The Center for Humane Technology had a lot to do with it.

I’ve been following Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin at the Center for Humane Technology for years. If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix, you know Tristan’s face and his argument: the tech companies that run our lives are not neutral platforms. They’re slot machines, engineered by very smart, very well-funded people to maximize one thing above all else. Not your health. Not your relationships. Not your sleep. Your time on device.

That argument is not new to regular Foghorn Fitness readers. I’ve written about it at length. The distraction pillars. The phone breakup series. The Johann Hari and Jonathan Haidt posts. I’ve been making the case for years that your smartphone is doing things to your attention, your sleep, your nervous system, and your relationships that you haven’t consented to and probably don’t fully understand.

And then I built an app.

Wait, what? 

I know. We’ve been over this. And a podcast episode I listened to yesterday clarified things for me in a way I hadn’t expected. CHT just released a new Your Undivided Attention episode in which Aza Raskin sits down with fellow CHT co-founder Randy Fernando to walk through their Seven Principles of Humane Technology. I want to take you through those principles — and then show you, specifically, how each one maps to the design decisions I made building the Slowfit Method® app.

Because this isn’t abstract. Every one of these principles shows up in the product.

First: What’s Actually Wrong With Most Tech

The episode opens with a clip from CHT’s very first podcast guest, cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who spent years studying casino design in Las Vegas. What she observed is the design logic behind modern slot machines: the goal is “time on device.” Everything is engineered to eliminate fatigue, minimize disruption, and keep you in the chair. Light doesn’t bounce at your eyes. Sound doesn’t jar your senses. The environment is calibrated to sustain your engagement indefinitely.

Raskin’s point: that’s exactly how your apps are designed. Not for your wellbeing. For time on device. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, the news feed — different technologies, same broken ideology.

Raskin himself invented the infinite scroll, pre-social media. He watched it get weaponized against users and has spent the past decade trying to undo the damage. He estimates it wastes something on the order of 100,000 human lifetimes every week.

That’s the problem CHT’s seven principles are designed to solve. Here they are — and here’s how I applied each one.

Principle 1: Use a Complex Systems Lens

One of the big things that we miss a lot when we are dealing with technology is we don’t look at the whole system. We look at just one small piece of it and that means we don’t correctly understand what its effects are going to be and we don’t correctly understand how to fix the problems that we find. — Randy Fernando

The failure mode Fernando describes is optimizing for a single metric — engagement, time on site, daily active users — while ignoring what that metric does to everything else. YouTube optimized for watch time. The result was algorithmic extremism. You can’t see the damage from inside the single metric. You need to look at the whole system.

In the Slowfit Method® app, I deliberately refused to build around a single engagement metric. There are no daily active user dashboards driving product decisions. There are no A/B tests designed to squeeze more sessions out of users. The question I kept asking during development was not “how do we get people to come back?” It was: “what does a successful interaction actually look like?” The answer: the user got what they needed and went and did “the thing.” That’s the whole system I was trying to optimize for.

Principle 2: Protect the Systems We All Depend On

If you extract faster than something can regenerate, obviously that’s a problem. Technology is a huge exponentiator of that extraction process. — Randy Fernando

Fernando’s framework here is extraction vs. regeneration. Most tech extracts — attention, time, data, dopamine — faster than humans can regenerate. The result is depletion. Of attention spans. Of sleep. Of real-world relationships. Of the shared information environment we all depend on for democracy to function.

The Slowfit Method® is built around the opposite premise. Sleep, recovery, social connection, movement, mindfulness — every pillar is about replenishment, not extraction. I tried to build an app that reflects that. An hour on the app is an hour less of the things that regenerate you. So the app shouldn’t take an hour. It should take two minutes and send you back to the things that do.

Principle 3: Design for Genuine Thriving

A tool that’s designed for genuine human thriving will leave you stronger when you put it down than when you picked it up. — Aza Raskin

This is the principle most directly tied to the experience of using technology. Raskin puts it simply: when you put your phone down after an hour on it, do you feel better or worse? When you wake up the morning after a late-night scroll session, do you feel better or worse?

Fernando connects the anti-AI sentiment building in the culture to this principle’s absence. Students booing AI at commencement speeches. Parents pulling kids off platforms. Communities organizing against data centers. That resistance isn’t coming from people who’ve read ethics papers. It’s coming from people who can genuinely feel that something is wrong.

What they’re feeling, Fernando argues, is the absence of this principle. Technology built to extract attention, replace labor, and harvest data rather than to genuinely serve the humans using it.

When I designed the Coach Keir AI interface, I wrote this into the system prompt: the AI should never try to extend the conversation beyond what’s useful. It should give direct answers. It should end responses with a single action item. It should tell you to put the phone down. Literally. You saw the screenshot in an earlier post: “Your move: Phone face down across the room. Lights out. Start breathing.” That’s designing for genuine thriving.

