Chris Cannon from M2MMA joins us. M2MMA is utilizing AI and Blockchain Technology to create a New Era of Smarter, Safer, More Engaging Combat Sports

OPENING PAUL WRIGHT Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Link Thru Social Podcast. We're on episode number 15. That's right, episode 15 this week, a special bonus episode. And we have a wonderful guest for you, Chris Cannon from M2MMA. Now, Grant will be joining us to explain how M2MMA is utilizing artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to create a new era of smarter, deeper, and more engaging combat support. It's a great topic, and I'm sure you're gonna enjoy it. Thank you once again, everybody, all our viewers and listeners for downloading, sharing, and subscribing. We appreciate your support, and we hope you enjoy this bonus episode. It will start right after this brief message from our sponsor. SPONSOR MESSAGE - SMART POST APP SPONSOR MESSAGE Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? Meet Smart Post App. You're all in one solution to create, schedule, and grow your content effortlessly. In just a few taps, you can generate engaging posts, stay consistent, and keep your audience coming back for more. No more guessing, no more burnout, just smarter content faster. Whether you're a business owner, a creator, or an entrepreneur, SmartPost helps you show up like a pro. Start posting smarter today. SmartPostApp.com. Smart Post App because your content should work for you. INTERVIEW - CHRIS CANNON / M2MMA PAUL WRIGHT & CHRIS CANNON And welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast, where we explore social media, technology, AI, and innovative businesses that are changing the way we live and work. Now today we're diving into the future of combat sports with cutting-edge innovation from M2MMA. M2MMA is utilizing artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to create a new era of smarter, deeper, and more engaging combat sports. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Paul. And it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Now, Chris, before we get started, maybe you can just tell us our viewers and listeners a little bit about yourself and your background, and then we'll get into the M2MMA. Not a problem. And I have a somewhat untraditional background for someone who's working in combat sports, believe it or not. so yeah, but my life has been sports. But prior to taking on this role, I was a professional golfer for 14 years. and I played in over 30 countries around the world across many different golf tours. never quite got to the level where I wanted to be at, is the reality of it. It was always my passion to be number one golf in the world. But if I look back, sport has always been my life. From as many as, well, from the earliest age I can remember, I wanted to be a professional athlete. And that was in football, that was rugby, that was cricket, that was tennis, that was motor racing, that was anything I could think of. I wanted to be the man in the arena, I wanted to have people, thousands of people cheering me on and so on. But eventually landed on golf. And but combat sports has always been a massive passion of mine. So, you know, growing up in the 90s, boxing was flourishing in the UK. We had people like Lennox Lewis, Frank Bruno, both fought Mike Tyson, someone in his heyday. We had Prince Nasty Mohamed. So, boxing, I was, you know, has always been a fan of that from a very young age. Then when I actually moved to the United States in 2005 to pursue professional golf, went to college over there at Wake Forest University, I was actually introduced to MMA in the UFC, which at the time was the first series of the ultimate fighter. Yes. And my first strength and conditioning coaches, these Canadian chaps from Montreal, actually, Andy Moran and Andy Moran and Paul Garnier, they introduced me to the UFC, and the ultimate fight was ongoing at that point, and I've been a massive fan ever since. So, yeah, combat sports for me, I'd much rather watch a fight than I would watch a golf tournament, that's for sure. Yes. And so when the founder of M2MMA, CEO Jeff Robinson introduced me to M2MMA and his long-term vision of utilizing AI technology to improve athlete safety and performance, for me it was a no-brainer. Like I, you know, I'd been at golf for a long time, hadn't reached the levels I wanted to reach. Yes, it was tough giving it up, but the opportunity to move into a sport I was really passionate about and that was very much centered on athlete well-being for me. I jumped with the opportunity and I know it's what I want to do for the next 30 years of my life and build a great company that helps athletes around the world. That's amazing, amazing story. And yes, artificial intelligence is becoming part of you know every industry. And so how is AI being integrated into M2MMA, specifically you know, combat sports? You're spot on. And to be quite frank, you know, two and a half years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you much about AI, but obviously I've learned it very fast and very quick from experts like Jeff