He told the Danish court he was 16 years old when he threw the grenades. He also told them he had been working for the network since he was 12. On the night of October 2nd, 2024, he and a 19-year-old accomplice walked onto a residential street in central Copenhagen. Next door was the Israeli Embassy.
Two grenades detonated on the terrace of a family home. Nobody died. The court handed each of them 12 years. What the prosecutor told the jury is the part you need to hear. He said the criminal network that dispatched these two Swedish teenagers was acting, his words, as the armed wing of a Middle Eastern terrorist organization >> >> in Denmark. He meant Iran.
He meant a state. And the kid who threw the grenade had been on the payroll since he was in sixth grade. This is not an isolated case. >> >> Since January of 2022, the Director-General of MI5 has publicly confirmed that his service, along with British police, has disrupted more than 40 Iran-backed plots against people in the United Kingdom.
Not 10, not 20, more than 40 in under 4 years. >> >> And the United Kingdom is not the center of gravity. Sweden is. Germany >> >> and the Netherlands are catching up. New York is a recurring address. Tehran has industrialized something and most of the world hasn’t caught up to what it is yet.
Here’s what I want to show you tonight. Iran didn’t get better at assassinations. Iran stopped doing them. The Islamic Republic has built a system in which it no longer sends its own officers to kill the people it wants dead. It outsources the killing to someone else’s citizens, someone else’s criminals, someone else’s children, and the structural reason it keeps working, the reason the disruptions you read about in the news are not actually setbacks, is the part I want you to walk away understanding. To
see what changed, you have to see what this used to look like. In September of 1992, four Kurdish dissidents sat down to dinner at a Greek restaurant called Mykonos on Prager Strasse in Berlin. Two men walked in and opened fire. The target was Sadegh Sharafkandi, the secretary general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.
He died at the table. So did three others. After 246 trial sessions, a German court ruled formally in the judgment that the killings had been ordered by Iran’s Committee for Special Operations. The court named the people it believed had signed off. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Rafsanjani, Foreign Minister Velayati, Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian.
The presiding judge said in open court that the political leaders of Iran had ordered the murders for the sole purpose of staying in power. Every member state of the European Union recalled its ambassador from Tehran. They came back six months later. That is the part most people miss. A European court named the Supreme Leader of Iran as the ordering authority of a quadruple murder on European soil.
And the consequence was a six-month diplomatic timeout. That was the price, and Tehran filed it away. A year before Mykonos, Shahpour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister under the Shah, was stabbed to death at his home in Suresnes, outside Paris. One of the convicted killers was paroled 19 years later and received a hero’s welcome in Tehran.
A year before that, Kazem Rajavi was shot in his car near Geneva. A 13-man Iranian team flew in on service passports. Before that, Abdol Rahman Ghassemlou, the leader of the Kurdish Iranian opposition, >> >> was killed in a Vienna apartment during a negotiation meeting that the Islamic Republic had itself arranged to set him up.
These were all Iranian operatives. Iranian passports. Iranian travel records. Iranian fingerprints. And every time the forensic trail walked back to Tehran. Then came the Arbabsiar case and the seams of the old model started to show. In October of 2011, a failed used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, named Mansour Arbabsiar, sat in a hotel room trying to hire the Los Zetas Cartel to bomb a restaurant in Georgetown.
The target was the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The restaurant was Cafe Milano. Arbabsiar was Iranian-American and he was taking his orders from a cousin in Tehran, a senior officer in the Quds Force. The cartel hitman he was negotiating with was a DEA informant. When the informant pointed out that bombing a crowded restaurant would likely kill dozens of American bystanders, Arbabsiar, on tape, told him, “They want the guy done and if a hundred go with him, so be it.
” A hundred thousand dollars moved from a Quds Force bank account into an FBI controlled account in August of that year. Arbabsiar was arrested at JFK. He got 25 years. Everyone at the time called it amateur hour. Iran watchers said the plot didn’t fit the profile. It was too clumsy, too exposed, too reliant on a random relative.
