Welcome to our podcast where I, Kealy Severson, Erik Johnson, and Alicia Swamy are exposing mold. Today we are here with our special guest, Galiano Tiramani.
Alicia Swamy:This podcast is brought to you by Michael Rubino, The Mold Medic and All American Restoration, the first and only mold remediation company in the country specializing in remediating mold for people with underlying health conditions or mold sensitivities. They've quickly become the most recommended remediation company from doctors and mold inspectors nationwide. Check out our show notes to pick up your copy of Michael Rubino's book, "The Mold Medic: An Expert's Guide on Mold Remediation," or visit AllAmericanrestoration.com to get your home assessed and get your health back on track. Galiano Tiramani is an entrepreneur who has founded successful startups, notably a cryptocurrency exchange, an ATM network called CoinHub, which acts as a custodian for customer funds with an annual trade volume in excess of $10 million. In 2017, he founded Boxabl and has raised $20 million to fund the company. He is now at the final stages of setting up the first Boxabl factory. Boxabl has a large waitlist of almost 40,000 pre orders. One of Boxabl's most famous customers, Elon Musk, is currently living in one of their prefabricated units. Galliano has a bachelor's degree in business, grew up in Connecticut has two children and enjoys riding dirt bikes.
Kealy Severson:Welcome Galliano. Thank you so much for joining us.
Galiano Tiramani:Hey there, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, my name is Galiano Tiramani. I'm the founder of a company called Boxabl. And we are building houses in a factory using a lot of unconventional methods and building materials.
Kealy Severson:That's really interesting. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about what is the purpose and intention of your company and how your prefabricated homes vary from other prefabricated homes?
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, so the goal of the company is to dramatically reduce housing costs. And we hope to achieve that by applying the assembly line principles to housing. Because right now, the way buildings are built, they're all built kind of by hand, you know, out in the field, and they don't take advantage of the factory environment like all the other modern products do. So we've solved a bunch of problems to make that possible. By starting out with the shipping issue, we- our units ship at a much lower cost than other factory built houses because they fold up. So that's important. And then beyond that, we've selected all new building materials and re engineered the building from scratch. And as it relates to you guys, we are not using drywall in the building, or using a different type of wall board that has some good ratings on mold and other things as well.
Alicia Swamy:That's fantastic. Thank you very much for giving us a little synopsis. Now I'm really interested, like, what was the inspiration behind this? Like what made you want to bring a new form of building to the market? Were you just kind of tired of seeing the same old, same old and construction like, what, what sparked to the innovation for the company?
Galiano Tiramani:Well, you know, housing is a really big problem. All over the world, we just saw huge opportunity to kind of transition this old school into industry into the factory. The original idea happened when my father who's the co founder, also, he built a modular house using the traditional modular houses that are available and just experienced a lot of problems with the construction and a lot of problems with the shipping solution, and originally came up with that idea for the folding to solve the shipping solution. And then we just kind of started working on on the side. And as we went forward, things got better and better. More and more resources came in and the product got more and more exciting. And we devoted more and more resources to it. And now we're actually sitting in a factory that we just moved into yesterday.
Kealy Severson:You have a high population of environmentally sensitive folks who who request your homes that you know.
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, a lot of people are asking questions related to that, like related to, you know, off gassing and mold growth stuff. And as we've gone forward, we've selected all these different building materials and tried to select it very carefully to handle all the different requirements, whether it's that or fire resistance or energy ratings, etc. So there's a lot of different considerations when figuring out how to engineer a new building type.
Kealy Severson:This is just a curiosity question. I know some prefab houses that are that are assembled in location, you know, they might have room for leaking. Do you have any? Do you have any issues with any of your products or complaints like that from your clients?
Galiano Tiramani:We don't expect anything like that. We are just getting started as a new company. You, you know, where our panels come together, we have two things. One is a shape that should not allow water runoff to enter the house. And the other is a gasket system that really seals it up very well, kind of like a car door. So I think we're going to be pretty good on on that front. But we'll do a lot of third party testing, and we'll dial in the engineering, if there's any issues on that.
Kealy Severson:Did the houses come with any type of warranty?
Galiano Tiramani:They will, however, we have not identified specifically what that is just yet. Right now we're just in the process of setting up the first factory. So we've moved in here recently, we've got all the equipment bolted in, and then we'll be turning on production soon. And we've got a lot of work to do. And to kind of get the company up and running.
Alicia Swamy:Wonderful. Are you serving the entire nation? Or is there only certain pockets that you are offering Boxabl.
Galiano Tiramani:We plan to sell these everywhere in the whole world. But we're starting off with a factory that's only so big, should produce several thousand units per year. So I expect they'll all be probably all be sold locally here in Nevada and Southern California.
