Imagine this. It's Saturday morning. You're already
tired. The week was, you know, long. And the
weekend. Well, it's not looking much better.
Oh, I know this feeling. You got to get your
daughter to soccer at 9 a .m. sharp. You need
to do the weekly grocery run. That's 45 minutes
if you're fast. Then you got to hit the post
office. But, and here's the tricky part, their
windows only open from 10 to 1. And on top of
all that, you have a hard stop. A Zoom call at
exactly 12 .00 p .m. This sounds like a nightmare.
That sounds like my actual Saturday last week.
Right. It's the classic chaotic Saturday. Feels
impossible. Now, if you give that whole mess
to most AIs today, they just fail. They just
spit the list back at you. They don't see the
friction. But there is one hidden switch one
toggle buried deep in the settings that fixes
it instantly. And that's just one of them. We're
talking about buying back like 10 hours of your
week. Easy. Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're
taking a look at a guide from Max Anne over at
AI Fire. It's called 6 Best Gemini Settings to
Enable in 2026 Power User Guide, specifically
for Gemini 3 .0. Which is a beast of a model.
But the idea here is really interesting. Max
Ann says most people are driving a Ferrari like
it's a golf cart. What do you mean by that? Break
that down for me. Well, most of us use these
incredibly powerful tools, you know, the hard
way. It's that rinse and repeat cycle. You type
a prompt, you get a kind of meh answer, you get
annoyed, you type it again. It's manual labor.
It is. What this guide points out is that Google
has buried six specific features inside Gemini.
And they are all turned off by default. Off by
default. That seems weird. Why would they hide
their best stuff? Well, I think they want a super
simple interface for most people. They want it
to just feel like a chat. But these aren't just
tips. They're actual toggles in the settings.
And if you flip them, you stop using a chatbot
and start using a real proactive assistant. We're
going to go through all six. Okay, let's unpack
this. We can start with that chaotic Saturday
problem. This brings us to the first setting.
Thinking mode. Thinking mode, yeah. This is all
about shifting from just speed to actual strategy.
Most of us are used to the default, right? I
ask, what's the capital of France? And it says
Paris before I can blink. We think that speed
is the goal. Right. That's fast mode. And it's
great for trivia. It's great for, you know, defined
photosynthesis. But think about how our brains
work. There's system one, thinking fast, gut
reaction, and system two, which is slow and deliberate.
When you ask a normal AI to solve a logic puzzle
or debug code or plan that nightmare schedule,
fast mode is a disaster. It's all system one.
It just hallucinates because it's rushing to
give you an answer. It's choosing speed over
being correct. Exactly. Thinking mode forces
the AI to just pause. It literally stops. It
maps out a plan, breaks the problem down, and
it checks its own logic before it types a single
word. Okay, so let's go back to that Saturday.
Soccer at 9 -0 -0. Groceries. Post office. Zoom
call at noon. What does thinking mode do differently?
So fast mode just gives you the list back. It
doesn't see the problem. Thinking mode looks
at it and goes, hold on. It spots the 40 -minute
gaps. It realizes, hey, the grocery store is
right next to the post office, so let's do those
together to save a trip. And make sure you're
not rushing back for the Zoom call. It builds
a real logistical plan, not just a to -do list.
It's doing the mental heavy lifting that usually
wears a person out. That's it. It acts like a
project manager. You'd use this for anything,
with moving parts budgets, coding, planning a
trip. It's on Gemini Pro, so it's about $20 a
month, but... I mean, if it saves you from one
huge mistake, it's paid for itself. So are you
saying the delay is actually the feature here?
Yes. The silence prevents hallucinations and
ensures logic. That's a huge shift in thinking.
We're so used to instant that silence feels like
a bug. But here, the silence is the work being
done. It's the AI taking a deep breath before
it answers. All right, let's get to the second
setting. This one fixes something that I think
drives all of us crazy. The context problem.
Every time I open a new chat, I feel like I have
to reintroduce myself. I'm a podcaster. I focus
on deep dives. Please don't give me shallow listicles.
