Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us today. It is with great pleasure, I would like to introduce Zia, Zia is a great friend, a great friend and also a colleague from Columbia University. He is also a partner at our company called Lifton, an architecture firm based in Beirut and in New York. And I have heard about Lifton before and I started my own practice because of in conversation and I was very pleased about the work that they do. It has always been a source of inspiration and also a role model for all development that is in our company. So it is a great pleasure to have Zia tonight to share a little bit of background on projects and your work and also to celebrate your own success. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So tonight I'm going to have a short lecture and it's really comprised of three complex presentations. First I'm going to talk about our office practice. And then I will talk about Amir Chekhiwars language which is the most which I have just completed in the rural area of my level. Through that I'm going to try to talk about the research we have been conducting at our studio but also at Columbia University. So usually it's going to be a pleasure. So usually we try to start our lecture with this relatively old project of ours which is really a bathroom renovation apartment inside Manhattan. And we start with that detail because we think that this project is emblematic of the representative of the office approach which is carried from the interior scale all the way to the urban architecture. So what you're looking at here is really the design of the glass door of the bathroom which is designed in a way to hinge around the toilet paper to see if the toilet paper intersects the plane of the door kind of sticking outside. And it allows kind of the ease of replacement of the toilet paper. So if you ever use a bathroom with an amount of paper somebody can easily repair the bathroom by exchanging the toilet paper. So the solution starts from this or the problem starts from this kind of pragmatic utility where to put the toilet paper in order to rely on the new architectural solution. So in this case it's the mechanical tool that is the door which allows us here to challenge the thin membrane that divides public and private and domestic space. The first project I will talk about is a book called The House in Fakirada. But I don't know if it depends on this idea of public-private again to the architectural scale. The project sits on the corner side, kind of hugs the side and it bends gently to create a common area of the door. But the main idea was that the client came to us asking for a space where they can host socially back down kind of very frequent places. On a rather really small site with not much space basically to have a big family. So we decided to use the roof as kind of the main public space over the kind of socially that we have. And for that we created a loop in line with the private part of the house without ever entering it. So one can arrive to the house, basically climb from the outside, go out to the roof and then go back to the house without ever entering the private area. So just going to scan through some of those pictures. You can see here it's still under construction, almost finished actually. And then you see some of those circulation kind of thread that rushes in the interior without ever entering the space as well as the spaces of the house. Because it has this benches, it doesn't design the dining table so that it kind of fits into the space as well. Also allow a little bit of conversation happening later as well as the plastic table. So the second house again is with similar issue of public private. This is kind of a side research that we've been conducting at our office which looks at the politicians houses in Lebanon. These are some of the houses for the last 30 or 40 years now. They've been taking over what's supposed to be the kind of public venue where the constituent can interact with their representative. So it's kind of like a downfall but privatized. And it happens at the scale of the house and it happens across the country. Each religious sex having their own kind of house, the dissident, the politician. These are some of the examples, historical examples.  So we were also approached to do a house for the politicians a few years ago. We kind of tried to kind of learn from that kind of back in the political technology in Lebanon of politicians houses. And we created a house that has, instead of having a vertical separation, it has this 40 by 60 meter floor with the public areas below, which kind of aggregate of big spaces from the private synergized areas above. And the house became really kind of an indication of those massing on top of the public versus private, which were then challenged with these vertical spaces that cut across the verticality of these absolute horizontalities. Again, a third project that must be completed a few years ago and now is actually dismantled, which is the very big exhibition center located in Lebanon. So if you know the history of the region, you would know that actually Lebanon went through a civil war from the early 1970s until the 1990s, mostly in downtown area, which was demolished, the levels of which were kind of dumped to the sea to create this landfill area where the new city is supposed to be projected, supposed to be grown. And we were hired to design an exhibition center that here on this exact site. But what the client saw was a kind of ground, which is avian out of sand. We saw it as a place where it really embodies the history and violence of war, but also a kind of projection of what the city will become in the future. For that we created a building that has basically corrugated facade, aluminum facade, that will reflect the growth of the city around it. So the building becomes basically the indicator of the city that will be projected onto the site. So the more basically the building sits in this nothingness, it has a very fine kind of green facade, but also very delicate given the construction side, the violent construction of what would happen on that side in terms of reducing the dust and rubble etc. But also as the building, as the city goes around, the building will be reflecting the identity, the continuously being shaped identity of the site. And you can see also the effect of the collage technique of reflecting different buildings from different contexts and collaging them on the facade of the building. What happened is the building we made and the status has never evolved because really the city around it was never built because of many political and social economic issues and the building was eventually demolished without ever reflecting anything. A small gallery that we just finished in Beirut, which is of Hamrassi. Hamrassi is an interesting street that we've been researching and talking about it very quickly with some students at Columbia University. It's really a modern street that is home-blown. It doesn't have as modern as the building that you see in terms of the free-standing object of the plaza etc. But actually it's a series of rather generic office buildings and residential buildings facing north with kind of experimentation with glass facade in the early 50s and late 60s. And on the west, on the south with kind of deep parking in the sun. But it's really a street that is kind of closely with fabric and this is one of the drama that the students have produced trying to basically escalate the history of those buildings and understand the robust ground floor that has in terms of stairways, shortcuts, small commercial units as well. So you see this is kind of one of the details and most of those buildings have these internal streets that run across the sites. Nearby we're working at the same time on this gallery that is a gallery that really sits in the basement. And one of the kind of early lessons that we learned is trying to really create a similar relationship from the one we were just discussing, which is trying to bring light deep down and trying to create a continuous circulation from the sidewalk all the way down to the gallery space. So the facade really is this slit kind of opening, maximizing the openness to the sidewalk. And then as you basically descend down into the stair, the main cascade of the stair into the gallery with the kind of views back into the side in front of the concrete. The last project that I talked about before talking about the mosque itself is a collaboration project that we've been working on with Steven Orr Architects in New York, which is in the Beirut Marina located also in downtown Beirut at this site. And the way Steven sees the project is like really the continuation of the concrete which is this promenade by the water that becomes here public and kind of ramps up on the roof of the building, which I'm going to go through it very quickly. But then kind of expanding the site to become this public platform with rules, effect compounds, as well as the city area vegetation. And underneath it is commercial spaces that are related to the water edge itself. Alright, so next came the mosque. And as a research first, one of the first things that strike us was that Islam, as we understand it today, is perhaps one of the fastest growing religion in the world today. It's expected to be the biggest, basically, faith by 20.5. And it's a religion that we discussed before. It's considered to be bottom-high meaning there are more youth than elderly people, especially when you compare it to Judaism and Christianity. But what was interesting is that although Islam, Islamic population making was very young, there was a paradox that is we still built in those kind of historical or historicist terms when it comes to the architecture of the mosque. So contemporary mosque today is really in this crisis world where each community or each country is looking for what is authentic and what is the real mosque architecture supposed to be. Of course the minaret etc. are kind of signified of the mosque. But really the mosque is never really described in the Quran or in the religious text of what it's really supposed to be, in terms of architecture or even station. So there's really no reference, one reference to what the mosque should look like. Again, early in 2011, another event happened in Switzerland which was the banning minaret to happen in the whole country when mosques were built, which was kind of an early, if you wish, indication of Islamophobia that we see more of it today. At the same time we're invited to this prior quadrillion of performance and design in 2011 for which we kind of adopted the Mosque of the Monde, I'm sorry, the Monde by Odorossi who really said that it's really the space of the imagination, architecture, imagination to start. And it's a theater that basically travels in Venice in the water. And basically what we did was we graphed and come to the theater, the only four minaret left in Switzerland, kind of as an act of defiance perhaps, but also we created this map, which is really the Mediterranean map where this mosque, the Monde now, will be traveling between east and west and negotiating and questioning this civilization of divide between modernity and what's supposed to be the condition of Islam. So the carpet was actually like a praying area, which is a minimum mosque, all that you need basically to perform. And it was located at an angle within the traditional space, and actually now accepting exhibits here. The second kind of, or third round of research that we went to when looking at typology or the architecture of the mosque was some of those design transportation we had at architecture school at different times, here and recently more of it at the Monde University. And if you look at the translation of the mosque in Arabic, and you might know that as a Turkish