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Steven Wolfe Pereira: How Can You Govern Something That You Don't Understand?
Description
(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 mentors
(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/
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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United Stat