Clay A. Johnson introduces his plan for an information diet by explaining his own previous failings in the area. He discusses his time spent working for Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004 and how by blindly following only the information they wanted to hear and not attempting to take in anything else, the members of the campaign had doomed themselves to failure.
This was one of the first instances that sparked him to set in place the ideas for the information diet. The general conceit behind the idea is that we often monitor and control what we take into our body through what we eat, we rarely do the same for our mind. Johnson looks to solve this issue by establishing the baseline for the diet of the mind, namely, the information we take in. He spends the time in his book, The Information Diet, going over what steps need to be taken in order to create a healthy mind for today's society, as well as how these issue came to be so commonplace and how it has affected much of the general population.
