Podcast #5 – From Prisoner of War to CEO: Jas Krdzalic’s Unbelievable Journey

Doug Dvorak (00:01.774)
Good day Mission Possible podcast community. I’m your host Doug Dvorak and I’m extremely excited to bring you inspiring stories from incredible guests.

These individuals are on a mission to create remarkable possibilities that not only enhance their own lives, but also make a lasting impact on the communities they serve and the communities they live in. Stay tuned for some truly amazing conversations. My guest today is Jas Krdzalic. Jas, welcome.

Jas (00:46.477)
Well, hi, hi. Thank you for having me. It’s exciting to be here.

Doug Dvorak (00:50.058)
Excellent excellent. We’ve had a great couple of weeks here at Tamarack Resort in Donley, Idaho with some great snow and it was great seeing you and your family and taking some turns Jas is currently the general manager of digital marketplace for Albertsons He’s the former president and CEO of bodybuilding.com and before assuming the role in 2016 Jas spent 12 years at Micron technology culminating in a six-year period

as a senior director of strategy and operations. He is also a former member of the Federal Reserve. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Idaho and an MBA from Northwest Nazarene University. Again, welcome, Jas.

Jas (01:32.384)
Yeah, good to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to share all these stories and experiences with your listeners.

Doug Dvorak (01:39.618)
Yeah, I think it was about 18 months ago we had you over and you were talking and I knew of your stellar accomplishments from an education perspective to the Federal Reserve, bodybuilder.com and now at Albertsons, but I really didn’t know your back story. You were taken as a prisoner of war and tell us a little bit about that journey when you came here and what that meant to you.

Jas (02:07.574)
Yeah, so maybe a little bit of a background and a context. So I was born and raised in former Yugoslavia. You might predate some of our listeners, right? It’s back in the 90s now that we’re starting to talk about the war. But when the former Yugoslavia separated into multiple states, the typical way that countries separated through some form of a conflict, right? So we had a pretty…

pretty big and pretty bloody conflict from 1991 to 1996 in that region. I was born in a state of Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia, today known as Bosnia Herzegovina, sovereign country today. And in 1993, our town succumbed to the…

to the battle and we were all captured. I say we, I’m talking civilians, soldiers, everybody that was in the town. We were captured and spent close to a year in what is commonly known as a concentration camp, a prison camp, prisoner of war type of encampment. That experience we can obviously elaborate on it. It’s not something we gloss over.

After the Daytona agreement was signed, this was during Clinton’s presidency, the camps were disbanded, but obviously the life, as you know, it has changed. It’s never going to be the same. One thing that I always feel that it’s never talked about is the post-war environment is not…

While nobody’s dying, it’s not much better in any other ways. Socially, economically, it’s really in a tough environment. And then if you’re particularly gonna be residing in an area that now it’s under your former enemy’s control, you can assume the second class citizen lifestyle, which is not something that anybody would desire, nor is something…

Jas (04:06.026)
that we lived like before. that was a quick and easy decision for us not to continue our lives in the region.

We’ll elaborate a little bit on circumstances of getting out, but eventually late 1994, October precisely, my family and I, my family is just my folks. I’m a single child of two parents. We relocated to Twin Falls, Idaho of all places. At a time I knew nothing about Twin Falls, frankly of Idaho either, you know, kind of an unbeaten Looking back on 30 years now, that was probably one of the biggest blessings of our lives is that we

moved to Twin Falls Idaho.

Doug Dvorak (04:48.088)
Jas, real quick, did they predetermine where you and your family were going or did you have an option to come to Twin Falls?

Jas (04:55.275)
Yeah, so the process, was a company, a company organization, a material organization called International Organization for Migrations, and they were specifically during that time working on migrating victims of war. So you couldn’t just be a typical refugee, right? I just got displaced. No, there had to be some level of…

let’s say critical lives impaired, whether it’s death in a family and things of that age or prisoners of war like we were. And the choices were United States, Sweden and Australia. Those were the three countries that were participating in the program at the time.

But during the process, what organization does is they run a scan for your family members. So one of the things that my parents did is listed down all of the relatives that they had. Because during the war, we lost contact. And this is back in the day, no mobile phones, there’s no getting a hold of anybody anyway, plus it’s war, right? There’s no electricity or running water, let alone communication capability. And as they ran the scan for the family members, turns out that my…

dad’s sister, my aunt and her family have gone through exactly the same process and they were relocated to Twin Falls, Idaho. So organization always tries to unite families, right? Support and live together. So Twin Falls it was. At that point in time we didn’t care what it was. It could have been, you know, any place as long as it’s not there. So it worked out.

Doug Dvorak (06:20.33)
And tell me, what did you come with? Like, you know, a thousand dollars, the clothes on your back. I mean that because you left a good life. You’re an educated, your dad, your mom. You left a very good life up and until that conflict. But what did you come with?

Jas (06:24.044)
You know I appreciate that.

Jas (06:39.191)
We came up with a single bag of clothes between my mom and my dad and myself.

I don’t recall the exact number, but let’s call it a $50 in a pocket, somewhere around that, not a thousand, I can assure you of that. We did not have that kind of money. Our family in Croatia that we were staying with didn’t have that kind of money at the time either. Everybody suffered through that conflict tremendously. So when we arrived to Twin Falls, Idaho, it was kind of a real off the boat, except off the plane in this case, but it was a real kind of an off the boat situation. I recall vaguely, I was 17 years old at the time, but…

Twin Falls Airport did not look anything like it looks today. It was a shack in the middle of nowhere. And we got off the plane and the lady said, let’s go grab your bags. And we’re like, this is it. Like there’s no other bags, right? There’s nothing else, right? And I remember the refugee center lady saying, oh, these guys are real refugees. Like, I recall that comment very vividly.

Doug Dvorak (07:25.806)
Doug Dvorak (07:38.848)
Excellent. So you’ve gone through unimaginable hardships and came out the other side and as an executive and member of the Federal Reserve. Can you briefly walk us through your early life in Twin Falls and why did you choose the United States? You sort of alluded to that because of relatives, but was there anything else? Unpack that for us.

Jas (07:50.433)
Yeah.

Jas (07:58.861)
Yeah, yeah, so great question, Doug. I love that you asked that. Right, obviously I had no say in this. was 17 years old. My parents were making this decision, but…

Doug Dvorak (08:07.352)
So you had no say? was your folks made the decision and… Okay.

