All right. Apparently analysts at UBS say that the bookings for cruises next year, what do you guess is the booking rate for cruises next year? So cruise ships of course are scarier because everybody's afraid to get the coronavirus on a cruise ship. But what do you think the bookings look like for 2021? Way up or way down? Turns out they're up sharply. They're up 9 percent compared to last year. So cruise bookings are up.

Now the story goes on to say it might be just the people who rebooked. You know they're just optimists and like let's just give it a year. We'll just push it out of here. So you've probably got, you know it could be only 9 percent really had the original idea. In theory is just mathematically speaking it couldn't be only 9 percent new people and all the rest are just rebooks. I doubt that's the case but you get the point.

So here's where I'm going with this. When you're trying to figure out what will be the final economic outcome of this let me give you a little economic lesson. And it's a variety of things I've said before. Let's say you are the cruise industry and you just got done, you just got creamed this year. I don't want to say decimated because that only means 10 percent. So you're the cruise industry. You just got wiped out. So all of 2020 is just nothing but you know hundreds of billions of dollars of losses.

But let's say it's six months from now or yeah let's say it's the end of the year and the problem is behind us sufficiently that people feel safe going on a cruise. But your industry has been you know just destroyed. You've got all this debt. Then can you get a loan to reopen your business? And the answer is if you've got bookings for the entire year you probably can. The only thing that would prevent you from reopening is that all your customers went away.

If you're a good business before this, before the problem, if you are already a good business and the only thing that happened was you took on a whole bunch of new debt, while the government might pay some of that depending on your situation. And some companies might go bankrupt but the assets would still exist. And another company could say well you guys ran up a lot of debt and you can't pay it back so sorry you're bankrupt. But we'll buy your ships, we'll buy your operation and we'll just start our own company. And all the customers are still there.

So would the new cruise industry that bought all these assets for practically nothing, the bank lost a lot of money but the cruise ship has all the bookings for next year and they've got a cheap boat, lots of cheap ships I guess. So it seems to be that if you have this critical thing which is that people have booked the business in advance you can open up.

So let's take this to its logical conclusion. You've got restaurants that are just getting killed. Very difficult for a restaurant to get credit or to get a loan. But suppose you used something like OpenTable or one of these online reservation systems and they might have to tweak the system so you can make a reservation a year in advance. What if all of us decided to save the restaurant industry? And you can only do so much now because you know you can do what I just did before I got on, ordered some food for delivery. You can get takeout. That's not enough. I mean you know you're lucky if they can limp to a point where something is better.

But what if there was an online system and all of us could go online and just book like once a week or whatever is our normal amount of eating out and just book all your local restaurants for the entire 2021? So that when the restaurant goes to their bank and says we got killed this year but I've got a really good idea that we're gonna have strong business next year. And if you want to know why, I'm actually booked for every night in 2021. Every night with real people with real names. Now I can't guarantee every one of them shows up but you know the system will prompt them. I think they'll still be in a mood to want to save the local restaurants. Maybe you should give me a loan because what's better than this? This is better than my regular business. I never had this much business. I've never been booked every day.

So there may be a way. Because I keep telling you that all of economics is always a psychology experiment. And part of the psychology is to get people to guarantee your business in pretty far future. Because if you can credibly be guaranteed some future business you can get a loan and you're back in business.

So there are a lot of things that are really different about this situation and starting back the economy that I think we've never seen before. And everything that I feel about it suggests it's going to be way better than even good estimates are. So call me a super bowl on human innovation and ingenuity when it's time to crank back the economy.

Yeah you saw all the ingenuity that's going into dealing with the medical aspect of the coronavirus. I mean amazing amount of energy. Nobody, just tremendous. We're gonna have that same amount of ingenuity on the financial tinkering, on the economics, on the business models. You know if it's not your thing and you're not a business person it may be scarier and look like there's not as much flexibility to do things. But I think I could speak for most experienced business people and entrepreneurs. You should check this by the way. You know I can't really speak for everybody but I have a feeling that people who know the most about how to create a business, you know what a business model looks like, what are the requirements, how do you get credit, you know the basics of business. I think the people who know that most about that are probably going to be among the most optimistic about how quickly we can get back.

And that has to do with the fact that the people with experience have greater visibility about where all the buttons and levers are. So I could say sometimes if you're experienced in something you can smell the solution before you know what it is. You know say you're an experienced mechanic or engineer or even artist, anything. Often you just know where the solution is. You can just smell it but you can't describe why. It's just something about your experience that says yeah there's something here. I don't know what it is but there's definitely something here.

And so my contention is that those of us with lots of business experience see this economy as having every potential still. The moment it opens up we're gonna have to re-engineer on the fly. You get really clever, get really creative, work really hard, be really disappointed, get back up, make it work again. But it happens to be also the thing we do best. You know what Americans do better than figure it out right? If there was one thing you could say that defines Americans, and I know I'm talking to an international audience but maybe you would agree. Yeah this could be just a you know that American thing. I don't know.

But if you had said all right tell me one thing that defines an American. You know I'm not talking about you know loving the country and the Constitution stuff. Let's say that's all a given. But what makes the character of an American? What's the most defining feature? We can figure stuff out. That's our most defining feature. Give us a problem we'll figure it out. Go to the moon we'll figure it out. Cure a cancer, we're getting there. You know it's not done but we're getting there. Build an electric car. You name it. You got a problem, humans are really really good at solving problems even ones we've never seen.

So I think you're going to be really surprised in the positive way when the things open back up that we will have a better recovery than 90 percent of the world believes. So I'm gonna put me in the 10 percent. We're super optimists because I'm gonna bet on people and I'm gonna bet on the best of us. So I'm not even betting on average people because average people you know if you can find your way back to your old job that's probably good enough.

But so most of us don't need to do anything heroic. We just need to show up. But like everything else there are going to be those you know that 1 percent, that 2 percent, maybe it's 10 percent. But the best of us are going to figure out how to do it differently because that's the whole thing right? You can't just go back to work like nothing happened. You got some problems to solve but they're well within the solvable range for the most clever among us who have the right intentions. And everybody's really sort of got the same direction. So all good news.