Ep 58: An Unpopular Opinion of Blockchain Technology with Beau Button

Beau Button is a software development expert who has been involved in the industry since he was eleven years old. He is the co-founder of Atlas Reality, a mobile gaming company that is currently transitioning into the Web3 space.

In this episode, Dr. Brook is joined by Beau Button to discuss The Atlas Reality game as well as why Beau does not believe decentralization is the biggest draw towards blockchain technology. Beau Button learned about the game and its development process when he started working on Atlas Earth, a virtual reality game that is part of the Atlas Reality ecosystem. The Atlas Reality game is a location-based game that allows players to purchase and sell virtual land. The game also features game elements such as a virtual currency and an in game competitive system. The long-term plan for the game is to allow players to build on their virtual land.

"The benefit of owning that land is we pay you virtual rent, and that rent accrues every second of the day, regardless of you being logged into the game or not."

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. What is virtual real estate?

2. How do you make money from virtual real estate?

3. What are the benefits of owning virtual real estate?

Connect with Beau:

Website: https://www.atlasreality.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/beaulbutton

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beaubutton/

Free Download:

The Words of Web3 - A comprehensive glossary of terms used in the space https://mailchi.mp/9d043022b5a0/words-of-web3

Connect with me:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbrooksheehan

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrookSheehan

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drbrooksheehan

Transcript

[Beau Button]
 Hey.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Hey. Dr. Brook here with another epic episode of Dr. Brook on the Block. I am joined by an amazing co pilot today, Beau Button, who has been actively involved with software development since he was eleven years old. That's my daughter's age right now. He got to start learning about computers around the age of nine, digging into the hardware side of things first, and then eventually picked up the software development at the age of eleven. Having spent the majority of his career as a serial entrepreneur working in the government space, Beau has now transitioned into the mobile gaming space through his company Atlas Reality, which we're going to talk about today. Beau has become a technology and automation enthusiast even in his personal life. He spends the majority of his time outside of work building through 3D printing and is very passionate about hunger and food scarcity, education and veganism. Welcome to the show, Beau. Thank you so much for being here.
 
 [Beau Button]
 Thank you for having me.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yes. So, like I always ask my copilot on the ride, what is your origin story into Web3? How did you end up here today?
 
 [Beau Button]
 Well, in my profession, it was hard not to see or hear about crypto before this kind of nomenclature naming Web3 came into existence. I'd be lying to you if I didn't write it off. Initially, in the early days, I didn't really see an application for the blockchain that was relevant to what I was doing, which was in the government sector, but I was always kind of jealous of the success stories from a speculative investment side. Like someone would buy some bitcoin and it would spike, and I'm like, that sounds great, but I dabbled as a day trader, just like, as a hobby, and I learned the hard way that that's not for me because I'm an obsessive compulsive kind of person. For, I don't know, three or four years. I kind of just read about it and kept up to speed with what Ethereum was doing in their approach to the blockchain. So you had more of a programming model on top of the blockchain instead of just a token, which is where BTC is? Yeah. I mean, when Sami, my partner, and I started working on Atlas Earth, which is our most recent game, it's a virtual real estate game, I had to dig really deep into Web3 because our closest competitors are blockchain based virtual real estate games. So that's when I really got I went heads down, learn solidity, try to figure out how all of it work to understand what these folks are really trying to achieve. And that's how I got into it. And to be quite frank, we are a Web 2.0 off chain gaming studio that's currently navigating our path on chain. And we don't have a product right now that is on chain, but we are working on a game. But from like an outsider's perspective, we're slow to start, but we've been building Web 20 games and trying to figure out how do we get on chain, but also maintain all of the kind of experiences we are able to build off chain, which is where I think Web3 games right now are really suffering.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, that's interesting. I've had a copilot on the show many episodes ago now who use the terminology he's in the process or he's decentralizing. So his company is not fully decentralized. Fully web. Three. They're wed two similar to, like, what you were saying, and they're moving into the decentralization space. So very cool.
 
 [Beau Button]
 There are a lot of folks that are really married to the decentralized kind of topic. We can talk more about it later, but I'm not as passionate about the decentralization aspect of it as I am about what the transparency and ultimately the distributed nature of the blockchain brings to technology decentralization. There's been a lot of attempts that have kind of failed in miraculous ways. But anyhow, I digress. We can talk about it if you're interested.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 No, I love that. Can you expand just a tiny bit more and then we'll go into Alice reality? Because I think that's a really great discussion.
 
