I was sitting in my car this morning just staring
at the dashboard and I had this weird thought
it feels like most of us are sitting in the driver's
seat of a Ferrari this machine engineered for
you know absolute peak performance but we're
driving it around a golf course at five miles
an hour we have this massive engine under the
hood but we're just we're afraid to do anything
more than tap the accelerator that is wow that's
painfully accurate, especially if you look at
how the average person is using Gemini 3 .0 right
now. We treat it like a search engine from, what,
2010. Ask a question, get an answer, close the
tab. But the reality is this thing is designed
to run your life while you sleep. It's not a
chatbot anymore. It's a workflow engine. Welcome
to the deep dive. I want to slow things down
today. We usually rush through the news, but
today we have a piece of source material that
I think requires us to actually, you know, pause
and think. We are looking at a guide by Max Ann
titled, You're Using Gemini 3 .0 Wrong. It was
published just yesterday, February 8th, 2026.
And the premise is exactly what you just said.
The AI landscape has shifted right under our
feet, and most of us just completely missed it.
It really has. And that shift is subtle, but
it's profound. We're not just generating text
anymore. We are building deliverables. We're
building systems. Right. So our mission today
is to unpack seven specific hidden features that
are buried, and I mean deep in the settings menu
of Gemini 3 .0. These are features that, according
to Ahn, change the whole game. But before we
get to the how -to, I want to talk about the
friction. Ann calls it the amnesia problem. This
is the core argument of the whole guide, really.
It definitely resonated with me, but I have to
play devil's advocate for a second. Isn't amnesia
just a feature of software? I mean, I open Word,
it's blank. I open Excel, it's blank. Why is
this a problem for AI? Because Word and Excel
are tools you use to output your thoughts. The
AI is supposed to be a partner that contributes
thoughts. Think about it this way. If you hired
a new executive assistant, a human being, and
every single morning when you walked into the
office, you had to reintroduce yourself. Hi,
I'm Dave. I wrote a podcast. Here's our style
guide. Here's who our sponsors are. And then
the next day you do it all over again. Okay,
yeah. I'd fire them by lunch. Exactly. Yeah.
You'd never get any deep work done because you're
spending 90 % of your energy just on onboarding.
But that is the default setting for Gemini. It
starts from zero. Every time. It has no memory
of your style, your context, your projects. So
real work, complex work, it exposes those gaps
immediately. You feel that friction because you're
just constantly repeating context. So if the
intelligence, I mean, if the intelligence isn't
the problem, but the memory is, what is the architectural
fix here? Because I don't want to just give it
all my data and hope for the best. The fix is
that you have to stop treating it like a blank
slate. You have to enable the persistent productivity
system settings. You build a system of record
inside the AI. Okay, let's get into the mechanics
of that. This leads us to the first big feature,
max and highlights, custom gems. Now, I'll be
honest, gems sounds a bit like a mobile game
currency to me. It does, doesn't it? But stick
with me on this one. So in this context, it's
something very different. Right. Think of a gem
as a cloned version of the AI that you have trained
for one very specific purpose. You aren't just
opening a chat. You are defining three things.
A roll. a task and an output can you walk us
through a concrete example the guide mentions
a meeting summary assistant but that sounds pretty
basic i can already ask it to summarize meetings
you can but how often do you get a summary that's
actually you know usable usually it's too long
or completely misses the point so with the gem
you don't just paste notes and say summarize
this you build the gem once you tell it roll
You are my executive assistant. Task. When I
paste meeting notes, extract key decisions, action
items with owners, and any open questions. Output.
Keep it under 300 words. Use bullet points. Okay,
so it's a saved prompt. I feel like I've seen
that before. It's more than a prompt. This is
the part that people miss. You can upload reference
files to the gem. Up to 10 documents. What kind
of documents? Like a PDF of my company handbook
or something? You could, but that's kind of the
boring way to do it. The guide suggests something
much smarter. Don't just upload a generic style
guide. Upload the last five emails you wrote
that you were actually proud of. Upload a project
brief that got approved immediately. That's interesting.
So you're giving it training data on your best
work. Exactly. You're saying, don't just write
like a professional. Write like me. on a good
day so it mimics your specific voice your formatting
even your shorthand That's a huge difference.
Usually I find myself typing the same three paragraphs
of instructions. You know, don't use emojis.
Keep it brief before I even paste the content
I want processed. Right. And that's that friction
we talked about. With a gem, you click the preset
in your sidebar, paste the notes, and it just
executes. It already knows the rules before you
type a single word. So effectively it becomes
a clickable preset that houses your specific
institutional knowledge. Precisely. All right.
Let's pivot. So gems solve the issue of repeating
instructions, but that doesn't solve the issue
of the AI being isolated from your actual data.
