Karin Conroy (00:06.542)
Before we jump in, if building authority and visibility is a priority for your law firm, we run something called the Authority Tour, where we help firms position their expertise strategically across the right platforms. You can learn more at conroycreativecouncil.com slash authority dash tour. for today, we are going to be talking about influence. And most people think influence is about persuasion, tactics, or visibility. It’s not.

Today we’re talking about the blind spots in human influence and how AI isn’t replacing influence, but it’s exposing where we are misunderstanding it all along. My guest is Sean Kelley, an attorney, entrepreneur, and influence strategist who built a multi-state law firm while legally blind and now focuses on how perception, decision-making, and trust actually work at scale.

This conversation will challenge how you think about influence, authority, and of course, what everybody’s talking about, AI in this influence-driven, AI-driven world. So, Sean, thank you for being here. And thank you for this awesome conversation. I feel like this really kind of crosses over between so much of what everybody is talking about. Obviously, our audience is lawyers and you’ve got a background in that, but everybody is talking about AI.

and there are so many directions people are taking it that are sort of fear driven. And let’s start first with talking about what influence is. And in the intro, I was talking about how it’s not this idea of persuasion. What are people getting wrong about this?

Sean Callagy (01:35.195)
Thank

Sean Callagy (01:49.425)
Yeah, current. Thank you so much for being here. And it’s an honor and privilege to be sharing with your audience. Thank you. So we talked about influence, integrity based human influence, and which is the core study of my entire life, because I do believe that influence is the only human attainable superpower, period. That’s it. What I believe people get wrong, Karen continuously first is to think it’s a soft skill. It is the skill set. It is leadership. is management.

Karin Conroy (01:55.321)
Thank you.

Karin Conroy (02:07.277)
Awesome.

Sean Callagy (02:18.193)
It is recruitment, marketing, selling, fundraising. It is marriage. It is children. It is generational impact. Everything happens after yes. But what if yes isn’t pitching, hooking, closing? What if it isn’t pressure, oppression, manipulation? What if instead all influence truly is, is the loving pursuit of the relevant truth. Taking an idea, a truth from our mind, our heart, our soul,

energetically transferring it to another and having it received and acted upon when it should be. That’s what I believe influence to be.

Karin Conroy (02:54.061)
Okay. All right, so that is very, like very big picture, very somewhat theoretical. And I can tell that each of those words you have very carefully chosen. So I wanna dig in a little more deep into what you mean by this, that it’s this loving pursuit of the truth. How is that different from what people are usually thinking of when

First of all, when they hear the word influence, that has got a lot of kind of big things that pop up instantly just that we’ve talked a lot about influencers in social media. And I think visually there’s these ideas that pop into people’s heads in terms of what you were saying earlier, in terms of you’re trying to sell me something, you’re trying to pitch me something, you’re trying to convince me of something that I am kind of starting with a no.

and you’re trying to twist my feeling. How is what you’re saying different?

Sean Callagy (03:56.351)
Yeah. Yeah. So the difference is, and yes, I agree with you, Karen, that people are at a default no. on my blessed property here in Northern New Jersey, we have a foot and half of snow on the ground. And when my four and a half year old daughter desires to feed the deer, they are at a default. No, a default. No. And because they’re afraid and people are afraid of becoming prey.

Every time yes is at stake, whenever yes is at stake. And the distinction is whether or not we’re integrists. And there’s three component parts of that. We are transparent in all relevant facts. Second, we’re seeking to add more value than we will receive. And third, the thing we say is works in a certain way does work in that way. And I distinguish between integrity based human influence and being an integrist person.

of influence versus being an influencer as follows, that you’re presenting people with an unblinding, having them see what they don’t see about the relevant truth. And the truth is, Karin, for me, yeah, I agree with you. People have reflexive reactions to every single word in all languages because we have to. We’re built on efficiency. How do we make quick and rapid decisions? The challenge is our traditional educational models all the way through graduate school, law school, all of it.

doesn’t teach people correctly, remotely correctly, remotely optimally or masterfully how to function in a capitalist system. And capitalism, generally speaking, teaches people the wrong things about integrist influence. So the space that I’m in, I agree there’s context inside of context inside of context, is a simple space of recreating people’s relationship with influence, beginning with the concept of integrity and that there’s nothing more important human beings could possibly do than master

how to cause one word with integrity and that word is yes. And then of course, which yeses to optimally cause. So it’s a recreation of a concept that people would otherwise think that they understand what it is. That is literally the causing of yes, your mastery of it, which yeses you cause is what is in your law firm bank account, checking account, your personal account, how much time freedom you do or do not have, and the impact that you do or do not have in the world is all the simple byproduct.

Sean Callagy (06:21.405)
of the mastery of causing S with integrity and which S does you cause.

Karin Conroy (06:25.839)
Okay, I wanna back up to a moment ago when you were talking about how this is not a taught skill in school, all the way from elementary, all the way up through graduate school. When I was in business school getting my MBA, there was kind of two big groups. There’s the engineers and then there’s those of us in the soft skills. So, I was in the marketing category in the other group and their brains are…

In both groups, both of our brains are working on the other sides of, you know, the two different sides of the brain. And we both obviously have bias and I felt like my side is the most important piece in this business world. They feel like they are creating the thing, the pro… Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. And so, but they’re in their minds and these minds of these engineers, they’re creating this product.

Sean Callagy (07:10.175)
You’re right and they’re wrong. You’re right and they’re wrong. I’ll explain that in a second, but please go ahead.

