From Kitchen To Culture

Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern

Before the rise of bite-sized content and algorithm-driven storytelling, some creators built influence the long way, through deep curiosity, lived experience, and long-form craft. In this intergenerational conversation, award-winning chef and storyteller Andrew Zimmern reflects on how he went from kitchens to global screens, using food as a bridge to culture, identity, and understanding. Joining him is a new-generation creator who ascended through digital platforms, bringing a fresh perspective shaped by real-time audiences and algorithmic winds. Together, they explore what has changed, and what hasn’t, when it comes to building trust, telling human stories, and connecting across cultures. What can today’s creators learn from the depth and patience of pre-social-media storytelling? And how can legacy storytellers adapt to a world moving at the speed of the scroll while keeping meaning at the center?

Media Moneyball

The rules for media investment are shifting. New technologies, creator platforms, and community-led models are changing where capital flows and why. In this conversation, three early-stage investors share what they look for when backing founders in media, entertainment, and creator tech. They unpack their current investment theses, the trends they’re watching for 2026, and how creative vision, audience ownership, and smart business models can build companies that endure.

The World’s Creative Future Platformed by TikTok

TikTok is reshaping our world's creative landscape, platforming millions of people and giving them the ability to spark trends, build communities, and convert storytelling into opportunity. As creators drive culture, commerce, and influence across borders through TikTok, the platform's unique blend of discovery, creativity, and accessibility enables new voices to rise and industries to form. This session explores how the platform is powering a worldwide creative renaissance, and what it means for the future of culture, creators, and the businesses that grow alongside them.

How To Tell Your Best Stories Ever

What happens when the ancient craft of storytelling collides with the most powerful creative tools ever built? A KAIRO Talk powered by Google, this presentation shows how AI expands creative possibilities while keeping storytelling fundamentally human. Through an AI-generated short film and a behind-the-scenes breakdown, the speakers show how ideas move from insight to strategy to fully realized worlds using today’s AI tools. Mood boards, characters, storyboards, and cinematic choices can now be created in minutes, yet still depend on human taste and imagination.

Achieving Outsized Returns on Entertainment & Media Investments

Two of the industry’s most influential voices, Chuck Roven and Dr. Roy Salter, come together for a rare joint dialogue on identifying E&M Industry investments possessing outsized return potential in often misunderstood or overlooked business areas including (a) investing in theatrical and streamed “Guideline Content” matching the most profitable and risk mitigated content produced and released by the world’s leading Content Creators and Major Distributors; (b) investing in brand-building social-media advertising to drive outsized Guideline Content value; (c) investing in the adaptation of large-audience-proven music IP into Guideline Content; and (d) leveraging these & other strategies in an innovative US Exhibitor-Affiliated distribution company focused on high-return high-concept and elevated-genre Guideline Content. Mr. Roven will combine his decades of producing globally successful Guideline Content with Dr. Salter’s decades of advising on thousands of successful E&M transactions to illuminate how creative judgment, disciplined production capability and clear-minded investment analyses and structuring can be combined with strategic capital, social-media ad-techniques, proven Guideline Content sources (i.e., large-audience music IP adaptation), a US Exhibitor-Affiliated theatrical feature distributor and other resources have the potential to generate extraordinary economic returns.

AI and New Technologies: Redefining the Future of Media