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.
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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Paul Cheung: Promises & Pitfalls
Paul Cheung’s parents moved from Hong Kong to the United States when he was a baby. He met his father just once prior to being put on a Pan Am flight from Hong Kong to JFK all by his nine-year-old self. From a Lower East Side tenement to suburban New Jersey, Paul witnessed firsthand the “promise and…
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Watch “Finding The Secret Song”
Relocated from New York City, untethered from his globe-trotting day job at a major tech company, approaching a certain age and suffering from anxiety and depression, singer/songwriter Benjamin Wagner initiates a road trip to write and record his groundbreaking tenth album, Constellations. Somewhere between Nashville and Muscle Shoals, a waitress from Texas, tailor from Mexico,…
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David Smydra: Fast Break
It was one hell of a Q4 for my friend, former Twitter Curation Lead, David Smydra. David has been at the forefront of assuring that tech platforms deliver personalized, high quality news by leading “humans in the loop,” journalists who bridge the gaps between editorial quality, product and audience development, and algorithmic design for more…
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Listening To 2022
2022 has been an outstanding and occasionally excruciating year. Through it all, I’ve found an abundance of hope and healing in my community of friends and neighbors. I began the year committed to publishing our show once a week to crowdsource and share life wisdom from my vast network of actual friends and neighbors across…
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Finding The Secret Song
In Finding The Secret Song, Wilmington filmmaker Ismail Abdus-Salaam explores a very specific moment in singer/songwriter Benjamin Wagner’s, life and career. Relocated from New York City, untethered from his globe-trotting day job at a major tech company, and approaching a certain age, Wagner initiates a road trip to write and record his groundbreaking tenth album…
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