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First, I want to talk about what museums mean to you generally. What's your first memory of going to a museum?

KIRSTEN: So my first profound memory was seeing the King Tut exhibit at the de Young because my aunt worked there, so we got to have a behind-the-scenes experience of that amazing exhibition. My parents were big museum goers. We spent a lot of time in museums, and then I would take my son to museums. The trick was to not spend too much time because then he would associate "museums" with "boring." And so really the things that he was interested in he'd focus on but blow by the other things that ... You don't have to read every panel in every museum. I think for children in particular, that's important.

ERIC: Right, right. What do you remember of the King Tut museum [show], of the "Treasures of Tutankhamun," I think it was called? How did that make you feel at that age?

KIRSTEN: Well, just the profound history. We're such a young country, and to think about all these years ago and that people like us existed at that time and what they were facing and what their lives were like, I thought it was really interesting to have that depth and actually to see things. It's one thing to read about it, but to actually see these artifacts and immerse yourself in that experience, I think that was really profound at that age.

ERIC: Walt Disney's story is also humbling, maybe not in quite an ancient way, but still quite impressive and varied in its scope. I'm sure one question you get a lot from people is whether or not the museum is run by the Disney Company. It's not, but I was wondering, could you explain how that relationship works between you and the Walt Disney corporation?

KIRSTEN: Yeah, we have a very close and collaborative relationship with the Walt Disney Company, and they lend us a lot of objects. At times, we lend them some too — we lent them our "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" Oscar for the Academy Awards festivities a couple of years ago — but it is a separate nonprofit that Diane Disney Miller established. So that's how the museum is run: as a separate nonprofit with a very strong relationship with the Walt Disney Company.

ERIC: Yes. And correct me if I'm wrong, Diane Disney Miller was one of Walt's daughters, and her husband Ron Miller was CEO of the company at some point after Walt passed. Is that right?

KIRSTEN: That's right. So Diane Disney Miller had one sister, Sharon Lund. Then Ron, after Ron and Diane got married, Walt really took a liking to Ron. He was playing in the NFL. He was playing for the LA Rams, actually, and Walt would come and watch his games. At the end of the season, Walt said, "What are you thinking of doing next year?" And Ron said, "I think I'm going to sign another contract." And he said, "No, I'm tired of watching you get your bell rung on the field. You're going to come work for me." So he gave him a job at the company. And you're right, he was CEO until 1984.

ERIC: And you also mentioned the "Seven Dwarfs" Oscars, which are in the lobby of the Walt Disney Family Museum. Could you, for people who haven't been, who haven't seen those Oscars, could you explain what those are?

KIRSTEN: Sure. So Walt has the record for the most Oscars ever won by an individual. We have over 30 Oscars in the lobby. They rarely made unusual Oscars, but they made the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" Oscar for Walt after the film had ... There wasn't a category of Oscars to win at that point for animation, so they later gave him sort of an honorary Oscar and it is a fan favorite. People love that Oscar. The little Oscars are so cute. And Shirley Temple gave [it to] him, she was the one who presented it to him.

ERIC: I was lucky enough to tour the museum with your colleagues Caroline Quinn and Chris Mullen. I'll tell you what struck me on this visit is that the Walt Disney Family Museum is the closest thing San Francisco has to a presidential library. You are trying to encapsulate the impact of one person on most of the 20th century. The main difference between Walt and a president is that he wasn't limited to eight years in office. He had an influence for such a long time. I was wondering if you could talk about that, about how as the executive director of this museum, how do you think about the scope of the story that you're trying to tell?

KIRSTEN: Yeah, it's interesting that you had that insight because that was the other option Diane was thinking of is style it as a presidential library. In the end, Walt's life was so big and so vast and covered so much, and his international reach, how inspired people are and devoted to him and his legacy that she really felt like a museum was much more fitting. But you're right, there is that aspect. I mean, it's a single-subject museum. What's different about our museum is most single-subject museums are established long after the person has passed away, so there aren't people that were directly connected to that person necessarily. His own daughter, who experienced him throughout her whole life, was there to provide input along with a lot of the people that worked alongside him, other family members, friends. So there was a lot of very dynamic input about who this man was, not just in business, but his personal life and his hobbies and how he was with his family.

