Morgan Friedman: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the latest edition of Client Horror Stories. I am very excited to have with me the one and only Lance Cayko. How are you doing, Lance?

Lance Cayko: Doing great. Got a fresh cup of coffee. Excited to be here today.

Morgan Friedman: Quick question — do you get jokes about your last name being Cayko as frequently as I get jokes about my name being Morgan Freeman? “Oh, the actor. But you’re not Black.”

Lance Cayko: One of my best friends — and this is a little morbid — his name is Matt Perry. So when Matt Perry died, I’m not going to deny that maybe he wasn’t a little relieved, because his whole life was this Matt Perry thing, you know? And then my best friend and business partner, his name is Al Gore, which is just crazy. And then, of course, my last name is Psycho. So I think God just put me together with everybody who has goofy last names that are too coincidental. I get two reactions when people hear my last name. The first one is they think I’m lying, and that’s actually when I get a little offended. I’m like, why would I lie about that? That’s not really my style. But I get genuinely happy when people give a reaction like you just did before we started recording — that real happy, fun, weird, joking kind of reaction. It’s actually a perfect icebreaker. I’ve always leaned into it. I’m trying to get my children to lean into it too, because people don’t forget you with that last name.

Morgan Friedman: Probably no one can spell it either. Everyone wants to spell it with a P.

Lance Cayko: Always. It’s always C-A-Y-K-O versus P-S-Y-C-H-O. There are only two people who have ever gotten it right, and they were both scammers from India. You know the calls — you can tell it’s some kind of scam, like “your credit card” or whatever — and they go, “Is Mr. Cayko there?” And I thought, whoa, wait a minute. I actually ended up talking to one of them for a bit before I caught myself and thought, oh right, you’re a scammer. Go away.

Morgan Friedman: So getting the right spelling of your name is itself a tell. If someone nails it, that’s a signal of sophistication — even if that person turns out to be a scammer. That is actually a good lesson.

Lance Cayko: For sure.

Morgan Friedman: With that lesson in mind, I think we’re going to get many more lessons in the next 45 minutes. Lance, I have my coffee in hand, freshly brewed, and I am beyond excited to hear about your craziest client horror story.

Lance Cayko: Yeah, it’s a pretty wild one. I actually have a big dream one day of writing a book, and there would be an entire chapter dedicated to this particular story, because I think it is one of the most mind-blowing ones I’ve ever had. I was actually telling my wife just last night — she was sharing stories about clients she had, this husband and wife who ended up pitting each other against her — and I thought, you know, at some point you’d think we’d have experienced every possible anomaly when it comes to crazy clients putting you in weird, precarious positions. But here we are.

So, about thirteen or fourteen years ago now, the more I think about it, there was this couple. They had moved from the South to Colorado. A great couple, big beautiful family, and they came into our office — we were still in the startup phase at that point. I met the wife and the husband, and she had these beautiful hand-drawn plans for a house they wanted to build in the foothills of Boulder County. They were so impressive that I actually said, “Are you an architect?” And she said, “No, I’m an interior designer.” And I told her, honestly — and I knew I was talking myself out of work here — “I’d just take those drawings as they are. They’re good enough. You don’t really need us. Just hire an engineer, and he’ll handle the structural side of things.” And then we didn’t hear from them for a while.

Morgan Friedman:  I just want to add as a parenthesis to that comment, because what you did in that moment is one of my favorite sales techniques. I always try to convince people not to hire me. “No, you actually don’t need me to run an ad campaign. ChatGPT can do everything. Here’s exactly what you should do yourself.” What I’ve found is that it builds enormous trust and shows off your expertise, so they either want to hire you immediately, or they try to do it themselves for two seconds, get completely overwhelmed, and come back to you.

