On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Dr. Robert Malone about how powerful businesses, government officials, foundations and journalists are behind the growing push to regulate artificial intelligence, an effort which, he says, has less to do with saving humanity from extinction than protecting the valuation and competitive advantages of AI behemoths. On the news roundup, Zane and Varney discuss two articles that dovetail with Malone’s insights. The first is a Free Press article by a previous podcast guest, Roger Pielke Jr., that details how a “scientific” organization that openly says it is committed to climate change advocacy is gaming its studies to stoke fears about the climate – and is treated as an unbiased authority by much of the press. The second article, published by the Guardian, shows the influence many big companies have over government regulation by detailing how the EPA allowed pesticide giant Bayer to pick from a menu of regulation options for the controversial and destructive weedkiller dicamba. 00:00 Cold Open 02:13 Welcome to the Show 03:18 News Roundup: Introducing This Week's Stories 03:46 How "Fake Climate Science" Blamed a Nepal Disaster on Warming (Free Press) 10:08 Regulatory Capture: How Bayer Helped Write Its Own Weedkiller Rules (The Guardian) 15:43 Introducing Dr. Robert Malone 16:20 Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle," and the Original Regulatory Capture 24:17 The Hugging Face "Rogue AI" Incident: A Staged Fear Campaign? 32:03 A Timeline of the Coordinated AI Panic 38:36 Is There Really an AI Panic — and Should There Be? 43:31 Frontier vs. Open AI: Who Gets Regulated Out of Existence? 50:36 What Real AI Guardrails Should Look Like 54:06 AI, Censorship, and the Threat of "Pre-Thought" Control 1:04:11 Closing & Thanks to Dr. Malone Articles Discussed in This Podcast: Dr. Robert Malone/Substack: What the AI Panic Is Actually About https://substack.com/home/post/p-215832105 Dr. Robert Malone/Substack: The Machine That Decides What You Know https://substack.com/home/post/p-216901102 Free Press: How to Fake Climate Science and Fool the World https://www.thefp.com/p/how-to-fake-climate-science-and-fool?utm_campaign=realclearpolitics Guardian: EPA Let Bayer Pick Its Weedkiller Rules https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/20/epa-bayer-regulation-pesticide-dicamba RCI Podcast: Al Gore and the Politicization of Science https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/video/2026/04/18/al_gore_and_the_politicization_of_science_with_roger_pielke_jr_1177499.html RCI/James Varney: Government and the Case of the Phantom Frog https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2017/06/27/wildlife_services_calls_private_land_critical_habitat_for_nonexistent_frog.html