Karin Conroy (07:21.718)
And so that is the most important. They’ve got this product. A lot of the guys that I’m in on the West coast, so a lot of the engineer guys in my cohort were doing defense work. They’re working for big defense. They’re creating these actual things, the things that go into big airplanes or whatever it might be. And so like we are all in their minds, they’ve kind of picture this triangle. We are all underneath them and they are just creating the thing and we’re making that happen.

until we got to our marketing course, which we had this incredible marketing professor, Imran Karim, who we were lucky to have, he just wanted to live in Newport Beach. And so he started to show us these case studies and the difference that happens in businesses between marketing and failure of marketing. And I feel like this is influence and everything we’re talking about is under that broad category of marketing.

you know, presenting your ideas and, you know, influences somewhere in there. And so there was this significant moment where they took this, it was a light bulb moment for all of these classmates of mine where they realized, there’s value in this idea. And the short question that I’m trying to get to is, can you talk a little bit more about why does this matter? We’re talking about influence, you’re talking about kind of feelings and these heart centered,

ideas and you briefly touched on kind of the bottom line, but more broad scale, why does this matter to a law firm and a lawyer in terms of whether their influence is successful or not?

Sean Callagy (09:06.447)
because lawyers are notoriously depressed because they make less money than they want to make.

Karin Conroy (09:12.162)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (09:16.535)
Yeah, sometimes less money than a McDonald’s manager. Yeah.

Sean Callagy (09:20.031)
100 % and they work more hours than they want to work. And the only pathway out of that is understanding that the people who generate the business employ the people who don’t. And once you realize that, then the question becomes, how do I generate the business? And you mentioned, I have a background in law. I will say this with great humility.

I’m the verge of becoming the first blind, I am blind, self-funded, unicorn business founder, meaning billion dollar corporate value in the history of planet earth. One in 27 billion, if that’s how many human beings have ever lived. Blind, self-funded, unicorn founder. I failed freshman high school geometry for the year. I had 159 on my LSATs and a 1230 SAT score. When our professors

Karin Conroy (10:15.733)
That’s amazing.

Sean Callagy (10:19.369)
told us that influence marketing, selling, whatever label they put on the F word soft skills, they’re wrong. The engineers, the lawyers, the accountants, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Tom Brady, they all worked and work for the greatest yes causers. That’s what Walt Disney was. That’s who created, built the NFL.

Karin Conroy (10:47.095)
Yes.

Sean Callagy (10:49.353)
The people who can cause yes and the optimal yeses have all of the most skilled and talented people who work for them and so do I.

Karin Conroy (10:59.094)
Okay, so why, how do these highly intelligent, highly competent people, like the ones you just mentioned, how do they, how and why do they struggle to influence them? How are they not those people?

Sean Callagy (11:10.249)
Heh.

because they lie to themselves and their parents lie to them from birth because people are not logical. And the more that people define themselves, and you know this, Karen, like I’m saying things you live on and you’re a master in expertise, right?

Karin Conroy (11:14.647)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (11:23.414)
Right.

Karin Conroy (11:27.276)
Yep. Right, exactly. I’ve got like written on the wall over here.

Sean Callagy (11:32.415)
No. And, so for everyone, and I say this with a grace love, like this is loving message, like, let me hug you out there, right? That for everyone, if you do not, if you’re resistant to what I’m saying, it’s because you’re afraid that what I’m saying is true. Because if what I’m saying is true, then you’ll have to face your greatest fear. The rejection of people.

which by the way, doesn’t even exist. We live in an emotionally driven, fearful monster in the closet under the bed, insane hallucination about people and business. And the people who are in love with what they create more than other people, it’s because we’re afraid of people. And it’s understandable. People have hurt people since the dawn of humanity.

They used to kill each other. We don’t kill each other now. Maybe we sue each other. Maybe we try to destroy businesses. But at the end of the day, the reason, Karin, is because of exactly what I’m saying. And the people teaching us, maybe not your incredible marketing professor, you are blessed with a miracle, but the people teaching us typically are not people who’ve been capitalists. They’re not people who cause yes. They’re people who hold an audience that is authoritatively assembled.

Karin Conroy (12:46.19)
Totally.

Sean Callagy (13:00.191)
called the classroom in kindergarten or a classroom at Harvard or whatever business or law school, and they have a captive audience that they tell things to who cannot have any power to reject them and not show up typically because most situations of teaching attendance is mandatory. So we are taught by non masterful yes causers who’ve typically with rare exceptions in certain business schools never done anything like what I’m talking about.

Karin Conroy (13:19.341)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (13:30.001)
in the real world, and these are the people that are ingraining the wrong priorities inside of people, particularly law professors.

Karin Conroy (13:39.331)
Yeah, yeah, okay, so I’m picturing this big veil of kind of these things that people are lying to themselves about and hiding behind, or the curtain, the Wizard of Oz curtain, whatever you wanna, however you wanna picture it, whatever visual you wanna work with in your brain. So we’ve got this false sense of perception and this false sense of reality and all of these fears that we’re sitting behind and.

We think that we’re doing a great job in these businesses, but we can’t really rise to the level that you’re talking about without overcoming that. So let’s get into the second phase of the conversation, which is, okay, now what? How? What is that thing that we need to overcome? What do we really need to see? And how do we see it?

Sean Callagy (14:29.183)
Sure. So thank you, Karin. First, I’ve said causing yes is the greatest superpower. Second, I’ve said which yeses you cause is what builds what we call compound influence, the greatest attainable force on planet earth. And here’s the how is your self mastery. So one is influence mastery. The second is process mastery. The third component is what we’re talking about now, which is self mastery. How do you get yourself to do it? And I have a simple attainable framework.

It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be different. Any change is painful and difficult, but it’s incredibly simple. It’s to understand this. You are not who and what you think you are. Period. I grew up quite introverted. I am blind, but I was a three sport athlete. did things through physical dynamics. I became the captain of the Columbia university baseball team. I was recruited by a hundred division one schools.

I was unanimously selected captain and it wasn’t because of how I used my words. It was because of how I acted within the scope of team dynamics. So the painful, brutal, awful transition and recreation of my existence I had to go through was gut wrenchingly painful when I went to law school and later deciphered that I didn’t want to go blind and be broke as an attorney.