Alicia Swamy:Awesome. And if someone were interested in purchasing is there, like what, can you walk me through the process? Maybe if someone interested in wanting to order and the whole financing? Or how does that work?
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, so right now we're just actually just taking a big waitlist of customers. And we have a lot of interest in the product so that the list is pretty big. We're just getting, you know, people filling out forms on the website. And then as soon as we're ready, we'll reach back out with kind of next steps on that. And it will involve various resources, including financing, that hopefully has an easy process for people to buy these houses.
Alicia Swamy:As we all know. And as we're all experiencing climate change right now, how durable would you say your Boxabl homes are for fire, flooding, earthquakes, snow impact, and all that.
Galiano Tiramani:They are going to outperform traditional buildings, we've spent a lot of time dialing it in the energy that the wind ratings we've got on them should handle the category D winds, the worst wind conditions. They're incredibly energy efficient, because of the way they're built, they have a very airtight building envelope with limited thermal bridging the interior wallboard we're using is very water resistant. So if it gets wet, it just dries off. And it's good to go. It's not going to absorb moisture or become damaged. And there's not really any, you know, wood, any traditional wood at all, or any wood on there on the exterior of the building. And generally, that's kind of what's degrading first on most buildings. So, you know, we think we've engineered something that is far ahead and extremely durable, and hopefully, will last night very long time.
Alicia Swamy:So my husband and I are purchasing land and you know that we want to do the whole off the grid thing, right, that seems to be more popular these days, can Boxabl be fully off the grid? Or does it have to be on the grid?
Galiano Tiramani:You can connect this to any utility solution that you want. So it should do great as an off grid solution. In the future, we might supply those off grid fit outs at the factory. But right now we're just kind of providing this room module that's a component in the building system. And we'll be, you know, used to build final buildings to make the builder developers process much easier and faster.
Alicia Swamy:Okay, so hypothetical I just ordered a box of a home from, from you. And I want to know from when it's complete to, you know, factory to set up on the land, how long does that usually take?
Galiano Tiramani:The actual install, it's really just going to be a few hours, you're going to prepare a foundation and utilities connection before our unit arrives. But when it actually unfolds and bolts down, it's just extremely easy and fast and user friendly, so dramatically faster than a traditional building.
Alicia Swamy:Wow, that's incredible. So just a few hours?
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, it's it's all fully finished in the factory that's like electrical plumbing, HVAC, kitchen, bathroom. And then it just kind of unfolds on site and it gets locked into place. So really important for us to to get everything we possibly can done in the factory, where the costs are lower, and it's in its higher quality and more efficient.
Alicia Swamy:So how many factories Do you guys currently have up? Kind of doing all the prefab work?
Galiano Tiramani:Well, just this one that we're we're just just start setting up now. We're just getting started. This factory should produce several 1000 units once it's up and running, and then we'll we'll take it from there and be looking to scale it from there.
Alicia Swamy:Awesome. Now this is kind of a nitpicky question, because we do deal with a lot of people who have hypersensitivities. And contamination is a really big issue. And I just wanted to know does your factory kind of go through rigorous testing or standards to make sure that none of the items in the factory are contaminated or anything like that?
Galiano Tiramani:I don't know about contaminated specifically. But we do have many procedures and quality control programs and third party inspectors and everything you can imagine. So, you know, these are manufactured products, we'll be building the same thing over and over forever. So, you know, we're going to be able to put a lot of attention into into detail, and you're finding things and solving problems, and making sure that that this is really top notch quality control. That's something you can't really do. And you're kind of custom building out in the field. Because of course, there's many more variables. So I think we'll be in a good spot for that.
Alicia Swamy:Since you're kind of revolutionising the whole system of construction and building, how's the response been by just typical construction agencies or anything like that? Are people getting a little upset with what you're doing?
Galiano Tiramani:No, not at all. And we thought that might happen. But it hasn't. Everyone is incredibly excited and interested. And I think that any traditional builder just sees this as a way to improve their process, speed up their build time, lower their costs. And I think they're very happy and eager to become customers once we prove it out.
Alicia Swamy:So it seems like a lot more people are getting interested in what you're doing and kind of want to mimic it in a way.
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, we have a huge amount of interest. I mean, we get done really well with social media marketing, and it's resulted in just a massive amount of inquiries. Thousands and thousands of inquiries for the product.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, I would have to say that when I posted this on our page, I mean, it just blew up with people asking about"What is Boxabl?" "What are the materials made out of?" "How do I inquire?" So once we launched this, you know, I know you guys are probably on back order right now. But we might increase that for you, which is good and bad. Right?
Galiano Tiramani:So I have a question for you. How do I test my house for mold?
