Episode 139: Changing Hollywood’s Car Culture with Ed Begley Jr. 

 

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Doug Gordon: Hey everybody, before the episode gets going, we wanted to let you know about a big event we’re really excited for. On Friday January 31, The War on Cars will be appearing live on stage at Hunter College in New York City with our friend Ray Delahanty. You might know him as CityNerd on YouTube. We are huge fans of Ray’s videos and know a lot of our listeners are too, and this is gonna be a fun, informative and inspiring night.

Doug: Right now, presale tickets are available only to Patreon supporters and alumni of Hunter College. For access, go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and sign up today, starting at just $3 per month. Not only will you get the chance to purchase tickets before they go on sale to the general public, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content, ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts and more. This is a great time to sign up to support The War on Cars as we’re now offering discounted annual memberships. If you’d still like to pay monthly, we are also offering a discount off your first month through the end of the year. If you’re already a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars or CityNerd, you can go get your tickets right now. We are so looking forward to seeing you and CityNerd in New York City on January 31. Thanks a lot!

Sarah: This episode was produced with the generous support of the William and Helen Mazer Foundation.

Doug: Here’s a funny story. I was in Los Angeles to record a few episodes of the podcast. Before I recorded the interview you’re about to hear, I arranged to meet our audio producer Avishay Artsy at a coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. Even when I’m in a place like LA, I am committed to being as car free as possible, and had chosen my hotel based on its proximity to Ed Begley Jr.’s house. So I leave the hotel, I plug in the address of the coffee shop into my phone, and I start walking.

Doug: After crossing one busy and dangerous road, I found myself in a really pleasant residential neighborhood, mindlessly following the directions on my phone. It was actually a really nice walk, but the only other people I saw who weren’t in cars were landscaping crews or contractors renovating homes. You know, there’s that old new wave song, “Walking in LA” by the band Missing Persons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Missing Persons: [singing] Walking in LA. Walking in LA. Nobody walks in LA.]

Doug: Yeah, this was that. After a little bit, I did see one person walking out of his front door and down to the end of his driveway to his mailbox. Turns out it was Ed Begley Jr. Before the interview, we had only communicated by email, so I introduced myself, had a brief and really lovely conversation with Ed, and then told him I’d be back shortly. It was the kind of serendipitous moment that can only come when you aren’t in a car. And it was the perfect way to meet Ed Begley Jr. for the first time, especially in a city like Los Angeles. Ed Begley Jr. has had a career that spans decades and genres, although he’s probably best known for his work in comedy. I’m a big fan of his appearances in the Christopher Guest-directed mockumentaries like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, A Mighty Wind: The nachas that I’m feeling right now because your dad was like mishpocha to me. When I heard I got these tickets to The Folksmen, I let out a geschrei and I’m running with my friend, running around like a vilde chaye right into the theater in the front row. So we’ve got the shpilkes, because we’re sitting right there. And it’s a mitzvah what your dad did, and I want to try to give that back to you. Keinehora, I say, and God bless him.]

Doug: Other people might remember him as Dr. Victor Ehrlich from the 1980s NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, St. Elsewhere: “Ehrlich, you’re a pig.” That’s very original. They didn’t even spell Ehrlich right. This is not funny. Whoever is doing this, is not funny anymore. Enough’s enough. I’m not an animal, I’m a man!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, St. Elsewhere: If anybody here agrees with that, please oink.]

Doug: More recently, he’s been on Young Sheldon as the physics professor Dr. Grant Linkletter.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: Sheldon, there’s a wait list of students who’ve applied for that position. I just can’t give you special treatment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: Not with that attitude.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: Tell you what, I’ll think about it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: Should I come back or should I wait?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: Come back.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: I’ll wait.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Young Sheldon: I thought about it. No.]

Doug: Ed has really deep roots in Hollywood. His father, the actor Ed Begley, won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1963 for the film Sweet Bird of Youth. Ed Begley Jr. gets into all of this in his memoir, To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step On It! It documents his life, his activism and his career, one that has made him beloved by movie and TV fans, while also making him a bit of an iconoclast. That’s because ever since he got started in show business, Ed Begley Jr. has spent his career pushing back against conspicuous consumption and car culture. And that’s no easy feat in an industry where fancy cars are synonymous with success and status. 

Doug: Ed has been a lifelong public transit enthusiast, and he’s rather famously ridden a bike or taken the LA Metro to multiple Academy Award ceremonies—something we talk about in the interview. He’s also had one kind of electric vehicle or another for a lot longer than most people even knew EVs existed—another thing you’re gonna hear about. There are countless other ways in which Ed Begley Jr. has dedicated himself to environmental conservation, including with his LEED-certified home. And he graciously offered me a tour.

Doug: Let’s do it. Wow, that was fast.

Ed Begley Jr.: Perfect timing.

Doug: Perfect timing. Good to see you again.

Ed Begley Jr.: Yes, good to see you again. I’m Ed. Welcome.

Doug: This is Avishay.

Ed Begley Jr.: Come on in. Make yourself at home.

Doug: Thank you.

Ed Begley Jr.: Welcome to my LEED Platinum home. Well, here’s the best place to start. Come over here. This—the picture is worth a thousand. The main point total that you get for the LEED points you need is from something called the ‘envelope’ of the house. Look at here, this way, the way I’m looking to the west. It’s 12 inches between the inside, the drywall there and the stucco on the outside. There’s seven layers and it’s 12 inches. So with that kind of insulation, 12-inch thick, you have a very tight envelope, they call it, of the house.

Ed Begley Jr.: All of these are double pane windows in every window in the house. So you have tremendous efficiency. There’s four zones, one, two, three, four. Two in the bottom, two in the top. And then you can really be specific. My wife might want it cooler than I would want in my room, in the bedroom, you know, I mean, in my office there. And you can do that. She can have it one temperature, and my daughter can have it another. My wife yet another. So that’s very efficient. And a high SEER rating, you know, for all the heating and air units, and nine kilowatts of solar on the roof. And also two big 4’x10′ solar panels, you know, for hot water. Come out here and I’ll show you some more.

Ed Begley Jr.: I grow a fair amount of my food here. I’m kind of between crops, but had a lovely tomato crop this summer. And we’ve had lots of other lettuces and what have you. And I’m just now starting to plant things again. I make compost back there. Also this pool, my wife very much wanted to keep a pool. There was a pool on site, but it was a weird geometric shape, and it was under that oak tree there so it wasn’t getting a lot of heat from the sun. So I said if we can move it over to the west a little bit, make it into a rectangle so we can cover it—the weird shape you couldn’t really cover easily—so then it’ll get some heat.

