This Friday Matt "The Law" Lindland, Olympic wrestler and former Republican nominee for the House of Representatives, will be facing off in the Rose Garden against "King" Kevin Casey. Casey is an up-and-coming fighter in the MMA (mixed martial arts) who earned a brown belt under Brazilian jiu-jitsu legend, Rickson Gracie. Exuding extreme intensity over the phone, Casey is confident but humble, refusing to trash-talk Lindland or even name for me anyone, dead or alive, that he would like to fight in the ring: "I've never had the attitude to challenge or issue anything towards anyone who was considered a legend. I like to let the legends live and I just want for my time to be respected as one of the pound-for-pound greats."

King Kevin and Spencer Pratt
  • King Kevin and Spencer Pratt

Matching Casey's confidence and nixing the humility is his promoter, reality-TV personality Spencer Pratt. Knowing of (and fearing) Casey growing up, Pratt also trained under Gracie and holds great affection for the MMA. I got the chance to talk to both men this morning. King Kevin was restrained and gracious, limiting his answers to Friday's fight with a fighter's focus. Pratt, on the other hand, bubbled with enthusiasm and a willingness to talk about anything. Follow the jump for Pratt's views on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, the healing powers of crystals, his political ambitions, Die Hard 4 and so, so much more.

On his client, "King" Kevin Casey:

You'll get me killed to even acknowledge him as a regular civilian. He is the most intense earthling I've ever come across.

On Matt "The Law" Lindland:

I saw that little Strikeforce video where [Lindland] said he was going to fuck Kevin up, something with no class. That's why you're a silver medalist dude, 'cause you have no class. Gold medalists, they shut their mouths. Like, Spencer can have a big mouth because I'm not getting into the ring so I can talk, buddy, but do you understand? I'm not trying to be funny. If it's not too late for this guy to pull out of the fight, as an American citizen I warn him: he is not fighting a human being; King Kevin is on the warpath like an Apache working for Geronimo. God put me in his life to warn people. Kevin always says he feels like he's a hawk. He lets the buzzards fly around him, but the second that buzzard touches him he's going to rip that buzzard's head off. I see him being the most successful athlete. Bigger than Tiger Woods, bigger than Michael Jordan, because he's not going to have fifteen porn stars on text message like Tiger Woods and ruin his career, he's not going to try to play baseball... I see him going straight to the top in all realms.

On his own rise to fame:

When I was twenty I was just finishing USC as a political science major and I took a year off to be the youngest creator and executive producer of a FOX network television show and it was on for two episodes after The Simpsons and before The Family Guy [sic] on Sunday night prime time, Princes of Malibu, but it got canceled because my parents got divorced. I went back to college. 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. I got my own show, a spin-off and it worked and everything but they ended up paying me more to stay.


Princes of Malibu

The Princes of Malibu | MySpace Video

On his foray into cyber-security:

By 2013 the US government alone is going to be putting out almost fifteen-billion dollars in private contracts truly just for me to be hiring guys from MIT to protect our system. Being somebody who's already affiliated with some of the smartest people in the world — one of my advisers is from DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Program Agency, he advises for the Pentagon. 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 — as big as our nuclear weapons, as small as our Twitter accounts. That's going to be one of my major focuses: protecting America and all of our systems.

- 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.

- You could be the Justin Long and Kevin could be the Bruce Willis in that situation.

I wouldn't say King Kevin would want to be in that movie because it could get him in trouble, but he's more of the bad guy. He's so scary he couldn't even be Bruce Willis.

On his burgeoning hip-hop career:

I just do that for fun because I feel that there's no one in hip-hop that deserves to get this money I get. I do exactly what they do. I went and got Steven Moralis who produced “Pop Bottles” for Lil Wayne which is a great club track [Actually it features Lil Wayne but the song is by Birdman — ed.] and hired him and paid him a big check like these guys do to make “I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,” and I just did a catchy hook with a great track and if I put a million dollars of marketing behind it like all these labels do for their hip-hop artists it would be on the radio all the time and people would be like, “I'm a celebrity, get me outta here!” But I do it for fun. I don't think I'm good, I don't think I'm bad, I think everyone is bad and good at the same time, so why not let me put out my own music?

On his experience on the actual show "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here":

It was a hustle! They told me I could quit the day that 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 the song 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 that in other situations?

I'm so hated, 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.

pratt.jpg

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. All Democrat, independent, Republican - all that means nothing to me except right now 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, but I don't need people... you know, it's pretty obvious what Spencer thinks about anything because I feel like I'm so real.

-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... Hilary Clinton... you know, all the G's out in the game. These people work so hard. People say, [high-pitched nasal voice] “Spencer, you're the biggest famewhore, you wanna work and have your hands in all this stuff” - if you Google these guys' conglomerates you'll see they have their hands in everything from plumbing to spaceships. I want to be America's I'll-hook-you-up-with-anything-you-need. I'm the 99 cent shop for America. I want to be the first trillionaire before thirty and I'm twenty-seven in August.

On his spirituality:

You know what, now that I've done my research that [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. I'm the type of person, I'm not going to comment on something I don't understand and crystals I don't understand because the Greeks and Plato and everybody said that crystal was frozen heavens of the Gods. I bought too many rings and wallets. I needed something to become a hobby that was ancient, let's say.

On his hair:

Heidi always has a hair stylist and a makeup person, so once they're done with hair it's always a different — like, either a Japanese guy or a sweet, fruity Italian — they always wanna be like, “Can I do your hair?” and I'm like, “Yeah, go get it.” They're getting paid so I always just let them do what they want. And the reason I don't shave the beard is because the haters love it so much. You can't shave something that gets people talking so much.

Hate on, haters.
  • "Hate on, haters."