At this moment, it is not that Europe is weaker than Russia. The fact is that Europe is weaker than Ukraine. What we’re looking at here, a Ukrainian drone pilots dropping mock explosives on NATO vehicles during a training drill.
The exercise dubbed Hedgehog pitted thousands of NATO troops against just a handful of Ukrainians flying FPVs and bomber drones. Basically, NATO invited 10 Ukrainian soldiers to participate in Hedgehog, one of the alliance’s largest military exercises in the Baltic. 10 soldiers. They had to fight against two NATO battalions… with only their drones. The result was devastating.
It ended in disaster for NATO, whose soldiers were caught completely offguard by the pilots’ tactics and suffered punishing losses. In half a day, the Ukrainians simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and carried out 30 attacks. By dinnertime, two NATO battalions had been neutralized. One commander observing the exercise summed it up in two words: “We’re finished.
” The Western debate on Ukraine is sometimes framed as an act of generosity, with NATO propping up a weary partner. This perspective is erroneous and dangerously blind to a strategic asset for the alliance that is in plain sight. Come on, Europe is defenseless against Russia. It’s being rearmed, yes. Spend money, yes.
But he spends with a 20th-century mentality. Buy tanks like it’s 1945 while the Ukrainians do the job with $1,000 drones. And you don’t have to go to Ukraine to see the consequences. The Gulf countries learned this the hard way during the Iran-Iraq War. At Dubai International Airport, a drone crashed into a fuel depot, causing a fire, suspended air traffic, and planes turning around.
Petro-monarchies spend billions on Patriot and THAAD, the most expensive systems in the world. And when Iran sent them a wave of cheap Shahed drones, the interceptors ran out in weeks. Look, Qatar had 34 Patriot systems and none of that prevented one-sixth of its gas facilities from being destroyed.
Who did they call when they were overwhelmed? Exactly, to Uncle Zelensky. And in this we are just as vulnerable as the Arabs. A few weeks ago, four Ukrainian maritime drones that were going to attack Russian targets in the Black Sea were diverted towards Romania and exploded, one of them in the port of Constanta, the largest in the country.
Sunt încă multe necunoscute după explozia dronei maritime în portul Constanța. Cronologia incidentului, schimbul de informații cu Ucraina, modul în care a fost administrată situația generează dezbateri aprinse And in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, an errant drone forced the president, the prime minister, the mayor, schoolchildren and hundreds of thousands of people to take shelter in basements.
In some schools, the children started to cry. And it wasn’t very reassuring when a government app for locating shelters crashed from the server. If a single drone can paralyze the capital of a NATO country and disable its alert system, imagine what would happen with a thousand. What in Ukraine is called MONDAY. BREAKING OVERNIGHT.
RUSSIA UNLEASHED A MASSIVE MISSILE AND DRONE ATTACK ON THE UKRAINIAN CAPITAL OF KYIV. Conclusion? Europe needs to learn from Ukraine. And fast. Because this is dangerously reminiscent of France in 1940. The French had built the Maginot Line, a series of impressive fortresses along the border with Germany.
That cost a fortune , and well, you could even say it worked. The problem is that the Germans surrounded it through Belgium, crossed the Ardennes with their Panzer tanks, and reached Paris in five weeks. The Maginot Line was the correct answer to the wrong question. And that’s exactly what E
urope is doing now: spending billions on Patriots and frigates… but the real war is being fought by $70 drones with AI modules. So the questions I ask myself in today’s video are: Does Russia have better drones than Europe? What can Europe learn from Ukraine before it’s too late? And who will protect the Europeans if the Americans leave? Today we’re going to answer all these questions, but first… And now let’s look at a little history.
I’m Fonseca and welcome to… The story of how drones changed warfare features a young man who sold advertising on Facebook. Meet Mykhailo Fedorov. Russia continues the war because it believes it can break us through force and resources. That is why the president has set a clear task for the Ministry of Defense team alongside diplomacy to strengthen our defense in order to compel the enemy to peace.
Fedorov was 28 years old when Zelensky hired him for his presidential campaign in 2019. It turns out this guy managed ads on social media. His most military-oriented profile was a PlayStation joystick, but now he is the Minister of Defense of Ukraine. And NO, DON’T THINK he’s your typical neighborhood bad boy .
Fedorov goes to the ministry in sneakers, jeans and a sweatshirt. He’s put a ping-pong table in the hallway. Eat salads and buckwheat bread. And he is convinced that autonomous weapons are the new nuclear weapons. Fedorov assures that the countries that possess them will be safe from everything. In fact, their strategy, which is called “Land, Air and Economy”, has three simultaneous objectives.
Intercept 95% of Russian drones and missiles , kill more soldiers than Moscow can recruit, and [ __ ] the Russian economy by destroying oil export terminals . All of that with his favorite toy: drones. Look how the streets o
f St. Petersburg are scented in the morning… The governor of the city urged residents to stay indoors for the first time since the war began. Russian officials say more than 140 drones were shot down over the surrounding region, while the defense ministry says 380 drones were intercepted across western and southern Russia. Okay, I know what you’re going to say. Yes, drones existed before Ukraine.
