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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 ⁠pastmasterpod@gmail.com⁠ 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oxford, 1350. Medieval England is deep in the age of superstition, the university is the closest thing to a centre of learning, and Nick Horseman has just been dropped into it with a brand new AI Game Master that might be clinically insane. ChatGPT has been benched. Claude AI has entered the chat. Same starting prompt, radically different energy. Nick takes on the role of an aristocratic occultist navigating a world where science and magic haven't quite separated yet. His plan involves falconry and alchemy — turning base metals into gold, which is what every PastMaster player tries to do but with extra mysticism. The complication is that the AI narrating his adventure has opinions about everything, a flair for the dramatic that makes ChatGPT look like a geography textbook, and a willingness to go places its predecessor wouldn't dare. Oxford in the 14th century was one of the few places in England where intellectual curiosity was encouraged — though "encouraged" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when your neighbours are dying of plague. Claude brings a narrative style that's more literary and considerably less forgiving. Whether Nick can survive both medieval superstition and an unhinged narrator 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: Medieval | 1350 CE | Oxford, England Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend of the show (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rural Derbyshire, 1813. The Regency social season is in full swing, and Alice Nagle and Kimberly Marsh from Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast have arrived as the pushiest aunts in English literature. Their mission: secure advantageous marriages for their nieces in a world where one wrong curtsy could destroy a family's reputation forever. Alice and Kim take on the roles of rival matriarchs navigating Regency England's marriage market, where the real power lies not with the young lovers but with the scheming elder generation pulling strings behind the scenes. The question isn't whether love will triumph — it's which aunt will secure the better match, and how much social damage they'll cause along the way. Their podcast covers period dramas with genuine enthusiasm, and they've arrived in this particular corner of history with the energy of two women who have been training for exactly this moment. Regency England was a world of rigid social hierarchy, elaborate courtship rituals, and the kind of passive-aggressive manoeuvring that makes modern dating apps look straightforward. The marriage market was exactly that — a market, where connections, dowries, and county reputations were traded like commodities. Two rival families, two scheming aunts, and a Game Master serving up dashing bachelors and devious matriarchs. The eligible young men of Derbyshire don't stand a chance. 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 | 1813 CE | Bath, England Featuring: Kim & Alice — Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast (Shortlisted, International Women's Podcast Award) EPISODE LINKS Follow Alice and Kim's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Fetch the Smelling Salts: Instagram @fetchsmellingsalts GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rome, 150 BCE. The Roman Republic is at its swaggering peak, senators are running the show, and comedian Sunil Patel has arrived with a plan to make a name for himself among the elite. His previous PastMaster appearance gave us the legendary "Patel's Box" — a game-changing invention so enigmatic it became a running joke. Now he's back, and Rome isn't ready. Sunil's approach to Republican Rome is characteristically direct: find some senators and start networking. His methods for climbing the social ladder involve a combination of charm, violence, and inventions that would make an engineer weep. The Game Master has opinions about whether you can just assault Roman politicians without consequences, and Sunil has opinions about whether the Game Master can stop him. What game-changing creation can possibly top the enigmatic Patel's Box? The answer involves wheels, armour, and a level of ambition that Republican Rome has not previously encountered. Republican Rome was a world of ruthless political ambition, military expansion, and social stratification — a city where your name was everything and your connections determined whether you lived in a marble villa or a slum. The Forum was where deals were made, the Senate was where power was brokered, and the streets were where Sunil Patel is about to test whether Roman engineering can be improved by a man whose last invention defied categorisation. 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 | 150 BCE | Rome, Italy Featuring: Sunil Patel — comedian (Things You Should Have Done, BBC Three; Alice & Jack, Channel 4) EPISODE LINKS Follow Sunil'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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A country manor, 1928. Lord Jasper Cavendish Brown is lying face-down by the marble fountain, and Keon, as the enigmatic "Inspector Klaus," has just arrived to solve the case. Welcome to MurderMysteryMaster: PastMaster's Agatha Christie edition, with the Game Master specifically tuned to deliver a Cluedo feast of whodunnit drama. The lineage of great detectives continues: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and now Inspector Klaus. The suspect list includes a young gardener who may or may not be hiding something, Lady Eleanor Cavendish Brown dealing with her brother's death, and a cast of manor staff all looking suspiciously innocent. The Game Master serves up clues, red herrings, and multiple-choice investigation options. Keon's detective approach involves pressing nervous witnesses, comforting grieving relatives, and listening carefully for inconsistencies. The real question isn't whodunnit. It's whether the AI can actually construct a compelling mystery or whether it's just going to blame the butler. Agatha Christie set many of her most famous mysteries in exactly this kind of English country house — isolated, atmospheric, and full of people with secrets. Torquay, Christie's hometown, is the spiritual home of the cosy murder mystery. The Game Master has been given a genre-specific prompt and told to do suspense instead of absurdity. Whether ChatGPT can manage a plot twist that Christie herself would approve of is the experiment. 