And please, please don't talk to me like a corporate
HR bot. Exactly. It's just friction. The fix
is... custom instructions this is your digital
id card for the ai it's buried in settings then
settings and help and instructions for gemini
think of it like a permanent cheat sheet for
you so you set it up once and it just knows who
you are from then on every single time it's like
handing a new employee a user manual for how
to work with you you tell it your role like freelance
graphic designer you tell it your goal help me
build a stronger portfolio but here's the best
part You tell it what you don't like. The anti
-preferences. Yes. You can straight up say, no
jargon, no formal, corporate speak, keep answers
short and actionable. Max and even suggest you
can add things like what you're studying or the
kind of business you run. It seems like such
a small thing, but the time you'd save not having
to type for context over and over again must
be huge. It completely changes the conversation.
You stop getting that generic one -size -fits
-all advice and you start getting strategy that's
actually built for you. And the best part is
this one is free for everybody. So does this
really stop the generic advice? Absolutely. It
swaps generic fluff for tailored strategy. I
like that. Swapping fluff for strategy. Okay,
this next one. This is where I feel like the
assistant idea really starts to become real.
Workspace extensions. Oh, this is the big one.
This is what breaks it out of the chat box. The
source uses a great analogy for this. It says
using Gemini without extensions is like hiring
a brilliant assistant, but then locking them
in an empty room with just the notebook. And
you're on the outside shouting through the door,
hey, what did I say in that email last Tuesday?
The assistant has no idea. They're smart, but
they're completely blind. So how do we open the
door? You go into your settings, find connected
apps, and you toggle Google Workspace to on end.
And suddenly, Gemini can see. It can use the
at workspace command to connect to your Gmail,
your Drive, your calendar. Okay, give me a sense
of the scale here. What can it actually do with
that? Okay, so imagine this. You can type, summarize
the key metrics from all of my Q4 marketing reports.
Now think about that. You might have like...
50 PDFs scattered across a bunch of folders in
your drive. Gemini scans them all, instantly
pulls out the data, and builds you a summary
table. That is, wow. That is wildly powerful.
I mean, it's basically magic. Seriously, it's
a real whoa moment. Just imagine asking a human.
to read a year's worth of PDFs and having the
answer in, what, 10 seconds? Yeah. Or Gmail.
You can say, find all my emails about Project
Phoenix, group them by who sent them, and tell
me which ones need a response today. It just
cuts through all the noise. It synthesizes your
entire digital life. And again, this feature
is free. It works on both the free and the pro
plans. So it actually leaves the chat window
to go get information. It sees your digital life
to synthesize data. That capability alone feels
like it changes what a file even is. If the AI
can read everything, I don't have to be perfectly
organized, which is a relief. It makes search
feel obsolete and replaces it with answer. All
right, let's talk about maintenance. You know,
I have to admit something here. I am absolutely
that person. I have great intentions. I say I'm
going to check my analytics every Monday morning.
I say I'm going to audit my subscriptions every
month. And then life just, you know, gets in
the way. Work piles up. Yeah. And I just don't
do it. I still wrestle with that simple consistency.
It's a human flaw. That's where scheduled tasks
comes in. This is the AI night shift. How does
that work? It's basically autopilot mode. You
describe a task one time, set a schedule, and
Gemini just runs it in the background for you.
It doesn't wait for you to log in or ask. It
just does it. So for my analytics example. You'd
set it up once. Pull the weekly analytics from
my drive every Monday morning and email me a
summary. And that's it. Monday morning you wake
up and the email's just sitting there. You didn't
even have to remember to ask. Or like a daily
news briefing. Totally. Send me the top three
tech stories at 9 a .m. Or a monthly budget check.
