From 20 hours of prep to 20 minutes

How Shamus Madan uses Jamie to build every episode of his show

"Jamie has made me consistently create great questions and go viral on autopilot. It's the quickest and one of the highest-leverage tools I've ever used across my stack. We wouldn't be able to run our show today without it."

– Shamus Madan

The problem

Shamus built his podcast on a simple rule: never ask a guest a question that the guest has already answered somewhere else. Hitting that bar means doing deep research, reading their books, working through old interviews, and hunting for the thing nobody else had found.

It worked. It just didn't scale.

"Each episode I'd probably spend roughly 10 to 20 hours of research before we actually sat down and recorded. The benefit is I had a very deep understanding of what they did by the end of it, but it just really wasn't productive at scale."

The alternative was hiring it out. At four episodes a month, a researcher good enough to match his standard would run $50–60 an hour, plus 5 to 10 hours a week of Shamus's own time to train them.

So he slowed the show down instead.

What changed

"Jamie is the backbone of our entire show. You can have the best video production setup in the world, and if you have horrible questions, it's not going to matter."

Now Shamus types in a guest's name and their company, clicks generate, and has a full research brief and question set in under 30 minutes. Because Jamie is connected to his YouTube channel, it's learned how he actually asks questions, and the turnaround speed has changed how he works entirely.

"There have been times where 30 minutes before an interview I'll just have Jamie give me a bunch of questions and we can kick off. That would have never been possible before."

The results

Using Jamie, Shamus has seen a surge in his pre-production efficiency and content performance:

• 60x faster research time spent per episode

• +42% increase in short-form impressions

• 500K more views from clips within a 30-day window

• Saved $50K/year by not hiring a researcher

Shamus also uses Jamie to pick which moments become clips. He asks Jamie which segment will perform best, and pulls from there.

On accuracy:

"A lot of people talk about AI hallucinating. Jamie is one of the only research tools on the planet I've not seen that happen with."

And the response in the room:

"Guests ask me, 'Where did you even find this stuff?' They don't remember talking publicly about some of these things. You go super deep and a light clicks on, like 'this person really gets us.'"