Lance Cayko: I appreciate you saying that. I haven’t heard many people appreciate that move. I’m just kind of a contrarian about most things, so I thought, well, let me just try it. And it works in the same way. So yeah, they chose the path of not hiring us, and that was totally fine. But four or five years later, I get a call — or an email, I don’t remember which — from the husband. He says, “Hey, we’ve moved to Boulder, we want to do something with this house, we want to pop the top and do a big addition.” He’s talking modern, talking a big game, the whole thing. So I go to the house, and he greets me at the door. Right away I notice this is not the same location we discussed with his wife four or five years ago. I had barely a moment to register that before he says, “Hey, nice to re-meet you, and this is my girlfriend — we’ll call her Sarah, not her real name — this is my girlfriend Sarah.” And I said, “All right, cool,” and didn’t ask too many questions. He actually corrected himself shortly after and said fiancée, not girlfriend.

Morgan Friedman: Oh. So someone got divorced.

Lance Cayko: Yep. Someone got divorced. And look, I’ve been divorced myself and remarried. I get it. It’s modern America. It is what it is. So we started working on the project. It was turning out amazing — a beautiful modern addition with really cool views of the Flatirons and the mountains. Everything was going great. But then, about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through the process, the bills started becoming delinquent. We had already submitted the drawings to the city of Boulder and they were in review. The only real leverage I have as an architect in a situation like that is to stop moving the project forward — and in this case, to tell the city we’re not doing anything further until the client catches up on their bills. I don’t want to go to court. That’s silly. Let’s handle this like adults. I always try to work with people too — hey, we can do a payment plan, we can put it on a credit card, whatever, let’s make it work — but I need some skin in the game to do that. So that was kind of a yellow-orange flag.

Then we started getting some strange emails. The building permit hadn’t come through yet. We’d only submitted drawings, they were under review, and I was holding the line — pay what you owe and then we’ll address the city’s comments and hopefully get you your permit. But I was getting ghosted. Ghosted, ghosted, ghosted.

Then one day, out of nowhere, I get an email from him with photos attached. He goes, “Hey, do you think this lumber is the right kind? I’m having some issues.” And when I look at the photos, my jaw dropped — he had literally ripped off the roof and started construction without a building permit.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. Without a permit. And without telling you, because you were part of the process — your stamps, your architectural and engineering credentials are tied to this thing.

Lance Cayko: Exactly. One hundred percent. That was the final straw. I made the decision to write a formal letter to the City of Boulder officially withdrawing ourselves from the project. Done.

Morgan Friedman: But wait — formally rescinding is a massive escalation. Before you did that, were you clear with him? Did you say, “This is breaking regulations, we need to fix this immediately,” or did you just go straight to the city?

Lance Cayko: Great question. Before I made the final decision, I did email him back in a tone that was partly understanding and partly firm. Something along the lines of, “Look, Chris — let’s call him Chris — I get it. Getting a building permit in Boulder is painful, it’s expensive, it takes forever. I understand why people sometimes do what they’ve got to do. But you need to stop. You have to stop right now, or we are going to stop.” And then I slept on it, and decided — no. This is it. We just can’t have our name put in jeopardy in Boulder, where we do so much work. Your reputation in this business is everything; if it slips, your plans get pushed to the bottom of the review pile.

So I wrote the formal letter to the city and blind-copied him on it, so he could read it verbatim — we are formally withdrawing, we are done. A month or so later, I got an email from a competitor of ours asking for our drawings. Confused, I asked why. They said, “Oh, Chris fired you guys. He hired us to pick up the project.” And I had to explain — no, no, no. That is not how this went. I fired him. It just kept getting fishier and fishier.

The project eventually got finished, but I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stop trying to understand what had actually happened, especially because his fiancée, Sarah, had started calling and texting me separately, and you could tell she was completely distraught. So I reached out to her and said, “Can we just have coffee? I just want to understand what’s going on.” She hadn’t known that Chris was withholding payments. She had no idea. It wasn’t even his property — it was her property. He was just selling her this dream of a renovation on her own house, and she had no idea that we’d been fired or that any of the legal issues had started.

So I got her to meet me for coffee, and she started explaining everything — how it all fell apart, how she had no idea he was doing things illegally or off-book, and how he had basically drained her bank accounts and left her with a completely unfinished house, roof torn off, exposed to the elements.

Morgan Friedman: That’s mind-blowing.

