It was just the two of them this week, which presented the opportunity to be even more self-indulgent than usual. After a few industry shout-outs, the main recipient of that extra podding latitude was AI, which has been in the news even more than usual, as the utopians and dystopians battle it out for the future direction of this era-defining tech. They eventually move on to a spat between Deutsche Telekom and Meta related to the fair contribution debate, before concluding with a look at the increasing role of the US state in the fortunes of chip maker Intel.