audience here is that Jama and Masjid are both more than 65 months. Of course in Arabic Jama is a place of gathering or of collections, where Masjid is really a place of prostration where somebody could question. But there is these two translation and the students were focusing on the Jama as this expanded motion, which is a place of gathering that that's only dedicated to religious functions only. So these are some of the visuals that I'm going to go through quickly of some of those ideas that the students were experimenting with. For instance this one, kind of the student combined with the mosque that operates at different times, and she also worked on the skylight system that the person performed doing function, providing proper kind of sun, direct sun, east-west based on the time of the day, but also on the sun needed or on the light quality that the museum space itself. So finally we arrived to the point where the existential question come to be here is what is Islamic architecture, and if there is anything as such as Islamic architecture, which kind of produces many other questions as problematic perhaps. So when we ask what is Islamic architecture, are we also allowed to ask for instance what is western architecture, and is therefore comparable to Christian or Buddhist architecture. So when we say Christian architecture, we need to talk about the architecture of the church, the church that holds itself. When we talk about Islamic architecture, we're not only talking about the mosque, we're talking about any kind of architecture that used in the Islamic world across 4,400 years, across kind of a huge swath of geography all the way from the east, far east to Mediterranean and further west. When did Islamic architecture start? Is really the question that every state of architecture poses and that there is always the need to know when did it exactly start, as if there is a creation point after which Islamic architecture started to be. Usually it's associated with the prophet and the history of basically the early history of Islam, but really is Islamic architecture born again with the prophet at that very specific moment, or where does it end? Also history of architecture works usually depends on the Islamic architecture and throughout the 18th century. There is no survey or studies or research that's done after the 18th or early 19th century of Islamic architecture, which means Islamic architecture has always been understood through this lens of medievalization. It's always a medieval entity to research and look at. It never experienced the same modernity as these people. So Islamic architecture has to start and end. Is Islamic architecture only traditional? Yes, usually this is how it is described. Or is it based on Islamic period? So when you find yourself, you know, faced with this huge value of work, we try to start to classify, right? So is it first in Mayan or is it all the way to the Ottoman? That's one way of basically the discipline structure of Islamic architecture. Is it architecture in the land of Islam? This is perhaps the most logical solution that they arrive on, which is all the architecture that's happening in the Islamic world. Let's call it Islamic architecture for now. Does it assume unity or diversity? More often than not, it looks or it succeeds. So whatever is happening in Anatolia or whatever is happening in Anatolia, there should be a relationship of always seeing them looking, seeking to find that idea of Islam being related to one entity or to one divine. Does it have any diversity? Of course it does. When you look at the architecture in India versus in Europe and in Russia or in Morocco, there are differences. But then it's refrained that this is actually diversity with the unity or unity of diversity. So there's always kind of loopholes that we find historians trying to define Islamic architecture with. Is it universal? Of course every religion is universal but the trick here is that if the religion is universal it is practiced in a very universal way. It is practiced in a similar way in different periods or in different regions. But this is very useful usually for architect today. Because it is universal then you can abstract it and you can appropriate it. So you can share example here. This is abstract as being the split essentially Muslim or Arab. So it could be appropriate, it could be transformed like the institution of the Bajor Lubeh and France where it is becoming mechanized. It's a mechanized Bajor Lubeh. So now it is modern. Before that it was traditional. What is Islamic about Islamic architecture? I don't know. Nobody is able to answer that. Is Islamic art also secular or architecture? Is it to begin with the second and the religious divide? Is it to begin with the western paradigm that is imposed on Islamic architecture? So when you ask what is Islamic architecture there is even more questions that are cool that are even more problematic to begin with which really start to unravel the whole distance that we understand today. And this is where kind of the mystery became even more rigorous in our studio and at school as we kind of faced with the idea of designing the mosque soon after. One can trace some of those problems and today the decision to fletcher, banister fletcher in the history of architecture which is really a book done not long ago but now it's in its 21st ethnic division. So it's being still published and used and taught at architecture school across Europe. And it's trying to be, what he was trying to do is to trace basically the evolution of architecture. So there's Trump, there are all these different civilizations so there are two kind of branches, there are the hefty branches Italian, French, German, and there are all these dead-end branches, the Byzantine architecture here, the Mexican and you have the Sarsenic which is really what we see called Islamic architecture in the early 20th century. Sometimes it was from the Armenians, some of them were Burish, Oriental etc. So in a way this of course the street keeps on growing and here in the American this is the flat iron building, yes, you were wondering. But this is basically the logical progressive evolution of architecture that some civilization and culture did not really flourish and others did. So in a way all those civilizations here were denied any notion of modernity that's why when we talk about Islamic architecture it ends in the 18th century because modernity is something new, it's something that the Islamic word has never experienced so we don't need to talk about it because it really ended there and this is I think an alternative. Of course the earlier Orientalist lecture on the painter visited the Middle East Cairo and other places and they include these fantastical paintings of what the Arab Islamic words just looked like. Of course they never sat me in a mosque to know any of these figures but they kind of walked through the city, went back to Paris to their own studio and then they enlarged it, they kind of put together a new imaginary of what Islam or what the space of Islam was to look like. Of course in these ridiculous figures here there are these obsessively armed figures here also very strange to that context around that time in Cairo.  The argument we're making here, this is not that different from what we see in this picture which is going to be this new propaganda video kind of put out by acts that are very much staged where there is this mosque. This mosque is very much part of the picture or part of their argument. This is authentic, this neoclassical mosque and also is what Islam could talk about as a people. They're also looking for what is most likely about this unique about Islam. But then the next day they go ahead and they start destroying other mosque and shrines of other religious texts or also minor religious texts. So this idea of the Orientalist imagining what Islam looked like at this unique moment in time or ISIS imagining what Islam ought to look like today trying to impose. But if we look at art, architecture, culture, cultural production, literature because history always found negation and more of paradoxes when you set out this argument at the beginning. So this is really prototypical Dutch neoclassical painting in the 1655. But if you look at it carefully this is actually what you call the museum in Europe. You see that there is this assimilation of what is considered an Anatolian carpet at the time used here as a tablecloth. So what is supposed to be a typical western classic painting is actually absorbing and assimilating Islamic visual culture. But you also see it in buildings like this one which is often described by competitors or as an architecture as hard to classify. What is this, isn't that, is it from an Anatolia? You cannot really classify it in one category or the other. Even if you look at it, literature produced even all the way up to the 19th century by this Italian poet Reine who described himself as a half-mustard Idlis, but he doesn't report. So again, it's really a kind of a job. It's to position yourself outside what you expect Muslim to be or hope to be. So we drew a map, we called it a city, and it's a collection of mosques. There were 1,400 years across geography, all the way starting from the prophet's house here all the way to contemporary mosques, the Arab dog. But the project was set to fail from the beginning. It really was asking the question, can we unify the Islamic world in one drop? And the answer was no, because as you look through this slide, the piece is exhibited in the back of this piece here, you'll see that there is no mosque typology, there's no one plan that you can say is the authentic or is the original. But actually there's a hybrid, so always a hybrid typology that keeps on evolving and adapting to its own context and culture, its own politics and economy, etc. But there are traces and there are things to learn from the maps. So as we start to kind of try to draw it further, we found characteristics that could be perhaps highlighted, but the early mosque was really integrated into the city, it wasn't only integrated into the physical fabric, but it was also integrated into the society that was supposed to serve, it was built by the people who went up using it, but it's also in the proximity to where they lived and where they were. So the Mayat Mosque, for instance, in Damascus, the Grand Mosque of Damascus, really sits on the church which really sits on that road and that road before it. So it's really what you can see today as one of the most important Islamic architects of the mosque or typology is really an unordination of all these civilizations before it. But it's also integrated itself into the market, and this is one of the characteristics that we know of today, but then there's the courtyard, and it's clear the way, and it's introducing the same way. Another interesting mosque that we can look into which is a kind of a mosque in Thalist, and it's really a university, it's one of the oldest universities that we're creating today, and we'd like to graduate from it. But we see also the mosque now kept sometimes growing in the fact that it was tentacles expanding and occupying those pockets with different schools and different classrooms. As we keep going this is time and year, for me this is time and year, and this is the most professional mosque. But unlike the Mayat Mosque with the circulation between the market and the sacred space and the religious space itself, it's happening in sections this upper balcony that kind of settles itself from the bustling market below, but it's really still part of the city itself. But we also try to understand the few, few points that were never really in the picture. So this is Aga Khazor mosque in Iran, which really sits underwater in the system that is kind of integrated in the city, and the building is no less than