Three for the Founders

Jon Augustine, Lybroan James, Reynaldo Macías

Welcome to Three for the Founders, where Brotherhood meets the Breakdown. We’ve been having these conversations for years, and now YOU are invited to join us. We’ll say the things you are afraid to say, and ask the questions you want to ask. Three brothers. All truth. No filters.

  1. Jun 22

    Ep. 45 - The Talk (SPF Edition)

    What do YOU think? Text us! THREE FOR THE FOUNDERS — Episode 45 "The Talk (SPF Edition)" What does sunscreen have to do with racism? More than you think. This week on Three for the Founders, what starts as a casual scroll through Threads — while nursing a dog with a neck abscess, because that's how we live — turns into one of the sharpest conversations we've had about white defensiveness, the limits of respectability politics, and why so many people still can't say the word racist out loud without flinching. Reynaldo posted something simple: Jackson Dart introduced Donald Trump, and the internet had nothing to say. Colin Kaepernick kneeled, and the republic nearly collapsed. Nine-point-six thousand views later, the replies confirmed what we already knew — a lot of people are out here confusing prejudice with racism and wondering why the distinction keeps mattering. It matters because they are not the same thing. One is a feeling. The other is a structure. And this week, we break down exactly why that difference changes everything. Then we get into the sun. Because here's the metaphor that stopped us cold: white people are to Black people what the sun is to white people. Ever-present. Necessary, even. But without protection, proximity causes damage — and the damage accumulates quietly, over time, until one day you're peeling and wondering what happened. SPF. Lotion. Ashiness. The talk Black parents give. The talk white parents give. Turns out both are survival instructions. The contexts are just a little different. Episode 45. The breakdown is real. The sunscreen recommendation is also real. Let's go. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    44 min

  2. Jun 8 ·  Bonus

    Ep. 44 - Monuments and Monsters (Extended)

    What do YOU think? Text us! "Art Versus Artist, Power Structures, and Huerta’s Revelation” Okay. Stay with me here. Because this one requires you to hold two truths at the same time — and if you’re not used to doing that, today’s episode is going to be uncomfortable. Good. Here’s what we know: Dolores Huerta — farmworker organizer, civil rights icon, the woman who stood next to César Chávez for decades and helped build one of the most consequential labor movements in American history — waited sixty years to tell us something she knew. Sixty years. And before you judge her for that silence, I need you to understand why she was silent. Because if she had spoken in 1965, or 1975, or even 1995, they would not have investigated César Chávez. They would have destroyed Dolores Huerta. Full stop. We’ve seen that movie before. But here’s where it gets complicated — and this show doesn’t run from complicated. The same week Chávez’s name is coming off buildings, Jeff Epstein’s client list is still a closely guarded secret. The Catholic Church has paid out billions — with a B — to survivors, and the institution is still standing, still collecting, still canonizing saints. Donald Trump has thirty-four felony convictions and a seat in the Oval Office. So let’s be honest about what’s actually happening here: we are very good at erasing individual people — especially individual Brown people — and remarkably reluctant to dismantle the systems that make monsters possible in the first place. That’s the through-line today. From Chávez to R. Kelly. From Bill Cosby to Thomas Jefferson. From J.K. Rowling to Kanye West — who sold out two SoFi Stadium shows, eighty thousand seats each, with no promoter and no advertising, which is either a miracle or a warning, and I’m not sure it’s a miracle. The question isn’t whether bad people can make great things. History has answered that. The question is: what do we owe the people they harmed — and what does it say about us when we decide the art is worth more than the answer? Antonio, Lybroan, Jon — let’s get into it. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    1h 4m

  3. May 26

    Ep. 43 - Vote Like Slavery Is On The Ballot

    What do YOU think? Text us! “The Map Is the Message” The Supreme Court just redrew the rules — and not in your favor. In a decision that strips race from the redistricting equation, the Roberts Court has handed white supremacy one of its cleanest legislative victories in decades. No hoods. No poll taxes. Just math — and maps drawn to make sure your vote counts less than your neighbor’s. This week, Antonio, Jon, and Lybroan are back, and they are not calm about it. From the 15th Amendment’s promise to the Compromise of 1877’s betrayal — from Shelby County to the latest ruling — the brothers trace the long, deliberate project to dilute Black political power and name it for what it is: not a setback, not a stumble, but a strategy. One that has been patient, funded, and waiting. But grief isn’t the only thing on the table. So is accountability. So is economic leverage. So is the uncomfortable question of what “good white people” actually owe — and what it looks like when they pay it. Brotherhood meets the breakdown. Let’s get into it. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    1h 17m
  4. Ep. 42 - Holidays, Race, and the Myth of Shared Memory

    May 22 ·  Bonus

    Ep. 42 - Holidays, Race, and the Myth of Shared Memory

    What do YOU think? Text us! Commemoration is never just ceremony. Every holiday, every monument, every flag is a choice about whose story gets to be the nation's story. When that choice has consistently excluded the enslaved, the colonized, and the dishonored veteran, the radical act is not destruction — it is insistence. Insisting that the full truth be told. Insisting that the buried be named. Insisting, as these hosts do week after week, that acknowledgement is not the enemy of healing. It is the only path toward it. Before this Memorial Day passes, find one history that your education left out — Decoration Day's Black origins, the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum, the story of a veteran like Papa James — and share it with one person who doesn't know it yet. Not to argue. Not to shame. Just to say: this happened, and it matters, and now you know. That is how the fire gets passed. Welcome to Episode 42 of Three for the Founders. One year in. Still awake. Still building. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    1 hr
  5. Ep. 41 - The Murder Machine: Nationalism, the Draft, and Who Pays the Tab?