 [Beau Button]
 Yeah, it kind of goes hand in hand with my philosophy on privacy. I have a lot of friends that are very privacy centric. They use the Brave browser. They don't want location history, search history, and I always pause and say, what in the world are you doing? Yes. I don't necessarily like people invading my privacy. If it's at my home and you're looking through my window, I have a problem with that. But I've been on the Internet my entire life and I've never really felt like my actions on the Internet shouldn't or couldn't be used. It would be great if I could monetize that. Like if FaceBrookk would have given me $9 a month for all of the data that they're basically aggregating from bow button and using it to do something like serve these reels which you can get hooked on Doomsko and do things that they know you like. But as it relates to decentralization from the political perspective, there's a lot of, I think, just misrepresentation of what it really needs to be. There's a huge audience of folks that just doesn't want the government, they don't want, like, Big Brother, like, looking and being able to control things. But the reality of the situation is everything that's masquerading as decentralized is centralized. Most of the decentralized blockchain is owned and operated, or at least operated by one of the three large cloud vendors google, Amazon or Microsoft. So if Microsoft wants to screw the pooch as it relates to Ethereum, they could. So I'm less concerned about that. I mean, if you remember the Napster model where it was peer to peer, that decentralization made sense to me because it was a really easy way to exchange files and it wasn't a privacy play or a Big Brother. I want you out of my hair trying to play. It just was a technological play that made a lot of sense. But like I said, I'm more so about transparent. And what that means is we all have databases. As companies, they're in walled gardens or silos. I can get access to it. Maybe I throw an API in front of it. Maybe I charge you for the API. But that's kind of old school. And as a consumer, I have no problem with things that I own being publicly discoverable by anybody on the Internet. And as a software engineer, it's very attractive, because now I can leverage those digital assets in a way that's unique to my experience. Like in a game, I can leverage something that you own from another. It could be a brick and mortar vendor. It could be your Starbucks points that they're now mending on chain. Decentralized part of it. Architecturally, it's necessary because that's part of the core tenet of blockchain, is the distributed aspect of it. But from like, a Big Brother government, that's not a concern of mine.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Well, I like your perspective. I like your perspective. It's interesting, and it's a fresh new idea. I think a lot of people, especially in luxury, talked about decentralization, decentralization, decentralization. The transparency of blockchain technology and being distributed globally, and not just really housing to one area, whether it be California or Illinois or wherever it's at, being distributed is vastly important to the development of where things are going. So with all of that being said, let's now get into Atlas Reality. How long has this been going on? Because I did notice, I did check out the website and see what you guys are up to there's franchising, there looks like there's Atlas Reality, and then there's other aspects and pieces to that part of that Atlas Reality ecosystem. Tell us more about that.
 
 [Beau Button]
 Yeah, so the company was originally called Cerberus Interactive. I couldn't even say it. That's the reason we changed it, because you can't say it, you can't spell it. And then people, if they do know what or whose service is, you get into this long story about mythology. But we started as a consultancy. We had no, I think, clear vision of the games. If we were to build our own games, what would they be? So we started building games for other companies. My background was not in video game development. My background was in enterprise software, specifically in the government sector. And my partner saw me he's the younger brother of a long term high school friend, a long time high school friend. And he reached out to me and said, hey, I want to start building games. I'm a user acquisition and marketing expert for a really fast growing fintech company. And my initial reaction was, I don't know anything about game development, but the tools in the language that I use to write enterprise software@microsoft.net. And C sharp so happens to be the same kind of language and tools you can use to build games in a game engine called Unity. Three D. And at the time, I was, at that point in my career, where I was like, look, if I have to build another invoicing app or another line of business app for a customer that doesn't know what they want, when they want and how much money, you know what? I was just ready to kind of just change the scenery. So it was a blessing in disguise because ultimately, that decision led us to where we are today. Atlas Reality came into existence about a year ago, which was again driven primarily off of the fact that we were Cerebrus or Cerebellum. People would just invent new ways to pronounce the business name.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 By the way, Cerebellum is the little brain in the back of your head.
 
