>> clay johnson, whose company managed president obama's online campaign, outlines ways for people to consume information in a healthy way. this is about 45 minutes. >> thank you everyone for coming today. my name is michael bassett, and i am very excited to introduce to you all clay johnson. clay was the cofounder of his cn company, which is best known fov its work with the obama campaigt in 2008 after leaving blue state digital, he found sunlight labs. it became a network of over 200g designers and developers. .. weeks fed 100 in the year 2010. he is the author of the information diet. and just as we have become

morbidly obese, the food, sugar, fat and flower. flour. we've become morbidly obese in text messages. videos, social media updates and e-mails. this is causing a problem clay will discuss shortly. i would encourage you all to be turning off your phones and open your minds. with that, i introduce you to clay johnson. [applause] thank you, that introduction was appropriate. i appreciate it. so i'm clay johnson. i wrote this book called the information indict. i'm trying to talk to people. it's not a book for me. i want to enjoy you to think about things differently. and maybe this can be a cause for change for you in your

life. and a cause for change in a lot of various things. this is a result of me working ten years in politics at both blue state digital. this kind of thinking has really just sort of come to fryings now. what got me to think about this is the chart. does anybody know what this is? so this is the obese rate in the united states over time, and the blue is representing 10 to 20%. the beiges represent 20 to 125%. and the reds represent 25 to over 30%. and this takes us through 2006, this is what obese looks like today in the united states. and if you're wondering why a fat guy is talking about obese, you should have seen what i looked like before i started writing the book. the interesting thing about obese is that we is kind of know where obese comes from.

it's not like cancer. you know, my mom suffered from breast cancer. we don't know where she got it from or where she got it from. we know a lot of things around where obese comes from and the boils down to really this, the pizza tastes a lot better than broccoli. and, of course, that's a gross oversimpleification, but what that means is we're wired what was good for us. not necessarily what is good for us. in other words what used to keep us alive through winter, was fat, sugar and water. winter is not too much of our threat to us. our bodies evolved in a land of scarcity. and now we life in a land of abundant. our food intake hasn't caught up inspect is is the percent increases. you can see, we eat about twice

as much cheese as we used to in 1950 but only 25% more plants than we did in 1950. this is because pizza tastes better than broccoli. there's three things -- distinctions i wanted you to get out of this. what it is people ask for. two, there's what it is that people want. and three, there's what it is that people need. so the difference between what it is people ask for, and what it is that people want is best illustrated with the iphone. so on the left is what phones used to look like before the iphone. on the right is what phones look like now. and the difference is, if you only had to go with what people were asking for, when this is what phones looked like. what people would have told you, is we want a bigger keyboard. right. and part of the jen yises of

steve job he got what it is they're asking for but not what they want. what they want is no keyboard at all. so we've centralized agricultural into large corporations. what they have to do, they now have a fie douche area responsibility maximize the wealth of the shareholders. i think we heard about it before. part of that is producing the cheap and poplar calorie. they figure out what people want. pizza tastes better than broccoli. what they give us is this. this is an amazing image, right? always look to japan on the future of food upon the left you have bigs in a plan et. there's little slices of pepper roan any the crust. you have hamburger around the edge. this is stuffed with pep roan

any over here. you have stuffed cheesy bread on the right side. the pizza comes with a honey dipping sauce. now, if you think about this not from a food point of view. from a logistics point of view. it's miraculous. it's made from stuff from all over the world but it's brought to your house in less than a half an hour for $15. the technologist in me goes wait a minute this is as much as a accomplishment a technical feat as putting a man on a moon. so, what am i getting at? that pizza and the information details have a lot in comment. we have industrialized food to create cheap calories and we indust railed media to great cheap information.

