The CEO Who Predicted Bitcoin, AI, and What's Coming Next | Ep. 396 with Sam Tabar CEO of Bit Digital (BTBT) and White Fiber (WYFI)

0:00Gold is basically kind of a useless piece of yellow metal. Bitcoin is the world's first global currency that has no weight like gold. That's easily transferable, easily fungible. It's very threatening to governments. It's very threatening to banks. And there is no inflation on Bitcoin.

0:17Daniel Robbins:You have such an incredible history. Two publicly traded companies on Nasdaq. CEO, I mean, that's incredible. Let's go back, though. I think you do need to kill the person you thought you were in a way. And I remember going to school with kids who had much more than we did. To be honest, it really bugged me. And so I wanted to make sure that when I grew up that I would never have those feelings.

0:49Daniel Robbins:So I'm excited today, Sam. You have such an incredible history, story. Not only have you seen things at the forefront, you've been at the forefront when everyone else, I'm sure, was like, that will never be a thing. And you saw it and you did it. Two publicly traded companies on NASDAQ, CEO. I mean, that's incredible. So let's go back, though. French-Canadian mother, Nazarene father, born in Canada. I'm sure most people in that situation would not say one day I'm going to be running two NASDAQ companies. Was there something that was instilled in you from either your parents or something you learned when you were a child that's brought you here today?

1:33Yeah, that's a good question. My father was a car mechanic and my mother was a tarot card reader. So I grew up in an unusual household from a lower economic class. class and I remember going to school with kids who had much more than we did and there was always a difference, a material difference between my family and the neighbors or my family in the South and the kids at school and to be honest it really bugged me and so I wanted to make sure that when I grew up that I would never have those feelings again. So that's one of my motivations but also another motivation is that I do like to take care of my loved ones.

2:16I take care of my mother. I take care of my upcoming new family. And so those are really very primal motivations for me. And I embrace that, actually. I enjoy that. And in this world, unfortunately, money solves a lot of problems, and you can't ignore it. So, you know, there is an artist in me, But at the end of the day, I do have to look at reality and how financial pressures can be a really terrible thing when you're trying to raise yourself up or raise a family. And so I just want to solve those problems. But there's also other things as well. I really love technology. I think technology is basically a proxy for magic.

3:01I love new technologies. I'm always the first one with a new gadget. and when I looked at the trajectory of my career, I've always been able to recognize patterns when it comes to technology. So when it comes to crypto or artificial intelligence and data centers and so on, I've been able to determine that these were going to be massive trends that were going to transform society and capitalism and economics. And so far, I have not been wrong in the pattern recognitions that I've been able to surmise. And I've been able to take my thesis to the public markets. And we've gone public on a number of companies that's now currently listed in NASDAQ, that being the digital, but more straightforwardly, white fiber.

3:52Daniel Robbins:I remember when Wall Street was like, crypto's a joke. You know, there are certain really prominent people were like, I will never do anything with Bitcoin who are now investing billions of dollars into Bitcoin specifically, and obviously working with stable coins. So you made this bet. You saw it. You talked about data centers, AI, before people were really chatting about it. Obviously, it's been around, but it wasn't what it is right now today. What muscle, how do you see these things, these visions that you say to yourself, this is going to be a thing? Well, I remember growing up in the 90s when the internet was invented.

4:36And we were using something called the World Wide Web, which is what www stands for. And we were doing things like going to websites and emailing. And these things were very nascent back in the mid-90s. No one would have ever imagined apps like Uber or Tinder or what have you. No one would ever imagine those types of applications in the mid-90s.

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6:17Daniel Robbins:Are you ready to start your creator journey and make it big? Visit fanview.com today and launch your career. You can also find the link right at the top of the description and in the pinned comment to check out Fanview Creator Academy. When the internet was invented. And so, you know, these technologies sort of force your, they kind of break your brain. They force you to imagine or reimagine what society can be like if this technology is taken to its logical limit. So I was blessed to grow up seeing what the analog world was and then what the digital world was. That being analog pre-1995 and then digital after 1995, 1996.

