Nov. 27, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:49:08
2850 The Truth About Bill Cosby
Recently comedy and television legend Bill Cosby has been accused of multiple instances of egregious sexual assault. Given Cosby’s clean cut public persona – even allegations of such behavior is enough to send shock-wave throughout the world. In this presentation, we take an extensive look at the life of Bill Cosby – what made him who he is, his influences, childhood, career, cultural impact, philanthropy, history with the media, controversial comments about the black community, commitment to education, successes – and known flaws. Was Bill Cosby like the image he portrayed on television? Was the Cliff Huxtable character he portrayed on The Cosby Show a reflection of his own personality and life? What can we learn from his life and career? What is the truth about Bill Cosby?
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is a presentation, the truth about Bill Cosby.
And just before we get into his life, his contradictions, his generosities, his infidelities, and the recent 18-lady series of allegations against his conduct, just wanted to mention, try to be as honest and open as possible in all these shows, that this man has had a significant influence on On me, I find these allegations and what is occurring in his life heartbreaking.
Either he is a man sinned against or he is a man egregiously sinning.
And either one of those is a tragic and horrifying situation.
When I was a child, I grew up fatherless.
And like all fatherless children, I constantly have the...
Needy Child radar for father figures and invented a few and one of those was of course Bill Cosby.
I actually remember hearing his comedy routines in the 70s.
For my younger listeners this would actually be the 1970s despite appearances.
And loved his calmness, his peace, his humor, his gentleness.
I mean, as Seinfeld has pointed out after chatting with Bill Cosby, keeping an audience spellbound with slow-talking stories for two hours is a talent that is singular in nature, an ability that is singular in nature itself.
And, of course, I remember being on a plane going somewhere and watching California Suite where Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor played competitive guys and were just bang on.
Fantastic.
Bill Cosby, I thought, was a fine actor and, of course, an incredible comedian.
A clean comedian who once famously chastised Eddie Murphy for swearing.
I don't mind a bit of swearing.
I've done some myself, but I really liked his commitment.
To clean humor.
And, of course, The Cosby Show, which ran from the early 80s to the early 90s, was an incredibly powerful phenomenon.
Again, particularly for people like myself who grew up without a father because Cliff Huxtable, who, of course, Bill Cosby played in the show, was one of the last, if not the last, Positive male sitcom characters.
Of course, ever since then, Men have generally been portrayed in sitcoms as buffoonish, as foolish, as, you know, the woman is always right and the kids are always right.
This was a man who was allowed to be a leader, who was allowed to be, dare I say the word, a patriarch, probably because he was black.
A white man in the same role in a white family would probably not have been able to get it on the air.
So he got a very positive and peaceful family life across to people.
Of course, he was criticized for not portraying the black family accurately.
But I think his intent was to educate as much as entertain, which of course was part of his raison d'etre for his life as a whole.
I mean, he was a very well-educated man.
He had a bachelor's degree, a master's, a doctorate in education.
And in the Cosby show, he regularly consulted with a child psychologist and strove for as much realism as possible, once chastising one of the cute kids for trying to be overly funny or overly cutesy and said, you know, would you ever talk to your father that way?
The kid was like, well, no.
It's like, well, then don't do it on this show.
Try and make it as realistic as possible.
He had an eight-year run, which has continued ever since, of educating the world about really good parenting.
Parenting without yelling.
Parenting without cursing.
Parenting without calling names.
Parenting without hitting.
And what he's done in the hundreds of millions of people who've watched many of his shows or more.
What he's done is spread positive parenting messages, positive family messages across and around the world for, I guess now, going on 30, 40 years.
And that I find to be an incredible achievement.
And there's no doubt, even if the current allegations are false, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever, and in reality, That Bill Cosby, the man, was not particularly related to Cliff Huxtable, the character, or the character that he played in his stand-up.
Routines, for reasons we'll get into, but a blindingly intelligent man, as we'll talk about, he tested the highest in his entire school for IQ, blindingly intelligent man, and a very generous man gave lots of money to lots of people and bestowed on a college the largest single donation I think of 20 million dollars that's ever been given and helped put many people through college helped many people with their careers no not just the 18 women but others and He
was, for me, a very positive and inspiring role model.
He came from adversity.
I came from adversity.
Of course, I would not compare my adversity to his, but seeing the degree to which he was able to overcome his early history and make his way in the world to a staggering level of success was very inspiring to me.
Media portrayal of his commitment to family life and his children and the authority.
I mean kids in sitcoms these days always seem smarter than their fathers and the wives always seem smarter than They're husbands, but it was really refreshing and a wonderful thing to see, his portrayal of a benevolent patriarch.
So I'm sad about the whole thing.
I mean, to tell you, it's a heartbreaking thing, no matter which way you cut it.
If these allegations are true, then he was an incredibly well-camouflaged monster, and if the allegations are false, then these women are doing unbelievable evil.
I just wanted to be upfront with all of that.
I do find this, for what it's worth, it's emotionally difficult to go through this kind of analysis.
How many of us could survive with any kind of public reputation intact, significant deep dives into everything we've ever done?
You can take all of this stuff with a grain of salt, but we We have really tried to be as fair as possible.
We have tried not to repeat allegations that aren't significantly substantiated or admitted.
And again, you'll find, as usual, all of the sources in the description of the video and below.
So let's dive into one of the most fascinating public figures of the last 50 years.
So, when did William Henry Cosby Jr.
first make the scene?
Well, I guess his opening night was July 12, 1937.
He was the first of four sons who were born to Anna Pearl, a maid, and William Henry Cosby Sr., who was a welder by trade.
And when Bill, young Bill, was just shy of two years old, his mother gave birth to another child, a second boy named James, who was tragically born very sickly.
He battled one illness after another and died young.
And of course, this was emotionally and financially a great challenge to the family.
And one of the reasons, if it's true that he began to drink during this time period, one of the reasons why Bill's father began to drink heavily, the story goes, is because of the emotional financial pressures of having a very sickly child.
So on many occasions, Bill Sr.
would head to a local tavern after work instead of coming home.
And Bill Cosby, or Bill Jr., we call him in this part of the narrative, recounts that he heard his parents argue endlessly about how much money Bill Sr.
had spent, where he was, how much alcohol he'd consumed.
And of course, oftentimes, the majority of Bill Sr.'s paycheck would be spent at the local tavern.
And this was to the point where Anna would be waiting at the bar on payday to take the paycheck before he could drink away their only income.
Decades later, Bill Jr.
could still recall the precise number of nights that the fights between his parents turned violent.
He said, I remember my father beating my mother up three times.
I was too small to do anything about it.
And things got so bad that the family had to move to a lower income area away from Bill Jr.'s friends and to a basically real rundown area with dilapidated buildings, no hot water and no tub in the bathroom.
Water had to be heated on the kitchen stove for bathing and Bill Jr.
only had one change of clothes.
The family was later accepted into a government housing project and conditions slightly improved.
I actually remember, by the by, when I was a kid, we had a coin-operated heater and we'd just scrounge around for coins to put into the heater to get some heat.
Eviction notices were tragically a regular occurrence in Cosby's childhood became a source of embarrassment.
He would regularly feel humiliated when other kids joked with him or made fun of him or teased him about his family's poverty and inability to even pay the rent on time.
And Cosby tried to mask over his shame by making fun of his family's poverty, but of course it was very painful for him to hear taunts from his peers, like, if your father sold all that wine he drank, you could pay your rent.
It sort of reminds me of, of course, another fantastic comedian, Jim Carrey, who has made jokes about being homeless for a time.
He says...
I'm trying to remember the bit he says about his father.
He says, Daddy, are we homeless?
He's like, no, we're just camping.
Are we by any chance living below the poverty line?
Nope.
Now, up in the dumpster, son.
Come on.
And there is, of course, making fun of these kinds of tragedies that occur early on is, of course, an understandable defense mechanism.
If the pain is not dealt with, it can lead to difficulties later on, which we'll see.
Now, when his mother felt overwhelmed, she would send Bill Jr.
to stay with his grandparents.
And Bill Jr.'s paternal grandfather, whose name was Granddad Samuel, left a huge impression on him.
Would often read Bible stories to him, giving each character a unique voice and crafting an amazingly engrossing narrative, always with a lesson attached.
And for those of you who have heard Bill Cosby's amazing Noah story, I'm sure you can find it online if you need to.
You never know what kind of impression you're going to leave on someone, often until years later, but I think that Granddad Samuel had a good deal of influence, of course, on him.
Now, his mother had left high school at 14 to begin earning her living the way that she would for the next 40 years, cleaning and sewing and cooking for as little as $8 a day.
She actually did want to become a teacher, and I think it's...
Carl Gustav Jung, the famous psychologist who said, Nothing has as much impact on a child as the unlived life of a parent.
And Anna was determined to see that her children got the proper education that she did not complete, which caused a lot of conflicts between her and young Bill.
His first grade teacher was so impressed with Bill Jr.
that she gave him extra work to do until one day she told him that she didn't have anything more to teach him.
Can I have some second grade work?
Bill asked.
No, the teacher said.
Why?
He asked.
Because I only know first grade stuff, she admitted.
Now, after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and the recognition of black war hero Dory Miller, black males enlisted en masse to fight the Japanese.
Bill Cosby Sr.
saw this as an opportunity to escape his responsibilities at home, avoid the endless fights over money and the challenges of raising young boys, one with serious health ailments, so he joined the Navy and served three tours of duty over 15 years.
Now, Bill Cosby Sr.
never advanced in rank above being a steward's mate, and when he returned home for the short leaves between his tours, he spent most of his time drinking in the local tavern.
He did participate in the family by producing two more sons to basically abandon by going back overseas.
This, of course, is a tragic situation.