Lance Cayko: It gets worse. She started digging a little deeper into who Chris actually was, and at one point she looked at me and said, “Did you know he’s still married?” I told her, honestly, that when I came to meet her and Chris at the house, I didn’t ask questions because it wasn’t really my place. But I had to tell her: “Yes, Sarah, I’ve met the wife.” And then I told her the full story — how they had come into my office together years before, how she had shown me those beautiful drawings and told me she was an interior designer, the whole thing.

The look on Sarah’s face. I can’t even describe it. It was like she had seen a ghost or an alien. She was absolutely mortified that she had been lied to so completely and so thoroughly.

Morgan Friedman: Let me make sure I’m following this correctly. He was still married to the original woman — the interior designer.

Lance Cayko: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: And then separately, he was engaged to Sarah, convincing her to spend her own money renovating her own house, but she didn’t know he was still married.

Lance Cayko: She had no idea. None. Not until everything started falling apart. She started getting formal notices from the City of Boulder — you are building illegally, stop immediately. There were stop orders being placed on her property. That’s when she panicked and reached out to me. And once she started pulling the thread, she went deep. She called his father, looked everything up, really investigated who this person was. She was a God-fearing Christian woman, which adds a whole other layer to it, because she told me he used to do Bible study with her. And on top of everything else, the town where the legal wife lived and the town where Sarah lived were about fifteen miles apart.

Morgan Friedman: Wait — I’m a little slow — there’s also a bigamy angle here.

Lance Cayko: Yes. Absolutely. So she and I were both just sitting there going, “Oh my goodness. This is intense.” He ended up leaving the state entirely, because she made clear she was going to press charges — fraud and whatever else applied. He ran back to Texas with his tail between his legs and went to live with his father or something like that. The other architecture firm ended up finishing the project with Sarah, and she didn’t go bankrupt. I don’t know all the details, but I’ve driven by the house several times since it was finished and it looks genuinely beautiful. It’s got the roof, the modern pop-top addition, the whole thing.

Morgan Friedman: It has the roof.

Lance Cayko: It has the roof. And then a couple of months after it was completed, his mugshot appeared on my Facebook feed. And I know, I know — tinfoil hat and all of that — but you know how you talk about things near your phone and they show up in your feed? I was like, sure enough. There was his mugshot, and the paper had made a big deal of it. I was like, “Holy — ” and I can’t remember all the specific charges, but it was significant. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, deferred prison time, all kinds of consequences. And it turned out it wasn’t just Sarah and our project — once the can was opened, other people came after him too. He had apparently been swindling people from the very beginning, all the way back to when he first moved to Colorado from the South, back when he and his wife walked into my office over a decade ago.

I even used this guy as an example when talking to my sons. I said, “Don’t do this. The truth always comes out, and this man has ruined his life. He’s also ruined two women’s lives temporarily, and that’s the part that’s worse than just ruining yourself.”

Morgan Friedman: He ruined other people, which is worse than just ruining yourself.

Lance Cayko: Exactly. And once I saw the mugshot, my spicy brain couldn’t be turned off. I decided I was going to reach out to the first wife, the interior designer. I just had to know — did she know? Was she aware? I looked her up on Instagram. She’s an artist, and she has this beautiful profile with all her work. I sent her a message saying something like, “I don’t know if you remember me,” and told her the story. I asked if she’d be open to coffee — partly because I genuinely wanted to understand what had happened, and partly because my son is an artist and I had seen her work, and I thought maybe she could offer him some guidance or even take him on as an apprentice.

She agreed to meet. And it was the same story in reverse, from her perspective. She said they had absolutely no idea he was living a double life. He would come and go between both houses, maintaining two complete lives, two women who thought they knew him, living about fifteen miles apart.

Morgan Friedman: It’s incredible to me that some people can actually pull that off.

Lance Cayko: It seems exhausting, doesn’t it? Like, one wife is already so much work.

Morgan Friedman: Speaking of how someone could actually pull something like that off — it reminds me of something. I have a couple of friends who are tech superstars, names you’d probably know. This was about twenty-five years ago. One of them — his stories never quite added up. He’d be making a certain amount of money, but then things wouldn’t align, and there’d always be something weird. And eventually another person in our group made this observation: “I figured out why his numbers never add up. Every single figure he uses — how much his companies are making, how much something cost — he always either doubles or halves the real number to make himself look better.” And my friend and I realized — that’s kind of genius, in a terrible way. Because one of the great challenges of being a liar is keeping your story straight over time. But if you just pick a rule — you know the truth, and you double it or half it — you can lie consistently. These people who live double lives probably have a whole system of rules like that to make the lying sustainable.