Jas (08:10.176)
My folks were making a decision. However, however, everything that has happened to me, I owe to my mom and dad. They made sacrifices so that I don’t have to. And the choice that they made in addition to being reunited with the family, it was really between Australia and United States. And I can tell you that the most basic human instinct was the reason for that, as far away as possible.

Right? I think that was in my dad’s mind. Sweden’s too close. Europe burns all the time. Like the war scars you in a ways where you think that every 50 years there’s gonna be a conflict in Europe. So I wanna get out of it, right? Kind of a thing. I wanna get away from it to different continent altogether. So I think he was wrestling with those two choices. Obviously his sister played a big role, reuniting with her, cause he hasn’t even seen her during the conflict at all during that time. But one thing that he has shared with me was,

Doug Dvorak (08:45.663)
Interesting.

Jas (09:03.768)
that asking a lot of people that went into diaspora before, right, after the World War II and stuff like that, those that made it to United States always reflected back on the quality of life that they had that maybe in other places was not possible. Not that you wouldn’t have a good life, but…

He was a big believer in me and he always thought that, you know, if I set this kid up, he’ll do something with it. He won’t let me down type of a thing. And he felt that United States is the best opportunity for me. So while it might’ve been easier for him to be somewhere else where maybe social life is a little bit different, maybe you get more support from government. He knew that, that, you know, I won’t let him down if he gives me the opportunity, if he makes the sacrifice. So that’s how United States of chosen.

Doug Dvorak (09:45.258)
Interesting. So the next question, but before I ask, when I was living in Chicago, my North Korean dry cleaner who made it out was very entrepreneurial and I’d always take my clothes. I traveled quite a bit and I’d go in on a Saturday, pick up my clean clothes and then drop off my dirty laundry. And he was always open on a Saturday. I went there and there was a piece of paper taped to the front door.

Sorry, customers, for the inconvenience. We will be closed for the next week. And he hadn’t closed in 10 years. We’re going to Harvard to see our daughter graduate. Talk about the American dream from your perspective. You read a lot about today. Our youth are disenfranchised. Is the American dream, from your perspective, alive and well?

Jas (10:23.244)
Yeah.

Jas (10:36.619)
I think it is. I think it’s just covered up by noise today, to be honest with you.

Doug Dvorak (10:41.462)
What kind of noise?

Jas (10:43.109)
Well, obviously political noise, but let’s not go into that realm we’re gonna be all day. a political noise is, I think the noise of the economic stability for a long time for young people feels different than it does for say, your, my generation or others. It is in our best interest for the market to stay stable, right? Because we have made our investments, we have made our assets, we want them to continue to return, we want them to be safe and stable for the remainder of our lives.

Doug Dvorak (10:45.858)
No, no,

Jas (11:10.572)
For somebody in their late 20s, early 30s, stability in the market just precludes them from participating in it. Because they don’t have the required resources, if you will, to go and buy Nvidia stock. They can’t do that today. That’s just not in the cards. They can’t get into housing because the housing’s been so strong and so good since the crisis of 2008, 2009 that…

people are priced out of the starter homes. I remember my first starter home was $115,000. There is no $115,000 homes in Idaho anymore, right? 300 is now the starting home and you think about $300,000 mortgage, what is that payment? What do you have to make? It’s a very, very different. So without benefit of crises that allow people who have been smart with their money in that position to take advantage of it,

the youth feels a little bit paralyzed by that. It feels like it’s always gonna be this way, like it’s never gonna be any kind of a cyclicality that’s gonna bring about an opportunity for them to acquire assets. And maybe it won’t be as big as say crisis of 2008, 2009 was for you and I, early 2000, 2001 or early 92, back to 1981, right? All the crisis that we can think about that generationally have allowed us to do stuff.

I think what this generation is going to experience is the largest transfer of wealth ever in the history of the world. What you can leave to your family, what I’m going to be able to leave to my family, to our kids, is hopefully going to be something that they see as that American dream that maybe the 20-year circumstance that they lived in didn’t align for the acquisition of assets.

but it did their folks and their folks can support that now. So I think it’s just noisy right now because of how the market is and how it’s been playing out and being sucked into the political vortex. That’s a topic. When I moved to United States, nobody talked politics today. You can’t have a cup of coffee without it being a conversation. So that’s a big change. So I think it’s just making the younger generation uneasy, anxious, for lack of a better word.

Doug Dvorak (13:19.234)
Yeah, but you came here with your family with a bag each and 50 bucks and look at what you, your dad, mom have been able to accomplish. just yes or no. The American dream still alive and well, albeit nuanced.

Jas (13:30.794)
Yeah, let me spend a little bit time on that.

Jas (13:35.949)
A nuance, yeah, and it was always something different. In the 90s, it was a different thing. Every generation has something. But I want to say something, Doug, that I think you’ll appreciate. Coming to United States in late 94, if there ever was a blessed time to arrive to the United States, it was then. Everything was changing. The markets were good. The economy was as stable as you can get stability.

there was a lot of innovation coming about, right? You can feel it, like PCs were not yet out, but you know that this is coming, know, this guy Gates and this group of people at Microsoft are working on something that we all gonna be able to have a computer, what an interesting concept, right? The idea of MP3 player, right? Sandisk Sansa was coming out in 1998. So you start to start thinking about like, wow, there was a very innovative period of time. There was a lot of, you know,

internet came about, dot com boom was starting to come around. So I think there was optimism in here that Americans really felt and kind of carried into their everyday lives. So not too long ago was talking with a friend and he asked me what I attribute our success to the most. And I said, well, know, outside, know, our hard work and work ethic and maybe being blessed with good health, being blessed with

you know, parents that allowed me the affluency. know, there’s a lot of stuff that worked in our favor. That way, one of the biggest things was the timing of arrival in United States. The acceptance that I felt by Americans as an immigrant was palpable. I never felt unwelcomed. I never felt like somehow I’m taking something away.

from somebody, those words were never uttered. I don’t think the thoughts were there, because somebody would utter them, but I don’t think Americans felt that way, at least not into a false idol, maybe some other place they might have. I remember our neighbors, Ren and Renee, I mean, we still stayed friends with them to today, coming over, and this is a working class family, this is not, they’re living next to refugees, so you can imagine they’re not like affluent or anything, but coming over and…

Jas (15:52.535)
Can we help you get acclimated? Can we help you understand how to go to post office United States, which is different than how you went to post office back home, how banking system works, like all these things that you take for granted, you think that they’re simple and easy, they were not. When you come into foreign country, you don’t speak the language, you don’t understand the norms. And to have that level of you’re welcome here, we want you to be an American, how can we help you, played such a big part in it.