It happens in a lot of marriages where the marriage is difficult and so the husband becomes avoidant and therefore the wife becomes more angry and therefore the husband becomes more avoidant and therefore, I mean, we understand that this usually ends in only one way.
Now, when the father is absent, not always, but a lot of times, one son is cast in the role of sort of surrogate husband for the mother.
And so with his father away for months and months at a time, his mother was constantly working.
Bill Jr.
was charged with the raising of his brothers.
At the age of 11, he'd make them breakfast before going to school, return home afterwards to take care of them.
One of his brothers said he kept us in line and whipped us when we got out of line.
And so, of course, there's significant violence in the Cosby household.
Of course, verbal fights between the parents, the occasional beating up, and physical aggression from Bill towards his brothers.
Bill Jr.
felt resentment towards his baby brother, Robert, whom he thought his mother spoiled.
Robert slept in a crib in Anna's room, but Bill and Russell, Russell is the famous one from his stand-up, they shared a bed in the second bedroom.
Which made them very close, but also ensured that they would get on each other's nerves.
In 1946, the Caspi's second child, James, came down with strep throat and then developed rheumatic fever.
It killed him within weeks, just a month short of Bill's ninth birthday.
So, violence, absentee father, constantly working mother, significant poverty, and the death of a sibling.
This is a very difficult start to life.
Now, as a boy, Cosby would often have boxing matches with neighborhood kids.
After one fight, his opponent fell to the ground unconscious, and Cosby literally thought he had killed him.
He ran back home and confessed what he'd done.
After his father made sure the presumed-to-be-dead boy was in fact all right, he laughingly asked Cosby to announce his retirement from the ring.
Also adding, let's keep all the hitting in this family to me hitting you.
God wants it that way.
On the subject of raising children and becoming their source of entertainment, Cosby made a pretty chilling remark about his father.
Cosby said, So, although there's obviously a cutesy aspect to this, this is basically a death threat.
And children do take that stuff quite seriously.
It's a very powerful way of breaking the bond between parent and child.
Caspi Sr.
seems to be a pretty violent man.
In a 1991 book called Childhood, Caspi provides a window into his life as a kid with a story about his relationship with his father.
He begins by claiming, no matter what threat my father ever made or carried out, I loved him very much.
Then he goes on to describe one particular night of his childhood, Bill Jr.
and his brother Russell.
Are sleeping together and fight for control of one small mattress.
If you've ever seen kids in the backseat, elbow, elbow, fight, fight.
After a barrage of punches coming from the young Cosby, Russell starts to cry.
Be quiet, you fool, Cosby said to his brother, fearful of attracting his father's attention.
It was too late.
What's going on in there?
asked their father.
Oh, that ain't us, Dad, replied Bill.
Well, you take my message to whoever it is.
You tell them if they don't quiet down, I'm coming in with my belt.
Bill turned to his brother and whispered, You don't shut up.
Dad's coming in with his belt and rip the meat off your bones.
You'll wish I was hitting you again.
And of course the fighting continued and Bill Sr.
issued another threat.
Now listen to me, you two.
If I hear any more crying or arguing or heavy breathing, I'm coming in there with the belt or maybe a machete.
Go to sleep!
And instead of going to sleep, the two brothers decide to jump on the bed, eventually breaking it.
Of course, why, when you receive these kinds of threats, would you do such a thing?
Well, children would generally rather have bad attention or negative attention than no attention.
So the father came into the room, and after listening to Bill's made-up story about how a stranger came in through the window and broke the bed, Bill Sr.
said, Okay, here's the story.
If I have to come back in here once more, you'll both be sleeping on hospital beds.
The story ends with Russell spitting a mouthful of water on Caspi, thus initiating another fight.
Bill Sr.
enters the room and say, Okay, since you boys want to spend the night breaking beds and spitting water and greeting people who come in the window, I'm going to let you get out of bed.
Oh good, said Russell.
We don't got to sleep anymore, Dad.
Right.
You'll both stand here for the rest of the night, and if I catch either of you moving, I'm going to kill you or do something worse.
You understand?
I mean, this is a lack of bonding, a lack of security that comes along with it turned the young boy into a habitual liar who made up stories to avoid punishment.
Cosby later recalled, throughout my boyhood, I was under constant pressure to think of something that had a chance of being believed by my mother or father.
As one young teacher told the young Cosby, William, you should be a politician.
You lie so well.
There was actually a whole show about this, I think, in the 70s called Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.
When Bill Jr.
wouldn't obey his mother, she would threaten him with his father.
Wait till your father gets home, according to Caspi, was one of the great maternal pronouncements of my youth.
Now, within the neighborhood as a whole where the Caspis lived, there was a significant amount of violence.
Regular robberies, beatings being dished out, and punishments for placing last in a game or competition, like having...
Rubber balls or snowballs thrown at your naked behind.
And one of Bill Jr.'s greatest fears was ripping his clothes in a confrontation because he knew his family couldn't afford to purchase any replacements.
So he quickly learned to use his fist to protect himself.
But also very quickly found a much more effective weapon, his comedy and charm.
I mean, one of the great charismatic figures of the 20th century.
Now, Bill hit his growth spurt fairly late.
He was a short and skinny boy.
He was often the subject or target of bullying.
But he felt that, quote, as long as people were laughing, they were my friends.
So to get myself across and to be an important person, I made them laugh.
Through humor, I gained acceptance.
But humor was a coping mechanism that kept him safe from bullies and had him avoid some of the trauma of his childhood.
But, again, I argue that it has its costs in the long run.
His youngest brother recalled, Bill could turn painful situations around and make them funny.
You laugh to keep from crying.
And you can see this in his recounting of the story where his father comes in at night and threatens to kill them, or worse.
The kill them is shocking.
The or worse makes it funny.
So in fifth grade, Bill Jr.
and the entire school took an IQ test to identify students with advanced learning potentials.
Weeks later, it was announced that Cosby was the most intelligent person in the entire school, which, of course, he was very happy to hear, but tragically, in the community, made him the target of further bullying.
He was transferred to an advanced class but showed little interest in academics.
Rather, he preferred to be the class clown.
One day, his teacher became frustrated with his behavior and decided to put him on the spot, inviting him to perform in front of the entire class.
He would later describe it as his first experience of the adrenaline rush that comes with performing before a live audience.
But he finished the year with another disappointing report card and an immense amount of boredom.
Reminds me when I was in England, and I think I was maybe eight or so, maybe nine.
I was reading Emil and the Detectives.
I was so bored in school.
I mean, who wasn't, right?
And we used to have these little desks, and I would actually just have the book down and sliding it back and forth in front of the deck to read it.
And the teacher got angry and told me, well, if you're so smart, young Mr.
Molyneux, you should take over the class.
And then she made me get up and gave me the chalk.
And this was a Friday.
And I went up and I said, okay, well, fine.
If I'm going to be in front, I might as well have some fun.
So I wrote the next day's date and said, well, class, we're about to start our day's lesson.
And then the kids were all laughing and saying, but that's the wrong date.
And I said, no, that's the right date.
And you know what?
That must mean that it's Saturday.
So no school!
Class dismissed!
And everybody went completely nuts and all that.
And the teacher never asked me to come up in front of the class again.
But it can be...
It can be fun.
When punishment backfires, it's good karma for a good heart.
And so in sixth grade, his mother, Anna Cosby, learned that a former friend who shared her dream of becoming a teacher, but did actually become a teacher, would be her son's teacher.
Anna secretly reconnected with her friend and requested that she do whatever it takes to improve Bill's school performance.
And one weekend, this involved taking Bill to a movie, buying him a meal at a diner, and bringing him home from downtown in a taxi cab.
And this was one of the first times that Bill had been out of North Philadelphia, and when he woke up the next morning, he felt that it had been some sort of magical dream.
Those things, too, you know, if you get a chance to give a poor kid a cool experience, it's well worth doing.
When I was a kid, my mother had a friend whose husband was an airline pilot.
This is back when airline pilots used to make a fortune.
And they had just an amazing house with an indoor pool, which, of course, in England is crazy.
And I just remember a New Year's Eve party so vividly, throwing the streamers, dancing, and all of that, mostly adults around.
Those kinds of memories are just...
They're oases sometimes in a difficult childhood, which you can get from A to B. In fact, A to Z through if you need to.
And so Bill was often called the teacher's pet, but this teacher also convinced him to try out for the school play.
Which was his first bout with stage fright and it wouldn't be his last.
People are often confused by stage fright among people who get in front.
I get nervous before a speech because I care because I want to do a good job and anything you really care about you don't want to fail at and that's sort of where it comes from.
So, he felt safe with this teacher, he felt supported in class, and he did very well in his studies, at least more so than he had at any point since the first grade.
At the end of the year, his report card was, A, across the board, and Anna hoped that her son might finally be starting to fulfill her academic dreams for him.
But a note from her friend and Bill's teacher left her with concern.
William is a boy's boy, an all-around fellow, and he should grow up to do great things, she wrote, adding that he would rather be a clown than a student and feels that his mission is to amuse his classmates inside and outside of school.
Now, how many class clowns go on to be comedians worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
I don't think it's the majority, so reason for concern is important.
You know, the guy who's good at the local karaoke night doesn't necessarily end up opening at the Met or even the bar.
So, in seventh grade, Cosby juggled more odd jobs, both to support his family, which of course was financially struggling, and to keep some spending money in his pocket.
He shined shoes, he bagged groceries, delivered newspapers, and more.
However, as they entered their teens, the biggest change for Bill and his friends was their new preoccupation with the opposite sex.
Ah, the hormone tsunami that erases your brain.
Cosby was learning how to approach girls, but he was self-conscious about his height, his growth spurt was still one year away, and also about how little money he had.
By the time he was 13, he understood sex, but he believed that girls wouldn't find his small stature.
Attractive.