 [Beau Button]
 My name is Beau Button, and I've had people introduce me as Brook from Cerebrum. And I'm like, you didn't get my name right. Yes, it's tragic, but no, look, we pivoted it about a year into the company's existence. So we're talking 2018. We stopped building games for other folks, and we started building location based games. I can't quite explain why location based games is where we started. Obviously, we were influenced a good bit from Niantic and Pokemon Go. It was a new type of game, a new type of experience. It promoted getting outside. That wasn't super important to me. At the end of the day, I do love the fact that people had to go outside to play Pokemon Go, but I wasn't like, oh, we're going to change the world. Everybody's going to be physically fit. Let's build games where you have to walk around to do anything. But I did have a lot of experience in geospatial, meaning I've dealt with maps in the past, a lot with maps. My previous company, we liquidated distressed real estate on the Internet. So there was kind of an attraction. Like, I've got C sharp experience. I'm learning how to develop things in Unity. I already have math experience. Let's build a map based game and see what we can do with it. And the first game we built was called Atlas Empires, and it was an amalgamation of Pokemon Go and Clash of Clans. And from a corporate perspective, it was a success from, I think, a revenue and business perspective, like, in regards to finances, we made enough money to justify building the game that we're working on now, which is Atlas Earth. And that's really when atlas reality, atlas Earth and Atlas Empires kind of came together. We are one company with two products, earth and Empires, and right now, we're focusing almost 95% of our energy on Earth. If anybody that plays Atlas Empires is listening to this, my apologies. We are still committed to Atlas Empire.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, so explain Atlas Earth so it's location based, like gaming. So I can play here in California and in my local area. So San Diego I'm building. What am I doing in the Atlas Earth game is what I'm going to do.
 
 [Beau Button]
 So the easiest way to explain it is to kind of take a step back and look at virtual real estate as a whole. What is it? Most other virtual real real estate estate ecosystems, like the sandbox, upland and Decentralized. Let me just talk about Sandbox and decentralize. The virtual real estate that they're selling is not anchored to the Earth. It's fictitious. Basically, someone like a level designer designed these virtual environments, and they created parcels of land that they would sell. Obviously, their play is blockchain NFT. You can own the land. You've got it in your wallet and so on and so forth. But when you log in, what you see is not Austin, Texas, or San Diego, California. It's somewhere in the meadow on the end. The other competitor, upland, is very close to us. They leverage real location based data and existing mapping technology. So think about just opening Google Maps. You see the map where your houses and the surrounding streets. We work the same way. The difference between upland and us is they're on chain, and they have a lot more robust mechanics about property ownership and building and improving and all these other things. So it's a bit more difficult to digest. For your average gamer, earth is quite simply, location based virtual real estate that's anchored to real land. So if you open the app now, where you are in San Diego, we've got a grid system that's superimposed on top of the entire globe, and you can buy individual pieces of land. Those pieces of land are roughly 30ft by 30ft. And when you buy them, you use our virtual currency, which is Atlas Bucks. And the benefit of owning that land is not so much about speculating what that land may be worth in the future when the metaverse pops off or if Snoop Dogg is your neighbor. The benefit of owning that land is we pay you virtual rent, and that rent accrues every second of the day, regardless of you being logged into the game or not. And if you accrue $5 of virtual rent, you can cash that money out in cash fiat, no crypto, no stablecoins. Like, you can go to Starbucks. I mean, arguably, you could probably use USDC at Starbucks nowadays, so that is not a good example. But long story short, it's a currency that we can use in our everyday life that doesn't have any obstacles in front of it. Like, I need a wallet. Where do I put my pass key? Or anything like that. In addition to that, that's a really simple game. Again. All right, well, you purchased land. Well, why? What's the point? Well, obviously, if you can accrue virtual land, that's a benefit. But in reality, if you own one piece of land, it'll take you a very long time to get your initial $5 back. So this is where the game elements start to add to the experience. You can watch ads to Brookst the rate at which your land generates rent. We make money, and in essence, the players make money by sharing and that kind of experience. And then additionally, you can compete to be the president or the mayor or the governor. So that's kind of one of the inner game loops where the lot of people that just they buy just to compete, which is great for us because we're selling more land, they're generating more virtual rent, and there's this really competitive, ingame experience where, oh, so and so just lost the mayorship of Austin, Texas, and somebody is going to replace them. So that is, in essence, what we have today. The long term plan, though, is to allow players to build. And this is kind of where our competitors started to let them build first and then worry about how do you make money, how do you attract users, how do you attract brands after the fact? And we're seeing that kind of fall apart right now in front of us. So we're at that point now where we've got probably the most users, the most number of daily active users by far, and arguably the most real revenue from players and brands. And we're starting to introduce the user generated content side of this, where players own land, and now they can build on those lands and ultimately create experiences to invite their friends to do whatever they want to do. It doesn't matter if you just want to chat, if you want to talk about we have a lot of folks that are into crypto that play our game, even though it's not on chain, a lot about crypto. And yes, they've asked me every single day of the week, hey, when are you going to introduce a token? I'm not interested right now. But that's what it is right now. It's a virtual real estate platform that allows you to cash out real money. And we cashed out a pretty significant amount of money across probably from 20,000 unique players. Not everybody gets to that $5 threshold, but we have a lot of people who have, and they passed out real cash.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah. So then if I'm buying land in Atlas Earth, am I using fiat money to purchase that land, or am I using you talked about Atlas Bucks.
 