a piece of architecture that kind of belongs to that water system to begin with. We also included an agricultural mosque. There's always the emphasis on looking on urban mosques. Islam is always described as an urban religion for some reason, which means that for the best part of the 20th and 19th century nobody was looking at agricultural mosques or at the northern areas of the Islamic world to study them to begin with. So that kind of part of the history is kind of our absolute at this point. So we try to expand some of those. This is for instance Hassan Khadri Mosque. The mosque sits in this agricultural field. The whole town was built around agriculture as the industry of that community. And then as we come closer to the modern period, we start seeing of course the infrastructure, the highway, we start seeing the modern zoning happening in the center. And we start also seeing that the mosque becoming larger in scale, if you notice, but also becoming isolated, right? When people live here they have to drive to reach to this mosque. This is the National Assembly in Dhaka. This part of the National Assembly is actually mosque and it's really part of that monument. This is the National Mosque in Malaysia as well. This is the mosque in Baghdad by Walter Gropius. This is another period that is totally missing from the history of architecture, which is the modern period in the Islamic world. The map really tried to erase the innovation. It's really looking at the map, at the plan and to study the plan, trying to change any kind of bias towards aesthetic or towards understanding the mosque from a stylistic perspective and really focusing on the way it sits in the context and the way it's organized especially. But again, you can see smaller mosques. You see this one, China 15 wide mosque in Bosnia, which is really one of the most interesting modernist mosques in the 1980s. And here I get an exception, I just picture a bit because it's so small to notice, but it is often compared to modernist architecture in Europe, but actually it was really the thing that is sitting in the backyard of this community, serving that community. And then there are these grand moments where you see you can see the most international and international people in the world. The mosque really, not unlike the water, the water tank, as it were, infrastructural, this one tried to link to an airport. It's really sitting in between the runways and connected to those terminals. This is the other terminal on this end, the Royal Danube. But this is, I think perhaps it's an interesting moment also not very good at. In the history of architecture, I didn't find any reference. We had to kind of make up the plan by looking at the aerial view and sending somebody a picture on the inside. It's not really documented or analyzed, but this is an interesting moment where the architecture is actually trying to belong to this kind of global network of movement, of travel. And it is a piece of infrastructure as much as the terminal itself. And then of course we end up with those grand mosques like the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi which really, its context is this beautiful, supposed to be kind of the Islamic landscape that you can already see from the sky. And also it sits of course in the sea of parking lots, not life anymore. You know, with this huge drop of area and the Rahlam becoming here almost a space like itself, which is kind of the VIP part of the mosque, which is inside behind the space of the mosque itself. So that map we've been working on and populating and it's really exhausted, but it's in no way complete. We first exhibited it at Oslo Kinale, this past summer architecture of Kinale, as this long table, low table, that Piken has to basically squat to basically look and almost try to basically to be able to see more carefully. And then in it we're kind of also a call to prayer that's also going to be playing here in the exhibit, which was designed by the Rahm Salam Dhabi which is also an interpretation of what the call to prayer should look like or should be allowed to date. So unlike the table here in the XJX, we went for the kind of more diorama effect. The curtain wraps around the space by itself. On the floor you can kind of follow through and see the different mosque type of which you can have titled based on the theme that we kind of extracted from them. So this is on the interior and then on the exterior we created another timeline here. It's a timeline what we call, if this is really the construction of Islam and the construction of mosque architecture, the outside is the destruction of that same timeline except that we focus mostly on the 20th century. And this is to say that yes you can look at those monuments and deduce what Islam architecture is, but maybe there's another history to be written when you look at what has been destroyed and demolished as opposed to what has been built and made as monument of states, of patrons or of sultans, etc. So I just took a few and now I took a few slides just to give you a sense of what happened. We hear about ISIS and what they're doing today which is obviously horrible and disgusting, but in the early 30s you see for instance in the USSR Stalin's atheist 5 year plan which is really trying to consignorize the world by destroying or transforming 25,000 mosques kind of in 105 year plan. But then there's a turning point there's in 1979 in KSA there was a siege of Makkah by extremist sergeant who were trying to basically destroy Makkah and then there's really in 1979 if you look more carefully at the political institute of that region it's really a turning point from what happened before to what happened after in 1979 there was the first war in Afghanistan against the USSR by backed up by the United States in order to fight communism and there was the surgeons of kind of Sunni extremists at this point Taliban included. But also in 1979 there was the Iranian Revolution in case you want anyone else to happen which brought to the fore here kind of Hsia extremist. So it was a turning point in history early 1970s beginning 1980s where we start to see this kind of extremist Islamic political movement which is really in fact all I'm trying to say here is that all these movement are contemporary and modern and not historical as within kind of thought and as being old history of violence continuing in the region of course you know by 2015 ISIS is the biggest kind of news with all the kind of erasure of history and archaeology in Syria and Iraq but when you question the universal aspect of the of the mosque architecture you also have to question the universal matter which is really here represented by Corbusier or the Lord that's supposed to be the humanist interpretation and should look like the proportion of the positions and we playing with the Corbusier figure in our office earlier was militarized as we looked at in terms of history of war and conflict and perhaps resistance later it became a drunk when we looked at some of the competition we worked on like the PS1 competition in New York which was kind of a party space but here today we're looking at the Corbusier, you know, modular kind of expanded to include position that really these do not fully cover our document so here it kind of documented the position of any person standing or sitting or etc or what you should you can see it here on your left there is a man and a woman version of that modular and the exhibit becomes really structured now these pieces the man the modernary interpretation and the the first piece being documenting the architecture of the Amir Shalil Aslan what we are talking about right now so during all of this kind of research driven by design important to note here that we were not historian, we were architecture designers we were architect and we used the drawing techniques as a work of understanding that history and representing it was formed at the same time being critical of it but at the same time we invited to do a design mosque and kind of quaint town of Amir Tal in rural area Shouf mountain in Lebanon located really at this intersection here at this very corner which is an 18th century structure that connected this 18th century old palace which was the client residence coming from Beirut passed by several pounds and really continue up to the mountain and here you keep going up to another location the cedar of that forest this is the site as we were handed to us this is kind of the old structure it was added in the 70s this building which we first destroyed and the interior was really 120, 150 square meters space that's supposed to be transformed into a mosque but from the beginning we were not sure what the mosque did like so we were obsessed with this idea of a ghosted mosque or maybe a silhouette of mosque that exists and does not exist for one the orientation doesn't work with Mecca so we had to kind of rotate the building to face the proper direction and then we start experimenting with this idea of ghosting or shedding the mosque that the silhouette of the mosque that's formed as you walk and move around it so at a certain point it's a building kind of converted dome here which I'll talk about in a minute but at the same time as you rotate and you move around it the structure becomes very transparent and kind of blends itself with the kind of this very rich backdrop that's also at night partially lit, partially not lit so that it appears and disappears as well and it was generated by this idea of kind of shredding directionality versus Mecca the element kind of takes really parallel to Mecca which you see here in the space of the museum we kind of also trace that direction in the physical space itself and then we're playing with this idea of the model you know whether it was is this the shadow or is this the real element of the kind of second animal that was added onto the mosque but it was a mosque that's supposed to be kind of the anti thesis mosque of what we know of Shamsibah Shamsibah for instance which is really a cube that is contained in by itself it's introverted, it's looking inward and what you were interested in actually to rewrite that language by introducing those extroverted curves concave and convex that helped us first define kind of the main public space which is this plaza, the civic plaza that we added in front of the mosque but also helped us kind of shape those different sub-spaces, the roof garden that we opened that's also accessed from the side view and it created all these this is what we call a rotated axonatic view which is kind of taking the model and looking at its spatial potential at each and every moment whether it was from the inside or from the outside or tangential to it and you would see for instance the different spaces that the structure and look here try to frame or define in and around the mosque as you walk around it trying to define to the roof and to the roof garden itself we were also reading many theologians that kind of worked on critically understanding the history of Islam like Yusuf Ziddi and Muhammad Al-Arkoum Muhammad Al-Arkoum is very interesting figure who really kind of wrote the history of Islam from a humanistic point of view looking at the humanism as in the tradition itself Yusuf Ziddi who is Indonesian and we talked about the word akra which means lead which is the first word supposedly that came to the prophet that asked him to read the Quran and he's saying ok God asked us to akra to lead, he didn't ask us to recite so they must make a difference there reading is not reciting so to read the Quran is to be actually critical of it and to think about it with a moment of critical faculty and perhaps to interpret it so it's not a meta text it's not a text that is given to us as a question or interpret what I decided is really about mimicking and basically saying the words without thinking