The MAHA Americans Running for Congress with Ryan Sheridan

_THE INTERVIEW_

This interview was auto-transcribed and edited for clarity.

Ari: Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. You’re running for Congress in Missouri, and from what I've seen and heard, you have a very interesting platform, and it’s a very interesting race.

Why don’t you describe exactly what the race looks like, what you're running for, and what makes this one to watch?

Ryan: Thanks, Ari, for having me. I am certainly excited to share about the race here in Missouri's second congressional district. I'm taking on an incumbent, but I am delivering a message that resonates with younger generations in a way that nobody's discussing on the campaign trail, countrywide.

But especially here in Missouri, we're talking about delivering a message for accountability. People are demanding fiscal responsibility and making our citizens healthy. So it's really a unifying message that I think a lot of folks could get behind.

Ari: I've seen right now that one of the most popular figures associated with Trump is RFK Jr. And despite maybe not being in the media as often as other people in Trump's administration, what's happening across the country at a state level is pretty incredible.

In terms of MAHA bills that are being passed, I think there are something like 900 different bills that have been introduced across all of the states so far.

All of them are coming from different sources, including food, added food dyes, and vaccine mandates. Things like that. From what I'm seeing, you're running partly on that campaign as well.

Can you tell me a little bit of what that looks like in Missouri? How do people on the ground respond to that? Is that something they're actually paying attention to, which the media might be missing?

Ryan: It's really something that transcends party. It's overwhelming. Most people want our food supply to be clean and safe. They want our pharmacy, our prescription drugs to be affordable, which obviously Trump's EO today takes a swing at that. There's a lot of stuff going on at the state level, and each state needs to grapple with it.

But there's a ton that the administration can do that they are not doing. Congress is going to have to actually act to ensure that the next person who comes in doesn't erase some of the changes that RFK and Trump have implemented at HHS.

And that's really where I deliver, or our campaign delivers, saying, "Hey, all this stuff that we all agree on, we've gotta make it codified in law if we want it to be a lasting effect for generations to come.”

Ari: What are the biggest elements of MAHA that you see resonate the most? I'll give you an example. I don't think I've ever bought toothpaste with fluoride as a grown adult.

And I think people would often say, "What are you doing?" But now there are these different fluoride bills that are being introduced, and they're being discussed in a different way.

And from what I hear, it's not associated with what it was like before then, as it is today. Like, are there things like fluoride? Are they things like food dyes? What really piques people's interest?

Ryan: Transparency, which I think you're touching on, is really the most significant piece and something that's a huge part of our campaign. And by that, I mean that we need complete labels on our food, the products we eat, and the cosmetic products we buy.

There's a lot of stuff. Each piece of produce, like an apple or a peach, has been coated with something we're buying. Some of them are actually toxic.

Knowing what we're buying should be the baseline. It doesn't mean we say, Hey, you know, X produce company, you can't sell this product. Because I believe in free markets, let's sell the product. But people should know what they're buying, what they're putting in their bodies.

You bring up the fluoride. Absolutely a great example of how dated and questionable science really was, with nobody taking a swing at it. And if you took a swing at it, you were considered a conspiracy theorist.

And now we have people that are saying, “Hey, wait a second, a lot of these ideas are actually real, and fluoride really doesn't deserve a place in most people's water or their toothpaste.”

And you were called crazy for saying that before, and now it's becoming more accepted. And there's a lot of stuff like that in the healthcare space, in the food space, and in the medicine space that I think people are in the age of information.

We now have access to information we didn't have before, and people are waking up.

Ari: I want to do a quick rewind to the pandemic, where we had all of these vaccine mandates, and things were being rolled out so fast. And I remember so many people that I know personally, who were working in the corporate world, and they were very hesitant to get the vaccine.

People were pressured by these corporations and didn't feel like they really had a choice.

Essentially, they were coerced into it. I expected this to be one of the most discussed topics afterward, and the 2024 election would serve as a kind of rebuttal to this topic.

And I don't really remember seeing it brought up as much as I thought it would be. And I know that many MAHA members are currently focused on ensuring we don't face a similar vaccine mandate situation again, and that there are more vaccine exemptions.

What have you seen? Is this still something that animates people and that they're thinking about? Or is it something that people have for the most part, kind of like left behind? Like that was four years ago.

Ryan: It has definitely not been left behind. There are a lot of people who are still reeling, frustrated, angry, and even damaged. I mean, we look at the kids, and there's a generation that'll never recover from that.

