 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome, welcome to Unhinged with the DoorDork where your hardware nerds get together, we knock and we slam and we laugh and learn at some different doorfills. And we have fun while we do it. We dork around and learn a little bit more about doors and that's the idea behind it, right? And to have a little fun while we do it. Today, we do have a very special nerd joining us, Mr. Leo Des. Maybe one of the only guys that might not need an introduction on this platform, but Lee, why don't you go ahead and hop on and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do and maybe a fun fact. No, I appreciate that very much. So yeah, it's great to be here. I've been watching everything that you all been doing and I'm big fans and it's an honor to be here. So thank you and nice product placement, by the way, Benji. So I appreciate the opportunity to come on and share some time with you. So yeah, Leo Des been in the security connected product space, I'll call it for a little bit over 20 years, security a little less than that. Been at places like Brevo had my own integration company, Uniki, Allegiant had a consulting company called Group 337, which was purchased by Latch where I'm currently at now focusing on partnerships in the ecosystem side of it. But really my niche where I like to spend my time is in the access control industry. And so it's somewhat of a segmented knee deep in the access control space, but then overall just sort of lover of the security industry. But where I like to separate myself, if you would, would be to focus on the access control space and really one foot in the old and one foot in the new. Sort of the, I utilize the saying of like, majority of our industry has been focused on today and yesterday, I like to focus on today and tomorrow with an appreciation for yesterday. So that's where I like to spend my time. I like that a lot. Thanks. Yeah, it's been three years in the making of trying to distill exactly what it is and why, but that's my why behind or how I spend my time. Something that people don't know about me. I don't know, recently I got a tattoo, that's new. Oh. And it's a jar. A jar. Yeah. So that's sometimes those people all for a loop and they see that on me. More meaning behind that jar or is it a door pun? You know, like when is a door not a door pun? A jar, there you go. I wish I could say it was. That would be commitment in a lot of ways. That's why soon you got to get your tattooed on and step up and you don't have to. No, it's my wife and kids' initials. And then also I've always liked stencil tattoos for whatever reason. And I don't know, maybe it's a midlife crisis. I just turned 45. You know, it's cheaper than a motorcycle or you know, a lot of other things. So now I understand what people say they are a dick thing. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, that's something that most people don't know. I got my first tattoo. Well, my only tattoo when I was 20 and I'm 38 now. And I have not gotten another one cause I can't decide on what I'm gonna permanently put on myself. I actually, now that we're talking about tattoos, let's just dive in. I do not have a tattoo. And I don't know, I have a like a textile texture things, I don't like sticky things. But I wonder if I was gonna get a tattoo. It probably would be either something really about my family and love and all of that or something very dorky like a key or like door or something like that. Yeah, I've joked around. I think the next one is it can be like a padlock or something just sort of like moments in time. But this one, yeah, for whatever reason I've always wanted it. And I just said screw it. I'm like, I'll do it. So I did. Yeah, no, that's a great tattoo and a much better reason than just a door pun. So thank you. You can use it for that. I'll add it in front of it. But yeah, only for trade shows though. Okay, well, welcome, Leigh. So happy to have you on the show. You know her, you love her. Mrs. Mia Mera, why don't you hop on and say hello. Yeah, hello. Happy to have Leigh on today. And hopefully we can talk about the documented history of electronic access control at some point. My fun fact for today is that I was the president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in college. Kind of boring. That surprised me though, right? I mean, it's definitely a fun fact, but it's not surprising to me. Now that I know you at least. Yeah, also nerdy. Again, staying with the nerdy facts. I was also in student government too. So there you go. Super nerd, been a nerd from the beginning. All right, Benji, your turn. Fun fact. Fun fact. Okay, I got one. So not many people know this about me, but I almost went into culinary arts for school. I'm an avid cooker and love cooking and experimenting. And one of the things that I really enjoyed doing is going and experiencing really good food and then going home and trying to like recreate it. You know, like trying to do it my way. And sometimes I'm very successful other times, but I have no idea. Maybe I'm like missing some secret ingredient that I couldn't get half of my palate. I don't know. Very cool. On that note, I'll tell you, my wife started a catered company before she did. So I was a sous chef for her. It's called Fresh