Lessons From Afghanistan & Capturing Somali Pirates - Roderic Yapp - #133

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today, Roderic Yapp, ex Marines officer, now turned business leader, applying what he learned during his time in the armed forces to the world of business. And we don't really talk at all about business. We talk a lot about some of his fascinating experiences during his time in Afghanistan. He chased Somali pirates and recaptured a vessel from them at one point. So, yeah, I'm not going to be fucking with Roderic anytime soon. In other news, Johnny Newseif coming around, going to film some more episodes over the next few weeks. Me and video guy Dean got a couple of dates booked in to film some short form YouTube stuff as well. And the new Bro Trip episode 2 coming out on the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel very soon. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Roderic Yapp.
Roderic, welcome to the show.

**Roderic Yapp** (1:12)
Thanks very much, Chris, very happy to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:14)
Looking forward to speaking to you. So give us a bit of background. What's your heritage? Where do you come from and what did you do?

**Roderic Yapp** (1:22)
So my first career was as an officer in the Royal Marines. I left university in 2003, 2004, struggling to remember now, really with an aspiration to do sort of something completely different. And I remember there are a number of reasons that sort of caused me to go down that route, but fundamentally it really was sort of seeking a challenge, trying to do something that was different. And I found in life that if you're faced with a series of sort of paths, choose the one that's the most difficult because then you're going to learn the most about yourself. And ultimately, that's what I chose to do. So I joined up in 2005 I served for seven years. I was lucky enough to go to Afghanistan, got civilians out of Libya in 2011 during the Arab Spring. And then towards the end of my time, specialized in counter-piracy and did a couple of tours off the coast of Somalia in the Indian Ocean. So I had an absolutely fantastic time. Left when I turned 30 for a sort of number of reasons, primarily kind of domestic, got married in my final year, didn't really want to be an absent parent, and have since then been working in the corporate world before starting my own business.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
Why did you say fortunate enough to go to Afghanistan?

**Roderic Yapp** (2:39)
Because I think whilst I did choose to join the Royal Marines, I joined at a time where the operational tempo was really, really significant. You know, we were going, we were doing sort of back-to-back tours of a really demanding environment. And I think that I consider myself lucky to have been out to those places, been tested in that environment, because I think I would have found it really frustrating if I had gone through training and then frankly done a sort of series of exercises or prepared for a war that wasn't going to happen. You know, within 12 months of passing out of training, I was being shot at and being tested in a really hostile, dividing environment. So I consider myself lucky to have been there, done that, but also survived it and come out the other side.

**Chris Williamson** (3:24)
Yeah, I get that. There's not many people I know that would have said lucky for being selected to be shot at in Afghanistan.

**Roderic Yapp** (3:32)
It's a slightly strange way of looking at it. But I mean, there are a number of people that I work with, even now, former Royal Marines officers who joined the Corps in the 90s and weren't lucky enough to experience that. They were maybe going to Ireland, which wasn't as kinetic and as aggressive as Afghanistan and Iraq. So they were just because of the political situation, they didn't get the chance to go and experience it. And I was lucky like that.

**Chris Williamson** (4:03)
So talk me through what it's like coming out of university, because I had a bunch of friends as well who were in OTC when they were at uni, Officer Training Corps, and they had the potential, maybe I'll go to Sandhurst, maybe I'll do whatever. What's it like being a student and going out on the lash a few nights a week, like most of the people that all of us know if we went to uni with them, and how you may see what would be on Saturday, stuff like that, and then within, how long is it before you're on tour? Two years?