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

Jul 24, 2025

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(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.

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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 States License