about them which kind of came into play in the interior of the mosque itself which I would show in a second this is a book by Muhammad Al-Arkoum about humanism in Islam and then giving the kind of very frail structure that we came up with that would work with this idea so in the middle of we needed more kind of structural support and then here we started to mobilize kind of the new idea of calligraphy calligraphy as a structure perhaps so we incorporated the word in Sam human being on the ground and of course there is the word on the minaret that was we were asked to begin with to kind of have it as part of the architecture but what's interesting for us is that the construction of the drawings here becomes the structural drawing of the calligraphy starts and the structure and so to speak of course this is not new it has many precedent in terms of incorporating the text within the Islamic art itself and also the early traveler to the Middle East, the Oriental especially we're looking at the Islamic word and the Islamic architecture and they were finding it very offensive because it doesn't have the purity of form versus structure versus ordinate and that all amalgamated together and hence it was disregarded as being worth the study so this structure was prefabricated and it's all in place and suddenly you see the emergence of the text if you read Arabic you can see it these are some of the early studies the word Allah here is actually made out of this life-olded plate so when you look at it from one side you would see it written as a void kind of a moment of doubt you don't know if it's really there or not and then when you look at it straight ahead it's a world of positive plates that kind of forms the word itself kind of some of the details of the winner and the way we kind of steal it is by form of kind of structure itself embrace itself at the same time with text and the calligraphy so rendering and it was really a Google mosque and the president for us was another small town a smaller town it was needed to and it's like any town there's nothing special here there's a church, there's a mosque there's an hour town there are two kind of churches and this is really not unusual as you guys know in this part of the world but what's nice about the Amar town that we studied that has also a little fountain here has a statue, we had a statue kind of celebrating an important figure but it also had this really small fountain next to the mosque being used for the pollution but it really becomes like a pit stop along the way where people fill their kind of bottom water and take a rest in this plaza in a similar way our mosque was attached to this 18th century palace that literally sits on the canal on the kind of spring sorry on the spring that runs through it and like all traditional architecture in that region like the baths here in Istanbul you know the baths which is here sits on the spring and it's used for all kinds of purposes like the streets for agriculture it's used kind of to be heated and then it runs into the wall of the bath to heat the room it's used to grind the food historically it's used as a very noisy fountain in the middle of the palace so that if you're talking there's a sense of privacy around you and then it continues and runs into the town below so our mosque was really kind of attached to the system so what we did is we took this naturally kind of running spring connected to this fountain that we revived that was there sitting on site and then we should also connect it to the ablution area it's all continuously running water and it goes back in the joint the spring itself so the first thing we did was to kind of revive the school that's now active and then the water runs into the ablution area which is always running water which kind of became instantly also another stop on this kind of fountain route it sits at this high altitude of the mountain there is kind of regeneration of bird flocks here the region of different times so we were hoping that also the project with time would have kind of an IV going on it and it becomes also perhaps a stop or a refuge for kind of birds that we kind of studied and we looked into perhaps having the opportunity to house them within the structure itself the interior the interior is really simple it's kind of white out stucco that's imported from Aleppo which is kind of available in the region and then the Mehrab is the only, really the Mehrab is the only fixed pond which is going to give you the direction to Macke and here it's done in reflective Aleppo now which is if it is a fixed pond it's also a fixed pond that needs to be questioned so I didn't talk about that earlier but the history of Islam even the direction to Macke is not really was only defined later so at a certain point the Prophet's house was facing the Qutus the Dome of the Rock and then the Umayyad when they built the Dome of the Rock was actually in competition with the rulers in Macke so even this direction to Macke that we take for granted was actually negotiated through time and then became what we know of it today but that kind of became opportunity for us to also talk about that very specific historical one the carpet here was designed also in collaboration with the Lebanese artist which is really a visualization of Quranic verses and it gives you this blurred ground kind of unstable ground the pattern is printed on it so with time it will wear out and it will show the use and abuse of the space so there is a kind of skyline that is also facing Macke and that kind of links through which you can look back at the mineralic one and then the back wall which is a small kind of reading area of the world inscribed in the wooden pattern this will be soon a small shell and this is kind of a visual relationship between the interior of the mosque and the double-climbing and the mineral is usually this urban center where this kind of interior life forms back into the space of the mosque when the mosque opened I think it performed in the way we hoped it would which kind of spilt all the way outside to the plaza with these kind of carpets everywhere and then who wins your mosque this kind of spin on who wins your architecture which is a research conducted partially at Columbia University looking at who wins what for us today especially when you talk about regions like the Gulf with this huge kind of project built by chief laborers but here who wins the mosque was kind of a series of people that really came together from different parts of Lebanon you know the Wender the Surveyor the Surveyor this is kind of the local Krews guy, these are kind of Christian from north anyway this is not really important and it's not even an important story to say except to say that this what happens when you build in that part of the world and this what had happened historically when you look at the architecture of the mosque is that for instance Kordava Mosque in Antalusia was built by Jewish and Christian expert at the construction industry when Islam came and invaded and became kind of the rule of the land in the same way when it shifts and Antalusia became Christian they used local Muslims expert to maintain and to upgrade the mosque itself so this is nothing really new and nothing really strange to talk about but unfortunately today I think it's something to highlight just to say that there is really no that our entire history needs to be rewritten thank you we will skip a formal Q&A and we will do since you are here and we will have multi-food upstairs and this exhibition to look at downstairs please join us to celebrate thank you so much and please any questions I think Zia will be happy to answer so please don't be shy ok thank you for coming


When I heard that less than 10% of our plastic is recycled, I was confused. Call me stupid, but I always thought this logo means it's recycled. True to this, this only means it can be recycled. I wanted to know why so little is reused, so I went to figure it out. Turns out the cycle of plastic is pretty complex. But this is basically the problem. There are different types of plastic. Products might look the same, but the type can be different. There are ways to tell this. Grypa? But trust me, it's not great. So the few people that sort our waste obviously make mistakes. This means that plastic is not 100% accurate. The guys that design the plastic machines want them to be as efficient as possible. So the machines are very fast, but also complex and pretty expensive. The factories that use these efficient machines to produce huge amounts of products don't want to use recycled plastic. It might damage their machine or slow down production. It's just too much risk. My goal was to set up a small workshop which runs on local plastic waste. I asked people to bring me their old and used plastics. And bought an old shredder to chop it into small pieces. To turn this into products I needed my own machines. So I designed a set of machines that are less complex, easy to use and produce small series. And start to make them.


The more fresh whole foods we eat, the healthier we tend to be. You don't need to be any sort of scientist to understand that. And it is exactly the same thing for our dogs. Recently in Scotland a few weeks ago, I guess there was a big semi-annual meeting of golden retrievers. And they got 400 and some golden retrievers in a yard and took a picture of them and it's quite heartwarming. I saw some statistics that 50 years ago, the average lifespan of a golden retriever, was correct me if I'm wrong, somewhere around 17, 18 years. And now it's 12 years. And that's pretty disheartening for many, many reasons. Let's start there. What the heck is going wrong We know so much more about nutrition and care of pets and we're getting worse and worse at it just like we are with humans. Yeah, I mean, that's really true. And part of the reasons behind that are very similar with humans. I mean, part of it quite frankly is a, it's an overbreeding issue and it's a genetics issue. And that's one side of it, which, you know, I mean, that clearly that's a little bit different than it is with people. But I mean, I think it's interesting as you have seen in your line of work, medicine gets better and better and better but the human lifespan is not dramatically increasing. And why is that? I think a lot of that is because our medicine's getting better, our nutrition's getting worse, our lifestyle's getting worse, the toxic soup that we live in is getting worse. And at best it's a zero-sum game.  And sadly, unless things change, the baby boomer generation, which I am, may unfortunately be the longest living American species. And if we don't do something, it's downhill, folks. Let's talk about genetics for a minute. And this is very interesting to me because my wife and I have owned four Cavalier King Charles Spaniels in our lifetime. And these dogs were profoundly overbred and to save their existence, quite frankly, and many of them, all four of our dogs had blew out their mitral valve at some point in their lives. The last two we were able to keep alive for well over a year and a half with blown mitral valves being our surgeon, I know how to manage that. But these dogs, unfortunately because of this, live very short lives. Are we overbreeding everybody in general or is it just certain dogs that we have to worry about their genetics? Well, I mean that's a great question and I think purebred dogs as a rule, overbreeding is a real issue because what winds up happening is, breeders are breeding for very specific characteristics, whether it's a physical trait, whether it's a behavioral trait. But of course, as you well know, I mean, genetics doesn't happen in a vacuum.  