Summarize my spending and flag any unusual expenses
on the first of the month. It turns the chatbot
into a system that works for you. This is a pro
feature, but again, if it saves you from paying
for one subscription you forgot about, it's worth
it. So why not just use a calendar reminder for
that? This doesn't just remind you. It does the
work. That's a key distinction. A reminder is
another thing on my to -do list. This takes things
off of it. Boom. Exactly. Okay. Moving on. We've
talked about thinking, context, accessing files,
scheduling. But what happens when you hit that
knowledge wall? The knowledge wall. You know
that feeling. The AI gives you a confident answer,
but then you ask about something really new or
super niche and it just starts to wobble or just
make something up. Right. Because the standard
model is just pulling from its training data,
which is like a frozen snapshot in time. It's
not looking at the world right now. That's what
deep research is for. This is the autonomous
analyst. How is this different from thinking
mode? Great question. Max and Audra has a really
clear line. Thinking mode is like locking yourself
in a room to solve a puzzle with the info you
have. It's about internal logic. Deep research
is like sending a junior analyst to the library
to go find new information. It leaves the room.
It sends an agent out onto the live web. It reads
dozens of articles, academic papers, whatever
it needs to. It cross -checks the claims. Then,
and this is the key part, it doesn't just give
you a paragraph. It writes a structured report
with links to its sources. So if I ask, what
are the top five AI breakthroughs in the last
90 days? A standard chat might give you a vague
list from six months ago. Deep research goes
out, finds the actual news, verifies the dates,
synthesizes what it means for, say, a marketer,
if that's your job, and then it hands you a whole
document. It turns hours of Googling into a few
minutes of waiting. And the cost on that? You
get five reports a month on the free plan, but
it's unlimited on Pro. So is this just a fancy
Google search? No. It reads, synthesizes, and
writes a structured report. It's the synthesis
that matters. Google gives you links. This gives
you understanding. That's it. It does the reading
for you. Now, we have to talk about the last
setting. In an age where data privacy is, well,
it's everything. Sometimes I hesitate to ask
an AI certain things. You know, maybe it's a
sensitive financial question or something about
a client who is under an NDA. That hesitation
is healthy. You should be careful. But it shouldn't
stop you from using the tool. And that's why
temporary chats exists. This is the NDA protocol.
What happens when you flip this switch on? So
you go to activity controls or there's a little
toggle at the top of the chat. When it's on,
nothing is saved. Nothing is used for training
the model. The second you close that window,
the entire conversation just evaporates. So it's
completely off the record. Totally off the record.
It gives you all of Gemini's brain power, the
thinking mode, the logic, all of it, but with
a zero digital footprint. It's perfect for medical
questions, drafting legal ideas, financial planning.
And it doesn't lose any intelligence in this
mode. Full reasoning power, just zero digital
footprint. That's really reassuring to know there's
a kill switch for its memory. It's essential
for any kind of professional use, I think. So
we've gone through six settings. Thinking mode,
custom instructions, workspace extensions, scheduled
tasks, deep research, and temporary chats. The
hidden six. We've walked through the list one
by one. But as we usually find on this show,
the real power isn't in the individual pieces.
Max Anne argues the big competitive advantage
is what you do with them together. It's about
chaining. Chaining. Right. Don't just use one
at a time. Stack them. Think of them like Lego
blocks of data. Walk me through what a chain
would look like. Okay. Step one. Use deep research
to get fresh data on a new market trend. Gives
you that report. Step two. You feed that report
into thinking mode and tell it to develop a strategy
based on your custom instructions. Right. Then
step three. You set up a scheduled task to go
out and update that strategy with new research
every Monday morning while you're asleep. You're
not just asking questions anymore. You're building
a system. You're building a machine that works
for you. That's the real difference between a
regular user and a power user. Most people are
just chatting. You could be orchestrating. It
really shifts the role of the person from being
the doer to being the architect. Exactly. And
the wildest part of all this, most people will
never turn these on. They'll just stick with
the defaults. Which means what? It means if you
do it, you have an instant advantage. You're
playing with a full deck while everyone else
is missing a few cards. I think that's the big
idea to sit with. Yeah. These tools are incredibly
powerful, but only if we actually take the time
to configure them. Just open the settings, toggle
just one of them. Start with custom instructions.
It takes two minutes. Two minutes to save 10
hours a week. That's a pretty good trade. It's
the best trade. Thank you for listening to this
deep dive. Go explore those settings. We'll see
you next time.