What is the cost of lies?

It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth.

The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.

What can we do then?

Hi, this is Peter Segal, and I'm Craig Mason.

And I'm sitting with Craig to record the first episode of the Chernobyl Podcast, a podcast about the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, which was written and created by Craig Mason.

The intent here is to talk with Craig about where the show came from, why he created it, the experience of making it, and how closely the...

The documentary, would you call it a documentary?

I guess so, a dramatic retelling of history, how closely it tracks real history, where it differs and why, and ultimately why it was made at this time and place.

Yeah, and of those many wonderful reasons to do this, the one that was most important to me from the jump was a chance to set the record straight about what we do that is very accurate to history, what we do that is a little bit sideways to it and what we do to compress or change.

It knows, in no small part, because the show is essentially about the cost of lies, the danger of narrative, and I didn't want us to... I guess, miss a chance or transparency if we had one.

So, I've never actually heard this kind of thing before in relation to dramatic retellings of history, so I'm kind of curious to see how it all works if people are horrified by this or enlightened.

I think they'll definitely be horrified, speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries, what else happens I think is up to them.

This episode of the Chernobyl podcast concerns episode one of the Chernobyl miniseries titled 12345, which of course was the reading in the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened.

Let's start then with the beginning. You were guessing around 20 or so in 1986 when this all happened, maybe a little younger?

I was younger. I was 15. I remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred about three months earlier, which was the Challenger disaster.

I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. Beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into a very simple notion.

Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant and it blew up. That's it. I was a little older then, and what do I remember?

I remember that Chernobyl blew up. It was bad, but it ended up being okay in the Soviet's light about it.

That's exactly right. It's a bit of a shame that so much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied and the Soviets created this system that led to that all which is true and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell.

Because it's an important part. What we did not get on our side of the news was how I like to say only this could have only happened in the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union could have solved this problem.

What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve was nothing short of remarkable.

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