Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.

The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.

Today's episode begins with the disagreement between Israel and the US about how Israel should retaliate against Iran. While the US is trying to scale the response back to a series of limited strikes, Israel has waited for a long time to go after Iran - their biggest strategic threat - in a serious and meaningful way. Will they ever have a better moment? What targets will they go after? And will it be a conventional military response or a more covert operation? In the second half of the show Janice marvels at the groundbreaking research of University of Toronto's Geoffrey Hinton - this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics - that developed deep neural networks, without which there would be no ChatGPT. His work has and will revolutionize every part of our existence. Janice argues that Canadian universities are not getting the financial support their world class researchers so desperately need. Why isn't Canada supporting their centres of excellence?

To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt.

This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue.

More information at www.munkdebates.com.

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