9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23.

This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to DSR. I'm David Rothkoff, your host, and we're joined today by two of

our favorites, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center. How are you doing, Rosa?

I'm good, David. Good to see you. Happy Thanksgiving week and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign

Relations. How are you doing, Max?

Hang it in there. Hang it in there. Well, you know what? That's clearly something to be thankful for.

And before we get off of this podcast, we'll talk about what's going on in the world that you're actually

thankful for. But I want to start with the news and start with you if I can, Max, because there's been a lot of

action this week or the appearance of action around Ukraine. And, you know, it's part of a cycle

now that's a couple weeks old, which started with a 22-point plan or something to that effect for peace

in Ukraine, which then it turned out was not actually generated by the Americans. It probably

was generated by the Russians. The Ukrainians pushed back. The Americans did some damage

control, not very effectively, I might add, by taking multiple sides in the story, and then came back

with a plan that had fewer points to it, and then more recently, and some reports of progress,

although who knows, and then more recently somebody, and it's interesting to speculate as to who, leaked an

audio tape that showed Steve Whitkoff, the negotiator for the U.S. and all of this,

apparently giving a Russian official advice on how to sell the approach that they're looking

for to Donald Trump.

Whitkoff also apparently said to the Russians, you know, there's got to be this kind of

land swap and that kind of land swap and so forth. And, you know, who knows where this is?

Well, I thought maybe Max does. What of it? It seems like a

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