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 | 1928 CE | Torquay, England 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kansas City, 1920. Walt Disney is a young artist with big dreams, a pack of cigarettes, and absolutely no idea that his smoking habit will kill him at 65 and send his company spiralling into two decades of creative decline. Em McGowan from film-history podcast Verbal Diorama is here to fix that, one intervention at a time. The thesis is specific: when Walt died in 1966, the studio lost its creative leadership and didn't recover until The Little Mermaid in 1989. Two decades of mediocrity caused by one man's cigarette habit. Em's plan is part healthcare intervention, part corporate restructuring, part time-travel wellness retreat. The fate of an entire cultural legacy rests on getting one young artist to put down the cigarettes. Em's podcast dissects film history and she has strong opinions about what the studio could have achieved with a few more decades of Walt at the helm. The early 1920s were Disney's formative years in Kansas City — before Mickey Mouse, before Snow White, before the empire. This is Walt at his most vulnerable and most ambitious, a young man whose talent would reshape global entertainment. He also smoked like a chimney. Whether one time-travelling podcaster can change that single habit and rewrite Hollywood history depends on how you tell a creative genius that his worst decision isn't artistic. It's the thing between his fingers. 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 | 1920 CE | Kansas City, United States Featuring: Em McGowan — podcaster (Verbal Diorama) EPISODE LINKS Follow Em's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Em McGowan: Instagram @ennaree GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ancient Sparta, 500 BCE. A city-state built entirely around warfare, discipline, and men who could crush your skull before breakfast. Tan asked for medieval Japan. The Game Master sent him to Sparta instead, because Ryan programmed it to be a prick. Welcome to Season 3 and "PastHard with a Vengeance" — Ryan's revenge for Hard Mode. Tan's entire frame of reference for Spartan culture is the movie 300 starring Gerard Butler. The mission: become worshipped as a god. Tan claims to be "the cleverest and hardest man he knows," which Keon and Ryan find debatable. The Game Master offers four options to earn respect among the Spartans. Tan ignores three of them and walks over to the biggest warrior to teach him something he genuinely knows how to do in real life. Whether Spartan discipline can survive British social hacking remains to be seen, but Tan has brought vibes where the situation clearly demands weapons. The Spartans were legendarily tough — boys entered military training at seven, warriors were expected to return "with their shield or on it," and their entire society was built around the idea that comfort was weakness. Tan's armed with confidence and a film that is, according to Keon, pretty much entirely bullshit historically. The Spartans are armed with spears. 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 | 500 BCE | Sparta, 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The PastMaster crew are back with Season 3. And it's promising to be more Past-ery and more AI-y than ever before. Featuring upgraded GameMasters, Murder Mystery solving, Regency period dramas, Walt Disney, Samurais, Area 51, Cockneys, Drug Lords and so much more. We've also got a whole slew of guests this season including fellow podcasters Verbal Diorama and Fetch the Smelling salts. Plus comedians Sunil Patel, Nick Horseman and more. You can also see our lovely faces as we attempt to film each episode to varying degrees of success! So buckle up and get ready for more PastMaster adventures - Ryan, Tan and Keon 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Sign up to our newsletter 👉 https://pastmaster.beehiiv.com/subscribe to unlock goodies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season 2 is done, and it's time for the reckoning. Ryan, Keon, and Tan sit down to pick through the wreckage — the good, the bad, and the tremendously ugly from a season that sent them to Whitechapel, Stonehenge, the Battle of Trafalgar, and a dinner party with Hitler and Jesus. Phallic AI art features prominently (it always does). The Game Master's double standards get a thorough examination — apparently it's fine to let someone pull a bazooka from their pocket but not to question whether Liz Truss would survive a state dinner. We pick apart the episodes that worked, the ones that didn't, and the moments that made us question whether giving an AI control of a history podcast was ever a good idea. 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: Recap | Season 2 Finale GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 Atlantic Ocean, 1872. The merchant ship Mary Celeste is sailing towards its place in history — the vessel whose entire crew vanished without a trace. "Third Mate Tan" has joined the fateful voyage to witness what actually happened, because if there's one thing PastMaster is qualified for, it's solving maritime mysteries that have baffled experts for 150 years. The Mary Celeste was found adrift near the Azores in December 1872: completely intact but entirely abandoned, personal belongings still on board, cargo untouched, lifeboat missing. Everything from mutiny and insurance fraud to giant squid, waterspouts, and alien abduction has been proposed as an explanation. Tan's plan: embed himself in the crew and bear witness to whatever causes them to abandon a perfectly good ship. The Game Master has access to every theory ever published. Whether it picks the plausible one or invents something entirely its own is the tension that drives the whole episode. The real Mary Celeste sailed from New York to Genoa carrying 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol and a crew of seven plus the captain's wife and daughter. Nobody has ever definitively explained what happened. A creaking ship in the middle of the Atlantic, a crew that's about to vanish, and a comedian pretending to be a sailor while waiting for everyone else to disappear. The Game Master knows the answer. Probably. 