 [Beau Button]
 Yes. So the entire game is built on our virtual currency, and we have several faucets. So you can exchange fiat via an inapp purchase for Atlas Bucks. And the more you buy, the less expensive they get. That's probably going to be more in alignment with your pay to win type player. So you've got some disposable income. You want to spend $100 on Atlas Bucks, you buy the Atlas Bucks. You can then buy the land using the Atlas Bucks. So you can't buy the land directly with Via, but there's definitely a proxy, a way to get there. What we're trying to do, and I think what we're doing better than most, is we have a lot of faucets, meaning we have a lot of places where people can go or things that they can do to actually earn Atlas Bucks. So, of course, we allow you to convert your time into Atlas Bucks using incentivized video rewards. You want to watch an ad for 30 seconds, we'll give you two Atlas Bucks. There are limits, because if you just continuously watch ads, the value to the ad networks for that particular user decreases. Therefore, the amount of money we make decreases, because if you're just you're not buying anything. Clearly, the intent of an ad is to get you to go buy something, whatever.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Right? Yeah, absolutely.
 
 [Beau Button]
 And then the thing that I haven't talked about, and I think no one else has, that we have a patent for is we have something we refer to as the Atlas Merchant Program. We have about a dozen nationwide merchants. Jamba juice on Diane's pretzels. Burger King. Popeye's Fried Chicken. These companies are partnered with us, and what we allow is in game missions that drive users from the game to the physical brick and mortar locations of the participating merchants. And because we sit on top of the loyalty program, rails from Visa and Mastercard, we're able to give them instant in game rewards. So if you go to Popeye's and buy, I don't know, a shrimp tackle box I am from New Orleans, by the way, so most people probably don't know what that is, but I do. If you buy something from Popeye's, you swipe your card while you're in the drivethru. You will indeed get a push notification in the game showing you that for every dollar you spent at Popeyes, you've earned this many Atlas Bucks. The amount you get per dollar varies by merchant. The way we make money is we get a commission on that sale because we drove the customer there.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, exactly.
 
 [Beau Button]
 And we're trying to figure out other ways. I'm not a huge fan of ads. I'm a parent. And when my youngest daughter shows me her phone and there are 3000 apps installed, and I'm like, what are these? She's like, I don't know. I just watched an ad and it automatically installed itself. And I'm like, there's just no way. And then, sure enough, you inadvertently click the X, which is really not the X, it's the install, the download.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah.
 
 [Beau Button]
 No, it's vicious. I mean, bless her heart, she's ten years old, so I'm trying to prevent that. But as a human, there's a part of me that dies when I think about how many ads we allow people to watch. But until we come up with another option, or until we grow that Atlas Merchant program to have more gas stations. Like, just last year, actually, I think between last year and this year, we drove a little over $2 million to Speedway, which is an easy gas station really big for us. We're based on commission, big for Speedway because they don't pay us until we generate revenue for them. So I'd like to see that area of the business grow. And at some point and this might be pie in the sky is surpassed in ATP purchases. Just do what you already do. Use your Visa card. Use your mastercard. Get your ingame rewards. Come into the game. Buy your real estate. Mingle with your friends. Have experiences in the Metaverse, quote, unquote look, you can see my eye roll when I say the word Metaverse, but yeah, that's where my brain is. And quite honestly, that's where the company's brand is. But it's not as easy as I'd like it to be. Getting in front of these brands is a challenge, but we've got an entire team now that's literally knocking on doors saying, hey, we've got evidence. We've got two years of data that shows from a brand's perspective, this is where you need to be if your goal is to make money.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, okay. I want to go back to something you've said, but before I do that, you did the I roll with the Metaverse. And one of the things that was in the profile was, like, I hate to ask you about your definition of the metaverse, or how would you define metaverse? So I want to go there, and then I'll come back to the other thing. Why are you eye rolling with the metaverse?
 