I had no idea how legal economic models work. had no idea how capitalism worked. I was an athlete and I worked hard at it and now I had a whole new world. So what did I do? What can you do? What can everybody do? It’s first to realize this. If you ever watched the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, one of the most powerful movies ever and my grandfather Harold, I’m sorry, my great uncle, my grandfather’s brother, Harold Budnick is buried at Normandy. How?

Karin Conroy (16:24.034)
amazing.

Sean Callagy (16:25.279)
Did these people end up as 18, 19, 20 year olds and some of them courageously exploded off of these boats into Nazi machine gun fire? The answer is because we will die for our identity. Okay? Two pieces of this. People are lied to and said, well, you’re just like this. This is how you were born.

No one truly knows what percentage, no one, and I’ve studied this extensively and you could challenge me on this, write me on this. No one truly knows what percentage of our personality is actually genetic or cultural conditioning or overall conditioning. So if we don’t know, then why wouldn’t we choose to believe since nobody actually knows the truth that we can shift and change our identity to anything? I believe that. Right.

Karin Conroy (17:22.496)
Right. yeah.

Sean Callagy (17:25.011)
So, so Karin, so I had to reshape my identity into being the greatest marketing genius, the greatest business developer, the greatest yes causer, but to reconcile this with my heart and being and how repugnant I thought marketing and selling was, I had to, I had to reconcile how to do it integrously. Okay. That conditioning process of us deciding our identity is really very simply in this.

linking massive pain to not changing.

Karin Conroy (17:59.362)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (18:00.159)
and massive pleasure to changing, but then it’s one more piece, one more little piece. The journey of fear. I was in 1997 when I quit my job six months out of law school from major law firm. built a 40 person law firm two years thereafter, making millions of dollars a year, go from making 2,500 bucks a month. I was petrified. I wanted to quit every single day for 12 months while I was conditioning in my new identity into my own nervous system. It’s not a day, it’s not a week, it’s not a month.

It’s a massive transitional process of recreating your own identity. In between, there is one super tool, one. The drugs you put into your body. I’m a drug addict, Karen and everyone. And I’ve never taken a narcotic in my life, never smoked pot, I’ve never taken an opioid, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, and I drink almost no alcohol whatsoever. I probably have three drinks a year. At the Christmas party, I despise alcohol. I’m not judging anyone.

So what drugs am I addicted to? I’m addicted to the balance between endorphins, dopamine, and cortisol. In the beginning of all new things, cortisol will be produced in massive levels, and you’ll want to run and be fearful. The reconditioning of our identity decreases cortisol, but what do we do in between? We can’t meditate it out, walk it out, pray it out. I’m a person of faith. Can’t do any of those things to get all the way there. I am…

Karin Conroy (19:08.387)
Okay.

Sean Callagy (19:28.529)
a 12 time a day endorphin loader into my body. I work out. I’m not counting that every right before I got on here, I put endorphins in my body for 60 seconds. So I feel more loving, more present, more patient, more caring, more apathetic, more respectful, more powerful, all of those things. That is the how to car in is to understand the recreation of identity, that journey by linking massive pain to identities that don’t serve our ultimate mission, vision and purpose.

And the bridge in between is 12 time a day, endorphin loading as a recondition identity. If people actually do that, you can recreate anything and become the greatest rainmaker business developer, free attorney in the world, meaning you’re free, not your no cost. are free to make your own decisions. You live in no one else’s narrative or oppression and you’ll have everything you want.

Karin Conroy (20:21.454)
Okay, so tell me more about this endorphin loading. What does that mean? 12 times a day you’re loading endorphins like you did just now before we started recording.

Sean Callagy (20:29.503)
Sure. It means I’ll get on the ground typically and do pushups. So I’m not got 60 pushups or I’ll do crunches or I’ll do body weight squats. I don’t think you get enough. I do jumping jacks occasionally. I don’t think jumping jacks quite get you there. It’s not to break a sweat and you can build up to it. It’s to feel the release of endorphins into your body, which overwhelms and counteracts the cortisol.

Karin Conroy (20:42.093)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (20:55.215)
Okay, I’m a firm believer in that. I really do believe that, you know, a lot of people, I feel like mindset is so overused, that phrase and the idea, but physically, you need to physically be in the right state, both mentally and physically with everything that you’re talking about, all the chemicals and everything in your brain in order to even consider the level of success that you’re talking about and also to push back on that fear.

and the challenges and everything, because that’s what’s gonna be coming at you all day, every day, is the fear and the potential for failure and everything that the world is gonna present in your lab. Especially I feel, yeah.

Sean Callagy (21:35.219)
And Corrine, if I could say this, I have not been, and this is possible for everybody here. This is possible. I haven’t been intimidated by a human being in the last 20 years of my life. Not a single one in a single situation. I have told judges their courtroom is a farce. They said, what’d you say? I said, respectful, your honor. Your courtroom is a farce. And you heard me the first time I’ll say it again. That’s why you’re looking down and not looking at me.

Karin Conroy (21:48.339)
no.

Sean Callagy (22:04.159)
because you know I’m telling the truth. And I will not blink and I will bring truth forward, not because I’m a tough guy, because I live my identity is the loving pursuit of the relevant truth.

Karin Conroy (22:07.031)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (22:17.41)
Yeah, I want to get into this work. I don’t have a smooth transition into AI and I want to get into this idea where

Sean Callagy (22:26.811)
I do. We could bridge in. just tell them it is an easy, ask me anything you want. It’s a very simple bridge, but please.

Karin Conroy (22:33.391)
Okay, well, I wanted to talk about influence where this individual versus group influence and where it’s really all about not considering trying to influence one person, which is where most marketing goes wrong and what most law firms start with. And a lot of these initial conversations that I’m having with law firms, lawyers, the law firm owners, they start in these places that they

think are the right places to start. So they start by talking about SEO and ads and all of this other thing where at their core, it’s like a cancer just kind of rotting and rusting the basic ideas of where they should be starting. And it’s very clear from the outside for me to see, okay, here’s where the issue is. And here’s where we need to kind of just tear down the walls and rebuild.