Confections. But yeah, she did desserts. And basically when I started the integration company that we had primarily did audio video work and then some security, but we were doing lunch and learns and she happened to move here from Oregon, University of Oregon. And instead of buying Panera or whatever it was, was like, why don't you make the lunches? And next thing you know, it turned into a whole catering company. So one of the things that we would do was pretty fun is we would go out to restaurants and try different things and see if we wanted to bring it back to the menu. So I share that experience with you. That was the fun part of it. The hard part is being on your feet for that long, cooking and you're working for that living very hard. Oh yeah, especially if you are catering, that's like all day. So much prep work that goes into that as well. Many people don't understand the prep work that comes into it, especially as a sous chef where you're doing most of the prep yourself. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. We learned a lot about each other doing that. So it's cool. Wonderful. Okay, so let's dive into Unhinged. For those who don't know how the show works, I'll share my screen. I'll pop up a picture of a door, fall, fell, install, code violation, something a little unique. And because we have Lee on deck, I accustomed a little bit more towards access control because I knew that was your niche. So there'll be access control centric to this certain extent. But anyways, we'll give it a knocking score. One being not too knocking bad and 10 being pretty knocking bad. Like this is a code violation. Let's get the AHA involved. I think we've only had a couple of those so far, but we'll see what happens today. You guys ready to get started? Let's do it. Yeah. I don't know if you're ready for this. I'm gonna do my best. What do you see? First impressions. Is that a wave to open? It is. You're gonna trigger that before you even unlock it. Or can you only trigger it after you unlock it? Yeah. It might be a little bit of both. Oh, this is like a wall paint. So the keyway? Yeah. That's a pretty open keyway. Okay, I was just saying that. I thought I was like, am I missing something? Did you doctor that up? This is at a hospital and they're missing something. Really? Maybe a cylinder. Yeah, it could be. I mean, do you need it? No, I'm kidding. The only thing that strikes me here, I always feel like the architectural aesthetic side of a lot of the stuff that we do, it seems to be like just slammed together and in a lot of ways. It sort of like shows the disparate systems and lack of interoperability of these systems and that that you have to have like in Portlandia when they're like, just put a bird on it. It's like our approach to every door. It's like, I'll just put this on it, right? Like, and I get why? It's because of the needs and sort of the, I mean, that's two things on Portland, by the way. And by the way, I think this is very Portland show, but I just don't feel like it does us any service in the architectural community to the fact that it's like continuous Mr. Potato Head of doors in a lot of ways. There's got to be a better way, in my opinion. No, I get that. A lot of times when you look at access control, you get a hodgepodge of different systems that kind of get built together to try to make something work. I agree with you. It doesn't seem like it was designed that way. It was almost like an afterthought. Well, it was probably done in multiple steps, right? Like this hospital's probably built mechanical system. Then they probably came back at another time and said, well, we want access control, but we don't want to put any whole EAC in. So electric strike reader, then pandemic probably happened, right? And now they want touchless, so wave to open switch, right? So this is probably two to three renovations on this opening. Yeah, which was also like one of my things that I always like to think about is, when you talk about the access control industry, I think the biggest issue that it currently has is actually the doors. So I know we're on a door door, but if you think about it, like look how much real estate that door has. And we always try to solve things like in the centimeters and inches versus this entire door that, that's why I get kind of excited when you think about what some of these door companies are doing where they're embedding technology into it. Is that going to be the way things go moving forward? I gotta believe in some respects, but I don't fault people for trying to do solutions like this, because they're trying to deliver a solution of a need that, you know, it's somewhat impossible to plan for every scenario in a lot of cases, right? Especially as things change and utilization of that, you know, that was a lab. Now it used to be an IT closet before type of a thing, right? Yeah. So from a security standpoint, one thing that stands out to me, yeah, it's the lack of a key way. If anyone has a flat head, they could easily open this up without needing the right credentials. But also, if you look closely, you can actually see that it is a guarded lock set, but the guard is actually slipped into the latch. And I know it's hard to see unless you like blow it up. But if that's the case, you could use the