Rebuilding Trust in a Fractured World: The End of Top-Down Power with Cory Warfield

What if trust isn’t something we recover—but something we redesign?

In this episode of Sense Making Conversations, Andrea sits down with technologist and futurist Cory Lopes-Warfield to explore a new approach to leadership: co-governance. It’s a model that uses AI, blockchain, and verified human identity to move beyond top-down power and create shared systems of decision-making. From universal basic income to decentralized identity, Cory offers a bold vision for rebuilding trust—not just in institutions, but in each other. If you’ve ever wondered whether democracy is still working—or if something better is possible—this episode invites you to imagine what comes next.

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Before becoming an official LinkedIn Top Voice with over a half million followers and nearly a billion impressions, Cory was a career waiter who solved the problem of scheduling in the restaurant industry using data and machine learning. Cory bootstrapped that venture from idea to market, then raised capital from accelerators, angels and VC to grow the team, gain substantial traction, and ultimately exited after several years to pursue other entrepreneurial endeavors.

Through that experience, Cory had created a LinkedIn profile that was instrumental in the growth of that venture every single step of the way — learning the algorithm, growth hacks, and tuning into the psychology of the platform was truly the “secret to my success”. This turned into a venture of its own (Coryconnects) where he has helped create dozens of other top influencers on the platform as a viral growth coach, while he has gone on to help web3 companies build, scale and raise capital as a cofounder at DCRBN Labs, helped dozens of early stage startups as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at the Founder Institute where he has also been named Mentor in Excellence several times and was a Managing Director for several cohorts, all the while delivering keynotes such as at The Metaverse Expo in Vegas, covering CES as the face of Interesting Engineering where Cory was a partner and Editor in Chief of AI Newsletter, AI Logs, which I quit to launch my own weekly newsletter, “Tech For Good”.

Cory is a futurist, a growth hacker, an influencer, a serial entrepreneur, a traveler, explorer, philanthropist, musician, and he loves his wife and family, pets, animals in general, and our earth greatly.

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Find Cory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corywarfield/

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