Coronavirus: Preppers and the Pandemic
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
They’ve been preparing for the worst for decades, but are survivalists, or “preppers,” really ready for the coronavirus outbreak? Ron Hubbard, owner of Atlas Survival Shelters, is banking on it as he sells survival shelters which he says are more in demand than ever. But writer Mark O’Connell, author of the upcoming “Notes from an Apocalypse” is not so certain the preppers have it right. And Beth Healey, a British medical doctor who spent a year at Concordia Station in Antarctica, has some insight into the psychological effect radical self-isolation can have.
Producer: Benjie Guy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, the companies that say they're doing well out of the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 0:10.5 | I probably sold as many in the last 10 days as I sold all of last year. Wow. Yeah, the phone's ringing about every 10, 15 minutes with a serious buyer. |
| 0:22.6 | We're talking about the business of survivalists or preppers, as they're sometimes called. |
| 0:27.5 | They've been investing and preparing for catastrophe all along, but not everyone is cheering them. |
| 0:33.5 | When catastrophic situations happen, the solution that will get us through it is not people |
| 0:39.5 | bunkering down as individuals. The idea of community, the idea of civilization is threatened by that |
| 0:45.2 | in itself, I think. That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:51.4 | For some people, the world is divided in two. On one side are the woefully unprepared masses, |
| 0:58.2 | on the other that prepared for anything. So our bunker, as you watch it open here, is lifted by a hydraulic jet. |
| 1:06.8 | Now, it is made out of 3-A. AR-500 bulletproof steel. This is the same material that you use for |
| 1:15.0 | targets. So you can shoot it over and over and over again and it doesn't ding it, it doesn't go through it, |
| 1:19.8 | it doesn't do anything to it. That is how I'm making the entrance to your shelter. |
| 1:25.1 | Ron Hubbard there, owner of Atlas Survival Shelters in the United States. |
| 1:30.0 | He's showing potential customers around one of his survival bunkers. |
| 1:33.4 | I don't want people getting in your bunker, unlike some other people who just put regular |
| 1:39.4 | roofing hatches up there. As the coronavirus spreads, Ron's been attracting new customers. |
| 1:45.5 | It's been a huge spike about 11, 12 days ago. All of a sudden, people that have been looking at |
| 1:52.1 | shelters just for long-term investments that were on the fence that hadn't decided yet, |
| 1:58.1 | we're all just committing, committing, committing, committing, |
| 2:05.6 | and saying, let's just do it because they have the same opinion that I have that what's going on with this coronavirus is horrible, but it's not the big one. |
| 2:10.3 | And they believe that this is just a wake-up call for the future for other disasters. |
| 2:16.3 | What he offers is a safe seller. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.