Five More Steps with Jason W. Gallo

A lot of leaders talk about resilience. Far fewer can explain how to turn resilience into something a whole team can actually use when the pressure is on. Grant McGaugh sits down with Jason Gallo to trace that shift from a “power through it” mindset to authentic leadership built on tools, trust, and empowerment, shaped by Jason’s Brooklyn upbringing and a Grand Canyon moment where the only goal was “five more steps.” 

From there, we zoom out to the biggest workplace shift many of us will ever live through: artificial intelligence. Jason lays out why AI will surpass the impact of the internet and cloud, how agentic AI changes the way work gets done, and why trust infrastructure matters as much as technical infrastructure. We talk candidly about the anxiety people feel when new tools show up overnight, the adoption curve that follows every major platform change, and what leaders can do right now with training, communication, and the humility to say, “We don’t have all the answers.” 

Jason also shares a practical story from inside Cisco: “corporate camouflage,” the stuffed elephant that gave a room full of executives permission to be heard, and how that kind of vulnerability can unlock real innovation. We dig into mentorship as a “board of directors” (including devil’s advocate mentors), representation in tech, and how Cisco is transforming its ecosystem through the Cisco 360 partner program using co-design with roughly 35,000 partners worldwide. We close with a personal reminder on prostate cancer awareness and prevention. 

If you found this helpful, subscribe, share the episode with a leader navigating AI change, and leave a review. What’s one trust-building move your team needs to make this month?

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

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Transcript

Voice Over IP Roots And Welcome

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome everybody to the Follow Brand Podcast. This is Grant McGall, and I get an opportunity to talk to someone that I've been wanting to talk to probably since the beginning of 2026. That is Jason Gallo. And there's a lot of reasons behind that. If anybody's done the history of my story, I started at uh especially in South Florida in 1998, doing uh a VIA, Lucent ATT, got into the you know communications, digital, uh voicemail world. And then this little company called Cisco came along, and they know they were just this tiny little router company, right? And they said, you know what, we can do voice over IP. We can we can actually put this on a data network and and do this at a much lower cost. And we laughed about that. These guys kicked our natural butts. I mean, I mean, they just put it on the map when it came to voice over IP, and they did it so well because data and the data engineering and what was happening in that world, they understood that that telephony was really just an application on the data network. They proved it, they won that particular battle, they did a great job. But Jason Gallard does a lot in the partner community, but he has a story that I think will be very interesting for us to truly unpack and understand. So, Jason, welcome to the Father Brand Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Happy to be here and uh great to be a part of uh this uh episode and here for your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Absolutely. Now, you're from everybody has an origin story, and I I love origin

Brooklyn Origins And Early Lessons

SPEAKER_01 1:30

stories, right? Because I'm a big Marvel fan. I love Spider-Man. Spider-Man has a fantastic origin story. Now you're from Brooklyn. I gotta hear what is the Jason Gallo origin story?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Yeah, so I I often uh uh share a little bit about uh that background. Just a kid from Brooklyn, as I like to say. Uh find myself in the tech industry, uh, like uh not so many of uh my students or uh my buddies growing up who were from Brooklyn, but yeah, 1980s version of what Brooklyn looked like. You know, I know Brooklyn is uh quite different nowadays. My dad used to preach in front of crowds at uh Yankee Stadium. Uh mom was the third uh New York City sanitation woman ever and a 9-11 first responder. So uh she had quite the impact on my life, as you can imagine. Uh and my grandparents, you know, they were uh also big in my life, local entrepreneurs. Uh they sold genuine simulated wood. And uh that was my simulated wood. That's interesting. You know, I learned marketing from that experience, right? Genuine simulated wood. And uh had a local furniture store, and so that was my my first job. So humble beginnings, um, box boy at the furniture store, and you know, really just uh a kid from Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Well, we gotta keep unpacking that story because you go from that that that particular fun found fundamental beginning, right? Very well grounded, but now you're leading one of the largest uh partner programs within Cisco Systems, which is a leading tech company that people don't know uh what