So we absolutely still must have accountability for all the COVID debacle, including mandates, including shutdowns, including people turning the other way, and including using bad science to justify infringements on our liberties and personal freedoms.

And I intend to take that absolutely to Congress. Congress is the place where it needs to come from, because, as I mentioned before, any administrative sort of EOs or anything like that can all be wiped away when the next administration comes.

But there's absolutely still a taste from grassroots folks and folks on the ground, but especially in Missouri, that we have to come to terms with this.

Because if we don't, it's gonna happen again. I mean, it might take a hundred years, but it will happen again. And if we don't close the door and say, no, our freedoms and liberty are absolute under no uncertain terms, then it opens the door for them to continue to do it in ways that we might not even foresee now.

And on top of that. If we don't have honesty and transparency with some of these organizations, CDC, NIH, up and down within the government, then how can we actually trust our government to give us accurate information and deliver what we're paying them to do with our tax dollars?

Ari: There is another thing that I wanted to talk about specifically with you coming from the healthcare industry. You're a nurse practitioner. You worked in there, you saw everything happening.

How did your experiences there affect the way that you see what needs to change politically now? What drove you to this point of view?

Ryan: Look, I mean, take a rocket scientist or the highest trained doctor from Harvard to know that our healthcare system is broken. I mean, we see these people, and as a nurse practitioner in the healthcare space, I see people who, if the system were working properly and our approach to care were effective, would have a different outcome. Then they would be better.

And they're not.

When our healthcare dollars for the average person account for up to 20 percent of their income, yet outcomes remain subpar and among the worst globally, it should be a five-alarm fire for people to acknowledge that this isn't working.

We've gotta do something different. Countries that spend significantly less on healthcare tend to have better outcomes.

How is it that somebody can come to me and they're on six or seven medications, and we try to pair them back because somebody before them, before me, really didn't have a keen eye.

They just said, here's another script, here's another script, here's another script. And that's what we see all across the healthcare space. It's reactive. It's not prevention. It's band-aids. It's not seeking to find the root cause. And it's really a mess.

Ari: I completely agree. And the way I've seen the hospital and healthcare systems, especially as they've become more bureaucratic over the past two decades, is that they're really good at delivering average outcomes for everyone. And for most people, it becomes below average, and something definitely has to change.

I'm always shocked, too, how people have so much faith in the healthcare system, especially after having personal experiences that are negative.

So, what do you think has to change?

Ryan: For sure. Yeah. Piggybacking off a little bit of what the administration alludes to, is increasing direct access to care. You talked about that administrative, the really the bulk of healthcare expenses is now an administrative cost.

And over the last decade alone, we have transitioned largely from providers who are either self-employed or employed at a small practice to being an employee of a large system.

That takes away all the responsibility of the provider to deliver good care. There's no real risk for them because if they don't get good care, they still get their paycheck, it's fine. But if I, for example, don't deliver good care, that patient is gonna go somewhere else, and that directly affects my bottom line.

So I'm incentivized to deliver good care because of the kind of decentralized mechanism of the care that I deliver. And that's what we really need to have in the healthcare space.

It is better for a patient to spend 30 minutes with their doctor or 45 minutes or an hour, and then talk to them and get to know every detail of their life. Then spending maybe 10 minutes with the most highly trained doctor in the world, will get better outcomes by somebody listening to all of your problems.

So we really need to increase the availability of direct primary care. We do that through decentralizing the entire healthcare system. We need to eliminate certificate of need laws that significantly hinder competition. And this is really a problem that we see across the American economic landscape. Industries have consolidated, and this consolidation has a direct negative impact on the consumer.

No exception in the healthcare space. If you go to any state, most states, the biggest employer is a hospital system or two. And that's a problem. And there's really only a hospital system or two, maybe three in a place like New York or something. But it's problematic because there's, the individual doesn't really have an alternative to where they might seek care.

There's no real incentive for them to have care delivered effectively. But if we had, say, thousands of decentralized providers, they would all be competing. They would all wanna deliver a really good outcome. And that's how we can increase the availability for patients. And also niche, you know. Find who works for you, but you don't really get that.

If you have an insurance company that says, Hey, you can go to these hospitals and work with these providers. You don't really get to pick who you're working with. So it's a scam, it's a racket, and it's a negative outcome for all of us.

Ari: I was blown away to find out that I think something like 30, 40 years ago, most doctors in America owned private practices. And they would see their own patients and they would kind of do their own thing.