>> >> What nobody fully appreciated at the time was that the Islamic Republic had just run a live experiment, not on whether the plot would succeed. They knew it was high risk on whether they could contract out the killing to a foreign criminal organization and keep their own officers a full layer back.
That part worked. The Quds Force officer was safe in Tehran. The plot collapsed, but the architecture didn’t. Six years later, the architecture collapsed in a way Tehran couldn’t ignore. Four shocks, all in the same stretch of time, forced the Islamic Republic to rebuild. >> >> The first was a warehouse in southern Tehran on the night of January 31st, 2018.
Fewer than 24 Mossad operatives cut their way into that warehouse with 3600° torches and walked out just over 6 hours later with 50,000 pages of documents and 55,000 pages stored on 183 CD-ROMs. It was the entire clandestine nuclear archive of the Islamic Republic. What the heist told Tehran was not just that its nuclear program had been mapped.
It was that its counterintelligence was catastrophically penetrated. Anyone operating abroad had to be assumed compromised. The second shock came in May. Trump pulled out of the Iran deal and maximum pressure sanctions began choking every budget line the intelligence services drew on. The third shock is the one I want you to sit with because it’s the hinge and it involves a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg.
Stay with me on that because it’s going to come back. On July 1st, 2018, Belgian police arrested a man named Assadollah Assadi while he was on holiday with his family in Germany. Assadi was not a foot soldier. He was the third counselor at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, a diplomat with a service passport and full accreditation.
He was also a Ministry of Intelligence officer with the internal designation Department 312. What he had done 4 days earlier was personally carry 550 g of the high explosive TATP on a commercial flight from Tehran to Vienna and then hand that explosive wrapped to two couriers at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg.
The couriers were supposed to drive the bomb to Paris. The target was a rally at Villepinte outside the city where 25,000 Iranian exiles were gathering to hear Maryam Rajavi speak with Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich >> >> on the stage. The code word for the explosive was PlayStation 4. An Antwerp court convicted Assadi of attempted terrorism and sentenced him to 20 years.
The ruling did something no other European court had done in a quarter century. It named the specific intelligence directorate, Department 312, that had ordered the operation. A red notebook recovered from Assadi’s car listed payments to contacts in 11 European countries. Tehran had just been caught sending a credentialed diplomat to deliver a bomb at a fast food restaurant in Luxembourg.
The message to the Islamic Republic was not complicated. Stop using your own people. Your own people are visible. The fourth shock was targeted killings on Iranian soil. In January of 2020, an American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, at Baghdad Airport. In November of that same year, Mossad killed the nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on a road outside Tehran using an AI-assisted remote machine gun fired from a pickup truck that nobody was driving.
Iran’s supreme leader publicly swore revenge. >> >> The new Quds Force commander, Esmail Qaani, gave the doctrine out loud at a memorial. He said, “We take revenge against Americans with the help of people on their side, >> >> inside their own homes, without our presence. Without our presence.
” That phrase is the whole new system in four words. What Iran did next is the part I want you to understand because it explains everything that follows. Tehran restructured its entire external assassination doctrine around one principle. No Iranian officer at the trigger. >> >> No Iranian passport anywhere near the scene. The IRGC officers stay in Tehran.
A diaspora criminal, usually Iranian-born, usually with an international warrant already on him, becomes the middleman. The middleman subcontracts to a local gang boss in the target country. The local gang boss hands the actual job to somebody disposable. A teenager, >> >> a drifter, an addict, a foreigner on a tourist visa. Four layers.
Every layer designed to be cut off without exposing the one above it. And the laboratory where Iran built and tested this model, more than anywhere else on Earth, was Sweden. His real name is Rawa Majid. In the Swedish press, he’s called the Kurdish Fox. He was born in Kermanshah, Iran, in 1986 to Iraqi Kurdish parents who were fleeing Saddam Hussein.
