Bill Maher

You know this woman, this freestyle skier who ended up skiing for China in the- L.A.

Go.

Yeah, okay.

She's Stanford.

Okay, I will tell you the real prize at Stanford

is the students, right?

Everyone who works there knows that the intellect of the students and the ingenuity of the students is what sets it apart.

And again, there are other places.

Now, the downside, doing research is very expensive, very expensive.

And in the current NIH climate, one of the first things that happened when HHS got revised, and I was very bullish about pushing back on this, is they wanted to cut the indirect cost, the support of the university, not just the labs, to 15% across the country.

that would devastate science across the country.

Now you could say, oh, Stanford's got this massive endowment, it's as big as a country, same with Harvard, why don't they pull from there?

Okay, let's just take that argument and say,

15% would take the University of Utah, which is a fantastic place, a fantastic place for biomedical research and many other things, the UT Austins, the Wisconsins, the Wash U's, and it would demolish them.

Fortunately, that cut didn't happen.

And I'm very happy to say, and I take no credit for this, but I've been very vocal on the phone and elsewhere, getting in Jay's ear and other people's ear, you cannot cut the federal budget for research in this country.

It fuels companies.

It fuels businesses.

Basically, the healthcare exploration and development for the entire world, and they just put a 1% increase on the budget.

Now, I think that's too small, but the problem that I have with big institutions, rich institutions like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, now here's the other piece of it, is that