I hope I would receive the same welcome today. Something tells me probably not. But I think that that’s one big, I would say that’s one biggest thing that America has done for us. was allowing us to be part of it really fast. I felt like integrating was easy.

Doug Dvorak (16:36.323)
Well.

Doug Dvorak (16:40.46)
Yeah, well, you know, this experiment of a multicultural democracy at 250 years, we’re still in the first or second inning, but you are proof that with a little luck, timing, hard work, focus, that,

Part of the American Dream is still available. You and your family were taken as prisoners of war, an experience that would shape anyone’s life. Can you describe and unpack the moment you were captured and what went through your mind and your mom and dad’s mind at the time?

Jas (17:11.722)
Yeah, so little bit of a background to the specific conflict in our hometown. For listeners that don’t care to study it or anything, brief, brief synopsis of the conflict in former Yugoslavia. Former Yugoslavia was a socialist country made up of, it was a federation of six states. These states were brought upon together after World War II by Marshall T. during the Communist Party.

Marshall Tito was the president for life until 1981 from the World War II. Definition of a dictator is always hard to say. Let’s call him a benevolent dictator. Everybody loved him. didn’t matter that he, I mean, it’s a dictatorship and nobody else can take power, right? It’s not a democracy. There’s no voting for the president. He is it. But he was loved. And while I’m sure that he had his flaws and things like every other human does, one thing that he really leaned hard into is brotherhood and unity.

between Serbs, Croatians, Muslims, and Slovenians, right? Those are the largest, call it nationalities, I hate that term because we were supposed to be one nation, but they allowed that separation to stay under the guide for a long period of time. But during his tenure, I think Yugoslavia thrived. We were never part of the Soviet Union, of the Eastern Bloc. was one of the independent states.

Tito was very firm with Stalin in 1948 that will go to war if you try to, you know, do something. So we built this interesting economic model there that Tito and the party built. was called market socialism. So they allowed for the development of private sector. They allowed for economic prosperity that it’s very similar to say democratic or capitalistic societies, but large, big entities, big companies were still publicly owned, i.e. owned by the government, right, ran by the government.

And social medicine, social education, all those things that you think of. As a matter of fact, as a kid, I remember going to the Adriatic coast for vacations and we would see a lot of folks from Eastern block living in the tents and kind of selling their things. That was the original Craigslist, right? Selling their things right in front of their tent. So it was always kind of interesting to think that way. Or if we wanted to travel to say Poland, Romania, or any, it was so cheap for us to travel there.

Doug Dvorak (19:26.094)
You

Jas (19:37.261)
We were their West. So it was a very different life. People felt really good about being Yugoslavian between World War II and mid to late 80s. Sarajevo hosted the Olympics in 1984. I’m sure you remember that. So the whole world was there. It was kind of a known thing. Marshall Tito died in 1981. And while benevolent dictatorship might be a really good form of government, I don’t know if it is. I didn’t study it enough.

Seems like my folks lived a good life during that time. That succession planning sucks. Very, very hard to get somebody just like that in the office, right? He didn’t pass it on to his kids. He was very careful about the nepotism and things like that. So then the, you know, kind of a last-ditch minute decision is we’re gonna do the rotation of the presidency every two years from a different state, one of the six states.

Sounds good, sounds like a novel concept, but you can imagine that comes with a lot of problems. Two years might not be a long enough term to get anything enacted. It becomes very preferential treatment. And some of that undertone of nationalism that existed before the World War II started creeping in. Like slowly, small instances, right? You can kind of see certain direction. Like every war dug, money economy plays a big part in it.

By the time 1988 rolled around following the investment made into Olympics. And by the way, side note, totally personal note, small country should never host Olympics. That will crush your economy. Right, and it did ours. A lot of volunteering happened. People worked for free to make the Olympics happen. It was a national pride and joy. But we built these venues that nobody’s gonna use ever again. That is a huge, that huge, huge investment being made on stuff that it will never return value following two weeks of events, right?

So you had, you know, with bobsledding. We’re not hosting world bobsledding championships anytime soon, right? And here’s a bobsled on Igman, right? For whom? So I think that that started to build deficiency in the economics, right? We started borrowing upon borrowing, right? Not to dissimilar to United States, but not the GDP growth, not the base of assets of value. So I don’t want anybody to think that it’s the same thing happening here. No, no, no, we’re a much, much stable economy in comparison to that.

Jas (22:03.466)
What it really culminated in by the early 90s is hyperinflation. And that we’re talking, you stand in line, say, for eggs, and by the time that your turn gets there, the eggs are more expensive than they were when you got in line. That’s the hyperinflation. And the monetary unit of the country called dinar devalued so badly, it would take you like a billion dinars to buy a pack of gum. Like it had no value, it’s just paper, right?

My dad could come home with bags of money and it’d be totally worthless. Like he could just fire start a type of a thing. Like it’s nothing. The banking system was really struggling. I don’t think that it had a way out. It just started to collapse on its own. And then the overall economy was soft in early 1991, if you recall that, right? Think about it always this way. When it’s soft in United States, it’s horrible elsewhere. So you have to really be conscious of what does that really mean in other country.

Of course, that plus that kind of an underlying nationalism starting to creep in really elevated anxiety and conflict. And I remember as a kid, I didn’t understand this, but I remember my dad being very nervous and scared watching the 14th Congress. So it was the 14th time since Marshall Tito that they are meeting, right? He kind of started transitioning the power in the late seventies. So was the 14th congressional, parliamental and

State of Slovenia, which is an independent country right now, beautiful place. If you want to see a Switzerland for less money, go to Slovenia. That’s basically it. They stood up and left the Congress, right? Went to referendum and people voted to secede from the Union. And as you know, no secession from the Union is ever done without a little bit of blood being spilled, right? But that conflict, while it was kind of jarring,

It just came on the heels of Ceausescu overthrow in Romania, like the whole Balkan area was just kind of tinder boxing a little bit during that time. Sporadic shootings in Slovenia, but for the most part, the Slavija National Army pulled out of Slovenia. You can imagine Slovenia has completely abandoned a lot of that were in the army during that time. It was a mandatory 18 to 20 service in the army. It kind of went relatively silent.

