Three for the Founders Podcast By Jon Augustine Lybroan James Reynaldo Macías cover art

Three for the Founders

Three for the Founders

By: Jon Augustine Lybroan James Reynaldo Macías
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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.

© 2026 Three for the Founders
Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Ep. 35 - Whose House Is This, Anyway? Independent Schools and Teaching Honestly
    Mar 16 2026

    What do YOU think? Text us and let us know!

    Three for the Founders | New Episode — Live Recording Feb. 21, 2026 · 51 min

    Three fraternity brothers. One live room. No easy answers.

    In this week's episode, Reynaldo Antonio, Jon, and Lybroan gather an audience and go somewhere most institutions won't: an honest reckoning with how history gets taught, who belongs in independent schools, and what DEI actually looks like when the cameras are off.

    They talk about the difference between teaching history to do better versus teaching it to feel good. They name the quiet discomfort of being an educator of color in someone else's house. And they make the case — through story, not data — that the people doing the real work are still doing it. Quietly. Authentically. Underground.

    Brotherhood built this conversation. Honesty keeps it going.

    🎙️ Listen at threeforthefounders.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Like. Subscribe. Share it with someone who needs it.

    Here is the playlist of our theme songs . . . What’s Yours? Gimme My Theme Music (A Playlist!)

    Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok and let us know. Til the next time...left on founders...we out!

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    54 mins
  • Ep.34 - History Has a Price Tag!
    Mar 2 2026

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    Let us ask you something before we even get started.

    Do you believe what the founders wrote — or what the founders did?

    Welcome back to Three for the Founders — where Brotherhood meets the breakdown.

    But first — we have to show some love. Shoutout to Lorelei Newman, UCLA alum, who found this podcast at what sounds like a pivotal moment in her life. She sent us a message with a question we haven't been able to shake: “How do you know when something should come to an end?" Lorelei, we don't know who or what prompted that question for you — but we're glad the show found you when it did. And shoutout to Rahim Muhammad, who heard Episode 18 — "Your bell schedule is racist" — and then did something most people won't do. He went back to Episode 1 and listened to everything. In order. That's not a fan, that's family. And as always — respect and love to the founders of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Incorporated. We don't start without acknowledging you.

    2026 is the centennial of Black History Month. One hundred years ago, Dr. Carter G. Woodson — the second Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard, following only W.E.B. Du Bois — looked at American society, looked at what was being taught in schools, looked at what was being erased and distorted and flat-out lied about, and decided he was going to do something about it. He launched Negro History Week in 1926 with a mission that was radical then and — let's be honest — is still radical now: combat the exclusion of Black people from American history. Dismantle the lie that Africa was a "dark continent" with no civilization, no culture, no past worth studying. And affirm, loudly and without apology, that Black achievement didn't begin with survival — it began long before enslavement tried to end it.

    A hundred years later, the question isn't whether Woodson mattered. The question is — what have we done with what he built? And what does the next hundred years look like?

    That's what we're getting into today.

    We're putting a new framework on the table for what Black History Month could actually become — not a feel-good celebration, not a corporate email in February, but a genuine, structured reckoning with the full scope of Black history across its African roots, its atrocities, and its power. We're running the numbers on reparations — and when we say numbers, we mean numbers. Trillions. Per person. We're going into the Atlantic slave trade with the nuance it demands — including African participation, the construction of race as a European tool, and why collapsing an entire continent into a single story is its own form of erasure. We're talking about what made U.S. chattel slavery uniquely, deliberately, systematically cruel in ways that set it apart from slavery across human history. We're wrestling with scripture — how the same sacred text has been used to liberate and to oppress, sometimes in the same breath. And we're asking the hardest question underneath all of it:

    Is history something we teach to learn — or something we curate to feel good?

    Because as Howard Stevenson put it: "Until lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

    This is fifty-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds. No fluff.

    Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok and let us know. Til the next time...left on founders...we out!

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    59 mins
  • Ep. 33 - Fatherhood From The Middle *bonus*
    Feb 24 2026

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    Three for the Founders | Bonus Episode

    "Hot Takes, Heartfelt Dads & Bringing POCC Home"

    Feb 23, 2026 • 22 min

    Fraternity brothers Reynaldo Antonio, Lybroan, and Jon jump back in for a bonus round that moves fast and hits deep. First up: is Stephen A. Smith's $100M ESPN deal turning "the people's voice" into controversy-for-profit — and who else is getting rich while Black America pays the tab? The brothers draw the line between hot takes and real takes, and it's a line worth hearing.

    Then, they pull back the curtain on an upcoming live session for SoCal POCIS's Bring PoCC Home — a regional answer to the People of Color Conference’s indefinite “postponement". With independent schools navigating the Trump administration's pressure on DEI and the quiet erasure of history, Lybroan, Jon, and Antonio are walking into the room with one guiding question: “D we believe what they wrote, or do we believe what they did?"

    And before the credits roll, things get personal. Jon's father-son story — the one that's making grown men emotional in rooms across the country — lands here too, alongside a Robert Bly quote that'll stop you mid-commute, and a Valentine's Day moment from Antonio that hits different when you realize he was channeling his own father without even knowing it.

    Bonus episode energy. Founder-level conversation.

    🎙️ threeforthefounders.com | Instagram • Facebook • YouTube • TikTok


    Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok and let us know. Til the next time...left on founders...we out!

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    22 mins
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