But that’s a difficult conversation. And what they’re talking about when they talk about those tactics is this kind of one-to-one individual influence where I want to put out an ad, think about influencing this one particular type of potential client or whatever the case might be instead of what you talk about, which is more of a group broader scale influence. So let’s talk about that and then segue into AI, because I know that’s a huge part of this conversation we’re going to have today.

Sean Callagy (24:00.767)
Yeah. Well, thank you for that. So the dynamic of group influence is if we, if we look and think about, please everybody remember this, I knew nothing about business. And I, I, I built a law firm where I was working at it five hours a week, taking off more than 12 weeks a year and making millions of dollars a year. I’m not that smart. It’s not because I’m a cool person. I’m not very cool. It’s because there’s a

Karin Conroy (24:11.201)
Right.

Sean Callagy (24:29.885)
tactical, strategic way to do it, just like playing ping pong, just like making better pizza or cake. It’s just a recipe, a formula, right? So now bridging into what you’re

Karin Conroy (24:40.885)
Yeah, and this is what people are tuning in for because all the stuff we were talking about before, I guarantee you, a lot of people want to kind of skip through all of that and they want to get to this piece of it. But before you even get to this piece, just briefly talk about why you really need to do all that work first before you get to the tactical part of it.

Sean Callagy (25:00.957)
Yeah. Because if your identity isn’t squared, listen, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. There’s certain characteristics that we have to be for people to want to work with us. And most lawyers think it’s like, I’m a really great lawyer. I’m really great. Nobody cares. People do business with people they know, like, and trust how I built everything I built because people know, like, and trust me and that I can deliver the goods behind it. I have two top 100 national injury verdicts, one of only two attorneys in America out of 1.2 million attorneys to do that.

Karin Conroy (25:05.058)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (25:16.259)
Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Sean Callagy (25:30.035)
and the only person that was blind, how’d I do that? Because the jury knew like entrusted me, the judge knew like entrusted me. How to get the clients, they knew like entrusted me. Everything is people know you, they like you, they trust you. And there’s a science to the characteristics people know, like entrust. You know who people don’t like? People who tell them they’re wrong. People who disagree with them. People who mismatch them. People who want to talk more about them than what’s of interest and value to the other person. Like there’s…

fundamental conditioning we have for how to be known, liked, and trusted. And if we fall in love with causing people to feel seen, heard, and understood, I have a lot of lawyers that work for me, know, in my firm currently, and I teach this all the time freely, and most of them do not adopt this. And they work for the people in my firm who do. If we want to cause people to be, listen, watch.

Karin Conroy (26:23.393)
Yes.

Sean Callagy (26:27.903)
Karin, here’s a demonstration. I am impressed by you. It’s not ingratiating falsely. I really am, Karin, because most people who allegedly do what you do, I am unbelievably frustrated with. You seem like a deep, brilliant thinker. You’re an incredible communicator, super effective. It is clear to me you know what you’re doing. Very few people in marketing do.

Karin Conroy (26:33.934)
Thank you.

Sean Callagy (26:53.855)
It feels that way with you and I can feel the desire you have to serve the audience, to get the truth, to give them valuable takeaways. That makes you not only masterful, it makes you integrist and heart centered. It’s authentically how I relate to you.

Karin Conroy (27:07.042)
Thank you so much. That is the nicest thing I think any guest has ever said about me. I appreciate that so much.

Sean Callagy (27:14.335)
Because Corinne, that’s what I’m trained to do, not to make you feel complimented, but to see you. Here’s the litmus test. Corinne, is the way I just described you, yes or no, please, is that, am I hearing you correctly? Is that how you relate to yourself?

Karin Conroy (27:23.422)
Yes. Yes.

Karin Conroy (27:34.957)
Yes, 100%. And I would recommend that everyone rewind 20, 30 seconds to the beginning of what Sean was just saying and the way that he just, in a nutshell, I mean, that is the kind of work that takes people their whole life to figure out how to reflect back on a person, the way that a person wants to be heard and seen. And in that maybe,

15 seconds where you were describing the way that I approach this podcast, I approach this conversation, I approach my work in general. The way that you were able to capture that in those 15 seconds was also masterful. So I highly recommend, back up a little bit, listen to that again.

Sean Callagy (28:24.311)
And current case, you one more question. Do you like me more now than you did before I shared that?

Karin Conroy (28:26.391)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (28:30.223)
Of course, I feel like we are best friends, of course. Like all of a sudden I’m like, yes, let’s go get some lunch and hang out and chat about Ireland because you know, we both were talking about how, yeah, I mean, 100%.

Sean Callagy (28:34.121)
Yes.

Sean Callagy (28:39.327)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (28:44.307)
And Karin, I didn’t invent this. This is what the movie, Notebook, wait, The Notebook? On a legal marketing podcast? Yes, The Notebook said the definition of love was as defined in The Notebook was being a great witness for someone’s life. So the road to I see you, I hear you, what you say matters to me is being a great witness.

Karin Conroy (28:47.053)
Right.

Sean Callagy (29:11.465)
for someone’s life and witnesses don’t lie. Great witnesses don’t lie. So it wasn’t a lie. They don’t ingratiate. They don’t kiss somebody’s butt. They tell the truth about people. That’s what a great witness does. Footnote, it’s also what Oprah Winfrey said. You like Oprah, not like Oprah, thinks she’s full of it or not, but she is a multi-billionaire overcoming racial bias, gender bias, teen pregnancy, sexual abuse, all massive challenges to economic freedom, right?

Karin Conroy (29:14.806)
Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Sean Callagy (29:39.133)
And this woman said the reason she held the microphone for 30,000 people, make him a multi multi-billionaire is because she said, I hear you, I see you and what you say matters to me. That’s how please.

