politics. Democrat, independent, Republican—all that means nothing to me except who do we have to battle against to keep freedom in America?

So you're not that interested in domestic policy like illegal immigration or religion in schools?

I mean, I'm interested, but I wouldn't comment on something that I don't live and breathe. Obviously I love our immigrants, the illegals are working hard....

Gun control?

Oh gun control, that's not politics, that's American. It's my Second Amendment, it's not politics. I'm just going off of what I learned in school. I love my guns legally... legal guns. I'll train with professionals but guns are my favorite thing on this planet.

ON HIS ROLE MODELS:

Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, Lou Wasserman... Obama... Hillary Clinton... you know, all the Gs out in the game....

ON HIS SPIRITUALITY:

You know what, now that I've done my research [the word Christianity] has been attached to so much... it's like picking a team now. I don't want to pick a team. I believe that the one God made all the universes, all the realms, all the dimensions, all the Gods—anyone's God! So your God is cool too, because the God I'm talking about made your God... so they're all on the same team. I'm more on, like The Matrix style: I feel like we're all connected like "The One." I would say instead of Christianity I'm a crystal, you feel me? I would never say I'm a Christian again or a Buddhist, because my best friends are, like, Orthodox Jews so you think I'm gonna sit next to two guys and be like, "Oh, you're not going to Heaven because you're going to blah-blah-buh-blah?" That's not me. Any judgment is not me. I'm too crazy to judge anybody.

Can you talk more about crystals?

Once I found out that all of our, like, coolest fighter jets and all the aircraft carriers, radar, and all the spaceships—once I found out that NASA and everybody was using crystals in their computer systems to generate more power, etc.—and then when I realized that my LCD TV is liquid crystal definition and when I realized that my gold Rolex has a crystal running it and that my iPad is just a crystal with, like, crystalline silicone chips, I realized that everything I do and love has to do with crystals. Then I go to, what's the only thing that's always been worth money? Crystals. Diamonds are just crystals and jewels are just crystals. What's something that I can love that will always hold a value whether wealth, energy... they totally give you energy; it's science! They have piezoelectricity frequencies and they can track all this stuff with microscopes.