Short guy syndrome is a huge problem, which there's really not as much sympathy as there should be in the world about it.
So he and his friends heard about a supposed aphrodisiac called the Spanish fly, which was supposed to make women, quote, come flying at you, legs first.
So that's when the boys hatched a plan to trick girls into ingesting Spanish fly powder to have sex with them.
After pooling their money, they set out in search of a Spanish sailor who could sell them this rare substance.
Eventually, they found an American sailor who gave them what he claimed was Spanish fly for free.
So the boys moved into organizing a party in Fat Albert's apartment, convincing his mother to bake them cookies with the Spanish fly on them.
When the girls arrived, Cosby offered the girl of his choice a cookie, but she turned down the offer because she disliked ginger.
My style perhaps could have been smoother, but this, after all, was the first aphrodisiac I ever had pushed, wrote Cosby in one of his books.
Now, probably not too shocking, nothing happened.
The powder may have been cornstarch, but obviously was not any kind of potent aphrodisiac.
Do I need to get into why this story is significant given the later allegations that he drugged women for sex or drugged women and raped them?
It is, of course, a massive insecurity, this idea that if the woman is in her right mind, she'll never sleep with me.
And this, of course, was early on.
I believe, I don't know if there's any proof for this, but I believe that first sexual experiences are heavily imprinting in terms of what you go for later on in life.
And...
So I think that this does speak to a significant sense of sexual unattractiveness and a belief that the woman's perceptions must be distorted in order to have sex with you.
And that is a very tragic and dangerous mindset to be in.
In eighth grade, Caspi's Allergy to homework, as it was called, caught up with him when he took geometry for the first time.
Although he could see the practical benefits of the addition, subtraction of fractions, he didn't understand what use he would ever have for geometry.
So his grades became a little bit more suspect.
Anna Cosby, though, was convinced that his high IQ would make him a candidate for the most prestigious public high school in Philadelphia called Central High.
Despite his long absences, Bill Sr.
became pretty interested in the idea, mostly because he heard how much money the school's graduates commonly earned.
Cosby's friends noted his irritation when his absentee father reappeared and pressured him to take the required entrance exam.
Cosby passed, the entrance exam was accepted to the noteworthy school, and his parents viewed the accomplishment as a source of paternal pride, sharing the news with family friends and, in the case of Bill Sr., his omnipresent drinking buddies.
After the celebration, Bill Sr.
went back to the Navy and continued working full-time, and there was nobody around to support Caspi in doing what would be required to succeed at a new school.
Instead of studying, Caspi was more interested in developments within the jazz world.
Now, just to put this in context, because I did a show or a conversation about Robin Williams after Robin's suicide and Robin Williams had a lot of his childhood was fueled by isolation and loneliness.
Now, Bill Jr.
had lots of people around him and so on, but he was a blindingly intelligent fellow surrounded by people who weren't as intelligent.
And there is going to be some loneliness in that.
And being unable to connect with people a lot less intelligent than you, and really this is just because where he was on the bell curve rather than his neighborhood in particular, It's tough.
And so you can't have an egalitarian relationship when your IQ is up here and people's IQ is down here relative to you.
And so to be an entertainer, to not have an egalitarian relationship, kind of makes sense in many ways.
And I think that had a lot of drive.
You know, I can't connect with you because our intelligence is very different, but I can entertain you.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it developed as well.
Now, of course, one of the most prestigious means one of the most difficult schools.
The courses, of course, were incredibly demanding relative to anything Bill Cosby had experienced before.
And the students, of course, the majority of them were Jewish.
They were the smartest kids in the city.
So every day he was exposed to the names and ideas of the world's great writers and thinkers.
But he struggled, of course, with his assignments.
And as usual, he found it far more interesting to make his classmates laugh.
During this time it was not uncommon for Cosby and his friends to hit multiple parties and be out until the early morning.
In the realm of drugs, Cosby was tempted to try marijuana only once, but he was turned off by the weird odor and declined the hit.
He was so expressive in his ability to entertain others that people assumed that he was either drunk or high, but it was not the case.
To avoid being broke, Cosby spent an increasing amount of time working.
He shined shoes.
He always appeared to be on the move.
Sports, jazz, the friends, part-time jobs.
The one thing, of course, that he wasn't making time for was schoolwork.
By this point, his grades were so bad, school officials insisted that he repeat several semesters.
The embarrassment from being held back led Cosby to seeing the school psychologist.
When he told his parents that the psychologist recommended that he transfer to another school, his father was livid and his mother, as usual, was disappointed.
This was in 1954.
And this, of course, was also the year of the Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka finally reached the Supreme Court.
Caspi's mother grieved at the irony.
When the Warren Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown v.
Board of Education, it opened the way, desegregation, it opened the way for millions of black children to go to school alongside white children their own age.
Yet her son, with the extremely high IQ, had already been given such an opportunity and had squandered it.
So Caspi enjoyed making people laugh because along with playing sports, it seemed like the only thing he could do well.
At Germantown High, he was falling behind in his classes again.
He was spending all his free time hanging out with his friends and watching TV and trying to teach himself to be a jazz drummer, banging away on a $75 use set that he kept in his bedroom.
But he wasn't too great at that either.
He was never going to be the next Philly Joe Jones.
Worst of all, he was starting to feel like a major disappointment to the two people he looked up to most in the world.
His mother, Anna, and the maid who worked endlessly to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of her children, and Granddad Samuel, the respectable factory worker who aimed to support him with Bible stories and words of wisdom.
Bill Caspi dropped out of high school in his junior year.
During this time, in a notable occurrence, Caspi, for the first time in his life, accepted When a friend offered him a beer after taking a few sips, Cosby felt a slight loss of control which unnerved him after the experience he would never touch alcohol again.
Now, I've had a beer or two, but I've actually never tried marijuana or any drugs.
I don't like the idea of losing control.
When you're smart, life is kind of like going down a ski hill at high speed.
You want to achieve a lot, you want to do a lot, and you need to be in control.
You wouldn't take a drug that disoriented you while you were going down a ski hill.
That's a good way to pull a Sonny Bono and hug a tree for all eternity.
And so I certainly can.
And of course, I got my first job when I was 10 and worked all through my teenage years and so on.
So again, some identification with it.
I certainly understand that.
And of course, that's what a high IQ person would do is say, what's the cost benefit of getting involved in drinking, particularly if my father is an alcoholic?
What's the cost benefit?
Doesn't really make any sense.
It's like me with drugs.
I mean, somebody offered me marijuana and I was like, okay, let me think about this.
Let me run this through my chattering forehead.
If I really like marijuana, then welcome to a life of...
Living in the legal shadows and trying to get marijuana and not knowing where it comes from and how strong it is and all of that and spending money and getting stoned.
So if I really like it, that's not really a very good thing for me as a whole.
And if I don't like it, then why bother?
And this is just one of these basic things that you think about if you think about consequences.
So, of course, Bill Cosby wanted to avoid his father's life.
His father was remembered as a wino who hung out on street corners when in town.
So Cosby didn't want the life that his father had, but he had no plans for his own life.
Now, Cosby devoted much of his teens to sports and jazz because they were the only fields where he'd seen blacks without money or family connections become successful.
When it was apparent he didn't have the talent to be a professional musician or athlete, well, he hit what he described as rock bottom.
I had no backup plan, he recalled.
As usual, Cosby maintained his usual cool exterior, making everyone laugh, but felt aimless and full of self-doubt.
Now for those who don't know, if you knew Cosby from the 80s or the 90s or whatever, or know him as the crotchety old guy yelling at black youths to pull up their pants, turn their hats around and get a job, He was like one of the epitomes of cool in the 60s and 70s.
When we get into his entertainment career, particularly I Spy and afterwards, I mean, he was the coolest of the cool.
He was a hepcat, to say the least.
And Cosby did confide in his mentor, Granddad Samuel, the man who taught him so much about pride and shame.
With an uncertain path ahead of him, Granddad Samuel's advice was to keep his chin up and not let anyone detect his inner turmoil.
If you put yourself in a compromised position, he said, you're going to have to learn not to act embarrassed.
So, later, When he decided to join the military, he would later joke that he decided on which branch of the military to join by calculating the least unpleasant way to die.
And I've certainly done that calculation too.
Infantry, no good.
Airplane falling, burning clouds from the sky.
Eh, Navy.
Okay, you might drown, I guess.
So you might get eaten by sharks, but not as bad in some ways.
At least you're already on the ground and nobody can shell you directly very easily.
Cosby chose the Navy.
Navy, that was the path his father had taken, and seeing his father in uniform was one of the rare positive paternal memories.
His decision was ironic.
Of course, Cosby always resented his father for abandoning the family to fend for themselves.
But Cosby, you know, a lot of people join the army because they don't have structure.
They join the military because they don't have structure.
They're shapeless, and they kind of need to be poured into some container that they feel is going to give them shape.
So shortly before his 19th birthday, without telling anyone else, he went to a Philadelphia enlistment center and approached the recruiter on duty.
So you want to join the Navy to see the world?
The recruiter asked.
No, Caspi replied.
I just want to get off my block.
There's a really good interview between Don Lemon and Morgan Freeman, where Morgan Freeman is saying that he doesn't believe that racism is a barrier to ambitious black men or women anymore.
And Morgan Freeman says, courage is the essence of life.
So many people come to me and they say, I could have done X, Y, and Z, but I just never got out of wherever I was.
And he's like, well, what do you mean you never got out of?
The bus runs every day.
You can get where you need to go.
And it turns out that the Navy was not the answer that Cosby was looking for after several run-ins with his commanding officer.
He was plotting schemes to escape further military service.
He wrote a letter to his mother saying, please contact the base commander and try to get me out of the military.
Instead, his mother wrote back to the commander telling him that her son needed to learn the value of discipline and to keep on him.