Ed Begley Jr.: It still wasn’t warm enough. I said, “You gotta meet me halfway, honey. Give me an area so I can put some solar panels, like over the garden area for some shaded crops or what have you, you know, like a little—some solar panels in the backyard to heat the water.” She says, “No, I don’t like the look of them.” Okay, what am I gonna do? She wants a warmer pool. We put black tubing on the back of the photovoltaics. Not the front side, you would block the sun. But the back gets nearly—oh, wow!—as hot as the front. You know, you could burn your hand if you touch a black car out in the sun. Wow, that’s hot! The back, the flip side of that car, that solar panel is every bit as hot as the front. So if you put black tubing in the back, this pool is, I think, about 91 degrees now. All from what would be wasted heat. And also, if you know about solar electric panels, they get inefficient when they get too hot. You gain a 15 percent efficiency by cooling them off without water and using it to your advantage in a pool.

Doug: Wow.

Ed Begley Jr.: We got olives here. I cure my own olives. Lots of fruit trees for fruit you can eat. All the fruit trees get their water from a greywater system. Come with me and I’ll show you my guilty pleasure. I do have a car, and it’s down the list of my transportation hierarchy, but occasionally I have to use it. You’re probably wondering what is my transportation hierarchy.

Doug: Yeah. I was gonna ask what is your—if you had to rank, what would it be?

Ed Begley Jr.: Number one is walking. I quite deliberately for a long time in my life have lived in areas where I knew I could walk to things like the bank and the post office. Walking is number one. Bike is number two. Public transportation is number three. Electric car is number four. And a distant fifth, I try not to ever do it, is flying. I try not to fly. And I’m pretty good now with these longer-range electric vehicles. I can do that.

Doug: Did you choose the location of this house based on proximity to transit?

Ed Begley Jr.: Transit, all of that. Definitely. Based on, you know, where the nearest transit was.

Doug: Because the bus stop and the metro is not that far from here. I walked from my hotel.

Ed Begley Jr.: Exactly.

Doug: Yeah.

Ed Begley Jr.: Very easy. So because you get LEED points for that specifically where you’re home, how close it is to transit. Come out here. I’m 75 years old now. Sometimes there’s a hill or a time of day or I don’t have the strength to ride that I used to. So I get a little help here. I got an e-bike. And you can set it very low, which I like to keep it at so I’m still doing a lot of the work. But if I need help I can put it on high, and you could just press the pedal and go on a nice e-bike. So that’s pretty handy. And also here, I wanted to have power available to me if there’s an earthquake or something else where I lost power from the utility. So I have this now as backup power to these Tesla power walls. But more importantly, it makes your power bill a lot less. Why? Because you can shave off 100 percent of your expensive use from 1:00 to 5:00 pm. You know, that peak power, it’s very expensive for an electron at a DWP or any utility across the nation, the ones that have time-of-use meters.

Ed Begley Jr.: And so because of that, I no longer ever buy 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm expensive power. I buy very, very little, mid-peak power. Very little of that. I mean literally, like, $8 a month or less than that. $5 a month, if that. And so all the power that I do buy is after 8:00 pm and before 10:00 am. And most importantly, when I do buy power, I pay—happy to pay it—three cents extra per kilowatt hour to get 100 percent green, that’s coming from wind, solar, geothermal. So it’s every bit as green as the solar panels on my roof that are charging my car and running my house right now.

Doug: Amazing.

Ed Begley Jr.: So these things are possible with today’s technology.

Doug: Amazing.

Doug: Ed Begley Jr. was an excellent host, and we sat down at his kitchen table for this interview.

Doug: Ed Begley Jr., welcome to The War on Cars.

Ed Begley Jr.: Thanks so much, Doug. Thanks for being part of this, allowing me to be part of it.

Doug: Well, I feel like you’ve been a warrior for a lot longer than we’ve ever called anything the war on cars. I was telling a bunch of people that I was coming to do this interview, and I was talking to one environmental activist and she said, “Oh, you know, Ed is probably the most famous person who’s had an electric vehicle the longest.” Which puts you in a sort of category above and beyond a lot of other people we’ve had on the show. So we’ll get into that. I also—my son will kill me if I don’t mention this. He’s 11 years old, and he just binged Young Sheldon.

Ed Begley Jr.: Fantastic. I love that show myself. I’m a viewer as well as a participant.

Doug: [laughs] And my mother and my in-laws are also big fans, of course, of St. Elsewhere. Our editor, Ali, she was like, “Oh, ask him about Spinal Tap!” You know, the little brief moment that you’re in Spinal Tap as the first drummer who dies.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: Your first drummer was …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: Brown Stampy Peeps. Great, great tall, blonde geek with glasses.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: Good drummer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: Great look, good drummer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: What happened to him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: He died. He died in a bizarre gardening accident some years back.]

Ed Begley Jr.: Happy to talk about that fine film. That was a great movie. The first mockumentary that I know of, and it was very well done.

Doug: And you’re in it for a brief moment, but there’s just something about that Beatles-esque scene. It’s so great.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Spinal Tap: [singing] Stop wasting my time. You know what I want. You know what I need. Oh, maybe you don’t. Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything? Give me some money. Give me some money.]

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah, they have their kind of mop top look, you know, reminiscent of other groups. You know, Herman and the Hermits and those groups that started “Ferry Across the Mercy” kind of stuff. And Chris Guest and Harry Shearer, Mike McKean. Rob Reiner called upon me to be the drummer. I jumped at the chance because I love those guys. Anything they’re doing, I want to be part of.

Doug: So there’s another movie I think that people might not know as well that you are in. It’s a great movie, Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, which is definitely related to the war on cars because it’s all about Detroit and the auto industry.

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah. And a lot of corruption that has occurred there over the years. And hopefully is a lot better now, but it certainly was prevalent back when we made that in 1977. The great Paul Schrader. He’d written Taxi Driver. He’d written—what else had he written? He’d written—I think he wrote Raging Bull. Yeah.

Doug: Yeah.

Ed Begley Jr.: That came out maybe a few years after that. Yeah, I think that Raging Bull came out after that. I think he might have written it just around or before that. Great director, great writer, great friend. He was certainly one of the best things that ever happened in my career. He got me more work than any agent ever got me in the ’70s. He just kept putting me in these wonderful movies.