Jas (24:31.905)
Then you get to Croatia. So we’re moving west to east, right? You can kind of see this, how this is developing. Croatia had much more diverse population than Slovenia. There were specifically two enclaves within the Croatia that housed a large Serbian community. And paramilitary forces started to build in these communities. All of a sudden you have these weird roadblocks and, you know,

I don’t wanna call him warlords, it’s probably too strong of a term, but some guy with military background is gonna be the head honcho of this little street now, right? This is gonna be his little kingdom. So that started forming and culminating in an all out war between Croatia, Serbians live in Croatia, plus the Serbia with the Yugoslavia National Army was really, really big force, right? We always prepared for an attack from the outside, only to use those bullets against ourselves, against our own people, right?

And the war in Croatia was bloody. At that time, Bosnia, which is now by far the most diverse state, you have population that is Croatian, Serbian, Muslim population living in this very, very small country. I always tell people geographically Bosnia is 130 miles across, straight line. That’s a distance from Boj Siatohut to Twin Falls, Idaho. That’s the country.

Right? And you got like four million people living there of all these different, calling nationalities. And I’m not an anthropologist, so somebody else can explain this better. just my perspective. Interesting to see then a lot of desertion from Yugoslavia National Army by young Bosnian Muslim men and Croatian men, because they felt that Yugoslavia National Army was attacking Croatia, because Croatia was also referendum to secede from the Union.

got recognized by the EU, Germany first, then United States, others as an independent country. Same thing is now coming to Bosnia, right? And I’ll never forget how scared my dad was watching the Bosnian parliament of the state talking, an individual by the name of Radovan Karadžić, who was the Bosnian Serb leader, standing at a podium. And he said, if Bosnia secedes from the union, one of these nationalities will…

Jas (26:58.389)
seized from face of the earth. Like it was a genocide threat on national television. Right? And a lot like you hear maybe sometimes today when the rhetoric gets really bad, nobody wants to believe it. My dad could not fathom that there’ll ever be a war in our country, that we would fight each other, that we would lose everything up in a prison camp. So you stay. Even though we probably could have left.

my mom’s sister lives in Hamburg, Germany, we probably could have left, been there, seek asylum, whatever. Nobody believes this is gonna happen in your country, right? Nobody wants to believe that. My dad, of all people, really, really was, call it patriotic, in the most naive way you can possibly be, like, we’re better than this type of a mindset. And of course, when the conflict broke,

broke out in Bosnia, initially Muslims and Croatians worked together against Serbs. Serbs were the aggressor. It felt like we were defending our little piece of land. And it became this kind of almost an enclave by enclave type of a war, Northeast completely occupied by Serbian with one little enclave called Tuzla that was a real stronghold for the Bosnian army. Northwest.

very strong Bosnian enclave, central Bosnia was strong Bosnian, Croatian enclave, Herzegovina very Croatian base. So you kind of have this small country with these very regional differences. And for your listeners, Serbians are by and large Orthodox, Croatians are by and large Catholic, Roman Catholic, and then Bosnians are by and large Muslim. One big clarification, it’s a nationality, not a religion.

This was a secular country before the war. I don’t remember anybody being religious. So let’s not call it a religious war. It’s a good excuse. It eventually became that, no question, because that’s a good way to divide people. I don’t remember any of my moms and dad friends ever going to a mosque or a church ever. And it was so diverse. My parents had friends come over every Monday and they played cards and talked and stuff like that. And if you go through these friends, they were Serbian couple, a Croatian couple.

Jas (29:12.492)
Muslim, it was a very diverse, some were even mixed marriages between the two. One lady was from Macedonia and her husband was a Croatian. So this was, to divide people that were never felt divided, now that takes some talent. It’s not like we’re not experienced it here a little bit right now, but that took that level of division. So the war exploded. Over the course of the war, I think that it is general that

that side start thinking about the end game. What does this really look like at the end? What do I get out of this? Croatian President Franjo Tujman and Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, had a meeting. Now this all came out in hogs, so I’m not coming up with something that didn’t come in public. And decided to divide Bosnia. Like big country, take half, I’ll take half and we’ll call it good, right? So the conflict between Croatians and Bosnians broke out.

So now you have everyone against everyone type of a conflict. Our town was, for the first part of the war, relatively peaceful. Let’s call it relative, because nothing’s peaceful during a war. There’s no power, there’s no running water, right? There’s nothing in the stores, stores close. I always tell everybody when there’s no milk in the store for three weeks, the war ensues. That’s usually how things work. And one morning,

This is early June, I want to say 17th. I woke up in the morning. School’s been out for a bit, right? Because bombings and air raids and all that stuff. And I my mom asking, you know, and I I’m hungry. And I said, oh, I don’t know, you know, maybe later. And all of a sudden you hear this sporadic fire. You know, the sound of a gun. can’t.

describe it but I can recognize it.

Jas (31:14.378)
I’m like, that’s weird, but you know, it’s not uncommon for somebody to get drunk and start shooting a gun. mean, everybody had a gun, like it’s war, right? Everybody’s a soldier. My mom says something’s going on and the phone rings, like the landlines, not that phone. And it’s my dad who was at work and he says, get down now. On the side of town where he was, it already started. Right, so he’s…

far apart and he’s like, I’m leaving right now. He’s gonna go to this one little neighborhood that’s just outside our, so we lived in like a condo building. Everybody lived like that, right? The big complex buildings. But there’s a housing, like a neighborhood of just homes behind it that happens to be very Bosnian nationality. No Serbs and Croatians lived there. And he’s like, I’m gonna go there during this conflict so if you can get out of the building and run over there, meet me there.

I mean, Doug, within five minutes of that phone call, the building’s on fire. Guns blazing everywhere, grenades falling, the whole roof of the house. We were on the fourth floor of a five story building. The fifth was kind of like, it had an attic feel to it, right? With a roof, that’s burning. Right, so we’re running downstairs, we’re sitting, there’s no basement in this building.

So we’re down in the hallway, tucked in a corner with rest of the people. Nobody knows really what’s happening. You hear noise outside, you hear voices of soldiers yelling, get that guy over there. Like you hear all of this. Conflict is urban, it’s urban warfare. We’re not talking some distant field. This is happening in your house, so to speak. My mom says we gotta get out of here. Because we can hear soldiers busting through the windows and coming in.

