Welcome back to the Field Cross Frum podcast. I'm your host Kevin. It's been a while since I did a podcast. It is a little weird.

What made me today is James Phillips. James, and we call him Phil, is our new lead from mobility, which is a daunting task because mobility covers a lot of different stuff.

Phil was a Marine, then he was a Marine Special Operations guy, and now he works for Field Craft. Probably the hardest job he ever had.

Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for doing this. We had a choice because you're an employee and you have to do it. We were supposed to do it before and something happened and it fell off. We already did that.

We had to go through a trial period first. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you're going to work out. Basically, the goal here is to introduce you to the listeners and talk about your background and then we'll talk about where we want to go with mobility in the future.

We're going to dip our toes in a lot of different things, see what people like and what they don't like. It is a very big subject when a lot of moving pieces like motorcycles and off road driving, defensive driving and horses and snowmobiles and planes, and cars.

We're going to be playing as cranes and automobiles. Let's start and go back to the start. I know you grew up in England, and I know that. I cannot be interested in what you thought about that.

It's really for a while, right? It's actually for my island. It doesn't want to fight me. People at Americans have said to me, England and Ireland, that's kind of the same country. Good Ireland and say that and see what happens.

It's like saying America and maybe Canada. Yeah, yeah. All right, so let's go back to the start. Where you grew up, family, early life, inspirations to go into the Marine Corps. I was told one time by SF guy who was a recruiter in the regular army before he went to SF.

He said, these kids come in and want to join the Marine Corps. They do it for two reasons. They do it because somebody in their family was in the Marine Corps. They like the uniform. Those are the few reasons and you cannot talk the matter.

So I'd be interested to see what your, your, your, I don't think one of those was mine. It wasn't. Yeah, I just. Yeah. All right, man, you're on.

So I was born in the UK. Most people don't really know where stuff is that in Ireland like they would in England either, but next to Stonehenge, like all the rocks. Okay. Yeah.

So grew up there and so I was about 10 knowing moves to the United States. And I was a little kid and.

Your dad military now my parents were in internet security, so they ended up moving to the US. Okay. A lot of my mom's side of the family was already over here. She went over when she was little to the UK and live with her grandma.

How much do you remember?

A fair amount. I mean, we live in the country side were early like in London or anything like that. So we kind of grew up on a little farm.

But struggled at school when I was little over there because I don't know how it was in Ireland for you, but I was doing Latin and French. You know, when I wasn't even nine years old yet.

Yeah, I, you know, I remember telling like my daughter when I went to school in Ireland, we did nine subjects every day. Like we had nine, like 40 minute classes and freaking tough. And it wasn't like you did a semester like here.

And then you get tested. I got tested on like five years of the second there. It was it was very, very challenging. Yeah. So they thought I had like they thought I had a learning disability because I wasn't doing well.

I don't have a learning disability. I'm just American.

I'm destined to be American. So, but no, I do remember quite a bit. I mean,

like, obviously you grew up there. So like the accent and all this slang and all that was not normal for you. It wasn't like a kid going over after growing up here. Right. And trying to understand people, right? Yeah, we actually

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