Jared Diamond: How Much Can One Person Change History?

Would World War II have happened without Hitler? Would someone else have built Apple without Steve Jobs? Jared Diamond joins Michael Shermer to ask how much history depends on particular people.

From Darwin's discoveries to the rise of Christianity, Diamond considers when someone is truly irreplaceable, when someone else would have done much the same thing, and how we can tell the difference.

Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of Time magazine's best non-fiction books of all time, Collapse, a No. 1 international bestseller, and The World Until Yesterday, among other books. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others. His new book is Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?