Because not a lot of jokes in the military.
I mean, they like to go see Robert Williams, but you don't get to charm and joke your commanding officer that often.
Now, so in the service, Cosby once mediated a dispute between black and white sailors after a mulatto, which is half-black, half-white servicemen, asked girls of both races to dance.
Cosby was friendly enough with the white sailors to tell them to go easy on the individual, but bluntly advised him to stick to our women, at least in public.
Caspi served as a hospital corpsman, working in physical therapy during his four years in the Navy, assisting seriously injured Korean War veterans.
And, I mean, can you imagine just how horrendous that would have been?
Korean War was brutal, as all wars are, and sort of reminds me of Bertolt Brecht talking about his time in the Army, where basically he said, well, the surgeon would say, saw off that man's leg, and he would.
So Caspi later talked about how the four years in the Navy gave him the discipline he lacked as a teen.
I am not your mother, the commanding officer had shouted on his initial day of boot camp.
Despite the loud proclamations, the Navy had been like a parent to him, instilling respect, punctuality, and the drive to work hard.
These were things that his own parents did not show him according to his own beliefs.
So even though he praised the military for giving him all these things, he felt that the military life was largely a waste of time.
As he said, the thing I really hated is that a guy with one stripe more than another cat thinks that he has the power of God over him, and he does.
After my first few days in the Navy, I knew I'd have to make it as a civilian.
And for that, I needed an education.
Caspi finished his high school equivalency diploma via correspondence course with the goal of pursuing higher education after his military service.
Despite a score of only 500 points on his entire SAT exam, barely more than half the average of all students heading to college in 1960, he won a track and field scholarship to Philadelphia's Temple University in 61-62, where he studied physical education while running track and playing fullback on the football team.
Despite being more than 23 years old when he enlisted, which was a full four or five years older than most of the other college freshmen, he was finally going to college as his mother always dreamed.
While playing on the varsity football team, Cosby's temper, which has been talked about for many years, flared up when he heard a fan of the other team shouting an endless amount of insults at his coach.
He turned to a white teammate who was sitting next to him on the sidelines and said, Let's get that guy!
Cosby and the teammate climbed into the stands, chased the fan down the stadium steps, threw an exit out to the parking lot and beat him up.
While some teammates were shocked by Cosby's behavior, others were aware of his violent temper.
This temper could flare when he thought he was being disrespected or somebody else was being disrespected.
Caspi began to bartend to help pay for some of his additional school expenses and learned that he could use his humor and make jokes to increase his tips, which obviously not as funny as Bill Caspi, but when I was a waiter in my teens, I found that to be the case as well.
So, he was very funny.
The manager basically said, here, I'll pay you five bucks, go up on the stage and make people laugh.
And he became a stage act, started honing his raw talents in front of a formal crowd.
Now, see, this is in his mid-twenties.
And people sort of talk about, wow, out of nowhere comes this...
But by this time, I mean, it had probably been 15 or 20 years that he'd been joking to entertain people.
You don't just sort of go up on stage and start to make these kinds of jokes.
Like, people just think, oh, wow, there's all this talent, you know.
But he's been practicing it for many times.
Like Robin Williams, his voices and his spontaneity had been practiced solo for many, many years before he went.
You just come out of nowhere and just do this stuff.
I started studying philosophy when I was 16 years old.
And now, 32 years later, you know, I guess eight years ago, I started this philosophy show.
It's now pretty much the biggest in the world.
It doesn't come out of nowhere.
You know, by the time I'd started, I'd been doing, I'd been reading philosophy and got a master's degree in the history of philosophy.
I had been doing it for decades.
It doesn't come out of nowhere.
It seems like the 10-year overnight success is the old joke, right?
So his early stand-up days, right at the beginning, he had his first unpleasant experience with the media and naturally this would not be his last.
So a reporter took interest in Cosby's story, you know, a college student working his way through school by doing stand-up and so on, and interviewed him for an article.
And the headline was, That, of course...
Sort of looks a little bit like an image of a black tribesman.
The opening paragraph described Cosby as hurling verbal spears at the relations between whites and negroes.
So everyone around him thought, hey, great publicity, but Cospy was not happy about it.
His act was mainly conceptual and observational humor, but the reporter focused on the race stuff that he did, portraying him as yet another black comic in a long line of angry black comics.
His first experience with the media had left him already feeling misunderstood and mistrustful.
But the media attention was beneficial and more opportunities started coming his way, but they conflicted with his college work and athletics.
So he was faced with a big decision.
He ultimately chose to drop out of college one year away from achieving his degree.
That is a ballsy move, to say the least.
He didn't ask his mother what she thought of his decision because he already knew.
He just informed her and moved on.
His brothers later told him that after their conversation, his mother went to her room and lay in bed for a week.
Now, his future wife.
Through a mutual friend, Bill met Camille Hanks and proposed to her within two weeks of that first meeting.
Camille was more practical wanting to get to know Caspi better and see if their romance could survive him returning to the road for his stand-up performances.
Caspi worked hard to make their relationship work despite his travel schedule, but Camille's upper-class parents were not impressed.
From their first conversation, Camille was struck by Cosby's honesty and sincerity.
He opened up about his long-term goals.
He said, I want to make enough money as a performer to retire and become a gym teacher at a city high school where he could help young teens avoid the same mistakes which he made.
After a successful appearance on The Tonight Show, Bill Cosby emerged in American consciousness as a national celebrity.
Now, of course, this was while Martin Luther King was giving his I Have a Dream speech and the civil rights movement battle was well underway, Caspi achieved national prominence without reference to racial tensions.
He was race conscious, which we'll talk about later, but was not his focus in his performance.
Caspi was sure he wanted to marry Camille and asked her father for her hand in marriage before offering her the engagement ring he had purchased.
When asked, Camille's father said, do me a favor, take this girl off my hands because her mother is driving me crazy.
Camille's mother was not happy about the wedding, but she didn't stand in the young couple's way.
Camille's parents agreed to host the wedding.
The date was set January 25th, 1964.
Not really the happiest wedding in many ways.
Not one single person from Cosby's family came to his wedding, not even his mother.
That is tragic and heartbreaking, I think.
So after his marriage, he continued, I think until Steve Martin, he was about the most popular comic around.
Cosby's career continued going to the stratosphere, and he was taking on other projects.
He also started recording comedy albums on a frequent basis.
These comedy albums were huge.
I mean, they went gold, they went platinum.
They were around in my little flat, little apartment when I was a kid growing up, and They were everywhere.
I mean, he was just an amazingly public figure.
And again, for people who are younger, I mean, just don't know.
He's not been, other than doing endless stand-up tours, he's not been much in the public eye for the past couple of decades.
So then, Caspi was offered his first show, co-starring with Robert Culp in an espionage comedy adventure series for NBC called I Spy.
And the show was a huge hit.
Caspi was honored with three consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Now, filming the first season of I Spy, his wife was pregnant with the couple's first child.
He was so thrilled, he started to talk about his impending fatherhood in his stand-up act.
This was the origin of the material which eventually led to the Cosby show.
Filming in Hong Kong for I Spy ran behind schedule, and Cosby missed the birth of his first daughter, Erica Cosby.
In total, Bill and Camille Caspi had five children, four daughters and a son.
I guess they got stuck on the letter E in the alphabet.
Erica, Elvin, Erin and Ensa and one son, Ennis, who came to a tragic end.
So during the 1970s, Bill Cosby made regular appearances on the Educational Children's Series, The Electric Company, and Sesame Street.
And he worked very hard on these, and he worked way below scale.
When he could make 50, 70 grand a weekend, he would take two days a week to work on The Electric Company and other children's shows, maybe being paid $70,000 a year.
This is part of his generosity and part of his focus on...
The education of children.
His PhD was about how Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids could be used to educate children.
So his critically acclaimed cartoon series called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids ran for 13 years and 110 episodes, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by TV Guide as the best cartoon show of the 1970s.
So he returned to college to earn a bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1970, a master's degree in 72, and a doctorate degree in 76 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
His work on children's education, his degree was in education, and so his work was pretty influential and pretty instrumental.
So they used to play some of his shows in schools in the morning, and this actually got kids, particularly black kids, to come to school.
This was quite amazing.
I don't think they're playing any of my shows to get kids to come to school.
His temper did flare up from time to time.
September 28th, 1976, he initiated a fight with Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, normally a place of such collected cool and calmness.
So Smothers and Cosby had previous history.
After some prodding, Cosby lost his cool and punched Smothers in the head from behind, knocking him to the ground.
Later, his publicist would insist that Cosby tried three times to get Smothers to quit bothering him.
When he wouldn't stop, he said, Bill tried other means to get him to stop.
When Camille heard about the incident, it reinforced her concerns that Los Angeles was an unhealthy influence for her successful husband.
So, by the time Bill Cosby was in his early 40s, he was earning sometimes over $3 million per year.
Just as an advertising pitchman continued to full schedule the stand-up comedy performances, he was incredibly secure financially.
Now, there's something called a Q-score, which is a measure of your likability in the general public, which, of course, people need to keep track of to figure out what you're worth as an advertising pitchman.
The perception of his likability and honesty made him a perfect spokesman for almost any brand.
Caspi did promotions for Crest Toothpaste, of course, Jello, Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola, Texas Instruments, EF Hutton, Kodak.
And many more.
As Koch's chief of public relations, Anthony Tortorici, described it, quote, the three most believable personalities are God, Walter Cronkite, and Bill Cosby.
Not bad.
The marketing arm, which ranks perceptions of celebrities based on online polls, said that a 2014 Survey, after the allegations from the 18 women, showed that Casby, once the third most trusted celebrity, now ranked at number 2615.
So, as mentioned, he sold an unbelievable amount of comedy albums.
