Three for the Founders

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Before he answers a single question about himself, Reynaldo Antonio does what the Frustrated Historian always does: he puts the record on the table. On June 14, 2026, outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, a police officer fired into a car and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley in his mother’s arms. The state declared the shooting justified before the public ever saw the footage. Notice the sequence, he says. Then he shows us where we learned to accept it: on prime-time television, where the dead have no names and the shooters keep their humanity. Some deaths require an explanation. Some require a cleanup on Aisle 5. Copaganda is real.

Then the table turns. After a detour through  Ava DuVernay’s new documentary on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “second founding” nobody taught us, Jon “The Equalizer” and Lybroan “The Mathman” James finally get their brother in the chair.

This is Episode 57: Who Is Reynaldo Antonio Webb Torres Macías?

It starts with a name. Tony was the shortcut that cut him down before he walked into the room. Antonio was the kid asking hard questions at a Jesuit high school and writing step-show intros at UCLA. Reynaldo is his father’s name, and the weight of living up to it. Jon reads “They Call Me,” a poem Antonio wrote in 2005 and hadn’t heard in a decade, and the conversation cracks open.

From there we get:

• Two parents who helped shape Los Angeles politics and Chicano Studies
• A ninth-grade essay that accidentally became a poem
• An eighth-grade flag football team that finally won, 7–6
• The rule of three behind his famous allergy to stupidity: grace once, grace twice, and the third time, you chose it.

Did you touch it? Then you should’ve caught it.

The episode drops on the eve of the November 3 midterms, and it ends the right way. There’s a shout-out to Mrs. Smith and Kai at Butte Vista Middle School, and a reminder that the closer the ballot is to home, the more it matters.

Three for the Founders. Where Brotherhood meets the breakdown.

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On Friday, Oct. 24, the Ninth Circuit ruled 2–1 that Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard for the June 2025 LA deployment was unconstitutional. The majority found no “rebellion or danger of rebellion” and said the protests were mostly peaceful and under local control. A federal judge had already ruled the deployment illegal in September 2025. The episode was recorded the week Sen. Alex Padilla was forced to the floor and handcuffed at Kristi Noem’s LA press conference, June 12, 2025.

June 2025. The National Guard and the Marines are deployed on the streets of Los Angeles. A United States senator is on the floor in handcuffs for asking a question. And three brothers sit down for only the third time on this mic to ask the question underneath all of it: when was America great — and for whom?

Sixteen months later, a federal appeals court has said what this city already knew. There was no rebellion. The protests were mostly peaceful. Local police had it handled. The deployment was unconstitutional.

But this episode was never really about the court case. It’s about what three men see when a red hat walks into the room. For one of us, it’s a white picket fence. For another, it’s a cross burning in West Virginia. For another, it’s a kid afraid to walk to graduation because ICE might be in the parking lot.

It’s about why white Americans claim the Founding Fathers but not the lynching tree. And it’s about the question every good white friend eventually asks: what am I supposed to do?

We didn’t have the answer then. We had a bridge. This is Episode 3. Los Angeles Under Fire. Let’s go.

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He grew up on the south side of Santa Monica, surfing a mediocre break and guarding it like home turf. He pledged a Black fraternity, played piano on a national TV talent show, and was told by the producers that he was exactly what the show was looking for. Then he walked away from all of it. In Episode 55 of Three for the Founders, the second of our three biographical episodes, Antonio and Lybroan turn the mic on their brother Jon William Augustine. What does a white kid raised on jazz records and Thelonious Monk album covers owe the culture that shaped him? Is it confidence or curiosity that puts you on a step-show stage in front of five thousand people who are all asking "who's the white guy"? Why would a 19-year-old with Elton John's agent's business card in his pocket stop returning calls and give twenty years to a church that asked for everything? And once you leave the system that told you who to be, how do you find out who you actually are? This one has surf lessons, Star Search receipts, Crazy Church, and a question about ikigai that lands somewhere none of us expected. Where Brotherhood meets the breakdown, and this time the breakdown is Jon's.