Karin Conroy (29:46.722)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (29:51.055)
And I just want to, sorry, I just want to spend a couple seconds talking about what you didn’t say. What you didn’t lead with was dollar signs and how I can make your firm more money. And, the equivalent that you see on a law firm website, for example, would be leading with, we’ve won these cases. We’ve made this much money. We have done X, Y, and Z and me, me, me, I, I, you know, our firm all about us award, award,

dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign. And this is the recipe a lot of firms use is to lead with that kind of stuff, which is nothing that you were talking about.

Sean Callagy (30:32.563)
Yeah. And Karen, thank you. Received. And if I could reflect and see the audience, the reason you are most likely here is because you want to create greater financial abundance. You want to do so in less time, meaning your audience, right? And you want to do it in a way you feel proud of, fulfilled by, purpose-filled, and you want to take those resources you’re making in the law, create other income streams.

Karin Conroy (30:45.975)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (30:53.44)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (31:01.117)
and impact streams so you could do more good in the world. Karin, would you agree that that’s why most people are watching this right now?

Karin Conroy (31:07.855)
Yes, 100%. And I think that if, come back to that kid that you were when you started law school and why did you do that? And then, and also why specifically did you choose the practice area that you chose? It probably wasn’t about money. Maybe it was an area that could give you a certain level of success, but what was behind that? Why did you want that success? And where’s that like core piece of you that drove those decisions?

Sean Callagy (31:34.089)
that? Sure. Well, let’s start with this. I was called by many people, all American boy, Luke Skywalker. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t chase women in college. But I was also partially an ego driven a hole. Because I thought I was better than the people who drank, did drugs and chased women. So I thought I was better.

Karin Conroy (31:45.282)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (31:52.685)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (31:57.133)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (32:04.231)
I judged other people. I went to law school thinking I was better and judging other people quietly, covertly, liked by many, many people because I didn’t say bad things about people, but I thought them, right? So what happened is I knew I did not want to go blind. I did not want to be broke and I did not want to be an alcoholic like most people in my family who had my hereditary degenerative eye condition.

Karin Conroy (32:18.701)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (32:31.581)
And when I realized, I’m like, went to law school because I wanted to not be blind and broke. Not because I want to be rich necessarily. I just don’t want to be blind and broke. But to answer your question very specifically, Karin, and this is something I really teach, and this is really something that could be misheard, misinterpreted. But I say this. This year, I had the privilege of giving away 120,000 toys to kids. Almost a million dollars in toys I bought for Christmas this year. I didn’t raise the money.

I donated the money, my money, not money raised from other people, right? I could never have done that if I mixed two things, my philanthropy and my work. I don’t mix those two things. So yeah, so my work is I recover. Well, I mean, I do many things. I help people become free. I have people do the things that I did. That’s part of my unblinded platform, but in Calgary recovery, the billion dollar company value I mentioned,

Karin Conroy (33:16.518)
interesting.

Sean Callagy (33:29.841)
We, I believe in what we do very much, right? I believe in what we do. We help medical providers recover money. They weren’t paid hospitals, doctors from insurance companies, but that isn’t my life’s mission and passion. It is a, an integrous income vehicle that lets me do my life’s work and passion, which is what I’m talking to you about, Karin, to cause freedom for people.

And that’s a business I have too. So I believe, this is what I believe, right? Is that we want to really make sure that we’re in businesses that have the right margins, the right residual, are consistent with our value structure, and then we have income vehicles, and then we build platforms to do as much good as we possibly can in the world. So that’s how approach things.

Karin Conroy (34:25.239)
Yeah. Okay. So let’s talk about fear. We talked a lot about this fear early in the conversation, those kind of behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz curtain and all of that. And there’s that veil of fear that we’re all, not we are all, but where a lot of law firms are building their initial approach from and how they perceive AI and technology as the problem.

And that that’s the big threat and that’s potentially the thing that we need to just stay away from because it’s problematic as opposed to how we can use AI and technology in a way that supports our influence. But it’s a very fine line where a lot of people are using it in a way that’s totally destroying their brand and their, their kind of approach and where’s the line and where’s, where can we use AI in a way that supports

this influence and everything that we’re talking about from, not from a fear based place.

Sean Callagy (35:30.591)
Yeah. So Karin, thank you so much. So I want to just share this with you. I seek truth. I did not do when chat GPT came into being for about a week. I was like, this is gonna be the greatest thing in entire world. I can take all of my work. I’m blinded the books I’ve written all of it put in the chat GPT and it’s gonna clone me and it’s gonna be the greatest thing in entire world. I realized within a week. That’s crazy. Not true.

cat GPT was shallow in knowledge, narrow in task. Yeah. Like couldn’t be right. So, and I stayed away from AI because I’m like, this is just a hyped overhyped waste of time. Enter 12 months ago. I began to realize, a lot of very high level masterminds and you know, incredible different people on the cutting edge of things. And I began to discover that.

Karin Conroy (36:00.078)
Yeah.

Especially in the beginning.

Sean Callagy (36:28.753)
AI has reached a new plateau at that time, seeing some of the people in the absolute cutting edge. And so what becomes very present for me, Karian and everybody is that all AI is, is technology and all technology is, is a way to do things more effectively and efficiently. That’s all the wheel was. That’s all the first person to figure it out how to like peel open nuts easier as a monkey, right?

Karin Conroy (36:56.599)
Right?

Sean Callagy (36:57.221)
Every single technology is greater efficiency, right? And mastery. That’s it, right? So what where law firms are completely toe and lawyers, totally, utterly insane. Like ostriches putting their head in the ground is to think you could stop this by avoiding it like ostrich goes head in the ground. Let me put my head down and hope this passes.

Karin Conroy (37:17.559)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (37:21.807)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Callagy (37:26.451)
This is a, and I’m not speaking for Karin, I’m not sure she’s gonna agree with me, but I know this to be true for my soul. This is a tsunami level, like Armageddon meteor heading to earth level event that is going to be, every single new massive technological innovation creates greater shift in economics.

Karin Conroy (37:34.894)
100%.