Doug: So there’s a funny story you tell in the book about filming that movie is that the auto companies read the first 10 pages of that script—the Big Three—and they said, “No way. You’re not filming this in Detroit in one of our factories.” So you filmed it at the Checker Motor Company in Kalamazoo. What was that like?

Ed Begley Jr.: It was a—it had an assembly line. You know, they’re putting out Checkers. They weren’t putting out, you know, Impalas or, you know, Chevy Vegas or something. They were putting out cars I’d seen many times in the streets of New York, those Checker kind of well built, sturdy cars, if you will, that could withstand a lot of taxi fares and a lot of trips around pothole Manhattan. But it was—yeah, it was quite an experience to be that close to the people doing that kind of difficult and dangerous work.

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Doug: I want to talk a little bit about, of course, your activism. We’re gonna get into that, both environmental and general political activism. But let’s talk about the book. It’s called To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step On It! I wonder, since this is The War on Cars, if we could start with your own relationship with cars. This being Los Angeles, of course, cars are this backdrop in your story. The one particular one I want to talk about is—well, you start basically with Christmas Eve, 1973, and a crash that you got into. I think you’re on your way to the Troubadour or from the Troubadour?

Ed Begley Jr.: Right, right. That’s correct. 1973. Yeah. There in Pasadena. Yep. I was going to the Ice House in that case, and I got in a terrible wreck there between shows that I was doing at the Ice House in Pasadena. I also got in another wreck on Sunset Boulevard in ’75, Christmas Eve, 1975, where I smacked into some cars that were stopped at a green—at a red light, and I was so out of it, I wasn’t even paying attention to the color of the lights and rammed some people. Thank God I didn’t kill anybody.

Doug: You had been living in Boulder, Colorado, where you got around by bicycle.

Ed Begley Jr.: Right.

Doug: And you moved to LA. And this is pretty early. And you buy a Karmann Ghia because you basically say it’s a small, fuel-efficient car, sort of the best you can get at the moment. And that particular crash, you’re T-boned by the driver of an Oldsmobile. There’s something about your description that I feel like it’s almost like that crash was a precursor to what we’re dealing now with the arms race of giant SUVs versus everybody else. You talk about the Oldsmobile as “a burly American,” which I thought was a really great description, and the Karmann Ghia as, like, the small European, the small German. But you were profoundly injured in that crash.

Ed Begley Jr.: I had a fractured femur. That’s the biggest bone in the body. You know, it’s hard to break. And when you do, it’s quite serious. And I was in traction for six weeks, then a body cast for eight weeks after that. So 14 weeks of the knee being immobile is not good for your knee. So I’ve had a certain amount of trouble with my left leg since 1973.

Doug: And you talk a lot about your friend Bruno Kirby coming to visit you in the hospital, bringing you your mail almost every day, checking in on you and sort of that community that was forged through your acting and your comedy career, and how important that was to you.

Ed Begley Jr.: Bruno was a very important part of my life. The great Bruno Kirby, a great actor and a great friend. You know, prior to that, my dad was a very good father, and I certainly needed some help in the, you know, kind of toughening up or getting stronger to deal with life category. But it was a little more Darwinian around my house than it was around Bruno’s. His dad had other ways of teaching things. I knew his dad very well, too. But Bruno, he was all about loyalty and help, being of service and what have you, and I just never thought of things that way. My dad was of service in many different ways, but I just—you know, I was a teenager when a lot of this started to take hold of my life. And I just didn’t have a lot of gratitude. And I didn’t—it was just survival of the fittest. And Bruno taught me loyalty, and he taught it by just doing it. You know, the things he did for people other than myself were extraordinary. What he did for me was extraordinary. And, you know—and I learned a lot from Bruno. As much as I learned from any relative, I learned from Bruno Kirby, a great guy and a great actor.

Doug: So getting back to that crash, there’s a moment that you talk about where you’re shooting a scene with Jack Nicholson in the 1977 film Going South that he directed.

Ed Begley Jr.: Correct.

Doug: And you talk about how you can’t quite tap into something in that scene. You’re having a hard time really making some sort of connection in the scene. And Jack Nicholson says something to you about terror, and to tap into something that makes you afraid. And you actually talk about tapping into that crash where you broke your femur. And you write that you decided to, “make terror my friend,” which I thought was a great line and an interesting philosophy, both for acting and for life. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Ed Begley Jr.: Happily. That was a big moment. What happened years before that certainly paved the way for that. I had learned finally in 1970, after three years of being in Screen Actors Guild and working and not getting fired once, I had no idea what I was doing. I took very few acting classes, took a few, but didn’t really know what I was doing, and somehow didn’t get the ax from anybody. But after three years—and it was on the show Room 222, which I did about six episodes of the course of a few years. So I’m with a gang of people I’m starting to get comfortable with. And I finally then had an amazing leap forward as an actor. I became comfortable around the camera, so I then spent the next decade pretty much being comfortable around the camera. And comfort is not something you want to see in every play, in every movie and every TV show that you’re doing. You want to see some discomfort as well. People can get comfortable by the end of the story, if that’s even the way you plotted it out, but to have somebody just relaxed and comfortable all the time is not very interesting to watch. But that’s what I did. That was the service that I provided in many of the films. I’ve looked back at them and thought, “Oh, I’m kind of relaxed in everything I do.” Not good enough. And it wasn’t good enough for Jack. You know, the guy that, you know, wanted a chicken salad sandwich, but he’d hold the chicken, you know?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: You’ve got bread and a toaster of some kind.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: I don’t make the rules.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: Okay. I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. I’d like an omelette, plain. And a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: A number two. Chicken sal sand, hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee. Anything else?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: Yeah. Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Five Easy Pieces: I want you to hold it between your knees.]

Ed Begley Jr.: And the rumor has it that he actually did that at the place, The Brasserie there on Sunset. Something went wrong between the server and Jack, and he got a little physical with a few things. That’s the way I’ve heard it. I should ask him. I never asked him. I just heard through Carol Eastman or somebody that it was based on a real thing. And he could certainly tap into that and America responded, you know, with the great movies, Five Easy Pieces, and, you know, he just did one great movie after another after Easy Rider. You know, he was just an amazing—and is an amazing—actor, an amazing friend, and he taught me to tap into that something. Whatever way you come up with it was fine by him. Tap into your past. Fine. Just make me—you don’t have to become the King of England. Make me believe you’re the King of England. And so any way you want to do that. And tapping into past experience helped me, and it certainly has helped him. And I tried to be a better actor. I’ll never be anything like what he is, but I became a better actor on that set as well.

