PastMaster: Reshaping History

Qin Dynasty China, 212 BCE. Climbing into the time travel machine otherwise known as the Hen & Hound, award-winning comedian Caroline McEvoy steps foot in Qin Dynasty China. She’s been set a mission to solve the case of the falsely accused road builder. She is armed with only a lucky cricket called Dinky, 'passable' Mandarin and some speculative tai chi moves. Ahead of her lie confrontations with local toughs, surly old women, tigers, lakeside dates and even perhaps an audience with the emperor himself. Will her martial art moves be recognised as legitimate? Will she tame the tigers of ancient China? All will be revealed. Featuring: Caroline McEvoy — award-winning comedian EPISODE LINKS Follow Caroline’s adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Caroline McEvoy: Instagram @carolinemcevoycomedy @comedybandits linktr.ee/carolinemcevoy Gun and Wand – the official companion podcast: https://pod.link/1723513729 GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greenland, 986 CE. Erik the Red has just established the first Norse settlement at Brattahlid, and comedian Ashley Haden has been living among the colonists for three months. The problem? A prominent farmer named Thorvald has accused him of stealing two sheep he never touched, and a public assembly called the Thing is happening at dawn. If found guilty, he owes compensation he can't pay, which means outlawry in the middle of a Greenlandic winter. Ashley's approach to Viking justice: invoke Odin, challenge his accuser to trial by combat, and open with a string of sheep-related insults so offensive that even the Game Master pauses. His knowledge of Norse mythology is suspiciously detailed, his combat instincts are disturbingly practical, and his long-term strategy involves hunting dedications to Freyja, political alliances with Erik the Red, and a patience for revenge that the AI clearly wasn't expecting. The real Norse settlement of Greenland was a branding exercise. Erik the Red named it "Greenland" to attract settlers to a frozen island where winter darkness lasted twenty hours a day, farming was barely viable, and disputes were settled by public assembly under open sky. Survival required community, reputation, and knowing whose favour to court. Ashley brings all three, plus a moral code that draws the line at torture but not at snare traps. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 986 CE | Qassiarsuk, Greenland Featuring: Ashley Haden — comedian (Pegasus New Act of the Year Winner 2016, We Are All C*nts) EPISODE LINKS Follow Ashley's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Ashley Haden: Instagram @ahpoliticalbreakdown X @ashleyhaden ashleyhaden.co.uk GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexandria, 48 BCE. Caesar's forces are closing in, fires are spreading through the harbour, and the greatest collection of knowledge the ancient world has ever assembled is about to go up in smoke. Laura Lexx and Ron from the Lexx Education podcast have been sent back to save it. They run an education podcast. They know this history. It helps them not one bit. The mission is the Alexandrian Rescue: get the scrolls out before Caesar's siege burns the library to the ground. Laura and Ron's strategy involves what they call "hi-piz" (don't ask), urine-based camouflage (really don't ask), and a hot dog that the Game Master flatly denies exists in 48 BCE. The Game Master this week is the most brutal yet, and their brand of scientific whimsy is meeting ancient warfare with the kind of results that make the AI question whether they read the mission brief at all. The Great Library of Alexandria was the intellectual jewel of the ancient world, a centre of scholarship that housed works from across the Mediterranean. Caesar's siege in 48 BCE caused fires that damaged or destroyed parts of the collection, one of history's most mourned losses. Laura and Ron can explain the historical significance in detail. They can tell you about Alexander's founding of the city and the Ptolemaic dynasty's patronage of scholarship. Sometimes knowing the history just means you can narrate your own failure more accurately. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 48 BCE | Alexandria, Egypt Featuring: Laura Lexx & Ron Lexx — Lexx Education podcast (Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week) EPISODE LINKS Follow Laura and Ron's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Laura Lexx: IG @lexxlaura | X @lauralexx | lauralexx.co.uk Ron Lexx: IG @lexxeducation | X @lexxeducation | lexxeducation.podbean.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tikal, 741 CE. One of the most powerful Maya city-states at the height of the Late Classic period. Towering pyramids, elaborate blood rituals, and a head priest who has the king's ear and absolutely no interest in hearing about an upcoming solar eclipse from some random time traveller. Comedian Bilal Zafar has three days to navigate this. His toolkit: creativity, self-declared ruthlessness, and roundhouse kicks. Bilal's mission is to warn the king about an imminent solar eclipse that the head priest has flatly denied will happen. Contradicting the priest means being accused of spreading fear and false prophecy, which in Maya culture is a fast track to becoming a human sacrifice. Bilal's response to learning the priest will have him killed: "Look, are you with me or against me? Because I can be very violent." His negotiation strategy involves clothing swaps with ceremonial priests and the kind of diplomacy that makes everyone present wonder if he's been at the suppositories. The roundhouse kicks remain untested. The Maya Late Classic period was an era of extraordinary scientific achievement. They tracked celestial events with accuracy that wouldn't be matched in Europe for centuries. They also filed their teeth into points, inlaid them with jade, and took their alcohol via enemas because it gets you drunk faster and bypasses vomiting. Bilal is caught between the astronomy and the blood sacrifice, navigating a civilisation that was simultaneously more scientifically advanced and more terrifyingly brutal than anything he was prepared for. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 741 CE | Flores, Guatemala Featuring: Bilal Zafar — comedian (Edinburgh Best Newcomer nominee, Catastrophe, Last Christmas) EPISODE LINKS Follow Bilal's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Bilal Zafar: IG @zafarcakes_ | X @Zafarcakes | bilalzafarcomedy.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samarkand, 750 CE. The Islamic Golden Age is in full swing, the Silk Road is the most lucrative trade network on Earth, and comedian Esther Manito has just been dropped into the middle of it with a mission to trek a caravan of silk from Samarkand to Baghdad. Easy enough — if you ignore the street-smart urchins, the uncompromising rulers, and the fact that the entire caravan has been poisoned. The Season 5 premiere sends Esther into the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate, where hard bargains are the norm and the AI Game Master is in absolutely no mood for tomfoolery. Her strategy? Negotiation skills, improvised poetry, and being — by her own admission — "a naturally competitive person." The reality? Fifty merchants, guards, and handlers falling violently ill, trust collapsing faster than a silk price in a flooded market, and a diplomatic situation that makes medieval trade disputes look like a gentle disagreement over lunch. Nobody trusts anyone, everybody suspects poisoning, and Esther is making up limericks. Samarkand was one of the great Silk Road trading hubs — a crossroads of cultures where Chinese silk met Persian craftsmanship and everyone had an angle. The Abbasid Caliphate at its height was the intellectual and commercial centre of the known world. Getting from Samarkand to Baghdad meant crossing deserts, negotiating with bandits, and surviving court politics. Getting from Samarkand to Baghdad as Esther Manito means all of that, plus camels, sherbet, and an alarming amount of poisoning. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI is the Game Master. The chaos is inevitable. The accents are unforgivable. Era: Ancient | 750 CE | Samarkand, Uzbekistan Featuring: Esther Manito — comedian EPISODE LINKS Follow Esther's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can the past be mastered? Is AI still cool? And where exactly has Keon gone? Season 4 was a big one — we pitted ChatGPT against Claude in a two-player electricity showdown, launched Death Wish Speed Runs (the game where you try to die as quickly and stylishly as possible in history), went live on stage twice, let the Thots TV podcast loose in a gothic horror, and sent a rapper to the Battle of Hastings dressed as Michael Jackson. So, naturally, Ryan and Tan need to sit down and take stock. In this bonus chat, the PastMaster hosts step out of the time machine to talk about what worked, what spectacularly didn't, and what's next. If you've ever wondered how the AI prompts actually get built, which episodes nearly fell apart during recording, or why Keon keeps mysteriously vanishing — this is the one. