Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

The Pulitzer-winning author explains why he adapted his classic book "The Third Chimpanzee" for kids: because we need them to fix our mistakes.

—By Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney | Fri Apr. 18, 2014 3:00 AM PDT

Jared Diamond didn't start out as the globe-romping author of massive, best-selling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world's foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: His twin sons were born. "I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world," remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. "I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050."