Robinson. We also have, you know, head of Google AI and machine learning on our board, Tiago Enrique, so and Gary Zavoletto as well. So for me, it's been a very quick and I must say, an incredible learning curve about the opportunity AI presents for us in society and especially in sport. It's something I'd never previously thought about. But you know, when Jeff introduced the concept of if we collect the right data in combat sports, right, and we're talking about longitudinal medical history, we're talking about real-time impact monitoring, athlete training data, AI affords us the opportunity to correlate that data and to actually deliver insights on how to optimize training and recovery. So that's how we're utilizing AI and M2MMA. And it starts really with the foundational data layer, which is the M2 Intel Combat Sports Operating System. That's where all our data feeds into that system and the AI runs through that and delivers the you know, the athletes, the regulators, the insights on how to again improve performance and safety protocols. Right. Now you mentioned the board on M2MMA. what does that look like? you have several different experts from different fields. why don't you tell us about that? That's correct. So, you know, when you go in, I and I like to always think in terms of sports, as you probably can imagine, if you've heard so far, right? So I think you're gonna go ahead and build a great team. And you mentioned the World Cup just before we jumped on here, taking place in Toronto. If you're gonna build a great team in any sport, you need the key players in different positions because everyone has different strengths, different weaknesses, but you put them in the right position to build a great team. So that's what you know Jeff has done with M2MMA, and we talk about, for example, combat sports regulation, you know, and in the last three different well, time's moving quickly, last seven months now. We've had Dr. Michael Schwartz, the co-chair of the ABC Medical Committee. He founded the Association of Ringside Physicians. He came to us actually wanting to know how we were going to use AI to improve athlete safety in combat sports. And once he understood our vision and our plan to get there, he, you know, we immediately integrated him to the board. And he's been a fantastic addition in many regards. And his guidance has helped us significantly, without a doubt. And then from there, we had Michael Mazzouli, the former ABC president, has also joined our board, which again, if you want to understand what combat sports regulation looks like and the intricacies of how we're going to integrate our platform and our technology into combat sports, these are the kind of gentlemen that gives us that direct pathway and information how to go ahead and execute on this, right? And then Big John McCarthy, obviously legendary MMA referee, is also joined on board. Yeah. So again, from the official standpoint, how can officials utilize this kind of technology, right? But also, if you want a man who's seen probably more up-close combat throughout their lives, there's probably no better man than John McCarthy, right? He's been there since day one of the UFC, seen everything they have to see across MMA and boxing. He also sits on the officials committee for the ABC as well. And again, the kind of insights that he's able to deliver us to help build this technology and deliver it. That's why these board members are so important. But they're not just names that sit there to give us credibility. As of many, you know, often boards are created in that kind of structure. They are actually giving us direct insights on how to deliver on what we're building. So, and also, so that's on the combat sports regulatory side of things. We have people like Dr. Thomas Botellieri, he's the chief of sports medicine physicians at Columbia University, right? I mean, what an incredible institution that is. And he's a concussion expert. If you want to understand, we have that direct expertise there. Dr. Karl Daigle, functional neurologist, is involved with some incredible work, you know, in terms again around concussion, athlete injury, and so on, and using innovative technologies, provides this huge amount of insight on that front as well. And then we start to look at AI. I mentioned Tiago, I mentioned Gary, Jeff Robinson, obviously, in his former life as well. He's got incredible background in being involved with IBM and Watson, and so his expertise there. And then from the athlete performance side of things, we go back to Chris McCormack, John Stephenson, you know, Olympic medalists, world triathlon champions. So again, we cover all bases because this is the platform we're building. It's an ecosystem that covers everything. So you need the expertise in the different areas, as I mentioned, the sports team analogy that can help us deliver on what we're building. Because it's all well and good having a vision, but you need the right people in the right places to actually be able to go ahead and execute on that. And exactly what we've built with our advisory board. Right. Yeah, you've you've built a stacked