Croatian soldiers at time. So my mom and I, she decided we’re gonna run across the parking lot, jump the fence and go into the neighborhood my dad is. So she said, I’m gonna run out first. You run after me as fast as you can. If I fall, you just keep running. Reflecting back on it, maybe she shouldn’t send me first. They’re gonna be ready for me. But she meant the best, right?

Jas (33:39.597)
It was a blur, that quality. 40 yard dash was a blur. I do remember bullets whizzing and somebody, I hear the voice like, get him, you see him running over there, type of a thing. So we jumped the fence and this guy that’s three years older than me, so was 19 years old, son of my math teacher, is in a full uniform.

And he’s like, you’re fine, you’re safe, you’re safe. We’re holding him here. So he started describing, they’re approaching from here where this is the line, your building now became the line of demarcation, if you will. But he’s telling my mom, your husband, he’s over there, you guys can go meet him. So we go into this basement of a house. There is 50 people there, civilians that escaped from various places. So we’re kind of in this.

ghetto, you will, ghetto of the, you know, everything else has already succumbed. It’s just this part of town that we’re in. And I hear, I remember stories, you know, these soldiers saying, the Bosnian soldiers saying, it’s like, where did they get all this firepower? Right? Cause we were pretty evenly matched, maybe a little bit stronger in the region, but all of a sudden it felt like, wow, like where’s all these 10 tanks sitting in a field just shooting at the city? Where’d they get that? Right? Kind of a thing.

So it was all a lot of confusion. I remember being very confused and observing confusion of adults. So then I was 16 years old at the time. Well, 15 gonna be 16 in August. So that I was 15. So he grabbed me and two other guys that I was friends with. It’s a small town, 5,000 people. This is like nothing. I knew everybody. They pull us into this garage and they say, okay, do you guys know how to take apart a gun?

Kind of, but you know, we have a Cliff Notes, do we have something that we can do real fast? So they show us how to take apart an AK-47 or AK-70 in our case, Yugoslavian made. And I can still do it today, Doug. And I said, your job is to clean guns. So when the soldiers come from the frontline, they’re gonna give you the gun, you take it apart, you clean it, right? You reload their ammunition and they go. So that’s what I was doing. There was no sleeping. All you’re doing is that they’re constantly coming through and you’re loading and cleaning, cleaning guns. And then,

Jas (36:01.654)
Some guy runs in and says, I need these kids, right? I don’t know where my mom is helping injured like other women were all my dad’s, I don’t know where, probably on a frontline. They’re shooting those guns, they’re all rotating, right? And they’re like, we need these kids. Need us for what? He’s like, well, we’re running out of food. We have to cross the street.

this lady that’s there says in her house she’s got a 50 kilo flower sitting in a basement, we gotta go get it. I’m like, wait, we gotta run across the sniper alley to go get it? Yeah, and he’s like, and it has to be you, you don’t have the gear and everything, you’ll be faster, you’re younger. It’s like, you you think about that, but that’s, it’s war, right? That’s why we always laugh when people in America say, we should have a civil war. No, you don’t want to. Trust me, you don’t want that. So we ran across bullets whizzing everywhere.

50 kilo bag is heavy. Like how are we gonna get this thing across, right? My cousin, he also lives in United States now in St. Louis. He’s like, well, know, always a good mathematician. He was probably the smartest of the bunch. He’s like, well, why don’t we, why don’t we break it into smaller pieces? We can put it in smaller bags and then put those bags in a rucksack and we’ll run across. So we’re doing bullets whizzing, bombs flying everywhere, like noise, smell of burn. And here we are.

Doug Dvorak (37:02.094)
Mm-hmm.

Jas (37:29.898)
transferring flour, you know, to run it across. I’m only emphasizing that just to kind of give you the sense of sounds like a normal activity in a very abnormal state. Humans get used to abnormal really fast.

Doug Dvorak (37:42.636)
Yeah, so life is relatively normal one day, then the war erupts, and before you know it, you and your family are in a POW camp. Survival in a POW camp requires an immense amount of strength and resolve. How did you and your family maintain hope during such an incredibly dark time?

Jas (38:01.098)
Yeah, when we got captured, so one day the commander, if you will, of the Bosnian forces used a megaphone in that little enclave that anybody can hear and say, we’re out of ammunition, we’re out of food, we’re surrounded. If we don’t surrender, they’ll just bomb us all to death, right? So picture 2,500 people with their hands up walking down the main street of their hometown.

For the first time, the place that you grew up in, that you love, place where you had that first crush, place where you had your first drink that mom and dad didn’t know about, place that you played guitar with your friends and stuff, is now this foreign place. When we came out of this enclave, when we realized the devastation of the town, everything is burned, everything’s broken. And picture a street, like a main street in any small town, lined with

creation soldiers holding guns like this and we’re walking down like this. Kids, kids ages three up to elderly of 75 years old, right? Everybody in that range. And you know some of these faces of these soldiers. These are not foreigners. This is not a foreign invaded army. This was a neighbor. These are your neighbors. These are people that you went to school with. These are people that taught class, right? It’s not.

Doug Dvorak (39:19.49)
These are your neighbors.

Jas (39:28.46)
It’s such a different thing to describe. It’s not a war that you watch in Hollywood movie. Like there’s that enemy, it’s unnamed, not humanized. No, no, these are people that you know, right? And I remember seeing one guy in particular. So I played in a band. We were a young band and there was an older band and he was a bassist in that older band, Croatian guy. And I always looked up to him. Like he lent us his bass player when we were doing a little concert and stuff. Like I would consider him a good guy. I remember him.

I remember seeing him in a full uniform with a gun, standing on one of the, on the balcony of one of the condos on the first floor as we were walking by. I cannot describe to you, like you’re looking at this person and you’re like, is that the person I know? Like they look so different now. It’s such a different feel of who they are. As we, so we were being marched into, into a storage facility that an old food company in town had. Think aluminum big hanger.

type of places. As we were approached them, we saw the tanks. They were Serbian tanks. They were not Croatian tanks. They made a deal. They made a deal. You help us do this, we’ll give you this other area. Right? So when you hear this, let’s make a deal. It’s not as simple as that for people that live where the deal is being made. Something goes wrong for them.