They didn't have to deal with this massive corporation bureaucracy, paperwork stuff. And that after Obamacare, it was like something like the vast majority of doctors got gobbled up by all of these really big healthcare systems.

And now they really do work in these organizations and do a lot of pencil pushing. They're not as excited to do their jobs. They have all these roadblocks.

Is what you're saying that you want to decentralize and break up these big companies that have merged? How do you do that in Congress?

Ryan: Yeah, one is eliminating certificate of need laws so that if a new hospital wants to open up or a new clinic that has federal dollars associated with it, they have to essentially get everybody else in the area to say, We don't have enough space in our hospital.

We have to get rid of that. If anybody wants to open up a hospital and take that risk, they should be able to do so.

I would seriously look at eliminating nonprofit status for all hospitals because they all turn in tremendous profits. We need to eliminate the medical loss ratio for insurance that was in Obamacare, which incentivizes insurance companies to continually increase costs because that's how they make money.

When it comes to that, you're exactly right when it comes to the switchover from private practice to being employed by a system and the protocols and the bureaucrats that dictate the care. But the way we do that is by operating in a space where these big hospital systems don't really have the consumer's best interest at heart.

We'd say, Hey. gonna take healthcare dollars, or excuse me, federal dollars for healthcare, which is the bulk of the spending, then you're gonna deliver care in our image. So we have the purse strings that we can pull.

And I would incentivize innovation. I would encourage some sort of investment in decentralization.

Maybe here's here, if you wanna open up a new hospital, if you wanna do this, if you wanna, maybe we look at investing that way and encouraging the detangling from the big health industry, which absolutely, I mean, across the economic landscape, the big health, big pharma, big ag, big food, all of those. When we get to the big space, the consumer's losing.

Ari: Shifting gears here, one of the things that you mentioned early on in the interview was that you have an agenda that is geared towards young people, and you yourself are very young, and I think everyone acknowledges that we need more young people in Congress. ]

And now, for example, in New York City with Mamdani, it's a lot of these young people who feel like people like Cuomo, much older, do not really have their interests in mind.

When I think about these new politicians who talk about younger people, they also miss a lot of other things that we care about, like housing. For instance, why can't most young people buy houses anymore, just like their parents used to?

We feel like the American dream is no longer available to us. And it wasn't our fault that it disappeared. Are there other aspects of your platform that you've directed towards solving problems that young people are looking to address, and that resonate with them?

Ryan: For sure. Yeah. If I had to identify three policy areas that I think are the most important, it would be housing, healthcare, and energy, as they account for the bulk of any American's expenditures.

On average, the average American spends around 40 percent of their income. In 1950, it was less than 30 percent. Healthcare was less than five percent. Energy was less than five percent.

So, when we add it up, we're spending 65, maybe 70 percent of our income on just those three things. We haven't bought groceries, we haven't invested in our future, we haven't really lived. So it's important to address those.

Housing is an interesting one because the bank's encouragement of asset acquisition over business investment has inflated the real estate market to its current highs. We need to decide whether to encourage business investment or asset purchases.

But what does this look like on a policy level for individuals? The key issue is encouraging businesses to stop acquiring housing. 40 percent of homes are purchased by an institution. 40 percent of the rental market is unaffordable for single families or young people. So how do we fix that?

Well, we talk about leveling the playing field. Businesses can deduct all their expenses, depreciation, and interest. Consumers don't get to take depreciation, even if they take the standard deduction or itemize. They don't get to take all of their expenses.

If the hot water heater breaks, the business can deduct the cost, but the consumer can't. So it's the only segment of the American economy where the consumer and businesses are playing in the exact same ballpark. Everything else has a slight tweak.

So we have to level that playing field to encourage businesses to play fairly.

But it's more than that. It's the financial burden that the government is imposing on the American people. $37 trillion in debt, which is what they admit that they have.

But if you talk about unsecured promises, Social Security has $25 trillion that we have to pay out today. It's unsecured, but we have to pay it off. Medicare, Medicaid, and another $75 trillion.

If you add our unsecured liabilities to the $37 trillion in debt, we're really talking about $137 trillion in debt. If we were running a business, that extra hundred trillion would be an unsecured liability. It would be on our balance sheet. It would be called a pension, or whatever you prefer, but it would be there.

We need to be honest about the crushing, burdensome debt that young people face, as they are the ones who have to pay it. We have to pay it.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars per person. That does not translate to a good future for people who have to pay that back. They're in the hole, and they haven't even gotten out of the gate yet.