He went on to win eight gold records, five platinum records, and five Grammy Awards.
In 86, he became a best-selling author with the publication of the book Fatherhood, would go on to publish ten other books.
This, of course, is during the Cosby Show phenomenon.
He was generous with his financial success.
He ended up putting his younger brothers through college and sent his mother enough money so she never had to work again.
He paid the way of hundreds of students through college in his continued dedication to advancing education.
He donated tens of millions of dollars to charities and various schools.
So, of course, and we'll get to this when we get to the allegations, he did give some money to some of the women who claimed that he abused her.
But This was not singular to any possible indiscretions or rapes with women, but it was a pattern of his behavior that he gave money to lots of people.
He was also influential, Bill Cosby, in hiring blacks for production roles, even though he ran afoul of the Hollywood trade unions.
Trade unions have a strong history of racism.
When Cosby asked what it took to get into the union, they explained, well, you've got to pass a skills test, but even to qualify to take that test, you've got to train alongside an existing union member, and both the union member and the trainee have to be paid in full.
And Cosby personally funded the cost of the extra training and was instrumental in getting Hollywood trade union cards for 48 new black members.
One of his largest gifts was, as I mentioned, a 20...
Million dollar grant to Spelman College, the largest gift ever granted to any of America's traditionally black colleges.
The gift was used to establish the Camilla Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center, along with three chairs in the Fine Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
Now this donation was made after he confessed to infidelity.
So he confesses to infidelity and then spends 20 million dollars to name a huge academic center after his wife.
My eyebrow doth raise slightly.
So the Cosby Show was huge and I'm sorry if you're too young to remember this although I envy the youth and the slightly smaller forehead.
So it was originally created as an extension of Cosby stand-up comedy depicting family dynamics between parents and children.
It wasn't actually his idea but producers came to him and said we need to turn this material into a show.
It was the highest-rated television show for five consecutive seasons, remained in the Nielsen ratings top 20 throughout its eight-year run, and reinvigorated the previously stagnant sitcom genre.
Airing from September 20th, 1984, until April 30th, 1992, the social and cultural impact of the show was being felt and discussed long before the revolutionary television juggernaut ended its run.
So, Bill Cosby, when he was younger, he was asked, did you have a happy childhood?
And he said, no, but I will in my stories.
The revisionism of tragedy in childhood to the Huxtable family is pretty significant.
He was, of course, accused of not portraying the black family accurately, but of course...
I mean, to me, if you make a story about an exceptional person and then you're then criticized for not, that that person is exceptional, well, of course, that's why you're making a story about him.
Alexander Salk developed the polio vaccine.
Blindingly intelligent, dedicated guy, very generous guy, never patented the vaccine, gave it away for free.
If you make a show about him or make a movie about him and people say, well, that's not the average white person.
It's like, well, yeah, that's why we're making a movie about this guy rather than that.
So the fact that it was an exceptional family, even by white standards.
Look, people say it wasn't a depiction of the black family.
My God.
I mean, even now in America, 70 to 80 percent of parents hit their children.
And in some studies, the average is about 936 times a year.
They hit their children three times a day, from the age of seven months to four years of age.
A lot of hitting going on of children in America.
There was no hitting in the Cosby Show.
No yelling, no name-calling.
And there was parental authority that was legitimate and earned.
And there were life lessons that I still remember to this day.
I think the eldest son had a mortgage and was freaking out.
And Bill Cosby was saying, oh, you've got friends, you've got family, you've got support, you've got a job, don't worry about it.
And I remember one reason, again, it's been a long time since I watched the show, and I certainly didn't watch them all, but There was a man who was talking about drug problems and Bill Cosby's face was so serious.
I just remember being incredibly moved by how this incredibly funny man could be so incredibly serious in listening to this man's troubles.
I now understand why, which we'll get to, but...
Cosby said, look, the parents make mistakes, the kids make mistakes, but the people show great love and respect for one another.
And I think that is a wonderful thing.
He gave the world, as I mentioned, eight years of education about parenting.
I call it peaceful parenting, but there's lots of different ways to talk about it.
But basically it's parenting without power, aggression, violence, abuse, hitting, spanking, even timeouts.
I don't remember being part of it.
I do remember that...
I think there was one show where the little girl had a sip of whiskey and then the family all pretended to drink whiskey, but it turned out to be tea and so on.
And Felicia Rashidshad was the mom.
I think that's her name.
She was incredibly funny.
There was one where the kids were concerned that she was going through menopause and she overheard them talking about the symptoms, you know, mood swings and hot flashes and so on.
And she ended up making fun of them by coming in, having extreme mood swings and then sticking her head in a freezer.
I mean, just very, very funny stuff and very, very warm stuff.
I mean, I think most of us, particularly those of us who had really rough childhoods, wanted to, you know, climb inside that vacuum tube and live with those people.
I mean, it was a wonderfully warm and funny and lovely family portrayal.
Thank you.
So, in 92, two professors from the University of Massachusetts published a study, and they did lots of focus group studies with black and white viewers of the show.
And They wrote a book called Enlightened Racism, The Cosby Show Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream.
And it was confirmed, basically, that Huxtables had given whites a distorted view of black progress overall.
But on the other hand, the study found that both blacks and whites were grateful to have had a show that portrayed African Americans in such a dignified and constructive light.
The study also found that black viewers saw the charge that the Huxtables weren't authentic as faintly ludicrous, given the show's constant invocation of African-American history and culture.
Coretta Scott King, I think Martin Luther King's wife, called the Cosby Show, quote,"...the most positive portrayal of black family life that has ever been broadcast." Well, that, I think, is an impressive achievement.
And for those who don't know, I mean, the art that was hanging there was African-American art.
I think his sweaters were all made by African-Americans.
Some of the race focus, you know, I don't mean to criticize this, but some of the race focus is faintly troubling to me.
Like, if I was a hugely rich guy and I said, well, I'm going to give $20 million to a university, but that university has to pretty much only admit white people, well...
You know, that would be race-focused, I guess.
And the fact that Bill Cosby was so race-focused, again, I obviously can understand it.
I mean, history and all that.
But if I said, well, I'm going to get a bunch of people to work on my show, but they all have to be white, race preferences and so on, it's a tricky subject.
And I don't have any particular answers.
I just wanted to point out that I find it mildly troubling.
So, the Cosby show was an amazing phenomenon, a powerful phenomenon, and it also showed, you know, that the charges of racism are a challenge and have often been a challenge.
Nat King Cole, a fantastic entertainer from the 60s, did very well.
Sammy Davis Jr., a fantastic entertainer from the 60s, did very well.
Bill Cosby, of course, there were...
The idea that somebody or anyone I know who would be white would say, well, I'm not going to watch The Cosby Show because it's a black family.
I mean, quality is quality.
And the degree to which entertainment can be provided, irrespective of race.
Anyone ever said, oh, Sam Cooke, no way, he's black.
I mean, that's insane.
I mean, I'm a fantastic singer and songwriter.
The world, it's possible that the world is fairer than we think.
So, as far as the kids go, his daughter Erica went to the University of California at Berkeley to study art, embarked on a career as a painter.
Now, the two youngest daughters were still in school during this time and were happy to be associated with the famous parents and their work.
While in college, Ensa had assisted her mother Camilla with her book projects, while Elvin had transferred to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and assisted in the wardrobe department on her father's productions.
Now, his daughter Erin Interesting, and it really speaks to one of the most foundational questions of ethics and family life, which is to what degree are children born problematic or challenging, and to what degree is it environment?
It's the old genes versus environment challenge.
And I remember these bits that, again, I'm going to paraphrase and do it badly because I'm not Bill Cosby, but he would say, oh, you know, the first child comes out in all sweetness and light and sleeps through the night and so on, and then they're like, oh, great, this is easy.
Let's have a second kid.
And the second kid comes out with a chomp and a cigar and says, all right, who's in charge here?
I've come to make trouble.
And in his early comedy routines, Cosby jokingly referred to his second daughter as Beelzebub.
She was a difficult and had much more of a wild side than Erica.
So at 14, Erin, this Beelzebub spawn, according to Cosby, started drinking alcohol, smoking pot while at boarding school.
Boarding school.
You know, kids in the Cosby show were not sent to boarding school.
The brothers...
The older brothers did not hit the younger brothers in the Cosby show.
The parents did not fight with each other.
This had nothing to do with Cosby's childhood.
This is an important thing to understand.
This was an unbelievably sentimentalized and idealized creation of a family.
That was the polar opposite.
It did not reflect the American family at the time, or even now, where there's a significant amount of 50% of sibling relationships are considered to be abusive by psychologists.
The vast majority of parents are still hitting their children.
None of this was portrayed.
It was a sentimentalized, idealized version of the family.
It gave people a window into what a peaceful family and a loving and respectful family would look like.
But it was not an accurate reflection of either white or black or Hispanic families at the time.
Or Asian families, for that matter.
Cliff Huxtable was also an incredibly available doctor.
Doctors who were pretty busy.
And Bill Cosby himself was much like his father before him, though not to his greater degree, was an absentee father.
He was on the road a lot.
He tried taking his kids with him for a time, but particularly on the movie shoots and TV show shoots, working 14, 16, 18 hours a day for seven minutes of footage a day.
You just don't have time for your kids.
By the time Erin enrolled in college, she graduated cocaine, graduated to cocaine, sorry, ignored her schoolwork and dropped out in her sophomore year.
Her parents responded by telling her that if she quit college, she would be on her own, and she was.
And of course, Bill Cosby quit college but supported himself through stand-up.
He said, we let the child go, said Cosby.
No one's getting kicked out of the house and we're not pulling away the safety net.
We have phone numbers and the person is to call anytime there's any trouble.
But we're also saying...
This is your idea and you're going to have to earn the right to be on your own.