And I remember a Serbian soldier sitting on a tank as we were walking by yelling, I told you, you joined the wrong crowd. Like, why did you tie your flag to them? Look how they betray you type of a thing, right? If you joined us, this wouldn’t have happened type of a thing, right? So your question, resilience. This is an unusual circumstance. You have civilians, mom, dad, kids, everybody hoarded up.

It’s June, it’s warm, you’re in these aluminum boxes. How do you persevere? I’ll say two things. One, human ability to adjust to its circumstance is animalistic.

Doug Dvorak (41:42.99)
Mmm.

Jas (41:46.401)
how quickly you’re able to normalize your situation. That this is now new normal and what are we gonna do with it and make it best. Now I’m a kid, maybe if I had a kid I’d feel different. I was not responsible for anybody else, I’m sure for my dad and my mom, this felt a lot worse than it did for me. Because you gotta worry about somebody. My dad and other men were taken immediately from us, they separated us, they housed them in the old gymnasium of the middle school.

That way if they ran away, they shoot us. If we run away, they shoot them. So control, crowd control type of a motion. My mom was a hero during that time. No crying, no hand wringing, no what are we gonna do? Some people did. Some people fell apart during that time. She was just very strong. She started seeking for ways like what’s around that can become

comfort to me in some shape or form. was sleeping on concrete. Somehow she found a cardboard box broken down so I’m not laying directly on concrete, right? Very heroic move by her. She knew a lot of the people on the creation side because she worked in commercial environment her whole life. These were business partners, maybe even coworkers in a lot of ways. And she’s done some really good stuff in her past for these people, helped them, supported them.

to where she was able to use those past relationships to maximize the terrible environment that I was in, right? So all of a sudden she’d come and she’s like, so-and-so brought these crackers, here you go. So I’m eating crackers, right? But you gotta hide them, because you don’t have crackers for 2,000 people, right? Kind of a thing. So her resiliency and the resourcefulness really came through and it was a bedrock of me maybe not suffering as badly as I would, if not for the strength of my mom.

during that time.

Doug Dvorak (43:41.518)
God love your mom and God love her, Ivar, that you’ve brought me. So you come to the US, you’re in Twin Falls, and I remember you got a job after a couple years at Foot Locker, and you were the number one athletic shoe salesperson at Foot Locker in Twin Falls to such a degree that regional managers start.

Jas (43:45.437)
yeah, she makes a good high five.

Doug Dvorak (44:09.656)
calling so unpack briefly that experience and then I want to get into your trajectory at Albertsons and Federal Reserve.

Jas (44:15.084)
Yeah, if it’s okay with you, Doug, how we arrived to United States, I just wanna give one story real quick and I’ll get to that. I think this is the most important story I just, for your listeners, if I, to take anything away from the war time is, let’s call it a karma or whatever you want, what you reap is what you sow type of a thing. How we got out of country. When the camp was disbanded, we were living in that same ghetto where everybody has to ghetto up.

Doug Dvorak (44:19.96)
Sure, please.

Jas (44:40.749)
in this space. That’s not a life that you want to have. Two, three families to a house. It was very different. This Croatian lady approached my mom and said, your mom was so-and-so, right? Yes. During World War II, Croatia was part of the Axis. They were on the Aussie side. They ran concentration camps and things like that. But not every person is bad.

Right? The neighbors that lived next to my grandma and grandpa happened to be Croatian. When the Communist Party was coming in power, they were kind of rounding up people. Everybody’s guilty until proven innocent in the wartime. Right? My grandma hid this family in her basement for over a year and protected them until everything kind of. So this lady came to my mom to pay the debt back for that time. So what my grandma did served our family well.

her protecting some innocent people gave us an opportunity. This lady put her family’s names on the list of people that are gonna leave on a bus through forests or whatever to Croatia. I know it’s weird. I’m running away from Croatians to Croatians.

Doug Dvorak (45:52.14)
No, this has Schindler’s Lisk-esque kind of, wow, I never knew that. Really.

Jas (45:56.557)
It does. It does. So we went under false names. We went under false names, yes, to Croatia. We pretended to be Croatians coming out of a prison camp that was different prison camp that Bosnians kept Croatians in. Like there’s no innocent parties here. Like some is worse than others. So that’s how we went to Zagreb, Croatia, where my uncle lived his whole life. Which imagine you’re living there, you hear that your family is in a Croatian prison camp, you live in the capital of Croatia. It’s such…

It’s a trip, right? So yeah, so we made it to Twin Falls, got English as a second language classes, know, reading classes. Miss Barbara Sears, greatest teacher I ever had in Twin Falls. She took all Bosnian kids under her wing and helped us learn English and read, write. you know, we were young, so it’s fast. You know, we all listen to Metallica, so the words are familiar. It’s some familiarity. But yeah, couple of jobs, you know, I’ve worked at Blockbuster. Yes, kids that used to exist.

Doug Dvorak (46:47.544)
Hahaha

Jas (46:54.741)
I worked at a blockbuster. I was terrible at Pizza Hut, the worst waiter that Pizza Hut ever had for like two weeks. I was like, my gosh, I’m terrible with this. But I find home at Foot Locker. And yeah, Twin Falls, Idaho, wouldn’t think a big community, but a lot of basketball players. mean, Twin Falls is a farming community, a lot of LDS, a lot of basketball, right? So people like their sports gear, right? So we had a pretty good demand profile to the point where, you know,

a district manager was like, what’s going on from Fawcett? How come they’re hitting these numbers, right? When we don’t have that maybe in Boise or somewhere else, right? And I wasn’t alone, the team was really good, right? But we were doing a good job. So he came and I remember sitting with him and he was like, well, what’s the sales trick that you use? Mind you, Doug, I’m 19 years old. What sales tricks are we talking about? It’s not like I have some amazing, know, Porter’s Five Forces model hanging out in my back room at Full Locker.

And I said, can I use an S word? I said, I love this shit. I love shoes, man. Athletic shoes, I own 100 pairs. I’m not selling these people. I’m just excited about what I love and seems to be resonating. So very early in my career, learned that if you’ll, like people say, do what you love and stuff. If you’re gonna sell a product, believe in a product. Be the user of the product. It is hard to run a business that you’re not customer of.

Doug Dvorak (47:58.52)
Sure.

Doug Dvorak (48:21.46)
Absolutely.

Jas (48:22.228)
It is absolutely impossible. If you don’t do what your customer does, if you’re not completely connected and that the, that passion comes out, it’s hard to sell people. They know you’re selling them as opposed to sharing your experience that you want them to have, to have with them. So it was an easy job because I loved what I was doing.