Sean Callagy (37:54.717)
at a greater speed than anything that ever came before. Just go through the thousands of years before the industrial revolution, then fast forward to the revolution of computers, to the revolution of cell phones. We are at the event that will take every technological shift that has ever occurred and will make them all collectively combined, look at going and compared to the Godzilla of AI. You go, well, you’re not making me feel any better, Sean. I’m not saying you use any car empathy listeners.

Karin Conroy (38:20.289)
Right.

Yeah, right. They’re kind of, oh, that’s a little scary.

Sean Callagy (38:25.779)
But yeah, but, but what if, right? We can leverage and harness this and be on the cutting edge of it. So I believe final, final, this is going to end in dystopia or utopia. I don’t think it, it’s going to end, you know, much in the middle of those things. believe it’s going to end in utopia, but it could be very painful for those people who avoid it and stay away from it. So what would I do? It’s realized that all AI we’ve created something called

Karin Conroy (38:33.687)
Right.

Sean Callagy (38:55.045)
Acti, know, me, Sean Caligie, and it began with legal tools. And we began using legal tools internally that all of a sudden we’re taking things. This is about a year ago. We’re taking things that took, let’s say an order to show cause in a complex commercial litigation case that would take 300 hours to do. We were producing results in two to five hours that would have taken conservatively a hundred hours to create maybe more. And we’ve only continued to advance that outcome.

We have made more than 10 lawyers, Korean with our commercial litigation team, quit and fire their clients because they couldn’t deal with us. But what AI is doing is it’s bringing more integrity into the functioning within the legal work because lawyers lie. And in litigation, lawyers lie extra. What AI can do

Karin Conroy (39:47.117)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (39:52.381)
and the hands masterfully produce and we do it act die is we destroy lies. We get to truth more rapidly, right? It’s number one. And number two, it also can help you build, grow, scale business because things take a lot of time to create. And all you’re doing, right, is minimizing that time. And final thing I’ll say, can you imagine this to be true, Karin and everybody? What if you had a hundred

Karin Conroy (40:11.852)
Right.

Sean Callagy (40:22.239)
person call center calling to book you to speak as a lawyer, calling you to talk to potential, make direct phone calls and direct clients asking if they want to review their contracts or if you want a second opinion on litigation, whatever the services you provide, what have you got a hundred person call center tomorrow? It would take you eight to $10 million to build that with AI. And we’ve done it with Acti, right? You can have that in your pocket. Now we’re releasing something.

this week called Genesis Forge of Heroes, where in 10 minutes, you can create a more masterful, yes, causing agent than yourself. P.S. We have a million dollar bet out for charity that somebody could prove what I said to be untrue. So Corinne, Acti, AI, AI with integrity and mastery isn’t here to replace humans, but it is here

to be ridden like a tsunami wave by the most masterful big wave surfers in the world. And if not, there is gonna be a very disruptive event if you’re thinking the tsunami’s not coming and you’re just hanging out on the beach and you don’t have a surfboard, you’re gonna get whacked.

Karin Conroy (41:39.438)
Okay, so what is it that Acti does? Because it sounded like there was some legal work that it was doing, but also it’s expanding the footprint from a marketing perspective. What is this tool that you guys have built?

Sean Callagy (41:55.295)
Sure. It is a super being that one, creates every legal tool imaginable. Like, wait, what? Yes, we’ve created factories to create agents instantaneously that do things based upon the unblinded formula and the paradigm of all of these incredible things. So what are you modeling? What are you building this on? With great respect and humility, the superpower of influence driven through how to take a deposition better.

how to sift through a production of a million documents, all of these things to come up with predictive models on what to do, but it isn’t just predictive by the agents. It’s based upon literal beans that we’re creating that use tools of influence to say, what’s the next question you should ask at a deposition? What should the interrogatory sound like? How would I create a better contract? What’s the percentage likelihood this contract will be breached and why? All of those things.

On the left hand that I’ll call those the full suite of legal tools, both in transactional and litigation on the next side, it’s marketing tools that would be able to, make assessments, build funnels, do all sorts of different powerful things, create messaging. And then third it’s tools that automatically do things for you in automation. So you like, wait, what? Yes. Tools that can call people and have conversations.

with human beings better than 99.99 % of human beings can cause yes. These are audaciously crazy claims we’re making. Acti is our war.

Karin Conroy (43:35.214)
I’m picturing the call because I’ve heard a lot of, I don’t know, but I’ve heard a lot of these AI automated phone answering services for one thing, but you can pretty quickly tell it’s AI. And I’m worried that how do you preserve trust with this? Because as soon as someone thinks it’s AI, or do you start from the beginning where it says, this is an AI,

Sean Callagy (43:37.843)
You want to hear it?

Karin Conroy (44:02.351)
phone call and so they know from the beginning and or or how does it work so that it doesn’t because as soon as I hear from for me I’m getting a lot of political calls for example and I can tell they’re all AI and I instantly just hang up like it’s just garbage and I and I think if you know if this was a candidate that I had liked I think you know that did not leave a good impression on me and

Sean Callagy (44:16.969)
worse.

Sean Callagy (44:27.967)
Sure.

Karin Conroy (44:29.39)
I’m less likely to give you a little bit of money based on that.

Sean Callagy (44:34.089)
Yep. So Karin, of course, because those agents are not masterful in integris influence, they are not causing people to feel seen, heard and understood. They’re causing people to feel lied to manipulated. They don’t know like or trust the agent. The agents we create do the opposite. We took an event for something called man in the arena. a personal development event. They contacted us late invited me as a speaker late.

And I explained all this them like that’s crazy and possible. They had, worked three months to fill their event. We produced 25 % of the audience in total that showed up at the event in two days with our Acti agents reaching out to local businesses and professionals.

Karin Conroy (45:22.169)
So tell me a little bit about how it sounds and how do you overcome, because as much as we are talking about how far chat GPT has come, it’s still relatively young and there are definite things that you need to fine tune and work through and there are still a lot of adjustments that need to be made so that it works and does what it says and it doesn’t ruin your brand.