screwdriver. That'd be even easier to open up the doors. You could just slip open the latch that way. And I wonder if there's any like, I don't know, at a hospital, there might be some stuff that people might want to get a hold of, whether it's information or products behind this secure door. That's my first impression, first concern, and partially why I threw this up there. Yeah, and if one door looks like this, more than one door probably looks like this. Yeah, I wonder why they took the cylinder out of there. Maybe because they didn't need it anymore because they have the access control system on there. But I always say this, you can have the best access control system in the world. But if you don't have a controlled key system that backs it up, that supports it, that goes hand in hand with it, you literally bypass your whole system right there. Yeah, actually, you bring up a good thing and maybe tell me if I'm going out of the rules here, but you mentioned the key backup. This is a continuous debate that goes on within our industry. Like what is your views and your thoughts on? Are keys going away? I think eventually we'll get there. But like if you look at the European market and the Asian market, they're already there. I think right now what the perception is, if I don't have a key to override electrical failure, then there's panic around that. So until we can overcome that perception, you'll have a key. I hope we get there. Because that is such a pain to deal with when you're building out a master key system. And it is often your weakest point of your access control system. So I hope we get there. I don't know if it's gonna be anytime soon in the States, just because there's so many of these really established facilities that rely heavily on that system. Unless we have a whole paradigm change in the industry, I think it's gonna be a while before we see that. And I would add as a caveat that there would still need to be some kind of backup system set in place for emergency. So our first responders had to get involved. Yeah, I'm aligned with all of that. My belief is I don't think in our lifetime we'll see it go away. And frankly, I think this is where we'll get interesting in a lot of ways our industry has been horizontally focused. The same systems and products that are built for airports would be built for hospitals that are built for the subshot down the road. And the belief that at least I have is that verticals will specialize and those verticals will have sort of norms or truths. And our industry in certain instances like this it may very well need to have it. But then you could see in some cases, if not having it it's also what's interesting is the US market being such a big growth market but yet slower to adopt in some of those areas the technology, it's like this weird thing where it also though creates a long-term really good opportunity for companies. Like you get examples like multi-family, right? There's a belief that it'll go away and you won't have keys, but then laws come into place because not everybody has a phone and the rest of it's where you would have it and also has a good backup plan on that side. So I just don't see it going away as much as I would love to see it from an innovation standpoint. We can all see the day and maybe this is where we go back to the door side thing, right? The doors go swoosh and they open up like the Jetsons like we believe maybe you wouldn't need a key but you could also imagine there still would be a key override and a lot of those things just in case the power went out or the swoosh didn't work to open up. In this case, it doesn't look like they needed one. Maybe they did, but yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking they probably took the cylinder out from a convenience standpoint or they were in the middle of switching out key systems or updating it and just forgot the store because they didn't need it. They said access control, why have it on it? So what is this now? This is like two rotten tomatoes or what was the... Yeah, let's give it a back in the store. Lee, Mia, what do you guys think? I don't think we have a lot of like, well, I mean, other than you could get through this door with a simple tool. I don't think there's really a life safety risk. There's definitely a security risk here. So I'm gonna say it's about a five. I think that the EAC and a way to open could be laid out better. Yes, there's 15 other solutions we could put here. That being said, the solution we have could have been laid out a little bit better. And then that, you know, the guarding, the fact that the guarding is in the strike, not great, but we've seen worse. Hot mess, seen worse, give it a five. I'm good with that. Kat, yeah, I was thinking a very similar thing. And like this is in a hospital so they'd have to get multiple layers through of security or if someone watching them or looking at them, I happen to get this far. And if I had, I mean, without anyone like really catching me if I had poor intentions or was trying to steal narcotics or something, I would maybe give it a little higher score because I knew what was behind that door being a lap. But that being said, yeah, not too knocking bad. Kat, next one, are you guys ready? 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