board there with people from all different sides of the of the spectrum. Now, you mentioned about concussions. I that's been a very concerning thing for fans and obviously the athletes. could AI one day help detect dangerous trends you know about from blood trauma, fatigue, injury risks? That is very much the goal, Paul. I think the point is we know concussions is a real issue in impact sports, right? But at the moment, there's many different potential influencing factors. And in we look at combat sports in particular, I think one of the biggest areas is things like sparring. The reality is the majority of head impacts an athlete will take is subconcussive impacts in sparring. Yes. So again, having this platform where an athlete can track their sparring data, even to start with, as simply as like how many rounds did I spar this week? What kind of intensity was I looking at? And then we can build layers of additional data on top of that as we add in, you know, our real-time impact monitoring technology as well. We correlate that with other metrics like you know, heart rate, heart rate variability. We correlate that with you know nutrition, all these different that's when we can start to learn, okay, well, actually, what is an athlete's optimal sparring protocol? At the moment, it's built based on experience, and but it's not backed by data and it's not individualized because the reality is everyone is different. What might be right for Paul is not right for Chris. And this is what the platform has been built to deliver. And then over time, we can start to you know take those data points, take the trend analysis, and actually inform okay, what are the risks involved here? Give some kind of you know, risk analysis. That's where we've envisioned it, certainly, and deliver the athlete the kind of information that they can say to actually we're seeing this trend developed, but you can plug into the AI, for example. I don't know if you're aware of the digital twin concept, right? So this is your yeah, so you can say, okay, cool. If I adjusted my sparring protocol, if I adjusted my nutritional recovery protocol, if I integrated this kind of technology or a partner that we may work with, how might that affect my digital twins performance in my fight two months down the line? Another one is weight cutting. So we've had extensive discussions, you know, internally around this, obviously with our esteemed advisory board members. Yes. And another part of the M2MMA ecosystem is the M2 Lab. And the M2 Lab is around research and development of technology. So, and one of the things we've looked at, you know, I think there's a lot of anecdotal evidence potentially around the risk of TBI associated with dehydration. So, again, how can we help support an athlete find their optimal weight? How can we support their weight cutting process that may reduce the risk of TBI? Is there a link there between dehydration and TBI? Got to go ahead and do the research. We've got to figure this out. And that's again the data platform provides us that foundation where we can take all that data, also have a living lab environment, work with a lab environment as well, because again, you know, someone like Thomas Bottiglieri actually runs his own lab at Columbia University. So, again, we have that direct expertise in how to set up a lab, how to do research projects. So it's really all about, like you say, in the end, we want to be able to give the athletes the kind of insights you mentioned and also the regulators, the information that enables them to improve protocols around safety, but also to improve protocols around performance, because you may find that actually the weight that you think you're best at is not the weight you're best at, right? And John McCarthy gave a very good anecdotal story about this the other day. He said he was referring an event in PFL Ireland recently, and he was referring a fight, and he one fight in particular, he'd been in the in the middle of the cage before a number of times beforehand. I'm not obviously going to go into names here, but he referenced the fact that previously were a little chinny, he described them as, which is, you know, that you know they he'd seen them go down from strikes, perhaps. And this is something he also referenced in Dr. Schwartz as well. Sometimes you see fighters go down from strikes are fairly innocuous, but why is that? Right. And similarly, he referenced this one as well. But he said this guy came in somewhat late notice, had to fight up a couple of weight classes, and performed the best he'd seen him perform. Like he is as good as he'd ever looked. And perhaps that was because he'd been fighting at weight he should never have been fighting at. And this is the kind of you know information we'd like to be able to deliver athletes to again improve their performance, but also protect them. I'm just really admiring what your whole your whole plan is for the MMA world because I think for too long we've you know seen some recurring injuries and something similar and fighters and that. And now by putting all this together and research, so is