emily: you were there when chenobyl happened? max: oh, yeah. i was very much in kiev. think it was about 90 miles. so it's pretty close. yeah. it was very anti-climactic, retrospectively. a couple weeks after it happened, it became this giant, terrifying thing. but, when it happened, it was a very sunny day. emily: and you escaped. max: my parents found out through a friend of a friend in the government that something really awful happened at the chernobyl nuclear power station. and because i had a family full of physicists, they were like, nuclear power station accidents is no joke. basically packed me and my younger brother onto a train and sent us both off to crimea the next morning. you would get tested as you were coming off the train, with a sort of homemade geiger counter. one of my feet was setting off a geiger counter. i remember this very vividly, because the guy was like, well, we may have to cut off his foot. look at this thing, it's beeping like crazy. we don't even know what that means, but it's beeping, it means he's radioactive. well, my mom said, maybe