It still doesn't know what I'm working on unless
I paste it in. Right. By default, Gemini is sitting
in a clean room. It can't see your Gmail, can't
see your drive. It doesn't know you have a dentist
appointment at 2 p .m. It's smart, but it's blind
to your actual life. And this brings us to feature
number two, connecting Google Workspace. There's
a toggle in the settings to change that. Yes,
under Connected Apps. Once you flip that switch,
you unlock the ability to use the at symbol to
direct its attention. I have to admit, when I
read this part of the guide, I was a little skeptical.
It felt a bit gimmicky. But then I tried the
example. at Gmail draft a reply to Sarah about
the Q1 report. And what happened? Well, it worked.
But more importantly, it didn't just write a
generic Dear Sarah email. It actually found the
thread. That's the whoa moment. It reads the
thread to understand the context of what Sarah
asked. Yeah. It looks at your previous replies
to understand the tone you usually take with
her. And then it drafts the response. It's not
just writing text. It's performing an action
based on history. And it's not just email. The
guide lists at Drive to find files, at Calendar
to check schedules, and even at Workspace to
search everything at once. Think about the panic
search. You know that feeling, right? You're
on a Zoom call. Someone asks, hey, where did
we land on that budget proposal from last Thursday?
Oh, God. And you start sweating. You open three
tabs. Is it in Drive? Is it in Slack? Is it in
an email? Exactly. Instead of panic searching,
you just type into the chat. At Workspace, find
the deck from my Thursday client call. And it
pulls it up. It just eliminates that cognitive
load of, where did I put that thing? Does this
fundamentally change the search behavior of the
user? Yes, completely. It eliminates tab switching
by bringing the data directly into the chat interface.
Let's talk about the third feature, which I think
is my favorite concept in the whole guide, scheduled
briefings. Max Ann describes this as work happening
while you sleep. This is where we move from being
reactive to proactive. Usually you have to initiate
the interaction with the AI. You ask, it answers.
Schedule briefings flips that. You write a prompt,
but you attach a time trigger to it. So give
me the mechanics. How does that look in practice?
Do I need to know how to code or something? No,
and that's the beauty of it. It's surprisingly
natural language. You literally type every Monday
at 7 a .m., summarize my calendar, and highlight
meetings that need preparation. I have to be
honest here. I still wrestle with prompt drift
myself. I have all these good intentions to ask
for a summary or check my tasks, but I get busy
The day starts and I forget to ask until I'm
already late for the meeting. That is exactly
what this solves. It automates the asking. Yeah.
You can set it up for daily briefings on unread
emails from your boss or a Friday 5 p .m. summary
of everything you completed that week so you
can log your hours. It shifts the dynamic completely.
You aren't chasing the information. The information
is waiting for you when you wake up. Precisely.
It's the difference between pulling data and
having data pushed to you. And I assume there's
a dashboard for this. Or does it just run for
hours? and I can never stop it. No, thankfully.
There's a specific scheduled actions panel in
the settings where you can pause or edit them.
Okay, feature number four. This connects back
to the memory issue we started with, but on a
macro level. It's called personal instructions.
Think of this as global memory. So we talked
about custom gems, which are for specific tasks,
like a summary assistant. Personal instructions
are for you as a user. Across every interaction,
every chat, every day. So this is where I tell
it things like I'm a podcaster or I prefer American
English spelling. Exactly. Instead of explaining
I like bullet points or keep it professional,
in every single chat, you save it once in the
settings. The source lists examples like use
a direct professional tone, keep replies under
200 words, or I work in B2B sauce marketing.
But hold on. People change. My job changes. If
I set this up to say I'm a marketing manager
and then I switch to being a, I don't know, a
yoga instructor, isn't this going to screw up
all my results? That's a valid fear. But the
guide mentions a really important command here,
the forget function. It's granular. You can tell
Gemini, forget my memory about formatting preferences
or forget that I work in marketing. And it wipes
just that specific part while keeping the rest.
That's smart. It lets the system evolve with
you. What's the psychological benefit of this
feature beyond just saving keystrokes? It stops
the feeling of talking to a stranger. The tool
adapts to your identity. We're going to take
a quick break, but when we come back, we're going
to look at the flip side of memory, when you
don't want the AI to remember you, and a feature
for the heavy researchers out there that bridges
the gap between your notes and the internet.
Stay with us. Mid -roll sponsor break placeholder.
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We're unpacking
the hidden features of Gemini 3 .0 based on Max
Anne's new guide. We just spent a lot of time
talking about memory, context, and letting the
AI know everything about you. But the guide brings
up a really important counterpoint in feature
number five, privacy. Right, because sometimes
memory is a liability. It is. Sometimes I just
want to ask a dumb question. Or I'm brainstorming
a surprise party for my wife, and I don't want
party planning to suddenly become part of my
professional work profile. Exactly. Or you're
researching a medical symptom. You don't want
that influencing your future business drafts.