Lance Cayko: Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. It sounds so exhausting. But people are wild. I don’t know. I’m not even sure there’s a single clean lesson from this story. I look for lessons in everything, and with this one I kind of think it’s just an experience more than anything. It just never ceases to amaze me.

Morgan Friedman: I think we still have time to find a couple of lessons if we challenge ourselves. Let me take a sip of coffee and I’ll throw out the first one.

This story reminds me of a saying my grandmother used to have. It’s originally in Yiddish, and it’s connected to the fact that Jews don’t eat pork — that’s the context. The saying is: if you’re going to eat pork, eat the best kind. What I love about that phrase is what it actually means. It’s not endorsing breaking rules. It’s saying: obviously, don’t break the rules — it’s illegal, it’s immoral, you’ll go to jail, it’s bad. But if you’re going to break them anyway, don’t do it for small stakes. Don’t steal a dollar. Do it for millions.

And I feel like there’s something here in this story. Because I always hear these infidelity stories where it’s like, “Oh, he was on a work trip, he had too many drinks, something happened.” And it’s like — if you’re going to blow up your marriage and destroy your life, obviously the correct answer is don’t. But if you’re going to do it anyway, at least be this guy. Live the full double life. Bible study, two towns, two complete families, fifteen miles apart. If you’re going to eat pork, eat the best kind.

Lance Cayko: You know, it’s funny you mention that, because Bryan Johnson — the tech guy, the one who’s obsessed with trying to live forever — posted just last night: “Friends, stop drinking alcohol. Not cut back. Eliminate it.” And he listed all the problems with even one drink. Then someone in the comments said, “What about twenty drinks?” And he replied, “Now that’s something I can get on board with. If you’re going to do something, get after it.” That’s the same spirit. Whole-ass everything. Don’t half-ass life. Life is too short.

Morgan Friedman: And there’s actually deep wisdom in that, even if we’re laughing about it. I genuinely believe that a huge portion of the world’s problems come from people doing things in a mediocre, half-committed way. If everyone who said they were going to do something actually thought it all the way through — took it to its logical conclusion, considered the consequences — so many disasters would be avoided. It’s incredible to me how hard this is for most people. The vast majority of people I know coast through life on a half-effort, because you can. You can get just enough money, just enough time, just enough of everything. But you can never truly achieve something remarkable unless you commit to it completely.

Lance Cayko: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that phrase — whole-assing everything — that actually came from my best friend and business partner Bill. We were doing our first real estate development together, and I was wearing three hats at once: developer, architect, builder, just grinding through it. He looked at me one day and said, “You know what, Lance? You just whole-ass everything, don’t you?” And I thought, yeah. Absolutely. Why would you do anything else? Life is so short.

Morgan Friedman: And the poor people who got caught in the crosshairs of this guy — both women, the kids — it’s just shocking.

Lance Cayko: He was a good-looking guy. Both women were genuinely beautiful women. I get it in some sense. He just had this proclivity to live on the edge, to need that cortisol spike, whatever it is. Some people just need that.

Morgan Friedman: Okay, so we have one great lesson. I think we can find more. Here’s an interesting angle: the fiancée, Sarah, is a real estate professional. She knew full well what permits are and why they matter. And she still missed all the signs. How did that happen?

Lance Cayko: I think it’s the love and infatuation blindness. I hope everyone listening has been deeply in love at least once, because then you know what it feels like — there are blinders that go on. They’re involuntary. When you’re that deep into something, into someone, your critical faculties just switch off in certain areas.