what media says what it is what people want not what they need. what is it they want what they are asking for. what they are delivering to us is this. their delivering to us, afford make rather than information or entertainment rather than news. and i believe this is having an actual significant effect not only on the nation's health but on our individual health and well being. it's actually killing us. i'll give you an camp. there are two people in the world right now who make a lot of media. and they every morning wake up and figure out what it is people want. what they tell them is what we want more thanking in else in the world is to be right. who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right. i love being told i'm right. i expect all of you to do so after i'm done with this talk. so how does that get delivered

to us? i should note, if you think about afford make is much more critical than information to our evolutionary well being. it was critical to the survival to be affirmed by our community 10,00050,000 years ago than knowing the facts. when ugg saw eat a leaf from a tree and die. he didn't run a scientific test to figure out whether the leaf caused it or not. they said those trees kill people. don't eat those. not the idea of correlation and caw decision. let me give you a specific example. this is an app story. it came from the associated press. ap economic worries pose new snags for obama. the ap is a wire-service so you can see the story replicated across the web, and all kinds of different places and different

news providers pick it up. here's what it looks like when it gets to fox news. now, obama has a big problem with white women. and you think that -- might have taken a little editorial liberty with that headline. not only that, but they also subtracted about 700 words from the story, and entirely to make the case that obama just has a problem with white women. taking all the nuance out of the story. now, as a self-professed liberal, the liberal in me says the reason why they're doing it because fox news has a conspiracy to destroy the president in america. 7 but the businessman knows that the reason they chose obama has a big problem with white women. that's what people will click on more. and the reason why they

subtracted the 600 words from the story, is because that's what want peopled to hear. when people are affirmed, they keep coming back and more ads is sold and more money is made. they are exeersing their fiduciary responsibility to maximize the wealth of the shareholder. pizza tastes better than block i broccoli or opinion tastes better than news. paying a news personality money is a lot cheaper giving them a giant seven-figure contract is cheaper than paying for a newsroom. i don't mean to rag on fox news. how they make editorial decisions. now this is how they exercise their fiduciary responsibility to create cheap popular information. it you zoom in on the fourth column on the right here, you'll see that the most important are

part. the average piece of content on the huffington post is supposed to cost $84. it's supposed to have an average gross margin of 50%. they make that based not on people paying for the content but based on advertising. so by their nature, by the nature of this model, this content must be sensation list. it's got to get the page views in other in order to sell the ads. how do they determine whether or not it's going get the views? by figuring out what it is people want. this is another part of the aol way which talks about how they decide what topics to coifer. at the task is traffic potential. is the story seo winning in demand terms. ededitors -- but our media is supposed to

provide us more than that. and we should expect more from the media. after all no one was searching for the pentagon papers when they were released. no one is searching for the things media writes in order hold government accountable for the actions. it's having severe elections on the elections. i want to show you another map. ignore the green, those are racists. if you live over time, you'll see, keep your eye on the a red county or a blue county. you'll notice, after about 1996, something strange starts to happen. and this is the advent of the 24 news cycle and the internet. which is all the reds going get redder and all the belies begin to get bluer. no county ever changes in the graphic. this is what things looked like

in 1960. which is what things look like today. we used to be a purple nation. now we're a land of vibrant reds and deep dark blues. we're losing our ability to change our minds. because of our media consumption. again, who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right? there's lot of data to show this. if you type in democrats are or republicans are into google it comes out that republicans are stupid, evil, idiot racists. this is not based on what google thinks of republicans. this is based on what people are singerring for and typing in. google deems these are the things that we're going to that the public is defining republicans as. if you search for democrats are. you just swamp out with the racist with socialst. it's the same thing. and this is what we are doing to

describe one another in the political process. we're looking to make a case, not looking to sthin size ideas. we're looking to figure out why everybody is so stupid and we are right. and this is killing america. so i think that this graph, and this graph, are related. i think they both suffer from a human being's ability to live in a land of abundance rather than a land of scarcity. we are wired for scarcity, not for abundance. and it takes a new kind of skill to live in a land of abundance. and that skill is called a diet. i think that these health care problems are echoes across the country from the tea party to occupy wall street, you see signs like this now, this is a sign that caused me to quit my job at the sunlight foundation.