The guide calls this temporary chat mode. It's
essentially incognito mode for your workflow.
Yes. When you toggle this on, the history is
deleted after 72 hours. And more importantly,
that data isn't used to train the model and it
doesn't get saved to your long -term memory settings.
It's a safety valve. You can ask the dumb questions
or the sensitive questions without polluting
your long -term profile. Exactly. It keeps your
global memory clean. Now, feature number six
is a heavy hitter. This is for the people who
are doing deep work. The guide talks about the
integration of Notebook LM. Now, I know Notebook
LM as a separate app. I've used it to organize
research papers. Is this different? It's the
same brain, but now it's integrated directly
into the interface. It's designed for when you
need to synthesize a massive amount of information.
The guide says you can attach a notebook with
up to 300 sources, PDFs, videos, Google Docs,
entire websites. That's a library. That's not
just a file. That's a massive archive. It is.
But the magic in Gemini 3 .0 is the combination.
In the old world, you had your static notes in
one app and live search engine in another. Here,
you have both. So you can ask a question that
bridges both worlds. Yes. The example in the
guide is perfect, you can ask. What are the latest
trends in AI video? That's a live web search.
And then in the same prompt, add, and how do
they compare to the research in my attached notebook?
And that's the static knowledge base. That is
incredibly powerful. You're cross -referencing
the entire internet against your private archives
in seconds. It creates a synthesis that neither
tool could do on its own. The live web doesn't
know your notes, and your notes don't know what
happened five minutes ago. Putting them together
is where the insight happens. So it essentially
bridges the gap between your private archive
and the public internet. Exactly. Deep structured
research meets real -time data in a single answer.
We are down to the final feature, number seven,
and the bonus. This is about moving beyond text.
We're talking about canvas and formulas. I feel
like canvas is a term that gets thrown around
a lot in tech. What does it mean here? Canvas
is a shift in interface. Usually you chat, you
get a column of text. It's linear. But if you're
building a presentation or a coding project,
linear text is terrible. Canvas opens a dedicated
window on the side to build actual artifacts.
The guide mentions asking it to... create a 10
-slide presentation. And it doesn't just outline
the slides in text. It builds the slides. It
handles the formatting, the structure, the flow.
And because it's a dedicated window, you can
edit the text directly, just like you would in
a document editor, while still chatting with
the AI to make big changes. So I can highlight
slide three and just say, make this punchier.
Exactly. It's collaborative editing, not just
command and response. It also mentions building
web apps or interactive quizzes from dense PDFs.
Turn this policy document into a quiz and it
builds a playable interface. It's moving from
tell me to make this. Which brings us to the
bonus feature AI formulas in Google Sheets. Oh
man, this one hits home. I live in spreadsheets
and they are usually a mess. We all do. This
feature is a superpower for messy data. It's
the AI function. Walk me through a painful scenario.
Let's say I just got back from a trade show.
Okay, so you have a CSV export of 500 people.
The names are mixed with the job titles. Some
are in all caps, some are lowercase. And the
interests column is just a paragraph of text.
Usually cleaning that up is two hours of manual
copy pasting or writing complex nested formulas
that break if you breathe on them wrong. Right,
and I usually just give up and do it manually.
With this, you just type AI. Extract the job
title and format as title case A2 and drag it
down the column. It processes every row individually
using the LLM. That is wild. It treats every
cell like a tiny prompt. Exactly. You can use
it to translate, to extract sentiment from customer
reviews, to reformat dates, anything. But there's
a catch, right? It can't do a million rows instantly.
Correct. The guide notes that it currently processes
only the first 200 cells at a time due to usage
caps. Still, for a lot of tasks, 200 rows of
automation... thinking is a lot better than zero.
Absolutely. It turns a two -hour headache into
a two -minute drag and drop. So let's zoom out.
We've covered seven features, custom gems, workspace
connections, scheduling, personal instructions,
privacy, Newtbook LM, and Canvas. What is the
big idea here? If you take one thing away from
this deep dive, what should it be? The big idea
is the shift in mindset. We are moving from a
search engine mindset to a productivity system
mindset. The search engine is passive. You go
to it when you have a question. The system is
active. It surrounds you. It feels like the goal
is to set up a system that remembers how you
work so you don't have to repeat yourself. That's
it. Automation in context. Yeah. If you were
repeating yourself to your AI in 2026, you were
using it wrong. The friction isn't the tool's
intelligence. It's the user's default settings.
Maxanne ends the guide with a bit of a challenge.
She says, stop reading. Start setting this up.
It's good advice. It feels a little unfair how
much time this saves once it's running, but you
have to do the initial lift. You have to go into
the settings, turn on the workspace connection,
and write your first gem. It's the difference
between driving the Ferrari in first gear and
finally shifting up. Well said. Thanks for listening.
Go fix your settings. We'll see you in the next
deep dive. Thanks, everyone.