Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Saragossa.

Coming up, Apocalypse Now, the world of prepping.

This is something that is rapidly spreading around the world.

We kind of had this sense that preppers were a bit kooky and a bit fringe,

and now their preparations seem maybe a little bit more practical in the face of all of this.

Survivorists or preppers as they're known have gone mainstream with people in Silicon Valley's

tech sector leading the way. But is it all just an expression of distrust in government?

There's some resentment there because taking care of your core survival needs, that should be one of the functions of government and where our tax dollars should go.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

There was a large, almost phosphorescent flash, And that was the main power plant that powered all of

Lower Manhattan going out. And so there was this bright, otherworldly, eerie green. And then

everything just went black. Tech entrepreneur Julia Friedrichson there, recalling the moment that

sparked her interest in becoming a prepper.

It was 2012 and Hurricane Sandy had just hit New York.

It was definitely a scary moment where I realized that I wasn't prepared for even very basic things that come just from storms, that I didn't have enough water, that I didn't have a radio

to listen to emergency broadcast. So I felt completely cut off, which is a very weird feeling

when you're surrounded by 8 million other people who are all just as cut off as you are.

And I never wanted to experience that again. These days, Julie's much better kitted out.

When the COVID pandemic hit the US earlier this year,

after spending the first three months cooped up in a one-bedroom high-rise apartment in New York,

she and her husband decamped to Judy's home state of Colorado.

We have water to last us many months.

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