Clay Moffat Podcast Transcript
Clay Moffat joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Clay Moffat. This isn’t a trust fall, it’s a crowbar. Clay Moffat didn’t write The Trust Trap because he had time. He wrote it because he was almost out of it. One eye was already blind. In December, 2024, the other one started fading fast. Suddenly, the man who coached world-class athletes a billionaire and top tier performers found himself six inches from a screen, barely able to see the cursor.
After burning through months and thousands in medical appointments, the verdict came in surgery, the same one that stole his first eye in 2010. So with the clock ticking, Clay made a call. Write the damn book, no launch plan, no PR team, no backup vision.
Just three weeks. One final window and a promise to leave something behind that was real raw and useful as hell. Now that book is out. He’s not hiding. He’s stepping forward not to promote himself, but to help millions because what he wrote in a time of darkness, it’s the flashlight most people don’t even know they need.
Well, good afternoon, Clay. Welcome to the show.
Clay Moffat: Thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely my friend. I appreciate you making the time, and I know you’ve kind of transplanted from Australia into Thailand today, so I appreciate it. It’s hard to make these time zones work sometimes. I’m in Kansas City, in the middle of the United States, so glad to have you again.
And Clay, I’m gonna jump right into your first question. Could you start us out with your story behind your book, the Trust Trap? Which was written in just 21 days while you were rapidly losing your vision. And how did the urgency of that experience shape the rawness and honesty of the final book?
Clay Moffat: That’s, that’s a fair question.
So I should probably start with the reason why I didn’t write it, and it wasn’t a passion project, it wasn’t writing for fun. I wrote it for exactly what you just meant, which is if everything went the way, the last surgery that I had, then I was gonna go blind. That was gonna be in pitch black. My left eye was already gone from a surgery back in 2010 and late last year.
My right eye, which is the only one I had left that was working, that started failing and failing fast, and I spent a lot of money with multiple from old just to try and figure out what was going on, and it took months and thousands and thousands of dollars. And the surgery it came to in the end of February that they said, okay, you have to have this surgery.
And my heart kind of sank a bit because it, it was kind of good at the same time. It was good because, okay, we’ve got a way outta this sounds bad because the surgery was the same surgery that took the vision of my left eye. So it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve got three weeks to like really do this thing, to really make a course or make a book or make something because if it goes the other way, I don’t know how I’m gonna be able to coach.
I don’t know how I’m gonna be able to use like what I’ve been building for the last 15 years in my head. So I sat down, wrote the book in 21 days, published it in 21 days. And that urgency stripped away every ounce of drama, every ounce of self-doubt. And what it gave me was unwavering commitment. There’s no posturing, just a raw, unfiltered truth about how trust actually works and why so many smart people keep stepping into the same landmines, the same field, the same destruction.
I lived it. I attempted to build a tech platform, Rhythmoya, which was a huge project, and I dumped over half a million of my own money, which were profits from coaching and working with people and speaking ignored every single red flag because I wanted to believe the people around me were solid. I believed in the project so much, and they weren’t.
That mistake didn’t just cost me money, it cost me the mission. Uh, it cost me my coaching company because I’ve put so much energy and time into that that it ended up taking away from my clients. So it was massive. So the book was my way of making sure that other founders who are non-technical, I mean technical fans, can still go down the same path as well.
Don’t go down the same path, especially when you don’t get a second eye or a second shot. Right.
Brian Thomas: That story is just amazing. Gosh, talk about, you know, you’re back against the wall, but I can tell you, you shed everything. You said, Hey, I have no other worries, but one thing and one mission, and I got that done.
And that’s just an amazing story. Just love it. And out of this work, obviously you found out more about people and trust and about yourself, and I think that’s just awesome. And I love podcasts that start out with a story like this. So Clay, you’ve trained with some of the world’s top experts in behavior, hypnosis, and influence.
What was the most surprising lesson you learned during that time that most people wouldn’t expect?
Clay Moffat: The simplest thing is that the easiest people to de see are often the most smartest. And people are like, there’s no way that’s true. I’m smart. I can pick this apart. Like, lemme explain. We’re wired to believe our own logic in our ability to figure things out.
But influence doesn’t happen with your logical brain. It happens with your emotional patterns. So I trained on the guys like Chase Hughes, I being mentored directly by Chase Hughes, Ken Cleveland. I’ve been mentored directly by David Snyder. There’s been a whole bunch of other people that have trained within courses.