And that's unfortunately how we wound up with Cavaliers, something like 80% of them developing mitral valve disease, which is a shame because they are literally the nicest dog that has ever walked the face of the earth. In fact, whenever people ask me for advice on what's a good family or kid dog, I always say Cavalier because they are the best dogs ever. But that said, this whole concept of like purposely breeding dogs is in some ways it's asking for trouble. The good news now is there is some genetic testing available. It's not as extensive as it is, say, in human medicine right now, but you can run testing, looking for a whole host of genetic predispositions in dogs. And that's helpful both from a breeding perspective. So hopefully people can be a little bit more responsible when they are breeding purebred dogs. But on a boots on the ground perspective, more importantly, as for us as pet owners, so if I were to run a genetic test on your dog and I saw your dog was prone to mitral valve disease, that's something that we can monitor very closely, something that we can intervene before there's clinical disease and something that hopefully with the right nutrition and the right supplementation, we can delay the onset. Yeah, actually our last Cavalier shockingly made it to 15 and a half, which is an old Cavalier. Yeah, and we've learned through the years with Cavaliers that let's use every trick in the book. So you're absolutely right. Okay, the big question that always comes down to pet ownership is what are you gonna feed your dog? And I wanna spend a lot of time, despite the fact that probably most pet owners know better, you say, and I think you're right, that 94% of dogs are still eating dry Kibble. Yeah, that is unfortunate, the reality. And here's the interesting thing when it comes to both nutrition for our pets and longevity for our pets is the levers are actually easier to pull for our pets than they are for us because I don't have somebody handing me every single bite of food that I eat every day. But my dogs do, which means that if I make a little effort and I put them on the right food, I can make their nutrition perfect in a way that quite frankly, mine will never be. I haven't figured out how to employ Oprah's chef just yet. I'm still stuck figuring it out on my own on a day-to-day basis, but I think that we all intuitively know about nutrition and you don't need a PhD in nutrition to know this is that every animal on the planet evolved eating fresh whole foods. We all know that eating highly processed foods is problematic and yet that is what the vast, vast majority of people are feeding their pets. Kibble and canned food are by definition highly processed food. They carry with them all of the baggage and all of the problems that processed food does for us in many cases actually more so based on the content of things like advanced glycated end products, et cetera. There's even more in those foods than there are in the processed foods that we eat and we're asking our pets to eat that food every single day and then we scratch our heads and we wonder why there's problems down the road. And of course, one of the things that's the most troublesome to me is that my profession, unfortunately, is in many ways complicit in this because that's how veterinarians are educated. Put the dog on a high quality kibble and you're done. That's nutrition advice in a nutshell that we get in vet school. So that's what most pet owners are getting from their veterinarians. And again, as you know, I mean the entire medical paradigm is set up to address problems when they occur. There's very little preventative medicine that happens in the Western paradigm of medicine and nutrition just doesn't really get addressed until there's clinical disease. Right. Yeah, a while back researching one of my books, I usually head down rabbit holes and I was very interested and I was looking at veterinary medicine and where advice came from and I won't mention the veterinary school but it's in the Midwest and it's very famous and it is responsible for a lot of the nutrition advice that veterinarians get. And lo and behold, I said, gee, I wonder where and it was basically kibble advice. And I'm going, oh, why in the world? You know, this is a very prestigious veterinary school and looked after for, you know, good advice. And I wonder where the funding from this veterinary school comes from. You asked the right question.  How did the whole concept that we ought to be feeding kibble to our dogs, was it? Was it convenience, was it stool size? Where did it come from? Oh gosh, this, you know, I mean, the whole concept of like commercially made kibble and whatnot goes back, goes back to the early part of the 20th century really, really when the large portions of the population in the United States were moving from agricultural communities into cities. So, you know, it used to be when people lived on farms, the dogs were eating whatever was there on the farm. And then that was that. And when people moved into cities, they didn't really have that availability so people had to feed something. And Pet Food Company saw an opportunity.  Feed them this instead. And what they were selling at the time was canned dog food. And that's how the whole concept of like highly processed shelf stable food started later on, you know, during World War I when metal became scarce and the cans were a problem, then it became dry food because they didn't have to put it in cans and that's how we got kibble.   It's shelf stable, you pour in the bowl, you walk away. You know, it's just like, processed food is super convenient for us. It's not good for you. But I mean, if you're looking for a quick meal, it's as easy as can be. And that's really where this all comes from. Of course, the problem now is that, now the marketing and the PR is telling people this is the most healthy way to feed your pet when clearly it is not. Price obviously comes into this somewhere along the line. Sure. And is there a perfect diet for a dog or a cat if you had unlimited resources and if you don't have unlimited resources, is there a middle ground and what do you do if your resources are really quite limited? Help us through it. You know, I mean, time and money, no object, then what our pet should be eating is a freshly made, properly balanced whole food diet, meat, vegetables, perhaps some degree of carbohydrates, although there's a discussion about how much of that is actually necessary when it comes to dogs and cats.  I think in the reality is, is very few of us have the time or the resources to do that sort of thing. You know, that said, you can make food at home for your pets. It's not that difficult. And if you have a reasonable amount of freezer space, you can make a bunch of food, portion it out, freeze it, and maybe make a couple of weeks worth of food all at once. It's not that expensive to do. In fact, it's cheaper to do it that way than it is to buy store-bought fresh food. You know, so it's kind of one of those, you know, so many times in our life, we're doing that equation of we're balancing our time and our money. And it's just a function of figuring out which is more valuable to you at any given moment. But you know, I mean, if you're looking to save some money but you wanna feed fresh food, making food from a balanced diet is a great way to do it. Alternatively, you can go out and you can buy fresh frozen raw food, fresh frozen cooked food and feed that. That is going to be more expensive on a per meal basis because you're paying somebody else to do the work for you. There's also freeze-dried foods, which are excellent. Freeze-dried foods work out great because they don't take up freezer space. They have many of the benefits of fresh whole food diets, but you get the convenience factor of kibble. So there's a huge benefit, you know, in freeze-dried diets. And then to your point of like, you know, how do you function in the real world here if those sorts of things are not doable? There are other options. There are dehydrated foods, which are a little bit less expensive than the fresh foods. There is air-dried kibble, which is a little bit less problematic than extruded kibble from the standpoint of the process food perspective.  So, you know, sustainability is kind of everything.  Like you can feed your dog some fresh food and some kibble if that's what works in your life, if that's what needs to happen. I would say feed as much fresh food as you can and as little kibble as possible.  So, if you can get your dog or your cat eating as much properly balanced fresh food as possible, you are going to be doing them an enormous favor as it pertains to their health and longevity in the long run. What about the argument that if you're feeding kibble and there are potentially high quality kibble? Should you change it? Should you change from a chicken-based kibble to a beef-based kibble to a fish-based kibble to a venison-based kibble? Or should you just say, oh, now they're used to this and I don't want to rock the boat and maybe they'll get diarrhea if I change.  Well, at the risk of getting involved in a marital disagreement, I will answer that question. When I look at nutrition for animals, the place I always start is with answering the question of what did that animal evolve eating? What spectrum of nutrients did they evolve eating? And I mentioned earlier that no animal on the planet evolved to eat processed food. Well, also no animal on the planet evolved eating the same food every day long-term. It's just not available in the wild and that's not how their bodies or our bodies are really designed to thrive. We are designed to do the best on a variety of nutrients. So, again, in a sustainability sense, it's not practical for most people to feed their dog or their cat something different every single day. However, I am a big fan of rotating through different ingredients and different formulas over time. Depending on how sensitive your pet is from the standpoint of diet changes, that may be something that you can do every couple of weeks or maybe it's something that you do a few times a year. We do know from the research that when animals are eating the same protein sources for a very long period of time, you do actually potentially set them up for food sensitivities and inflammatory bowel issues down the road. So I think it is definitely advisable to rotate through different ingredients and that's true whether you're feeding fresh food or kibble or anything else. That's kind of a separate issue from the whole process versus fresh food thing. So do it as frequently as you think is, again, practical and sustainable for you and your pet. Great advice. Do you hear that, honey? I'm gonna be getting a call later. Yeah, that's right. I'm sorry. If this woman by the name of Penny calls, you know where it came from. You and I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that gut health not only applies to humans but applies to our pets as well. And that certainly there's been, I think sadly very little interest in pet gut health as something that we should be worried about. I mean, for goodness sakes, they're dogs and cats. They crud off the ground and they roll and stuff. They're different than us somehow. Help everybody understand that their gut health is critical to their long-term health. Sure. So I mean, to start with the basics, which are things that you're telling people all the time is that 80% of our immune system sits in our gut and our microbiome, the population of bacteria in our gut have everything to do with the health of our immune system and our overall body health and our brain health and everything else that happens in the body. And all you need to do is talk to somebody who has chronic gastrointestinal issues, IBS, Crohn's disease, what have you to look and see how debilitated those people are as a result of chronic gut disease. There is no difference when it comes to animals. I think while there are clearly physiologic differences between dogs and cats and people, et cetera, the reality is in broad strokes, mammals are mammals. We all kind of work the same. There are subtle changes, clearly an optimal nutritional profile from a cat is different than a dog is different than a person, but all of the same gut health rules apply. I think it is a true statement that your average dog or cat is actually far more resistant to foodborne illness than we are as people. They're just better able to deal with that.  