It was really important to Diane. You've noticed in each of the 10 galleries, in addition to all of the other art and artifacts and objects, there's a family wall. So it shows Walt with his family and friends — it's period wallpaper — throughout his life. And she really wanted to debunk these myths that he was not a family man, not committed to his friends and family. And fortunately, because he had a camera in his hand most of the time, there are a lot of photographs, but also footage of him and his family, which really brings him to life. We also have 20 hours of a interview that Pete Martin did of Walt, and Diane's idea was to have him tell his story. So you hear his voice throughout the museum, which I think is really innovative because you hear it in his own words, what he went through.

She wanted to tell the truth about all of the challenges, the failures, the setbacks. It's interesting because when it first opened in 2009, my son, who was a teenager at the time, came here, and he came home, he said, "Mom, you have to go to this museum. Walt Disney failed." And as a teenager to think he could become this unbelievable international icon having had major setbacks along the way. So it is very inspirational and a very honest depiction of who he was.

ERIC: Yeah, it really seems like his life was shaped by these failures. When I was doing this tour with Caroline and Chris, we were talking about Oswald the Rabbit, which [was] the first character he made, which he lost the rights to in a contract dispute with Universal, I think it was, and how very quickly after that you start to see the words "Walt Disney" in much larger type on the posters. He starts to really own the character of Mickey Mouse and he starts to understand the importance of making himself central to the works that he is making.

KIRSTEN: Right. And more than the failures, it was the perseverance after the failures, because I think a lot of people, you have a failure and then you move off in some other direction, and he just kept going forward. That's when he created Mickey Mouse. It's really an incredible story for somebody who didn't go to college, didn't really go to high school, and had this incredible artistic talent himself but quickly realized that his talents, although he was artistic, were better spent in the leadership roles, the visionary roles, and inspiring other people to push their limits.

ERIC: Now, one of the things that Chris mentioned to me is that sometimes, especially later in life, he said Walt's tales grew in the telling. I was wondering if you could speak to that, of how does that complicate things for you as a museum if there's decades removed from something happening and maybe the story sounds a little bit better if he tells it in a certain way.

KIRSTEN: Well, but that's the other interesting thing that we had people around who knew that the story was perhaps embellished over time because how would you know that if everybody's gone? And so Diane would correct him a little bit, "Well, it didn't exactly happen that way." Or the animators at the studio. So it's really such a treasure that we had all of these people around. And sadly, even since the opening of the museum, we've lost a lot of those people. So it was very important to record those memories. And we have video also of interviews.

ERIC: Yeah. So you've done original interviews yourselves since the museum opened, is that right?

KIRSTEN: Yeah. The Walt Disney Family Foundation made a film, "The Man Behind the Myth," and in connection with that there were a lot of people interviewed about Walt. So there's what's in the movie, but also a lot of B-roll. That's extremely valuable to us.

ERIC: So yeah, on the topic of legacy, you were talking about some of the failures and setbacks that Walt went through throughout his career. There's one in particular that I really love the way that you show it in the museum, which is, I think the text on the wall is something to the effect of, "This was the hardest period of my life," and it's referring to the animator strike in the '40s. Could you set up for folks what was happening in the '40s and what caused this crisis for Walt?

KIRSTEN: Yeah. So one thing people don't understand is "Snow White" was mocked and ridiculed. "Who's going to sit for an hour and a half and watch a cartoon?" And the banker really believed in Walt, thank goodness, because it cost a fortune back then, but it was a success. But the movies that followed — "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Bambi" even — they were released when the war had broken out in Europe, and that was a big market for Disney, so they didn't do very well. In fact, Walt had to do his first public offering at that point to raise capital. So it's very hard to make movies because you need a lot of capital and a lot of people for a discrete amount of time, and then you have a lull. There were people at the studio who were paid very well, but then there were some more junior people who weren't.

