Petro has suffered an electoral catastrophe in the second round… But like a good left-wing candidate… he accepts his defeat with sportsmanship: “A lot of tension. President Gustavo Petro has just spoken out through his network on X and is adding fuel to the fire of his accusations regarding the irregularities that occurred during the first round of the presidential election.
” Indeed… When you DON’T LIKE the results, it’s time to play the FRAUD card. And I already know what more than one of you is going to say: Isn’t that what you did when Maduro won the elections? I don’t hear the official political scientists saying anything about these elections. Perhaps they are more officers than political scientists.
In times of democratic crisis, everyone takes the side that benefits them. And I fear that the [missing word] of that political science is not the [missing word] of truth. DON’T WORRY. I’ll explain it to you. The difference is that in some cases EVERYTHING is public, while in others we are still waiting for the minutes.
Those records that the wallet himself said would be published 30 days after the mega fraud… and that we are still waiting for. In any case, everything points to the Colombian left losing in the second round, and the question is: Who is the alternative to Petro? The riverfront promenade in Barranquilla. The first words of Abelardo de la Espriella.
The winner of today’s first round election, Abelardo de la Espriella, speaks there on the boardwalk in the city of Barranquilla. “The Espriella spectacle. Look at that boat in the middle of the river. They’re not going to steal democracy.” Well, this is the man… whom they’re calling the Colombian Bukele.
Why? As you can imagine: he promises a tough stance against criminals and is a political outsider. But he’s not just any outsider: I present to you… ABELARDO DE LA ESPRIELLA! ABELARDO DE LA ESPRIELLA This is a campaign ad, not what we do in Spain! Compare this man to this… The rapid integration of foreign populations can generate… integration challenges… Shut up! Bored! We want to see the Tiger of the Nation! In me, you will find a president who defends the law.
That’s why I became a lawyer! Because I am a man of law! It’s a pleasure to listen to him! With that baseball cap, that Colombian national team jersey… (which, by the way, he’s been told he can’t wear anymore at campaign events) He’s like Bukele but more charismatic! And besides, this one is truly right-wing.
He says he became a lawyer because he defends the law and a tough stance against crime. The problem? That ‘s true and, at the same time, it’s not. I mean, this man was a lawyer… That’s true. He was the lawyer for Alex Saab, one of Nicolás Maduro’s trusted men . And here you’ll have to forgive me: I believe in justice and that everyone has the right to a lawyer.
But, when someone has been the lawyer for one of Super Bigote’s front men … you’ll have to excuse me for being a little suspicious. In any case, this gentleman has become the right-wing rival for the second round of the Colombian elections. That is to say, on June 21, Colombians will have to choose between this man.
He’s from a good family, he loves his people, he’s a patriot, he’s with the people… He’s from a good family! He loves his people! I love the elections in Colombia! And on the other side, Abelard presents himself against this other gentleman. Dear fellow Colombians, despite decades of violence and painful confrontations, Colombia has managed… Ah! I have to keep going.
Well, this is… Ivan Cepeda, the left-wing candidate. He is the successor to the current president, Gustavo Petro. You know… THIS Gustavo Petro. That’s why Colombian women are beautiful, and that’s why flower exporters, instead of exporting European roses and carnations, which take away our market share, should export Colombian flowers, which are more beautiful. But that’s business advice.
I do n’t know if Ábalos would agree with this statement. By the way, if there are any feminists watching this video, don’t be shocked! Petro is on his team. He himself has acknowledged being a committed feminist. Pay attention. They say I’m a misogynist, but I like women! And I think that will continue until the day I die. And misogynists are the ones who have different tastes.
Of course… How can he be a misogynist if he likes women? And in fact he is also very respectful of lesbians because he really likes to see them scissoring . Seriously… okay, I’ll stop now. I don’t understand why this interview didn’t go viral.
I suppose that, since Gustavo Petro is left-wing, he can be allowed to say anything and will still be considered a feminist. It’s like you’re Bad Bunny. You have a license to say and do whatever you want. But one thing is clear: Colombian politics is not boring. And for some reason, Colombians disapprove of Gustavo Petro’s administration.