He arrived in Uppsala, Sweden, when he was 1 month old. >> >> He did 8 years for cocaine trafficking, and when he got out around 2018, >> >> he started building what the Swedes now call the Foxtrot Network. By 2023, Foxtrot was the most violent criminal organization in Sweden. Majid himself had skipped the country, bought Turkish citizenship through the golden passport program for somewhere around 3 to 400,000 dollars, and was running his empire by phone from a 2.
1 million-dollar mansion in Marmaris. I covered Cyprus a few months ago, where an investigation found that 53% of the golden passports the Republic had issued turned out to be illegal. Sweden’s most wanted criminal didn’t need Cyprus. Turkey sold him the same product for 300,000 dollars, no questions asked about what he was running.
The golden passport industry doesn’t just sell citizenship. It sells untraceability. And Iran knows exactly where to shop. Here is the moment the whole new model locks into place. On October 6th, 2023, the day before a Hamas attack pulled Israel into a regional war, Iranian police detained Rawa Majid near the Turkish border, and they gave him a choice: cooperate with Vaja, AJA, Ministry of Intelligence, or go to prison. He chose to cooperate.
I honestly think that day at the Iranian border is the most important single moment in this whole story, because within weeks one of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers was a functioning Iranian intelligence asset with thousands of foot soldiers already on European streets. >> >> And then the children started arriving.
On January 31st, 2024, a live grenade was found in the grounds of the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm. The US Treasury, in a sanctions designation issued the following year, put the sentence in writing. In January 2024, the Foxtrot network orchestrated an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on behalf of the government of Iran.
Swedish investigative reporting later described that first grenade, which never detonated, as Majid’s admission ticket to Iran. Not an assassination attempt, a demonstration. Then came the shooters. On May 16th, a 15-year-old boy from Västerås received a text message. Go to Tyresö. Locate weapons. Go to the Embassy.
Take the gun quickly. Load it and conceal it. He was arrested before he got there. The next day, on May 17th, a 14-year-old boy fired a 9-mm pistol at the Israeli Embassy at 2:00 in the morning. Under Swedish law, he was below the age of criminal responsibility. He was not prosecuted. On October 1st, a 16-year-old fired a modified tear gas gun through the Embassy window.
He later told a Danish court he had been working for Foxtrot since he was 12. Before I go further, I want to ask you something directly. What would you honestly pay a 14-year-old to walk up to a foreign embassy in the middle of the night with a loaded gun? Because someone worked that number out. SAPO, the Swedish Security Service, has the receipts.
120 euros for a petrol bomb. 1,500 euros for an assassination. Photos recovered from a juvenile’s phone showed stacks of 500 kronor notes, about $50 each, in an envelope. On Telegram channels, CNN found recruitment messages offering $150,000 for a hit in Denmark. Shooter needed, message read. Shoot to the head.
What do you think it’s worth? Tell me in the comments, because I find the fact that someone answered that question and wrote the number down almost more disturbing than the attacks themselves. Meanwhile, the network was expanding. On October 2nd, the Copenhagen grenade attack I opened this video with.
On October 10th, a 13-year-old shooter was dispatched to a site owned by the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems in Gothenburg. The head of counterintelligence at SAPO, Daniel Stenling, went on the record in May of 2024 with the clearest statement any Western intelligence service has made on this. He said, “Iran has been carrying out security-threatening activities in and against Sweden for several years.
To carry out these activities, the Iranian regime has on occasion made use of criminal networks.” By the end of the year, the Swedish Prime Minister went to the European Union and publicly demanded that the IRGC be designated as a terrorist organization. In January of 2026, the EU finally did it. But the Swedish model didn’t stay in Sweden.
