Benjamin Wagner is a consultant, creative and founder of Essential Industries, a boutique consulting firm specializing in individual and organizational strategy, transformation, communication and collaboration.
From his half-decade helping launch Facebook’s Journalism Project globally and his tenure transforming MTV News, to his award-winning PBS documentary, Mister Rogers & Me, Friends & Neighbors podcast, or recent album, Constellations, Benjamin's focus is the essential nature of our shared human experience.
Hannah Storm: Little Earthquakes
In sharing her story, Headlines Network Founder Hannah Storm empowers us all to share ours. “If I go into a therapy session, and they’re like, ‘Let’s talk about x,'” she says, “I’m like, ‘And let’s talk about all the other letters in the alphabet.'” The host of the Behind The Headlines podcast, and outspoken mental health…
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LJ Malberg: Expander Energy
“The most challenging parts of the music and entertainment industries aren’t the music and the entertainment,” CoMuse CEO LJ Malberg says. “The most challenging parts are the relationships that we have with each other and ourselves.” LJ knows. In her two decades of industry experience straddling creativity and capitalism, she earned her stripes onstage as…
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Tracey Quillen Carney & Dr. Julius Mullen Sr.: Trauma Matters
“Every interaction is going to leave a mark,” she said. “What do I want it to be?” Delaware’s First Lady, Tracey Quillen Carney, squinted at me across the stage. I clung to a mic in my left hand, my well-worn clipboard in my right, juggling them alongside my list of questions for a pair of well-rehearsed experts, a…
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John Faye: The Book Of Your Life
John Faye is emotionally hungover. The release party for his new memoir, “The Yin & Yang of Everything,” wrapped only a few hours earlier, and he’s still making sense of the half-reading, half-rock show featuring a cast of bandmates, songs and stories spanning three decades. “I have this tendency to lean into these ideas and…
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Elisa Peimer: Are You Resilient?
This week, the Surgeon General outlined steps to counter the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart.” This follows last fall’s urgent message re: wellness in the workplace, and last spring’s urgent message re: mental health in adolescents. It isn’t hyperbole to…
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In The End
On July 22, 2021, I was spinning in some sort of time warp, relentlessly recycling my past, dizzily dreading my uncertain future grounded solely in the insight that, despite my best efforts to control or direct my own life, I wasn’t steering at all. Abbi and I just had returned from a relative’s memorial service in Miami…
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