Hello, welcome to this episode in which I am sharing a very interesting conversation

with somebody who owns multiple copies of the Declaration of Independence.

And I don't mean the kind you buy on Amazon, y'all.

I mean like, the kind from 1776.

He has purchased them, put them on display, museums all over the world. He is a billionaire philanthropist.

And we had so many interesting things to talk about. Today I'm jetting with author David Rubinstein.

I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

Thank you so much for joining me.

I am really grateful for your time today

and I absolutely loved your new book.

So can you give everybody just a little overview of what it's about?

And then we'll kind of dive into some of the really interesting topics you discussed.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

The book is called The American Experiment,

and it's about the effort over the last 230 years or so

for America to live up to the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence

and the Constitution where we guaranteed people certain rights and so forth and we

have these rights as part of our I would say DNA there's certain things that are part of our DNA in this country. The right to equality, the belief in separation of powers, the belief in the importance of voting. And we've tried to live up to those rights over the years in that DNA but we have not

always completely succeeded in doing so and this book talks about through the voices of

other people how we've struggled to live up to these DNA pieces of our body.

I really liked how you said that in the introduction like this analogy of the

earth would not be what it was if we were not precisely in our position in the universe. We were closer to the sun,

...