NYU’s 2022 Commencement Speaker Taylor Swift –  Hw

– I would like now to introduce Jason King Chair and Associate Professor of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Tisch School of the Arts, who will present the candidate for Doctor of Fine Arts. Will trustee, Brett Racon, please escort the candidate to the lectern. – Taylor Swift blazing singer, songwriter, producer, director, actress, pioneering and influential advocate for artists’ rights and philanthropist.

You have brought joy and resolve to your hundreds of millions of fans throughout the world. One of the best selling music artists in history. You have crossed genres, demographics, age groups and borders of all kinds to touch lives around the globe. With nine original studio albums two re-recorded studio albums, five extended plays, three live albums and 14 compilations.

You have sold well over 100 million album units, earning awards and honors in every category. You have used the remarkable platform you earned to galvanize support for the Equality Act to prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

And you have spoken out and you have supported initiatives to protect women and girls from harassment and sexual assaults. You have donated significantly to victims of floods and tornadoes, for cancer research, literacy programs for children and public education.

You have fearlessly challenged the exploitation of music artists and successfully championed their right to be compensated for their work. – Taylor Swift, you are a role model across the world for your unprecedented talent and accomplishment, your fierce advocacy for protection of those facing discrimination and your commitment to speaking out forcefully, eloquently and effectively on behalf of all artists.

By virtue of the authority vested in me, I am pleased to confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Fine Arts honoris causa. (audience members cheering) I am now pleased to introduce Taylor Swift, who will respond on behalf of the honorary degree recipients.

– Hi, I’m Taylor. Last time I was in a stadium this size I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery leotard. (podium members chuckling) This outfit is much more comfortable. I would like to say a huge thank you to NYU’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Bill Berkeley and all the trustees and members of the board.

NYU’s President Andrew Hamilton, Provost Katherine Fleming and the faculty and alumni here today, who have made this day possible. I feel so proud to share this day with my fellow honorees Susan Hockfield and Félix Matos Rodríguez, who humble me with the ways they improve our world with their work. As for me, I’m 90% sure, the main reason I’m here is because I have a song called “22.

” And let me just say, I am elated to be here with you today, as we celebrate and graduate New York University’s Class of 2022. Not a single one of us here today has done it alone. We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures, those who showed us empathy and kindness or told us the truth, even when it wasn’t easy to hear.

Those who told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that. Someone read stories to you and taught you to dream and offered up some moral code of right and wrong for you to try and live by. Someone, tried their best to explain every concept in this insanely complex world, to the child that was you, as you asked a bazillion questions, like how does the moon work and why can we eat salad, but not grass? (audience chuckles) And maybe they didn’t do it perfectly, no one ever can.

Maybe they aren’t with us anymore. In that case, I hope you’ll remember them today. If they are in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination. I know that words are supposed to be my thing but I will never be able to find the words to thank my mom and dad, my brother, Austin, for the sacrifices they made every day, so I could go from singing in coffee houses to standing up here with you all today

because no words would ever be enough. To all the incredible parents, family members, mentors teachers, allies, friends, and loved ones here today, who have supported these students in their pursuit of educational enrichment. Let me say to you now welcome to New York, it’s been waiting for you.

I’d like to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor. Not the type of doctor you would want around in case of an emergency, unless your specific emergency was that you desperately needed to hear a song with a catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section.

Or if your emergency was that you needed a person who can name over 50 breeds of cats in one minute. I never got to have a normal college experience per se. I went to public high school until 10th grade and then finished my education, doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals.

Then I went out on the road for radio tour which sounds incredibly glamorous, but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and my mom and I, pretending to have loud mother-daughter fights with each other during boarding, so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest. (audience chuckles) As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I would hang on the wall of my freshman dorm.

I even set the ending of my music video from my song “Love Story” at my fantasy imaginary college where I meet a male model, reading a book on the grass. And with one single glance we realized we had been in love in our past lives which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last four years, right? But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you because you went to NYU during a global pandemic being essentially locked into your dorms and having to do classes over Zoom.

Everyone in college during normal times stresses about test scores. But on top of that you also had to pass like a thousand COVID tests. (audience chuckles) I imagine the idea of a normal college experience was all you wanted too. But in this case, you and I both learned that you don’t always get all the things in the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery surface that is life.

You get what you get. And as I would like to say to you wholeheartedly you should be very proud of what you’ve done with it. Today, you leave New York University and then go out into the world, searching what’s next, and so will I. So as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice unless they ask for it.

I’ll go into this more later. I guess I have been officially solicited in this situation to impart whatever wisdom I might have to tell you things that have helped me so far in my life. Please bear in mind that I in no way feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today.

