DOGE, Government Fraud, and AI Audits
3/14/20261 hr 29 min
Jeremy Jones joins Michael Shermer to talk about DOGE AI, government fraud, and the strange reality that some of the biggest problems in public life are both widely known and somehow never fixed. Jones explains how his team uses AI to sort through enormous government datasets, isolate suspicious billing patterns, and surface waste at a scale that would be almost impossible to catch by hand.
They also get into Jones's own background—growing up in Luxembourg, landing in Chicago, and seeing firsthand how different systems shape people's lives—before moving into a broader argument about immigration, education, bureaucracy, media, and why trust in institutions is falling.
It's a blunt conversation, and at times a confrontational one, about fraud, incentives, and what happens when everybody knows something is broken but nobody seems able, or willing, to stop it.
Jeremy Jones is the co-founder of Rhetor, an AI-powered intelligence and strategy company for campaigns, advocacy orgs, and government departments. Rhetor began with DOGEai, the viral autonomous AI-powered government watchdog on X that has drawn engagement from The White House, Elon Musk, and members of Congress, which was created as a public good and out of Rhetor's commitment to restore accountability in the ruling class.
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Jeremy Jones· Guest0:46
The notion that people are rounding up brown people that are randomly walking down the street is just not true. There is no more racism that I've experienced than liberal white people. This stuff doesn't live in reality. They're brainwashed by, by their white guilt to think that, "Oh my God, I need the white knight for anybody that is not like me or that needs my help." Just that thought in itself is racist, right? Because their whole idea of power dynamics and white privilege, this idea that they need to help the-- a disenfranchised poor brown person is an issue. Regardless of what-- how you stand, if you're pro-Trump, anti-Trump, I think when my kids are in school, we're probably gonna be talking about, if not the, one of the top three most consequential presidents in American history. This second term alone, crime is down drastically, and he