Doug: And you also write in there—and I think this really does relate to activism in so many ways, because I know people who have lost children in car crashes and become activists, or experienced all kinds of tragedy and turned it around into something positive. And you had an acting teacher who said the most interesting thing to watch is how a character deals with pain. I’m reading the book as an activist thinking, “Oh, man, I just know so many people who they have these incredible stories where they’ve taken pain and they’ve turned it into something different.” And how they’ve dealt with it and how they’ve gotten to this place of using that pain as a source for good in their life is one of the most interesting things about—it’s not everything that defines them, but it’s one of the most interesting things about them. How does that serve you as an—not just as an actor, but as an activist?

Ed Begley Jr.: It dawned on me that that was a very common trait in the things that I liked. You know, what I liked about Sophie’s Choice, what I liked about any of Jack’s movies we just mentioned, what I like about Joaquin Phoenix, what I like about Daniel Day Lewis, what I like about Elizabeth Moss, Meryl Streep in anything. You know, these great actors, they have a way of showing you how their character, how Sophie is dealing with pain. What happened to this woman, you’re thinking. What happened? Something happened to this woman, Sophie, and I sure hope I learn what it is by the end of the movie. And then you do. You see what her choice was and how horrible that was.

Ed Begley Jr.: And, you know, when you look at what some parents have to deal with in life, a kid gets sick, sick with cancer, sick with, you know, worse, if it’s possible. The kids that died at Sandy Hook, you know, and the parents having to deal with that, you just—it’s unimaginable pain. And I don’t—I’m not suggesting you trifle with that, but certainly, whatever pain you have in life that you’re able to deal with and stay alive yourself in these kind of more manageable areas that I found myself in, I was able to tap into that and use it to get better as an actor, to improve. And I sure needed help with—I needed some improvement, but I got it without getting fired, and that’s my good fortune.

Doug: I wonder if we can talk a little bit about your dad, because you write a little bit about how your dad, he was conservative, you know, and you’re known as a rather progressive guy. And really involved with Democratic politics. You’ve been to many Democratic conventions and spoken there. You talk about how your dad was sort of an original idea of conservatism, like conserving the planet, conserving resources. Can you talk about sort of that political influence and personal influence that your father gave you?

Ed Begley Jr.: He was great in so many ways. He was a great actor, but he was also great as a role model. He was a conservative that liked to conserve. By that I mean we turned off the lights, turned off the water. Saved strings, saved tinfoil. You know, he was the son of Irish immigrants. He lived through the Great Depression. So all these things came natural to him. Though he didn’t use the word ‘environmentalist’ much, he was one and just showed me those things. So when Earth Day came around—he died within a few days of the first Earth Day, so I did a lot of this stuff to honor him as much as anything. And I also found that another thing he promised if I did it right, it would fit within my budget. You have to do it where you can afford it. So even though I wanted a fancier electric car than the golf cart I had at that point, even though I wanted solar panels on my roof, I didn’t even try to get anything like expensive solar because I knew I couldn’t afford it.

Ed Begley Jr.: I was fiscally conservative myself, and I saved money doing all this stuff. The bike riding, the bus taking, the vinegar and water, the baking soda, the vegetarianism, all that stuff put extra money in my pocket, which I used to climb up the ladder and buy a solar oven or a rain barrel and eventually get to the point where I could afford solar—solar hot water, and then finally solar electric. So I get that from—and many other wonderful traits that my dad had. I get that from him, and I’m grateful for it. And we need to bridge that gap again. We need to reach across the aisle and find some way to work together, because we can’t do it alone. We need each other in this country. We have to get better at that.

Doug: Let’s talk a little bit about your relationship with electric cars. You have a brief cameo in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? You’re at a press conference, I believe, in that movie. But your embrace of EVs, like you mentioned, it kind of goes much farther back than that, all the way to 1970. Could you tell me about your first electric car?

Ed Begley Jr.: It really happened because of my dad. I wanted to buy an electric car, but nobody that I knew was making or selling them. I didn’t know anybody that sold or made electric cars in 1970, first Earth Day. And I wanted to get around a little faster sometimes than the bus or my bike. I wanted to take people on a date, if that was possible in the world. So I thought, well, how am I going to do that? You know, I got to find an electric car. And I thought, well, let’s just look in the phone book, see if there’s anybody in there that’s selling.

Ed Begley Jr.: What a stupid idea. There’s not going to be an ad in the —I don’t know if anybody—there’s not gonna be any list in the phone book. It was like my dad was talking to me. “Just try. Go look in the phone book. You can say you tried. You know, don’t just curse the darkness. Light a candle. Try to do something.” Well, this is a waste of time. Open up the phone book back in 1970, there it was: Electric cars. Some guy named Dutch was selling electric cars. A little tiny ad, if you can call it that, “Electric Cars.” And I bought an electric car from this guy named Dutch—I don’t remember his last name—for $950. It was a Taylor-Dunn electric car. Taylor-Dunn. And it was not really an electric car. It was an electric cart—with a T at the end, at a top speed of 25 miles an hour had a range of maybe 20 miles. But that’s—the valley from one end to the other is less than 20 miles, so as long as I had an outlet where I was going, you know, I could do it.

Ed Begley Jr.: Going over the hill was a different matter. Going over Benedict, I did once and once only. Going over the Cahuenga Pass once and once only. I never tried Laurel Canyon or Coldwater. I wouldn’t be here today. But here’s what I liked about it—my dad’s idea again. I did the electric car for the right reason, so I wasn’t making any smog from my vehicle. You’re still making a little bit at the power plant, but considerably less because you’re mostly driving it during the day and charging at night. It’s a better time to use power—these big generators up and working all night long whether or not there’s a big load. So I knew I wanted to get an electric car, but it was more like a golf cart with a windshield wipe and a horn, to be quite honest. You know, I wouldn’t call it a car. I took Cindy Williams, who played Shirley on Laverne and Shirley, I took her out for a date very early in both of our careers. I did not get a second date from Ms. Cindy Williams. I just didn’t. It was not exactly a babe magnet.

Doug: I was gonna ask how this went over. It’s LA, you’re an actor in the ’70s, how this went over with your—you know, your dating life.