Why do they disapprove? Because, apart from giving “advice” to the “businessmen” of a certain economic sector, Petro promised to end drug trafficking violence. Obviously not with an iron fist, because that’s very right-wing. He proposes… something like AMLO’s “hugs, not bullets” but on a massive scale. Is it working for him? Well, judge for yourselves. “This is the latest data: we have two hundred fifty-eight thousand one hundred forty-four hectares, December two thousand twenty-five, according to satellite imagery from the CIMA system, December twenty-five, which is the National Police. Uh, it is zero point twenty-three of the territory.”
Petro doesn’t say this in his statements, but I’ll tell you… When he took office in 2022, that figure was 230,000. And it’s not just that the hectares have increased . Criminal groups continue to operate with impunity, and look… Petro has not explicitly supported these groups.
But if I wanted to try to help them continue with their businesses, I would do EXACTLY what Petro has done in his administration. And that’s precisely what has driven the new right-wing candidate to become one of the hottest issues in the presidential campaign: the fight against drug trafficking. So the questions I ask myself in this video are: Who is Petro really? How effective has their fight against drug trafficking been? Is the new candidate the SALVATION that Colombia needs? Today we’re going to answer all these questions, but first, let’s
look at a little history. I’m Fonseca and welcome to… We all know that Colombia has two problems that it has not been able to solve so far. The first is drug trafficking. It is the world’s leading producer of cocaine , and for now no one seems able to take that position away from it.
And the second is the violence that began in 1946 due to the dispute between conservatives and liberals. That period, called precisely “the violence”, plunged Colombians into a conflict that has already resulted in 450,000 deaths and 8 million internally displaced persons. In other videos I have already told you about the history of violence in Colombia. What matters to us for this video is that NOTHING has changed since then.
And that is precisely how the country was when Petro assumed the presidency in 2022, and it largely explains the result of Sunday, May 31. To begin, we will say that Petro comes from one of those guerrilla groups, the M 19: Black Ink. With the alias “Aureliano” he became one of the figures of the political wing. In case you don’t remember the M-19, it was the one that did this.
The M-19 killed 19 judges and left a hundred dead behind. During those days the extradition of drug lords to the US was being discussed, so I ‘m already giving you a clue about the friendships of the M19 and how the members of the guerrilla viewed the legal system. After the assault on the Palace of Justice, the M19 was pursued by the army and the police, and many of its members decided to abandon the armed struggle and make a living as ordinary politicians.
And one of those who abandoned the dark side was Petro. But before we get to Petro’s arrival, we need to understand the context a little better. Colombia had been experiencing YEARS of confrontations and violence. And this reached the point where they had to sign agreements with criminal organizations. The last of these major agreements was signed by Petro’s predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, in 2016.
And to give you another clue as to how polarized Colombian society is, in the negotiations that took place in Norway, it was agreed to hold a referendum to ensure its support. Do you know what happened? This “could have been a historic day that would put an end to a war that has lasted more than half a century and has left hundreds of thousands dead, but that was not the case in the referendum held this Sunday.
Colombia rejected the peace agreement with the FARC in a very close vote, with 50.2% voting against 49.7% who opted for ‘yes’.” The majority in Colombia rejected the peace plan, and yet the president who succeeded Santos, Ivan Duque, pressed ahead. It seemed that there was no way to calm the war… Until Colombian society decided to take a chance and give the reins to Gustavo Petro.
And it made sense because if there was anyone who knew the most violent groups from the inside, it was precisely him. The problem? His proposal seemed more inspired by a Paulo Coelho self-help manual than by those on fighting narco-guerrillas: you hide everything behind the fraud and the FARC, and on the other hand you are hiding the great acts of corruption in the country, which is how the corrupt regime of Colombia has really worked because you are interested in continuing the war, you know why? Because
thanks to continuing the war, the state is robbed. This is what he said in the debate against other candidates BEFORE winning the presidential race. From his perspective, the problem was not the guerrillas or the drug traffickers. It was corruption and the American DEA: When the new president arrived, he said: ” We cannot continue negotiating with only one group, we have to negotiate with everyone at the same time, because peace has to be total.