Doug Dvorak (48:40.834)
You are passionate about it and you are a customer. you’re at Foot Locker, you go to University of Idaho, you get your bachelor’s degree, you start your professional career, then you’re at Micron for 12 years. Please tell the story that the former CEO of Micron, you’re in the back of the room. I love that story. Please tell us that.

Jas (48:43.339)
Yeah.

Jas (49:02.888)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so obviously, you know, my last name is a little bit more complicated than your average American last name, right? K-R-D-Z-A-L-I-C. I always joke that one day I’m going to start a radio station. I’m going to say K-R-D-Z all Bosnian all the time. Right. It’s like, I have the call letters in my name right up front. So a few, few instances, I was working on competitive intelligence market research. So a lot of reliance on this information by the executive team to make decisions, right?

Doug Dvorak (49:16.504)
Hahaha

Jas (49:31.799)
So in few meetings, I was brought in, still junior in my career, but I was brought in because I had the data, I had the models and opportunity to share it. I owe my career to a guy named Dan Burton, CEO of Hellcatalyst down in Utah now, who kind of was like, identify, hey, this kid’s got talent and work ethic. He seemed to be hungry, right? Kind of a thing. So he brought me to those meetings, right? So was able to share bits and pieces of information that helps executives make a decision.

On one particular occasion, late Steve Appleton, phenomenal leader, absolute force of life. I loved everything about a man during my tenure there. Somebody asked a question, and it was something around the capacity that one of our competitors has in a particular country. I think it was Taiwan at the time. And yeah, the person was fumbling like what it is. And he goes, where’s the kid with the funny name? He knows.

Doug Dvorak (50:26.83)
And you did.

Jas (50:29.424)
I did, I did. It was my job, right? It’s not because I’m smarter than the other person. That wasn’t their job, it was mine. So I knew it. And you know, I learned from Steve, Mark Durkin at that time, early on the humility of the role that’s required. I’ll never forget, I was competing in bodybuilding at the time. And I was walking down the hallway between the meetings or something and Steve was coming the other way, know, fourth floor, building 17. And I don’t know where he goes like, hey, how’d the competition go?

He knew, he knew, he knew, he knew that a kid with a funny name competed in bodybuilding. He knew that and he asked how did it go and he knew that it was last Saturday, right? And how I felt in that moment, I kinda, I don’t know if I swore to myself, it was subconscious, you embedded in your head. I wanna treat people like that. I wanna know that.

Doug Dvorak (51:01.868)
That’s leadership. That’s leadership.

Doug Dvorak (51:23.96)
So you have that experience and then again, harkening back to your earlier successful sales career at Foot Locker, you’re 12 years at Micron, then you’re a competitive bodybuilder, you’re competing, you’re winning, and then you become CEO of bodybuilder.com.

Jas (51:44.896)
Yeah.

Doug Dvorak (51:45.944)
Corporate leadership requires an incredible amount of discipline and strategic thinking. How did you transfer the resilience and survival instincts you developed in captivity into your professional life?

Jas (51:55.883)
Yeah, that’s a great question, Doug. There’s so many different ways that I can answer it, but let me make it. Let me start with one really big thing.

Doug Dvorak (52:02.499)
Sure.

Jas (52:05.842)
No fear. Once you survive that, what could be worse than this? Okay, death maybe, but is it? Right? A good question, maybe for ourselves to ponder. But I didn’t approach any job that I had with fear. I approached every curiosity. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Call it a growth mindset versus fixed mindset, whatever it might be. Not that I’m not fearful that I’m gonna make a mistake or something. That’s natural, that’s normal for a human.

I was willing to take on a job that maybe others were like, is this ever gonna work? This might be a hard initiative to do. I remember when Dan asked, gosh, it would be awesome if we can get real good financial analysis on our competitors, right? Not a readily available information. These are South Korean competitors. They’re not American competitors, right? How do you really get the right gap analysis done and stuff like that? And he was hearing that a lot. it’s gonna be hard and stuff.

And I remember saying, I was like, I’ll try. Right? I mean, I’m starting my career. I was like, and I did. Did I have mistakes in it or let’s call it a not ideal information? Yeah, to make some assumptions, but it’s a start. It’s an educated guess. I was willing to make it. And I think a lot of it had to do with you got the second life opportunity, know, opportunity of the second life. Make the most of it. Don’t be afraid. Raise your hand when others may.

not want to. If it seems like a hard thing to do, it’s probably worth doing. So kind of get after it. I remember at Micron taking on roles consecutively that I was not ready for or qualified for. I was like stepping all over myself in the beginning of every single role, but I was willing to do them because they were needed, they were important, they made a difference for the organization. I’d like to think that a small part, played a

played a role in that company surviving the big free market carnage that was going on in semiconductors and arriving to be one of the only survivors in that space. And now look at the strength of the organization and the beautiful leadership that they have got now and where they’re going. It’s impressive. I mean, it was the greatest university I ever attended. We say Micron Technology was the greatest university I ever attended.

Doug Dvorak (54:27.182)
I that. I have an adage when I bring on team members to my various businesses. A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s, and C’s put you out of business. IQ or intelligence quotient is important, but can do, saying yes to those difficult tasks. And many people face challenges, but few can find the strength to turn them into successes. What advice would you give to someone who’s facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles right now?

Jas (54:54.944)
Yeah, a couple of things. In my career, I have observed and I’ve seen this to be the truth. Nobody gets fired for being stupid. They do get fired for not knowing how to get along with others.

Building relationships with people, even the ones that you don’t necessarily align with, is an absolute requirement for sustained career, anywhere but particularly the United States. And we’re not talking playing the patronizing game or anything like that. I’m talking find something in every individual that you internally can support fullheartedly.

and then go after helping them. And if you do that in your career, the tide will rise you. People that are me, me, me, me, me, me in a career, and I’ve been that guy too, that didn’t work out for me, I think we all made those mistakes, does not work as well as what can I do for others. And I know that you’ve heard this many times, and I’m sure that there’s books written about it, and smarter people than me have talked about it. But I have found that knowing how to get along with others,

and ability to get buy-in from people on things that you wanna do is one of the greatest, greatest assets you can ever gain for yourself. That’s why I Dale Carnegie, right? How to make friends and influence people, right? A lot of that theme kinda comes from that, but I felt it real time, real life. I’m not necessarily the smartest guy in the room. I’m not necessarily the best.