 [Beau Button]
 Well, I've been on the Internet literally my entire life, and I've seen it evolve from and even not just the Internet on a desktop computer. I was really involved in the early stages of mobile Internet. Like, before we had full screens and touchscreens, we had some really interesting proprietary protocols where you would basically download what is arguably a website on a screen that looks no bigger than, like, a watch. And it was exciting, but never did we come up with a new term for it. It was just an evolution of the Internet. And where I am in regards to the metaverse I mean, it's a cute word. I get it. FaceBrookk. Honestly, I can't say that a part of my dislike for the Metaverse is not associated with the fact that Meta FaceBrookk is now Meta. You've really screwed that up. Not that I'm against FaceBrookk. They're a very powerful platform, and they're very great to us when we advertise. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing is nothing more than the evolution of the Internet. I'm not sure why all of a sudden we've decided to start to surface the technology terms like Web3 crypto blockchain to the consumers when we've never done that before. And I think it's kind of this Instagram TikTok generation where it's like they just want to keep doing what other people are doing and they want to create this replayable experience. But for me, the Internet is what we're talking about. What we're talking about in terms of the metaverse is where the Internet goes from two dimensions to three dimensions and is more equitable for the end user. I want to be in VR or on my desktop in a 3D experience. Call it a video game, call it whatever you want. It's going to be powered by game engines no matter which way you slice or dice this. But the other side of it is the equity. We're consumers. We're leveraged every single day. If you know how it works, if you watch some of the I think there's a movie called The Social Dilemma. It was one of these movies about how FaceBrookk has all of these algorithms. And it's true. As a consumer, I adore these algorithms because I've got several pairs of shoes I never would have known about if somebody's algorithm wouldn't have said, hey, you like weird looking shoes, let me put these on your feed. So the equity side is we've got to do a better job. As companies, if you make a lot of money and you're leveraging people, yeah, they're getting entertainment. But quite frankly, as a human, as a father, they're also getting dumber. I know that sounds harsh, but there's your skills. What can you do in the marketplace? What's your marketable skills? You're not just going to forgive me, shake your tush on TikTok and become a billionaire if you can. Two or three people can. But I want players that have equity. I want them to be able to earn something that's valuable. And I think everybody in this space, even the ones on chain, despite them delivering tokens in the play to earn, or play and earn space, are generally committed to providing equity. But there's too many roadblocks between being able to use that equity for me right now. So equity to me is I want money. I want players to earn money. Money they can use to buy things with, pay bills with.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Well, I would just counteract a tiny little bit of what you're saying because there are a lot of people going into the metaverse, into the gaming space, play to earn that are actually allowing people to cash out their tokens into their fiat. Absolutely money by doing that.
 
 [Beau Button]
 No, absolutely. I think if we can kind of cut through some of the past failures, like there's a big one, I'm not going to name them because it'll open a whole can of worms, but I think a lot of these were originally predatory. I think what we're seeing now, considering where the market is, the crypto, I mean, the entire economy as a whole is kind of in a weird place. But crypto specifically, we're starting to see genuine use cases that are on chain play to earn kind of experiences. I'm excited for that. And quite frankly, I think Atlas Reality is going to be at the forefront of that. But what we bring is several million users. We don't have to look for them. We're going to bring these Web Two users that aren't familiar with Web3 into Web3, and it's a seamless onboarding experience, but behind the scenes, it'll be on top of the chain. They don't need to know that it's an NFT or fill in the blank. Name any acronym. If you use our game today, and the first thing you saw were all of the technical acronyms of the technology that powers it, you would pass out. You'd literally just be overwhelmed. So I'm a little confused about why NFTs became a term, but yes, I agree that there are legitimate players in that space, and you can go to a decentralized exchange and you can transfer your ingame tokens to something like Ethan. I actually have a checking account from a company called On Juno. I think they rebranded as simply Juno, but I got a small portion of my paycheck in crypto, and I use their debit card, and I can use USDC at any merchant anywhere in the world. And I love really interesting benefits. They just introduced their own loyalty program where you get J tokens or something. I can't remember what their current to you. So forgive me if anybody that works at Juno is listening to this. Whatever it is, it's great.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Awesome. I got to check them out. I didn't even know that existed, to be honest.
 