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah. Well, my Mustang would have been cool. You know, I had a Mustang when I was 18. My dad got me one for graduating high school. That would have been cool. But an electric car? People just thought I was crazy, or I don’t know what they thought about me, but it wasn’t positive. A few people thought, “Well, that’s cool, you’re trying to clean up the air. I get it.” And that again comes from my dad because when I would complain about things like the smog, he’d say, “I hate the smog too. I know what you’re against. What are you for? What are you doing to clean up the smog? Ride your bike, take the bus. Wonderful. Do what you can and do something. Don’t just complain about it. Maybe you can make a difference.” And in some small way I’d like to think I did.

Doug: We’ll jump back to some of your other electric cars and your relationship with them, but you’re mentioning that it just wasn’t seen as cool back then, and you didn’t get a second date with Cindy Williams. Did you ever think there’d be a day where it was cool to have an electric car, or just not a big deal even really now to have an electric car?

Ed Begley Jr.: I reasoned that—and I reasoned correctly when you think about it—if they just had better batteries, just a bigger battery range than my—I think it had two batteries in it. Two, you know, like, marine batteries or something in this little electric car. Maybe four batteries, deep cycle lead acid batteries. If they had, let’s say 10 or 12, with that kind of current then you could—and a better—it just had a rheostat. It wasn’t even a controller. There’s no solid state anything. And it was just a simple, you know, rheostat, which is not the most efficient way to, you know, use slower and faster power.

Ed Begley Jr.: But it worked. It got me around, you know, the San Fernando Valley, and occasionally in my reckless behavior to go over Cahuenga or Benedict. Again, it’s not something I did twice. I did it once and once only. But it was—the great thing about it was it was very good for my pocketbook, because the cost of charging the car, same as it is today, was much, much less than buying the gasoline. And the service? Much, much, much less. There’s no tune up, oil change, fan belt, radiator flush, smog check, valve job. None of that stuff that you normally have. And so it was very good economically. Had the same batteries in the vehicle the whole time I had it. I didn’t have it for just a year or so, but I didn’t need to change the batteries in that year. And I sold it for $950, exactly what I paid for it. when somebody in the retirement communities there at Palm Springs used it after me. But it had a California license plate, had a turn signal and a horn. That’s all you had to have. You could say, “You can’t deny me a license. I want to drive this electric car. And it’s safe. It’s got brakes, you see, it’s got a turn signal and a windshield wiper. Leave me alone.” And they would give it a California plate.

Doug: Let’s jump to the ’90s. You have some great stories in the book about charging at OJ’s house in 1992, before everything that happened with OJ. Could you tell me about that? I mean, it feels like the electric car was a real conversation starter for you at that point.

Ed Begley Jr.: I charged it at many people’s houses. I charged it at Harrison Ford’s house in the early ’90s, too. I charged it—I think I charged it at Jack’s house a couple of times. I think I might have charged it up at Marlon Brando’s house. But when you have a car that has a range of, like 32 miles or something, which some of the earlier ones after the golf cart-y car, after—you know, when I started driving those, started driving the conversion cars, those would have a range of 30 miles, maybe 40 miles. I got one that finally had 50 miles. Whoa! Katie, bar the door. I can make it to Thousand Oaks and come home, too, on the same charge and I didn’t have to charge there for seven hours out in Thousand Oaks before I can make it back home.

Ed Begley Jr.: So to have a car that had 50-mile range, that was a breakthrough. That happened in 1994, and only because of this guy who taught auto shop class at Van Nuys High, where I went to high school. He didn’t teach me back then. It was—you know, he was teaching long after I’d graduated Van Nuys High. But he taught an auto shop class there, and he thought electric cars were part of the future. His name, Richard Mayer, and he made these cars. He would go to a junk shop and said, “That VW Rabbit looks pretty good for my purposes.” Well, the guy said, “I gotta warn you, it has a hole in the gas tank.” “No problem.” “The generator’s not working.” “No problem there, either.” But if the engine’s shot, take it out. I don’t need that.”

Ed Begley Jr.: So he’d buy this car for $500 or something that had a steering wheel that worked and a chassis and wiring harness that worked, and he would put in a controller, a good electric motor, you know, some cabling, and put in, I think, like, 10 or 12 deep cycle marine batteries that were good for—you know, good Trojan batteries for that period, early ’90s. They were lead acid. There was no nickel metal hydride even then. Not for these purposes. There’s certainly no lithium ion or anything like that—lithium polymer, nothing like that. Not only could you go 50 miles, but it had a certain amount of pickup. You could get on the freeway and not get hit by a truck. You could legally drive in the freeway. The golf cart-y things, of course, you could not.

Ed Begley Jr.: But the first car I bought after that Taylor-Dunn electric cart was in 1990. I took a few years off because it was—they just didn’t go very far very fast, so I didn’t find it to be practical. I bought a car from a guy in Illinois. A friend said, “There’s a guy here where I live. He’s selling an electric car for 1,700 bucks.” Said, “Does it drive?” “Yeah.” I said, “I’m just gonna have him ship it to me. You don’t have to say any more. 1,700 bucks on the tires alone and the batteries, I’m fine.” So he shipped it to me.

Ed Begley Jr.: And then I met this guy at an Electric Vehicle Association meeting. His name was Howard Latowski. He’s since passed, but he was a great kind of an inventor and a handyman, and very quite adept with electrical wiring. So he had me put another 2,500 bucks into it. I paid $1,700 for it. $2,500. Now I’m into it for $4,200, and it would go on the freeway and had good pickup. So Howard Latowski was a great friend, and he allowed me to get that car. And then I had a—after that, I had a Solar Car Company of America. There was a Ford Fiesta or something like that converted to electric. And then oh, I had a Bradley Kit car for a while, too, with the gull wing doors. I drove that for a little bit. And then finally the EV1 came out in ’96, and I got that, and I’ve never looked back. Then I’ve had Detroit made, you know, or American made, you know, electric cars for the most part that have been very good cars.

Doug: And the EV1 is the car in Who Killed the Electric Car? That is the car in that film.