my job at the sunlight foundation was to unleash data on the public. hoping if the public could access better data they could make better decisions. the problem is the data was competing with glen beck, and again who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right. the result is that is a new kind of ignorance. the ignorance that affects highly informerred as much as it does the least informed conformation is the new h1, n1. i want to get practical why this should matter to you even in a business setting. stanford university conducted the test, last month or the month before journal of applied psychology. and they divided a group into three parts. one group, their task was to increase the value of a contract

negotiation. maximize the value of the contract negotiation. so they get one group, relevant information and meaningless information and another group just relevant information. and the final group, no information at all. they walked in blind. by meaningless information i don't know right or wrong information. they didn't feed them lies and the person's favorite babd, and in the person's dog birthday is september 2nd. meaningless information. what is interest, when they looked at the ability for people maximize the value, the people with useless and relevant information increased the value of their contract negotiation by 14%. but they did not perform nearly as well as the people who went in blind.

let me repeat that. the people who went in with no information, lost i'm sorry beat the people who went in with factual information, factual information plus meaningless information. consuming just a little bit of meaningless information subtracted value from the controller. i find that incredibly terrifying. i'm not talking about the graph where the smarter you are the more depressed you get. i'm talking about this being a case that an information diet is actually critical to your performance. critical to the well being. for the rest of the conversation, i want to talk about how to build an information diet for yourself and some tips so you don't have to wade through my book. although i highly recommend it. the first to be a conscious consumer of information to understand that your intake of information has affects on you that you don't particularly

understand. part of that is ethics. your clicks have consequences very important consequences. when you're looking a the the "huffington post" and click on, say, an article about a two-headed cat that was born in china a couple of days ago i didn't look at. that is a vote for more kind of content like that. not just you reading it. that your intake of information has an ethical consequence on other people. much like the food diet has the ethical consequence on other people. you have to take that into act. it also has an effect on you. one recommendation i give to everybody, is to schedule -- i'm sorry to measure their information intake. this is a service called rescue time.com. and it sits in the background of your computer and tells you what you spend your time on.

in one -- i think it was a three-day period here. i spent three and a half hours on e-mail. and that used to be before i started using the service like nine or ten hours. i spent all my time on e-mail. it helped me go, wait a minute, help me reclaim some of my time back. it helps you be more mindful about how you're taking in information. another thing to do is schedule your information intakes. i remember i was growing up in atlanta, i mom loved the television show, "northern exposure" she picked me up from soccer practice. we would race home so she didn't miss a beat of joe seduction of the pilot, may gi. and i was scared for my life in the car trips. it was important to her to get home to watch the show. now we can always watch the television program that we

whenever we want to. that doesn't mean that we don't have to schedule it or that we shouldn't schedule it. by scheduling your social media time. you're em empowers yourself to not get lost through the rest of the day with the media diet. i try and do writing the in the morning. i do news consumption for 8:00 and 9:00. it i block my time for e-mail. i eliminate most information toes. the only person who can call me is my pregnant wife. the only information information information toes i get -- who can interrupt her is her and my dad. i schedule time for facebook and twitter. the reason i do that is so i don't find myself lost on the witnesses throughout the day. i just make a appointments with them, instead. the second thing is to avoid processed information inspect is a lot like food, right.

and biology we have the thing called the pyramid. we learned this in eighth grade. it describes how energy is transferred up and down the food change. you lose 90% of energy as you go up the food chain. which why we tend to eat a lot of cows and not lions. it's not energy efficient. the return on investment is too low. i think truth has the same thing. what actually happened. the actual truth. what gets recorded ab and what gets processed and what ends up on television. a fraction of what happens. i like to trelt to where i work in washington, d.c. what happens in congress. what happened. the negotiations between congress. the conversations behind closed doors. what lobbyist said to people. what makes it into the congressial record. that's the votes and floor

speeches. the stuff of public consumption. and then there's what getsing a gait bid organizations who i used to work for, the sunlight foundation. there's a press who writes on top of their data. and what makes it finally on television like on fox. and msnbc. a fraction of the actual story. part of that is because they have a fine amount of real estate agent they can tell a story in. so being a conscious consumer means ever striving to get closer to the source of what happened. that's going to help you make better decisions because obviously if you're only consuming the processed stuff. you're subject to delusion. you're subject to someone else making up your mind for you. providing that provides source material i think is vital. the third tip i have, be be a producer not a consumer.