” He thought, now we see how naively, that since he had been a guerrilla fighter, and was the first left-wing president with a very progressive platform, he thought he was going to succeed. And so it was; as soon as he assumed the presidency, he limited the DEA’s actions, stopped fumigating coca-growing areas to reduce cultivation, and dedicated himself to making the guerrillas promise to lay down their arms.
Did he succeed? For a while, yes… But the results of the first round of the elections show that Colombians haven’t been too pleased with his administration. Has it been that bad ? Well, right now we’re going to see Colombia in ruins. There’s a way to understand why many Colombians are fed up with Petro. The data refers to the area planted with coca leaves.
In 2026, and according to the UN, it reached 258,144 hectares in 2025. Let’s remember that Petro took office in June 2022 and that in that year there were 230,000 hectares of the sacred leaf of the Incas and the Junkies. “This is the latest data: we have two hundred fifty-eight thousand one hundred forty-four hectares, December two thousand twenty-five, according to satellite imagery from the CIMA system, December twenty-five, which is the National Police. Uh, it is zero point twenty-three of the territory.
” Petro himself says so, and we’re not going to argue with him about it . Now, what does more surface area of coca leaves mean? Just as you imagine: we need to talk about the new report released by the United Nations on the global expansion of the drug market. And the news is as follows, Chinta and viewers.
Colombia continues to lead the world in coca and cocaine production records. Under Petro’s rule, Colombia is consolidating its position as the world’s leading coca producer, and this contradicts the promises he made when he was a candidate. In those days, the solution he proposed was to convince the farmers to replace their crops with others like cocoa or coffee… All very nice and woke, but reality rules. Or rather… MONEY RULES. Let me explain.
One hectare of coca yields a net annual profit of between $3,200 and $6,400 with an initial investment of $1,200. One of cocoa or coffee costs between $600 and $2,400. As you can imagine, even if the farmers agreed with Petro, money rules, and so do AK-47s, because behind those plantations are the cartels and guerrilla groups that LIVE precisely off what is grown in those fields.
And you can imagine that hitmen are not the type of people who are satisfied with a conversation about the benefits of replacing cocaine with… COCOA. Deep down, I think Petro knew his electoral idea had no future, and so he did what any left-wing populist would do: he covered up the situation. President Petro would allow coca cultivation until its substitutes became profitable for the growers.
The result? You can probably imagine. More Andean snow to sell, and as always happens when the business grows, there were more people interested in participating in the distribution. And make no mistake… these are not groups seeking to conquer the market with marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
We are talking about the guerrilla, which was supposed to have been demobilized since the agreements of the Duque era. There remained the so-called “dissidents”, which were the FARC groups that abandoned the Peace process. There were about 7,000 fighters led by four factions: the Central General Staff led by Iván Mordisco, the Second Marquetalia under the command of Iván Márquez, the General Staff of Blocks and Fronts of a certain Calarcá, and the National Coordinator of the Bolivarian Army.
In total, a dozen fronts were reactivated to increase the number of armed men to 27,000. Result? Another wave of violence in 120 municipalities in Colombia. And the figures speak for themselves because homicides went from 37,795 in the Duque era to 40,663 in the first three years of Petro’s presidency: Petro said that homicides have increased in cities like Cali, Bogotá and Pereira, but said that in Medellín they have decreased compared to the 90s when they were very high.
The figures show the FAILURE of his pacification plan. 78 massacres in 2025 alone, 187 social leaders murdered, including 39 signatories of the peace agreements. And not only was there an increase in the number of left-wing guerrilla militias, at the same time the cartels became stronger.
The main drug gang, the Gulf Cartel, increased its membership from 4,000 to 10,000 since Petro became president. No matter how you look at it, Petro was a failure to stop drug trafficking and the guerrillas. And that is why, from the 50.44% of the votes he obtained in 2022, he barely managed to gather 43% in the last elections. Everything points to him NOT INHERITING the throne.
