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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

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Transcript

Question: What inspired “The Second World”?

Parag Khanna: This book [The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order] is actually a couple of things. One is, how do you create an excuse to travel for a couple of years and have that entirely paid for.

And the other thing was that I wanted to do a television program and I wanted to call the Second World. I wanted to be a step up from the only planet and step down from like a hard national kind of documentary and kind of give the latest social, political, environmental, cultural kind of feel, a middle tiers sort of countries that aren’t well covered by travel shows, or that are covered by really superficially like in terms of their food or beaches.

And I thought that was really necessary and still is necessary. But I wrote it as a TV idea and it did not have legs because I did not have any connections in TV. So eventually I turned into book proposal and that is why this book happened.

Recorded on: 3/3/2008