You'll get no money from us towards your support.
For the next several years Erin stayed with friends in New York and spent the majority of her time partying.
In 1989 she went to a nightclub and connected with a male friend who was there with Mike Tyson.
Mike Tyson, for those who don't know, a famous boxer who was convicted of rape.
Eventually Erin ended up at Tyson's estate.
At his estate, he made an aggressive sexual advance towards her.
Apparently, according to her report, pinned her down, but she was able to escape.
She told her father about the situation.
Bill Carsby immediately called his legal team.
Tyson was informed that he would face charges unless he sought immediate counseling.
Tyson agreed and honored the agreement briefly, but eventually stopped going to his sessions.
This is a tragic and horrible situation.
If the Cosby's had pursued charges against Mike Tyson, then several years later Mike Tyson may or probably would not have been convicted and sent to prison for raping an 18-year-old in an Indianapolis hotel room.
And according to Aaron, Mike Tyson was incredibly angry that he had to go to therapy and so on.
Cosby demanded that Erin also seek treatment.
She had admitted to a $200 a day cocaine habit.
After consulting with experts, the Cosby's decided it was too early to pull back on the tough-life stance, but they offered to pay for her rehab treatments.
She was told that she would not be welcomed back into the family until she straightened herself out for good.
Eventually, the National Enquirer tracked Erin down after she spent five weeks in a rehab facility.
She said, looking back, I can't believe how dad managed to go on with his show every week, portraying America's favorite father while having a daughter like me, causing him so much pain.
People see Bill Cosby as a superdad, but I'm proof that drug and alcohol tragedies can happen even in the most loving families.
And this is why when he was listening to the actor talk about drug problems, he was so serious.
I think.
After the story, Cosby commented further, quote, We have four other children and this particular daughter appears to be the only one who is really very selfish.
She's 23 now.
She's never held down a job, never kept an apartment for more than six months.
She uses her boyfriends.
She wants the finer things, but she can't stand anybody else's dirt.
It's going to take her hitting rock bottom where she's totally exhausted and at that point where she can't fight anymore.
Right now we're estranged.
She can't come here.
She's not a person you can trust.
You think you're not a good parent because you don't answer the call, but you can't let the kid use you.
After the National Enquirer headlines about her troubles, Erin had married and quickly divorced, but kept a much lower profile through promoting parties and working in a gift shop.
The two youngest daughters were still in school and happy to be associated with their famous parents and their work.
While attending college, Enser had assisted Camille with her book on television.
Inspired by her stylish parents and fashionable friends, she transferred from Spelman to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
And in her spare time, she liked to hang out at her dad's studio and help out in the wardrobe department.
So, Ennis, finally Bill got the son that he'd always wanted, and he made a point of spending significant one-on-one time with him when Bill wasn't on the road.
As Ennis got older, he took his son with him on the road, hanging out with him during the day and asking him to stay in the hotel room during his performances.
Cosby was increasingly frustrated, though, with Ennis's lack of scholastic achievement, which obviously mirrored Bill Cosby's own youth.
The older he got, the more Ennis struggled with taking exams and completing homework assignments.
He was sent to different schools, but this didn't correct the problem.
After a specific instance where his homework wasn't completed, Cosby confronted his son and wanted answers.
"'I was robbed!' Ennis said.
"'I was on my way to school and a man with a gun took my homework!' And he didn't take your money?
Cosby asked skeptically.
He didn't want my money, Ennis pleaded.
Just my homework.
So Cosby, of course, was not amused to see his own son lie to his face, and he was determined to teach him to never do it again.
He took Ennis to one of the barns and gave him a spanking.
Do you promise not to lie again?
Cosby said.
Yes, Ennis said, crying.
Good, Cosby said.
Then go back to the house.
Ennis was about to leave and Cosby struck him once more, further shocking his already startled son.
I lied, Cosby said.
Do you want me to lie to you again?
No, Ennis whimpered.
Following this confrontation, Ennis worked harder but still did badly on tests and took a huge amount of time to finish his homework assignments.
He quickly grew indifferent towards further schoolwork, but Cosby urged, you just have to try harder.
Ennis tried as hard as he could but got nowhere until he was diagnosed with dyslexia.
Okay, now everything started to make sense, and after Ennis went to a special school designed to help dyslexics develop strategies for comprehending information, his grades improved, and shortly thereafter he discovered his passion, teaching special education and helping individuals like himself.
He set his goal of attending graduate school to get advanced degrees in education and later received his master's degree from Columbia University's Teachers College.
Caspi was, of course, overjoyed with his son's turnaround, but Ennis wasn't done yet.
He was aiming for his doctorate.
Then, a staggering tragedy struck the Cosby family.
On January 16th, 1997, Ennis William Cosby was fatally shot by the perpetrator of an attempted robbery in Los Angeles.
Ennis was 27 years old.
People close to Cosby, I mean, everybody knew.
He and all of us have an incredibly difficult time of death.
Now he had to bury his only son and hold his family together in the process.
Of course, he was able to use humor to distract from emotional pain, but this was tragic and, frankly, uncharted territory.
There are very few comedians who can make anything funny about such a tragedy.
It was a terrible time, but there was one small silver lining to this cloud.
Erin Cosby reunited with her family.
She'd barely spoken to or seen her family for over a decade, but she wanted to be with them while they grieved Ennis' death.
The killer was eventually found and was sentenced to life in prison.
But this tragedy did to some degree keep Bill Cosby from being in the public eye, or at least perceived as a comedian in the public eye.
So the week after burying his son, Cosby did want to get back into the public eye.
He said, this isn't right.
I may be hurting inside, but I'm an entertainer.
My job is to make people happy.
So Cosby picked up the phone, called CBS News, and told them he was ready to grant his first interview since Ennis' death.
That afternoon, news anchor Dan Rather was contacted immediately, dispatched to the agreed-upon location to conduct this exclusive interview.
In the interview, Rather asked Cosby the expected questions about how...
He and his family were coping in the wake of his son's murder.
He asked him his thoughts on the LAPD's directions and investigations into the murder, and then rather took the conversation in a different direction.
Two days after Ennis' murder, a woman named Autumn Jackson had been arrested and charged with trying to extort $24 million from Bill Cosby, under threat of telling the world that she was his out-of-wedlock daughter.
At the time of the arrest, a Caspi spokesman insisted that Bill Caspi barely knew Jackson, but admitted that he had funded her college tuition for a year and paid other expenses, describing her as one of the hundreds of people Caspi had helped put through school.
Is there any possibility that you are the father of this child?
Rather asked.
Caspi took a deep breath and glanced towards the ceiling.
There's a possibility, he said.
I mean, if you said, did you make love to the woman?
The answer is yes.
Now, of course, Rather had a completely different story on his hands.
Until that moment, it was never acknowledged that Caspi knew Autumn's mother, at least in the carnal sense, but now he admitted he did know her and he'd slept with her and could possibly be the child's father.
Caspi proceeded to reveal further details about his, quote, relationship with these women, Noting that he learned of Autumn's existence after contacting her mother, Sean Berkey's, for a second rendezvous during a stay in Las Vegas, he described how he paid them both money to stay silent and gave them advice on how to improve their lives.
The public image of the ideal family man, Bill Cosby, of course, was dealt a serious blow that day.
Cosby then commented on why he had voluntarily confessed to something that his people had spent a significant amount of energy trying to suppress.
He said, as an entertainer, I want to be known as a fellow who, not only was he honest, he took the hit himself.
You're not going to find me running around talking about how many entertainers do you know who, or you can't go on the road without.
That's not it, man.
It was my choice.
While information about Caspi's admissions was released immediately following the interview taping, viewers never saw the actual interview.
CBS News later announced that 60 Minutes had decided not to air the story.
But why?
Immediately questions, of course, were raised as to whether Caspi had managed to get the story suppressed.
So they said, we did the right thing in terms of immediately releasing the news from the interview, but it became a tabloid feeding frenzy kind of story.
We didn't see any way to avoid the perception that we were somehow adding to the hype or somehow exploiting this tragedy.
The entire situation enraged Camille Caspi, who issued a statement condemning the press for paying more attention to the Autumn Jackson case than it did to the death of her only son and the search for his murderer.
She said, all personal negative issues between Bill and me were resolved years ago.
We are a united couple.
What happened 23 years ago is not important to me, except for the current issue of extortion.
What is very important to me is the apprehension of the person or persons who killed our son.
So, according to reports, she extorted about $100,000 out of Bill Cosby, this woman, and then when she wanted more, he went to the police and she went to jail for extortion.
After this latest media firestorm, Bill Cosby went to his usual remedy, going back to work.
The Jell-O brand was about to celebrate the 100th anniversary.
Cosby, of course, was so intrinsic to the marketing and promotion of the brand.
So he wanted to, in fact, he insisted on participating in the planned media events.
But there was one condition.
He said, I just don't want to talk about Ennis.
The representatives for the Jello brand agreed and not wanting to take any chances.
They went so far as to specifically remind the media prior to the festivities that they could not ask questions or ask Bill Cosby to talk about his son's murder.
A reporter brought up the subject anyway and Cosby completely blew up, lashing out at the Jello representative and storming out of the room.
I told you, no question about that.
I'm ending this interview.
So, the pound cake speech.
Back in 2004, Caspi delivered a famous speech that shocked blacks and black activists in particular.
Here are some highlights from what became known as the pound cake speech.
In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on.
I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was two?
Where were you when he was twelve?
Where were you when he was eighteen?
And how come you don't know he had a pistol?
And where is his father?
And why don't you know where he is?
And why doesn't the father show up to talk to this boy?
Fifty percent dropout rate, I'm telling you.
And people in jail and women having children by five, six different men.
Under what excuse?
I want somebody to love me and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent.
