 I'm excited to introduce you to Sami Bloom. Sami, Sami is a creative director, performing artist and founder of Bluing Studio. I've been drawn to his really deep interest and commitment to both his life as a creative and this field of impact investing. He's an amazing human bridge between the artistic community and all of the work that is represented in the audience. So in dreaming up Socap 18, I asked Sami to create a piece for this main stage and he has outdone himself. He will be your emcee over the coming days, but tonight he is a performer with a treat to kick off Socap 18. I'm so thrilled to have you all here and if this next performance surprises you, let it be the first of many surprises for the week. I hope it warms you up for the many valuable strangers you will meet and the insights you discover from every corner of the social capital markets. So without further ado, please welcome to the stage Sami Bloom. A picture of beautiful band of a chromatic continuum of values, some describable, some ineffable, all blended just right. This image is born in the center of a dying star, an engine of energy 150 million kilometers far, inside of its core, 200,000 times hotter than this room. Under 3.84 trillion pounds of pressure per square inch, a family of photons begins their journey. Through emission and absorption, they bounce through the body of the sun for tens of thousands of years before their journey to the surface is done and then they are flung into the vacuum of space. If you were to travel as fast as these photons, you could travel around the earth four times in the blink of your eye. After a multi millennia migration from their fusion fueled formation, the photons leave the hand of their plasmatic parent for just an eight minute jot before colliding in earth's atmosphere with the liquid of life, droplets of rain that refract them just right, producing the bowed image we know to be the visible spectrum of light. Each color that we see has its own frequency, the number of waves that pass a fixed point in a given amount of time because each color has a different wavelength, they're each slowed to a different degree and refracted at a slightly different angle. The combined effect of this two degree spread is light scattered into perfectly blended bands. Now here's the trick. Rainbows only happen when the sunlight is coming from behind you. As the light shines into a curtain of raindrops in air, front of you, only one color from each droplet will refract at the exact angle necessary to reach your eye. That is to say that in one part of the sky, all the raindrops will bounce red light into your eye. All the other colors from those same particular droplets will scatter too high, too low, or too far to the side, but just a few degrees away in the sky. The orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light, bouncing out of these raindrops will be the ones to be seen by you. You know that rainbows actually form in a full circle in front of you? It's the Earth's horizon, however, that blocks you from seeing the full circle, exposing just the upper arc. And this means that you'll always be at the center of a rainbow you see. Now some pilots, astronauts, and mountaineers under the right conditions have been able to see a full circular rainbow. So these colors that we supposedly see, well, how do we? A physicist might tell you that color is a property of the surface of objects, not what we think we detect, but rather a disposition to absorb and refract light of different wavelengths. They call this a spectral reflectance profile, one that sits in a certain denial that color is anything but what's on the surface. Well, a neuroscientist might remind you that there's no color in your mind, that all colors are acts of interpretation, a nervous system activation, producing a sensation that becomes part of a grand hallucination that we agree to label as reality. A philosopher might think differently, labeling color as an ecological property, a feature of the way light and surfaces interact, and that in fact, color holds no contract to be stable. They would say that because under certain lighting we can believe in optic fable, that color is locked inside the same box as our historical quest to understand how we perceive everything and why. And lastly, an artist might show us the image of a tree, ask us to focus on what we see and then propose what is a tree's least favorite color? Green, for it's willing to give it all away. Now, it's fair to assume that humans have observed rainbows for millennia, but prisms came later. Early Latin writers of the Roman Empire first reported on the play of colors through crystal and glass, supposedly mimicking the spectral phenomenon well before Isaac Newton in the 1600s. What Newton determined that no scientist or philosopher had before him was that scattered light could be refracted back into its original form, proving that prisms did not color light, as had once been believed, but rather exposed its component parts. Over the following centuries, you would come to discover that the visible spectrum we see is an incredibly small portion of a larger electromagnetic spectrum. From the longest of radio and television waves that stand as tall as buildings, to microwaves that range from our height to that of a tree, to infrared, that would fit on the point of a needle, to the visible light that a human eye can see, to the ultraviolet light that molecules, to X-rays, the size of atoms in our bones, to gamma rays who at the size of atomic nuclei can alter the DNA in our cells. So, let us review. Photons born tens of thousands of years ago in our sun are flung into space for an eight minute race to Earth. Flying over our shoulder, they collide with droplets of rain, creating a different bowed spectrum for each of us, none of them the same. The jury is still out on what color is that we see. From physics to neuroscience to art and philosophy, we still haven't cracked how we perceive and what it means to be. What we think we can see sits on an invisible electromagnetic axis, far larger than the chromatic cut our eyes alone can pick up. We'll come back to this idea again. But first, let's explore light sibling, sound. Sound is a vibration, an audible movement of a medium such as water or air. It sits on a spectrum too. Loud is a rock concert or quiet as a feather in air. See, visible