So they went on strike. At the same time, the war was coming to the U.S., and Walt had moved his parents down from Oregon and bought them a house, and something went wrong with the furnace. And his mother passed away actually, was asphyxiated, and his father was impacted by it. [He] was different after that event, and it crushed Walt. He felt personally responsible and could never really talk about it, actually. He blamed himself so much for that. And then the strike comes along, and he felt like this was his family and couldn't understand that they couldn't work this out. The strike was a surprise to him. So that was a very difficult period for him. And as you saw in the museum, he ended up going on this goodwill tour of South America with some of his key artists and animators. Roy, his brother who ran the company with him, basically said, "Walt, you need to get out of town for a while and I'll work this out." So they settled the strike.

ERIC: Yeah. So I mean, back to the way it's depicted in the museum, you're at a sort of a T-junction where you could go down the hallway and learn about the propaganda films that he was working on during the war, or you go straight ahead and learn about the renaissance, the first renaissance in the '50s with all the movies that were coming out after the war. But you're sort of confronted by all of these protest signs. They're framing a display in the museum, all these angry protest signs, I assume re-creations of real ones that the animators had. When you have this museum, which is about one person, how much negativity do you choose to emphasize? This is very much something that I assume that if Disney the company were making this museum, they maybe would not want to highlight this so much, but for you as an educational institution, this is such an important part of his life, right?

KIRSTEN: Right. And that was Diane. She's a truth teller and she wanted everybody to know the full story. The strike was a very difficult, unhappy time for Walt. And he testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee about the strike, and that audio is actually available in the museum on one of the handsets because Diane wanted people to know the whole story. They asked him if he thought the Communists were behind the strike, and he said he thought they were. That's all there. And I think her idea was we're all human and we all go through different phases in life and you can persevere and you can learn and you can change too. And I think that was all Diane. She really wanted people to know that.

ERIC: This being a museum about the family, yes, but mainly focused on one person, just on Walt, how do you respond if someone comes into the museum with a negative opinion of him? I mean, testifying for Joseph McCarthy, history mostly looks positively on Walt's work, but that's sort of a dark moment for American history there. So how do you respond if someone comes in and they are not feeling positive or they're not interested in this idea of redemption?

KIRSTEN: It's interesting because we don't get too much of that. I think Diane's idea to put it all out there was a smart one. I remember there was a Spanish news crew that came through years ago and they wanted to interview me about did I know about this Joseph McCarthy hearing and why don't we have anything about it in the museum? And I said, "Oh, well actually let me take you over here to gallery 6." So I think it was disarming for people that Diane was willing to tell the truth about her father, and he had his moments in time like we all do, but we don't really get much of that because it's sort of all out there. She wasn't hiding anything.

ERIC: Tell me if you disagree, but it feels like part of your job at the museum is just winnowing down how much detail do you get into because there's just so much ground to cover.

KIRSTEN: Oh yeah. I mean, we have a huge collection. About 10% of it is on display.

ERIC: Wow.

KIRSTEN: But there are things like ... He was a chain smoker and we can't, as you probably recognize, there aren't any — well, there are a few that slip through — but there aren't supposed to be any images of Walt smoking. Diane really talked to the company about that because she wanted people to know if you smoke, your dad died of lung cancer and he had just turned 65. And imagine if Walt had lived another 20, 30 years, what this world would be like. So she wanted people to know the harmful effects of smoking. But what's interesting is Walt didn't want children to see him smoking either. He wanted his image to be that he ... That was not something ... [It was] a habit that he had picked up, unfortunately, when he was a teenager.

ERIC: Yeah. Earlier this year I saw the movie "Saving Mr. Banks" where Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney. And in that movie, you hear him hacking. You hear this hacking smoker's cough throughout the movie, but you never see him smoke. They kind of found a middle ground there where they were depicting the effects of the smoking but not actually showing it.

KIRSTEN: Oh, I forgot that. Maybe I didn't pick that up in the movie. That's interesting.

ERIC: So I want to talk about your career working at the museum. You've been with them since 2013, is that right?

KIRSTEN: That's right.

ERIC: Before then, what was your personal connection to both Disney the company and Walt Disney the man?