Alicia Swamy:We actually had some people come on, and we had Michael Rubino from all American restoration. And we've had some microbiologists come on. And the tests that we have currently in the market that people are using are just not 100%, they don't show the full complete picture. And testing for mold is usually through air or through tape tests or surface level tests. And again, it only shows like a like a snapshot of what happens. And there's people that are so hypersensitive that even if they test their home, and they have low levels of mold, post remediation, they could still be sick because of just again, the inconsistency in the testing isn't just 100%. So a lot of people like us who are very sensitive, we kind of have to go based upon our symptoms. If we walk into a building, like me, Kealey, and Eric, we can feel if that building is contaminated right away, because we will start feeling symptoms. And sometimes that doesn't always reflect in the test, because it's extremely hard to suck out the amount of air that you need out of a home to be able to do that. And there's been only one microbiologists that created an apparatus for a company to do that, where they're able to suck out gallons of air, but that apparatus is no longer functional. So we're just kind of lacking in that field. Right now. Again, it's just a faulty system right now, so.
Erik Johnson:Now the, um, paradigm that we, uh, are interested in, represents an extreme level of hypersensitivity, where the standard methods of testing have completely failed us. So we're looking around for new housing solutions. Things that are low chemical, very low potential for mold can be set up in a pristine like, preferably desert environment and reclaim our lives by a strategy we call"mold avoidance". So there's going to be some interest in your housing solution as a means of ordering something that's fairly safe, fairly reliable, that can be quickly moved out to a good location. We're hopefully a sensitized person, like, like us, will have a quick solution to move right in.
Kealy Severson:Yeah, we've all kind of gotten to the point where our location and our house is our healthcare because of how we're reactive we are to standard VOC's and, and, and things in the environment. And so you know what, at least he was trained to say that there's mold produces chemicals called mycotoxins, and there's no test that exists that can evaluate the full profile and concentration of mycotoxins. So a lot of people don't even know a lot of people who have different autoimmune conditions, maybe from a leak in their house, they could never have access to information that would that would definitively prove that by their environment. And so our, our patient base, our audience base is entirely people who are looking into mold illness recovery, but also really considering housing as healthcare, housing as healthcare and medicine.
Erik Johnson:The way we would test for mold is by sending a number of sensitized people in and just start pointing whatever we feel.
Alicia Swamy:We have a very concerning growing population of people that are becoming sensitive because of our toxic environments. It's happening around the world. It's the outside, it's the inside. And I think people tend to miss that point of what Keeley had just said that housing really is your first step of health care, because you could not eat junk food, you could, you know, do all these different things. But you can't stop where you breathe, right? You have to constantly breathe in the air that you're surrounded in. And that's usually your home, people spend the majority of their time in their homes, and they don't realize that the indoor air quality is a huge contributor to health or disease. And that's kind of what we've been discovering. And so finding people like you in this industry that are redoing things, rethinking the building, the cheap building materials that have been used since the 40s, and kind of connecting that, like wow, people are getting sick because of their homes, and they're not even realizing it. So having alternate solutions is extremely important going forth into the future if we want to preserve our health. And that's just kind of how we're we're going through it right now.
Galiano Tiramani:Where's the mold growing? Is it on that sheet rock or somewhere else in the bathrooms?
Alicia Swamy:Mold is growing in the sheetrock, any cellulose based materials that are in the home, HVAC systems are a major proponent of that as well, in windowsills anywhere where there's humidity, moisture, a food source, these are the things that mold needs to grow basically. And, you know, it's usually all different types of molds together. The more heavier, more dangerous ones like Stachybotrys, Chaetomium grow with other ones like Aspergillus and Penicillium. And they all kind of mix together. And we don't really know the synergism of their mycotoxins and what they're doing to people, I mean, we're seeing it in our patient base of people with autoimmune respiratory issues, I mean, cancers, you name it down the line, the WHO coined mold illness as the greatest masquerader. So it can manifest as anything, basically. So it's just extremely important to educate people because this information isn't readily available. And if people are sick because of their homes, you cannot find help from a regular doctor. And even some from what I'm seeing in our patient base, even some natural paths. And these functional doctors are dropping the ball on people who are sick with mold as well. So that's kind of where we're at with that.
Erik Johnson:Look in the bathrooms is probably the number one offender, because the Stachybotrys, the toxic mold just loves to grow on the paper backing sheet rock. But a lot of times this fools us and it grows on the paper backing of the fiberglass insulation, especially in a north wall with just purely from condensation.
Galiano Tiramani:Interesting. Have you guys heard of magnesium oxide board?
Erik Johnson:Yeah. So that's a great step forward.
Alicia Swamy:What's your opinion on that? Because there is people that advocate and there's people that say, well, that's not really the best choice. What What do you think about?