7:04Those are two very different worlds that I happen to live in. And it helped me sort of understand, okay, so what's the next thing? And when crypto was invented in 2008, Bitcoin was invented in 2008, that was during a very terrible financial crisis that occurred in traditional capitalism. And a very mysterious guy by the name of Satoshi invented Bitcoin, which basically is a decentralized monetary store of value. and uh and it's it's you know if you think about the history of money like think the way money worked in the past is that it came from the earth so money came basically was dug up by gold and silver and copper that was where how the how ancient society basically had money all these old coins that you see they're all made out of gold silver or copper and so money came out from the ground in the past.

8:03And then as time went on, money came from the top. In other words, government. Government came up with this thing called fiat, dollar, pound, dinar, what have you. These are currencies. These are invented fictions by government. And so it went from the ground to the ground to the people, and then from the government to the people. But with respect to Bitcoin is from the people. It's a decentralized currency that the government can't control, nor does it come from the ground. So this is a currency, this is a technology, a store of value that is people oriented, which is why it's very threatening to the existing capital structure.

8:47It's very threatening to governments. It's very threatening to banks. And that's why there was a lot of resistance to Bitcoin because governments and banks just can't control that currency, nor can they make money off it. And they can't also manipulate it just as the way they manipulate currencies today. So I kind of enjoy that trajectory, that historical trajectory of the history of money. When it comes from the ground, then it came from the top governments and now comes from the people. This currency just became so big, it was just impossible to ignore. And now, as you rightly mentioned, a Bitcoin is now a very received, well-received, almost mainstream store of value.

9:31And to a large extent, it's replacing the gold markets. Gold is basically kind of a useless piece of yellow metal. I understand that you could use it for like fillings for your teeth and maybe some jewelry during weddings, but it doesn't deserve the$13 trillion value valuation and market cap that it currently has today. I think it's 13 or 14 million, maybe even more than that. I haven't looked at the most recent data point on the market cap for gold, but there's no point. There's no reason for it. Bitcoin rather completely take over gold as a store of value. And it's much easier to have Bitcoin over gold.

10:10I don't know if you've ever held a$20 ,000 pound of gold. It's very heavy. Gold bars are very heavy. You can't really put them in your pocket, nor can you go through airports if you want to go to the United States to, for example, Germany. That's going to be a very big piece of metal. And so when you have Bitcoin, you have that, there's no weight to it, right? It's an international currency. It's also the world's first global currency. All other currencies are denominated in certain nations, like the euro, which is an economic union, then the US dollar, the Canadian dollar. But Bitcoin is the world's human's first global currency that has no weight like gold, that's easily transferable, easily fungible.

11:00And so that is really a technology that I thought was really, really cool. I understand that Bitcoin does not have the cleanest beginnings. But in other words, when it was invented in 2008, Bitcoin was used for purchasing drugs or all these weird illicit trades. I just want to remind your audience that when the internet was invented, it was a pretty dark place as well. The internet had a lot. It still is. And so that's how nascent technologies start they start with you know appealing to like the you know that the darker aspects of humanity uh whether you know for example the internet was like full of porn and a bunch of stuff that you know but that it doesn't mean the technology of the internet is bad and it's same thing with bitcoin bitcoin started with like it became this like in the early days a currency for illicit trades.

12:01But it doesn't mean that the technology itself is bad. And now it's grown up to be proper and legitimate, and it becomes a real store of value. And it even helps certain developing countries. Like, for example, there are some countries, like, for example, Venezuela, where inflation is running rampant. And so when you have farmers who are trying to build their life savings and they're using the Venezuelan currency, if they save money in the Venezuelan currency, inflation is just going to eat all its value up. So if they just convert it to Bitcoin, they know that the inflation on Bitcoin will not happen.

12:39There is no inflation on Bitcoin because nobody's printing an excess amount of Bitcoin that you can't do that. You could do that with a national currency, but you can't do that with Bitcoin. And so it kind of helps the farmers in the Philippines or in Venezuela where currencies are volatile if they put their life savings from all that hard work as a farmer or what have you in Bitcoin as opposed to the national currency. So I think there are many wonderful use cases for Bitcoin. And when I was a lawyer and at the time a banker, I also realized that cryptocurrency currency can really disintermediate the middleman because there's no middleman anymore when you exchange value when you have Bitcoin.

13:23So just going back to the old world of fiat, whenever I send you money, I have to send it to you through PayPal or through a bank or some sort of payment processor. There's always a middleman between us that's slicing a little bit off the top in terms of service fees and what have you for no reason. What does that middleman really do?