wake up every morning as a producer. what that means is, you know, i like this. i write 500 words before 8:00 every morning. i have rules, which is first i stop using an iphone as my alarm clock. what happens is i check my alarm chock, i shut it off and i wonder what people said about my book on twitter. or i wonder if anybody nice sent me an e pail. you're welcome to do if you say nice things. instead, now my rule in the house is, i wake up, ienl allowed to brush my teeth and i sit down and i write 500 words. i do not check my e-mail. then i pretended like i'm going to the gym. then i eat. that's the most impt lesson. to change your frame of mind. if you wake up like a consumer, you're not consuming on purpose.

you're not doing in purposefully. you're mind leslye wandering the internet. it it you start the day as a producer, then everything that you're doing, everything that you're consuming, can be tied back to what it is you're making. if you're not making in, then what are you doing? the fourth thing, and the most important thing for me, is to demand sustainable news. i think this country needs a whole news movement like we had a whole foods movement. the interesting thing about obese, is that we've kind of got a handle on it. the reason why we have a handle on is because walmart has reduced the amount of salt, fat, sugar, or is reducing by 20%. and that's having huge repercussions amongst all of the food supply in the united states and actually slowing the rate of obese. the reason why they're doing that is not because they're nice

good hearted people. or because michelle obama asked them to do that. walmart needs to move to urban areas and they need to chase after a different kind of customer. the whole foods customer. the local shopper. and so, i think the same thing can be known the world of media. where if we start being more conscious consumers of information. if we starten demanding from our media they show our work. they start demanding they provide more local intelligent local news. or they provide an ad-free experience or we can pay for. then we'll have a more sustainable media that doesn't have to sensation lies itself. we're going have a more sustained media that will make the nation healthy again. and have a sustainable media that will make us healthy consumers of it. the book is intended to be a part of the conversation that i

hope you'll join me in. intended to be a part of a movement. thank you so much for your time. thank you michael, you are one of the most attractive people i have ever seen in my life. and i appreciate your time and attention, it seems like most of you did not look at your cell phones, which means that probably maybe michael has arrived? and thank you very much. i guess it's question time now. thank you. [applause] >> all right. does anyone have a question they'd like to ask. >> yes, i'm going hand you the microphone and step. >> thanks it was a great presentation. the question i had for you when you talked about going to a source to find your

information. if you try to extremeline the time, how do you find the time to go to the sources. i imagine you have to go to a lot of sources. >> focus on death rather than breath. you have to eliminate a lot of stuff that is not important to you and focus on stuff that it is. i think, one tip i have that is in the book that expresses the presentation but still is important. it's another lesson you learn from food is go local. so i find, for instance, it's easier to get to the source of the information i'm consuming when i'm consuming stuff in the local area rather than the national area. one thing that has always puzzled me in ten years in working in washington why the ballot box for president of the united states of america has more votes if in it than the city council. it makes for a more of an

impact. for a more decisions that affects your daily life than the president of the united states. the president can raise your taxes, but they can't. that's what congress does that was an oaringment -- argument i had. the idea that we should be paying so much attention to global or national news that does not affect us in any way is kind of prepostuse. you know, it is symptom age turning for me as an activist to say, but mark zuckerberg has a quote in the book. i'm not going quote, people care more about a squirrel dying in the front yard than they do a genocide in rue an d.a. it's sad but true. the person will eliminate the dead squirrel problem in the front yard quickly. but they can't stop a genocide by themselves. and, i think, i'm not saying we

should, you know, disvow any knowledge and put our heads in the sand in terms of bad things that are going on. i am saying we should start at home. i'm saying, be more concerned about your spouse than barack obama. be more concerned about your neighborhood than your member of congress. be more concerned about the school that your kid goes to than whether or not you live in a swing state or how many republicans live or how many democrats live there. i think we'd have a better society if we did that. >> okay. great talk. kind of a two-parter. the first, research did you find any terms of how different generations are consume information. younger being more and the second is. do you think that people who are born today being exposed to an