KIRSTEN: I'm a lawyer by background, so I was in law firms and I was in executive positions as general counsel and VP of HR and worked at large conglomerates and hedge funds. But then I started my own practice and as part of that, I would go in and help companies find their next executives, their CEO, their VP of HR, their general counsel. But I would tell everybody who would listen, I want to get into mission-driven work. It was important. I thought later, in retirement. Well, I got a call from a law firm that I used to work for and said, "Would you help this museum find their next executive director? Will you come in, help and stabilize things, and then work with them to identify their next leader?" So I met Ron, we hit it off. I met Diane, we had a great time. So I came in, I was working with them, working with the staff, and after a few months, Diane came in the office one day and said, "Would you just take this job?" (laugh)

So I don't have ... I mean, I love museums. My family are artists. In the background, I was a very serious violinist growing up, loved museums, but I'm not a museum professional by background. And I, like everybody, I love Disney, but I'm not one of these people that has the annual pass or anything. So it's really about working with the family. Diane had really brilliant focused ideas about the museum and how she wanted to share her father with the world.

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One of the themes of this podcast that I'm finding in interviews is the gap between how we experience museums as regular museum visitors and how it is to work inside of the museums. Just the amount of thought and care that goes into designing these exhibits and how do you curate the collection, all of those things that happen behind the scenes that for the average patron, they probably don't think about those things. So what's an example of something that you either learned on the job or that you wish you'd known before you took over the executive director role?

KIRSTEN: You need good curators, and we have them. Again, we have such a large collection and just the rotation. The story is there. It's the 10 galleries, it's chronological through his life, and it's Diane's ideas about how to present it. But we have a number of different maquettes we can rotate through or the "Snow White" merchandise or Walt's miniatures. There are things that ... And keep it interesting for the guests. And then the special exhibitions also are a major component.

ERIC: When you consider repeat visitors, is that a core group, a core part of the audience for the museum is having people who come back again and again to see rotated exhibits or to see new things like the Mary Blair exhibit that you did last year?

KIRSTEN: Yeah, it's both because we have our members who come quite often, but then we have people from out of town or that come specifically because they are a Mary Blair fan or love the movie that we're featuring or things like that.

ERIC: Right, because you also have a movie theater where you show classic Disney movies. Talk about that and what goes into programming that every month.

KIRSTEN: Yeah, so we have a beautiful 120-seat theater. It's "Fantasia" themed, a gorgeous little refuge, and we have the film of the month. We also do public programs in there and have some really interesting guests. We do some educational programming in the theater too. Education is a big part of the museum's mission. It was very important to Ron and Diane and the family still.

ERIC: What does that look like in practice, the educational programming the museum does? How do you apply the collection and the exhibits of the family museum? How do you introduce it to new generations and what does that actually look like for school groups and others coming through?

KIRSTEN: We have a wide variety of educational programming. So the school groups, they go through the museum and then they have sessions on the multiplaying camera or some component. And then we have afterschool classes, we have weekend classes and workshops. We have the summer classes and camps. We do virtual. I think everybody during COVID got very adept at virtual programming and educational efforts. And we go out to schools, to mostly Title I schools. We have partner schools where we have a yearlong relationship with them, but really focused on the craft of animation.

ERIC: You mentioned earlier that you currently only have 10% of the collection on display. I had heard that Diane collected something like 30,000 objects related to Walt's life before the museum opened. Could you help me understand that 90%? What are you not showing? What are you not displaying in the museum?

KIRSTEN: The family, when Diane had the idea for the museum, they really didn't have many objects or much art. Walt didn't bring art home from the studio, so they had his Oscars, his miniature collection.

ERIC: I learned more about these miniatures from the museum's marketing and editorial specialist, Chris Mullen. Walt started collecting them after seeing the art of Narcissa Thorne, whose miniature rooms you might have seen at museums in Phoenix, Knoxville, and Chicago.

