From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

How can you not like a man who's watched whereword seem to be sex, drugs, and Alan Bennett?

It would be my guest, writer, performer, actor, and self-biographer Russell Brand. His book is my book he worked. Russell, thanks so much for doing this.

Well, it's a joy to be here. Thank you. There is a phrase you used early in a book that I think is so loaded

and so descriptive of you. It's a phrase pathologically mischievous. When you stomp, you stomp

to the old gentleman's flowers. Yes, that was naughty of me and regrettable. That has had an

impact on people. Yeah, when I was seven years old, I was instructed not to buy an elderly

neighbour who had

taken an interest in me, a kind of paternal interest, because my own dad weren't around.

He said, oh, look at these flowers, and he explained to me the cycle of life. I think I may be

embellishing this story slightly, but as I recall, he showed me these nasturtions and told me

how they embody beauty and how they were perennial and how they

would always return that some things in life are forever not everything's transient and passing

then as he went off to use the lavatory he said don't stamp on those flowers russell and prior to

that announcement stamping on the flowers had never crossed my mind but after the it had been

articulated it seemed inevitable that i had to stamp on the flowers that i had to crossed my mind. But after it had been articulated, it seemed inevitable that I had to

stamp on the flowers, that I had to fulfill my destiny, my dark destiny, was to tread them

flowers back into the dirt from whence they came, to pound them into yesterday under my sandaled

foot. And I did just that, and then I felt gnaut. There really is that awareness, even at that age, of how there is an astonishing lack of impermanence.

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