 [Beau Button]
 I'm pretty sure they rebrand this to Simply Juneau. I remember seeing an email, but originally was O N Juno. And you just sign up for a checking account. You log into your if you use a payroll provider that supports, like, instant linking, or you can just say, I want this much money each month or each paycheck, and it just shows up as USDC. Or you can actually buy BTC and several other period tokens.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Very cool. I'll definitely check them out. So I want to get back to you. So the thing that I do want to go back to is you talked about, you know, just morally, like, feeling if about serving so many ads and like, doing more like having more partnerships with big brands that you can offer a better user experience for the Atlas players. Part of the aspect of being on chain here we go with the NFT's. That's why I'm chuckling. Part of that is giving, yes, your users are buying land in the game, in the web to game. But then if I buy that land and I decide I want to sell my parcel here in San Diego to another user, like, if I'm selling that as an NFT, you, as the creator of the game, are getting a percentage of that sale. And so there's a lot of money making opportunity for the gaming developer as. Well, as for the consumer who's purchasing the land in the Web3 space, how is that looking currently? And what are your thoughts about maybe looking at that, like, as a potential? Because you did talk about being able to bring a couple of million people with your game and onboarding them into the Web3 space when the time comes.
 
 [Beau Button]
 Yes, I think the biggest issue is all of that. The secondary market. Selling, trading, whatever you want to do. Bartering digital assets can exist 100% off chain, and we are indeed working on an off chain secondary market for the land that you purchased in Atlas. The benefit of a smart contract is a it's publicly transparent and auditable. Anybody can scrutinize it. There's an element about that that I love, especially having dealt with third party tools that weren't open source, that had security vulnerabilities. I love the transparency in the code, but the fact is, there's really nothing about the blockchain that's required to allow in a single ecosystem. And this is the big caveat here, is in a single ecosystem. So we control Atlas. Firmware Atlas reality. It's a closed ecosystem. And quite frankly, our land is not valuable outside of our ecosystem because the real value is the virtual rent that we pay you. So if we go away and you still own the land on the chain, OK, you got a Brookkmark. That's great. What are you going to do with it? So, in these other marketplaces where they're selling virtual land, the utility is really not there. It's speculative. It's like, all right, well, the Metaverse is coming, the Metaverse is here. Like, big brands are coming into the Metaverse. So if I buy it for five years, maybe I can flip it for ten years. I'm not interested in that. That is literally day trading and our users aren't they shouldn't be dabbling in that. Go to the Robin Hood route, go to Acorns microinvestment strategy route. But for us, we can empower our players to have that secondary market. We can also, just like you had mentioned, participate in every one of those transactions. So there will be a fee to sell from the original owner to the secondary territory, whatever, every time it gets sold. We can absolutely sink some Atlas Plus out of the equation, which makes the economy balanced in the end. But none of that requires the blockchain. Where the blockchain becomes extremely useful is when virtual real estate platforms genuinely offer utility for the land and then outside of their ecosystems, those pieces of land are valuable. And I do think we will see that come to fruition in the next few years as people start working in Oculus headsets and starting to build virtual businesses and wanting, like, conference rooms. And there's a few products out there that are really deliberate on this. There's one, I think, called Immersed or something like that, which they're selling virtual land, but you build an office you have players which are really your employees meet and have whiteboard. I do believe that's the future, but ultimately we're going to be able to do everything that you just described without the overhead, no gas fees, nor the complexity for and this is the big elephant in the room. Any concerns of regulation. We're a game. We're a game.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's it.
 
 [Beau Button]
 We're not a security. We're not having to deal with that. We don't know what the government we don't know what anybody is going to ultimately do as it relates to securities. And we've spent a lot of time and ultimately a lot of money working with SEC attorneys to make sure that our business model is bulletproof as it relates to securities and exchange. And that's one of the reasons right now we're not overly eager to just throw everything we built for Atlas Earth on chain. So we're working on a third game that kind of marries all of the ideas of empires, Earth, and the Blockchain in a way that I think is extremely unique.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Nice. And what is that third one? Is that launching next year? Is that launching in a few years? Kind of seeing where the vision of everything going?
 