Ed Begley Jr.: That is correct. That’s the car that I drove. I drove that car from 1996 through 2001 or so. We could see the writing on the wall that they were gonna crush them and take them all back because nobody owned the car. I didn’t. Nobody did. Jay Leno didn’t even own his. They were all on lease, so they had the authority, the right, legally, to take it back. And they did, and they crushed them. And I think—I can’t remember his first name. His last name is Wagoner. He was one of the top executives at GM. Somebody said, what’s the best thing you ever did here? And he said something—I don’t remember what he said. They said, “What’s the worst mistake you ever made here at GM?” He said, “Killing the electric car.”

Doug: Why did he say that? Just because it was ahead of his time or, like, they should have been the leader?

Ed Begley Jr.: The time. There’s a saying in recovery programs, you know, like AA or something like that. “Don’t quit before the miracle.” You’re just about to get the big job or the big promotion or whatever the thing is, and you quit and you start drinking again. Don’t quit before the miracle. It seemed like a rough road putting that car out and selling it. It seems tough, but just wait six months longer. And the other thing is, with that car, one thing I never understood, I used to say to people in the early ’90s, mid-’90s, when they came out with the car, “How many people here know I drive an electric car? GM EV1.” Every hand, 200 people in an audience I was speaking before would put their hands up. 200 people. How many people know where to get one? Three hands would go up. They didn’t know you had to go to a Saturn dealer to go buy an electric vehicle.

Ed Begley Jr.: Worse than that. Many people who would back then fax us, write us—email wasn’t done much, but they’d call us, write us letters saying, “I went to a Saturn dealer to buy one, and the sales rep tried to talk me out of it, or did talk me out of it. Said, ‘You don’t want this car. They don’t go very far.’ The dealers themselves had their salespeople trying to talk to people. They could have sold many more of the vehicles. They complained about weak sales. But, you know, there’s a saying in—a line in Shakespeare, I believe—”To condemn with faint praise.” And that’s what they did. There was a Big—they took out a big ad in the LA Times. I saw it with my own eyes. Huge thing with toasters and blenders going out to the curb to greet the new electric car. The electric car is here. The voice of Linda Hunt, the esteemed actress, was saying, “The electric car is here!” It was a wonderful ad.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: The electric car is here.]

Ed Begley Jr.: The insignia that had—that was a Saturn insignia was as big as my thumbnail, maybe. On a full-page ad. My thumbnail. Saturn on a full page. People didn’t see it. It was like they were literally trying to kill it. You know, they wanted it to die for some reason. They thought it was a weak child and they didn’t want it to survive.

Doug: So they could basically say, “Hey, we tried.”

Ed Begley Jr.: We tried.

Doug: Right.

Ed Begley Jr.: When deep down, what it came down to is nobody likes being told what to do. They were told to make these cars by the ZEV mandate, by the Zero Emission Vehicle, the ZEV mandate. You must make this. If you sell 100,000 cars in California, you have to make 1,800 of these cars that you will sell in California or other states. That was just the law. “Nobody tells me—you can’t mandate technology. We’re not ready!” Of course they were ready enough. The car, the GM with the ’99 version, three years after it came out in ’96, the ’99 version had then, like, some sort of nickel metal hydride batteries. Yeah, they were nickel metal hydride. The first were sealed lead acid batteries. You didn’t have to put water in them. But then—pardon me—the next one in ’99 was nickel metal hydride. And so you could get to Palm Springs on it. That was a big thing, making it to Palm Springs.

Doug: It’s funny, because that range anxiety that you’re talking about, you know, people didn’t want to buy them because they thought, oh, they don’t go very far. But here you are talking about, oh, you know, you can get from one end of the valley, 20 miles, to the other, and most trips in the US are three miles, five miles.

Ed Begley Jr.: Right.

Doug: So it would have been totally fine. And like you said, you could plug it in overnight. So they were just ahead of their time and not really ready. But also like you said, the companies were not putting their all into getting Americans behind the wheel of electric vehicles.

Ed Begley Jr.: Well, they’re much more practical now. You know, I’ve more than once driven all the way cross-country. I just came back from Albuquerque, New Mexico. There’s a robust charging system all over America now. I know because I’ve used it. It’s amazing with the quick charges and all, you can easily get—you know, I got to stop anyway and have breakfast in Needles or somewhere like it—Barstow or Needles—stop and have breakfast. I get a charge. I make it into Flagstaff, I have lunch, I get a charge. I make it into Gallup, New Mexico, have dinner. Restaurant, nice Indian restaurant right nearby. Next thing I know, I’m in Albuquerque a couple of hours later. So it’s totally doable. It’s not really much different from driving a gasoline car.

Doug: So you mentioned earlier this idea: Don’t quit before the miracle.

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah.

Doug: And as I was reading your book—look, I’m an activist, and being an activist means dealing with a lot of rejection, having a lot of hope, waking up every morning thinking, “I can make today a little better than yesterday. It might be worse, actually, but in the long run, I know that I can make it a little better.” And I was struck in the book by how similar that is to an acting career. You have to have amazing tenacity. Against all odds, you have to get up every day and think, “Okay, didn’t get the part yesterday, but I’m gonna go up for the part today.” And you have to be maybe a little crazy. You know, there’s something in your brain that’s working a little different than other people.

Ed Begley Jr.: A lot different, but thank you.

Doug: [laughs] I’m trying to be polite. I’m in your home.

Ed Begley Jr.: You’re being very polite.

Doug: I’m a guest. I wonder if the qualities that have served you well as an actor—because you’re very open in the book about those periods where it was tough for you, and the parts didn’t come. And I was just so struck by how similar that is to activism. You know, it’s a long game, and you can’t quit before the miracle.

Ed Begley Jr.: Exactly. And, you know, I was in such bad shape emotionally in so many ways as a young man, I didn’t fully understand. I think alcohol saved my life before it almost killed me. I needed some form of sedation or meditation or something, so—and a car is like that. I think cars and gasoline have served us very well for many years. You know, it’s been great, but then they kind of turned on us with air pollution and, you know, climate change and all that stuff. Gasoline, you know, has done great things for us, you know, with the ability to drive cross country back when that’s all we had. But we have choices now. You know, it was like burning high-sulfur coal, helped us build the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. But it’s a different time now, and you can’t. You do that again, you do it at your own peril. These technologies and ways that we’re so attached to you can’t stick with them past their time. People in the developing world, they want to—they want to build a Brooklyn Bridge the same way we did with high-sulfur coal and what have you. And who can blame them? But we have to help other people see that that’s not the way to go for all of us. That it’s gonna cost them too much money with health care problems and what have you, with asthma and emphysema and the cost to breathe that dirty air in China and other parts of the world is huge. So we have to share our technology, and make sure other people see the wisdom of using it.