Morgan Friedman: That’s such a good point. And I think there’s a related lesson about the importance of outside expertise — not because you’re incompetent, but because you don’t know what you don’t know. If I’ve never done a home renovation, I might not even know that something as simple as putting in an elevator requires a permit. I’d never have thought to ask. And this is where spending a few thousand or whatever for some sort of an expert — an architect, a consultant, a lawyer, whoever — goes a long way toward preventing catastrophe. From this woman’s point of view, if her fiancé wanted to embark on a renovation, an architect would have said, ‘Just make sure you have documents A, B, and C in place.’ Someone with more general business or construction experience — not necessarily an architect — would have said, ‘Hey, just make sure you have clarity on who’s paying for what and what the final cost looks like.’ A business expert understands all of this instinctively. But a housewife who had spent her life reading the Bible rather than building businesses would never have even realized those questions needed to be asked. The expert asks the questions you didn’t even know existed. Does that make sense to you?

Lance Cayko: “It’s resonating. Here’s what I think it is. I hope everybody listening — including you and me — has been in love at least once. Because when you get deep in love, or lust, or whatever one of those two, there’s just this blinder that happens. And I wonder if that’s what it is here, because this woman is actually a real estate professional. 

Morgan Friedman: That makes it even funnier. Of course the real estate professional knows their permits.

Lance Cayko: Yes, So, she’s got to be careful about that love blindness — I think that’s what it was.

Morgan Friedman: You know, love, infatuation — sometimes you get so excited about something that you say, “We don’t need to sign the papers”. But guess what?  You always need to sign the papers. 

Lance Cayko: You’ve got to cross your T’s and dot your I’s. No matter how much you love someone — even with a business partner — you’ve got to have a breakup plan. You’ve got to basically have the prenup before you go into business together. Like, okay, yes, I love you, yes, I trust you, business partner — but at the end of the day, it could fall apart. You could get sick. Who knows? All kinds of crazy stuff can happen. So you’ve got to go through the actual crossing of the T’s and dotting of the I’s, and just not get caught up in the emotion of it. It’s like you’re in a movie — but you also don’t want to be in a movie, because that’s exactly what they ended up being in. I mean, it really was like a real-life movie. I was just sitting there having coffee, looking back at it all, going, ‘Oh my goodness.’ How many other architects are ever going to be able to tell a story like this? I thought we were just supposed to draw stuff.”

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Sometimes I think the whole world is basically one big movie, and each one of us is the hero of our own film. So you look at the movie playing out between these people and you think — wow, they’re having this crazy double-life, secret adventure kind of movie. And then you’re over here like, I’m just building some buildings. But then other people look at your life in a completely different way. Someone who hates their job sweeping floors looks at you and thinks, ‘Wow, he gets to draw and build things all day — he’s living the dream. I wanted to be an architect.’ You’re living an exciting life and you don’t even realize it. 

Lance Cayko: Yeah, right. It’s like — comparison is the thief of joy. You’ve got to try to have that lens where you’re grateful for what’s right in front of you. Even as someone who does pretty well financially now, at the base of it all, it’s about being thankful for something as simple as a good home-cooked meal — like the one my wife made last night. That’s really it. Instead of thinking, ‘I bet that guy’s having lobster tonight,’ you realize, ‘Yeah, but I’m having lamb, and she made it, and it’s wonderful.’ Just trying to be a little more present. And maybe that was also part of the problem here — was there a lack of mental presence? Were they both having a kind of metaphorical out-of-body experience, where they were going, ‘Oh yeah, everything’s fine, I don’t need to pay close attention to this, I can detach from the situation’? And because they weren’t more attached to it, they didn’t see all the little subtle things that would have clued them in — the small signs that, if they’d been present, would have made them stop and think, wait a minute… 

 Morgan Friedman: That’s a lesson I need personally. I pride myself on noticing details. But also sometimes I’m not present. Sometimes I’m in outer space as well. So this is a good reminder to make sure that you’re always present. I have two short semi-related things from the conversation that I thought would be fun to mention to wrap up. I know absolutely nothing about building homes, permits, anything like that in the US, but in Argentina I’ve built a couple of homes and it’s crazy. You might just find it funny how wildly different the system is in Argentina. Basically you can just buy off permits. There are some permits the government just never checks, so you just file it and then you start doing your thing. There are other ones where you just very explicitly pay off the government. It is so wild compared to the American everything-is-in-white-and-legal universe.