And more than one person will ask, “And who is the alternative?” Well, right now we’re going to see a clone of Bukele or Trump. Abelardo De la Espriella is like those… improvised remedies that emerged during the pandemic. Do you remember those who said you had to take chlorine or hydroxychloroquine to kill the bug? The Colombian opposition candidate is somewhat similar. It’s the remedy to get rid of
Petro, but nobody guarantees that it’s the IDEAL solution. To begin with, he has a connection on his resume , how to put it? A bit of CONTROVERSY with… watch out, you won’t see it coming… CHAVISMO. Alex’s shadow over Abelardo de la Espriella’s candidacy. In the midst of the fervor of the 2026 Colombian presidential campaign, the ultraconservative candidate Abelardo de la Espriella has announced legal action against columnist Ana Bejarano of Cambio magazine for a piece that exposes his historical ties to Alex Saab, the controversial
Venezuelan businessman and current minister in Nicolás Maduro’s government. Alex Saab is now housed in a US prison, and like Maduro, he awaits sentencing for his criminal dealings within Chavismo. Problem? De la Espriella was the lawyer for Maduro’s front man, and although he says he hasn’t had him as a client for seven years, he can’t avoid making comments. He was their lawyer while Chavismo was robbing and beating Venezuelans.
And hey… maybe he’s changed his mind… This isn’t something patented by Pedro Sánchez. The problem is that this is n’t the only change of opinion he had: Journalist Cecilia Orozco, in her column today titled: In Colombia, the right wing has gone on pause, referred to Mancuso’s criminal past to clarify the relationship between the presidential candidate and the former paramilitary leader, a relationship they had while the latter was actively involved in paramilitary activities.
The new candidate is like a Trump, but with a natural tan. Or a Mileir after going to the stylist. He fulfills the rule of the eccentric leader who comes from the right, riding on the failure of the left, which in the last decade grew tired of demonstrating that its recipes only produced setbacks in all areas.
And it is this discrediting that new leaders with charisma and good management of networks take advantage of to reach power. And they know how; Political marketing is key. Don’t you like Petro? Well, I’ll be more anti-pretrist than anyone. Does the guerrilla movement bother you ? BULLETS for everyone.
And if the polls say that the central problem is violence, then what better than to promise to imitate Bukele? Beyond the resemblance… De la Espriella wants to apply the Salvadoran’s recipe and open prisons to deposit criminals and throw away the key upon release. The presidential candidate proposed a model of privately run prisons, with security provided by military veterans and reservists , inspired by the Salvadoran model.
Bukele’s clone wants penitentiary centers located in completely remote and isolated geographical areas of the country, and which, unlike the Salvadoran model, would be PRIVATELY MANAGED. Apart from this, he promised to undo each of Petro’s progressive reforms. We have to be honest about this. De la Espriella’s past may be controversial, but on the other side there is Ivan Cepeda, who is like Petro but without charisma, and everyone knows that he is the continuation of the same policies, but with strings tied around his wrists and with his political boss pulling them, just like when Medvedev was “president” of
Russia. Colombia is facing a fight between… More of the same, or a leap into the void because NO ONE knows how far the opposition candidate can go . The thing is, to do everything De la Espriella proposes, laws are needed. And to achieve them, it is necessary to have a majority in Congress.
Do you know how many senators and representatives in the lower house it has? None. In the legislative elections in March, he was still an outsider candidate and therefore his party, called Defenders of the Fatherland, could not get a single legislator elected. It only has the 3 senators and 6 representatives of its National Salvation allies. In both chambers there are so many parties that those who draw the different forces have used up all the colors.
This is a problem, and not even Petro and his Historic Pact force could mount a strong opposition. It has 25 out of 108 seats in the Senate and 27 out of 183 in the House of Representatives. But well… This is a problem that will have to be solved when the second round takes place. Now it’s your turn. Do you think the Salvadoran model will be replicated in Colombia? Will the new candidate be ANOTHER FIASCO? Will Colombia ever be able to get out of this situation?
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.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