The Americans used them in Afghanistan and Iraq for surveillance missions and targeted killings. Türkiye used them in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. Iran sold his Shahed to his colleagues in the neighborhood. But what Ukraine did was DEMOCRATIZE the use of drones. Turn it into something that any infantry unit could manufacture, operate, and improve on the fly. I saw a story in the New York Times that was mind-blowing.
A young man who worked at a German startup returned to Ukraine after the invasion and began manufacturing 200 FPV drones a month with volunteers. When he saw that the Russians were taking them down with signal jammers, he started developing autonomous attack software.
His company, NORDA Dynamics, created Underdog, a module that attaches to a combat drone and allows it to attack without human control in the final phase of flight. Well, it turns out they have already distributed more than 50,000 modules to frontline units. And then came Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google. In 2024, Schmidt spearheaded a confidential military initiative to develop advanced unmanned aerial vehicles, with the intention of establishing an American alternative to Chinese-made drones.
It turns out he set up a secret operation with several names: White Stork, Project Eagle, Swift Beat. Their flagship product is the Bumblebee, a drone that the Russians themselves christened “Marsianin,” which means Martian to us, because they believed it came from NASA. But no, it didn’t come from NASA.
It came from a Ukrainian garage. The Bumblebee has computer vision, autonomous target recognition, GPS-free navigation, and resistance to electronic interference. A Russian report analyzing a downed Bumblebee concluded that “there are no effective countermeasures against it and none are expected in the near future.
” According to Ukrainian soldiers, an AI assisted targeting system helps this drone pilot strike what appeared to be a Russian tank from more than 12 m away. And then there’s Brian Streem. A film director from Queens who made videos for Cardi B and shot aerial shots for Spider-Man and True Detective.
In 2019 he ran out of money, attended an investor speed-dating event in Buffalo, and a guy from the air force told him: “What you do interests us a lot.” Streem thought, “If they come at me, we’re screwed.” Five years later, his company manufactures visual navigation modules that are assembled in an office next to a bun shop in Brooklyn. They navigate without GPS, cannot be electronically interfered with, and have already guided drones to verified targets inside Russia.
When asked how he went from making Spielberg happy to guiding explosives, he replied: “If you think military missions are difficult, try to make Spielberg happy.” And some of you will ask, what can be learned from all this? Well, a lot and fast. Think of Poland. The country that spends the most on defense in all of NATO in proportion to GDP: 4.7%. And yet, its military industry is stuck.
The head of Poland’s national security office warned last month that current ammunition stockpiles would only allow Poland to withstand a Russian attack for one or two weeks. One or two weeks. With 4.7% of GDP spent on defense. The problem isn’t how much you spend. It’s HOW you spend it.
That is why there are three conclusions that Europe should tattoo on its forehead. The first is that military innovation no longer comes from the top. In Ukraine, soldiers manufacture drones using 3D printers, welders, and improvised explosives. The commanders on the front lines give feedback to the engineers, and they modify the designs in real time. The innovation cycle is measured in weeks or days… not in years.
Why am I telling you this? Because NATO has a procurement system that takes YEARS to approve a screw. Ukraine has a cycle in which a soldier tests a drone on Monday, returns it to the engineer on Tuesday with notes, and by Wednesday has an improved version. Under the pressures of invasion, Ukraine has become a live-fire testing ground where arms manufacturers, governments, venture capitalists, frontline units, and programmers from across the West collaborate to produce weapons that automate parts of the conventional combat chain.
Second lesson: combat data is the new oil. Ukraine has accumulated more than 5 million annotated battlefield videos filmed by surveillance and attack drones. They include images of how humans behave when a kamikaze drone approaches them. This means they know whether to run, hide, or surrender.
The Ministry of Defense has opened this data to companies from allied countries to train artificial intelligence models. In return, Ukraine receives the models that are developed using its data. It’s a macabre win-win, but it’s the world we live in. And third: a country that until recently was known for being poor can change the rules of the game for everyone.
A machine vision module from the Ukrainian company Fourth Law costs $70. With him, a Ukrainian brigade went from a 20% success rate to 80%. The Wild Hornets’ Sting interceptor, which shoots down Iranian Shahed fighter jets, costs $1,000. Why am I telling you this? Because a Patriot costs 3.9 million. Currently, Ukraine produces about 4 million FPV drones per year. Europe doesn’t produce even a fraction of that.
At least it seems he’s starting to get his act together. Berlin and Kev are working together to produce drones, including long range systems capable of striking targets up to 1500 kilometers away. It’s clear that it’s not in our best interest to become like France in 1940.
Because that means having the best static defense in the world… but an enemy that has already learned how to outflank it. And right now there are American veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who visit the front lines and come back trembling. Because if they think they could n’t stand the Ukrainians for even 48 hours, imagine us Europeans.