Lance Cayko: Oh yeah. So I’m actually half Brazilian. I didn’t know who my real dad was until I was about 33, ten years ago. I’m 43. I’ve been to Brazil three times, I think, and he’s been up here five or six times since we kind of reconnected and found each other. But one of the things I was trying to do right away — he was like, “We’ve got to get you dual citizenship.” I’m like, “Yeah, I should. Why not? I want dual citizenship. I want another passport. You know, what if I’ve got to leave or something?” And Brazil is great. So on one of the trips we went down there, I got to see all of the inner workings of how it works. We’d get stopped going through the bridges and stuff and I’d be like, what was that? How come there’s no just credit card thing or whatever where you can pay like a formal toll? And he’s like, oh no, that’s not how it works. You have to pay to get past the guards. And I was like, okay. So we did that all one day — this is him, not me doing anything illegal, just regular stuff over there — and then we tramped around the jungle for one whole day trying to bribe government officials to give me a dual citizenship passport in Brazil. It’s just their culture. It wasn’t my decision. It didn’t work, we didn’t get it. But I was just fascinated by the whole experience. I was like, holy cow, it is really different over here.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. I’ve lived in Argentina for a long time. My wife is Argentine and I also lived in South America for years as well. Very similar idiosyncrasies. One way I like to describe Argentine culture and how things happen to Americans is the following. I always tell people in Argentina every problem is solved the same way and it starts like this: I know a guy.

Lance Cayko:  And that’s what he said over and over again. Don’t worry. 

Morgan Friedman: I know a guy. Do you want Argentine citizenship? I actually know the guy. You want something else? I know that guy. Everyone knows a different guy. And this style has its advantages and disadvantages. In Argentina, by law, anyone in construction is required to be a member of the construction workers’ union, UOCRA. but the vast majority aren’t. So what happens is every single construction site that uses union workers UOCRA puts up huge flags that say the union is present, UOCRA is here. And any construction site that doesn’t have that, officials come around and start investigating — wait, are you using illegal workers, what’s happening? So there’s this whole thing where you ask yourself, do we put up a flag even though we don’t have union workers? We’re only doing construction inside, not outside, so they won’t notice. So we don’t need to do that. It’s all these crazy sorts of things that are still hard after all these years for my American brain to imagine.

Lance Cayko: Yeah. 

Morgan Friedman: My final fun comment — it’s a slight tangent but I’m in a fun mood — is you mentioned the coincidence of that mugshot just appearing on your Facebook feed. I’m a math, logic, science guy, but just in the last couple of years so many weird things have been happening to me. How does the universe operate? And to me it’s not even that Facebook is listening. It’s been happening to me so much where I think about things and they come up on my feed, which is kind of creepy. How does technology work? How does the universe work? Are there sensors from the universe? I don’t know. And this just happened to me last night. I’ve been with the girl that’s now my wife, dating and married, for a total of 20 years. But maybe 23 or 24 years ago I was dating this other girl, kind of in love with her. I’ve not spoken to that ex-girlfriend in something like 23 years. Just a couple of days ago I was wondering, whatever became of this person? I haven’t thought about her in 23 years. How did her life turn out, all grown up? And then just yesterday on my Facebook feed this person, who basically never posts, came up saying, “Hey, if any of my friends are single men between 35 and 55 who want to have a baby through artificial insemination, send me a message with a picture of a sperm.” And I was like, I don’t know how her life turned out, but to me it was just incredible that I was literally thinking about someone for the first time in 20 years and then they just came up. The universe is a strange place.

Lance Cayko: It is. The mental-to-digital reality now. I’m with you because I swear it didn’t used to be like that. It used to be you had to vocalize it or type it because the cookies would pull from Facebook. Now just the thinking — and not to get too esoteric, but there are people who think we’re just going to get more telepathic as we evolve. And I’m like, yeah, it could be true.

I watch a lot of the Wi-Files on YouTube — that’ll clue people in to where my spicy brain gets. But yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun.

Morgan Friedman: With that, this has been such a fun conversation. A whole bunch of interesting random tangents. It was great having you on. Thank you for sharing your stories. And everyone who stayed around to the end, I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Until next time.