Grit, Mentors, And Five More Steps

SPEAKER_01 3:05

you're doing. How do you go from there to there? I mean, that that's a big, big gap in story, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah, so I appreciate you uh calling that out. I guess for me, that that background, if you will, it always uh instilled in me leadership and this idea of uh being able to be the first to accomplish things. And and you know, when people think that something's impossible, uh, there was truly this belief, whether again it was for my dad preaching, my mom being the one of the first sanitation women ever, if that meant uh what it was going to take to put our kids through college, um, that nothing is impossible. And you really just have to persevere and push through it. Um, but I think the evolution as you go from that to, you know, um understanding leadership at a different level um was a part of uh my personal growth. So I often tell the story where around 2003, I was finishing up University of Chicago, had the uh opportunity to um go to Booth School of Business and learn tremendous amount there. But I found myself after that back in Brooklyn with a group of friends and was sharing similar uh uh sentiment or thoughts as I just shared with your audience, which is, you know, everyone can just, you know, push through their limits and you can be the first, and nothing is impossible. But what I missed at the time when talking to a bunch of friends is that you know, one of my friends was really going through a life crisis. And that advice doesn't necessarily always work, like be the first and push through. I had missed the point, uh, which is you know, that there's more to it and there's more to leading um than simply just just pushing people. And so I fast forward past that incident with a my friend in Brooklyn a few years later, uh, had a buddy of mine, uh, a mentor of mine, who said, Hey, let's cross the Grand Canyon together. And like, okay, a Grand Canyon Rim to rim challenge. And by mile 15, my mind, I'm just completely given out. But he had already planned this list of questions and things to talk about to pass the time. By mile 20 or so, you know, the body starts to give out, and he had already instructed us to have some electrolytes and extra water, etc. Uh, and by mile 24, my legs literally gave out. I mean, I literally collapsed on the ground. Uh, and at that point, my friend sat with me and periodically uh we thought through how do we take five more steps?

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

At least figure out how to, you know, move forward in a progressive way. Um, and I'll never forget that moment because I learned what I had missed with my friend back in Brooklyn, uh, which is that real leadership, yes, it is about being the first, believing that you can push through, that the impossible is possible, and all of those things. But what my mentor taught me was that along the journey, you have to also equip the team with the proper tools that unlock their strengths.

unknown 6:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

And that empowering moment uh allowed me, obviously, to finish uh that uh Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim challenge. But it was where I went from that Brooklyn kid mindset that was I can power through, I can be resilient, I had the grit to I have to have all of that as a foundation, but I have to then empower those around me to also unlock their unique strengths uh and lead in a different way. And so when we talk about going from that one mindset to where I'm at today, um, I I really attribute it to those few incidents.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

You mirror what you just put forth as your story, is what I wrote about in my latest book. I came out with a book in 2025. It's just right behind me here on first light, and that is called The Brave Patch of Authentic Leadership. And what you just talked about is exactly some of the principles that I bring forth. Because you gotta first get to your identity, right? And you really won't know your identity until you've gotten through you, you you got challenged to your core, and you really found out how much you had to take. And I love what you just said about five more steps. Well, you got nothing, you I said I got nothing. How do you take five more steps with that encouraging voice? You can do it. This is how you do it. Here's the tools, I'm gonna show you how to do it, and then that skill set, but that mindset, that mindset shift is so important to get to that next level. I call it my brave framework, which is now you gotta get your identity. Now you truly know yourself at a much deeper level than you did before. Now you can be more resilient as you start to go through these different things. You still want to move forward, you still want to be that that first, that gun roll, but you're doing it as not only just your I, yourself, but then as we how do we get there? And I can see why you're now leading the partner world in what you're doing, and then being authentic about it because you got to be real uh in what you're doing, right? And have that vision, and then you execute on that. I see that a lot in what you just said, and your true, I'm gonna call it a Spider-Man moment.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

You know, I love it, I love it, and I think you're right. It exactly mirrors that that shift from the me to the we.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

And this is important now because I feel we've both been in this technology platform from a long time. I got in with voice over IP, which I talked about, and start to get into social and mobile compute, cloud computing. I've watched Cisco grow along along that whole entire stratum. We're now in, and probably in our lifetime, we'll never see such a technological leap in an AI era. Artificial intelligence

