I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.

Who's famous anymore? No one. There are these comedians that are famous in a weird way. There are comedians, like Anjelah Johnson and Russell Peters, [who] are unbelievably famous, but in a way they're selling out 1,000-person stadiums.

I would say emotionally we've all turned into these sort of toxic, shallow, angry, polarized demons screaming at each other from across echo chambers. My whole thing is that I'm trying to get underneath the anger into the truth that's underneath it.

Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop.

I'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.

So in that way, fame has become a weirder thing to go after, but the thing about me is I've never been after fame. That sounds cliché, but it's true. I think fame sounds uncomfortable to me, but being able to like write this book and make my living doing very exciting, creative stuff sounds really amazing. It has been really amazing.

I think people are lonely and desperate for attention and unemployed and bored. I don't mean that these are losers that live with their mom, although that is true for many of these people. I think people in general are literally underemployed and lonely and bored in this country because of the economic downturn, and because of the isolation that's available because of the internet. The internet has both freed people up to connect with each other and isolated them.