Three for the Founders

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

What do YOU think? Text us! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501133/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://threeforthefounders.com] on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/three_for_the_founders/], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578948059363], or  YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@three_for_the_founders] and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

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

What do YOU think? Text us! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501133/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://threeforthefounders.com] on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/three_for_the_founders/], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578948059363], or  YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@three_for_the_founders] and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

Ep. 40 - Say My Name, Say My Name

What do YOU think? Text us! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501133/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://threeforthefounders.com] on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/three_for_the_founders/], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578948059363], or  YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@three_for_the_founders] and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

Ep. 39 - Monuments and Monsters *Bonus*

What do YOU think? Text us! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501133/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://threeforthefounders.com] on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/three_for_the_founders/], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578948059363], or  YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@three_for_the_founders] and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!

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

What do YOU think? Text us! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501133/fan_mail/new] "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 [https://threeforthefounders.com] on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/three_for_the_founders/], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578948059363], or  YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@three_for_the_founders] and let us know. Til the next time...left on Founders...we out!