That would probably not work out so well for me. So that's an advantage that I guess that they have over us, but I mean, the bottom line is gut health is the cornerstone of health. So that clearly starts with nutrition because what you're putting in your gut is ultimately feeding those bacteria. So there's nutrition, there's prebiotics, there's probiotics, there's supplements, you can't discount things like lifestyle, stress, anxiety as it pertains to gut health. I don't think that there's a human walking on the planet that has not experienced the effect that stress and anxiety has on our own gut health. And again, this all translates.  We're dealing with a population of nonverbal animals. And what that means is we have a responsibility to be a little bit more in tune and I'm a little bit more attentive than we may sort of intuitively want to be because frankly, their health and wellbeing is 100% in our lab. We took on this responsibility to care for them. So now it's our job to do the best that we can. Not a day goes by that you see, you see it all the time, a dog or a cat in the cone of shame because they have eczema or literally hair issues, skin issues. And it seems to be getting worse and worse. I don't remember 50 years ago, cones of shame on all the dogs. In my opinion, that is because of leaky gut. It's because of intestinal permeability. It's because of the food we're feeding our animals. What do you see as a veterinarian? Same thing? I think that's an enormous piece of it. Undoubtedly there are environmental allergens, et cetera. But that said, I can't tell you how many times in my office I've had people walk in with animals that have chronic, chronic skin issues. And the interesting thing is it's not always even about the specific ingredients.  He's sensitive to chicken. And they wind up eating a fresh food diet that has chicken in it and they do great. It's not even always like what the protein is. It's how that protein is processed that makes it more antigenic and makes their body more reactive to it. Yeah, same thing. We can go into some of the fun things I've done with my dogs after, well, we had a cavalier who was wasting away at literally wasting disease. And the vet said, well, his pancreas is shot and this is all from that.   And he was a young dog. So I put him on literally a raw food diet.   Yeah, and you know, the probably the most tragic part about that is is your average veterinarian will find a way to write that off and not attribute that to the diet change. Yeah, no, don't get me started. Which doctors do all the time as well, MDs. You bring up a very interesting point. I think because it's summer and because of the heat wave, we tend to forget about, I think water needs in our pets and the various ways that maybe we're not getting enough water in our pets. Can you expound on that? I thought it was a very good point in your book. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, it's sort of one of these intuitive things. We all know that hydration is important. We don't necessarily think about it a whole lot.  And like, for me, it's a thing that I have to consciously think about. I bring a large water jug to my office every day and I know that I need to get through that by the end of the day. But that's a conscious thing that I make an effort to do.  But like, you can't make them drink out of their bowl. You can encourage them to drink out of their bowl by making sure that the water is fresh and clean and regularly changed. But at the end of the day, they're gonna drink when they wanna drink. And the problem is, and this is not only is this true for dogs, this is especially true when it comes to cats, is a lot of them are subclinically dehydrated on a regular basis. That puts a lot of strain on their bodies, especially when it comes to cats. It puts a lot of stress on their kidneys. And kitties, they have a real strong tendency to have kidney disease when they get older. So maintaining proper hydration is critically important. And that's yet another problem when we're talking about feeding dogs and cats kibble is there's almost no water there. So what I always tell people is, I don't really care whether your pet's water comes out of their water bowl or their food bowl. It just needs to get in them. So, you know, you're talking about, you know, feeding your pet kibble, which is, you know, maybe 6% moisture plus or minus, or feeding them fresh food, which is maybe about 70% moisture plus or minus. So every bite of fresh food they're taking, they're getting an enormous amount of water, and water is critical for digestion. It's critical for all manner of body processes. And rarely do our pets actually drink enough water out of the food bowl to sort of sustain their optimal needs.  They don't get enough out of the water bowl. And what they really need is they need to get it from somewhere else. You know, one of the common calls I'll get from people when they switch their pet to a fresh food diet is they'll call in a panic and they'll say, my dog's not drinking water anymore. To which my comment is that's actually a good thing. They're getting it out of their food bowl. It's fine. People just don't really think about it in that sense. But, you know, it's so critical that when we eat, we get enough water so that our food digest properly.  You wind up with dysbiosis. You wind up with gas. You wind up with inflammation because we can't digest our food because there's not enough water there to do it. So again, it all sort of wraps back around to that conversation of feed them that fresh diet that their bodies are evolutionarily designed to eat because that's how that biological machine was designed to thrive. You bring up an interesting point in your book and I mentioned earlier I was a cat owner during medical school. Cats like running water. Is this true? It is very true. I mean, if you look at cats in the wild, number one, wild cats are not particularly big water drinkers anyway. They tend to get most of their water from whatever they're eating. But when you do see cats drinking water more often than not, you will see them drinking moving water. You know, water from a stream or you know, some sort of water that's in motion. And the reason for that is because instinctually they know that moving water tends to be fresher and safer than stagnant water. And a lot of cats are not big fans of drinking water out of a water bowl for that reason. And that's sort of yet, you know, add that to the list of reasons why cats tend to lean towards dehydration because they don't really want to drink that water that's sitting in the bowl. Now there are sort of workarounds. They make like little bowls that are circulating water fountains. So there's like a little waterfall. So that makes cats happy. A lot of cats actually will enjoy drinking out of like a dripping faucet. That's the thing that they'll do. I used to have a cat that was very fond of coming up next to me when I had a glass of water and she would stick her paw in my glass of water and then lick her paw, which was great for her but not so great for me because I was not super keen on drinking that water after she did that. I knew where those feet had been. Well, yeah, that'll improve your microbiome as I argue. It'll do something to my microbiome, that's for sure. So yeah, that's a really good point. Now let's talk about mouth health and dental health. And the reason I bring that up is some people would argue, well, if you wet the kibble and it's mushy that they're not gonna get good brushing of their teeth and gums with this hard kibble and they'll get plaque and what say you? So where to begin? Yeah, where to begin? Yeah, I mean, clearly, you know, oral microflora is as important as gut microflora and it's no mystery to anybody how severely chronic periodontal disease will impact larger health. I mean, you see that in people all over the world particularly in third world countries where dental care is not paramount, you see all kinds of problems arise from that. And again, no different for our pets except that clearly you're not gonna talk your dog into brushing and flossing every day.  So that said, I hear a lot of people say, and I've heard a lot of veterinarians say this is why you should feed dogs and cats kibble because it helps keep their teeth cleaner. There's so many problems with that statement. It's hard to even know where to begin. I mean, number one, I think when you look at, when you look at dogs and cats that are eating fresh food diets, you certainly don't see any greater amount of periodontal disease than you would see in an animal that's eating kibble. In fact, arguably, I think you see less. I think you're right. Because I think what you're doing is is you're improving the microflora in their mouth so you're just developing less plaque, tartar, gingivitis, periodontal disease, et cetera. And there are a thousand other ways to work on keeping your pets' teeth healthy that don't involve you feeding a highly processed, high carbohydrate food that's ultimately bad for them for every other conceivable reason. One of the things I often talk with people about doing which is a little bit controversial in the veterinary field is periodically feeding dogs and cats a raw bone. Give them a raw bone to chew on. It's great nutrition. It's going to help clean their teeth. It's gonna keep their gums toned and healthy. And as long as it's raw, it's something that they can chew up and digest. You don't really wanna feed them cooked bones because they're too hard and they'll break teeth on them and they'll splinter and cause problems and whatnot. But raw bones of an appropriate size to the animal are very digestible.  We see lots of advertisements for dog treats in general. There are whole stores devoted to baked goods for dog treats.  And finally, there are treats that are supposedly really good for cleaning your dog's teeth. What do you think? Well, I mean, I think the treat thing in general, I mean, so much of that is your marketing to the heartstrings of the pet owner. Food is love and we love to give our dogs treats. And that's fine and there's nothing wrong with that. I think when it comes to treats for the sake of treats, probably the best thing to do is either feed them fresh food like some dogs will actually quite happily eat carrots, broccoli. I've seen cats sit up and beg for mushrooms. So like in cases where you can get your dog or your cat to eat fresh food, that's great. Alternatively, I'm a real big fan of single ingredient treats. So like a piece of dehydrated or freeze-dried meat, they love it. You don't have to feed them like a baked good with all these various ingredients in it and a whole bunch of carbohydrates and colors and whatnot that they don't need.  When it comes to dental health, there actually are some very good dental chews out there. There's one that I make called canine fresh, which I think works really, really well. It's got all natural ingredients, dogs do great with it, but I think you also have to be careful when it comes to looking at ingredients of these things. Some of these dental treats have chemical compounds in them like chlorhexidine, which is frankly used as a surgical scrub. So I'm not really sure if it's the greatest thing for our dogs to be ingesting on a regular basis. Some of these treats are literally made of plastic and your dog is supposed to chew up the plastic and swallow it. That doesn't make sense to me. Why would I want, I wouldn't eat and swallow plastic intentionally. Why would I want to do that with my dog? Again, it just comes back to, common sense is one of these things that is incredibly valuable when you employ it. And if something doesn't seem right or feel right, then before you do it, ask questions, do a little research and see if that's really the right thing to do. My upcoming book, Gut Check, I have a whole chapter devoted to microplastics and what they do to our gut microbiome. They literally dramatically change for the worse our gut microbiome. And you're right for years, these bones, and I won't mention the name, and they're still sold in lots of stores. Well, they most certainly are.  