This is coming from someone who is very AI positive. I’m very forward with all of that, but I’m also very aware of its limitations. So how do you overcome some of those limitations?

Sean Callagy (46:00.553)
Because the agents speak better than humans. By far not close, that is the answer. By far not close. I have like my phone in my hand, happy to call one of our hundreds and hundreds of Acti agents that would blow your mind, rock your world. And you’d say like, dude, how are you head of Disney, the White House, Google, OpenAI? How is this possible? We are.

Karin Conroy (46:03.489)
Okay.

Sean Callagy (46:28.273)
And we’re doing this at the highest levels. We’re in conversations with some of those influential people in America on this topic. And this company will never be for sale. We will be the artificial intelligence that runs all of artificial intelligence. And right now, right here, I bet $5 million to anybody listening, our agents will out influence anybody else’s agents on a Godzilla versus an ant scale.

Because we haven’t built it on scripts. haven’t built it on predictive decision tree modeling. We’ve built it on the unblinded formula in ways that people thought was impossible. And that may sound completely outlandish and crazy, but we’re demonstrating this all over the place all the time. Happy to demo it right now or not, but that’s the truth and reality of what it is.

Karin Conroy (47:02.989)
Okay.

Okay.

Karin Conroy (47:14.67)
Okay, amazing. Okay, so what are some of these core principles in the unblinded theory that it’s being like, you know, I’m obviously not asking you to tell me exactly how it’s all built, but what are those principles that are those differentiating factors in the way that you’re talking about? A lot of these, you know, prompts and scripts and things that people are seeing when it comes to AI are in one column. And what is different about your approach?

Sean Callagy (47:25.673)
Sure.

Sean Callagy (47:39.967)
Sure. So for fun, if you’re going to act website, I believe it’s up certainly by the time you listen to this podcast, it’ll be complete. We have an eight video sequencing of the difference between a traditional and a Tony Robbins AI bot calling how horrible it is, respectfully to Tony. And then seven different examples are agents having conversations with children, a drunken high adult, venture capitalist.

woman working high up in corporate America, Kevin Mayer, the former CEO of Tik TOK and how blown away he was. we have this entire sequencing. it’s very, very simple. Four steps, 12 indispensable elements for energies of human influence. What I was teaching long before AI, but we’re now leveraging through Acti. And here’s the first simple thing. You can not speak.

into closed listening. You cannot, because then you’re what Charles Schultz did in peanuts. Wah, wah, wah, wah, Charlie Brown, right? Wah, wah, wah, wah. So what our agents do is they maintain an emotional report index. So our agents will not progress to present something, share something in any way, shape or form that may or may not be interesting to the person until emotional report is created. How do you create emotional report cold? You talk really fast. You have a disruptive opening.

Karin Conroy (48:43.99)
Yes, yeah, right.

Sean Callagy (49:05.951)
You ask for 15 more seconds in a conversation, just like if you were a human being cold calling. It’s the same thing. Human beings, Karen and everyone, and I’m gonna prove this right now, human beings accept technology to replace humans all the time. It’s why we cry at movies. It’s why we cry reading books.

Those are technological replacements for non-real inhuman interactions. We cry at cartoons. They’re not real people. It’s technology. We will accept technology instead of humans all day, every day. But if and only if the technology creates emotion or poor, it causes people to feel seen, heard and understood, that could happen through a postcard.

Karin Conroy (49:40.205)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (50:03.495)
It could happen through a smoke signal. It could happen through a billboard or an ad online or through AI. All of those things are true. Once that occurs and reports truly in place and we’re clear on what this person needs and they’ve shared it with us. Once they believe that we will be the mouse to remove the thorn in their foot as a lion. Right. And we are truly clear on what that is. People will have zero problem communicating.

Karin Conroy (50:07.309)
Yeah.

Sean Callagy (50:31.901)
with non-human creations, which is why, know, Karin and your business, people click on ads and buy things all the time. People click on law firm ads. They click on landing pages. These are technological replacements for humans. People shop on Amazon all day and say yes to Amazon all day. That’s a less technologically evolved dynamic than AI, but I promise.

Karin Conroy (50:49.506)
But there’s a… Right.

Karin Conroy (50:58.752)
Right. And there’s a huge hurdle there that I think people are jumping over and not paying attention to that you’re talking about, which is that emotional connection. And they are making those purchases and clicking on the ads and whatever, if they have that emotional connection. And that sounds like you’re describing the difference between what your AI, are you calling it an agent or what are you calling the act I?

Sean Callagy (51:09.267)
Yes.

Sean Callagy (51:26.067)
That’s a great question. We’re calling them act agents, but we’re soon going to be replacing the name. have like five different choices because agent conjures up an image of other people’s stuff. And so we are going to change the word from agent.

Karin Conroy (51:28.78)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (51:35.04)
Yeah. Okay. But your AI versus what the kind of default things people are using where they’re just trying to jump to that purchase decision without going through those first critical steps of that emotional connection. So I do feel like I have a good segue at this point for the next section, which is the book review. So we have a whole library of

books that all of our guests have contributed and suggested that you should consider on your library called the Thought Leaders Library. And Sean, what is the book that you are going to recommend that people take pick up today?

Sean Callagy (52:13.055)
Yeah, it is 1997. I’m going blind. I’ve just quit my job six months out of law school and I am with my grandmother Nani. I despise garage sales. I only go to be a good grandson. I go I see a bunch of books for a dollar. One of them is named How to Make a Fortune from Public Speaking by Robert Anthony. I buy the book for a dollar.

I started reading it because my grandmother’s haggling over like, I don’t know what salt shakers for a quarter or something. Right. And she’s enjoying herself. So I’m just reading the book and this life altering what this book stands for is that what you know, Karen, and I’m sure you teach your people all the time. You talked about authority, authority is created by the person on the microphone. is the primary authoritative sourcing from the days of the master knees.

right? The ancient Greek order who caused people to rise in March, the power of the stage and the microphone is indescribable. That book unblinded me to that truth. I don’t, I wouldn’t say it’s like the greatest book ever in every way, but it is foundationally true. I believe that we do not even begin to appreciate the power of the stage and the microphone and Robert Anthony in his brilliant simple book, how to make a fortune from public speaking.

presented a life altering value for me for a dollar at a garage sale.