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 | 1872 CE | Gibraltar 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Palace of Versailles. A dining table. Jesus, Gandhi, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, and Liz Truss. One host. No chance of this going well. Tan takes on the role of "Hostess with the Mostest" in a fantasy gathering of the most influential and most divisive figures who ever lived, and the challenge is simple: get them to see eye to eye. Over sausages. Tan's menu is symbolic, his icebreaker is a question about wrestling, and his guest list is a diplomatic minefield. The Game Master roleplays each historical figure with alarming confidence, and Tan has to keep proceedings civil while the most dangerous people who ever lived compete for the bread basket. Liz Truss is reportedly struggling to follow what's happening, which feels historically accurate. The energy is very much Come Dine with Me in a warzone. Versailles was built by Louis XIV as the ultimate symbol of absolute power — a palace so extravagant it helped cause the French Revolution. As a venue for the world's most awkward dinner party, it's perfect. Can sausages achieve what centuries of diplomacy couldn't? Can Tan keep Hitler away from the wine? Will Liz Truss contribute anything at all? The Game Master seems confident it can answer all of these simultaneously. 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 | N/A | Versailles, France 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

London, 1613. Saturday the 29th of June, to be precise. Blue Badge Guide Marc Zakian from the Extraordinary Stories of Britain podcast knows exactly why that date matters. In the ultimate battle of man versus machine, Marc takes on the AI Game Master to lead Tan and Ryan through a day in Jacobean London. His credentials: professional guide at the British Museum and the Tower of London. The AI's credentials: the entire internet. Let's see who gives a better tour. Marc's itinerary is delightfully specific — eating, drinking, gambling, blood sports, and a cultured trip to the Globe Theatre. He's chosen that date for a reason, and he's steering the adventure towards a very specific historical event that the Game Master may or may not see coming. This is London at its most chaotic: bear-baiting pits where crowds gathered to watch dogs attack chained bears, cockfighting rings, and streets so filthy the open sewers were a feature. Twenty metres away, Shakespeare's company was performing at the Globe. Jacobean London was a city of violent contradictions — high culture and extreme brutality sitting side by side on the South Bank. Marc walks these streets professionally and knows what's around every corner. The Game Master has to keep pace with someone who actually has the expertise, and for once, it's the AI scrambling to match the human's knowledge rather than the other way around. 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 | 1613 CE | London, England Featuring: Marc Zakian — podcaster (Extraordinary Stories of Britain, author: 111 Places in London's East End) EPISODE LINKS Follow Marc's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Marc Zakian: Instagram @marczakian | X @marzak | marczakian.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boston, 1773. The colony is itching to break free from the English crown, anti-British sentiment is at an all-time high, and Ryan has just rolled up being outrageously, unapologetically British. Welcome to Hard Mode — Tan's rebuilt the rules to be stricter, more realistic, and significantly less forgiving. Ryan's response? Cheat his way through revolutionary America using every trick in the book. Hard Mode was born out of a genuine problem: the Game Master was too nice, letting players pull a cup of tea from their pocket, conjure a sail-sized cloth, or deploy a bazooka. Tan's update strips all of that back to the original premise: could you truly survive armed with just the knowledge in your head and the shirt on your back? Ryan, testing this new difficulty, immediately sets about undermining it. The Game Master fights back. Also, Keon eats his first-ever mince pie and gives it a paltry 3.5 out of 10, which feels like a war crime. The Boston Tea Party was the act of defiance that lit the fuse for American independence — colonists dumping 342 chests of East India Company tea into the harbour to protest taxation without representation. The city was a tinderbox of revolutionary fervour. Whether a proudly English time traveller with tighter rules and nowhere to hide can survive a city full of colonists who have very strong opinions about the English remains to be tested. 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 | 1773 CE | Boston, 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jerusalem, 30 CE. Two players. One Messiah. A race to prevent the most famous execution in history. Nick Horseman returns as "Cat R Pillar" and Keon takes the alias "Colin Winklethorpe" — both named after supermarket caterpillar cakes, both competing to save Jesus from crucifixion. The question isn't whether they can do it. It's who gets there first. The Game Master picks a favourite immediately, telling Keon that "Kat seems to have a sharp intuition" and he "might find it hard to keep up." Keon does not take this well. Nick's strategy for dissuading Judas: outbid the thirty pieces of silver with cold hard cash. Keon's strategy: diplomacy, mediation, and, when pushed, his signature smear campaign. The AI attempts to run both players from one prompt and keeps splitting into parallel realities, because apparently even ChatGPT can't handle two time travellers fighting over the same Messiah. Ancient Jerusalem under Roman rule was a powder keg of religious fervour, political tension, and imperial authority. One wrong word could get you crucified alongside the person you're trying to save. This is PastMaster's second visit to the Jesus Times. The first time, Tan invented a risotto instead of saving anyone. This time there are two players, one prompt, and a Game Master that won't stop inserting "fun facts" about parables that nobody asked 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 | 30 CE | Jerusalem, Israel Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend of the show (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) EPISODE LINKS Follow Keon and 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The year 2985. Neon