To understand how scalable this architecture actually is, you have to follow the paperwork to New York. Brooklyn, >> >> July 28th, 2022. A man named Khalid Mehdiyev gets pulled over for a traffic violation. The officer finds an AK-47 style rifle with the serial number obliterated, two magazines, 66 rounds of ammunition, a ski mask, and $1,100 in cash in the car.
Mehdiyev is Azerbaijani. He is a member of an Eastern European organized crime fraternity called the Thieves in Law. And he is sitting outside the home of an Iranian-American journalist named Masih Alinejad. Mehdiyev’s handlers were a man named Rafa Amirov, a senior thief in law living in Iran, and a Georgian mob boss named Polad Omarov living in the Czech Republic.
The IRGC had promised Amirov $500,000 to get Alinejad killed. $30,000 in cash had already been advanced to Mehdiyev. On July 27th, the day before the arrest, Omarov had messaged Amirov, “This matter will be over today.” The indictment that prosecutors filed was already detailed. The superseding indictment filed in October of 2024 was devastating.
It added a senior IRGC intelligence officer by name, Brigadier General Rohollah Bazghandi, a former chief of intelligence for the Force, a man who had been photographed at official events standing next to Qassem Soleimani. Under the alias Alex Peterson, a Google account traceable to Bas Gandi’s device had run the search query Massi Alinejad kidnapping plot 93 times over an 18-month period.
I want you to hold that for a second. A brigadier general in charge of counterintelligence for the most important expeditionary unit in Iran’s military was personally Googling his own target 93 times from a device that traced back to him. And the operation still very nearly succeeded. What that tells you is that the system does not depend on the competence of the people at the top.
It depends on the disposability of the people at the bottom. The jury deliberated for less than 4 hours. Amir and Omarov were each sentenced in October of 2025 to 25 years. And the Alinejad plot was not the only plot. In August of 2022, federal prosecutors charged a Quds Force member named Shahram Poursafi >> >> with trying to hire an FBI informant to assassinate John Bolton, the former national security advisor, for $300,000.
Poursafi offered an additional million dollars for a second target reported to be Mike Pompeo. The payment was to be made in cryptocurrency. Poursafi wanted it done by the anniversary of Soleimani’s death. In November of 2024, the Southern District of New York filed a complaint against an Afghan man named Farhad Shakuri operating on behalf of the IRGC for a plot that included and the language from the complaint is worth hearing, the surveillance and ultimate assassination of Donald Trump.
An IRGC official had told Shakuri that the money was not a concern. They had spent enough already. >> >> In early 2026, a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant was convicted in Brooklyn on separate terrorism charges for a parallel plot that prosecutors said was aimed at Trump, Biden, and Nikki Haley.
Merchant had met his IRGC handlers in Cologne. He had paid the FBI undercover $5,000 in cash. The code word for the assassination was fleece jacket. Three different presidents, one journalist, two former national security officials, all on the target list of the same state at the same time being handed out to different criminal networks on different continents.
Because that is the point. The system does not have a single trigger. It has a portfolio. So, I want to ask you something, and I mean this as a genuine question. What do you call this? Is it terrorism? Is it organized crime? >> >> Is it state violence? Because those words each come with a different set of laws, a different set of responses, a different set of allies you’re allowed to call in.
And right now, in almost every Western capital, no one has settled on the answer. That’s not incidental. That’s the whole advantage. The same model is running in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey. I’ll be brief because the pattern is the pattern. In November of 2022, three coordinated attacks hit Jewish targets in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Gunfire into the door of the old synagogue in Essen. An attempted Molotov attack on the Bochum synagogue. A German Federal Court later ruled the operation had been carried out, in their words, by an Iranian state agency. The man who had orchestrated them by text message from Tehran was a German-Iranian Hells Angels chapter president named Ramin Yektaparast.
He had fled to Iran after being named the prime suspect in the murder and dismemberment of another biker in 2014. From Tehran, he was running attacks on German synagogues. Yektaparast was shot dead in Tehran in May of 2023. Here is where I have to be honest with you. I don’t know for sure who killed him. There are three credible theories.
