The inspiration for David Obst’s latest creation came to him more simply than he expected. During a car ride with his granddaughter, trapped in a traffic jam from Santa Barbara to Ventura, he realized how much he hated traffic.

“I said, ‘I hate traffic,’ and my granddaughter said, ‘Poppop, you are the traffic jam.’ And I realized she’s right,” Obst recalled. “And I spent the next four years looking into it, and the stuff I found is just incredible.”

His research for his most recent book, “Saving Ourselves from Big Car,” published in September, morphed everything he has found in any other research in his life.

The book is a collection of stories about small communities striving to break free from their addiction to cars and their effect on the world and the environment. It is a call to action for its readers to do the same, realizing that they “really cannot live without cars.”

Growing up, Obst was not a particularly good student in high school, but he excelled in one class: U.S. history. After graduating, he became the first member of his family to attend college. He was accepted to California State University, Northridge (CSUN), which was then known as San Fernando Valley State.

After two restless years in college, Obst desired a change of pace. The solution for him was simple: travel to China at the age of 18.

Thanks to a summer of saving up while working as a construction worker for his current wife’s father, he made enough money to go to Taiwan to study Chinese under an overseas study program connected with Stanford in Taipei.

Obst resided in Taipei for about two more years. Armed with a simple vocabulary list, he acted as a translator between the soldiers and the women working in the bar G.I.s frequented, becoming very proficient in the spoken language.

When not working as a translator, Obst would explore the island on his bike, admiring the wilderness and the scenery.

“It was like going back a century in time,” he recalled.

During one of his trips, Obst befriended missionaries on the island and started to record the “great history of the missionary experience in China.” He wrote a letter to 10 of the top research universities in the U.S., which he found through an army-based library in Taipei. After receiving some responses, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University expressed interest in the story and offered him $10,000 to continue his research, which he accepted.

The investigation was Obst’s first experience with the world of journalism, allowing him to explore the culture of his new home.

“I traveled all over the island, talking to these missionaries,” Obst said. “I talked to quite a few of them, and their stories were fabulous.”

His research led to Obst being accepted to University of California, Berkeley (Cal) to continue his Chinese studies after sending the tapes to a professor he had befriended.

“I had not been a straight anything student in elementary school, junior high,” Obst said. “Something has just clicked in, and I think Cal State Northridge, I have a lot to thank for that, because I learned the set of skills necessary to be able to do any kind of course. I also was blessed in that I had an ability to tell stories so that my papers read, kind of like my books today.”

However, Obst’s time at Cal also proved to be short-lived.

“It was also just at the height of student rebellions on campus,” Obst said, explaining that the Third World Liberation riots and a demand for the integration of women and people of color into universities distracted him from his studies.

All of the events taking place were against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, affecting students most of all because of the draft age.

Obst himself became very active in the anti-war movement. He started a news service and began to gain traction with the help of contacts from young journalists he had known on the East Coast, who would send him stories to be published in the Daily Cal and the San Francisco Chronicle.

He then had a brief experience with planning a press conference on the Berkeley campus at the request of a close friend, Ramsey Clark, who had been a high-ranking government official in the Kennedy administration. As Clark arrived to answer questions, Governor Ronald Reagan ordered helicopters to fly over the campus and to tear-gas demonstrators, and Obst realized he had found the next part of his career.

“This is what I have to do now,” Obst said. “So, I left Berkeley and went to the belly of the beast, Washington D.C., to start my new service.”

In D.C., Obst’s new housing was only a couple of doors down from Seymour Hersh, who went on to become “a hero in the investigative journalism world,” but was, at the time, only an out-of-work former reporter for the Associated Press.

Obst and Hersh received a tip about a massacre that had occurred in My Lai, Vietnam, in which hundreds of women and children were killed in one afternoon by American soldiers – it was never reported.

“Big magazines turned it down; it was too controversial,” Obst said, who knew that the story had to be shared. “The New York Times wouldn’t touch it. Why should they post about it? It was too controversial.”

When they finally found a publisher willing to take it, the New York Review of Books, they were required to include a couple of paragraphs at the beginning of the story about how horrible the events reported were.

Seymour refused, desiring to be an unbiased reporter. The deal was broken, and the story was given to Obst, who had no idea where to take it. In the end, he resorted to cold-calling editors at every newspaper in America.

“I made it all the way up to the late C’s before I found someone who would even talk to me,” he said. “It was the Hartford Current.”

By the time he had reached the Z’s, he had 40 newspapers lined up, including the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The next morning, the story was published on the front page of every one of them. They proceeded to send out three more episodes of the same story, including one about a young soldier, Paul Meadlo, who had been involved in Vietnam.

Meadlo’s testimony was broadcast live on CBS Evening News, which landed Hersh a job with the New York Times as chief investigative reporter.

“That night, we go on CBS Evening News, with Mike Wallace interviewing him,” Obst said. “And it helped turn the country against the war. Because to see … good American boys butchering women and children for no reason was too much.”

Obst had success of his own, with magazines like Esquire publishing profiles on his work. Shortly after, he and Hersh applied for a Pulitzer Prize for their story on the day of the deadline, and ultimately won.

In 1971, Obst’s next step in his career began with a phone call from a friend, Daniel Ellsberg, who told him he had stolen the Pentagon Papers and wanted to publish them. Obst agreed, and the story was published on the front page of the New York Times.

However, this quickly had both Obst and Ellsberg on the FBI’s radar, and a grand jury indicted them for treason. Ellsberg’s lawyers were offered a “use immunity agreement” in exchange for Obst’s testimony. In short, whatever he said would not be used against him, but he had to have Ellsberg thrown into jail. His refusal meant imprisonment.

As a result, Obst fled to a non-extradition country, and the following day, he was on a bus to Baghdad.

The Watergate scandal in 1972 ended up being his saving grace after the federal district judge threw the case out after Ellsberg’s personal files were stolen by the Plumbers sent by President Nixon in an unsuccessful attempt to blackmail him.

The scandal led to Obst’s next publication just two years later, in 1974. Alongside the investigators who had uncovered the scandal, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, he published “All the President’s Men” at Simon and Schuster. The book, as well as its sequel, “The Final Days,” became the top-selling nonfiction books of the decade.

“You never know what life is going to bring you. You know, I have been very, very blessed,” Obst said.

After his time in D.C, once his son graduated high school, Obst and his wife moved to California, where he went on to work as a producer for Warner Bros. in films like “Revenge of the Nerds,” “The Whoppee Boys” and “Johnny Be Good.”

Furthermore, his time in California was mostly dedicated to working with the LA County Board of Education.

“I worked on that for almost a decade without any positive results – the only time in my life I have ever failed at anything,” Obst stated. “I was able to conquer journalism, book business and movies, but not public education. Didn’t even come close.”

Now, with his latest book published this year, he hopes to also push his program, “Universities Speak,” alongside Carla Sager, CEO of LA’s Best, to work with college speakers, professors and students from several campuses, including University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California and CSUN, to spread the word about this crisis.

“What Big Car has done to our species is so dangerous, and unless you and your grandchildren and children begin to fight back, we will be extinct as a race and as a species in a very short period of time. It’s that simple,” Obst said.