[L-R] Hosts Ryan & Tan and guest Nick Horseman having a laugh at PastMaster Live

In our second ever live show rapper and funnyman Nick Horseman rejoined PastMaster hosts Tan and Ryan for an adventure in the Colosseum of ancient Rome.

Taking part in the Cheerful Earful comedy podcast festival and set in the ‘big room’ at the Bedford Pub in south London, Tan and Nick went head to head on a mission to “get rich, get notorious and not die”.

Meanwhile our audience chanced their arm in ‘hard mode’, stepping foot in ancient Persia armed only with some hair gel and a misguided attempt at diplomacy.

Will Nick be able to skin a tiger with a Swiss Army Knife? Can hair gel deflect a spear-thrust? Tune in to find out.

Episode drops on Monday.

One for all and all for one

AI in the news

AI advertising in your face: all your favourite colours and sounds

AI adverts are attempting to discover and use your emotional state, resulting in ‘creepy slop’, according to a report by the BBC.

Ad agencies are already using large language models like ChatGPT to identify people’s online activity and fashion unique adverts that will appeal to them, mirroring language they use and featuring colours and music they enjoy.

Presumably that’s why I now get weird men popping up in my Instagram feed offering me pills to stop hair loss (you could say it’s a bit late for that).

I do think of it as annoying rather than convenient to have my digital experiences fed to me based on stuff I have already done. How are you ever to discover anything new or god forbid change your mind about something if all you ever see is stuff you already do and agree with?

Cops can’t keep up with AI crime

AI crime: bad

AI is reinventing crime according to this report by Axios, and law enforcement is unequipped und undertrained to cope with it.

Automatic processes created by AI can attempt to ‘lockpick’ systems millions of times per second, placing anything from smart homes to hospitals at the mercy of the hackers.

Anthropic, the company behind PastMaster’s favourite AI tool Claude, has reported that China recently used its AI model to carry out a large scale cyber attack.

Meanwhile poor old PC Plod is only trained to cope with one crime at a time.

It’s a truism that AI is just another tool but one that because of the speed it works at it is super potent. It does feel as though in the wrong hands it can cause a hell of a problem. And there are lots of wrongs hands out there.

COMING SOON

PastMaster Christmas special: out 15 December

If you thought Father Christmas was all presents, elves and grandfatherly chuckles, think again.

The traditional PastMaster Christmas Special is back in 2025 and will feature the brilliant Elsie, Meg and Laura from Thots TV.

We’ll be doing a sprint finish to the end of the year, smashing out weekly PastMaster eps from now til our festive extravaganza on 15 December.

And remember to leave some mince pies out for the big man. Or else.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Tan and the PastMaster crew.

PS if you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to see the PastMaster team try next, get in touch:

Instagram: @PastMasterPod

TikTok: @PastMasterAI

Bluesky: @pastmasterpod.bsky.social

X: @PastMasterAI

Email: pastmasterpod@gmail.com