Because yes, Ukrainians are amazing. But it turns out that the Russians do too. Because? Well, right now we’re going to see THE GREAT IRONY When I talk to you about the war in Ukraine it seems like I’m trying to sell you the idea that Russia is a LAME power here. And yes… Ukraine is rubbing its privates in the Russians’ faces.
But that DOES NOT MEAN that Russia DOES NOT HAVE DRONES. Russian drones have been attacking Berislav and surrounding villages since the fall of 2023, as shown in numerous videos on Telegram. Approximately 150 civilians have been injured or killed. Most of the inhabitants have left Berislav and, according to our research, the military presence is scarce.
Russia has a huge capacity to manufacture drones… The thing is, Ukraine has learned to handle them much better. And the problem arises when we compare Russia’s production with that of the European Union. The EU wants to reduce this dependence by creating its own industrial capacity and introducing new funding programs to support drone manufacturing, such as the European Defence Industry Programme.
Europe has the advantage that they have been supporting Ukraine for YEARS and this will strengthen ties and give them ALL the information they need. But it won’t be enough. When this war is over, Russia is going to get SERIOUS about the drone issue, since it has seen firsthand what happens when you are caught off guard.
The drone attack has worked out VERY WELL for Ukraine, in part because the Russians DID NOT EXPECT IT. Remember that the plan at all times was to stay for a week and then goodbye… Ukraine resisted partly due to Western aid and then thanks to their ingenuity in creating the world’s largest drone industry in record time. In other words… the “surprise” factor has played a VERY IMPORTANT role in this war, something that has caught the Russians off guard.
And this is a letter that… It’s not clear that it will work AGAIN… in the same way. I remind you that despite everything… Russia is one of the countries with the best human capital on the planet. There’s a LOT of brainpower there, and when the war is over… they’re going to pull out all the stops to prevent being caught off guard in the same way… What’s more, there’s already a program dedicated to it.
The unit, known as Rubicon, has expanded rapidly under the command of Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov since his appointment in June of last year. This is a VERY AMBITIOUS project started in 2024 that has precisely this purpose. Improve your drone handling skills. To train drone operators, develop new technologies, combat strategies and create doctrine for Unmanned Systems Forces.
In other words, they have already done their part to start the program. And the day the war ends, if there is no capitulation from the current government. They are going to allocate a HUGE amount of resources to this program. And since they have the advantage that democracy is conspicuous by its absence… They don’t have to ask the population if they approve of this.
And where am I going with all this? Beware: Europe is accelerating its march towards rearmament and affirmed this once again at the European summit in Brussels. The document from the 27 calls for an acceleration of efforts in all areas to increase European defense preparedness. We all know that Europe has really stepped up its game when it comes to rearmament.
Between the war in Ukraine and Trump, they’ve dropped the bomb we needed on our asses to wake us up. So far, so good. Problem? This: MGCS (Main Ground Combat System) is a Franco-German defense program that aims to replace the Leopard 2 and Leclerc main battle tanks with a multi-platform ground combat system by 2040. The problem is that a large part of the money will be allocated to state-of-the-art equipment for traditional weapons… but which is completely INEFFECTIVE against the new drone warfare.
We ‘ve seen it with the war in Iran… When Sahed started sending drones, the defense systems of other Arab powers responded… the problem is that they are solving a hacking problem by spraying the PC with a fire hose. They ‘re missing the point of the problem. Drones are very cheap and in a war of attrition they have the upper hand.
Drones, besides being cheap, are small and difficult to detect in time… and therefore to shoot down. And here’s where the problem lies… Europe can invest billions in the development of missiles, tanks, aircraft… And they can be far superior to the Russians. The problem is that drone warfare has radically changed things here.
In Ukraine we are seeing how Ukrainian drones are destroying Russian tanks, and how anti-aircraft systems are failing spectacularly to block the attacks. In other words… If we don’t get our act together to develop a competent drone program, with the help of Ukraine of course, we won’t be able to have a deterrent force against a possible Russian attack. Drones are going to become the new nuclear weapons.
Instead of one large explosion, they can generate thousands of small explosions in trenches, roads, and barracks, to the point of being more destructive and, of course, politically correct. Terror no longer comes solely from the image of a large nuclear mushroom cloud, but from that of a swarm of drones. That is why the race of the 21st century will not be nuclear, but rather a race to see who can develop a better drone program to overwhelm the enemy country.
Ukraine is in the lead, Russia is hot on its heels, and Europe is for now a spectator, continuing to spend its money on equipment that looks fancy in parades but has every chance of becoming scrap metal in a modern battle. Is Europe doomed? No. We still have time to get our act together. I insist, we have the current drone power on our side and we must take advantage of it.
And now it’s your turn. Will Europe prioritize its drone program? Are we doomed to suffer a drone attack by the Russians? Will this be enough of a deterrent to make Russia think twice before attacking us? You can leave your answer in the comments.
As always, don’t forget that here at Solo Fonseca, we release new videos every week, so subscribe to this channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss any of our updates. If you liked this video, give it a LIKE and we’ll see you next time.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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