David Meyer was one of the first Americans ever to earn a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He’s an eleven-time world champion, he holds the Coral belt, and he turns 64 this month — and still trains seven seven-minute rounds against men half his age. He’s also the co-founder and former CEO of Adopt-a-Pet.com, and now runs Food System Innovations. When Will asks what keeps him going, the answer has nothing in it to buy: hydrate, protect your sleep, cycle what you train so something is always recovering. His line on discipline reframes the whole thing — it’s easy for him to train today because he trained yesterday.
Then Jon asks about ego, and David draws a distinction worth the whole hour: ego isn’t something to get rid of, because it’s your identity. It’s something to tame. He covers the deathbed test, the paradox that the only way to improve is to train against people who beat you, and what he tells himself when he gets wound up — the mountains are laughing. And when Jon describes being introduced at parties as “my friend the Navy SEAL” rather than as John, David doesn’t tell him to let it go. He tells him to expand it.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
1. Why longevity has no cheat code, and what gets built instead by an ordinary day repeated
2. How David trains and recovers at 64 — cycling muscle groups, protecting sleep, and giving stiffness the time it now needs
3. Why ego is not the enemy, and what taming it looks like in the moment — including the deathbed test and “the mountains are laughing”
4. The paradox of competition: the way to get better is to train with people who beat you, and the way to win more is to care less about winning
5. What happens to a man when the title goes — and why expanding an identity beats letting one go
CONNECT WITH DAVID MEYER
• The Ageless Warrior Lab Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ageless-warrior-lab/id1840239491
• Food System Innovations: https://www.fsi.org
• His bio and background: https://www.fsi.org/david-meyer
• Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/agelesswarriorlab/
STAY CONNECTED WITH MTM
• Join the MTM community — text MTM to 33777
• Website: mentalkingmindfulness.com
• Take our Free Assessment - https://focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page
• Awareness to Action program: focusnowtraining.com/a2a
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• Work with us / speaking inquiries: focusnowtraining.com/contact
Produced by Robert Lopez: https://cratesaudio.com