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If your family never lived in the South, is lynching still your history?

Is not knowing ever innocent, or is it always a choice?

When Shaq pins on an FBI badge, is that service or selling out?

When you spot another person of color in a mostly white workplace, how do you know if they're with the lions or with you?

And, who actually gets invited into your home?

Jon, Antonio, and Lybroan take on all of it: a Converse ad that made its choices on purpose, lynchings in New York, and why TV keeps getting us to cheer for the cops. Look up the 1863 New York draft riots, send this to the friend who swears their people weren't involved, and tell us your answers in the comments.

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! 

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A sixth grader watches a basketball game, picks his college off the vibe, writes it down, and works. Six years later, a thin envelope shows up-Congratulations!

This week, we sit down with our brother Lybroan "the MathMan" James for the real story. Radical honesty at the dinner table. Mickey Mouse as a lesson on America. A Range Rover, a hot hood, and a badge that decided he looked guilty. Lifelong friendship built on lumpia and study sessions. The house on Crenshaw that made him who he is.

It's funny. It's tender. It's honest in the way only family can be.

Where 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! 

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We call it the Civil War.

They called it slavery.

But sure, let's keep using the nice name. Very generous of us.

A new episode of Three for the Founders is up, featuring a Frustrated Historian! He’ll be connecting some dots: a lost cause, executive orders, white-washing history, the insurrections we forget, and a QR code at a concentration camp asking visitors when they feel bad.

Nothing says "restoring sanity" like immigration detention centers, I mean Japanese internment camps.

What version of history YOU got? the one with the hard parts sanded off for your comfort? 

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Name a song you loved before you actually understood what it was saying. What changed when you finally heard the lyrics?

Can we teach rhythm?

Is rap music, or is it "just a beat without a melody"?

Where's the line between Kendrick, Shakespeare, and needing to know what they're talking about?

If shared rhythms build empathy, what's one song outside your usual rotation you'd commit to sitting with on purpose?

Is "Born in the USA" secretly a protest song? Why do reggae anthems groove even when they're raging against the machine? And is there something to the old joke about white people and rhythm — or is it colonial conditioning dressed up as a stereotype? This episode, the Founders dig into the DNA of music itself: lyrics versus feel, industry gatekeepers versus YouTube democratization, and whether learning to move to a different beat might just be a path toward empathy. Tupac, Prince, Kendrick, and Springsteen all make an appearance — plus a debate about whether rap is poetry that gets heated fast.

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! 

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Can a sing-along save the nation?

Before there was a Constitution, there was a drumbeat in Congo Square — do you still hear it?

Have you ever stood in a room of strangers — different politics, different pain — and felt it all dissolve into one held note? A blue note bent by enslaved people’s pain became the blues, jazz, and rock and roll that conquered the world — what does that tell you about who really built this nation’s sound?

If Bob Marley could put warring leaders hand in hand with a song, what’s stopping us?

Tell us — what’s your song?

Music can save America only if we’re bold enough to sing it out loud, together, right now.

Here's Our Playlist! Listen along!

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! 

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We had to keep talking about Nolan Xavier Wells. Kohen Wiley. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Alex Pretti. Renée Nicole Good. Keith Porter, Jr. Corey Ruiz. Five questions we need you sitting with:

• Why are we still meeting people as hashtags?
• Why does Black and brown justice depend on strangers with cell phones?
• Is there a rhythm to cop killing?
• Why is Jon the only one safe jogging?
• Does the system protect whiteness?

On this bonus episode of Three for the Founders, we'll give you our answers to all of these and more.

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! 

What do YOU think? Text us!

Nolan Xavier Wells. Kohen Wiley. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Alex Pretti. Renée Nicole Good. Keith Porter, Jr. Corey Ruiz. Five questions we need you sitting with:

• Why are we still meeting people as hashtags?
• Why does Black and brown justice depend on strangers with cell phones?
• Is there a rhythm to cop killing?
• Why is Jon the only one safe jogging?
• Does the system protect whiteness?

On this bonus episode of Three for the Founders, we'll give you our answers to all of these and more.

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!