The first is that Mossad got him. That’s the version the Washington Post and Iran International have reported, sourcing Western intelligence. The second is that it was a personal dispute, which is what Iranian state media pushed. The third is that the Iranian regime itself silenced him because he knew too much.
The fact that he was buried in section 19 of Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery in Tehran, the section reserved for IRGC and Basij members, tells you he was an asset of the state. It does not tell you which side had him killed. In the Netherlands, the model had been running for years already. In December of 2015, a dissident named Ali Motamed was shot dead outside his home in Almere.
The killers were two local Bijlmer criminals, nothing to do with Iran on paper. They were paid 13,000 euros each. In a text message recovered later, one of them wrote about the man he had just killed, “I don’t know why he has to sleep, and I don’t even want to know.” In November of 2017, Ahmad Mola Nissi, the founder of an Iranian Arab separatist movement, was shot outside his home in The Hague.
He had filed seven police reports warning that Iran was going to kill him. Dutch intelligence later assessed publicly that both killings were almost certainly ordered by the Islamic Republic. The contract had come through the Moroccan-Dutch criminal network known as the Mocro Maffia, the same organization that runs a sizable portion of the European cocaine market out of the port of Rotterdam.
In Istanbul, a Swedish-Iranian dissident named Habib Chaab was lured to a gas station by his ex-wife, drugged, smuggled across the border into Iran, paraded on Iranian state television, and executed in May of 2023. The man who arranged the abduction was an Iranian drug kingpin named Naji Sharifi Zindashti, who had been given formal sanctuary in Iran in exchange for running MOIS’s >> >> assassination logistics abroad.
In January of 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Zindashti and two Canadian members of the Hells Angels for a murder for hire plot targeting two Iranian defectors living in Maryland. The contract price was $350,000 plus $20,000 in travel expenses. The instructions to the recruits were, “Shoot the victim in the head a lot.
Make an example. Erase his head from his torso.” So, here’s what the full picture actually looks like. And this is the thing I want you to take away from the whole video. Because once you see it, the news stories you read about Iran start looking completely different. There are four layers. >> >> I know four layer systems sound like a PowerPoint slide, but stay with me because the design is the whole reason this works.
Layer one, an IRGC officer inside Iran. Maybe in Tehran. Maybe in Damascus, untouchable in either place. The Bolton plot was run by a Quds Force member sitting in Iran. The Alinjad plot at the command level was run by a Brigadier General doing his own Google searches. These people never leave. Layer two, a diaspora criminal who has reasons to cooperate.
Rawa Majid picked up at the Iranian border and offered the choice between cooperation and prison. Zindashti, an Iranian drug kingpin sheltered from extradition. Yektaparast, wanted for murder in Germany, hiding in Tehran, willing to pick up a phone and run synagogue attacks in exchange for continued asylum.
These people have a price and the price is usually not money. It’s protection. Layer three, a local gang boss who owes the diaspora criminal a favor or a drug debt or nothing at all, who just wants the $500,000. The Azerbaijani thief in law in the Czech Republic. The Makro Mafia figure in Amsterdam. >> >> The Hells Angels captain in British Columbia.
These are people whose CVs have nothing to do with Iran. And that’s the point. Layer four, the foot soldier, a teenager on Telegram, a Pakistani freelancer from Qom, a cash-strapped Azerbaijani with a rental car and an AK-47. These people are often not told the real target, the real client, or the real mission.
They just know the address and the amount. Four layers. And here is the part that took me a while to understand because it’s counterintuitive. The system is not designed to succeed. It’s designed to fail safely. Every time a teenager gets arrested outside an embassy, the IRGC officer in Tehran is not arrested. Every time an Azerbaijani hitman flips on his Georgian handler, the handler’s Iranian bosses are not even named in the court documents for another year.
