Ep. 613 – Finding Unity in Divisive Times: Morals, Media & the Human Condition with Danny Goldberg
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Offering a perspective of hope and unity, Danny Goldberg and Raghu Markus explore morality, polarization, and how negative media drives collective anxiety.
Pre-order Danny’s upcoming book, Liberals with Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles
This time on Mindrolling, Raghu and Danny discuss:
- The uproar surrounding the brutal beating of Rodney King by the L.A. police
- Seeing history as the study of change, and looking into how history impacts our lives today
- How the human condition largely remains the same century after century
- The inner conflict between morals: choosing what is right vs. what feels safe
- Building bridges by connecting over universal human values instead of polarizing politics
- Healing our felt sense of separation by remembering that we are all interconnected
- Those who feel they are losing power when others make progress
- The seduction of negative news media and how it feeds collective anxiety and division
- Finding perspective by remembering that every era faces troubling times
- Considering the Sermon on the Mount as a moral compass
- Learning to honor fear without being a slave to it
Click HERE to pre-order There is No Other by Ram Dass, with contributions from Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and more.
About Danny Goldberg:
Danny Goldberg is an author and music executive who has spent decades in the business. As a manager, Danny’s clients included Bonnie Raitt, Nirvana, The Allman Brothers Band, and Sonic Youth. As a label executive he was President of Atlantic Records, and Chairman of Warner Bros Records and the Mercury Records Group – among others. Danny Goldberg’s previous books include Bloody Crossroads 2020: Art, Entertainment and Resistance to Trump, Serving The Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain, How The Left Lost Teen Spirit, Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside The Rock and Roll Business and In Search of The Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea. Learn more about Danny and his work HERE.
Check out the article Culture, Empathy and Resistance by Danny Goldberg and the book NEXUS by Yuval Noah Harari
“People always say to me, ‘It’s never been this way’. That’s just absolutely not true. We had slavery in this country. Women couldn't vote until 1920. Homosexuality, you could still go to jail up until the 60s for it. The AIDS epidemic during the Reagan period. Not to mention human history, the Crusades, and the Holocaust. There have been many, many dreadful times.’” – Danny Goldberg
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone, it's Ragu back with mind rolling and an old, old friend Danny Goldberg, who I haven't talked to in a while Danny so happy to |
| 0:24.6 | have you here hey how are you raguel I'm good I'm good yeah um so we have a few things that we |
| 0:32.7 | want to catch up on um but uh before we even do anything, because it's amazing that Danny's got a book. So Danny's |
| 0:43.8 | written a number of different books. Some of you, I am sure, know it. Maybe this audience, well, |
| 0:49.9 | I don't know, more of Kurt Cobain. Danny was his manager many years ago, and there's |
| 0:55.4 | a terrific book around Kurt. What's it called, Danny? |
| 1:00.3 | Serving the Servants, Remembering Kurt Cobain. |
| 1:03.2 | Oh, yeah. I love that book. Yeah. |
| 1:05.7 | But there's others that are equally wonderful reads. |
| 1:16.6 | And I always talk to Danny because he tends to give me a little, |
| 1:21.3 | you know, when we're thinking about the turbulence that's going on and has been for many years, |
| 1:23.8 | and now it seems to be at an apex of some sort, |
| 1:30.6 | I always get a little bit of a, shall we say, bird's eye, more bird's eye view of this isn't the worst that ever could possibly happen, okay, that kind of a thing. So I |
| 1:37.6 | always appreciate that. And then, and Danny is, so the synchronicity is, Danny has a book |
| 1:44.1 | coming out, when is it, early October, right? |
| 1:47.4 | Yeah, first week of October. |
| 1:52.1 | It's, sorry. |
| 1:54.7 | Can you show it? |
| 1:56.0 | Oh, can I show it? |
| 1:58.0 | I can show it, yeah. |
| 1:59.5 | Hang on one second. Okay. Yeah, so I show it? I can show it. Yeah. Hang on one second. |
| 2:01.8 | Okay. Yeah, so I will elaborate a tiny bit by saying the book is called Liberals with Attitude. |
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