Galiano Tiramani:Well, I know that it handles water very differently than then sheet rock, it's just gonna get wet, it's gonna dry off, and it's gonna be fine. And I know that it's, they've done the ASTMD 3273 test on it for a mold. And it's rated to not grow mold. So it seems like a better choice to me. And I think that that sheetrock's probably the number one place where you're seeing that mold, because I've seen it before on on sheet rock.
Erik Johnson:What's the exterior of the Boxabl made out of?
Galiano Tiramani:It's going to be fiber cement board.
Erik Johnson:Oh terrific. And suppose somebody changes a job and has to move, for any reason. Can they fold this thing up and move it again?
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, it's totally possible within our system, they are meant to be permanent buildings, but by their nature, they can be relocated. It's just going to be a numbers thing of, you know, how much did you invest in getting it set up and getting a foundation built or developing your land otherwise, but in some cases, it may make sense to take it up.
Erik Johnson:So of course, we're all dying to know is Elon Musk thrilled to be living in one of these.
Galiano Tiramani:Sorry, can't talk about him. Apoligize.
Kealy Severson:That's fine. I had a question. I'm just thinking about this as like, as an easier and quicker building solution. And my husband and I have land in Oaxaca, Mexico where it's so rural, that standard construction machinery probably wouldn't pass through. So can you speak a little bit about like, how compact size is this for traveling long distances?
Galiano Tiramani:Well, it folds up to eight and a half feet wide. And that's very important to make it just highway legal. And then it can set up on site with you know, very little heavy equipment.
Alicia Swamy:Are these structures ADA compliant?
Galiano Tiramani:We have designed a version that will be and its featured on our website. And it was just a matter of making sure that the wheelchairs could turn in everywhere and certain handles and counter heights and things like that. So we do have a plan for that one.
Alicia Swamy:That's wonderful to hear. Because a lot of again, our patient based is pretty disabled. And it's pretty hard for them to get around in their home. So having even thought about that you guys even you know, have a build. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Regarding the foundation, is there a certain type of foundation that people need to have in order to put the box label on? Or is it pretty universal?
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, it's very universal, it's compatible with pretty much everything it can just bolt on the floor is very strong on it. So it doesn't necessarily need to be supported, like, fully underneath, you could support it on just a few points.
Kealy Severson:Thank you so much for your time today. It was nice talking to you and learning more about your company and the products that you produce.
Erik Johnson:Just, it's interesting to find out that, you know, it has magnesium oxide instead of sheet rock, and the exterior walls are going to be more mold resistant. So that's a major plus from our point of view.
Galiano Tiramani:Yeah, we've really been very careful in selecting all this stuff. And there's many different requirements. So and they don't always all align. But yeah, it's pretty cool. And you know, we're just getting up and running. So anyone who's interested, please take a look on the website, Boxabl.com and lots of other stuff on our YouTube and other social media channels as well. And we'll continue to post updates as we go forward. And we'll publish test data and all kinds of stuff in the future.
Alicia Swamy:You know what I have one more question before you go for the day, are businesses inquiring about Boxabls? Or like, hospitals or any other institutions?
Galiano Tiramani:Everyone you can imagine. We have a list with over 40,000 people on it now. So huge amount of interest for many different use cases.
Alicia Swamy:Wow, wow. And what are the the top three use cases that you're seeing right now?
Galiano Tiramani:Well, the idea was to target this for accessory dwelling units for backyard houses, with this initial smaller module that we're starting with. And so that was the idea. But you know, many other stuff. They're just rooms, and they can be used for anything.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, that's what I was thinking because I know California is really lax on their in law, regulations, or allowing people to kind of allow people to live in their backyard. So I was thinking,"Oh, yeah, would actually be great to put in your backyard and make extra income."
Galiano Tiramani:Yep, exactly.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah. Well, that's great. You know, hopefully, you guys start building hospitals one day, because hospitals are a big problem with mold and a lot of other issues. So, but anyways, we really, we wish you great luck. I mean, we hope that your business continues taking off. Thank you for joining us today. And yeah, if there's anything else you'd like to tell our audience, please do so.
Galiano Tiramani:Thanks for having me. And, yeah, we'll keep you posted on our progress.
Alicia Swamy:Sounds good. Thank you, everyone for joining us today, we just had a quick conversation with Galiano Tiramani. He is very, very busy working on Boxabls. And getting on all those backorders seems really cool what they've got going on and what they've invented and just bringing the assembly line approach to the construction industry but also utilizing materials that are pretty friendly for people who are sensitive so I am really excited to see what what they're going to be doing and just seeing their products and and seeing the reviews over time, how they stand up to climate change and all the rest. So please go ahead and like share comment on our content. Also, go ahead and check out our GoFundMe and Patreon page to keep this podcast rolling. Got a lot of stuff brewing over here. We can't wait to share it with all of you. Thank you again. We'll see you next time.