13:42Daniel Robbins:They're just taking that back the way you could just do that without any you know any commission it's peer to peer so i think that's that was an interesting technology for me so i'm curious too because i've been dabbling since about 2017 i wish at that point i went all in like i had these friends we do we all do they were just like you should buy this no they they told me they explained the technology and I'm like I don't understand blockchain like I don't get it I'm like if they had just said go all in I would have went all in instead I just dabbled for the first we talk a lot in this show about the terrifying moment right before you launch what if I fail what if no one buys anything and I remember those doubts clearly when I started my first business I was selling skincare and I was like I don't know if anyone is even gonna buy this and then I found the most amazing software that I've used still to this day, that is Shopify.

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15:24Daniel Robbins:It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash founders story. Go to shopify.com slash founders story. That's shopify.com slash founders story. No, a few years. Obviously now many people are in it for the ups and downs swings and looking at, you know, they want to make instant money or maybe more of an investment type. What do you see other types of use cases, maybe in the U.S. market or things that you're excited about? It doesn't have to be Bitcoin, just crypto. Obviously, we have stable coins and other things. What excites you about crypto for use cases in the U.S.?

16:14Well, when I think when it comes to, for example, Ethereum, and by the way, most stable coins are built on Ethereum, I think there is an amazing use case there. So Bitcoin competes with the gold markets for store of value, but Ethereum competes with the banks when it comes to exchanging value and because it has this technology called smart contracts and basically what smart contracts are is really simple it's their if-then statements so if somebody does this then my ethereum will go to the wallet over there so you're programming conditions what happens when you're programming conditions what is that it that is actually a contract so if you can program conditions on the movement of money which is what ethereum does you're basically replacing lawyers and you're replacing banks.

17:00And so that's huge. And so Ethereum basically took the technology of Bitcoin and just made it much better. The way I see it is sort of like Bitcoin is like 1.0 and Ethereum is 2.0 in terms of where cryptocurrency should be going.

17:16Daniel Robbins:Wow. Okay. I remember the NFT days. You remember those days? Yeah. I mean, NFTs were a big thing. At one point, there were more transactions on NFTs than there was Visa. So there are a lot of transactions on all the Visa credit cards in the world. And at one point, there were more transactions on NFTs than there were of all the Visa transactions. Now, what does that say? I understand the value of NFTs went down, but the technology was amazing. It never broke. Like this technology during those high watermark days, it did not break. All those transactions went through. Nobody's arguing over title of any of these transactions because it's on the blockchain.

18:01And you were able to make more transactions than Visa does globally. And the system didn't break. I understand the valuation went down, but that's not the point. The point is that technology works.

18:13Daniel Robbins:Yeah, I remember. I remember learning all about the contract. When you talk about this, we actually put on some blockchain events many years ago in Southeast Asia and such. So it brings back all these memories. So let's talk about reinvention because you've reinvented yourself. You were talking earlier about how you used to be an attorney, hedge fund, banker, founder, AI, CEO. Every time you did a reinvention, was there something you had to change within yourself or something you had to maybe leave behind? It's a good question. No one has ever asked me that question in the way you framed it. I think you do need to kill a person you thought you were in a way.

18:57I try to make sure there are no holy, there's no sacrilege. I try to make sure that I always keep an open mind to new concepts. and even if I'm really married to one concept, I am willing to let it go if I feel the idea can be theoretically outdated. So when I was a lawyer, I realized that this is actually an outdated profession and I received a lot of social pressure to remain a lawyer because I went to law school, I went to this well-known law school and then I went to this very well-known law firm and on paper I would be the last person to ever leave the legal profession because I had a so-called perfect resume in the profession of law.

19:46So I had a lot of pressure, not to mention student debts. And so I had a lot of pressure to not leave that legal career. But sometimes you have to follow your intuition and you have to move towards things that excite you and things that you find interesting. So I, you know, I took a financial risk because there's a lot of financial stability being a lawyer, but I felt there was more upside if I followed my interests. And so that's what I did. And I continued to do that being a lawyer. Then I went into being, I was involved in a Japanese hedge fund for seven years and that grew to be a big monster.

