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(Guitar music)

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(Applause)

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When your roots
are aligned with your passion,

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the sky's the limit.

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Life is filled with endless dualism.

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Change versus stability,
your brain versus your heart.

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It seems like everywhere you look in life,
there's some sort of dualism

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to challenge you
to balance in between them.

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And these two elements
can work one against the other,

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but they can also feed one another.

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And I believe that when your roots
are aligned with your passion,

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this can lead not to frustration
or misconceptions

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- as sometimes happens
with dualism in life -

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but to innovation and empowerment.

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As for my roots, my father, David Sassi,

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is the forth out
of ten brothers and sisters.

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My roots come from Iraq,
from North Africa,

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and also from Thessaloniki, Greece.

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My grandfather, Yossef Sassi,

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- I'm his namesake,
may his soul rest in peace -

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had two elements that challenged him
throughout all his life.

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They were his big loves, and he had
to juggle between both of them.

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One was his passion for religion,
and for God essentially,

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because he was a rabbi
and he was a man of spirit;

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and the second was his love,
his endless love for music.

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He played the lute
and he also researched and learned,

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and was also teaching
the Arabic musical scales,

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the "maqāmāt", and Oriental scales.

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And this was the heritage
that he left to his children.

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The music from Turkey, Greece, Egypt, etc.

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I have clear visions of my father,
when I was two years old or so,

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standing in the living room
in his underwear

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singing in Arabic, singing in Italian,

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in a lot of multicultural plethora
that I was exposed to,

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during my upbringing.

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This is a picture of me, by the way.

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(Laughter)

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Around that age,

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probably looking at my father
wearing his underwear

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(Laughter)

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just feeling happy
and feeling privileged

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to be exposed to this kind
of rich multicultural experience.

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And truly as I grew up, I found out
that I love other types of music as well.

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In my early teenage years, I was exposed
to rock and roll and heavy metal.

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You know stuff like--

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(Guitar music)

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So this was a different kind of music.

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(Applause)

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But the most interesting thing
happened to me was around age 14,

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when I first touched a guitar,

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and two things happened:

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one was that I knew I was meant for that,
I knew I found my match.

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This is what I wanted
to do in life: to play the guitar.

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As simple and as innocent as that:
just to play the guitar.

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And the other were the sounds
that came out of hands, my fingers,

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were sounds of--

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(Guitar music)

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They were kind of Middle Eastern;

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they had all kinds
of Arabic musical scales in them.

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So, essentially my upbringing, my roots,
merged into the music that I loved,

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that was my passion.

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This is why I believe that who we are
is essentially a delicate balance

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between where we come from
along with the way that our heart beats.

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And this has been proven to me

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throughout all my years
and also in my activities.

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I toured the world.

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I had the chance to play music

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that bridged and united people
together through music

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and brought fans from Iran,
Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,

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from India to South America.

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I've been able to make people happy
throughout the power of music.

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Enemies were dancing together.

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Throughout this musical journey of mine,

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I encountered a sincere genuine problem.

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Actually a challenge.

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I play 19 different guitar types,
string instruments:

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bouzouki, saz, oud, cümbüş,
ukulele, charango;

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from Armenia to Bolivia,
if you have strings, I will find you

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(Laughter)

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and I will use you
in ways I hope you'll like.

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(Laughter)

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This has challenges of its own, right?

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You know, to hold 40+ instruments,

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all the types, variations
of those instruments.

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I have a room at my place,
a room at my parents' place.

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People come to our living room,
they sit on a guitar accidentally.

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(Laughter)

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But what I do in my live shows

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is focusing and playing with essentially
two, three, four types of guitars.

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Sometimes I have to move
in between them in the same song even.

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One of them is the electric guitar,
as you've seen--

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(Guitar music)

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OK.

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And the other is the bouzouki,
you know, the Greek mandolin.

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(Bouzouki music)

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And the third was the acoustic guitar,
or the nylon string guitar.

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(Acoustic guitar music)

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I looked for ways that I can combine them,
all of them in one instrument.

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And then I thought, "What will I do?"

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I've started to find
all kinds of solutions.

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They were all cumbersome
and really not efficient.

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So I thought like a child. I said,
"What would my children do?"

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When they want something,
for example, one of them wants a cookie.

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They don't think twice
or how it cannot be done, they just do it.

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They never stop, they keep going.

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They'll take a table, they'll put a chair,

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they'll put another chair on top of it,
and eventually they'll reach the cookie,

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because almost everything they do,
they do for the first time

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and almost everything they do,
they want to do out of passion

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because they really need it; they have
a genuine need to get to those cookies.

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And for me, this guitar was my big cookie.

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So I went to a guitar maker
with a lot of experience,

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and I told him, "I want to built
this guitar, take me to the Moon."

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And he said

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- and he came highly recommended
because of his vast experience -

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it cannot be done.