 [Beau Button]
 This is a joke. I need to say it's a joke because I'm going to say in 15 days. And that's a running joke for all of our users. Historically, it's probably 95% my fault. Our roadmap for Atlas Earth always says, this feature is coming in 15 days. And there's a running joke that we operate on our own calendar to 15 days probably means 150 days, but for this, it probably means, I don't know, 400, 500 days. We practice an aggressive form of agile, and if anybody is an agile or a Scrum master out there, we just get shit done. And it's hard for me to tell you when I'm going to get shit done, when I really don't know what that shit is. Forgive me. I don't know if I can say that if it ends up sweeping out, then perfectly fine. I've been fond of just delivering. It might not be perfect. Actually. It's never going to be perfect. And that's another thing that you kind of have to swallow. It's like, I'm not trying to achieve perfection. I just want traction. And that's hard to estimate on. We're getting better at it. I mean, when I was a contractor, one of the first things you have to do when you were vetting a contract was, well, give me an estimate. We had one side of the company had Excel documents that would say, well, how many screens and how many buttons and how many text boxes? All right, well, it's $9,000, and then I'd go implement in 45 minutes. And I'm like, yeah, that's a lot of money for nine very little code for $9,000. And it's the opposite to where somebody would come up with a different model, but I don't know when it's going to come, but I do believe it's going to be before Q Four 2023.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Nice. I love it. I love how you speak in days, too. 400 days, 500 days, who knows?
 
 [Beau Button]
 But if I could snap my fingers and it was here tomorrow, obviously I would. But there's still a lot of R and D. We're working with patent attorneys because, again, our use of NFTs in this new game is novel. No one's doing what we are going to do, but we're only in this position because we've been lifting, we've been playing, we've been kind of experimenting with our competitors are doing. But there's this notion of portability of assets. Like, if I earn something in this game, I can use it in this game. If you speak to an experienced game designer, that's a fallacy. That's an illusion. It's a dream that will never come true unless there's guardrails and a system that kind of allows all of the players to kind of communicate before those assets are leveraged in their game. Like a game balancing person. If I take a Bazooka from Game A and bring it to Game B, if you don't have an opportunity to see how it reacts or impacts the economy in your game, it could decimate players. What we're seeing right now is really on the cosmetic side, which, don't get me wrong, as a parent of a 15 year old, is profitable. Look at Fortnite. Look at how many costumes they sold.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 My God. A Roblox.
 
 [Beau Button]
 All of them. Look, I'm impervious. I'm a goofy looking I always joke. I look like a beluga whale with the ball head. I don't give a shit what I look like on the Internet, nor in person. So I'm not going to come into the Metaverse and spend an hour and a half. I'm not going to have ABS. I'm going to be a spear with a head with no hair, and I'm going to be an asshole, just like but I do believe if we can build the framework that allows players to play one game and earn things that can be utilized in other games but also allows that other game to monetize it. Like if I earn it and I spend the money on game A, why does game B give a shit about it? They shouldn't because they're not making any money. So that's kind of what we're working on, is the system to make that make sense.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Got it? Yeah. There's a lot of terminology or a lot of words thrown out in terms of interoperability. I don't even know if I said that correctly, but being able to port things from one chain to another but.
 
 [Beau Button]
 One chain to another is a different technical problem, even on the same chain. If we're all building on, let's say, polygon, but we have 20 different games, just having those assets be portable, you can do it technologically. It's simple. You connect your wallet. Oh, you have this NFT from this game. Great. Well, what does that mean in my game? If it's a cosmetic okay, now you look like a clown. You look like a clown in all your games. That's great. Again, when it comes to weapons or anything that you leverage or utilizing the game, unless you're the same company, you've built all of the games and manage all of the economies, it's really hard for you to say, well, this weapon that you earned in my game is going to make sense in yours. So I'm trying to deconstruct that so it does make sense.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Got it. Very cool. I mean, you're doing a lot of fun stuff. Is there something I didn't ask you that you want to talk about?
 