information-aggressive environment might be consume for a greater amounts of information in a healthy way. >> i didn't write about this in the book about the generational difference. and i didn't on purpose. we have the sort of weird ironic are in schism that we're somehow better at being dumb than our grandparents are. and that we're like,man, you know, these tools are makes us stupid. i think people all made pretty generation after generation has made in retrospect pretty stupid mistakes. based on poor information. i avoid the idea that like, these young people are destroying their brains with twitter. because i think it's, you know, like those old people were destroying their brains with, you know, litter.

or, you know,ing in else you'd see on "mad men." my primary news source for how my parents grew up. i think though, there is a lot of great promise. the internet is the greatest source of truth on the planet, and the greatest source of ignorance on the planet. if i rule the world, or if i was the head of the department of education in the united states of america. i would probably create a push to rename english departments. it's important to start teaching kids the skills they need in order to vet information. and how to handle a lot of incoming information. to teach kids digital literacy that it is to teach them in a language they're fluent in by high school. does that answer your question? all right.

>> i'm going take one question from the twitter verse, of course. and this one -- who was it? what's that? >> this one comes from michael b eno in chicago. >> your alter ego. michael asks, we are digital and social media professionals and we are expected to be constantly connected. if the expectations we set ourselves and others have for us. is there a middle ground where we can still be accessible enough? >> a lot of people get confused. i think it's because we made a lot of mistakes when it came to the idea of a diet over the past last half the century. we said that a diet is about eating less. we started to hammer that home. it actually caused some significant society l problems when we said a diet was about

eating less. it didn't cause eating disorders but it didn't help people suffering from eating disorderrers. i think the idea that an the information diet become means being less connected is a false choice. you have to connect yourself to a good stuff. you have to understand that your body is wired for what it wants and not what it means. a little bit of, look, every time with the pizza is better than broccoli thing. someone says i prefer broccoli. someone is like, i put broccoli on my pizza. and that's sort of really prepostuse that putting broccoli on a pizza will name god for you. the idea that pizza doesn't taste better than broccoli. if we had pizza over there and a

pile of broccoli. the pizza could be gone in seconds and the broccoli would be here. i would eat all the pizza. just to prove a point. but i think this idea that we should eat less is a bad one. maybe we should not oblige ourselves every time that we see something that looks interesting to us, and rather think critically about information before we consume it and try to develop a framework for others where we say is what i'm about to read actionable to me. me, my family, my community. is the two-headed cat born in china going change my life in any way? the answer is no. it requirely is. being connected all the time. ever consuming information? i don't see there'sing in wrong with that. so long as you're consuming the

stuff that's going make you health. we have the idea this there's information overload. and i said information overload doesn't exist. we don't say that people are suffering from food overload. it's not like fried chicken is killing itself and zombie chickens are jumping into the deep fryers. they are flying into the mouths, right? why are we blaming the information in we should be blaming the suppliers and commanders. human beings are on either end of this. we have to make good, relevant decisions. i guess the last point i wanted to make to that question. for everything else america we consume in order to stay alive. there is a government agency out there that protections us from the bad stuff. we have the environmental protection agency that makes sure that the air we breathe and the water that with we drink doesn't kill us. we the united states of america food and drug administration. to make sure the food we eat

doesn't kill us. we disobility have a federal information quality administration. and nor should we. we have the first amend. because it would be immediately discounted the moment the government decided to start saying this is good and bad for you. if it exceeded it would be an incredibly dangerous thing to have control over. we have to take responsibility for our intake. it has to be a responsibility thing. and an ethical decision to go on an information diet. >> any questions? >> just with the prolifuation of media about comodification of, you know, the news, it seems like it's almost enabled the lazy people to get lazier and forced more educated and disearning people to exercise those skills more. and, you know, as kind of an

avid consumer of media, i would rather have, you know, the fox news about msnbc and watch both of them and try to figure out what the truth is. i'd have it be out there versus interpretation versus one source whatever one person interprets to be truth or fact. i guess, to me, the idea that i have to make an ethical decision after i read bbc not to go to, you know, the sensational story with the cat with two heads. because there are stupid people in the deep red or deep blue states. >> that's true. i'm about to be a dad in a month. i have to be maternalistic. i don't disagree with that. the difference here between what i'm saying at the paternal list.