CHRIS MULLEN: He saw her exhibit and just felt completely transported. And so Walt started to collect miniatures of his own — even create in some instances — plates, utensils, tools from various time periods, also miniature books, volumes of Shakespeare, holy books, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, real working firearms, so I'm told. He was collecting them just to have them, but his interest in miniatures did lead to what he thought could be a traveling attraction of different little American period vignettes that would travel around the country by train. And unfortunately, he priced it out and figured that with the limitations of capacity and the transportation of it, that there was no way to make it profitable. But he did have a name for that attraction, which he would keep for a little later on: Disneylandia.

KIRSTEN: [Diane] embarked on a very serious effort to acquire objects and art and artifacts. So there is a huge miniature collection, there's fine art, there's maquettes, ephemera. We have books that he had, the original drawing of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse that they didn't realize they had in a safety deposit box. There's a lot. We have furniture, we have the apartment furniture that's on display. We have more of that also from the apartment. So just a very wide variety.

ERIC: Some of the museums I've talked to, their ambition is to one day have a space big enough to display the full collection. It sounds like that's maybe not the intent, you're not eyeing a warehouse for this, but what are your future ambitions? What have you not been able to do yet in the 13 years you've been with the museum?

KIRSTEN: One thing we did do pre-COVID, we had a film festival — animation film festival — and we're planning to relaunch that, actually, which is very exciting because that was international. In fact, I think the last person who won it was from South Korea, flew over with her parents. So it was very, very dynamic, exciting, but we want to relaunch that as part of our educational programming. This museum, Diane had originally envisioned first an online museum and then a little museum. They had the collection stored in a warehouse in the Presidio here, and she was thinking just a little one, but like all things Disney, it grew and grew. So this is massive compared to the initial concept for this museum, but the idea of ... She really curated it well, the story and the objects, and it's so much that one comment we do get is it's overwhelming.

There's so much in there. You can't read everything. I mean, some people say it takes two days to go through, so I think there's plenty.

ERIC: I want to do something maybe a little silly, a little woo, but bear with me. I want you to think about your personal favorite room in the museum, just picture in your head, and imagine that we're walking into the room. What do we see? What do we hear as we cross that threshold?

KIRSTEN: There's so much I like in the museum, but the ribbon room, the one that you mentioned, you can either go towards the World War II propaganda and films or go into the post-war movies, the package films and "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." And it's a dimly lit room. It's got these projectors projecting the films up on this ribbon towards the ceiling, and there's an oval ottoman in the middle where many kids lie down. But there's just something about the feel in that that is very calming and exciting at the same time. You can hear songs from "Lady in the Tramp," that video's playing. And then there's also objects in the cases, some of the concept art and background art and cels, maquettes. The company was, as Roy describes it, a gaunt bear. I mean, they had really been starving through the war because they did everything for the government at cost.

Some of the studios made a lot of money during the war, but Walt committed to just charging costs to the government, so they weren't making money. So they actually had money tied up in Europe they couldn't repatriate, and so they went over to Europe to make the films. So there's some information about that too, but just how innovative he was in creating these cameras for "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and the Nautilus model is in there. So there's kind of an excitement, even though the studio's not in great shape, there's an excitement about the future and then Walt constantly pushing, pushing, pushing. Now he's getting into live-action films and starting to think about a theme park. And so I find that room really kind of calming, but also the future is evident in that kind of excitement.

ERIC: So you go from the ribbon room, you pass by some of Walt's miniatures that he collected, and you go down this hallway [with] this beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge. You really take advantage of your location in San Francisco's Presidio there. Could you talk about the bench at the end of the hallway? Many, many, if not all museums have benches someplace, but I think this is the only time I've ever seen a bench in a museum that has a plaque encouraging you to sit on this bench.

KIRSTEN: So that bench is from Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Walt used to go there and sit on a bench, maybe that bench, but a bench just like that, and watch his daughters on the carousel and ideate about a place where families could go together where everyone would enjoy the experience in a clean park that would have exciting rides and things for everybody to engage in. So those were his initial thoughts about what became Disneyland. He initially was thinking that ... Across from the studio in Burbank, he had designs for Mickey Mouse Park, 16 acres, but the city ultimately didn't approve it, thank goodness. And in fact, that's the site where eventually the new animation building was built. So then he pressed on and then started doing the site selection for a bigger theme park. And that's when he selected Anaheim.

