NPR's Katherine Maher on Leading "Without Fear or Favor"

How do millions of strangers come to trust one another enough to share a common reality?

In this episode of The Solve Effect, we welcome Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR and former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Katherine has spent her career building and leading the institutions that help us make sense of the world together—Wikipedia, Signal, and now public media, at a moment when trust in nearly every one of those institutions is under strain.

Tune into a conversation all about:

The Trust Ladder: As local newspapers have disappeared, Katherine explains how we lost the "lowest rung" that once connected our understanding of our neighborhoods to the nation—and why that's fueling polarization today.

Truth vs. Facts: Katherine's TED Talk on truth sparked pushback, including from Elon Musk. She unpacks the difference between the facts we can agree on and the deeper truths we each carry, and why admitting what we don't know builds trust rather than erodes it.

AI and the Open Web: Katherine explains what's at stake when models are trained on models, and why she still believes the open web is worth fighting for.

Leading Without Fear or Favor: As NPR faces federal funding cuts, Katherine makes the case for why mission-driven institutions can out-compete the market for trust and attention and what that looks like in practice.

Full transcript available here.

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