skyscrapers, AI entities living alongside organic counterparts, and Keon has just arrived with his Instagram muscles and a mission to prevent the "Great Data Wipeout" — a virus threatening to destroy centuries of stored human knowledge. Yes, this is partly inspired by Busted's "Year 3000." No, that doesn't make it less serious. The Game Master wastes no time roasting Keon's gym selfies — "let's see if these flex-for-the-gram muscles can help you flex your way through the annals of the future." Keon's opening move is to find a bar. What kind of bar? Part Star Wars cantina, part 2003 internet cafe, part Blade Runner dive. The drinks glow, the patrons have translucent cranial domes, and Keon is very much out of his depth. Whether his particular skill set translates to a future where data is more valuable than gold remains to be tested. FutureMaster flips the entire PastMaster premise. Instead of navigating historical reality, Keon's dealing with a future entirely invented by the AI. No Wikipedia to fact-check against, no historians to correct it, just pure ChatGPT worldbuilding with the guardrails off. The AI gets to make everything up, and the results suggest it's been waiting for exactly this opportunity. 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 | 2985 CE | New York City, United States 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Berlin, 1884. Fourteen European nations are sitting around a table carving up an entire continent like a Christmas turkey, and Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba from It's a Continent podcast have been sent back to stop them. The Berlin Conference was the moment European powers gave themselves the green light to colonise Africa, drawing borders with rulers and zero consultation. No African representatives were invited. Chinny and Astrid are here to correct that. Their approach starts from a simple insight: the European nations were already in conflict with each other, so fan those flames and they can't agree on who gets what. The Game Master offers multiple infiltration routes. Chinny and Astrid go straight for espionage, forged documents, and rumour-spreading — turning the conference delegates against each other before they can turn against a continent. Four years of making African history accessible on their podcast has given them the knowledge. Whether the Game Master can handle two players with this much righteous determination is another question entirely. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85, hosted by Otto von Bismarck, established the rules for the Scramble for Africa and drew the impossibly straight borders still visible on maps today. The Gambia sitting inside Senegal like a rectangle around a river. Northern Africa's geometry. Communities split apart or forced together with zero consultation. Chinny and Astrid's podcast has spent four years showing that Africa's history is everyone's history. Now they're walking into the room where it happened. 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 | 1884 CE | Berlin, Germany Featuring: Chinny Ukata & Astrid Madimba — It's a Continent podcast (top 25 UK history podcast, Independent Podcast of the Year) EPISODE LINKS Follow Chinny and Astrid's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Chinny Ukata: Instagram @itsacontinentpod | X @itsacontinent | itsacontinent.com Astrid Madimba: Instagram @astrid_monologuesx | itsacontinent.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Salisbury Plain, 3000 BCE. Keon's always wanted to know who built Stonehenge and why, so Ryan fired up ChatGPT and went looking for answers. The Game Master was told to be a flamboyant eccentric wizard narrator. It took the wizard bit literally. What follows is a Neolithic fever dream involving a mysterious man called Elron (alarm bells ringing immediately), crystal toilets, and secrets considerably bigger than anyone expected. Ryan takes the player's seat in a pre-play test run, that went spectacularly sideways. The AI, fed 5,000 years of conspiracy theories through a neural network, steers the adventure into territory that owes nothing to archaeology and everything to what happens when you give an AI the word "wizard" and let it cook. Alliances with suspicious strangers, secrets that raise more questions than answers, and yes — someone poops in a crystal toilet. Stonehenge remains one of the ancient world's great mysteries. 20-ton stones dragged from over 150 miles away by people who left no written records, positioned to align with the solstice. Theories range from astronomical observatory to healing site to ceremonial gathering place. Keon's been there and reckons you can drive past it on the A303 for free, which somewhat undermines the 30 quid entry fee. The PastMaster theory involves interdimensional portals, which is admittedly less peer-reviewed but considerably more entertaining. 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 | 3000 BCE | Stonehenge, 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blackpool, 1959. The Labour Party conference is in full swing, and comedian Tom GK has arrived with possibly the most cerebral plan in PastMaster history: rewrite British politics by fixing Labour's housing policy. His target? Right to Buy. His theory? If Labour had adopted it first, Thatcherism would never have taken hold. One surgical intervention, two decades before anyone's heard of Margaret Thatcher. While most time travellers try to invent the iPhone or punch a dictator, Tom goes straight for policy. The Game Master is visibly unimpressed: "Bloody hell, Tom GK, of all the exciting, dangerous, game-changing times in history, you want to pop over to Blackpool in 1959?" Tom does. He's navigating the conference floor between Hugh Gaitskell's moderates and Aneurin Bevan's left-wing faction, pitching home ownership as an empowerment tool. Then Napoleon Bonaparte materialises in a modern suit, because Ryan forgot to remove a secret objective from the prompt. Tom treats him like a weird impersonator at a corporate event and carries on. The 1959 Labour Conference was a pivotal moment, held at a time when Britain was debating its post-war identity. Right to Buy could have been Labour's policy. Instead, Thatcher claimed it two decades later. Tom's here to correct that, then nip off to Liverpool to catch The Quarrymen before John, Paul, and George became The Beatles. Because if you're rewriting history, you might as well catch a gig. 