Doug: I’m also listening to you, sort of—you know, you’re known for some of the mockumentaries with Christopher Guest, and you’re known for your comedy. There’s a skill obviously in improv of just adapting to the current situation, and not dwelling in the thing that you wanted to have happen, but being present and in the moment and responding to the reality now, which I feel like obviously is a skill that has served you well as an actor and a comedian, but has clearly served you well as an activist. I’m listening to you just rattle off all these facts about electric vehicles and batteries and you just—you seem very up on all of the technology and where this is headed.

Ed Begley Jr.: Thank you. That’s very nice to say. I had never thought of that. That’s a great way to look at things. It is kind of an ad lib, isn’t it? It’s an improv skill. Yeah. That’s a good way to look at it. I’m gonna remember that. Thank you. That’s a wonderful one, Doug.

Doug: I want to talk about something that I think a lot of our listeners know you from, and that is how you get to the Oscars. So this past year, the 2024 Oscars, you and your daughter Hayden took the bus and the metro to the Academy Awards ceremony. And, you know, part of what we talk about on The War on Cars is battling against car culture, this big pervasive thing that really defines American life. And it’s really hard to push back. It’s sort of the ultimate status quo beast, basically. And there’s no place outside of Detroit that is more synonymous with car culture than Los Angeles.

Ed Begley Jr.: Right.

Doug: And there’s probably no moment that’s more synonymous than the Oscars—people showing up in limos and things like that. Can you talk about sort of the origins of that story to take this sort of iconoclastic role with the Oscars, and showing up in—you know, on Metro, there have been years, I think 2015, when you showed up on a bike, and obviously you’ve shown up in your electric cars in the past.

Ed Begley Jr.: Just it’s fine tuning a very small point. But this last year, actually Rachelle, my wonderful wife, did not want to relinquish her seats to our wonderful daughter Hayden. So Hayden documented me going there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hayden Carson Begley: Even though I wasn’t my dad’s plus one to the Oscars this year, he still wanted to take Metro to the awards.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ed Begley Jr.: Riding the Metro since before it was the Metro. It was the RTD. I used to take the 93 line downtown into Hollywood. At Hollywood [inaudible] you could catch the 91W and get to Century City and places like that. I still ride it. I love it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ed Begley Jr.: My academy pin for being a governor for 15 years. My Metro pin for being a rider since 1962.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hayden Carson Begley: As someone who has thrice taken the bus to the subway, and then walked about half a mile in seven inch heels to the Oscars, I do understand my mother’s hesitation. Thank God there are people like my dad who don’t mind wearing running shoes on a red carpet.]

Ed Begley Jr.: But the year before, Rachelle very nicely and kindly gave to her daughter her seat at the Oscars. So she and I went there. Doing one better than me, my daughter Hayden, the whole week leading up to the Oscars, she got around town for all of her appointments, all her work, everything on just the Metro—the buses and the rail system in Los Angeles. She didn’t get in a single car, a single Uber, anything the whole week. And then culminating with the Oscars. And then she did a TikTok about it that was very well received.

Ed Begley Jr.: And so she started working with Stephanie Wiggins at Metro and helping her out at the LA Metro, which is—it certainly had some challenges after—you know, with COVID, a lot of people, many, many millions of people in LA are doing very hard work. They gotta get on that bus, they gotta get on the subway and get the hell home. They can’t afford an Uber or a Lyft or anything like it. So we have to make the transit system better for them. And Stephanie Wiggins has been doing that, and Hayden worked with her, and continues to work with her in doing so. But I’ll say this about the Metro system: they take more people more miles than any transit system in the world, because it goes all the way to Trancas, California, along north of Malibu there, all the way to Long Beach, and from there to Pomona, to Santa Clarita to, you know, Box Canyon, almost to Simi Valley there in Chatsworth. It’s a big, you know, wide open spot for transit. And they have a—they do a lot right. There’s some things they need to do a lot better at, but they also do very well given the size of the area they’re serving.

Doug: Yeah. I took Metro from Union Station to my hotel. It’s not too far from here.

Ed Begley Jr.: Great.

Doug: And as a New Yorker, the thing that I actually noticed was WiFi throughout the entire system. We only have WiFi in the stations for now. So when you’re in a tunnel, it’s a dead zone. 

Ed Begley Jr.: Oh, wow.

Doug: So LA, score one for LA, I guess, in the ever present battle between the two cities. LA’s got one thing up on New York, for sure. I want to talk a little bit more about the Oscars and Annette Bening because you guys were—you’re very close. You’ve known her for a really long time. She invites you to the 1991 Oscars ceremony. She’s nominated for her role in The Grifters—great film. And you write in the book that she must have realized that this invitation would only complicate her life. What do you mean by that?

Ed Begley Jr.: At that time, I was driving the Bradley, a car I alluded to earlier in my list of different transportation choices. And the Bradley had gull wing doors and was downright like a Maserati or something. Down low, low, low on the ground, you know, for efficiency, aerodynamics and what have you, to get better mileage. And so this amazing woman, my dear friend Annette, she had hit it off with Warren Beatty, and so that’s where her future was certainly headed. But she had asked me to go with her to the Oscars before any of that. And she, true to her word, allowed me to drive her there and back. And we had a great time at the Oscars, of course. And she—you had to be a yoga master to get in and out of that car. And she is that and much more. So she’s a dear friend still. And I don’t know if you saw Nyad, this movie when she played Diana Nyad. She’s just amazing. She is one of the great actors of my lifetime, and she’s just extraordinary, the level of work that she has done and continues to do.

 

Doug: On the subject of Annette Bening, you write about how when you first got to know her, you invited her to go for a bike ride. And you say it was something of an unconscious challenge for a new friend’s strength and stamina. Is there something more to that? I was reading that thinking, like, maybe between the lines, it’s not just about physical prowess of getting up these hills, but it’s like, are they humble enough to kind of eschew the trappings of Hollywood and just, like, be a normal person exposed to their humanity out on a bike on the streets?