And so, you know what you’re doing you’ll do things differently than I did them and for different reasons. So I won’t tell you to what to do ’cause no one likes that. I will, however, give you some life hacks, I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope, and friendship.

The first of which is, life can be heavy especially if you try to carry it all at once. Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I mean by that is, knowing what things to keep and what things to release. You can’t carry all things, all grudges all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started.

(audience chuckles) Decide what is yours to hold and let the rest go. Oftentimes, the good things in your life are lighter anyway, so there’s more room for them. One toxic relationship can outweigh so many wonderful, simple joys. You get to pick what your life has time and room for. Be discerning. Secondly, learn to live alongside cringe.

(audience laughing) No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe. I promise you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious.

(audience chuckles) You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to. For example I had a phase where for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950’s housewife But you know what? I was having fun. Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun. And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm but really shouldn’t.

I’d like to say I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of unbothered, ambivalence. This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to want it. That people who don’t try are fundamentally more chic than people who do.

And I wouldn’t know because I’ve been a lot of things but I’ve never been an expert on chic but I’m the one who’s up here, so you have to listen to me when I say this, never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school.

The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company. I started writing songs when I was 12. And since then it’s been the compass guiding my life, and in turn, my life guided my writing everything I do is just an extension of my writing whether it’s directing videos or a short film creating the visuals for a tour or standing on a stage performing.

Everything is connected by my love of the craft the thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end, editing, waking up in the middle of the night, throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a new or better one or a plot device that ties the whole thing together.

There’s a reason they call it a hook. Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me and I can’t focus on anything until it’s been recorded or written down. As a songwriter I’ve never been able to sit still or stay in one creative place for too long. I’ve made and released 11 albums and in the process, I’ve switched genre from country to pop, to alternative to folk.

And this might sound like a very songwriter-centric line of discussion, but in a way I really do think we are all writers and most of us write in a different voice for different situations. You write differently in your Instagram stories than you do your senior thesis. You send a different type of email to your boss than you do your best friend from home.

We are all literary chameleons and I think it’s fascinating. It’s just a continuation of the idea that we are so many things all the time. And I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be and when, who you are now and how to act in order to get where you wanna go. I have some good news. It’s totally up to you.

I have some terrifying news. It’s totally up to you. I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asked me for it and now I’ll tell you why. As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15, it came with a price and that price was years of unsolicited advice. Being the youngest person in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly being issued warnings from older members of the music industry, media, interviewers, executives and this advice often presented itself

as thinly veiled warnings. See, I was a teenager at a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young female role models. It felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the interviewer about me one day, running off the rails and that meant a different thing to every person who said it to me.

So I became a young adult while being fed the message that if I didn’t make any mistakes, all the children of America would grow up to be perfect angels. However, if I did slip up, the entire earth would fall off its axis and it would be entirely my fault and I would go to pop star jail forever and ever. It was all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and ultimately the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life.

This has not been my experience. My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life and being embarrassed when you mess up it’s part of the human experience. Getting back up, dusting yourself off and seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward and laugh about it, that’s a gift.

The times I was told no or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen, didn’t win, didn’t make the cut, looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important if not more crucial than the moments I was told, yes. Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs that would get me a ticket somewhere else.

Having label executives in Nashville tell me that only 35 year old housewives listen to country music and there was no place for a 13 year old on their roster made me cry in the car on the way home but then I’d post my songs on my MySpace and yes, MySpace. (audience chuckles) And I would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music but just didn’t have anyone singing from their perspective.

Having journalists write in depth oftentimes critical pieces about who they perceive me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation but it also made me look inward to learn about who I actually am. Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely.

Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by minute, ever fluctuating social relevance and likability. Getting canceled on the internet and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine.

(audience laughing) I know I sound like a consummate optimist but I’m really not. I lose perspective all the time. Sometimes everything just feels completely pointless. I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism and I know that I’m talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today, graduating from NYU.

So this might be hard for you to hear. In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person, under react, overreact hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom.

Finally, address the pain you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat. (audience chuckles) And I’m not gonna lie, these mistakes will cause you to lose things. I’m trying to tell you that losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time when we lose things, we gain things too.

Now you leave the structure and framework of school and chart your own path. Every choice you make leads to the next choice, which leads to the next and I know it’s hard to know which path to take. There will be times in life where you need to stand up for yourself times when the right thing is actually to back down and apologize, times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run, times to hold on with all you have and times to let go with grace.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t. How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t.

The scary news is you’re on your own now but the cool news is, you’re on your own now. I leave you with this. We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes, so will I. And when I do, you will most likely read about it on the internet.

Anyway, hard things will happen to us. We will recover, we will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it. And as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. And I am a doctor now, so I know how breathing works. (audience laughing) I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you.

We’re doing this together. So let’s just keep dancing, like we’re the Class of ’22.

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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