Agentic AI And The Trust Problem

SPEAKER_01 9:05

is everywhere, and now you're seeing these huge investments in infrastructure, which is where Cisco kind of sits. What do you see now as you look out that lens in the partner world? Because they've got a now upskill in a lot of different areas. And it's not just marketing is one thing, and I love how you said that too. How you sold your parents, you know, how they sold the wood. Because I see a lot of people selling a lot of um uh synthetic wood out there and calling it artificial intelligence, and like, well, what were you doing, you know, before you know 2022? Like, you know, but I see a lot of that out there, but they've got an upskill. What are you doing now in in your world to help people to be authentic in their AI journey?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, great, great question. And I'll tell you, as you mentioned, um, this is a once in a decade, if not once in a lifetime, uh type of a transformation that we're seeing. Uh, you know, AI, I believe, and and the folks here at Cisco, we definitely believe that it'll surpass the impact of you know other breakthroughs that we've lived through, like the internet or cloud, or you mentioned you know, voice over IP and telephony. You know, it's it's truly something that's going to reshape every industry. Um, we're also seeing uh not just uh AI as a tool, AI is now becoming much more of a teammate. We're moving towards these uh uh agentic AI uh capabilities where you know companies and workforces will consist of not just billions of people, but billions of people and AI agents that are interacting at once. Um, you know, the share of the scale of what we're talking about and the advancement, the speed uh is it's gonna dwarf anything that we as a society, frankly, I believe, has uh had to tackle or transform through. Um, and there's two things required to do that. You know, one is a platform, what you described, you know, that that transition from a platform uh where you, you know, you just have a whole new setup, a whole new structure of how um the landscape works. But the second is trust. And I think when you go through a change, a transformation, an impact that's this large, uh trust has to also be elevated uh to allow that that innovation to sink in.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

A hundred percent. I call it the trust infrastructure. What you just said, what we're talking about, it's not just the technological platform change, it's the social work construct change. Where do I fit in? There's a lot of um anxiety out there now. Where do I sit? I mean, what job function will I have? Uh, I put our commercial out just recently where I showed, like, if you sat down, you you nailed Microsoft in a suite of products. You just nailed, you, you just own PowerPoint and and Teams and Excel, and you were just great. And you sat down at this new um boardroom, and there's new individuals there, and they're opening up ChatGPT, they're opening up Canva, Claude, Gamma, I mean, all these other tools, and you're like, oh, I'm a little bit behind. So there's a gap there. The trust factor is number one, am I obsolete? Number two, do I have the ability to get more get the training that I need to get there? Number three, the industry is still defining itself, so so we don't really know exactly how this all is gonna play out. From a leadership perspective, how are you dealing with that?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yeah, that's that's exactly the the change that I I uh am describing there. Uh again, Cisco will handle the technological, the infrastructure side of it, but that trust uh infrastructure, if you will. Uh I'll share

Corporate Camouflage And The Elephant

SPEAKER_00 12:55

another story. So a few years ago, I was part of a special task force here at Cisco, uh, and the idea was we were going to launch this breakthrough technology. Every function sent a single uh representative that was going to support from you know their their functional understanding and expertise uh and success of this initiative. It really meant, besides, you know, helping support the company, it was like a career ticket to vice presidency and senior roles. So there's there was definitely a lot at stake for those of us who were selected. And yet we were regularly flying into these high-level meetings, and it wasn't quite clicking. To your point, you get in there and you'd have people opening up different things, et cetera. Uh, we were nodding even when we didn't really understand what someone was saying. We looked a line, but we might not really be prioritizing some of you know the challenges that a different function was bringing up because we we had our own concerns. I like to call it we were dressed in corporate camouflage.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

And that corporate camouflage, you know, it's I think a lot of us uh in our our you know, companies and our day-to-day jobs, we we wear that. We're protecting ourselves of the things we know that we have our own priorities, or sometimes the things we don't know and we aren't, you know, trusting enough to reveal uh that we are just aren't aware or don't have that that knowledge yet. Um, but that also causes a stifling of innovation, I believe. And so one day at this project, um a senior Cisco exec, she walks in, Nina Lualdi. I've always given her so much credit being a mentor of mine, but uh very unique uh purple streak in her hair, Bahamian jewelry, you know, she comes in with this stuffed animal elephant under her arm. And we're all like, well, wait a minute, we're very serious executives here. What is this? Um, and so she places this elephant right in the middle of the table. And some people laughed it off for me. I was okay, she's got my attention. What is this? And what we learned in that moment um was that this stuffed animal was really the embodiment of why we weren't innovating, why we weren't able to break through as a team working on this this launch. It was the proverbial elephant in the room. Uh-huh. And so some of your audience, I'm sure, is familiar with like in kindergarten, you get a talking stick, which is like permission to speak. Yeah. This was permission to be heard. Uh, and what we found is when an individual grabbed that elephant, it was uh an empowering moment that said, Hey, I really am being vulnerable enough to grab a stuffed animal elephant in a boardroom setting. But at the same time, I really need you to hear this. Um it changed the room. And for a second, if you take a step back, you know, in big meetings, there's a lot of us who may not speak up, or there's something you didn't understand, you stay quiet, or the stakes aren't even that high. Like someone has broccoli in their teeth and you just don't say anything. You know, that's that moment of not being able to trust and speak up that we're talking about here. Uh, and yet that elephant, it it allowed us to break through and have real innovation because you you took that that that disconnect, that corporate camouflage out of the room the second somebody grabbed it. So I guess in this era of AI, we're gonna have all that innovation. And yes, there are brown, groundbreaking ideas from brilliant people. There's technology that's going to uh hopefully inspire the world to do things differently. Um, but without that trust infrastructure, as you put it, I think the reality is the innovation is only going to be absorbed so far in our jobs and in our uh expectations of what the promise of the technology can bring, unless we're able to bring a diverse group of brilliant minds together and understand the new use cases uh and let those ideas flow in a way where everybody has permission to be heard.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

