The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.

Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.

For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.

There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.

Most of my stuff hasn't gone viral. I have been successful on YouTube and I'm very proud of the stuff that I've done, but compared to the people who are actual internet stars and making a living off of it, my views are nothing.

Taking new technology and incorporating into how people work and live is not easy.

The thing is, there are so many different ways to make music these days with virtual instruments, software applications, physical instruments, and computer programs.

I buy a lot of books I've found via the Internet, whose existences I'd otherwise never have known about.