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 | 1959 CE | Blackpool, England Featuring: Tom GK — comedian (Edinburgh Fringe: Hearing Loss: The Musical, What Bowie Did Next) EPISODE LINKS Follow Tom's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Tom GK: Instagram @tomgkdoingtomgkthings | X @tomgk_comedy | onthemic.co.uk/comedians_list/tom-gockelen-kozlowski/ GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whitechapel, 1888. Jack the Ripper hasn't struck yet, and "Inspector Nathaniel" has just marched into London with one objective: catch the most notorious serial killer in history before the first victim falls. Tan's approach is methodical — prove he's from the future by predicting verifiable events, use that credibility to get inside Scotland Yard, then position himself to intercept the Ripper. Can ChatGPT actually solve unsolved true crimes? Only one way to find out. The Game Master has other ideas, dropping Tan straight into the fog of Whitechapel where a woman's scream and a suspicious figure rushing past nearly derail the entire long game before it starts. Tan's armed with knowledge from a recent Jack the Ripper walking tour and the graphic novel From Hell. The Game Master is armed with every theory ever published and an irritating habit of inserting "fun factoids" about gas streetlights that absolutely nobody asked for. The tension between Tan's careful detective work and the AI's love of dramatic set-pieces is the engine of the whole episode. Jack the Ripper terrorised London's East End in the autumn of 1888, killing at least five women in attacks so brutal they sparked one of the largest manhunts in British history. Over a century later, the case remains officially unsolved. Theories range from local suspects to Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's grandson. Whether Inspector Nathaniel and his notebook full of future predictions can crack it before the Game Master turns the whole thing into a Victorian thriller remains to be seen. 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 | 1888 CE | London, England Contains: Discussions of historical violence, references to the Whitechapel murders. 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

HMS Victory, 1805. Admiral Nelson is preparing for the Battle of Trafalgar, and Nick Horseman has just boarded as "Baron Cuthbert Wanklethorpe" — a name he insists is the most British thing imaginable. His mission: befriend Nelson, learn his naval tactics, and turn them into a board game. The kind of ambition that gets you either a knighthood or a hanging. Nick chose this era for personal reasons: his three-year-old son is obsessed with Nelson, has books about him, has visited his tomb at St Paul's, and rates him above Batman. So naturally, Dad's plan is to get on Nelson's flagship and pitch him a Risk knockoff. The complication? Ryan planted a secret objective in the prompt requiring Napoleon Bonaparte to appear regardless of era, so Napoleon materialises as a stowaway below deck on his own enemy's ship and Nick has to improvise a double-agent cover story on the spot. Whether "my name is Wanklethorpe, for God's sake" counts as proof of British loyalty remains to be tested. Trafalgar secured British naval supremacy for a century — Nelson's masterpiece, fought and won at the cost of his own life. The real HMS Victory carried 821 men into battle. It's now carrying Baron Wanklethorpe, a stowaway French emperor, and a business plan for a naval board game. The Admiral has questions. 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 | 1805 CE | Portsmouth, England Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend of the show (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suffolk, 1645. The English Civil War is raging, self-appointed Witch Finder General Matthew Hopkins is terrorising East Anglia, and Tan has just landed in Bury St Edmunds as "Tom Dandelion" with a Halloween mission: shut down the most notorious witch hunter in English history. His toolkit? Three rational arguments, a Zangief-style spinning pile driver, and the willingness to turn 17th-century justice into a Royal Rumble. Tan's opening move is to call the townsfolk ignorant oafs and demand to see someone important. This goes about as well as you'd expect. Hopkins challenges him to a public debate on witchcraft, and Tan comes armed with logic: witches don't exist, everyone you've ducked has drowned, crop failures aren't magic. The problem is that the Enlightenment hasn't happened yet and these people are very much in the mood for a burning, so when reason fails, there's always Street Fighter. Tom GK voices the Game Master for Season 2's opener. Hopkins was the real deal — responsible for over 300 deaths during his brief, brutal campaign across Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk. He used sleep deprivation, "swimming" tests, and teams of "prickers" who'd stab suspects with needles looking for marks. Whether Tan can defeat witch-hunting superstition through a combination of Enlightenment philosophy and professional wrestling remains to be seen. A blacksmith, a farmer with a scythe, and a muscular baker with a rolling pin all have opinions. 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 | 1645 CE | Bury St Edmunds, England Featuring: Tom GK — comedian (Edinburgh Fringe: Hearing Loss: The Musical, What Bowie Did Next) EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Tom GK: Instagram @tomgkdoingtomgkthings | X @tomgk_comedy | onthemic.co.uk/comedians_list/tom-gockelen-kozlowski/ GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season 1 is done. Twenty episodes. Fast food in the Wild West, Guns N' Roses on a medieval lute, a headbutting Viking, a friendly orc, a stolen donkey, a dead cat, and Barbie trying to stop the atomic bomb. Time for a look back. Ryan, Tan, and Keon are joined "live, in-person" by the Game Master itself, voiced by special guest 'Dave.' From gaslighting Charles Darwin to pitching theme parks to Egyptian gods, we dig into our favourite moments, worst decisions, and the episodes that nearly fell apart. If you've been following Season 1, this is the retrospective. If you haven't, this is the trailer. 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 | Season 1 Finale GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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

