Three for the Founders

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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? 

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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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! 

What do YOU think? Text us!

What if the most dangerous racism isn't the kind that screams at you — but the kind that quietly shows up in your mortgage, your paycheck, and the words coming out of your own mouth?

When you can trace a straight line from a cotton field to a Wall Street bond prospectus, the question isn't whether systemic racism exists — it's whether you're ready to see it everywhere it's been hiding.

Jon, Lybroan, and Antonio are going there, and they're not coming back the same — are you?

Three for the Founders pulls back the curtain on the financial machinery that tested modern banking on the bodies of enslaved people, the Hollywood erasure that makes you invisible in stories set in your own city, and the tipping culture that was never designed to pay you fairly in the first place. 

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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World Cup Chaos, Colonial Ghosts, and the Weight of Melanin

The fellas dive headfirst into World Cup madness — a suspicious red card reversal, questions of who really "counts" as French, and the quiet power of watching Black players from Texas to Sweden claim the pitch. From Azteca Stadium heartbreak to a deep cut on Belgium's colonial body count in the Congo, brotherhood meets the breakdown on identity, empire, and who gets to belong. Plus: Cabo vibes, a Gloucester sailing trip gone charmingly white, and three hours stuck on the Logan tarmac watching Mexico fall to the colonizers all over again.

Listen at your own risk of becoming woke.

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!

What's good, fam — welcome back to Three for the Founders, where Brotherhood meets the breakdown.

Look, every now and then we get a guest who reminds us why we started this show in the first place. Today's that episode. We're sitting down with a man we're calling "Mr. Nobody" — an active commercial airline captain who's been flying since 1991, and who's choosing anonymity on purpose. Not because he's got something to hide, but because he wants you to judge the ideas, not the man. No race, no age, no resume flex — just the truth, standing on its own two feet. Real They Live energy, if you know the film.

And the timing on this one isn't an accident. We're recording this fresh off a stretch where the administration rolled back equal opportunity hiring protections by executive order, the Supreme Court cleared the runway for vote dilution against Black voters in Louisiana v. Callais, and ICE got the green light to use race in enforcement while colleges got told they can't use it in admissions. Sit with that contradiction for a second. Meanwhile, you've got a Sigma — Victor Glover, our fraternity brother — piloting Artemis II around the actual Moon. 252,000 miles. And somewhere in the middle of all that, some random commentator on the internet said the quiet part loud: "If I see a black pilot, I'm gonna be like, boy, I hope he's qualified."

So yeah. We needed to have this conversation.

Mr. Nobody takes us through it all — sixth-grade dreams of flying, a father who served in Vietnam and never made it past 27, gatekeeping that started before he could even drive a car, a military pipeline that tried to steer him into a missile silo instead of a cockpit, and a commercial aviation career where he's been "the only one" in nearly every room he's walked into. We get into the Tuskegee Airmen, the "tractor" metaphor for how status and insecurity drive race relations in this country, getting boxed in by a cop on a private airfield he legally owned, and what it actually feels like to be 6'2", 250 pounds, in a crisp uniform, knowing 200 passengers are sizing you up before you even say a word over the intercom.

This is a deep one, brothers and sisters. Grab something to sip on, settle in — Part 2 is already in the works. 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!