This is what you're saying is so important. I want the audience to truly lean in on this. We're going into the great unknown, whether we want to or not, kicking and screaming, just like we all went through COVID, it was a giant experiment for the entire planet uh to go through the shutdown and reopening. And all of a sudden, digital technology became at the forefront because the only way we could socialize and talk to one another. We're going through something similar, I believe. Meaning we don't have all the answers, and we have to admit it. We have to admit it, we don't have all the answers. From the top to the

Adoption Curves, Training, And Vulnerability

SPEAKER_01 17:35

bottom, we truly don't have all the answers. And I go back to some of the things that I remember learning, especially, and I go back to that voice over IP world, you know, in the Cesco world. Um, meaning we would talk to a certain set of individuals within the company and say, hey, we're gonna go ahead and change out our telephony system. Uh, we've had this telephony for a very long time, very, very long time, and it worked. Um, and you want to come out with this shiny new object, okay. I think we'll go ahead and do that. Not only four or five people do that, not everybody. Not understanding that that technology actually touches everybody in the community, and they all utilize it in a certain manner and a certain way. So when you change um their uh way of doing work, their workflow, and you give them a new technology, and then they have to decide individually am I gonna adopt it or not? Am I gonna use it or not? I'm gonna try and find some work away to get back to where I used to know how to do things and not move forward. So you get that resistance, and that that that that that pushback on the adoption of new technology is a very real thing. And I have found that the only way we got around that is through training, through communication to really talk through like the reason why we're doing it this way or this new tech, whatever it may be, is because it's gonna be it's gonna make you better in the long run. It might be a little bit of an angst in the short run, but in the long run, it's gonna be better. And as we look back at that, not everybody uses these types of technologies and they don't think twice about it. You look at mobile. I remember me on the cell phone world. I remember I'm why don't need to say I'm never gonna take a phone call in my car. That's ridiculous. I would never do that until all of a sudden I started seeing they had email on my phone and some other things on my phone. I said, Well, this is kind of cool. I kind of like this, right? I think that's the same thing with AI. There's gonna be some pushback around it, like, hey, I don't want somebody, you know, they can duplicate my voice, they can do this, they can do that. It's not good, this is bad, and you're changing how I do work. And so there's an adoption curve that is there. I know you see that because you see the partner community at Cisco, and then there's there's a ton of people connected to that. They're all trying to jump on board for some things, things, but then the population that you're looking to influence, meaning the business owner or the corporation, they're like, hey, you're kind of pushing this on me. Am I ready for this? Are you really ready for this, or you're not ready for this? And I go back to what I'm trying to say, my making my point is are we supplying the right communication? Are we supplying the right training and understanding? And can we say in our vulnerable state, we don't know everything? We we really don't, but we we assume that this is gonna be a better path forward.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Absolutely. Well, and and I think that is the the mindset that we we have to get into at an individual level, at a team level, at a company level, and then across the industry as well as a whole.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

So we're gonna continue along those lines of the story. And I'm gonna I'm going to ask you this.

Representation In Tech And Mentor Types

SPEAKER_01 20:55

I'm gonna speak a little bit to that elephant in the room. That is, and I've I've been in technology 30 plus years, and I would be very honest with you, Jason. I could count on my hand most likely. How many times I walked into that room, and the key decision maker of an IT project was a person of color? Just a fact. And in the technology realm, you see that that that that there's a very low percentage of people represented in that world out yet. This is something that affects us on a daily basis all the time. How do you overcome that in that in that first mode that you had? And what do you see about when other technologists are out there, people that are looking to get into those worlds? What advice would you have for them?