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Actually he said, they will compete
on shared resources in such a way

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that the instrument will never sound good

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and it will be for sure cumbersome
and have tilt issues etc.

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So as he was speaking,
I was thinking to myself,

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"I have cars at home,
I came to a car manufacturer.

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Well, actually I want to go to the Moon;
I need a rocket engineer."

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So I looked for my rocket engineer
and when I thought about it, I said,

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"The piano is a string
instrument, essentially."

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So I went to a guy
that had experience in piano building.

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Actually his name is
Benjamin Miller, guitar maker.

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Today he builds guitars.

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Also at the time
he was building some guitars,

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but most of his experience to date
back then was in renovating pianos.

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So I figured: this guy
knows about acoustics,

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this guy knows about musical instruments,
about wood choices, etc.

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Carpeting.

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So I told him, "Let's go
to the Moon. If you will."

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We came out to this quest,
to this journey,

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and we made all the designs,
and after more than a dozen meetings

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and a process
that spanned almost half a year,

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we eventually came up with a prototype.

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And this failed!

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(Laughter)

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It didn't work.

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It didn't work.

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And I was sitting there
holding this corpse of a vision.

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And you know what was
the saddest thing about it?

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That each and every word
the guitar maker said,

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happened.

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It was cumbersome, it had
tilt issues, it didn't sound good.

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Everything, word by word,
all his words were written in stone.

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But few minutes after that,
when I came back to my senses,

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I picked up that prototype
and I said, "OK, let's see.

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Here, this choice of woods here
was probably wrong.

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And the angle of the necks,
the ergonomics here.

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The weights of the tuning forks."

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So we made a lot of modifications,
maybe close to 100 of them.

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And this is how this guitar
was brought into this world,

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out of holding your failure in your hands;

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because sometimes when people tell you,
you're going to fail,

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and you don't go to the quest,
that's one thing;

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when you go to the guest
and you fail miserably, shame thee.

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That's a whole different thing.

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I want to show you
a quick tour of the guitar.

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You already heard
some of the sounds that it produces.

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So as you've seen, this guitar is
an embodiment of my musical journey.

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It's the East and the West.
It's acoustic and electric.

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It's the roots combined with the passion
for modern music and contemporary music.

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So I can play anything from, you know,
stuff that is a bit more contemporary--

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(Guitar music)

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And I can play, you know,
all kinds of rock and roll stuff.

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I can also--

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The guitar is a fascinating instrument,
because you can play so many--

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(Guitar music)

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So many variations and with so many
accessories and peripherals.

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And essentially, of course,
there is the bouzouki.

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(Bouzouki music)

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But something happened one day,

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when I accidentally plugged
the wrong cable

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to the wrong jack here in the guitar.

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And...

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I heard something something like that--

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(Guitar music)

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This is how a guitar sounds
through a bouzouki.

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A sound that was never
there before in the world.

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It wasn't possible
acoustically to produce,

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because these two souls,
these two different cultures

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now share one body as we all do.

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We are all connected;
we know that, we feel that.

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So now one can resonate through the other

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and produce sounds
that were not possible before.

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I want to ask you a question.

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Are there butterflies in the desert?

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Well, I introduced this question
to a lot of people,

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actually hundreds of people
on the Internet,

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and I asked this to them.

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I'll tell you the statistics.

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Most of you think
"there are no butterflies in the desert."

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Some of you think, "Maybe, why not?"

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Some say, a minority says,
"Yes. Why not? Why wouldn't there be?"

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So I studied it and I researched it a bit.

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And not only do butterflies
exist in deserts,

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there are butterflies actually in each
and every desert on our planet.

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And furthermore, butterflies are one
of the most diverse creatures

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that there are in deserts
all around the planet.

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And you'd think,

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what would a beautiful colorful creature
representing freedom do in a wasteland,

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in a place that has maybe no life in it
or has very little life in it?

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And this is exactly the dualism
we're facing each and every day.

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These are the misconceptions

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that we are living about ourselves,
about everything that we do in life.

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We think, we cannot be butterflies
in the desert, but there are actually.

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Let me take you
to another desert: the Moon.

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Did you know that when you leave
your footsteps on the Moon,

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they are most likely
to last there forever?

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Because essentially
there is no wind on the Moon,

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so there's nothing
to wipe it off the surface.

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Except a meteoric collision, of course...

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but still, that would probably stay.

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But I think we don't have
to go to the Moon

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in order for our footsteps to resonate
here and to the next generations,

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because I believe our foundations,
our roots, resonate in everything we do.

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I know, my family, my father
and my grandfather's do,

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in everything that I do

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and I'm hoping that my foundations,
when the day comes,

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will resonate, too, through everything
that my daughters, my children, will do.

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So I believe that foundations
aligned with your passion

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can essentially lead
to innovation and empowerment.

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So I encourage you to go out there

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and be the butterfly
you can be in your own desert.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)