    May 11

    Ep. 41 - The Murder Machine: Nationalism, the Draft, and Who Pays the Tab?

    What do YOU think? Text us! Five years. That's it. In 250 years of American history, the United States has been at peace for roughly five years. So what does it mean to wave the flag? To say "thank you for your service"? To call this country a democracy? In Episode 41, Antonio, Lybroan, and Jon don't flinch. They open with Jon's debrief from a white educator affinity session — what it looks like when white people finally slow down enough to talk about race — and then go somewhere bigger: the architecture of American militarism, the moral weight of sanctions, and the uncomfortable truth that what the U.S. exports most reliably isn't democracy. It's markets. By bullet or bayonet. Drawing on Imagined Communities and How to Hide an Empire, the fellas interrogate how nations — and the loyalties we feel toward them — are constructed fictions enforced by power. They debate the draft, dissect the "thank you for your service" reflex, and ask the question American mythology would rather you didn't: What exactly are we protecting — and for whom? Brotherhood, as always, is the method. Honesty is the argument. 🎙️ Find us at threeforthefounders.com | IG | YouTube | TikTok | Facebook Where Brotherhood meets the breakdown. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    32 min
  6. Ep. 40 - Say My Name, Say My Name

    Apr 27 ·  Bonus

    Ep. 40 - Say My Name, Say My Name

    What do YOU think? Text us! Season 2 | Airing Monday, April 27, 2026 Some episodes are too good to stay in the vault. Originally recorded as the Season 1 finale, Episode 40 never made it to air — until now. Consider it a gift from the archives, and the perfect bridge into everything Season 2 is becoming. Reynaldo, Lybroan, and Jon go deep on something deceptively simple: your name. What it carries. What it costs. What it means when someone gets it wrong — and whether that’s ever really an accident. From Kamala Harris to Barack Hussein Obama, from Prince’s war with his record label to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s meditation on language and colonial dominion, the guys connect the personal to the political to the philosophical. Because naming isn’t just courtesy — it’s power. And mispronouncing someone’s name isn’t always laziness. Sometimes it’s a message. Plus: Jerry Lewis, Charlie Sheen, God Sham God, a rare Revenge of the Jedi T-shirt, and the real reason Reynaldo Antonio Macias is not changing his name to Joaquin. 22 countries are listening. Make sure your city is in the count. Three for the Founders — where Brotherhood meets the breakdown. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    38 min

  7. Apr 20 ·  Bonus

    Ep. 39 - Monuments and Monsters *Bonus*

    What do YOU think? Text us! April 20, 2026 Before we begin — a word of care. Today’s episode includes discussion of sexual assault, harm to children, and various forms of violence. Please listen in a way that honors your own wellbeing. There’s a reason we build monuments — and a reason that word carries weight when it turns. When Dolores Huerta speaks, the world listens. And when she confirmed what the New York Times spent five years investigating — that Cesar Chavez raped her and molested children — the world had to reckon with what to do next. In Ep. 39, Antonio, Jon, and Lybroan don’t look away. They sit with the full weight of what it means when a hero falls — and what it reveals about who we hold accountable, how fast we move, and why some institutions survive scandals that would bury any one individual. Chavez’s name came off buildings within 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Epstein files sit open. The Catholic Church writes checks. And certain politicians collect convictions like trading cards while their names go up on buildings instead of coming down. The brothers work through the hardest version of the question: Can a bad person do good things? Where do you draw the line — and does it move when the artist is someone you love? When the community absorbing the shame is already carrying too much? This one doesn’t tie up neatly. It’s not supposed to. And that’s the way it is. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    36 min

  8. Apr 13

    Ep. 38 - It Does Matter If You’re Black or White!

    What do YOU think? Text us! "It Does Matter If You're Black or White" Three for the Founders | Episode 38 | April 13, 2026 | 1 hr. 11 min. The best episodes of Three for the Founders do what the best public radio rarely does anymore: they hold two enormous ideas in the same room without forcing a tidy resolution. Episode 38 is exactly that kind of hour. Lybroan James returns from a Homecoming trip to Ghana — led by Courageous Conversation architect Glenn Singleton — carrying something that doesn't compress easily into a trip report. Standing at the Door of No Return, tracing the final steps of the transatlantic passage, and being formally welcomed into the Apariti tribe, he wrestles with what it means to be received as home in a place American propaganda insists doesn't want you. Meanwhile, Jon Augustine walks into a white affinity space at the SoCal POCIS conference for the first time — and what he finds there is less a conversation than a symptom: orderly, earnest, intellectualized, and curiously disconnected from the soul happening loudly across the hall. The juxtaposition is the argument. Ghana's cultural economy — its communal rituals, its marketplace logic, its vision of African diaspora return as an economic and spiritual corrective — becomes a lens through which to interrogate why white affinity spaces so often struggle to produce the belonging they're designed to cultivate. The hosts don't belabor the thesis; they trust the resonance. Antonio's framing is sharp: community before content. Jon's hibachi analogy lands. And Lybroan's account of cocoa trade inequity and a UN resolution the United States voted against lingers longer than it should have to. Three for the Founders continues to earn its place in the crowded podcast landscape not by shouting, but by thinking — out loud, together, and in real time. Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, or  YouTube and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

    1h 11m
See All (45)

Ratings & Reviews

4.7
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

Welcome to Three for the Founders, where Brotherhood meets the Breakdown. We’ve been having these conversations for years, and now YOU are invited to join us. We’ll say the things you are afraid to say, and ask the questions you want to ask. Three brothers. All truth. No filters.

Information

  • Creator
    Jon Augustine, Lybroan James, Reynaldo Macías
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    45
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Three for the Founders
  • Show Website
    Three for the Founders

You Might Also Like