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI is the Game Master. The chaos is inevitable. The accents are unforgivable. Era: Special | Bonus Episode GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] EXPLORE THE PASTMASTER INTERACTIVE MAP The perfect companion for keeping track of our increasingly chaotic attempts to meddle with history. Link: https://map.pastmasterpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive -- or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? Season 5 of PastMaster is here. New comedians. New eras. New ways to catastrophically misread historical situations. Same ruthless AI Game Master. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | Trailer GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] EXPLORE THE PASTMASTER INTERACTIVE MAP The perfect companion for keeping track of our increasingly chaotic attempts to meddle with history. Link: https://map.pastmasterpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The North Pole has gone very, very wrong. Father Christmas has swapped his "Ho Ho Ho" for a whiskey bottle and a whip, the elves are screaming, and the factory is belching black smoke into the Arctic sky. Merry Christmas from PastMaster. Laura, Elsie, and Meg from the Thots TV podcast return for a festive special that was supposed to be a sacred pilgrimage to Bethlehem in Year Zero. Instead, they're staring down a corrupted Santa who's gone full capitalist monster. Their mission: save Christmas. Their strategy involves questions about whether frankincense is flammable, a proposal to have the baby kill Santa, and a suggestion about smashing an egg on the newborn Jesus "to start a new tradition." The Game Master is in absolutely no mood for any of it. Sacred meets profane, history meets mythology, and three podcasters try to hold it all together while the AI makes everything worse. The Nativity is happening somewhere in the background. A dystopian North Pole is happening in the foreground. Whether the Baby Jesus can melt Santa's frozen heart or whether the Thots TV approach to theological problem-solving makes things significantly worse is a question that only listening can answer. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | ~1 CE | Bethlehem, Palestine Featuring: Elsie Loades, Laura Connolly & Megan Mumby — Thots TV podcast EPISODE LINKS Follow the Thots TV adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Thots TV: X @ElsieLoades | IG @lauraconnolly98 GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Northumbria, 687 CE. The nuns have survived Ryan's naked Jesus act and Nick's witchcraft-and-Christina-Aguilera gambit. Now it's Tan's turn. His character name is Wee Willy Winky, the Beast Master. That's the energy we're working with. The Death Wish Speed Run finale: Ryan tried blasphemy, Nick tried seduction, and Tan's approach is to demand that Claude let him summon a bear called Rufus. Claude's response ("You don't have a bear") does not deter him. His relationship with the turnip cart, the nuns, and the basic laws of nature that PastMaster tries to uphold is adversarial from the first second. After three episodes of trying to provoke medieval nuns into violence, someone has to be crowned the pound-for-pound Death Wish Champion. St. Hilda's Abbey in Northumbria was a centre of learning that produced five bishops and hosted the Synod of Whitby, one of the most important ecclesiastical debates in English history. None of those bishops had to deal with anything like this. Tan's ultimate fate is historically accurate for how Anglo-Saxon religious communities dealt with people they really didn't like, and the way it happens is both deeply sad and deeply funny. Stay tuned to the end for a rich, untapped vein of historical exploration that suggests the Nuns of Death series might not be finished yet. Part 3 of 3. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England Part 3 of 3 EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Northumbria, 687 CE. The nunnery that refused to kill Ryan is about to meet its next challenger. Nick has a plan. A sexy, dirty, witchy plan. Nick's opening move: introduce himself as Emily. The nuns take one look at his jaw, his build, and his beard, and are not convinced. So Nick pivots. He touches his beard "incredulously" and announces it must be "the witch I hung out with yesterday." In 7th-century Anglo-Saxon England, admitting association with witchcraft is tantamount to signing your own death warrant. Nick's strategy from there involves Christina Aguilera lyrics, body art in unconventional mediums, and a commitment to provocation that makes Ryan's Jesus act look restrained. The Death Wish Speed Run scoring system has three categories: speed, artistic impression, and gritty realism. Nick is throwing everything at the nuns to see what sticks: blasphemy, seduction, gender confusion, witchcraft, and pop music. The 7th-century Anglo-Saxon church did not mess around with any of these things. Whether Nick's scattergun approach earns him a fast, stylish death or just another cold cellar and a man named Brother Cuthbert growling "more fire" is the question. Part 2 of 3. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England Part 2 of 3 EPISODE LINKS Follow Nick's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Northumbria, 687 CE. A 7th-century Anglo-Saxon nunnery. Prayer, scholarship, deep Christian patience. The last place in history you'd expect someone to get murdered quickly. Which is exactly why we chose it. Death Wish Speed Run is back, the game where you try to die as quickly and stylishly as possible in the past, and after the Australian penal colony the difficulty needed raising, so the setting is deliberately peaceful. Ryan goes first with a plan to strip naked and claim to be Jesus. His problem: Sister Edberg, built like an ox and carrying a wooden staff, who has absolutely no interest in a theological debate. Claude refuses to grant quick theatrical deaths, instead enforcing grim 7th-century religious justice. Ryan's backup plan involves hymns, fermented turnips, and running up walls like a motorbike. Scoring categories this time: speed, artistic impression, and gritty realism. Whitby Abbey, founded around 657 AD by Abbess Hild, was one of Northumbria's most important double monasteries and hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 CE. It was a centre of learning and devotion. These women wrestled livestock, hauled water, and worked the fields. They were not the meek nuns Ryan was expecting, and Claude's commitment to historical accuracy means they are far more interested in locking him up than putting him out of his misery. Part 1 of 3. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England Part 1 of 3 EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Woodstock, 1969. Four hundred thousand flower children, Jimi Hendrix finishing his legendary set, and one man backstage who literally cannot stop beatboxing. Tan has been sent back to Max Yasgur's farm as MC Wicked, a hip-hop pioneer arriving roughly a decade too early, with a mission to get on the main stage and blow the counterculture's collective mind. There's a problem: Tan knows almost nothing about hip-hop. His strategy is relentless beatboxing, robot dancing, and a vocal rendition of Daft Punk's "Human After All" performed for an audience who won't hear electronic music for another thirty years. The festival organiser's response to MC Wicked's act is a question that perfectly captures the confusion of everyone present: "Are you broken? Are you stuck in some kind of loop?" MC Wicked responds with more beatboxing. Whether this counts as inventing hip-hop, inventing electronic music, or inventing a new category of public disturbance is a question for the ages. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair ran from August 15-18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Three days that defined a generation's relationship with music, mud, and what Claude diplomatically calls "herbal creativity." Now imagine dropping a man doing call-and-response Daft Punk chants and mechanical robot dancing into the middle of it. The hippies don't know what they're witnessing. Neither does MC Wicked. Part 1 of 2. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1969 CE | Bethel, United States Featuring: Nick Horseman — comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards nom) Part 1 of 2 EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick Horseman: X @rociouspun | opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Colosseum, 80 CE. Fifty thousand Romans screaming for blood, Emperor Titus presiding from his box, and two time travellers with ten minutes to get rich, get notorious, and not die. Recorded live at the Bedford in Balham for the Cheerful Earful comedy podcast festival, this is PastMaster with a room full of people shouting suggestions. Nick Horseman and Tan go head to head in ancient Rome, with Tan betting on gladiators from the stands while Nick spawns backstage and immediately makes a decision about a tiger that the tiger does not appreciate. Meanwhile the audience gets their own game: ancient Persia, 550 BCE, playing as "Persia McPersia" armed with nothing but hair gel and a diplomatic strategy best summarised by the Game Master: "That's not how physics works. That's not how combat works. That's not how spears work." Claude, told to "be mean and be concise" for the live format, delivers ten-minute speed runs that give nobody time to think. From the gladiatorial arena of Rome to the Achaemenid Empire, this episode covers more ground than most PastMaster adventures and resolves approximately none of it well. Whether hair gel, a Swiss Army knife, or a man literally named after the country he's visiting can survive ten minutes of compressed ancient history is a question best answered at volume. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 80 CE / 550 BCE | Rome, Italy / Persepolis, Iran Featuring: Nick Horseman — comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards nom) EPISODE LINKS Follow the adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick Horseman: X @rociouspun | opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neo-Singapore, 2999. A vertical city-state stretching from the ocean floor to the stratosphere. Humanity's entire pre-digital cultural heritage is stored in a quantum archive, and a virus is about to wipe it all. Comedy producer Al Clayton has 72 hours to save the future. His first priority? 3D printing Charlie Simpson from Busted. Al's mission is clear: recover three cultural artifacts before they're permanently lost. Al's approach is to immediately petition for the resurrection of a 21st-century pop star at a cost of roughly one small moon. The Game Master, playing Sherlock Holmes, is withering: "You've been in the future for precisely 30 seconds and already believe you can casually resurrect a 21st century pop star." Al is undeterred. His creative enthusiasm and 30th-century technology are about to collide, and the consequences will echo through what remains of time. This is PastMaster's leap into science fiction, where the stakes are literally all of human culture and the person tasked with saving it is armed with nothing but enthusiasm, pop culture references from a thousand years ago, and an unshakeable desire to share a bowl of Frosties with a member of Busted. David Attenborough, for the record, died in 2047 at age 121. His consciousness was backed up. Al's was not. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | 2999 CE | Singapore Featuring: Al Clayton — comedy producer and director (Turtle Canyon Comedy) EPISODE LINKS Follow Al's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Al Clayton: IG @turtlecanyoncom | X @turtlecanyoncom | turtlecanyoncomedy.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Exhibition, Hyde Park, 1851. Six million visitors. The Crystal Palace. The pinnacle of Victorian innovation. And Chris Reading has just rolled up in a quack-mobile to sell miracle tea bags to the most sceptical audience in the British Empire. Chris's mission: acquire serious power in Victorian London under the tutelage of Game Master Gregor MacGregor, history's most audacious conman. His product line includes "Longevity Tea" (guaranteed to extend your life by at least 5%), shiny thermos flasks, plush toy lions, and a slogan that means something very different to the ladies than it does to the colonel. Chris knows exactly what he's doing. The Victorians are less convinced, and the Game Master's patience for his schemes has a shorter shelf life than the tea. The Great Exhibition of 1851 drew the world to Joseph Paxton's iron-and-glass Crystal Palace, showcasing genuine marvels from steam engines to the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Gregor MacGregor was a real Scottish conman who invented an entire country called Poyais and sold land rights to it. Chris is channelling that exact energy at the grandest showcase of innovation the world has ever seen, armed with a winking-face logo, a dubious medical degree, and the kind of confidence that historically ends with a walking stick to the knuckles. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1851 CE | London, United Kingdom Featuring: Chris Reading — comedian (ALIEN: CONTAINMENT, Time Travel Is Dangerous) Contains: Bad language, historical anachronisms and con artistry. But no drugs, disappointingly. EPISODE LINKS Follow Chris's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Chris Reading: IG @chrisjreading | X @ChrisReading | chrisreading.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friend of the show Ian Walker joins Tan to pit four AI large language models against each other and see which makes the best Game Master. The setting? It couldn’t be grander or have higher stakes: on board the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage to the US in 1912. Can Ian avert disaster and prevent the ocean liner hitting ice and dragging 1,500 to their deaths? Will his performance as 90s TV phenomenon Mr Blobby win over the crew and passengers or will he get thrown in the brig? And which of the four competing AI models will create the best gaming experience? Will it be good old ChatGPT, cheeky Claude, Google’s Gemini or Chinese upstart DeepSeek? All will be revealed. Contains: Mild language, historical anachronisms, a lack of realism and copious accents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Battle of Hastings, 1066. The day that ended Anglo-Saxon England, crowned William the Conqueror, and changed the English language forever. Now Keon's been sent back to stop it — armed with a red leather jacket, a single sparkling glove, and an unstoppable urge to moonwalk. As the mysterious "Agent M," Keon has one shot to save King Harold from the Norman invasion and — more importantly — get himself embroidered onto the Bayeux Tapestry. His strategy? Hand Harold a red leather jacket because it's "a very sturdy leather zipper" that'll definitely stop arrows. Convince an 11th-century army that pop choreography is a legitimate battle tactic. And somehow explain what a zipper is to a man who's never seen a button. DeepSeek AI plays Game Master this week, and it is in absolutely no mood to let any of this slide. What follows is a glorious collision of medieval warfare and modern pop culture — terrible French accents, creative reinterpretations of Norman battle strategy, and a one-man campaign to introduce hip-hop to Anglo-Saxon England while there's still an Anglo-Saxon England to introduce it to. History says Harold took an arrow to the eye at Senlac Hill and the Normans swept in to give us the Domesday Book, feudalism, and about 10,000 French words. But what if one moonwalking time traveller could change all of that? And what if the answer is: absolutely not, but it's hilarious to watch him try? If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI is the Game Master. The chaos is inevitable. The accents are unforgivable. Era: Warfare | 1066 CE | Battle, England Contains: Mild language, historical anachronisms, and some surprisingly smooth medieval moves. EPISODE LINKS Follow Keon's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com The Bayeux Tapestry (the real one) 👉 https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/ GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medieval England, date unknown. You wake up on cold stone. Your hands aren't your hands. Someone is shouting for Thomas, and there's a strong implication that Thomas needs to sharpen an axe. Welcome to PastMaster's Quantum Leap episode, where Ryan doesn't get to choose who he is, where he is, or what century he's in. In a twist cooked up by Tan, Ryan is dropped blind into history with zero context. No character brief, no mission, no era. Just a dark chamber, the stench of tallow candles and unwashed bodies, and a gruff voice demanding Thomas come quickly. Ryan's first guess at his own identity is Thomas Cromwell; his second is Thomas the Tank Engine. His approach to medieval executioner training involves requesting bog roll from a man who has never seen a button, and a relationship with tallow grease that Edmund finds deeply concerning. The Tower of London served as a fortress, prison, and execution ground for centuries, soaked in blood, political intrigue, and the kind of medieval justice that makes modern life look extremely comfortable. The Quantum Leap format strips away every safety net PastMaster usually offers. Ryan has no idea what century he's in, what his mission is, or why everyone keeps handing him axes. What he does with the axes once he figures out who Thomas is remains between him, Edmund, and God. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1400s CE | London, England EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What started as a missing persons case in 1920s Arkham has gone catastrophically sideways. Ezra Whitmarsh is alive but changed. Forbidden books are burning. Alien technology is doing things to mortal flesh that mortal flesh was not designed for. And T.G. Fells has one obsession that overrides cosmic horror, sanity loss, and the basic instinct for self-preservation: he needs to know who killed Christopher Marlowe. Dan Wheeler and Joseph Chance return as Gert and T.G. Fells to conclude their investigation, and "conclude" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The Arkham mystery has spiralled into something involving Yithian technology, temporal displacement, and a nervous businessman who turns out to be far more dangerous than he appeared. Where the investigation leads and what Gert does when he arrives there involves iambic pentameter, a tavern that goes very quiet, and a conspiracy that makes the Syndicate look like amateurs. Marlowe's death in 1593 is one of history's genuine unsolved mysteries. Theories range from a pub brawl to government assassination to a faked death by the man some believe was the real Shakespeare. The Yithians, from Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time," are beings who swap minds across millennia. Put those together with two podcast veterans improvising their way through cosmic horror and Elizabethan murder, and the question isn't whether they solve the mystery. It's whether there's enough reality left to solve it in. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | 1926 CE / 1593 CE | Arkham, United States / Deptford, England Featuring: The Apocalypse Players (Dan Wheeler, Joseph Chance, Al Clayton, Chris Reading) Part 2 of 2 EPISODE LINKS Follow Dan and Joseph's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Dan Wheeler: X @danwheeleruk | danwheeler.org Joseph Chance: X @JosephChance2 Al Clayton: IG @turtlecanyoncom | X @turtlecanyoncom | turtlecanyoncomedy.com Chris Reading: IG @chrisjreading | X @ChrisReading | chrisreading.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arkham, Massachusetts, 1926. Businessman Ezra Whitmarsh has vanished from a locked study. The air smells of ozone. His business partner is sweating through his suit. And someone called "the Syndicate" is already following you from the train station. This is Lovecraft country, and PastMaster has gone full cosmic horror. The Apocalypse Players bring their Call of Cthulhu expertise to PastMaster. Joseph Chance plays T.G. Fells, an electrical tinkerer with a lighter and a dangerous curiosity. Dan Wheeler plays Gert of the Well, a professional liar who hasn't lied yet but is absolutely planning to. Claude, playing Game Master in the style of Lovecraft himself, delivers prose so atmospheric the players forget they're improvising. When something in a Georgian mansion blinks at them with wet, alien intelligence, Gert's instinct is to hit it with a blackjack, and the situation does not improve. Set during Prohibition in Lovecraft's fictional Arkham, a New England town where Jazz Age prosperity sits on top of something ancient and deeply wrong. The 1920s period detail is immaculate: working-class Massachusetts accents, the social dynamics of small-town paranoia, and a reality that becomes increasingly unreliable the deeper the investigation goes. Part 1 of 2, and it ends on the kind of cliffhanger that makes Part 2 essential listening. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | 1926 CE | Arkham, United States Featuring: The Apocalypse Players (Dan Wheeler, Joseph Chance, Al Clayton, Chris Reading) Part 1 of 2 EPISODE LINKS Follow Dan and Joseph's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Dan Wheeler: X @danwheeleruk | danwheeler.org Joseph Chance: X @JosephChance2 Al Clayton: IG @turtlecanyoncom | X @turtlecanyoncom | turtlecanyoncomedy.com Chris Reading: IG @chrisjreading | X @ChrisReading | chrisreading.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dakota Territory, 1875. The Black Hills gold rush is ripping the West apart, the Sioux are losing their sacred lands, and a full-scale war is brewing between miners and the native population. Nick Horseman has arrived in Deadwood as Thorne Jackson-Reynolds, a refined English gentleman with a piano, Spice Girls lyrics, and absolutely no survival instinct. His peace plan involves artisanal cheese, a dance studio, and a Guns N' Roses impression. The armed outlaws of Deadwood are not immediately convinced. But when hat diplomacy enters the picture and Nick tells his own deputy to "stop being a pussy, it's only a hat" in front of a Sioux delegation, the negotiation takes on a momentum that has nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with one man's refusal to read a room. The Dakota gold rush triggered the Great Sioux War of 1876 and the death of Custer at Little Bighorn. It was one of the most violent land disputes in American history, driven by broken treaties and gold fever. Nick's proposed alternative to cavalry and conflict is monthly peace concerts and career changes into cheese-making. Whether the Wild West is ready for a posh Englishman with a business plan built on dairy products and Spice Girls covers is a question history never thought it would have to answer. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1875 CE | Deadwood, United States Featuring: Nick Horseman — comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards nom) EPISODE LINKS Follow Nick's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick Horseman: X @rociouspun | opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Port Jackson, 1788. Britain's brand-new penal colony at the edge of the known world. The convicts are starving, the guards are brutal, and Australia's wildlife is doing what Australia's wildlife does best — trying to kill everyone. Ryan, Tan, and returning guest Nick Horseman have not come here to survive. They've come to compete in PastMaster's second Death Wish Speed Run: who can achieve the fastest, most stylish demise in colonial Australia? Scored like figure skating: technical marks for speed, artistic marks for style. DeepSeek is back as Game Master, and it is in no mood for dignity. Nick's character name is "Speedy." Tan's is "Doggy Doggy Ballbags," to which DeepSeek responds: "Sure, let's roll with that, because clearly you've got the maturity of a medieval jester with a head injury." Their strategies for achieving a stylish colonial death range from confronting armed guards with improvised weaponry to smuggling Australia's most venomous wildlife in a sack. DeepSeek scores every attempt with the withering precision of a disappointed figure-skating judge. The First Fleet's arrival at Port Jackson established one of history's harshest penal colonies — limited rations, rampant disease, and punishments that made the convicts' original crimes look tame. Now three idiots are actively trying to speed-run the dying part, judged by a Chinese AI with a gift for insults. It's Aussie Rules, PastMaster style. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | 1788 CE | Port Jackson (Sydney Cove), Australia Featuring: Nick Horseman — rapper and comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) EPISODE LINKS Follow the Death Wish Speed Run on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick on X 👉 @rociouspun Nick's website 👉 opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timbuktu, 1330 CE. The Mali Empire at the height of its power. Gold dust literally fills the air. And sitting at the centre of it all is Mansa Musa — the richest human being who has ever lived, with a net worth of roughly $700 billion in today's money. Elon Musk is small fry by comparison. Ryan's been dropped into medieval West Africa with one mission: convince this golden emperor to fund humanity's first space programme. The logic is simple: if modern billionaires spend their fortunes going to space, surely history's richest man should have got there first. The Mali Empire under Mansa Musa controlled most of West Africa's gold production. His famous hajj to Mecca included 60,000 people and so much gold that he crashed Cairo's economy for ten years. Keon recognises the name from an Anderson .Paak song but knows nothing else. Ryan's elevator pitch to the wealthiest man in history involves optical illusions, mechanical curiosities, and a prototype that gets progressively darker as the engineering challenges mount. Medieval Africa's golden age meets one man's wildly ambitious space proposal. The empire is real. The wealth is staggering. The space programme is not going to happen — but the pitch is something else entirely. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1330 CE | Timbuktu, Mali EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gaul, 55 BCE. Julius Caesar's legions are marching north. A small Gallic village of thatched roundhouses stands in their way. And Tan has just arrived as "Risky Dave" — a cockney wide boy inspired by Asterix and Obelix, but with one critical substitution. Instead of magic potion, he's brought cocaine. In the Asterix comics, the druid Getafix brews a strength potion. Risky Dave has Colombian marching powder. Risky Dave can't speak the language, doesn't know the geography, and his entire communication strategy is pointing at his mouth and rubbing his stomach. His plan: find the village druid, replace the magic potion with class-A substances, and rally the Gauls to "bash the Roman pigs up." The substitution raises questions that the Asterix comics never had to address, chiefly what happens when an entire war party has access to battle stimulants but zero tactical coordination. And what happens when Caesar himself gets curious about the new magic. Caesar's conquest of Gaul was one of antiquity's most devastating military campaigns — eight years of warfare that killed an estimated one million Gauls and enslaved another million. The beloved Asterix comics reimagined this as a plucky village holding out with magic potion. PastMaster reimagines the reimagining with class-A substances and even less historical accuracy. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 55 BCE | Gaul, France Contains: Drug references, Roman military violence, and a profound misunderstanding of Asterix lore. EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victorian London, 1873. A string of ritual murders is forming a pentagram across the city map. Comedian and writer Matthew Crosby has stepped out of his bathtub time machine and into a proper murder mystery. His cover identity? French detective "Inspector Pompidou." His qualifications? Absolutely none. His modern object of choice? A fidget spinner, because "it wouldn't freak people out. It would draw people in." Matthew brings the energy of a man who'd happily time-travel to the Black Death and give everyone "the old razzle dazzle." His approach to Victorian detective work involves paying a newspaper boy to suppress the news, sizing up crime scenes for their property value, and the kind of confidence that only a fake French inspector armed with a spinning toy can muster. When Game Master Claude accidentally throws a certain fictional detective into the mix, Matthew doesn't question it — he embraces the space-time paradox and asks to share an opium pipe. Victorian London was a city of fog, gaslight, and genuine public fascination with the occult — seances were mainstream entertainment and secret societies thrived in the shadows. It was also, crucially, a city without CCTV, background checks, or any reliable way to verify whether "Inspector Pompidou" was a real person. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1873 CE | London, United Kingdom Featuring: Matthew Crosby — comedian and writer (Hypothetical, Dave; Badults, BBC Three; 1/3 of Pappy's) EPISODE LINKS Follow Matthew's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Matthew on Instagram 👉 @matthewcrosby1 Matthew on X 👉 @matthewcrosby Matthew's website 👉 comedy.co.uk/people/matthew_crosby/ GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Troy, 1200 BCE. The siege has dragged on for a decade. The Greeks are bored. The Trojans are smug. And "Tanchilles" and "Keonkeles" have just arrived with modern minds, Bronze Age materials, and a burning question: what if the Trojan Horse wasn't a horse at all? Keon has never heard of the Trojan War and thinks Achilles is a job title ("Achilles, like he kills"), while Tan brings a C in design technology GCSE. Armed with these credentials, they compete to build history's greatest deception. Their proposals range from the Trojan Diplodocus to the Trojan kebab van, and Game Master Claude in full science-obsessed mode ruthlessly fact-checks every pitch against what Bronze Age craftsmen could actually build. No dinosaurs, no advanced metallurgy, just timber, rope, and increasingly desperate ingenuity. The Trojan War, if it happened, likely took place around 1200 BCE at the site now identified as Hisarlik in modern Turkey. Homer's account gave us the original Trojan Horse. PastMaster's version involves two blokes whose combined engineering credentials amount to a C grade and some scones, trying to improve on one of history's most famous military deceptions. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 1200 BCE | Hisarlik, Turkey Contains: Competitive siege warfare design, rejected dinosaur proposals, and a Game Master with very strong opinions about anachronisms. EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan and Keon's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hampton Court Palace, 1522. Henry VIII is still married to Catherine of Aragon, but Anne Boleyn has just returned from France and is about to catch the king's wandering eye. Kim and Alice from the Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast have been sent back to save his wives — armed with a battery-powered smoke machine, a Halloween makeup palette, and their Catholic background. They didn't do any research. But they did write roast jokes about Henry VIII, and in PastMaster that's arguably more useful. The plan is beautifully unhinged: infiltrate the palace, gain Queen Catherine's trust, then scare the living daylights out of Henry until he changes his ways. Think less diplomatic negotiation, more haunted house with fog effects. Kim wanted to just kill him outright, but Alice vetoed that. Their strategy for getting past palace staff relies on sheer audacity, and Game Master Claude's "charmingly optimistic" response to their rescue mission suggests it won't be making things easy. The challenge: deploying theatrical haunting techniques on a king who executed people for less, while navigating Tudor court politics as "an American and a Singaporean" with zero knowledge of the period. Henry VIII's break with Rome reshaped England forever — dissolving monasteries, creating the Church of England, and costing two wives their heads. Now imagine two podcasters trying to prevent all of that with props from a party shop, knowledge of "Catholic shit," and absolutely no plan B. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Renaissance | 1522 CE | London, United Kingdom Featuring: Kim & Alice — Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast (Shortlisted, International Women's Podcast Award) EPISODE LINKS Follow Kim and Alice's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Fetch the Smelling Salts on Instagram 👉 @fetchsmellingsalts GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ur, Mesopotamia, 2100 BCE. The cradle of civilisation. The birthplace of writing, agriculture, and organised religion. Nick Horseman has been sent here as "Barry Smith" with one goal: cause as much mayhem as possible and die in the most spectacular fashion he can manage. Welcome to the Death Wish Speed Run. Nick chose Mesopotamia specifically because he knows nothing about it — "I've heard of ancient Mesopotamia and that's pretty much it" — and doesn't want to waste an era he might actually enjoy later. His strategy for achieving the fastest, most spectacular game over in PastMaster history targets the most sacred site in the city: the Ziggurat of Ur. What follows involves desecration, creative theology, and a claim about mystical excrement that somehow keeps the priests talking when they should be executing him. The question isn't whether Barry Smith dies. It's how many prompts he can stretch it to before he does. Ancient Ur was one of the world's first great cities, a centre of trade, religion, and early law. The Sumerians invented cuneiform, built ziggurats to their gods, and established some of humanity's earliest legal codes. None of which prepared them for Barry Smith. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 2100 BCE | Ur, Mesopotamia Featuring: Nick Horseman — rapper and comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) EPISODE LINKS Follow Nick's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick on X 👉 @rociouspun Nick's website 👉 opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before the Big Bang. Before atoms. Before the laws of physics even bothered to show up. The Thots TV team are back, this time with DeepSeek as Game Master, and they've been sent to the most impossible location in PastMaster history: The Void. Their character? A "heat-resistant" Danny Dyer. Their mission? Survive in a place where literally nothing exists. Not even a decent boozer. DeepSeek calls them "either a genius or a lunatic. Maybe both." Danny Dyer's plan for pre-Big Bang survival involves confronting the void with East End directness, which goes about as well as you'd expect when the void can invent new laws of physics on the spot just to teach you a lesson. From there it's a whistle-stop tour through the Garden of Eden and Ming Dynasty China, each scenario more unhinged than the last, with DeepSeek delivering consequences that make Claude look lenient. This episode spans approximately 13.8 billion years of history in one sitting. It also marks DeepSeek's debut as Game Master — a Chinese AI that delivers consequences with surprising sass. Whether Danny Dyer's void strategy or the Garden of Eden pub search is the more ambitious plan is a question only the listener can answer. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | 13.8bn BCE - 1500 CE | The Void / Garden of Eden / Beijing, China Featuring: Thots TV podcast (Elsie Loades, Laura Connolly, Megan Mumby) EPISODE LINKS Follow Thots TV's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Elsie on X 👉 @ElsieLoades Laura on Instagram 👉 @lauraconnolly98 GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York City, 1890. The War of the Currents is raging — and PastMaster is about to make it significantly worse. In this two-player showdown, Keon channels Nikola Tesla with ChatGPT as his Game Master, while Tan embodies Thomas Edison powered by Claude. Two players. Two AIs. One question: who controls the future of electricity? Google Gemini is on standby as impartial judge, because apparently three AIs is the minimum required to settle an argument about lightbulbs. Neither player fully understands what they're fighting over. Everything Keon knows about electricity comes from the Tesla tower in a 90s video game. Tan's pitch for direct current is "basically like MySpace but for electricity." Their strategies involve conspiracy theories, propaganda vehicles, and the kind of misinformation campaigns that would make Edison himself proud. Meanwhile the two AIs running the game cannot stop trash-talking each other — ChatGPT calls Claude's oversight "amateur supervision," Claude fires back that "ChatGPT is a chattering calculator." The real War of the Currents was a brutal corporate battle complete with public electrocutions of animals, smear campaigns, and Edison literally inventing the electric chair to prove AC was dangerous. PastMaster's version has two players who can't explain what a current is, two AIs with a personal vendetta, and a Google Gemini judge wondering what it's got itself into. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | 1890 CE | New York, USA Contains: Competitive electricity discourse, dubious scientific claims, and two AIs that do not agree on the rules. EPISODE LINKS Follow Keon and Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva, 1816. The Year Without a Summer. Lord Byron is brooding by the fire, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin are whispering in a corner, and the air is thick with opium smoke. In three days, this house party will inspire Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and some of the darkest poetry in the English language. The Thots TV podcast have arrived as the mysterious "Lady Thottringham" — a three-headed entity of Meg, Elsie, and Laura — with one mission: reshape the birth of horror fiction. Lady Thottringham's strategy for influencing literary history involves zero research and maximum confidence. As Laura puts it, "if we are just opinionators as heck, it will be fine." Their literary credentials? "I've never even read Chaucer. What the hell are they saying?" Their approach to Lord Byron, a man who famously hates direct women? Confrontational enough to be described as "a bit exorcist." Game Master Claude drops them into a room full of Romantic-era geniuses and waits to see how long it takes before the laudanum, the egos, or the complete lack of period-appropriate manners ends the evening. The real Villa Diodati gathering shaped gothic fiction forever. Three days of storms, opium, and ghost stories produced Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Now three comedians are gate-crashing it armed with knowledge of what everyone's about to write and absolutely no idea how to behave around the people writing it. Whether Lady Thottringham reshapes literary history or simply derails the evening depends on how much laudanum is consumed and by whom. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1816 CE | Geneva, Switzerland Featuring: Thots TV podcast (Elsie Loades, Laura Connolly, Megan Mumby) EPISODE LINKS Follow Thots TV's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Elsie on X 👉 @ElsieLoades Laura on Instagram 👉 @lauraconnolly98 GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Middle Earth. No date. No rules. And Keon has never seen Lord of the Rings. PastMaster breaks out of the historical timeline for a trip to Tolkien's fantasy realm, and Game Master Claude flatly refuses to play along. "PastMaster is specifically designed for exploring real human history," it insists, before offering ancient Chinese imperial courts as an alternative. The negotiation to get Claude into Middle Earth is an episode in itself. Keon's knowledge of the source material extends to calling Bilbo "Bo Bo Baggins" and thinking character names are job titles: "Achilles, like he kills." Tan arrives as "Arthur" with a pet warg called George and a plan to stop Boromir's betrayal of Frodo. Their combined Tolkien expertise is roughly zero — which, when combined with Claude's reluctance to bend a single detail of the lore, creates the kind of tension that no amount of elvish diplomacy can resolve. Back in Season 1, ChatGPT let us run riot through Middle Earth with barely a raised eyebrow. This time, the question isn't whether we can reshape the story. It's whether Claude will even let us through the door. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | Middle Earth Contains: Extreme Tolkien disrespect, questionable hobbit knowledge, and an AI with boundaries. EPISODE LINKS Follow the adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cape Canaveral, 1969. One small step for man. One giant mess for Chris Dillon. Back for his second PastMaster mission, Chris has a plan: impersonate Buzz Aldrin and steal his spot on Apollo 11. His cover identity? "Buzz Cauldron" — because it sounds like a wizard's name. His disguise strategy? Dress up "like a can of spam, whatever space food was." Chris's approach to infiltrating the most heavily secured facility in 1960s America is to walk up to reception and say he's lost his badge. Game Master Claude describes him as "a perfect mirror of Buzz Aldrin himself, like a prophet wearing an astronaut's skin," which is flattering right up until the real Buzz Aldrin walks through the glass doors. Two versions of the same man in the same building. Chris's solution involves accusing the actual astronaut of being the imposter. Whether NASA's security protocols can handle this level of audacity remains to be seen. The real Apollo 11 was a triumph of engineering and Cold War nerve — 400,000 people working to put three men on the Moon. Neil Armstrong once ejected from a burning simulator and went back to his paperwork. Now add one chaotic bloke with a fake name, zero astronaut training, and a disguise plan based entirely on canned meat. The Space Race was never prepared for this kind of one-upmanship. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1969 CE | Cape Canaveral, USA Featuring: Chris Dillon EPISODE LINKS Follow Chris's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harvard University, 2003. A lanky guy in a grey hoodie is skulking the corridors of Kirkland House with plans to build something called TheFacebook. Chris Dillon has been sent back to beat him to it. His cover identity is "Thomas Jefferson," at a 21st-century Ivy League university. His understanding of coding? "It's like MySpace but better." Chris's approach to tech entrepreneurship involves physical confrontation, identity theft, and the kind of confidence that gets you escorted off campus by Harvard police. Game Master Claude sets up a "Goldilocks prompt" difficulty — not too hard, not too easy — and Chris immediately tests the upper limit. His plan to outmanoeuvre Mark Zuckerberg relies on stolen source code, a computer virus, and LimeWire, which is roughly the 2003 equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Harvard admin wants student credentials by tomorrow. Chris has never written a line of code in his life. The real founding of Facebook happened in dorm-room sessions: a cease-and-desist from the Winklevoss twins, campus exclusivity, and a site that went global in under two years. Chris's version of disrupting Silicon Valley starts with a fake name from the 1700s and an understanding of technology that stops at MySpace. Whether Zuckerberg even notices the competition is one question. Whether Chris survives Harvard security long enough to find out is another. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 2003 CE | Cambridge, USA Featuring: Chris Dillon EPISODE LINKS Follow Chris's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regency London, 1815. The ton is in full swing, reputations are made and destroyed over a single dance, and comedian Micky Overman has just materialised in the middle of it as the mysterious "Lady Hemming-Trout." Allegedly Dutch nobility, armed with concealed jewels and a matchmaking mission she has no business attempting. The target: unite a shy heiress with a secretly penniless war hero before a fortune-hunting villain gets there first. Micky is, by her own admission, "so opinionated in a way that I don't realise is a problem." In Regency England, where one word from Lady Jersey can slam every door in London shut, that's less a personality trait and more a countdown. Her plan for navigating Georgian high society involves pistols, gambling, and the kind of directness that gets women banished from polite company. Game Master Claude builds a world of courtship rituals and razor-thin social margins, then watches the Dutch contingent barrel straight through them. The Regency era ran on elaborate social hierarchies, unspoken rules, and pistol duels that were technically illegal but very much still happening. The ton could end a career over a poorly timed curtsy. Now drop a 21st-century Dutch comedian into this world with a fake title, smuggled gems, and zero knowledge of what "the season" actually means. Whether Lady Hemming-Trout's reputation survives the evening is one question. Whether she cares is another. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1815 CE | London, England Featuring: Micky Overman — comedian EPISODE LINKS Follow Micky's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