20:26And then Bank of America actually poached me and asked me to be their head of capital strategy for Asia Pacific, which I did. So I was like a banker for a number of years at Merrill, just basically responsible for that entire region from China to Australia and Korea and Japan and Hong Kong. It was quite, quite heady days. And then I took some time off. I went to this festival called Burning Man, and I took some time off, which was a huge mistake. I highly recommend not taking too much time off. I took a bit too much time off, about four or five years, trying to figure out what my next move would be.

21:09And then I realized it would be a technology company in blockchain. And we were called Fluidity, which we co-founded. And we had this product called AirSwap, which was one of the first decentralized exchanges in the world built on Ethereum. and we successfully sold that company to Joe Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum and to ConsenSys. And we had, you know, our shareholders made money, which is saying something because most people in blockchain didn't make money in those days. And then I was asked to be an executive to BitDigital and I had some vision on how BitDigital should transform itself in terms of being a public company.

21:58And then when I used ChatGPT, I had the same feelings when I was using the internet in 1995. I'm sure you had that same feeling when you used ChatGPT. It's that ChatGPT moment. Like this is a brand new technology. So that was a few years ago. And I remember being in Singapore using it showing my colleagues, and we realized we need to be in this business. And so we leveraged our skill set in basically powering AI. And now we sit on the intersection of cloud and infrastructure. And we IPO'd White Fiber last August, a successful IPO. And I'm currently running both companies. So that's a long-winded answer in saying you just have to keep an open mind and always try to recognize new patterns and follow your interests.

22:58And like I said, I believe that technology is magic. And so I love always understanding the latest technology and being involved.

23:07Daniel Robbins:When you say the World Wide Web, I can't help but think my first internet days, I used to get those AOL free CDs for a month. I couldn't afford to get the internet. So I always get the free CD that you just create a new email address. and now you have like a limited internet of aol and just even the sound you got mail like it's what happened yeah this is a funny like maybe we need more sounds back remember like all websites had like music when you would like you yeah open a website and they all had music and it was like myspace had music or every website had music it took forever to load it's kind of it's it's hilarious thinking back to how much how much has changed.

23:49Daniel Robbins:And it's only been like 30 years, 20 some odd years. Like it's crazy to think of so much has happened in the last 25 years. Yeah. But one thing that I don't like what's happening is the homogeneity of the world. Like everything is starting to look the same. You just talked about how every website had like different jingles and different textures and i find like when it comes to the world where the world is going it feels like it's all like collapsing into like this one bland thing like i feel like all cars in 2026 are getting to look like the same shape and all music is starting to sound the same all these singers they're using auto-tune every all the music sounds the same All the cars look the same.

24:37All the websites have the same format. All the corporate CEOs have to sound a certain way. And I'm kind of a closet rebel. And I just rebel against things that makes me feel like I have to be this, that things need to be uniformed. And I don't like the uniformity of where the future is going. I really don't like it. And that's something I have.

25:07Daniel Robbins:Is it because of the ease of use of different LLMs and our reliance now on these or other AI tools that we're not really thinking anymore? We're just using them and we're just living with the end product? I think you're right. I mean, I have a girlfriend who's a musician and she was telling me that a lot of music sounds the same because all these, like basically musicians are using all the same technology right so because of that you get this like sort of same similar output whereas in the past people were approaching music differently and i think just going back to the llms that you're talking about people are just vibing with chat gpt or cloud and they're getting similar sort of outputs they're getting really great stuff don't get me wrong i use chat i'm a power user of chat and so are you, I'm sure.

26:02And there are even better technologies out there now like cloud. But it does create atrophy in some ways in our thinking. I just don't understand how children today when they go to school, they're using chat nonstop, which they have to, right? But I just wonder if that creates atrophamental, like the brain is a muscle. And if you're just vibing with chat, GPT to get this amazingly polished answer to a difficult question. Are you really using your muscle? And so I just don't know what society is going to look like. And I just wonder if our children will grow up to be soft brain humanoids. I just wonder.

26:44Daniel Robbins:Yeah, talking about society, two things that scare me. One is the algorithm with social media and how we are bending everything we do towards an algorithm similar to what you're saying, right? You have to make music for an algorithm or for a social platform, hoping somebody will do a 10-second dance of it. You have to create something. You have to create a video. This interview has to be structured in a way that it gets exposure through an algorithm. Otherwise, what's the point? I wonder the impact on our social media in this. And on top of that, I really, really am. And I'm pretty much convinced that there's a good chance that AI will replace a lot of the jobs.