ERIC: I sat on the bench and I did not yet have a trillion-dollar idea, but maybe next time I'll sit on the bench again and —

KIRSTEN: It'll come.

ERIC: Yeah. So we talked a bit about the educational mission in the museum. Could you speak to other visitors? Who comes to the museum? Who is the typical clientele of the Walt Disney Family Museum?

KIRSTEN: Well, there are a lot of Disney fans, but there are many who are just interested in who the man was or maybe something about the company or learning about his family or his life. So we get a pretty wide variety. I would say most of the members are high-affinity Disney, but there are other people that are just interested in Walt Disney. Diane, when she was in third grade or something, one of her classmates said, "Is your father Walt Disney?" She said, "No, no, no." And she said, "No, your father is Walt Disney." And Diane thought about it and she went home and she looked at her father and she said, "You never told me you were Walt Disney." So that's how so much out of the ... He was just this humble father who drove her to school.

ERIC: Oh, that's so funny. What's the best thing you've ever heard a visitor say?

KIRSTEN: Probably that when they say that they were surprised to learn about his failures and inspired by it, that's what Diane wanted people to get out of it, to persevere and to heed your own imagination and realize that there's something in all of us. And that's what he said. He didn't make films for children or adults. He made films for the child in all of us. I think that's what Diane really wanted people to get from the museum.

ERIC: Yeah. Depicting the complexity of the person and the depth of his ambition. I think sometimes in the popular imagination, when we talk about actors, directors, whatever, we can lose sight of the person. It just becomes about the end result. It becomes about the end product. So it's really interesting. It's really impressive that Diane had the wherewithal to understand that there was a story that needed to be told here that wasn't going to be told by just watching the movies.

KIRSTEN: Yeah. And the other thing, Eric, is that Walt, he was visionary, had these unbelievable ideas, changed the world. He wasn't interested in money. He would even say money is not for piling up. Money is for paying forward to entertain the public. I think a lot of people when they have that level of success, it's hard not to be influenced by the money and driven by the money. And there are many times he could have hung up his cleats and done really well, but he spent that money on things like "Snow White." He already had Mickey Mouse when he produced "Snow White." He could have just banked on the royalties from that, but he wanted to spend that money. He kept a theme park. People thought he was crazy. His good friend, Art Linkletter, said, "I'm not investing in that. What do you know about theme parks?" I mean, there were people who, each time, each pivot point he made, thinking he was crazy. And he didn't care.

In fact, there's a story that not long before he died, he drove by a Mercedes dealership and thought, "Oh, I wish I could buy one of those." And he thought, "Oh, I finally can." But he did crazy stuff like borrow against his life insurance policy and sell any vacation homes he had because it meant that much to him to create these ideas — for the public, if you think about it.

ERIC: His ambition seems ... When I was doing this tour, you go past this beautiful model of Disneyland — which I'll come back to in a minute — but you go past the model, there's a section about the World's Fair, and then there's also just the Olympics. Oh, he's also casually consulting on the Olympics in the '60s. It's a lot happening at that time, for sure.

KIRSTEN: Yeah, there's a funny story about that because it was the Tahoe Palisades — then the Squaw Valley — Winter Olympics, and they asked him to come and do the pageantry. So they signed a contract to do that and he got there and they said, "Well, you know so much about crowd flow and credentials and parks. Can you just take the whole thing on?" And so they sort of gave him the keys and then they wanted to meet with him, the guy who was running the Olympics, afterwards, and they got into this meeting. I know because Ron told me the story, Ron was there because Ron and his family were there during their first few months on the lead-up to the Olympics. And Ron said the guy looked so nervous and he finally said, "Well, Walt, you went way over budget." And he said, "I'm Walt Disney. What did you think was going to happen?" And then left the meeting. And Ron said he ran into that guy years later and he said, "That's the best meeting I ever went to."

ERIC: Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, so backtracking a little bit in the timeline. We were alluding to this model, one of the centerpieces, I think, of the museum is this extremely detailed model of Disneyland. And something that I was talking about with Chris was the fact that it was a model of a Disneyland that never existed. Could you explain what it is and what makes it that way?