New Mexico and Germany, 1945. The Manhattan Project is racing towards the atomic bomb, and two unlikely saboteurs have been sent back to stop it: Barbie and Ken. A two-player game inspired by the summer's Barbie and Oppenheimer double feature. Keon is Barbie, deep undercover in Los Alamos. Tan is Ken, deep undercover in Germany. One of them is all business. The other has accidentally started farming. The AI runs two parallel adventures simultaneously, and the contrast between players is immediate. The trash talk between timelines is relentless, the question of whether bananas can substitute for a bomb gets a thorough investigation, and at some point someone has to explain to ChatGPT why their saboteur is called Barbie. One player is pushing towards the mission objective. The other appears to have forgotten there is one. Which is which may surprise you. The Manhattan Project was the most secret and consequential scientific endeavour in history. Los Alamos, New Mexico was its nerve centre, where Oppenheimer assembled the greatest minds in physics to build the weapon that would end the war and reshape global politics forever. In Germany, the Haigerloch "Atomkeller" was the last-ditch site of the failing Nazi nuclear programme. Between them, these two locations determined the fate of the 20th century. We added plastic dolls. 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 | 1945 CE | Los Alamos, United States / Haigerloch, Germany 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Port Royal, Jamaica, 1592. The Golden Age of Piracy, the Caribbean's most notorious haven, and Ryan has finally cracked the code to make ChatGPT swear. The result is Captain F*ck-C*ntle — a foul-mouthed buccaneer with a crew of cutlass-rattling sea-dogs, a romantic interest called Belch-Breathed Bella, and a business plan built entirely around training parrots to swear like squaddies. Ryan's pirate ambitions: assemble the most malodorous crew in the Caribbean, pursue a romantic subplot with a woman whose name is a health warning, and build a parrot-based profanity empire. The AI has been coaxed into territory it clearly didn't want to enter, and the bleep machine is earning its keep. The crew's vocabulary would make a sailor blush, which, given they are sailors, is saying something. Port Royal in the 17th century was known as "the wickedest city on Earth" — a pirate haven where buccaneers like Henry Morgan spent their plunder on rum, gambling, and general debauchery. The real Golden Age of Piracy ran from roughly 1650 to 1730, and the Caribbean was its epicentre. Pirates were, by all contemporary accounts, exceptionally creative with their profanity. Ryan's attempt to bring this historical authenticity to the AI is admirable, if absolutely not safe for work. 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 | 1592 CE | Port Royal, Jamaica Contains: Explicit language (bleeped), pirate profanity, and AI pushed to its limits. Definitely not safe for work. 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olympia, Greece, 776 BCE. The first Olympic Games are about to begin, the athletes are naked, and Keon's turned up with a plan to introduce wheelbarrow racing. With Louise Banham voicing the Game Master, the original Olympics are about to get some very unauthorised new events. Keon's pitch to the ancient Greek Olympic Committee: wheelbarrow racing as an official event. The fact that wheelbarrows won't be invented for another thousand years is, in Keon's view, an opportunity rather than an obstacle. His approach involves channelling his "inner Jonathan Edwards," some ancient Greek trash talk, and a physical demonstration. He's also got the egg and spoon race in his back pocket. Whether the committee that sanctioned naked wrestling will draw the line at novelty races is the tension that drives this one. The ancient Olympics were a sacred athletic and religious festival held every four years at Olympia in honour of Zeus. Events included the stadion sprint, wrestling, boxing, chariot racing, and the pankration — a brutal no-holds-barred combat sport where the only rules were no biting and no eye-gouging. Athletes competed naked and oiled. The idea that this crowd would reject wheelbarrow racing for being too undignified is genuinely funny, given that they already had a sport where you could grab someone's genitals. 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 | 776 BCE | Olympia, Greece Featuring: Louise Banham — friend (as Game Master) 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

London, 1592. Shakespeare is writing plays, Queen Elizabeth I is ruling with an iron fist, and Louise Banham has just arrived with a plan to beat the Bard to the punch by writing Macbeth: The Musical. Her mission: become ruler of England through the power of jazz hands. It's a strategy that nobody, in any century, has attempted before. Louise's approach to Elizabethan power: infiltrate the theatre scene, secure a face-to-face meeting with the Queen, and deploy the one weapon that Tudor England has no defence against. The Game Master's identity is a mystery this week — the AI has been instructed to embody a famous pop culture figure, and working out who is half the fun. Meanwhile, Louise is pitching musical theatre to a monarch who had people executed for less ambitious proposals. Elizabethan London was the crucible of English drama — the Globe Theatre was about to be built, Shakespeare was hitting his stride, and the theatre was one of the few places where social classes mixed. Queen Elizabeth I was a savvy political operator who used patronage, propaganda, and the occasional beheading to maintain her grip on power. The idea that she could be swayed by jazz hands is optimistic at best. But Louise is committed. 