I’ve been studying body language since the OG of Body Language. Alan and Barbara Pierce, the Australian couple, released the body language books. Right, and it’s evolved a lot since then. One thing they all taught me is this. Your ego is too tired to being the smartest guy in the room. You’ll never see the knife until it’s in your back.
And with Rick Moer, I was so focused on execution and scale and getting it out and like, and a big thing about me is keeping my word. I pre-sold 140, 150 seats to this app, and for an app, it was rather expensive. It was around about 700, $800 a year, which is kind of expensive for an app back in the day, you know, we’re talking six, seven years ago.
And because I was so focused on it, I ignored all the psychological games being played around me, and I dismissed my gut and I logic my way, and rationalized my way of every warning sign. And the tech just wasn’t up to par because the people who said they could do things, it just ignored red flags. And the problem is most people don’t consider it being a red flag until it’s too late.
And they don’t pay attention, and they don’t know how to pay attention. So their gut is like, okay, this is a problem. There’s a problem, there’s a problem. But the brain has rationalized, oh, this is a trustworthy person. This is a solid person. So it just starts automatically ignoring and justifying these red flags.
Oh, Andy’s trustworthy. He’d never do that to me. So they put them in this halo effect. It’s not possible for him to do these things, but the trust patterns just destroyed everything. People wouldn’t keep their word. And now. Specifically, I teach people, founders. I teach entrepreneurs, I teach coaches, and I show them how to spot that stuff in real time before it costs them everything like.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. You’ve done so much. You worked so hard. And then of course a lot of people find things out through trial and error or through a traumatic event, or they were, they trusted somebody, they shouldn’t, they made a decision that they should have did their homework or maybe trusted their gut.
And I appreciate that. And you mentioned the smartest people can be deceived, and I know ego can be your downfall. I really appreciate that and thank you for sharing that little tidbit. Clay, in your work with elite athletes, billionaires and top performers, what patterns around trust and betrayal have you seen over and over again?
Clay Moffat: It’s simple, man. They have pattern blindness, right? They don’t have trust issues, they don’t have delicacy issues. You know, like they’re not delicate little flowers. They are people that work hard, they commit, they move forward. Yet they trust based on charisma and credentials or urgency. They trust based on the false idea that they think trust is a trait and it isn’t.
It’s not a trait. And so they hand the keys of the code, the roadmap, or the bank account to someone else who feels right. Which they’ve been justifying along the way, and then they get blindsided, but it’s not actually blindsided. Like there’s always clues. There’s always breadcrumbs, right? It’s a Hensel and Gretel fairytale that always wrecks you in the end.
And I have worked with billionaires, I have worked with pro athletes, I’ve worked with high level operators, and the downfall is almost always the same. They override their instincts because someone knew how to mirror their language or exploit their mission and they connect with them. And this person usually comes from a sense of authority.
And when I mean authority, I don’t mean like what we’re used to in the military, like hierarchical authority. What I mean is an authority figure. So someone who looks like an expert and you don’t really know enough about it, and so therefore you place your trust in that person. In my own case, that’s exactly why I overrode every internal alarm with Rhythmoya.
I kept justifying things, kept hoping they’d come good, you know, and they didn’t. And that delay cost me six figures, and I’d say probably 18 months of momentum. And with regards to my coaching business, it’s still not what it used to be like. It’s still recovering. It torched my reputation because I was known as a person that always delivered, and then I had 140 people that I’d signed up for that I couldn’t actually deliver what I had promised them.
I delivered something else, which was equally as valued, if not more in the end, but I didn’t fulfill on my promise, and so that’s what I teach my clients to build trust like they build software, right? Modular, testable, trackable. And recognize that it’s not something that’s permanent, which is what catches a lot of people out.
They go on blind faith and think it’s permanent and it’s not.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. Diving in a little bit more about your story and what I highlighted out of this is trust is not a trait, and I know a lot of people do override their instincts because the other person or party is playing on, I.
Whether, whether it’s your emotions or or mirroring the body language, whatnot, that makes you feel like you’re in a trustworthy place, and I appreciate that. And Clay, the last question of the day, you say trust is a glitch, not a gift. Can you explain what you mean by that and how recognizing it changes how we operate in business and relationships?
Clay Moffat: Absolutely. Your nervous system isn’t calibrated for the modern world. It’s calibrated for pattern of recognition, but more so than that, your brain is lazy. It’s economical. It wants to expand as little energy as possible because that is survival and we are wired to survive. That is what the evolution was.