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah, sure. Well, in general, I uh definitely resonate with that. Cause uh until recently, uh it's now a hundred percent of the times, I guess, when I walk in the room, there's a uh diverse leader because I'm walking in. But besides that, um I I certainly can understand uh for uh A lot of folks, what uh that may feel like and and understanding how to break through in those environments. Uh, I'll tell you though, the the the key is again coming back down to that human level, uh, we're all experiencing uh career journey and ambitions, and you know, what are those things that make us more alike than different? Um, and I will tell you the uh key for me was a mentor. Uh I was actually a part of a uh a McKinsey leadership pipeline at one point. And the thing I learned that um quite often is not taught is a mentor is not a single thing. Um, and a mentor, um, there's about 12 different versions of what a mentor can look like. A mentor is not necessarily somebody who's gonna tell you what you want to hear all the time. Um, there's a mentor who may be a connector and they're just going to connect you with different people. There's a mentor who's the coach and providing you some of that, you know, input that you need to hear and boost you. Uh, there might be a mentor who's a visionary, and they're like, look, just look ahead. If you look two to three years out, four to five years out, whatever it may be, having a career plan. And you'll get different mentors, and you should have that board of directors uh who can help you see through that. But often you might walk into a room where someone doesn't think like you, doesn't look like you. Um, and that's not always a bad thing. And it was when I shifted my mindset to understand that there's such a thing called the devil's advocate mentor, um, where I can learn just as much from somebody who doesn't think like me, who's disagreeing with my ideas, um, and is basically revealing potential holes in where we need to go, the journey that we're laying out in our strategy. Um, I still may not agree with them by the time I walk out the door. Yeah, but I'm way more informed when I'm in that room uh with uh a set of opinions uh and perspectives that I may not have walked in with. And so I've come to appreciate uh that in a different way. And I think the rooms that I'm in respond differently to me because I now have uh and make space for that type of additional perspective to enter into the strategy or to the uh initiative that we're crafting.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

That is so important. I call that the contrarian, contrarian archetype. You know, I bring up Spider-Man. Spider-Man, will Spider-Man be Spider-Man without the Green Goblin? Right. I don't think he agreed with everything what the Green Goblin was doing, but there was a relational tie. The contrarian is a part of that world of opposites that are just there. That not everybody will, you're not gonna agree, but you can agree to disagree. You know, this but they have a they have a they have a role to play in understanding that in the holistic uh world that you've got to see see all the different moving parts, and everybody has a different agenda, and for them, that agenda is over there. They might be more of a plateau guy, you might be more of a mountain guy. Uh doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just that's the direction that they want to move in, and you want a direction of moving toward the top of the mountain, right? All those things are very important to understand the perception. I go back to that first thing I said about brand identity. You have to understand not only how you see yourself, but how others see you. How you're seeing the room, how they're seeing the room, having that a complete set, and I think AI helps because I do that a lot when I'm communicating and about to develop whether it's going to be an email or some kind of post or some kind of communication. I say, how does that the person that I'm looking to send an email? If I'm sending Jason Galloway an email, how does he view that? And it'll come back with a whole different view. And I'm like, oh, well, that changes my whole email output. I like that about AI that I can do some modeling, which I really couldn't do before at speed, right? And understand these different perspectives. Like, all right, I'm not seeing everything because we even right now you can only see maybe 180 degrees, not 360. So AI is an agent, as you said, maybe it gives you a little bit more viewpoint. That's gonna be a good thing. When you're talking now to your partner community, and they they're going through this shift, this change, and there's a lot of things on the table that they're they're looking at. What kind of conversations are you having with them?

