Steven Wolfe Pereira: How Can You Govern Something That You Don't Understand?

(0:00) Intro (1:28) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel (2:15) Start of interview (3:17) Steven's origin story (7:09) The AI Market Explosion (10:07) Introducing Alpha: the company he leads.  (16:01) On Events and Board Forums: "There is going to be a premium on IRL really moving forward because the bar is going to be so high"  (17:50) The Necessity of Tech-Savvy Directors (19:58) Steven's State of the Art of AI for directors. "The AI wave is driven by 4 forces: 1) Compute (the most important), 2) Data, 3) Algorithms, and 4) Robotics." (25:11) Recommendations for directors on how to dive deeper into AI. *Reference to Menlo Venture's 2025: The State of Consumer AI (29:24) Understanding AI Tools and Their Value (31:55) Governance in the AI Age "How can you govern something you don't understand?" (38:21) Navigating Private vs. Public Companies (44:58) Geopolitical Tensions and AI. The options: 1) The Empire Strikes Back (China); 2) Star Trek (EU); and 3) The Capitalist Version of Mad Max (USA) (49:28) The Future of Agentic AI (52:12) The Importance of Data as an Asset (58:53) How can the Board address the AI challenge (1:04:14) Books that have greatly influenced his life:Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius Start with Why, by Simon Sinek (2009)The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleiman (2023) (1:05:36) His mentorsChinh Chu Viola McCauslandPaul SaganDavid KennyLisa Hook (1:07:39) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives his life by: "You become what you give your attention to. (1:08:19) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves. (1:09:20)  The living person he most admires. Steven Wolfe Pereira founded Alpha to solve a critical problem: most boards are governing AI transformation without the frameworks, intelligence, or peer networks they need to make sound fiduciary decisions.  You can follow Evan on social media at: X: @evanepstein LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/  Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/ __ To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/ __ Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License