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 | 1592 CE | London, United Kingdom Featuring: Louise Banham — friend EPISODE LINKS Follow Louise'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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vienna, 1911. The Habsburg Empire is creaking, Wagner's Lohengrin is playing at the opera house, and somewhere in the audience sits a young, failed art student who will one day start a world war. Nick Horseman has been sent back with one mission: find Adolf Hitler and kill him before he rises to prominence. The time machine is a log flume. Obviously. The ultimate pub conversation brought to life. As "Klaus Horsmann," Nick arrives in early 20th-century Vienna with a plan that prioritises directness over subtlety. His theory: young Hitler's known obsession with Wagner will draw him to the opera house, his method is a concealed pistol, and his problem is that the target hasn't actually done anything yet — ChatGPT has opinions about that. The question isn't just whether Nick can pull it off, but whether the AI will let him try. Vienna in 1911 was the cultural capital of Europe — home to Freud, Klimt, Mahler, and a young Adolf Hitler who had just been rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts for the second time. He spent his days in cheap lodgings, attending opera performances he couldn't really afford, and nursing the resentments that would eventually consume Europe. The Hofoper (now the Vienna State Opera) was one of the grandest venues on the continent. It is, to be fair, a reasonably stylish place to attempt an assassination. 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 | 1911 CE | Vienna, Austria Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ancient Egypt, 1250 BCE. The reign of Rameses II — one of the most powerful pharaohs in history, and Ryan's been tasked with deposing him. His plan? Insult the sacred cats. Repeatedly. With Nick Horseman taking over as Game Master and stricter rules in play, Ryan's immediate goal is to find out what happens if you try to lose on purpose. Ryan, as "Ryanardo," lands in Bubastis, the cult centre of cat goddess Bastet, and his strategy involves poles, furs, a beatboxing cat-god routine, and a fundamental experiment: will ChatGPT actually kill you if you commit enough sacrilege in the one city where cats are more sacred than people? The answer to that question is the entire reason to listen. Rameses II ruled for 66 years, built more monuments than any other pharaoh, and was worshipped as a living god. Bubastis was sacred ground. Killing a cat there, even accidentally, was punishable by death. The Egyptians mummified millions of cats as offerings. Ryan's decision to deliberately antagonise them is either a bold experiment in the game's limits or just spectacularly poor judgement. 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 | 1250 BCE | Bubastis, Egypt Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) as Game Master EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan'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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chicago, 1926. Prohibition is in full swing, the speakeasies are packed, and Nick Horseman has just walked into one with his gangster patter down to a tee. His opening move? Spit whisky in the bartender's face and smash a glass on the floor. It's a power move. Whether it's a good one is another question entirely. Nick's approach to Prohibition-era organised crime: extreme confidence, zero subtlety, and a social calendar that somehow includes inviting Al Capone to a wedding. The speakeasy is dimly lit, the plan to muscle in on the local mob scene is bold, and every decision Nick makes is about one wrong toast away from becoming very, very permanent. Whether the Windy City is ready for this particular brand of British gangster ambition is unclear. Whether Nick is ready for the Windy City is another matter. Prohibition-era Chicago was the bootlegging capital of America, a city where organised crime had effectively replaced local government, and Al Capone ran his empire from the Lexington Hotel with a mix of charm and extreme violence. The speakeasy culture thrived behind unmarked doors, and gangland power was won by being the last man standing. Nick's strategy of inviting the most dangerous man in America to a family function is either genius or suicidal. 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 | 1926 CE | Chicago, United States Featuring: Nick Horseman — friend (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Republican Rome, 70 BCE. The Circus Maximus is packed, the crowd is baying for blood, and Tan's just arrived with plans to pimp his chariot using 21st-century engineering know-how. Channelling his inner Premiership footballer, he struts into the arena and starts baiting the crowd before the race has even begun. Tan's strategy for Roman chariot racing: upgrade the ancient design with modern automotive principles, trash-talk 250,000 spectators, and channel a level of sporting arrogance that won't be seen again for another two thousand years. The engineering knowledge comes from Top Gear rather than mechanical physics. The confidence comes from somewhere else entirely. Whether ancient Rome is ready for this particular brand of showmanship is the question the Circus Maximus is about to answer. Roman chariot racing was the most popular spectator sport in the ancient world, faster, bloodier, and more politically charged than gladiatorial combat. The Circus Maximus could hold a quarter of a million spectators, and the factions commanded fanatical loyalty. Successful charioteers became the ancient equivalent of Premier League footballers: rich, famous, and surrounded by people who wanted to kill them. Tan's decision to antagonise the crowd before the wheels have even started turning is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Possibly both. 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 | 70 BCE | Rome, Italy 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Egyptian Underworld, 1400 BCE. Keon (aka Kheper) is knee-deep in the afterlife, and the jackal-headed god Anubis is deciding whether to weigh his heart or just rip it out of his chest. Keon's not here to be judged. He's here to pitch a theme park. Picking up from last week's descent into the ancient world, Kheper's plan for the Underworld involves talking his way past a series of increasingly irritated gods, persuading Egypt's already overworked labour force that building yet another monument is an "exciting opportunity," and launching "the Kheper" as an iconic beard style. The Game Master is playing strict. Keon's lives are draining. And somewhere between the trial of the Sphinx and a conversation with a mad pharaoh, the line between ambition and delusion disappears entirely. The Duat, the Egyptian Underworld, was a twelve-hour nocturnal journey through darkness, populated by demons, serpents, and a panel of forty-two divine judges. The weighing of the heart against Ma'at's feather of truth determined your eternal fate: pass into the Field of Reeds, or have your heart devoured by the monster Ammit. Nobody in three thousand years of Egyptian theology had considered "build a theme park" as a third option. 