 [Beau Button]
 No. Look, I'm passionate about and genuinely passionate. Not just like, hey, look, let's all get rich, and my partner shares the same kind of vision, is we need players to have equity. We want players to have equity. We want them to earn money. Obviously, we have a long way to go, especially in our game. Right now, there's not a lot for you to do. There are players that are playing our game because they're speculating about where we go in the future, which is no different than what they're doing in the ongoing games. But we've got an internal road map. So again, if anybody's an Atlas Earth player, it's not on the website. Trust me, it won't be there for quite some time. But internally, we've got a road map that I think really is going to solidify our position in this market, which is it's virtual real estate. It's the Metaverse quote, unquote, and it's play to earn, and it's genuine. We generally want people to me, I want you to pay bills. I don't want you to buy Starbucks or gas. Like, I want you to be able to pay your electricity bill at some point in the next ten years. Maybe it's sooner, maybe it's later.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, nice. One question, because it was something I forgot to ask you had mentioned you're going to be able to create people can build upon the land that they own in Atlas Earth. Well, what if there's already a building there? I'm looking like Google. You're able to see the streets, and there's, like, houses. How am I going to build if there's already home there?
 
 [Beau Button]
 Yeah, so we don't actually leverage the existing buildings. We just use the land, the parking lot. If there is a building there, that means someone else purchased that land and built the building there. But we don't actually leverage any of that geometry that's available, like street view, etc. So we toy with the idea, but there were some performance implications. And then additionally, we were thinking about, well, if there's a building on it, how do you build on it? The clean plate. You don't see buildings. And right now, the only thing that you would see on the map we have earmarked a lot of real estate for landmarks, like literal landmarks, the Capital Building in Austin, Texas, and things like that. But there's really not a whole lot on the land right now other than some trees and some shrubbery. And one of the reasons we are expediting this kind of user generated side of the business is when you started playing the game, when we launched, it was just a green square that's all you own. And then we introduced trees and shrubs, and the reception on that was magical. Everybody was like, oh, my God, I woke up and now there's an orange tree. And I'm like, It's just an orange tree. But these passionate folks who have, you know, 2030 parcels of land were just enamored with the fact that their land looked different. And they spend a lot of time in the game watching ads and going by groceries or gas. So that's what really motivated us to kick in and hide here and say, look, let's give them the tools to build whatever they want. Whatever. It doesn't matter. It could be a building. It could be anything.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Awesome. Both it's been a fun conversation. I love your energy. Thank you for building something so cool. Very excited to see what atlas digital or atlas reality? I apologize. And atlas earth and atlas what's the third one?
 
 [Beau Button]
 Empire.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Empire, Earth and Atlas reality. Like, what transpires in the coming years? Because it sounds like it's going to be some amazing, fun stuff.
 
 [Beau Button]
 I hope so. Yeah, no, we've got a great team. Like I said, we started off really small, and it's been an evolution every year, but Atlas Earth is really what springboarded us. We had an idea. We knew what we wanted to do, roughly. We had no idea how successful it would be. We did kind of a pre awareness campaign, and we pre sold a bunch of land before the game even existed. That was the straw that kind of broke the proverbial candles, but we got to just do it. All right.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah. Very cool. How can my listeners connect with you?
 
 [Beau Button]
 I'm on LinkedIn, twitter. There are only two bow buttons on planet Earth that I'm aware of, and the other one is my 15 year old son. So if you follow him and all you see is a bunch of arc and game stuff, that's the wrong one. Curse words and a lot of nonsense about the metaverse and Web3. That's me. But, yeah, LinkedIn is just a button. There might be a middle initial, which is L, but yeah, Twitter and then LinkedIn. And, yeah, that's the best place to get in touch with me. Send me an invite. I love to chat.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Very cool. I will make sure to link all those in the show notes below, so it'll be easy for people just to click on and get to the right bow button and not the 15 year old version of you yes.
 
 [Beau Button]
 He's probably ten years ahead of me, so I'm kind of scared to see where he goes as me influencing him from my 39 year old self. But, yeah, we'll see if he starts sharing things about NFTs and the Web3. I'm just retired. I'm done.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Oh, my God.
 
 [Beau Button]
 For sure.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Oh, my God. It's too funny. All right, you guys, thank you so much for listening as we pull this train into the station. You know the drill. Exit to your right, and we will see you on the next one.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 You made it. Congratulations. That wasn't so bad, was it? I hope you laughed and learned a little bit more about this Web3 universe and how simple and fun it can really be. Would you be so kind as to leave us a review and share it with your friends and family? It would mean so much to get this out to more people as we embark on the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever happened in human history. Can't wait till to see you on the next one. Bye.