Cisco 360 Co-Design With 35,000 Partners

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Yeah, uh, appreciate you asking that. Um, what I would tell you is there's a couple of things that um, as you mentioned, the the partner program, Cisco 360, uh is what we call it here at Cisco. And we recently uh announced that back in the uh late January, early time uh February timeframe. Uh biggest transformation in Cisco's partner program in 30 plus years. Um, and we have about 35,000 partners globally. So these are businesses that are you know really generating um uh profit and driving uh experiences and satisfaction with their customers who are you know um uh purchasing the Cisco technology and outcomes. And so it's it's a vast network of companies having to work together in the midst of a major overhaul of uh this program that stitches the community together and creates the connective tissue, if you will, uh, across all of these businesses. And so your question is quite um uh uh relevant in that, you know, you uh as a leader uh who, if you find yourself in that position, you're trying to bring along um multiple uh businesses across different global settings, across different government policy and how economics and taxation works. And how do you find that core um truth that can move the whole community forward? And we decided we couldn't do that on our own. And and we stepped out of our comfort zone and put in place uh something called co-design. And we're really getting a lot of um uh accolades for doing this, and and I'll say being very um uh courageous as a vendor to announce the partner program 18 months before it was even fully designed. And at first it was quite the shock for the community. It's like, well, you're you're Cisco, don't you have all the answers? And what's the FAQ? And give me the, you know, the webinar to show us all the answers. And we were like, no, we're actually announcing this and it's not done. And that was a surprise when you have, you know, again, 35,000 plus business owners and companies saying, Well, why would you announce something that's not done? You're you're gonna cause disruption. And you know, being a Cisco gold partner was was known in the industry. Um, isn't that gonna cause a challenge? And what we realize it at first may cause uh some, like any big transformation, uh a level of um change that we're all gonna have to work our way through. But in the long run, what it allowed us to do was co-design it together.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Everyone was bought in, everyone's fingerprints were on the clay. And so what we ultimately came out with uh was a much better solution that not only worked for Cisco, um, but it has now been received by the partners in a way uh that we could not have expected. Um we were just overjoyed with how a transformation at this scale didn't break major parts of this ecosystem, these these partnerships, these alliances that we've you know forged for so many years, because simply we listened and we co-designed it uh in a way that wasn't this is the answer and take it. It was um not a level of arrogance. It was we're gonna co-design this and listen to what the community needs, and then iteratively build the policies around what makes all of us stronger.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Love that, love that, love that because they have skin in the game. Obviously, you're affecting a lot of things, not just you know, yourself, it's everybody. So many people use these systems. I don't know if the audience is aware, but a lot of the routing that takes place, how the internet actually worked, the internet wouldn't be without Cisco systems, let me tell you that. Um, and they were still doing so much more innovation as they move forward. We're gonna conclude here, but before I do, I want to give you back the mic and anything that you would like to let us know that is important to you that we have not covered, uh coming from Brooklyn. I'm not gonna talk about the Knicks, but you might, you might, you might talk about the Knicks, but but anything else that you want to bring up, go go right ahead. I'll give you the mic.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Uh sure, absolutely. Um, so I I I am uh a New York fan, so I I definitely have to say, you know, let's go, Knicks, and and maybe more importantly, I love my Met. So I hope it turns out to be a good

Prostate Cancer Awareness And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 31:10

season. You can see the hat here in the background. Um, but also uh just in terms of men's health, I uh often when I have a chance to uh try and help remind everybody about prostate cancer. I lost my dad in 2020 and uh great, great guy. And it was one of those things where uh it's totally preventable. It's a um uh an unfortunate uh cancer that if you don't catch it early enough, uh it causes uh quite a lot of problems. And like I said, we lost him. Um but there's some great organizations out there like uh Zero Prostate. Uh they do local races and help support uh those types of um uh fundraising and and and benefits for uh people in need. And so uh if uh thank you for giving me a chance to kind of mention that, that would be one I would encourage uh is often forgotten. Um, but it it's certainly one of those things that takes uh some loved ones away from us that uh I'd ask your audience to consider supporting if they can.

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Oh, that without question, I'm all about health. I cut my teeth a lot in healthcare technology as well to actually help, uh, especially with the messaging, understanding what can be done in the healthcare realm. You can get to it early, early and often, especially for men. Get yourself checked out. Just get yourself checked out. There's no reason not to do that and then go through the process if you do. I think it's some the the numbers are pretty high about how many men actually will get prostate cancer um in this world. So, you know, don't don't say it won't happen to you is this is the thing, right? Right. So that one look like Arsenal, how do they get if the artist says, hey, how do we get in contact with you? What is the best possible way?

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Uh so LinkedIn, uh you can find me at Jason W. Gallo uh on LinkedIn, and uh I am very active. Uh will respond to uh messages, but also you'll see me post a lot of great stuff around AI, where we're headed with cybersecurity uh and the new innovations and things that we talked about on your show here today.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Excellent, excellent. Jason, this has been wonderful. I want to thank you. I want to thank your Cisco team and thank our audience for continuing to tune in to all the episodes of Follow Brand. They can see all of our episodes at five star medium. That is the number five that are star s t a r, be for brand, d for development, informasters.com. I want to thank you so much again for being on the show. All right, appreciate you. Thank you for the time. No problem. You take care of yourself.