your plan to partner with some of these major MMA groups? are you planning on maybe putting on your own events as well? branching off in doing that? what is the what is the plan as far as that's concerned? Okay, so number one, that we will work with all combat sports organizations to say we are building the operating system for combat sports. So that's including your medical end-to-end sanctioning, that's including event management suites, everything you need to run your combat sports event as a promoter, as a regulator, and as an athlete, a coach, official, all be integrated in the platform. Because also we want to make this sport more commercially viable. I don't think people really understand, unless you're involved in the sport, how complex and how time-consuming and costly it is to run a combat sports event. So, even aside from the athlete safety perspective, which is obviously a benefit of doing this, we're making the sports more commercially viable. So, yes, we want all promoters to be operating on our platform or all organizations. But number one, from a regulatory standpoint, again, working with commissions, the United States, federations around the world, associations across professional and amateur combat sports, yes, is the first priority. Then we're looking at again partnerships, which we've had discussions already with potential, you know, organizations like promotions, for example, giving their athletes free access to the platform and sorry, the promoter free access to the platform so they can monitor their athletes, right? So if you want to if you want to take care of your athlete in between the event, not just the fight week, post-fight week. If you want to look after your prized assets, the most valuable part of your promotion, the M2 Intel platform can help you do that, right? Who are the people we want to work with initially to get them, you know, to get partner up with, you know, to give them preferred access to this? That's one thing we're looking at currently. Amazing. And then sorry, I just I think I forgot the last part of your question, but yes, answer that. Oh, your events. Sorry, you mentioned M2MMA events. So, yes, so obviously, as you well know, like we have held two MMA events previously, very much the platform to present who we are and what we do to gain a following, to enable us to you know to showcase our long-term mission. But the MTMMA events will very much will be the showcase for our technology, right? So it enables us to have a platform when we come out with prototypes with the real-time impact monitoring technology, the AI run through the platform. We have an event to showcase that, right? To tell the story of the athlete going through the training camp, to tell them post-training camp, all different intricacies of the enables us to have control of that marketing to a certain extent, and also put on great fights and showcase how technology can be integrated into these events like never been seen before. So that is another core component of the M2MMA ecosystem for sure. Very exciting now. Now, blockchain technology, it's it's often misunderstood. How is M2MMA using blockchain technology in a practical way? Yeah, and again, this is another thing, Paul, that you know, two and a half years ago, I would have absolutely no idea about, that's for sure. Yeah, just it's just it's speeding, it's speed of light. the it's a sure, you know, and we with things like the crypto thing going on, and for myself, so you know, I had heard the name and I hear bits and bobs. And but again, I'm very fortunate to work with much smarter people than I am. People, you know, Jeff, for example, he understands it implicitly, but also another advisory board member, which I failed to mention in that earlier list because this now's the time to mention it, is Dragon Zeldzic. So Dragon, you know, internet international lawyers who understands cross-jurisdiction law, which is a very important thing when we start to talk about data privacy policy on a platform like ours, right? And also when you get into blockchain, you know, Dragon is a doctor himself because he did his thesis in blockchain technology, right? So if we're gonna build something on the blockchain, you need an expert like Dragon Zeldzic. So again, the right players in the right position. So for us, when we started about combat sports, and we started about medicals, we started about record keeping and so on. As I'm sure you're aware, like it's a little bit of a disjointed system currently. And especially when you know, if you're gonna start doing research and generate AI analytics from medical data, that needs to be verifiable and it needs to have a track or history of it. And this is what blockchain provides us with. It provides that verifiable history for data. Now, one of the interesting parts of it that however and the complexities of what we're building is the fact that obviously privacy laws around the world, some of them mean that you can, you know, data can be deleted, right? That's why we've been very specific in terms of building this with again, dragon support, and we're very fortunate to