Karin Conroy (53:41.824)
I love this idea because I have not read the book, but if I had to guess, it’s not that you’re going to stand up on the stage and then the next day you’re going to get a call that is obviously going to provide your fortune. It’s that this is going to be a foundational idea, like you said, that then leads you as this influential authority figure that then leads down that path to all of the fortunes that he’s talking about. So it’s not that

you know, this speaking engagement, I think a lot of people tie a speaking engagement to a direct like ROI. How many clients did I get directly from that speaking engagement? It’s like, that is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the broader scale impact that you make by being in front of that audience and having, and whether that’s an audience on a stage, whether you’re doing these podcast appearances, whether it’s showing up in media appearances.

Wherever it is, it’s those places of authority and influence that people look at you differently because you were there. Yeah.

Sean Callagy (54:45.843)
Yeah. Or maybe and, and I totally agree. Corinne, two things. First, I spoke on Tony Robbins stage 19 times. I never earned a dime from doing so directly. I never sold a single thing that was mine. And it was categorically, utterly life altering the value I received. Number one, number two, what if the value sometimes is just who you meet and what if.

Karin Conroy (54:48.78)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (55:00.259)
directly.

Karin Conroy (55:14.871)
Right.

Sean Callagy (55:15.785)
Karin, the value for us today is meeting each other from this speaking engagement on your incredible podcast. And what if we end up doing more together? So the value can happen in so many different ways, sorry, so many different directions. I couldn’t agree more. And this is what that book began to help me see.

Karin Conroy (55:19.789)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (55:23.596)
Yeah, exactly. 100%.

Karin Conroy (55:30.338)
Right, yeah, it’s okay.

You’re very excited about it.

Yes, yeah, to just kind of expand the thinking behind, instead of just this narrow idea of this one line between this speaking engagement and this X amount of money, it’s this much more expansive idea that can really be the core of how you build that entire fortune. Yes, awesome. Okay, so when people, we’re getting to the end of the episode, when people…

Sean Callagy (55:58.514)
Amen. Thank you.

Karin Conroy (56:04.675)
get to the end of the episode and they’re thinking back on everything that you were talking about, there’s a lot of big idea theoretical concepts in terms of just kind of coming to your law firm with heart and being centered in terms of making these connections and these human connections with people that will actually then raise you to the level of having a level of influence on them. But what is the main takeaway?

that you want people to think about in terms of this whole episode and everything we’ve talked about.

Sean Callagy (56:38.015)
Sure. Thank you for that, Karin. My proposal to everybody is one, to realize that influencing humans is the only attainable superpower. Footnote, I’ll have like the thing and a do not. Do not be a cynic. Do not be a cynic. It is an anti-hero characteristic and it repels growth-driven people. So if you want to be respectfully not making the money you want, you’re be working like an animal.

Karin Conroy (56:52.084)
I love it.

Sean Callagy (57:05.883)
and telling each other how screwed up everything else is, you being a cynic will draw that like a magnet to you. And growth driven people will run from you like you are the plague. You’re not a cynic, you’re conditioned to be so. So first, understanding influence is superpower. Influence is destroyed by cynicism. Second, it is knowing which yeses to cause, which yeses should you be causing most now is ecosystem mergers and ecosystem is any self identifying group of people.

You create a gas with the people who lead those ecosystems with people that you want to build things with or ideal clients for you. Not because you say, Hey, let me in and speak at your event. Like good luck with that. Find their pain points, create value friends. What I did with Tony Robbins. That’s why we have partnerships with medical societies across the country. We found their pain points and we solve them and their pain point wasn’t so I could sell my stuff to their people. That’s not their pain point. Find their pain point. Second and third,

condition yourself to a new identity as an ingenious, brilliant developer of business and influence with integrity in the world, using door fins along the way to help bridge the massive fear, the massive fear of rejection for a failure cortisol. It’s going to pour into your system as you’re going to change. And all these people around you can say that guy and carry, you know, car in and all these people that guys showing Cal, you don’t know what they’re talking about, right? Listen only to the people.

who have what you wanna have. I’m a blind guy with a billion dollar value company that doesn’t have to work a day in my life, nor to my great grandchildren ever if they don’t want to. So if you wanna listen to a person who doesn’t have that, God bless, you’ll have what they have or listen to people who do. Those are my final takeaways, Karin.

Karin Conroy (58:44.183)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (58:48.429)
Right.

Sean Callagy (59:52.543)
Amen.

Amen. And what if we stop watching the news? What if we stop making politics religion? I’m not a Democrat nor Republican. What if we stop watching news? What if we stop watching these things? And what if we took care of our own household, our own ecosystem? What if we created abundance, vision? It’s not it’s not easy. But it is quite simple and short. And it’s just much more fun. It’s so much more fun. Listen, I get frustrated. I

I curse sometimes I yelled sometimes I don’t judge people and call them names. So I’m not like acting like I’m sitting there at like an Azen Buddhist temple, right? But I’m a peak performance athlete and let’s go have vision and let’s go win championships together. It’s a lot easier to win business championships than athletic championships, because athletics that can only be one winner each season in business that can do lots and lots of winners. See the truth. Cynics live in lies, right? And sort of Piana people sometimes, but growth driven.

I call them G-Hicks, know, Karin. Growth-driven, heart-centered, integrist people committed to mastery, how I relate to you, I feel it, I mean it sincerely. I collect relationships with G-Hicks in my life. That’s what I do, and I invite people to do the same.

Sean Callagy (01:01:50.751)
It’s an honor and I am very clear that you’re person that can help these fine folks listen to this woman. I’m going to as well. Thank you.