Grandmother, mother and great-grandmother in the same room raising children and the child knows nothing about love or respect or any of the three of them.
All this child knows is gimme, gimme, gimme.
These people want to buy the friendship of a child and the child couldn't care less.
Are you not paying attention, people with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack?
Isn't that a sign of something?
Or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up?
Isn't it a sign of something when she's got her dress all the way up to the crack and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from?
We are not Africans.
Those people are not Africans.
They don't know a damn thing about Africa.
With names like Shenikwa, Shaligwa, Mohammed and all that crap.
And all of them are in jail.
We cannot blame white people.
Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.
We've got to take the neighborhood back.
We've got to go in there.
It's right around the corner.
It's standing on the corner.
It can't speak English.
It doesn't want to speak English.
I can't even talk the way these people talk.
Why you ain't.
Where you is go.
I don't know who these people are.
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
Then I heard the father talk.
This is all in the house.
Backlash, of course, is predictable, was fierce and immediate, but Cospy stuck to the statements he made and also later expanded upon them and released a book in 07 called Come on, People, on the Path from Victims to Victors, in which he turns a spotlight not on white racism and oppression, but on the failure of the black family and single motherhood in particular, as well as the perpetual victim mentality.
Here are some excerpts from the book.
Hopefully it will help you understand why some blacks have a love-hate relationship with Cosby.
I'm leaning a little bit more on hate lately.
He wrote, Parenting works best when both a mother and a father participate.
Some mothers can do it on their own, but they need help.
A house without a father is a challenge.
A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe, and that's about what we have today.
To be sure, the justice system disfavors black males and some are in the system who should not be.
But tragically, too many of our sons deserve to be right where they are.
Those black boys who do make it to high school drop out more often than they graduate.
Without a working dad in the home or in their lives, most of them fail to learn the kind of basic hands-on skills that would help them find an entry-level job.
Of course, with upwards of 70% of black males being born out of wedlock, taking on the black single mother was a PR disaster for Cosby.
There's a reason why Obama has never taken this issue on.
Single mothers are a core voting bloc for the Democrats, and so the left-wing media doesn't and didn't appreciate Cosby comments either, and he lost the support he once enjoyed.
He said, I feel that I can no longer remain silent.
If I have to make a choice between keeping quiet so that conservative media does not speak negatively or ringing the bell to galvanize those who want change in the lower economic community, then I choose to be a bell ringer.
In 2013, he also got flack when he wrote an op-ed for the New York Post.
Where he wrote, I'm a Christian, but Muslims are misunderstood, intentionally misunderstood.
We should all be more like them.
They make sense, especially with their children.
There is no other group like the black Muslims who put so much effort into teaching children the right things.
They don't smoke, they don't drink or overindulge in alcohol, they protect their women, they command respect.
And what do these other people do?
They complain about them.
They criticize them.
We'd be a better world if we emulated them.
We don't have to become black Muslims, but we can embrace the things that work.
Also in 2013, Cosby criticized Republicans who failed to stand for President Obama's State of the Union speech, likening them to racists who opposed desegregation.
I think we have people sitting there who are as bad as the people who were against any kind of desegregation.
So now before we get to the most challenging part of this conversation, a few caveats of course are in order.
I am not a lawyer.
Everything that I talk about is merely my opinion.
None of these allegations have been proven or disproven to my knowledge, certainly not in any court of law.
So all of this remains speculation and allegation.
Nineteen women as of now have come forward alleging various degrees of sexual misconduct on the part of Bill Cosby from inappropriate touching all the way through to drugging and outright rape.
That is not a good number, of course, as anyone can imagine.
I'm not obviously going to go through all nineteen.
We'll talk about a few of them.
Lachelle Covington, an aspiring actress, filed a sexual assault report in 2000 alleging that Cosby pushed her hand Towards his penis after she asked him for career advice and went to his house.
The New York Post wrote, A Cosby spokesperson claimed, The story is not true.
It did not happen.
Mr.
Cosby was not contacted by the police, and the first he learned about this was from the National Enquirer.
In January 2005, Andrea Constand, director of operations for Temple University's women's basketball team, accused Cosby of sexual assault.
The comedian allegedly drugged her with herbal pills, quote, herbal pills, that was supposed to ease her anxiety, and after incapacitating her, he touched her breast and vaginal area, also rubbing his penis against her hand.
Cosby admitted to having sexual contact with Constand, but claimed it was consensual.
After investigating the case, District Attorney Bruce L. Castro Jr.
decided that there wasn't enough, quote, credible and admissible evidence.
According to Castro, what hurt Constance's case was her delay in coming forward about a year and contact with Cosby after the incident.
The District Attorney claimed, quote, much exists in this investigation that could be used to portray persons on both sides of the issue in a less than flattering light.
Constant then sued Cosby for battery assault, infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and invasion of privacy, asking for at least $150,000 in damage.
This time, she also alleged that Cosby, quote, digitally penetrated fingers her.
She claimed the comedian gave her three blue pills, which rendered her semi-conscious, while Cosby's lawyers attempted to clarify that he only gave her a tablet and half of Benadryl.
There were 13 witnesses who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Cosby and were willing to testify in support of Constance's case.
Ten decided to remain anonymous, referred to as Jane Doe's, and the other three were revealed to be Tamara Green, Beth Ferrier and Barbara Bowman.
The lawsuit was settled in November 2006 for an undisclosed sum and with no admission of guilt.
None of the witnesses testified before court.
The Cannes Stand case briefly resurfaced in February 2014 after two Newsweek interviews with Green and Bowman.
Ultimately, as mentioned before, the spark that started the current fire was a comedy set by Hannibal Buress that went viral on the internet in October 2014, in which Buress called Cosby a rapist.
The story was soon picked up by major media outlets.
Nineteen women have now accused Cosby of sexual assault since the Buress performance brought the allegations to the public.
The allegations or the accusations ranged from forced kissing to rape, and amongst the alleged victims are former playmate Victoria Valentino, model and reality TV personality Janice Dickinson, Carla Ferrigno, actress and wife of Incredible Hulk, actor Lou Ferrigno, and the actress Michelle Hurd.
Some accusations involve sexual assault, and some include allegations that Cosby drugged and raped his accusers.
Recently, the Associated Press released previously unaired footage of an interview conducted with both Bill and Camille Cosby where the interviewer brought up the allegations.
I didn't want to.
I have to ask about your name coming up in the news recently, the reporter told Cosby.
No, no, we don't answer that, Cosby replied.
Cosby denied any further comment.
The clip released included an exchange after the formal interview concluded.
Cosby said, now can I get something from you that none of that will be shown?
Also adding that he thought the AP had the, quote, integrity not to ask.
If you want to consider yourself to be serious, I would appreciate it if the footage was scuttled.
Bill Cosby did break his silence about the subject but kept it incredibly brief.
He said, I know people are tired of me not saying anything but a guy doesn't have to answer to innuendos.
People should fact check.
People shouldn't have to go through that and shouldn't answer to innuendos.
Now, of course, he's surrounded by great lawyers, and to not discuss any of these allegations is probably the legal advice that he is receiving.
So, to not answer is probably no indication of innocence or guilt, but probably just the advice that he's receiving from his lawyers.
Again, I don't know.
This is just my particular speculation.
It is interesting about the one-sided mirror of race relations that if Bill Cosby were a white man serially preying upon and raping, as the accusations go, black women, I mean, everybody would go insane, but these women are all white to my knowledge, and that is interesting to say the least, and the fact that it's not commented on is also interesting to say the least.
Needless to say, I don't know whether these allegations are true or false.
They have not been established beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law.
And it seems to me unlikely that the truth will ever be known, because so much time has passed.
There's no physical evidence.
There is a significant percentage of rape accusations, of sexual assault accusations, turn out to be false, either because the evidence contradicts the claims or because the women, or men for that matter, retract their accusations.
So it is obviously 19 is a significant number, but some of these women were together for or named as Witnesses in the prior lawsuits would have known about each other's testimony, which doesn't, again, mean anything as far as proof of that goes.
The only proof that could occur is some certain physical evidence which, after the passage of time that has occurred, seems virtually impossible to obtain, or perhaps a confession of wrongdoing on the part of Bill Cosby, which...
I don't anticipate for a variety of reasons.
So we will not, I believe, ever know the actual truth about Bill Cosby.
Certainly great evil has occurred no matter what happens.
Because if he did these horrendous acts against these women, this is absolutely evil.
If he didn't and they're accusing him of it, then this is absolutely evil as well.
And we will, in all likelihood in my opinion, never know the truth.
Look, I know celebrities who will not be in a room with a woman alone.
There are people who practice therapy who will never close their door when with a patient of the opposite sex.
Because some people say, well you never know what these women, or men for that matter, are going to say.
And we know, of course, that Bill Cosby has admitted to extramarital affairs.
This coaching count stuff, you know, like I'm going to help you with your career, just come to my house alone and stuff like that.
I mean, it is kind of the oldest and fairly vilest trick in the book, whether it happened or not.
He did send money to some of these women.
There seems to be some evidence towards that.
Again, whether it's proven or not, I don't know.
But there seems to be some evidence that he sent money to some of these women.
But he sent money to lots of people.
And so that, to me, is not anything kind of airtight.
We do know, of course, that a woman went to jail for blackmailing him.
And so there is a financial incentive.
One hesitates to come to any rational conclusion about these things because, tragically, if the women had gone to the police right afterwards, they could have been tested for the drug.
His home could have been searched for the drug.
They could have tested for injury.
This is what is so horrendous about these kinds of he said and she said cases.
Beyond reasonable doubt is a standard, I believe, almost impossible to attain in these kinds of situations, which is why, before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, before the pill, there was...
Massive amounts of energy in society devoted to preventing people from getting into these kinds of situations.
