Hi, I'm Hannah and welcome to the A16Z podcast. We talk a lot about how various industries are

adapting to tech, but what about museums whose job, to some extent, is to lag behind? As part of our

recent DC podcast Roadshow, guest Sarah Lombard, digital curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, whose voice is the first guest you'll hear, Adam Martin, chief digital officer at the National Museum of African American Culture and History,

who is the second voice.

And Rachel Goslin's Director of the Arts and Industries Building at the Smithsonian talked with

me about all things tech, museums, and storytelling.

I saw you tweeted a study that museums are perceived to be more trustworthy than news at the moment.

At a time when there is tremendous schisms in society, it is a place where people expect to be safe

and to have issues, topics, stories that they can talk about in a way that is interesting,

provocative, eye-opening, and doesn't have the noise from outside.

One of the ways where hopefully we are starting to evolve, though, is because of the

expectations that our audience has now.

Just as we've seen in media, people also have an expectation now that their stories are going to be part of that.

And looking for ways to engage with museums in a way that they haven't in the past, where before it was a place where you went to receive information from one source

or from one interpretation. They want an opportunity to have their stories and their perspectives

be a part of their museum experience. In general, the expectation has gone from the museum as a

monologue to it's a dialogue. At the end of the day, museums and exhibitions are about telling stories.

So how is technology actually changing how we tell those stories?

How is it making it better?

How is it making it more challenging?

How about it's just making it more complicated?

...