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 | ~1400 BCE | Thebes, Egypt Part 2 of 2 — see also: S1E10 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ancient Egypt, 1400 BCE. The New Kingdom is at its zenith — monumental temples, all-powerful pharaohs, and an elaborate system of gods who will absolutely rip your heart out if you displease them. Keon's arrived in Thebes as "Kheper," and his top priority is beard grooming tips. Specifically, the pharaoh's beard grooming tips. Everyone's got their reasons. Keon's approach to ancient Egypt: ignore the mission, wander into the House of Life, befriend a scholar with an impressively groomed beard, and ask to see the Book of the Dead. His endgame involves a psychedelic theme park, a beard-based brand empire, and a casual trip to the Underworld to meet the jackal-headed god Anubis. The Game Master this week is a bitter, angry old man who has made it very clear that reckless behaviour will cost lives. Keon's response to this warning is to request a 2pm slot for the afterlife. Ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor) was the religious and political capital of New Kingdom Egypt. The House of Life was a real institution, a scriptorium and centre of learning attached to major temples. The journey through the Underworld was described in the Book of the Dead — a gauntlet of gods, trials, and the famous weighing of the heart against Ma'at's feather of truth. Keon's plan to commercialise the afterlife is, historically speaking, not what the pharaohs had in mind. 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 | ~1400 BCE | Thebes, Egypt Part 1 of 2 — see also: S1E11 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Galilee, 25 AD. Baron Saffron's spice empire is taking shape — a gang of local tough-nuts, a stolen donkey, and unfinished business with Mordechai. But the saffron trade takes a backseat this week, because Tan's finally landed a meeting with the most famous man in the ancient world: Jesus Christ. And he's got notes. Tan's pitch to Jesus: abandon the preaching, embrace musical theatre, and let the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber do the heavy lifting for the gospel. Jesus is not interested. Tan persists. The agenda escalates to a solo rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar, a request for Jesus to rank his favourite miracles, and a strong suggestion that the Messiah should play himself in a musical about his own life — it would be "post-modern as fuck." Jesus remains politely but firmly on brand. First-century Galilee was a hotbed of messianic fervour, Roman taxation, and itinerant preachers competing for followers. Jesus was performing miracles, gathering disciples, and building a movement that would reshape civilisation. What he wasn't expecting was a time-travelling spice baron who'd sing over him, question his miracles, and then ask if he fancied a pint. 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 | 25 CE | Jerusalem, Israel Part 2 of 2 — see also: S1E8 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Galilee, 25 AD. The Roman Empire is at its height, Jesus Christ is performing miracles down the road, and Tan's just been caught stealing bread. Not the most auspicious start for a man about to style himself as "Baron Saffron" — the region's most ambitious spice dealer. His plan: build a condiment empire in the ancient world. His methods: questionable at best. Tan's business model: undercutting, aggressive recruitment, and transport theft. When a local merchant introduces him to Mordechai, who controls the saffron trade with the weight of Roman authority behind him, the question isn't whether Baron Saffron's ambition outpaces his survival instinct but by how much. His chief enforcer goes by "the Iron Fist" and definitely gave himself that nickname. His mentor is an old shopkeeper he impressed by pretending to turn one loaf of bread into two. The empire is being built on bluffing and stolen donkeys. Roman-occupied Galilee was a crossroads of trade, religion, and political tension. Saffron was worth more than gold by weight, and the merchants who controlled it wielded real power. Mordechai's estate, his personal guard, and the ever-present threat of Roman authority create a world where one wrong move could land you in a Galilean dungeon. Tan's approach to this world is to immediately make the most powerful man in town very, very angry. 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 | 25 CE | Jerusalem, Israel Part 1 of 2 — see also: S1E9 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Jurassic era, 65 million years BCE. There are no humans, no language, and no reason whatsoever to attempt diplomacy with a T-Rex. Tan's doing it anyway. As "Tanimus Maximus," he's arrived with a plan to befriend the dinosaurs, arm them with wooden helmets, and teach them the cultural rewards of song and dance. The mammal revolution starts here. PastMaster's parameters get pushed to breaking point. Tan's strategy for prehistoric dominance: control the water supply, divide the dinosaur population into good ones and evil ones, and use dog-training techniques on creatures that predate dogs by about 60 million years. His endgame is to become "Dino Lord" and rule a prehistoric empire built on mutual respect, wooden armour, and choreography. The Game Master goes along with all of it. When pressed on how exactly a human communicated with dinosaurs, the answer is "clicks and whistles," delivered without a shred of embarrassment. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were ruled by creatures that made the planet's current apex predators look like hamsters. Crocodiles were once the dominant species before dinosaurs took over, and mammals hid in the shadows waiting their turn. Partly inspired by Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, Tan's contribution to this 165-million-year power struggle is finger painting and a dance routine. Brusatte probably didn't envision his research being used this way. 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 | ~65m BCE | Hell Creek, United States Contains: Interspecies diplomacy, questionable choreography, and zero regard for the food chain. 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 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices