This episode almost didn’t happen. I forgot to send Tanner the recording link until 20 minutes before, and on a Friday afternoon, getting someone to respond is always a gamble. Thankfully, he jumped in mid-monologue as I rambled about my daily ritual of watching TV episodes. When Tanner popped on, we had a brief tech hiccup—robot voice issues, lag—but once the connection stabilized, we dove straight into the good stuff.
Tanner Haas is the founder of Freedom Chat, a privacy-first messaging app that claims to be the most secure communication platform in the world. And he doesn’t just say it—he breaks it down in a way that leaves no room for fluff. I appreciated how specific and factual he was. We talked about end-to-end encryption, how other apps claim to have it but still allow data to be decrypted (I’m looking at you, WhatsApp and Telegram), and how Freedom Chat blocks screenshots, screen recordings, even linked devices.
His stance is firm: security isn’t just a feature—it’s a mission. And that mission started after several eye-opening events, including a scam call to his grandma that convinced her he was in a terrible accident. That shook him. Add to that an incident where he mentioned hot tubs in a voice note and then got ads for them everywhere? The man decided he wasn’t going to trust “private by marketing” anymore. He was going to build something better.
We talked about his Rumble partnership next. I had seen a press release from last year about him committing ad spend there, and I wanted to know how that panned out. Turns out, it was a play for long-term alignment. He believes in mission-first partnerships and wanted to get closer to a company that shared his values. And it’s working—Freedom Chat now runs on RumbleCloud and has more integration announcements on the way.
Then I asked the big one: Why start this at all? Why leave a profitable SEO business to take on encrypted messaging? The answer: conviction. It wasn’t a business move. It was a calling. And I believe him. Tanner is a four-time founder and three-time author who’s already thinking about running for president in 2040. Freedom Chat is just step one.
We even got personal. We talked about faith, political shifts (yes, we both voted Trump), and the broken healthcare system—which Tanner wants to tackle next. He hinted that Freedom Chat’s quantum-safe encryption could serve as the future bedrock for HIPAA-compliant health data systems.
We wrapped with a call to action: download Freedom Chat on iOS or join the Android waitlist. And trust me, after this conversation, you’ll want to see what real digital privacy feels like.
This was one of my favorite interviews yet—Tanner is sharp, no-nonsense, and clearly on a mission. And something tells me we’re going to hear a lot more from him soon.