Every time MI5 discloses another ten plots, no Iranian officer is extradited because no Iranian officer left Iran. The disruption is not a cost to the system. The disruption is the exhaust vent. The whole thing is built to be broken at the bottom without damage at the top. That is the structural payoff.
That is why it keeps working. Every failure is priced in. And now now I can come back to the Pizza Hut in Luxembourg because that was the last time an Iranian diplomat was caught personally delivering a bomb on European soil. Every assassination attempt since has been run through somebody else’s passport.
The Pizza Hut is a monument. It’s the moment the Islamic Republic decided it would never again put one of its own people in a room with the explosive. >> >> And it’s the reason a 14-year-old Swedish boy can end up at 2:00 in the morning pointing a 9mm pistol at an Israeli embassy while the man who ordered the shooting is asleep in a villa in Tehran.
If you’ve made it this far >> >> and the pattern is starting to look as strange to you as it does to me, a subscribe would mean a lot. There’s more of this coming. I want to bring this back to the children because the machine is a machine and I can draw you a four-layer diagram all night, but this is the part that honestly doesn’t sit right with me.
The Swedish 14-year-old who fired at the Embassy in May of 2024 was not prosecuted. He couldn’t be. He was below the age of criminal responsibility. In the Swedish legal system, the line is 15. Someone in the Foxtrot recruitment pipeline knew that. Someone had worked out that a boy under 15 carries a gun with legal impunity and then built a business around it.
Foxtrot did not stumble into using children. Foxtrot optimized for children. On a Telegram channel somewhere, a channel flashing a fox emoji over and over, the minimum viable age kept dropping. 15, 14, 13, 12. The Bijlmer hitmen in Amsterdam texted each other about Ali Motamed after they killed him. I don’t know why he has to sleep.
I don’t even want to know. Hahaha. They did not know who paid them. They still don’t. An entire human being in Almere was taken off the face of the earth by two people who were not told what he had done, what country wanted him dead, or why for 13,000 euros each. Arvin Khoshnood, an Iranian dissident and a Swedish citizen, opened his front door one afternoon in Malmö in September of 2024 and a 16-year-old boy was standing there holding a knife.
The boy was a >> >> Foxtrot recruit. He had been sent to kill a stranger in his own country. One more number, and then I want to leave you with a question. In March of 2018, Russia sent two officers from its military intelligence service to Salisbury, England to smear a Soviet nerve agent called Novichok on the front door of a former double agent.
They botched it. The Russian officers were exposed. One innocent British woman, a local resident named Dawn Sturgis, picked up the discarded perfume bottle the agent was hidden in and died. In the aftermath, 29 countries expelled 153 Russian diplomats. It was the largest coordinated expulsion of Russian officials in history.
Since January of 2022, Iran has run more than 40 plots against people on British soil. The Iranian ambassador has been summoned. Sanctions have been issued. Not one European country has expelled Iranian diplomats at the Salisbury scale. Not one. Why do you think that is? I’d rather hear it from you than tell you because I genuinely don’t have a clean answer.
The honest version I suspect is that the West has decided it can live with this. That prescribing the I R G C is too disruptive, that mass expulsions are too destabilizing, that the cost of real deterrence is higher than the cost of the occasional disrupted plot. And Iran has noticed. There is a teenager somewhere in Malmö right now watching a Telegram channel.
The fox emoji is flashing. A message has come through and the amount offered is small. A few hundred euros, maybe a thousand, and the address is attached, and the instructions are the instructions. A gun in a bag in a park, an embassy in the distance, a simple set of steps. He will not know who is paying.
He will not know why the address matters. He will not know that the officer who chose the address is asleep in a villa 6,000 km away, that the Brigadier General who approved the paperwork is sitting in a Tehran high-rise, >> >> that the system has planned for him to be caught and does not particularly mind.
He is layer four. He is supposed to be replaceable. And the question I cannot answer, the one I want you to sit with, is whether the rest of us are finally going to decide that he isn’t.
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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