Doug Dvorak (56:26.158)
Yeah, how to win friends and influence people.

Jas (56:40.158)
emotional cue guy, but if you always ask me what is one of your strengths, say people want to work with me. Right.

Doug Dvorak (56:46.378)
Absolutely. So you’re a busy dad, you’re a great husband, a great friend, you’re busy. No, you’re busy. And when I look to get things done in my organizations, I give it to the busy people. So in addition to your corporate achievements, how do you contribute to your community or give back to others who might be going through struggles?

Jas (56:53.216)
Thank you. Let’s compliment of the day. Thank you so much.

Jas (57:09.068)
Great question. Let me start with the big thing and then I’ll work on the smaller things that can be even more impactful. But one of the greatest privileges of my life, I would call it a highlight of my professional career, is being asked to join Federal Reserve Bank Board. And for those that don’t know this, know, this Federal Reserve Bank system is what it’s called, is 12 districts. It’s made up of 12 districts that each have a CEO.

The 12th district is the San Francisco Fed, right? Mary Daly leads about as exceptionally well as you can. If I could be quarter of a leader that she is, I would be very, very happy. Somebody to really admire and learn from. And within it, you have branches. And one of the branches is Salt Lake Branch. And I was a director on a Salt Lake Branch of the…

San Francisco Fed as part of the overall Federal Reserve Bank system. So I was not on a board of governors. I did not make a monetary decisions, but you play a key role.

When I first went to a meeting, talk about being in awe. I’ve never surrounded myself in my life with smarter people than that. But it’s not only the smarts, it’s not the IQ, it’s the EQ, the emotional smarts that these individuals had. Their ability to stay neutral on things that are not part of the mandate is something to behold. We all have a tendency to we’re off into the land of, know, I know.

something about this, let me talk about it. I know I do it, we all do it in our free time, we think we know a lot. The folks at Fed are so focused on the mandate of keeping prices low and full employment. And whatever conversation you have, it all comes back to that. Like how quickly that mandate is so deeply ingrained. Focus, focus, focus. mean, and what they just did with the inflation.

Doug Dvorak (59:04.846)
Focus, focus.

Jas (59:11.82)
to create a soft lending, that is a masterclass. That we didn’t have to crash the economy to actually stabilize the inflation. Most of the time, that’s the answer. Crash it and let it recover itself. What Jerome Powell and the team did, that’s a masterclass. I’m not saying in a micro that it worked for everybody. I’m sure that there’s people that are, I’m just saying in a macro level, that is a masterclass on how to get it done. Yeah.

Doug Dvorak (59:16.054)
Absolutely.

Doug Dvorak (59:39.822)
couldn’t agree more. one last question then we’re going to get into the rapid fire round. Finally, what does mission possible mean to you in your own life given everything you’ve been through and accomplished?

Jas (59:51.071)
As one, love the name of the podcast, the mission possible, right? I mean, immediately Tom Cruise comes to mind, but he’s impossible where possible. I think for me, it really means above everything else, the growth mindset. It’s not everything’s gonna go well all the time. There’s gonna be times when you’re not gonna love your job. There’s gonna be times when you’re not gonna be happy. There’s gonna be times where you’re not going to get the outcome you desired.

What happens after that matters more than that itself, right? I was just talking with my daughter, she’s gonna be 16 here soon and she received this invitation to honor society. She was so excited about it in the car. Like the level of excitement for it is very palpable. But I very quickly wanted to make sure that she says, if they didn’t send you this invitation, would you feel as good about the work you put in to get it?

And she’s like, well, what do you mean? I was like, I don’t want this external validation to be the only driving force behind it. If this never came, what you did to get it still happened. You still did that. You still learned, you did something. So I think that how do we find internal validation all the time, that work that we put in was valuable, even if it didn’t result in the outcome that we all wanted, even if it didn’t create maybe the…

next Tesla or something like that. You don’t have to do that to feel good about the life lived. And that it’s not gonna be a straight line. We’re all at point A, we all wanna get to point B, we all wanna go up and to the right, whether it’s in our relationships, finances, health, all of those things. It’s gonna be a squiggly line on the way up. Sometimes the low is gonna feel like it’s so, so low, but it’s still not as low as the point A where you started. So I have to remind myself, I fall prey to a whole who, me.

I think constant reminder of that makes anything possible. That it’s just one moment in a string of moments.

Doug Dvorak (01:01:54.476)
That’s great. Rapid fire round now, Jas. Five questions, one word or a short phrase response. Here we go. Most powerful memory from your time is a POW.

Jas (01:02:13.206)
It’s not what the eyes can see, it’s what your ears can hear and your nose can smell.

Doug Dvorak (01:02:18.08)
Excellent. One book or person that influenced your journey the most.

Jas (01:02:21.644)
Patrick Lanzione is the advantage.

Doug Dvorak (01:02:25.846)
Excellent. Most important lesson you’ve learned in your career.

Jas (01:02:29.036)
get along with others.

Doug Dvorak (01:02:31.074)
What motivates you when you wake up every day?

Jas (01:02:33.9)
my family above everything else.

Doug Dvorak (01:02:36.064)
One thing you wish more people understood about resilience.

Jas (01:02:39.596)
You don’t, that everybody has a hard time. It doesn’t have to be a prison camp. Some people that have never been in prison camp had their own prison camp and find grace for everyone.

Doug Dvorak (01:02:49.134)
Excellent. My guest has been Jas Krdzalic from POW, Prisoner of War, to CEO, Chief Executive Officer on the Mission Possible podcast. Jas, if some people want to reach out to you, how can they get a hold of you?

Jas (01:03:02.988)
My LinkedIn is up to date. By all means, look me up. That would be the easiest way. Shoot me a note. I tend to respond to those things really fast.

Doug Dvorak (01:03:11.67)
and spell your first and last name so they can search on LinkedIn for you.

Jas (01:03:14.604)
J-A-S, first name, last name, K-R-D-Z-A-L-I-C, as in cat.

Doug Dvorak (01:03:21.12)
Again, our guest has been POW to CEO Jas Krdzalic. Jas, it’s been a high honor and privilege. Thank you for your time. Have much health, prosperity, and happiness in 2025. Thank you, Mission Possible Podcast Nation. Carpe diem.