Ed Begley Jr.: I did it because I liked the challenge of the ride. And certainly upon first meeting someone like Annette, you go, “This young lady is in great shape.” You know, she’s a good deal younger than me. At the time, I was 41. She was 30, I believe. I think she’s 11 years my junior. But she said, “You want to go for a bike ride?” And I normally—there’s a hill. “Do you mind hills?” “No, not at all,” she said. You know, subtext, “My legs are in pretty good shape. I think I could handle a hill here in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s not the Pyrenees, it’s not the Alps, you know, we’ll be fine, I’m sure.” And she was the first person I ever said—male or female, I said, “Let’s go for a bike ride,” that made it to the top without dismounting. You know, I was prepared to dismount and wait for a person. And I—that happened many times when I’d say to a friend, “You want to go for a bike ride?” Going up that steep hill, it’s like, think Lombard Street in San Francisco. That kind of steep. So—but she didn’t. She made it right to the top, proving her strength in many other ways besides just on screen.

Doug: Are there other folks that you’ve been on a bike ride with that have really kind of—that are notable, or have given you a different perspective on your relationship with them?

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah, Rachelle. My wife Rachelle, now of many years, 20-some odd years, she did very well on the first bike ride up to Mulholland. She teaches Pilates. And so we’re both doing okay.

Doug: I want to give a big shout out to Streets For All LA, and Michael Schneider, who connected us.

Ed Begley Jr.: Me, too.

Doug: He’s a great guy, a real connector of human beings, and has done some impressive work here in Los Angeles, getting some important bills over the finish line. Let’s talk a little bit about where LA is going. You’ve lived here almost your entire life. LA’s got the Olympics coming up in four years, and they’re gonna be changing a lot, trying to move people without cars to generate all this traffic. Where do you see LA going in the next four years? Where would you like to see it go?

Ed Begley Jr.: I’d like to see as much transit as we can possibly afford. And we’ve certainly had a lot of good fortune with the past administration in Washington these past nearly four years. They’ve done a lot to help us finish, you know, the Red Line subway that’s now called the B Line or something. I can’t remember. They changed it to letter designations. I should know it, but I don’t. To me, it’s the Red Line still. But finishing that, finishing many other connectors and what have you. And they’ve had the funding, and there’s certainly the will to do it now, because if you want people to get out of your cars, you’ve got to make it possible for them to do so like they did recently with a very less—very much a less-costly endeavor, which is putting a bike lane down Hollywood Boulevard. Because otherwise you’re on Franklin, you’re kind of getting honked at all the time. If you’re going east, west in the Hollywood area, in East Hollywood, you know, you’re gonna—what road do you take? Fountain? You’re gonna get plowed there. You go pretty fast on Fountain. Hollywood, Sunset, Franklin, there’s no place where there’s any room for you to be. So they made a bike-friendly, kind of a protected, you know, with those little cone kind of things.

Doug: Plastic delineators.

Ed Begley Jr.: Yeah, those things. And that gives you a certain sense. You certainly would have an opportunity—an opportunity to hear—bup bup bup bup!—you know, if somebody was encroaching on your lane who’s out of it or God knows what. So you feel a bit safer. You feel a lot safer in that. That doesn’t cost that much money to do if you can get the community on board. Because people, understandably, merchants are worried about losing business. Will they still be able to get it in the parking lot and what have you. Can they still stop and buy some of my food and my wares? And the answer is usually less. I remember many years ago now with the Third Street Promenade, you know, people fighting. The merchants didn’t want to have it be pedestrian friendly because people couldn’t park in front of their little donut shop or their dress shop. Then of course, when they converted it to pedestrian only on Third Street, that made it to the promenade there. And if you were fortunate enough to have property that you owned or had a nice long lease then you were very happy that they did that. It proved to be very good for business, you know, there in places like that. That’s happened more than once.

Doug: It’s the same story in every city, almost. We’ve just spoken about this on another episode that we did with Rick Steves, the travel writer. And we talked about how in Europe they would say, “Oh, this will never work here. You can’t pedestrianize this street. It’ll kill our business.” And that’s in Copenhagen and places like that. Today we look at and think that’s a walking and cycling paradise. How could they ever have had cars here?

Ed Begley Jr.: Exactly.

Doug: Yeah.

Ed Begley Jr.: Now you’re getting into great stuff that a lot of it I haven’t thought of in a long time. It’s really good. Your questions are wonderful.

Doug: Thank you so much. I mean, it’s been such a privilege to read your book. I literally—because your picture is on both sides of this book. I was holding—this is a podcast, so no one will see this, but I was holding up my book like this, and my son just wanted me to go like this. He was like, “It’s like Dr. Linkletter is here in the room with me.”

Ed Begley Jr.: Oh, right.

Doug: So the book is called To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step On It! Ed Begley Jr., thank you so much for welcoming The War on Cars into your home.

Ed Begley Jr.: Thank you for being in my home and promoting this very important message. This is our future that we’re talking about here, and we have a chance at getting things right if we continue along this path that we’re both suggesting.

Doug: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. I can’t thank Ed Begley Jr. enough for his hospitality, his humor, his advocacy, and for sharing all of his stories with me and you. You can purchase his memoir, To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step On It! at our official Bookshop.org page. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Doug: I want to extend my gratitude to Michael Schneider of Streets For All in Los Angeles for connecting me with Ed. If you live in LA, please consider becoming a member of Streets For All so you can support its mission of making the city safer for everyone, no matter how they get around. Go to StreetsForAll.org to find out more.

Doug: This episode was sponsored by Cleverhood and Sheyd Bags. I’ll put links to both companies in the show notes, so go get some excellent rain gear and the perfect bag for bike commuting. The War on Cars is supported by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. We thank them for their generosity. This episode is just one in a series on the people, places and ideas changing car culture, so stay tuned for more.

Doug: As a reminder, we now offer annual subscriptions via Patreon. You can save 10 percent by signing up for the whole year. If you’d still like to pay monthly, we are also offering a discount through December. Go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and sign up today. A big thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon already, including our top contributors, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker. This episode was recorded by Avishay Artsy. It was produced and edited by me. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. On behalf of my co-host Sarah Goodyear, I’m Doug Gordon and this is The War on Cars.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, This Is Spinal Tap: I don’t know if I can tell this. Well, I won’t mention names, but we had a rock group come through here, and we saw them coming so we put down the rubber sheets in the beds. But apparently they weren’t aware that there was a toilet in the room. So we had a lot of cleaning to do after they checked out. And, you know, roasting a goat in the room, I still to this day don’t understand. Getting the smell of cumin and charcoal out of the drapes was a chore unto itself. So that was a big deal. We get an imprint in the credit card for a lot of money now. We learned from that one.]