It was survival. It was passing on the genes. There was. Procreating, right? So if your brain can recognize someone and they repeatedly show up as someone who is trustworthy, then you put them in this trust bracket. Once they come into this trust bracket, you stop paying attention, and because you stop paying attention.
You trust people because they’re trustworthy and because they feel familiar and they match a past pattern, which is great. The past pattern does usually predict future behavior and your brain starts to fill in the gaps and it starts to go, no, this is not a bad thing. No, this is a good person. No, we’ve got five years with this person.
They would never do that to us. And in any environment that’s lethal, especially tech with how quickly things move and how quickly things scale. So you might trust a co-founder because they remind you of a friend or because they are a friend. Like a classic example of this is Eduardo Saver and Mark Zuckerberg, right?
That’s a huge scandal where he is like he is a friend, mark Zuckerberg looking at his business and just completely separated in different way. You might trust a dev team because they say the right buzzwords, but the second you trust based on feel instead of proof, you open yourself and you set yourself up for a huge betrayal.
And that is exactly what smashed me with Rhythmoya. I trusted the wrong people. I trusted a person who was, I wouldn’t say close to me, but he was a good person and I trusted that he could do more than what he said he could. And then I trusted that he was actually doing the things that he said he was doing, and I ignored the gaps in a lot because it was such a matter of urgency for me, so that I could get this massive project out to people and deliver it.
So I’m like, okay, let’s just keep going. Let’s just keep going. I didn’t pay attention to this inner no, which is like there’s something up here, clay, you need to pay attention. So when you understand that trust as a glitch means you stop handing out equity, stop handing out passwords, mission critical decisions based on likability, and you stop handing out this permanence and this is who a person is, and start recognizing that everyone is fluid.
This includes me, this includes you, Brian. This doesn’t mean that you I or anyone’s a horrible person. What it does mean is that people shift based on context, based on incentives and based on their emotional and internal state. If you push someone in the right buttons, they will absolutely betray you because they’ll shift down into a survival mechanism.
That survival mechanism means I need to start thinking about me and me alone, and that doesn’t mean they’re actually intentionally going out to set you up and screw you over and no one, well, that’s not true. Narcissists, sociopaths, and might, but apart from them, people don’t wake up and go, you know what?
Let me think of five ways I can screw over Brian today. That’s what I’m gonna do. They don’t do that. They absolutely do think about what’s in it for me, especially when something’s going on. So the example I use to push this across the line for people is you start a company, you and your co-founder are gunning it and you’re working 70, 80 hours a week, maybe even 90, right?
’cause you’re really pushing hard. So you’re really pushing this thing out the park. You’re really going as hard as you can and like you’re working so hard that you’re working more hours than there is in the world, so to speak. Right? So you’re cruising along. Brilliant. Then two years down the way, like the company’s making money, you don’t need to work as hard, but you are.
But your co-founder now has a partner and she is pregnant, and this pregnancy starts to shift his incentives. He no longer wants to hustle and grind. He now wants to spend time with his wife and his newborn child that’s about to come out into the world Now. Is that a betrayal? No, it’s just a shift. He starts not showing up.
He starts missing calls, and you’re like, ah, he wouldn’t do that because this is the guy, so this is what’s going on now. Neither one of those people is bad. They’ve just now got a values misalignment and trust is built on a mutually beneficial outcome. Right now, you and I are both benefiting from this. I hope I’m bringing value for your show and your audience, and you are giving me an opportunity where I can reach more people.
That is a mutually beneficial outcome. If you didn’t believe I’d offer value, we wouldn’t be having this conversation to begin with, and that’s the difference with trust, and that’s where the glitch happens. People think it’s this permanent process because the nervous system, the brain is lazy and likes to make things permanent, whereas it’s not.
Everything’s a process.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Gosh, so deep there. You impact quite a bit and I appreciate that. I feel like I really know you. I’ve read your book already just based on our conversation, so I appreciate that. What I really like is you highlighted a couple things that I think people know, but may need to remind themselves that you know, we are wired to survive.
Our brain is lazy to conserve energy. And of course when somebody comes in that trust circle, right? We think, oh man, everything’s good. I’m not gonna worry about that anymore or that person. I’m gonna not spend the energy thinking about other possibilities. But that’s just amazing. I’m glad we had this conversation today and I’m just so appreciative of you and I’m so glad you were on the show, and I’m gonna look forward to seeing what you’re up to next and get you back on the show again sometime.
Clay Moffat: Thank you, man. I appreciate that. It’s been a pleasure. A real pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Clay Moffat Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