London, 1843. Charles Dickens is writing A Christmas Carol at 48 Doughty Street, and the PastMaster crew have been summoned by three Christmas spirits to atone for their previous sins against the timeline. Ryan, Tan, and Keon stand accused of "temporal meddling in previous adventures" — guilty as charged — and tonight they have a chance at redemption. Three tasks, three eras, three spirits. Nick Horseman returns as guest narrator, voicing the Christmas Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future with the authority of a spirit who has genuinely had enough. Each host takes on a challenge across a different time period. Ryan's wearing a polyester Christmas jumper that's "probably about to catch on fire," Tan's dressed as an elf, and Keon's sporting what might be a dinosaur-themed outfit. The AI Game Master opens with a speech about temporal meddling that suggests it's been keeping notes all season. Dickens published A Christmas Carol in December 1843, and it essentially invented the modern Christmas: the family gatherings, the generosity, the ghosts. The story was written in six weeks to pay off debts, and it changed the way an entire culture celebrated the holiday. Whether three comedians in festive knitwear can reshape Christmas history while arguing about whether Coca-Cola adverts count as historical events is the festive question. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Industrial | 1843 CE | London, England EPISODE LINKS Follow the team's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The countdown to Christmas continues with another PastMaster replay special. We've turned back the clock to this episode from Season 2 where we uncovered the mysteries of Stonehenge... Keon’s always wanted to know who built Stonehenge and why. So Ryan used PastMaster to find out (of course). In what is possibly the trippiest episode of PastMaster yet, our AI GameMaster concocts a Neolithic adventure for the ages. It all goes pear-shaped when Ryan encounters a mysterious man called Elron (alarm bells already ringing). It turns out the secrets of Stonehenge are much bigger than anybody ever realised. Alliances will be forged, secrets will be revealed, and crystal toilets will be pooped in... Is the AI’s Stonehenge story convincing? Tune in to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In true PastMaster style we're turning back the clock to revisit the past. In this case, our own podcasting past. In this episode from Season 2, Tan travels back to the slums of Victorian Whitechapel in a bid to catch Jack the Ripper and solve one of the most notorious unsolved crimes ever. If AI has access to all the knowledge in history, could it spot patterns in the data that mere humans have missed? Will GameMaster have a convincing theory as to who Jack the Ripper was? And can Tan actually convince Chief Inspector Fred Abberline that he is from the future, or will he make himself a suspect? PastMaster will return on the 16th of December for our first Christmas Special. Get ready for us to meddle with beloved Christmas history. And looking further ahead, where hard at work on Season 4, dropping in the new year. PastMaster is the time-travel role-playing adventure show where Ryan, Keon and Tan explore a different era of history in each episode with the help of our maverick AI GameMaster. Instagram 👉 ⁠@PastMasterPod⁠ (check out our AI-generated art illustrating what our adventures might have looked like) Twitter 👉 ⁠@PastMasterAI⁠ TikTok 👉 ⁠@PastMasterAI⁠ Gmail 👉 ⁠[email protected]⁠ Sign up to our newsletter 👉 ⁠www.pastmaster.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Palos de la Frontera, Spain, 1492. Christopher Columbus is about to set sail for the New World, and Ryan has joined the crew with one objective: convince everyone on board that he is, in fact, a deity. His strategy? Be extremely stylish and tell everybody to wash their hands. Recorded live at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. If you were dropped into the past with advanced knowledge of future events, could you use it to convince people you were divine? Ryan reckons the answer is yes, provided you lean into the showmanship. The live audience also gets a bonus round where they collectively attempt to "bake a gun" in revolutionary France, which is exactly the kind of audience participation that justifies a festival ticket. Columbus's first voyage changed the course of world history — three ships departing the Spanish coast for what turned out to be the Americas, not the East Indies. The crew were superstitious, mutiny was a constant risk, and anyone displaying unusual knowledge would either be worshipped or thrown overboard. Ryan's betting on worship. The crew have not yet formed an opinion. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | 1492 CE | Palos de la Frontera, Spain EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philadelphia, 1775. Colonial America is on the brink of declaring independence, the Founding Fathers are assembling, and Ryan, as the ever-reliable "Ryanardo," has arrived with two goals: amend the Constitution before it gets written, and get his face carved onto Mount Rushmore. The first is noble. The second is unhinged. Both are very PastMaster. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson are all present. Ryan's plan involves whispering about equal rights to men who own slaves, pitching constitutional amendments two centuries early, and generally trying to insert himself into the founding of a nation. Also, Dolly Parton is here, for reasons that are never fully explained. The Game Master hasn't even questioned it. The Continental Congress of 1775 was the beginning of the American experiment — a gathering of colonial representatives who would go on to write the Declaration of Independence and, eventually, the Constitution. Philadelphia was the nerve centre, and the men in the room would become the most mythologised figures in American history. Ryan's trying to join that club. Whether the Founding Fathers are ready for a British time traveller with progressive politics and an unexplained country singer is the question. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Renaissance | 1775 CE | Philadelphia, United States EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Athens, 355 BCE. The cradle of Western philosophy, the birthplace of democracy, and the current location of a man who is simultaneously one of history's greatest thinkers and an absolute unit on the wrestling mat. Tan's been sent back to find Plato and answer a question that's haunted humanity for millennia: was Atlantis real? The only person who might know is a philosopher who got his name from his wrestling coach because of his broad shoulders. The mission: find Plato, earn his trust, and get him to reveal the truth about the lost civilisation he described in Timaeus and Critias. The problem is that Plato is a formidable adversary on every front — a man who literally invented the method for winning arguments and who can also wrestle you to the ground while asking you to define what "ground" really means. Keon provides helpful context from the sidelines: the Klaxons had a song about Atlantis. "Great song, great album, Mercury-winning." Ancient Athens was the intellectual capital of the world — a city where questioning everything was a way of life and every conversation could turn into a philosophical trap. Claude AI runs the Game Master, and the question is whether it can solve a mystery any better than ChatGPT. Tan's navigating a philosopher who treats every interaction as a Socratic dialogue. Getting answers out of Plato is hard enough. Getting them without a wrestling match is harder. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 355 BCE | Athens, Greece EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three eras. Three players. One brutally unforgiving AI. Claude has been given a prompt demanding full realism, and the result is PastMaster's hardest episode yet — so hard there was time for three cracks at it, because nobody lasted long enough to fill a full episode. Welcome to Hard Mode 3.0: Hard Claude with a Vengeance. Keon heads to Victorian England armed with Downton Abbey clips. Tan gets dropped into the Aztec Empire at the height of its power. Ryan revisits a classic mission: taking out Hitler in 1911 Vienna before he rose to power. Claude is considerably less accommodating than ChatGPT when it comes to all three of these plans. How quickly each player gets humiliated is the only remaining question. Can Claude run a more realistic game than ChatGPT? The answer is a definitive yes, but "more realistic" means "you die faster and more humiliatingly." Victorian social codes were genuinely this rigid. The Aztecs genuinely didn't welcome strangers sauntering into Tenochtitlan. And Vienna in 1911 was full of people who hadn't done anything wrong yet. The AI wars are making for better Game Masters, and better Game Masters are making for shorter lifespans. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | Multi-era (1851 CE England / 1487 CE Mexico / 1911 CE Austria) EPISODE LINKS Follow the team's adventures on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been a little quiet over the summer, but fear not, the wheels of time are still turning at the PastMaster HQ! We've got 3 exciting announcements: 1. Next week PastMaster Season 3 returns. We're having another crack at making the show even harder, only this time using Claude instead of ChatGPT. But how hard is too hard? Tune in on Monday 23rd to find out. 2. PastMaster is going live!! We've been invited to perform at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. Catch us live and in person on Sunday 20th October at 15:35 at The Bedford in Balham. Tickets cost just £6 and can be purchased here: https://cheerfulearful.podlifeevents.com/festival/pastmaster-live-from-cheerful-earful-podcast-festival-20th-oct-tickets 3. We're up for some awards. We're thrilled to be nominated for 3 awards at this year's Independent Podcast Awards ceremony. Best Comedy Show, Best Gaming Show and Best Science and Technology show. Oh, and best Podcast Jingle too which is nice. We'll find out on the 23rd of October. 🤞 Get in touch with us: Instagram 👉 @PastMasterPod (check out our AI-generated art illustrating what our adventures might have looked like) Twitter 👉 @PastMasterAI TikTok 👉 @PastMasterAI Gmail 👉 [email protected] Sign up to our newsletter 👉 https://pastmaster.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sherwood Forest, 1152. Comedian Heidi Regan has arrived to meet her hero, and she doesn't mean the Kevin Costner version. Robin Hood, the Merry Men, and a mission to steal the Sheriff of Nottingham's treasure and break some outlaws out of jail. Claude 3.5 runs the Game Master for this one, allegedly the "chattiest, slickest chatbot in the game." Asked whether she pictures Robin Hood as a man or a fox (Disney's 1973 version is apparently still vivid), Heidi describes him as "an amorphous blob of human, Merry Men, and they're my boys." Her methods for helping the outlaws oscillate between stealth, cunning, brute force, and — most distinctively — a lot of tickling. Nobody in Nottinghamshire is safe. Her ideal outcome involves a good bath and a giant celebratory bonfire. The Robin Hood legend is rooted in the real tensions of medieval England: corrupt sheriffs, heavy taxation, and the vast Sherwood Forest that covered much of Nottinghamshire. Whether Robin Hood was a real person, a composite, or pure fiction is still debated. What's not debated is that Heidi Regan has decided he's real, he's her mate, and she's going to help him rob the rich. The Sheriff of Nottingham does not know what's coming. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1152 CE | Nottingham, England Featuring: Heidi Regan — comedian (So You Think You're Funny? winner 2016, BBC New Comedy Award winner 2017) EPISODE LINKS Follow Heidi's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Heidi Regan: Instagram @heidi_regan | X @heidi_regan | heidiregan.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kyoto, 1336. Feudal Japan at its most volatile. Samurai clans vying for power, the emperor's authority in flux, and the AI Game Master narrating the whole thing in a cockney accent. Ryan inserted one simple line into the prompt: "GameMaster must stay in character at all times. The character you must personify is a cockney gangsta with a penchant for the dramatic." The results were dramatic. Claude AI is back, bringing the same unhinged energy from its debut but now filtered through the voice of someone who sounds like they should be running a market stall in Bermondsey rather than narrating medieval Japanese history. Tan's always wanted to visit feudal Japan and meet samurai warriors. He finally gets his chance, but the real battle isn't with the samurai. It's with a narrator who has main-character energy, zero respect for the fourth wall, and a vocabulary that can only be described as rhyming slang. Medieval Kyoto — then known as Heian-kyo — was the cultural and political heart of Japan, a city of temples, imperial courts, and warrior clans. The 14th century saw the beginning of the Muromachi period, a time of civil war and shifting alliances. Whether Tan can attempt an agricultural revolution while his narrator keeps stealing the spotlight and calling him "mate" is the tension that defines the episode. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1336 CE | Kyoto, Japan EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel, Nevada, 1988. The nearest town to the most secretive military installation on Earth, and comedian Sunil Patel is here to ask the question PastMaster was arguably built for: does the AI Game Master, with access to the entire internet's worth of training data, actually believe in aliens? The logic is sound. If any entity has parsed every conspiracy theory, government report, eyewitness account, and 4chan thread about extraterrestrial life, it's a large language model trained on the internet. It's read about Bob Lazar's nine flying discs, it knows about Element 115, and it's absorbed every theory about underwater alien bases in the Atlantic. The question is whether it's formed a convincing theory of its own, or whether it'll just hedge. Sunil's mission: get inside Area 51 and see what the Game Master reveals. Area 51 — officially the Nevada Test and Training Range — has been the subject of UFO conspiracy theories since the 1950s. The US government didn't acknowledge its existence until 2013. Tan's been reading about all of it, from debunked whistleblowers to 4chan screenshots of supposed government insiders. Now the Game Master has to build a world around one of the most debated conspiracy theories in modern history. Whether it plays it straight or goes full tinfoil hat depends on what it's decided after absorbing every alien theory ever written. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1988 CE | Rachel, Nevada, United States Featuring: Sunil Patel — comedian (Things You Should Have Done, BBC Three; Alice & Jack, Channel 4) EPISODE LINKS Follow the team's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Sunil Patel: Instagram @sunilpatelcomedy | X @sunilpatel | sunilpatelcomedy.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medellin, 1973. Pablo Escobar is building the most powerful drug cartel in history, and Keon has arrived with possibly the most ambitious opening gambit in PastMaster history: become Escobar's right-hand man with a 50/50 split of all the takings. Just walk up and ask. Based on the documentaries he's watched, he reckons this is achievable. The documentaries, notably, all end badly. Keon's plan to prove his worth starts with a lavish party and the kind of confidence that either gets you a seat at the table or gets you shot. Nick Horseman lends his voice to Game Master duties while Ryan attempts a South American accent using his GCSE Spanish. The Game Master offers several routes into the cartel. Keon opts for confidence over caution, because that is the only setting Keon has. 1970s Medellin was ground zero for the cocaine trade that would reshape global politics, fund wars, and turn Escobar into one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He was personally responsible for an estimated 4,000 deaths. The cartel's rise was brutal, calculated, and relentless. Whether parties and charm are enough to get a time traveller into the inner circle of the most dangerous man in Colombia is the kind of question PastMaster exists to answer. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1973 CE | Medellin, Colombia Contains: References to drug trafficking and violence. EPISODE LINKS Follow Keon's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices