EP 23: Michael Jackson Performed at My Black Belt Ceremony. The Papers Called It a Fraud. Matt Fiddes

Mrs. Godfrey was running the careers stand in the school hall when sixteen-year-old Matthew Fiddes reached the front of her queue and told her he wanted to teach taekwondo for a living. "Don't be ridiculous, Matthew," she said. Nobody makes money doing that. Go and be a PE teacher.

He left school with no qualifications. Three years later he drove back to the same school in a brand-new Ferrari 355 convertible, asked to see her, and took her for a ride. He was making a million and a half a year from taekwondo. She cried, hugged him, and told him she was glad he hadn't listened, because her words could have ended his career before it started.

That's part two of our conversation with Matt Fiddes, founder of the largest martial arts franchise in the world (2,106 locations at last count) and, for ten years, Michael Jackson's bodyguard and friend. Part one was the Michael years. This one is how a bullied, skinny kid who left school with nothing became someone Michael wanted to meet in the first place. George runs this one solo; Paul was on his way to see Matt in Cyprus.

Find Matt at https://mattfiddes.com or message him on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/officialmattfiddes (he says every DM reaches him).Matt's franchising content for Rethink listeners: https://skool.com/rethink

It starts with Anthony, the much bigger boy who beat Matt up in the playground from age five to seven. Thirty-four years later, a TV show tracked Anthony down and put them face to face on live television in front of twenty million people. Matt shook his hand and thanked him. Anthony is now the anti-bullying ambassador for Matt's entire company.

The escape route was an accident. Matt tried jiu-jitsu first and hated it (long legs, sweaty grappling, no thank you), then moved to the taekwondo class next door and found he could already do the splits. For the first time in his life, an adult told him he was good at something. At thirteen, stuck in a maths lesson working out how many ways you could make fifty pence for a red phone box, he turned to the back of his exercise book and wrote down what he actually wanted: to be the best-known martial arts instructor in the world, a millionaire by twenty, and a Ferrari 355. His mother kept that book. By nineteen, every line on it had come true.

The route there was ugly. His family (a lawyer mother who was one of fourteen university-educated siblings, an engineer father) cut him out for a couple of years for choosing martial arts over university.