KIRSTEN: So these are all attractions that Walt had a hand on, whether they're still there, they're not there anymore, or they were in concept when he passed away. So that's why it's not an accurate depiction of Disneyland at any given time because it's the attractions that Walt had a hand in. Chris probably told you, but Walt was really motivated to create this park because once films were made, they're in the can, you can't change them. And he would watch them and think, "Oh, I would've done this differently." But with the park, he could change things and improve things. When he didn't like things, he could revamp it. So he really ... That appealed to him.

ERIC: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we are coming up on the end of our time, but I have a couple more questions for you. The first is what is a small detail that you love about the museum but that most people miss?

KIRSTEN: I don't know if most people miss it, but in the "Snow White" gallery, there's a Cartier bracelet that I just love, a "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" Cartier bracelet with the charms. I always say if that goes missing, you know who the prime suspect is.

ERIC: (laugh) What's something that people get wrong about the museum?

KIRSTEN: Well, our name is a little confusing: The Walt Disney Family Museum. It wasn't initially designed for children as much. We're trying to address that with some in-gallery activities and make it more interesting for children, but I think that's a little confusing to people. So it's the Walt Disney Family [pause] Museum, not the Walt Disney [pause] Family Museum. So it's the Walt Disney family that created it, but it wasn't designed as a family museum.

ERIC: Yeah, no, it's a really interesting topic in museum design, which is interactive exhibits. You have one that's about synchronized sound and you have others that are related to the various parts of the artistry and the robots at the theme parks. So were those later additions to the museum, then, those interactive elements?

KIRSTEN: Some were there from the outset, but some were later. And again, it's like the park. There are things that work, there are things that don't, and you kind of adjust. But the family now would really like to make it more interesting for younger kids.

ERIC: So as you're thinking about the future of the museum, what other museums have inspired you or how have you borrowed ideas from them?

KIRSTEN: It's interesting because it's a very unusual museum, this museum. Other single-subject museums and presidential libraries, as you mentioned, I think are interesting, but the traditional art museums just aren't totally aligned — except for the special exhibition ideas. But it really is all about Walt Disney, which is very iconic. There aren't many things like it, especially such a recent — other than the presidential libraries — such a recent cultural icon.

ERIC: So as you think about the museums you've been to in your life — not including the Walt Disney Family Museum, you're not allowed to say this one — what is either your favorite or the one that had the greatest impact on you personally?

KIRSTEN: Well, you know what's funny? I really like the exhibits outside museums like the Rodin Sculpture Garden at the Cantor Art Museum. The Gates of Hell are phenomenal. And then the work that Andy Goldsworthy does outside some of these museums like the Stone River outside of the Cantor Museum. I don't know if you've seen that, the curved wall he made out of the rubble from the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, which I think is phenomenal. And then the fissure outside of the new de Young that he did to kind of reflect the seismic dynamicism of this area. He has three works here in the Presidio, the Woodline and then the Spire up on Arguello, and then the Earth Wall that's in the officer's club. I find those, I don't know, maybe because they're outside and unexpected, those enhancements to museums, I really like. Maybe because I'm an outdoors person. I don't know. (laugh)

ERIC: Kirsten, I really appreciate all the time you've given us today. As we are speaking, you are about to head to D23, which is your big annual event, so I'm so grateful that you made time to come on the podcast. Thank you so much.

KIRSTEN: Oh, well, I'm grateful to you, Eric. Thank you so much for all of your time.

ERIC: Thanks again to Kirsten Komoroske for coming on the podcast. The Walt Disney Family Museum is in the Presidio of San Francisco, and it's open every Thursday through Sunday. They have some really cool exclusive stuff in the gift shop, including these pins. This one is of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt's first character, and this one is of Mickey Mouse as he was originally drawn. I'm giving these pins away to one lucky subscriber of the Call 'Em Like Museum email newsletter. To enter, just sign up for the newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, Lightning Pod. Our marketing specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Caroline Quinn and Chris Mullen. And thank you for listening to this episode. I'll see you at the museum.