But looking back, it's like, what the heck, did I think I was doing here? Chew up some plastic, that's- Yeah, exactly.  Before we leave the subject of food, and we could go on all day about this, fasting is really good for humans. Time-restricted eating is very good for humans. What do you think about dogs and cats? It's a great question, and we don't have an enormous amount of research when it comes specifically to dogs and cats. There is a really, really fascinating study out there that looked at longevity of dogs relative to whether they ate once versus twice a day. It will probably come as no surprise to you that the once a day fed dogs lived longer. Yeah. And for all of the reasons you full well know as it pertains to intermittent fasting. Again, going back to this whole evolutionary aspect of it, animals in the wild are not eating two meals a day. They're lucky if they're eating one meal a day. So, again, that's how our bodies evolved to thrive is eat now, don't eat for a long period of time, and then eat again. For all of the various reasons, cellular autophagy, cell turnover, what have you, all of the various hallmarks of longevity that you are intimately familiar with, intermittent fasting is incredibly valuable for that. This is advice I would give particularly to people who are getting, you know, bringing a dog into their house when you sort of have that opportunity to set the pattern, feed the dog once a day. You know, as long as they tolerate it fine, you'll probably will find that they will do better and live longer in the long run. You know, I think if your dog is patterned to eat twice a day at this point, it may be difficult to change. But, you know, next time around when you get that opportunity, think about going once a day. Great suggestion. We usually have two rescue dogs at any one time and changing their patterns of behavior are challenging. But yeah, if you get a new puppy, it's a great place to start. Yeah, agreed.  And it's perfect programming because that's when they would eat. Yep. When they caught their food. That's exactly right. You know, what you do, you sort of take advantage of the way that their bodies are designed to function. All right, my listeners know I'm a huge fan of supplementation. It doesn't make expensive urine. So according to your new books, it seems they're equally as important for our pets. Yeah, they absolutely are. And you know, I mean, there's a thousand reasons for that. And you know, we'll start with the fact that, you know, A, a lot of animals are not eating optimal diets. So there's plenty of room there to round out their nutrition. And even for animals that are eating optimal diets, you know, what we're really talking about is we're really talking about how do we get that biological machine to function at its absolute peak performance? And frequently what that means is, is adding some things in, you know, to their body systems, whether or not we're talking about vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, things like various mushrooms, curcumin, Boswellia, what have you. There's so many things out there in the natural world. And you know, I've been practicing herbal medicine in the veterinary context for a really long time. And it's just, it's endlessly fascinating what mother nature provides for us. Or if you choose to look at it in a different way, what co-evolution of animals and plants has done as a benefit for us in the sense of we have all of these opportunities to help our bodies or our pets' bodies if we just know how to do that, if we know how to pull those levers and when to do it, you know. So I go through a long list of supplements in the book, both for dogs and for cats. And very explicitly not for the intent of, I want you to feed these 30 supplements to your dog every day. It's a function of, let's take a handful of these, give these now, let's rotate into different ones over time. It's just like food. You want to keep the body guessing a little bit. You want to add in different nutrients over time because that's what's gonna work best for us. So again, from a longevity perspective, there's so much opportunity here to really help them be as healthy as possible. If you had to name a big three that we really are neglecting, do you have any that come to mind? Sure. Well, I mean, I think the first two are easy. You know, the two things that I tell people you can almost never go wrong with are probiotics and an omega fatty acid. So when it comes to dog and cats, generally that means fish oil. So probiotics and a fish oil are absolute no-brainers. Beyond that, it depends a little bit on what's going on with your dog, but I am a big fan of curcumin as an herb from the perspective of, it's good for gut health, it's good for liver health. So I think that's a highly, highly beneficial supplement. I also find that a shocking number of patients in my office when we test them are deficient in vitamin D. One of the interesting things about vitamin D in dogs and cats is they do not convert sunlight to vitamin D like we do. So it's completely a nutritional thing with dogs and cats. And intuitively I would have thought that my patients that were eating really good quality fresh food diets would be fine. Turns out that even most of them are deficient. So we do supplement an awful lot of vitamin D in my office. As you know, vitamin D is not something that you wanna just sort of throw in their food and not really think much about it. You can overdo it and cause problems. So D can be added as part of a multi vitamin for animals so they're getting a little bit. But beyond that, I would say just test them, find out what their vitamin D levels are. So you know exactly how much to supplement them with. I mean, vitamin D is, it's so important. It's just one of those really, really easy things that we can do that will make a huge difference down the road. Speaking of easy things, one of the things that disturbs me a great deal is the number of particularly very active breeds that I see in baby carriages. And I see even now baby carriages designed for dogs. Yeah, that's true. Is this a good idea? That's a bit of a loaded question. I mean, certainly there are dogs out there that for various medical reasons, a lot of walking may be problematic. So yeah, let's forget about that. Forgetting about them. I mean, dogs like any other animal need exercise. And I think when it comes to the question of how much do you exercise your dog, a lot of it really depends on your dog. It depends on their breed. It depends on their age. It depends on their health conditions. So for example, you have Cavaliers.  On the more extreme end, you can say something like a Border Collie. And that's a dog that could literally go out and run around for five or six hours and say, are we going out for more? Yes. Or on the flip side, if you got a pug or a bulldog, that's a dog that's a slower pace of exercise for dogs like that. So you really have to, you have to tailor the exercise to the individual.   So running's not my jam. I get my cardio in other ways. So, but then I see people running down the street that look like a gazelle and they're like floating down the street for days and that's great for that person. So, you know, I think it all has to be custom tailored, but you know, exercise is so critically important to health and longevity from the perspective of muscle mass, bone density, mental health, gut health.  You know, fortunately, my patients don't get cardiovascular disease like yours do, but nonetheless, you can't discount the benefits that regular exercise do and the one thing that I just sort of would like to leave that topic with is you can absolutely over exercise a dog. Too much is problematic.  You know, we've all seen sort of those frisbee dog kind of go up in the air and do that whole twisting motion. It looks super cool.  Interesting.  I mean, it's no different than a person who was an extreme athlete when they were younger. They're gonna pay for that later and you see that a lot with dogs that were really, really high impact exercises when they were younger. So I don't want to take away frisbee from those dogs that love frisbee, but like everything else in moderation, do it a little bit and then go do something else. Take the dog out for a long walk or a hike or even a run, but try and limit the real high impact activities. Good advice. Actually, I want one more thing before we go because it's really important. Neutering spaying, there seems like, particularly among breeders, there's an epidemic of they won't even let these dogs go home before they're spayed or neutered and that may be at eight weeks. What say you about early spaying and neutering? Not a fan. That's the short answer. It used to be the sort of the standard veterinary plan was spay or neuter them around four months old. That way you sort of avoid any potential behavioral issues that may occur from them going into heat. You clearly would avoid any sort of unplanned pregnancies, what have you. I think what we know now from the research is that at least when we're looking at larger breeds of dogs, there are definitive health benefits to waiting until they are fully physically mature to spay or neuter them. So depending on how large the dog is, that could be anywhere from a year to two years old to wait. And then I think the other concern from a spay-neuter perspective is behavioral concerns. There's always been a concern about aggression with dogs if you don't spay or neuter them. Interestingly, when you look at the research, it doesn't really necessarily bear out. So for example, separation anxiety, which is a huge problem in dogs, is actually much more prevalent in dogs that were spayed or neutered early. That's less of a problem in dogs that are either not spayed or neutered or it was done later. None of this stuff is black and white, but I think we do know from the standpoint of onsets of certain rates of cancer, certain rates of orthopedic disease, waiting is generally a good idea. I think the one place where I would sort of diverge from that is with cats. I would still recommend spaying or neutering cats before they're six months of age. And I say that because number one, you do not want a cat in heat in your house. It is not a fun thing. And number two, with male cats, as they go through puberty, they tend to develop this habit of urine marking, like they will spray on everything. And once they have developed that pattern of behavior, sometimes even once you neuter them, it doesn't go away. And that is a quick trip to a surrendered pet if they're peeing on the walls. So for their own safety before six months, it's probably a good idea for cats. Good advice. My mother had a large male Persian cat who happened to have the name of Lovie, which is, but this cat was spayed late. And yeah, he actually would spray my wonderful stereo speakers and large amounts of furniture and could never break him up. Oh, that's a great time. Yeah. Oh, well. More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. Vitamin D promotes calcium absorption from your gut. It enables mineralization of the bone and it's also very essential to prevent low calcium in your bloodstream.