have a man like him on board to develop these policies in a pathway, for example, where things like medical data and data that AI is trained upon is actually split apart and de-identified from the name of where it's attached, right? So we have incorporated all of that system and we've thought about it very deeply because this is not a two, three, four-year project. This is a 20-year project to really change sports as a whole, combat sports specifically because of the risk of head injuries and all the different aspects of where the opportunity lies to really change the game in this respect, to improve commercial viability, improve you know, corporate governance structures behind combat sports. So we've thought about this long and hard, and we've created a very strong plan, and we're executing it right now. That's very, very exciting. And Chris, it's been a fascinating conversation. the combination of AI, blockchain, combat sports, it's something many people haven't considered. And it sounds like M2MMA is working to build a smarter, safer, interactive future for athletes and promoters. I am involved in the MMA world, and it's tough out there for the promoters for many different reasons. And this platform that you're putting together is good for the fighters, good for the promoters, and the fans. And it's it's very exciting, and I really appreciate you joining us today. for those wanting to learn more about M2MMA online and follow the journey, where can they find you? Yeah, well, thank you all for having me on. And I appreciate your interest in what we're doing. I think that is the point that it is a win for all stakeholders. You know, and I think a lot of people don't appreciate how hard it is to run these events for promoters. And the more commercially viable and the easier we can run these events, the more money can end up in the athletes' pockets, right? And even the platform as itself provides an opportunity to put things like sponsorships and partners. Directly with athletes and to give athletes improved access to different, you know, for example, our partners that we work with, Brain and Performance Center, NeuroSolution, Green Hill Sports, IAFNA REACE Partners with, you know, resonate to create this ecosystem where it's a value exchange for everybody involved and everyone wins. So yeah, we're working very hard on that, and we appreciate people like yourselves giving us the opportunity to speak about it. In terms of where can people learn more about M2MMA, of course, M2MMA.com. We're on across all of social media at M2MMA official. And also, many people may not know, we're also a publicly traded company, which is another very important aspect of what we're building because it enables number one transparency, right? If you want to know everything's there. You want to know about M2MMA? It's a public company. We're building this big long-term project of addressing some very important issues. We're a public company. Also, if you want to support the company, again, the opportunity is invest to invest it there as well. Yes. So again, people can get behind our mission. And I think a lot of people are very passionate and care about this. So again, we've afforded them the opportunity to play a role in that. So, yeah, that's the kind of to conclude on that. We're here there. And if you want to reach out to me and get in touch and want to learn more on any of what I've spoken about today, please go ahead and do so. I'm always available. CLOSING & LINK THRU SOCIAL MESSAGE PAUL WRIGHT Chris Cannon, it's been a pleasure. And yes, we are going to follow your journey. And I would love to have you on the show maybe later this year, just because we just mentioned everything is moving so quickly. I'm sure you'll have more to report to us the next time around. Chris Cannon, I appreciate it. M2MMA.com is the website. The Link Thru Social Podcast will be back right after this. Well, that does it for episode number 15, the bonus episode of the Link Thru Social Podcast. What a great interview with Chris Cannon. They are doing amazing work at M2MMA. Just fascinating. And like I said, I hope to have them on again later this year as their journey continues. It's just an incredible mandate that they have. And it's something I'm sure that all of you will be interested to see how things progress. Now, if you want Link Thru Social to become your social media partner for an MMA event, also we do pro wrestling, boxing, other combat sports, sporting events, music festivals, expos, and food festivals. Link Thru Social can be your social media partner. Go to Link Thru Social, that's T H R U dot com for more information and to contact us on becoming your social media partner. The Link Thru Social podcast will be back next week with episode 16 on Thursday at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. Once again, thanks for downloading, sharing. Keep that up. We are building a wonderful community here, and you can find all the links to where you can watch or listen to the Link Thru Social Podcast at Linkthrough Social Podcast.com. Until next week, my name is Paul Wright. Have a great wee