i'm not saying the government should make that decision for you. i am saying i think it's enough people make that ethical choice for themselves then the market will change as a result. because it will force suppliers to chase after higher end consumers who can provide them with better value as consumers. i think, it's a mistake to think that my message in the antientertainment message. i think that consuming information that's, you know, there's one chapter in my book about a healthy sense of humor. why it's vital to have a healthy sense of humor. i'll tell the you the story. i met carol rove when was in the blue state. i think michael was with me when i met him. karl rove comes up to me, and said blue state digital. he said you do great things for the wrong people. i was on the fastest on the feet. i looked at carm rove strait in

the eye. and i said yet another half truth from karl rove. he thought television high lar use. he asked for my card, a couple days later, the weird note appeared on the desk with the weird stomps. apparently karl rove is an avid stamp collector. it was from karl. on it it said dear mr. johnson. if you would like to have the picture inscribed please send it along. otherwise take this note as a token of meeting the great man himself. i think that skill of being able to not take things too seriously and to be able to entertain yourself is important but cog assistantly for your brain to be healthy, but also as a way to identify when you're getting too much information. if you start losing your sense

of humor. if you start being unable to laugh, then maybe you should change your information diet a little bit. and my final thing on the paternalistic thing. there's a thin line between the science knowing what's healthy. like we know eating less sugar and salt and fat makes us healthier than not. that's paternalism. it's science. i think when the information diet was written -- i'm sorry when the first diet book was written in the mid 1800s the calorie a unit for measuring efficiency of steam steam engines. science habit gotten there and science hasn't gotten here yet. but i think it will be there, and i think if we start paying attention to the stuff as a healthy lifestyle choice, we're

going to see a lot more research come out of this. how to make the best decision. it's the best guess for the diet book. which was a good guess too. it's the at kins diet. >> this will be the last question in the room. u o'. if we do it quick, we can have two. i'll apps quickly. >> yes? >> thank you. i think the fundamental thing here the focus on the united states and i'm curious throughout your research in the compiling this information looking at it, have you seen any, you know, could it be a universal thing? have you seen or heard in it in other areas of the world? >> sure. i mean, if you think about it from a global prospective and a historical perspective.

it happened time and time again. the information -- there hasn't been e toesty without propaganda behind it ever. right. the genocides right were in fact fueled in part by radio, and radio now. i'm not sure that the economics were set up in a line such that the reason why hate speech was happening on the radio was because of large corporations out of fiduciary responsibility to provide that. i will say, whether what causes the information go out is different. but yeah, i think it's universal. i think the reason why i make the food analogy. i think it's the same thing. we're added abunked abundance.

>> i just wanted to thank. i haven't read your book. i might be in there. one thought of the analogy i thought would be god to make is exercise. diet and exercise controlling obese. the same thing on the other side with information. it seems to me when you're conservative and you're watch,ing fox news or liberal listening to talk radio. that's lazy. and when you discourse with another person has the opposite point of view. if you're a liberal going to talk to a libertarian or a conservative and discuss something. that's exercise. that's as important asking in. >> i would discourage freedom -- if you're watching a lot of msnbc. shut it off and exercise. like -- because that will make you live longer. i'm only half kidding. the average american spend 11 hour per day consuming information. when they do it, they're not on

a treadmill. they're sitting down. study is coming out saying sitting really kills you, not sitting. there's a google sedentary death syndrome. there's a you're right we need to build that. we also need to call our moms or go for a walk sometime. that stuff is important. >> please join me in thanking clay johnson for joining us. [applause] all right. thank you very much, mike. clay, there were a lot of individuals who wrote questions on twitter on the topics ever wikileaks, anonymous, the hacking group, howard stern, and the role of cubicles in an information diet