Don't invite Playboy models to your house alone if you're a married man.
Listen, Playboy models, if a married man invites you to his house alone while he's in Vegas away from his wife for months, don't go.
Nobody's that interested in your singing career.
They're probably just egg hunters.
Probably just want to have sex.
This is all, I think, fairly well understood.
A lot of effort used to go into trying to avoid getting into these kinds of situations.
Now, less effort is put into and a lot of disasters like this can occur and can have some plausibility.
Look, if I went, when I go on speaking engagements or to conferences, if I invited hot young philosophy vixens to my hotel room alone for philosophy advice, podcasting, I don't know, this would be inappropriate.
This would be wrong.
It would be disrespectful to my wife and nothing I would ever in a million years do.
There is a lesson which is try to avoid situations where compromise can occur.
If he did nothing wrong, he still exercised very poor judgment in how he tried to help all of these highly attractive young women with their careers if they in fact did show up in his hotel rooms and so on.
So again, we don't know for sure.
But putting that aside, which I know is a big thing to put aside, but there's in some ways Not more important, that's obviously hugely important issues, but longer lasting issues to talk about.
Bill Cosby was a brilliant and flawed, and is a brilliant and flawed man.
He was a hypocrite in many ways.
He worked on The Caspi Show.
He worked tirelessly to educate and to improve the lot of children.
He portrayed one of the best loved fathers in media history, Cliff Huxtable in The Caspi Show.
But Bill Cosby has self-admitted to having a series of affairs.
This was not part of the Cosby show.
Bill Cosby has publicly admitted to hitting his son, at least perhaps his other kids.
I don't know whether this happened or not, but he's publicly admitted to hitting his son.
None of that in the Cosby show.
Bill Cosby regularly made jokes about child abuse.
This is something that happens In minority communities, in the black community.
I know it happens in the white community too, but Sean McGunder, I think, makes jokes about it.
Eddie Murphy, of course, with his mother throwing the hitting children with shoes.
How funny that was.
Caspi talking about his father's threats.
Caspi talking about being hit and it being funny.
I mean, there was a child psychologist who consulted on the Cosby show.
Cosby knew better.
Obama has made jokes.
President Obama has made jokes about or made raucous comments about whooping kids and so on to great laughter from the black community.
This is not funny stuff.
Child abuse is not funny.
Hitting children is not funny.
Hitting children costs them IQ points.
It adds to dysfunction.
It adds to criminality likelihoods.
It has significantly negative outcomes.
It's not funny stuff.
And for a comedian to joke about it is tragic.
And for a comedian to practice The kind of, let's just call it rough parenting, that he denied his ideal avatar, Cliff Cuxtable, to pursue is tragic.
Despite being worth huge amounts of money, Bill Cosby regularly went on the road and therefore did not see his children.
It's kind of tragic and ironic, of course, in a way that Bill Cosby got to do The Cosby Show because he'd spent so little time as a father, because he'd been a workaholic, because he'd worked so hard.
Spent months in Vegas and toured around 100 or more days or dates a year.
That kind of work is what gave him the opportunity to portray the ideal father.
Time away from his family gave him the opportunity to parent the family of fictional characters.
Even more troubling to me is that he claimed that he loved his father.
I know, I know.
Honor thy mother and thy father, but his father was a violent drunk who spent them into poverty.
Who had children, fought endlessly with his wife, risked the family becoming homeless with a sickly child, and then spent 15 years in the Navy after having a number of children with his wife.
That is not an honorable man.
To say that you love such a man to make him a warm sitcom character in your treacly stories about your victimized childhood Is wrong.
It is wrong.
It is an insult to the word love to apply it to such a man.
It is wrong.
Bill Cosby, even by the standards, even by the race, even by the demographics of his childhood, had a severely abused childhood.
I want hunger, instability, drunkenness, violence against his mother, violence that he committed against his siblings, the death of a sibling, which is not exactly abuse but is traumatic.
He had it rough.
The boy had it really hard.
And this swallowing of pain and trauma and this regurgitation of sentimentality I think is such a willful opposition to the moral reality of his history.
I do not doubt it had hugely distorting effects on his adulthood.
Not at all the same people, but I did a show recently on Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand had the goal of shrinking the state and the state has grown.
Bill Cosby had the goal of improving families.
Bill Cosby, I would argue, had as his life's work, as his major goal, the improvement of families and, in particular, the improvement of black families.
When you get older and you have had When you get older and you have had a life goal, it becomes impossible to avoid doing the basic abacus of did you succeed or did you fail?
And I think that one of the reasons that Bill Cosby, like Ayn Rand, became increasingly cantankerous and crotchety in his old age is because He cannot look at his life's work and think that he succeeded.
When he was born, the black family was far more stable.
Illegitimacy was far lower.
Youth crime was lower than his age now.
And then what it is now, black illegitimacy, as he points out, over 70%.
One in three young black men are in the criminal justice system in one form or another.
He failed.
And when you have dedicated your life to the pursuit of a particular moral goal, in his case of course the improvement of the black family, and then you look around in the sunset years of your life, he's now 77, you look around and you say, what did I do?
What did I achieve?
I was on the road.
I was a workaholic.
I worked night and day.
I missed the birth of my first child.
I was on the road all the time.
I sacrificed my family life to improve the black family.
I did not improve the black family.
The black family is in many ways worse now than when I started.
There is a belief that people have.
It goes all the way back to Plato.
The belief is that immorality is a form of ignorance.
In other words, if people who make immoral choices had more knowledge, had better knowledge, had more facts, had better evidence, they would make better choices.
That evil, for want of a better word, is a species of ignorance that can be cured by knowledge.
Bill Cosby, with his PhD in education, with constant access to child psychologists, with the capacity to define, create, and embody an ideal father, was unable to achieve that in his life and unable to translate that To other people.
Unable to affect the kind of positive change that I genuinely believe he was desperate to achieve in his life.
When Bill Cosby was born, there was virtually no welfare state.
Now there are two generations of black kids who've grown up barely seeing any adult with a job.
White kids too, but his focus was on the black community.
Now My constant goal, I have incredibly lofty moral ambitions for the species as well.
I wish the non-aggression principle, the non-initiation of force to become as central to our minds as bone marrow is to our bodies.
And I am very dedicated to spreading the message of peaceful parenting, parenting with no aggression, no punishment.
I have really, really tried to learn from the mistakes of very brave, very intelligent, very noble people, very flawed people who came before me.
It's one of the reasons why I quit a very high paying software executive position job to be able to stay home with my daughter and raise her one-on-one, which I have done now for almost six years.
Maybe I could have gone out and done a hundred speeches a year on peaceful parenting and not been home for my daughter.
I am very happy with the choices that I have made.
I limit my speaking engagements to just a few a year.
I have not written a book, really.
I've written many books before my daughter was born.
I've not really written a book since because that takes the kind of concentration that would take me out of family life significantly for at least a couple of months.
And I don't think that my daughter is ready for that yet.
I have a wonderful relationship with my wife and daughter.
I am incredibly happy and feel incredibly honored to have had the time to spend with her.
Many years ago when I was doing my master's, I read Candide by Voltaire, where people try and make the world a better place, and the end result, which always stuck with me and struck me, the end result is tend your own garden.
If you want to change the world, Going out and facing the world and taking the megaphone of your abilities and talents to the world and blaring into the ear of the world doesn't seem to do it.
It is not knowledge the world lacks its examples.
Was Bill Cosby brilliant and flawed as he was?
Was Bill Cosby even allegations of sexual misconduct aside?
Was he?
Did he embody the ideal in real life that he pretended to in the Cosby show?
He did not.
He did not.
I think that's why it didn't work.
There's a weird alchemy that 95% of communication is non-verbal.
You have to do it in your own life.
I think if you do it in your own life and you don't keep it a secret, whatever you're trying to do will spread to the world even more powerfully and more permanently and more effectively than if you have the biggest sitcom in the world for almost a decade.
I say this not because anyone's particularly interested in my life choices, but because we must learn from what didn't work in the past.
Bill Cosby's genius, Bill Cosby's education, Bill Cosby's passion, Bill Cosby's workaholism, his dedication to what he did, did not work.
Did not work.
And the best honor we can do To people's mistakes is to not repeat them.
So if you want to make the world a better place, Focus on your family, your own family.
Not fictional families, not families in books, not families you can reinvent for the amusement of audiences.
Your real family.
If you've had trauma, deal with it.
Get to therapy.
Work on self-knowledge.
First commandment of Socrates, know thyself.
Do not fake anything.
We all have choices.
We all have choices.
We can be honest about our lives and our histories and the people around us for better and or worse.
We can be brutally, relentlessly, ferociously honest about these things or we can appeal to people's prejudices, make jokes, smile and engage in the most fundamental cover-up of what happened to us as children.
Bill Cosby Bill Cosby was a better father than his father.
And for that, again, allegations aside, we'll probably never know.
Bill Cosby was a better father than his father.
And for that, I admire him.
But it's not enough.
When you look at the degree to which our technology of surveillance and destruction and financial skullduggery is advancing, it is advancing Exponentially, not linearly.
We do not have the time for incremental improvements in parenting.
We must make the great leap.
We must make the great leap to better parenting now.
Not later.
Not in a few generations.
Not bit by bit.
We must make the great leap to great parenting now.
Parenting without spanking.
Parenting without yelling.
Without name calling.
Without punishments.
I've never punished my daughter.
She is a wonderful human being.
It is absolutely unnecessary and completely counterproductive.
And again, I hate to keep repeating myself, allegations aside, that is the greatest tribute that I can pay to the ideals and the mistakes of those who've come before me.
And I invite you to do the same.
Live your values in your life first.
The world only listens to a lived truth.
It may be amused by a sentimental reinterpretation, but it will not change unless you live the truth of virtue, of peace.