light because of the length of its wave can't pass through most things we see every day. But sound can bend around objects and join itself again. Thus, we can think about the spectrum of sound as the power of our voice, about our ability to move through and around obstacles by choice. So, now that you're experts in the spectra of sound and of light, we can talk about how and why the concept of a continuum has been a critical analytical tool across multiple disciplines. When I envision disability, I picture a spectrum of ability upon which we all exist. What if we were to consider that people are not able or disabled, but the built and virtual environment inhibits us under differing conditions from full and equitable participation. People who experience physical and or cognitive barriers to access and participation, including myself, are integral members of our community. We often possess a unique perspective and distinctive hyper-trained abilities that can be powerfully utilized across job sectors and events. However, even for those who experience extreme barriers to access, they deserve and we all benefit from their participation in our broader culture. As time goes on and under different conditions, our position on the spectrum of ability shifts. To consider all persons in the spaces and features we use to work and gather, it's a recognition of self, of community, and of the essence of humanity. I should note that this talk utilizes language that includes assumptions about our ability to see, to hear, and to comprehend complex information. Developing new language that will make sure more of us are welcome, regardless of our modes of perception, is tied with our collective liberation. When I envision gender, I picture a spectra of identity, attraction, sex, and expression. Modern Western understandings of gender put forth the idea of a static binary. This was long after native and indigenous people who knew that members of their tribe were capable of holding multiple spirits within themselves and often called upon these members for their wisdom. Gender identity is who we know ourselves to be. Based on what we have been socialized to believe our options are, and how much we align or don't align with one of those options. There is a broader invisible axis of all the genders that we could have. Then there are the options that are visible to us, and then there are the colors that we choose to mix. Attraction is the different ways we feel drawn to other people, whether romantically or sexually, and is most often categorized based on our gender and the gender of those we feel attracted to. This is what we refer to as sexual orientation. With a spectrumized view of gender, so too can one have a spectrum of attraction. I, for instance, identify with a word that was once derogatory and now reclaimed queer to describe my attraction to people across the gender spectrum and my non-binary place on the gender spectrum as well. I should also note that some people experience both romantic and sexual attraction, some only one and some neither. Sex refers to the anatomical physical makeup of our bodies, and specifically all the body parts we've named as sex characteristics, including the primary traits we're born with, such as genitalia, and the secondary traits that we may or may not develop later in life, such as body hair, breasts, and an Adam's apple. These characteristics are not mutually exclusive, and thus, maleness and femaleness also exist within spectra. I want to repeat this loud and clear for the Trump administration to hear. Gender is not defined by what we are assigned at birth. What was is or will be between our legs are the chromosomes that make up our DNA. Believing this is an antiquated and lethal perspective for the lives of our trans and gender non-conforming siblings. Lastly, gender expression is all the different ways we present ourselves through our actions, our language, our clothing, our demeanor, and all the gendered representations of how that is socially interpreted. I was able to safely dance upon this stage in these heels. In front of this audience is because of the trans and gender non-conforming women of color who gave their lives to a movement for human rights. And this brings us to the most complex and relevant spectra of them all. When I envision power, I picture spectra of privilege and oppression. This is a lesson that was first taught to us by black feminist writers who sought to illuminate the fundamental differences in their fate from the white middle-class women who proposed they shared the same oppression. It was again black feminist scholars and activists who would later come to coin and advance the term intersectionality. To note the ways that gender, race, class, ethnicity, and ability intersected to bring visibility to how identity affects the world we experience and the world we see. Power is a spectrum of ability to make the world as you wish it to be. Power is a spectrum of ability to make the world as you wish it to be. So if creating a better world is what we supposedly seek to do, here today in our lives, in the lives of the next generations to come, that we need to recognize that we will never see the full spectrum of what is true. We see our own sliver, our own unique vision in our mind's eye or way high up in the sky. In most of Western culture, we conceptualize time as a linear journey, a straight path from birth to death into whatever is or isn't beyond that we each individually believe. Now my ancestors, they view this differently. They use the Hebrew word kedim, which means in front of to describe the past. To describe the future, they use the word ahar, from the word aharit, saying on the beams of light from our tendency to listen to what we see. And in turn, we can move backwards together towards an unknown future, piece by piece, color by color, sound by sound. Constructing an aligned image, a remarkable vision, a beautiful band of light that we would all want to live in under the sun. I'm 6'10 in these heels, so if anyone wants to volunteer to try this, you can come on up, I'll teach you a lesson. This next section is a privilege to introduce who's coming to the stage as an individual who I've had the pleasure of getting to know since last year. And is the rightful representative of the territory that we have the privilege of occupying through this gathering.