Are you a high-level athlete not seeing the best results you don't want to listen to this Our next caller is mac from indiana mac. What's happening? Hey guys, how you doing good? uh, so I had some I was looking for some advice on how to combat the feeling of Not doing enough in the gym uh, so some context, uh, just started maps aesthetic and or not just started getting through a Phase two here and on these focus sessions days on my smaller muscle groups like triceps and traps I feel like i'm just not doing enough during my time in the gym So tell me tell me mac a little bit about your athletic background that I know you have Uh, yeah, so I was a d1 swimmer in college just recently graduated in may So i'm very much accustomed to the 20 hours of 20 hours a week of working out Six days a week two hours of practice. Yeah Yeah, I I've trained a couple highly competitive swimmers. I had no when I first started training one years ago I had no idea The amount of frequency and volume of training at that level. It was twice a day, right? You did like twice a day for hours in the morning Yeah, I mean it'd be yeah, it'd be a double probably twice maybe three times a week. I mean just A lot of a lot of volume. Yeah, okay. So let's so let's unpack this for a second. Okay What do you mean when you say that you feel like you're not doing enough or let's say you feel unsatisfied like What do you what do you mean by that exactly? uh like if I like if it's if i'm doing triceps it just feels like only doing three exercises of three sets just Isn't enough I guess like I just don't feel like I've I've done anything. What what does enough feel like to you? Little bit sore, uh, maybe not not like too sore, but you know, uh I guess just um Satisfied with it. I get like I feel like I've I've done a good work and I've I've put the work in Yes, but like with but what does that feel like so this is important that we know it sounds fishing for right now Well, I'm not even fishing. I just want to know what you mean because you're fishing Yeah, because I want to know what it feels like to you and and maybe you don't even maybe you haven't even put words to this but this is really important uh to break down because There's an upper limit To how much exercise your body can tolerate And then there's the best amount that's going to get you the best results And they're not the same So there's a there's a volume and intensity and a frequency that's going to give you the best results And then up above and beyond that Is what you can tolerate and you get diminishing returns, but you can tolerate it you can get away with it And so I need to know what feeling you're looking for because If it's you know, this is important because if you feel like you know, I just I feel like I can do more Well, that just means that you're used to training your upper limit of tolerance not Optimal not optimum for results Nothing necessarily wrong with that if you're willing to trade results in progress For that feeling well also keep in mind too when you're when you're a competitive swimmer You're trying to get great at the sport right like you're not trying to build the most muscle or burn the most body fat So if you're approaching weight training with that same idea Well, yeah, we could totally scale up the volume of of how much exercise you're doing if you just want to get better at exercising But I'm assuming that you have goals like I want to build some muscle I want to be stronger I want to lose body fat like if you have goals like that it's uh, there's a much more scientific approach To how you do that and what's optimal for your body to see the most amount of results Versus how much can I actually do in a workout that I'll actually be able to tolerate? Like Sal's saying those are different things and when I train Highly competitive people it's really hard for them to make that switch because That's how they have approached training for their sport for so many years And probably had success if you made it to d1 So you're you've learned to do that and push yourself to that level But when you're actually training to build muscle or to build strength or to lose body fat It's a it's a total different approach than just how much can I can I do now? Where's where's your intensity gauge through these sets? Like are you Placing more demand on the load and and After you're done you feel unsat like it feels hard on your way through But you just feel unsatisfied because you don't have that sore feeling after you get through your sets Yeah, um, I'm More putting more emphasis on the Total reps so I'm trying to hit that 20 rep range on the on these focus sessions You know what mac? Start to interrupt. Okay. So here's one of the challenges I'm gonna I'm gonna go through this because this might be something that you're thinking If not definitely people watching in the same position as you are thinking this You competed at a very high level And you trained it with an extreme volume And so the argument tends to come back and say well if it doesn't work Then why was I training so much and competing at such a high level? Well, here's why okay? Here's why swimmers and divers And gymnasts in particular Trained so much now. You don't see football players doing that kind of volume of training. It's different, but you see highly skilled sports Do incredible amounts of volume and frequency and here's why? Let me ask you a question mac. You are you're you obviously know how to swim very well How much of a difference does per does perfect technique make in your speed when you're swimming?  Yeah, this is true for diving and gymnastics as well Now that volume and frequency and training the reason why they're training you to the point that you can Maximally tolerate is because what they're really looking for is perfection and technique and execution And the more you practice the better your execution gets even if you sacrifice a little bit of strength and recovery and stamina That's worth it because it's all about skill and technique Now when you're working out adam said something great You want to be the best at working out? Well, then just go ahead and do as much as you could possibly tolerate But if you're looking for strength Aesthetics mobility Muscle building fat loss you're going to have to change your mentality. It is not the same Mental state as the d1 competitive swimmer that you were before now What i'm going to do is i'm going to try and help you here because it's hard to get out of that So here's some advice when you're in there doing your focus sessions Do your focus session when you're done with it do something else.  Yeah, that's why That's that's why I picked it Nothing for you, so it's like you gotta do something different. Yeah, I know that's why you are you in our private forum No, i'm not okay. You're gonna need coaching. Yeah, this is not that but okay the hardest people I ever trained Were people like you so and it's hard because it's you have that mentality. It's there.  It's just gonna keep happening. I promise you Yeah, I would love to see you absolutely. I would love to see you Why don't we give him maps in a ball too? Because I'd actually like to see him do maps anabolic as much as it'll drive him crazy And the thing that if you were my client, I might be too much of a jump. That's all right And if you were a client of mine, I was talking to your day I would actually be making medicine I'd want you to do long rest periods and we would just like I'd make you sit down And you'd be chalking up and we'd be talking about the squad I mean, oh, yeah, that looked really good last time now next time and like really analyzing your movement Sweating is so antsy. Yeah, and and making you sit and rest for those full three minutes You fire you and hire the crossfit But but I would I would I would make you do that and then and and Let's just let's just focus on getting stronger and stronger and giving yourself these these long adequate rests And it would I know it would drive you crazy But I know it's what's best for you and that if I could get you to commit For a couple months of trusting me I think that once you saw the strength gains and the muscle that would start to come on your body I think that I I could get you bought in but it's it's breaking that Those old behaviors that made you such a great swimmer. It's it's you don't want to be just great at working out I think you want to probably build muscle or get stronger. Those things are probably where you're I'm assuming, right? I mean, I guess we should clarify. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, Mac. What when you were competitive So were you were you more of a sprinter medium distance? No, I was the distance kid Now nonetheless, so nonetheless, I'm going to say this If you got to d1 for any sport You've got better genetics than 99% of anybody watching this if you do everything right with what we're saying You're going to get amazing results. So if your results are lackluster You're probably overdoing it. That's what I'm going to guess. You're probably overdoing it I would and I would say um what I would get my my competitive athletes do is to just is uh Let's channel that that crazy discipline that you have And attention to detail to other things like the diet like let's let's get like really crazy About really tracking the food and paying attention to how your body and strength is changing and like shift that and mobility Like get really good at mobility moves. Maybe take something from like our Our maps performance program and like practice mobility moves and get really good at that like find other areas that You can get hyper focused on and and take that competitive Mind of yours and channel it where it's going to benefit you Channeling that that into more volume and intensity and training is only going to hinder you So that you've got to shift away from and find something else to to focus it on Yeah, we look forward to seeing you in the forum mac. Gotcha Right on man. Awesome. Thanks for calling in Yeah, I appreciate it. Yep In another life, uh adam was a d1 swimmer remember that time we went to the pool and He did really well against it out. You know, it's I'm telling the truth now There's obviously general categories of clients that we've worked with The most challenging were these Especially when they were only like five to ten years out highly competitive college athletes for sure because they're successful It was so hard to get them to pull back It was it was easier to get the couch potato to start moving than it was to get that person To pull back because they're in it. They have another gear. They're very comfortable in that gear It brought them success and I like to explain the whole thing about skill and technique because certain sports The goal is is to push you to your absolute limits because it's about Practicing this like you look at a diver They're going to practice as much as their bodies can handle because every little You know, if you're off just a little bit, you're you're not going to be as good It's not about getting a stronger, you know, they're refining. They're sharpening You know, that's definitely part of the process practicing these moves and really getting really good at it And so that's the difference right is to be really good at all these exercises But like if you want to make a substantial change you have to really do something different than you've been doing the whole time Yeah, totally. Look, if you like uh mind pump, you'll love mind pump free dot com Head over there and check out all of our free guides We have guides that can help you with all of your fitness goals You can also find the three of us on instagram. So justin is at mind pump. Justin I'm at mind pump. Sal and adam is at mind pump adam Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe


Hey everyone, Drew with Geoalarm and I am back to talk to you about increasing and decreasing the screen timeout on the Geoalarm control panel. Sometimes that light sticks on a little bit too long, you might want to decrease that time or it doesn't stick on long enough and you want it to kind of hang out there. So go ahead and hit the hamburger icon. Into your code as she asks, 1, 2, 3, 4 is mine, you may have changed yours already to something else. Alright, what we're going to do next is we're going to go ahead and hit panel. When you hit panel, the screen timeout is the top left over here. You can go less here, all the way down to 1 minute, or you can keep going. It looks like 30 minutes is the maximum that you can do here. I'm going to set it back to 5, but that is for those of you that want a longer or shorter screen timeout for the light and it's literally that easy. If you guys have any questions or any comments, please leave them below. Other than that, take care, have a great day. 7-6, GeoArm, the worldwide leader in DIY security.