Principle 4: Align Incentives with Human Wellbeing

The fourth principle is about business models. Most tech companies have a fundamental misalignment: they make money when you use the product more, not when you’re healthier, better rested, or more connected to the people in your actual life. That misalignment is structural. It’s not fixed by good intentions. It’s fixed by changing the incentive.

The Slowfit Method® app runs on a subscription model. I make money when people find enough value to pay for ongoing access to the Vault — 270+ books, podcasts, tools, and on-demand workouts — not when they spend more time banging around for hours in the chat interface. That changes what I’m actually optimizing for. I want the free Coach Keir AI interactions to be so useful and so direct that people think “this person’s deeper knowledge base is worth paying for.” Not “I can’t stop using this.”

Principle 5: Foster Autonomy and Agency

Inhumane tech exploits psychological vulnerabilities. Variable reward schedules. Social comparison. FOMO. The fear of missing out on what everyone else is seeing right now. These are not neutral design choices. They are deliberate mechanisms for hijacking your decision-making and substituting the algorithm’s agenda for your own.

I built the anti-version of this into every layer of the app. No infinite scroll. No push notifications designed to pull you back. No streak mechanics that make you feel bad for not opening the app three days in a row. No social comparison features. The Coach Keir AI is explicitly designed to be anti-sycophantic — it will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Autonomy means you get accurate information and make your own decisions. That’s what I want the app to support.

Principle 6: Ensure Accountability and Transparency

This one is personal. When you open the Coach Keir AI, the first thing you see is a banner: “AI-generated responses. Coach Keir AI is not a licensed medical professional. Emergencies: 911. Mental health crisis: call/text 988.”

That’s not a legal disclaimer buried in the terms of service. That’s the first thing you see, every time, in the primary interface. Because transparency about what the technology is and isn’t matters. The AI is trained on my writing and my methodology. But it is not me. It is not a therapist. It is not a doctor. It is a tool. I wanted users to know that before they typed their first message.

I also published Substack posts about the app’s design philosophy before and again after I published anything about its features. One about why I built it to not be addictive. Another about the ethical decisions baked into the system prompt: the anti-sycophancy rule, the distress routing protocol, the nudge toward real human coaching. Accountability means making those decisions visible, not hiding them in the product.

Principle 7: Build for the Long Term

The final principle is the hardest one for most tech companies because the market actively punishes it. Fernando uses car safety as his example: the automakers weren’t excited about investing in safety until cultural pressure, regulation, and changed incentives forced them to. The same transformation needs to happen in tech.

I think about this principle in terms of the Slowfit Method® itself. The whole framework is built around the long game. Not the fastest result, the best result over time. Not maximum intensity, optimal sustainable load. Not the biggest Strain Score number on your Whoop this week, the best recovery over the next twenty years.

The app is an expression of that philosophy. I’m not trying to maximize short-term engagement metrics. I’m trying to build something that is genuinely useful to people over time. Something that, in a year, someone might say: that app didn’t try to take over my life. It helped me understand mine a little better. Actually helped me improve things. And then it got out of the way.

Why This Matters Right Now

I am not under any illusion that a single human performance coach bumping along towards 100 app downloads over two weeks in San Francisco is going to single-handedly reform the tech industry. That’s not the point.

The point is that the principles exist. They’re not idealistic. They’re not impractical. They’re a checklist that any builder of any product — at any scale — can apply. And I applied them. Imperfectly, with limited resources, in a space dominated by products that ignore all seven.

Raskin ended the episode with something that stuck with me. He said you know a system is humane when it is protecting the thing that it depends on. Ask yourself: has social media made democracy stronger or weaker? Has the infinite scroll made your attention stronger or weaker? Has the algorithm made your relationships stronger or weaker?

The answers are obvious.

Now, after spending a little time kicking the tires on my little app, ask: has the Slowfit Method® made my health stronger or weaker? Has Coach Keir AI made my sleep better or worse? Has this app left me more capable or less?

Those are the right questions. They’re the only questions, I’d say. I hope you’ll make a little bit of space in your life for this app. I promise it’ll help. 

And maybe go listen to the Your Undivided Attention episode. It’s 52 minutes and it’s worth every one of them.

Stick around.

Best,

Keir

P.S. The app is free to download. Coach Keir AI is available to all users. The full Vault unlocks with a paid subscription. Download here.

P.P.S. Want to work through any of this with a real human coach, as in, me? Book a session at foghornfitness.com.

P.P.P.S. Paid Substack subscribers get the deeper dives and the full resource library. Upgrade here.

P.P.P.P.S. All ten pillars of the Slowfit Method® at foghornfitness.com.