When I started building things, obviously I was pretty bad at it. You cant be good at it from the start, and I decided to just embrace that, roll with it, and turn it into something funny.
Simone Giertz
We're kind of a guinea pig generation.
Adding comedy into what I do is just my natural approach. It's how I approach anything that I find tricky or daunting, because it's like putting syrup in your medicine, and it just makes it easier to go down.
I really dislike soup, especially pumpkin soup.
I just like having creative solutions to tricky situations.
Art scares me. I don't feel cool enough to be an artist.
I don't have cancer, I just have a tumour.
I found it was way more fun to build useless stuff.
A lot of people just write off the projects that I do as stupid, but they obviously aren't, the ideas aren't the smartest but I think there definitely is a lot of thought behind it.
I've always avoided making being a woman my main asset and unique selling point. If it is then you'll start seeing other women as competition, and that's the last thing you need when entering a very male-dominated field.
If I'm not around, it's not because I don't want to be, it's because I can't.
When I build for YouTube, there isn't necessarily an end goal. I have an idea of how I want a thing to work, but if it doesn't work that way, I can always adapt the story. The story is the main driver, not the machine.
In some ways, it's good for company culture to build things that are intended to fail because it creates an environment where it's OK to fail. A lot of people are very scared of that, especially in the workplace.
It'd be really neat if I wasn't a Darwin Award winner.
I want to be an inventor in the real sense.
I think people just like seeing failure.
It's all men on my channel. All my comment sections are engineers at Google.
I think it's also important to show that failure is a part of the process. It can sometimes be the end goal. People are very obsessed with building useful things and I think often that also stops people from getting started.
Having the brain tumor, coming out of surgery and going through all of that, you're like, I am never going to feel the same and I have this new perspective on life. So much gratitude, life just feels like this enormous treasure. Then that kind of just falls away and you're back being grumpy about having an early morning meeting.
Career wise, I'm looking into different opportunities to do a TV show, but in some way that's not a goal in itself. To me, the goal is creating content and doing fun stuff that I'm proud to show. I don't want to do a TV show for the sake of doing it.
I set out to make a sandwich using a robot arm. I put a knife at the end of it and tried to make it spread peanut butter over bread. It didn't work so great.
Finding a better way is all I do.
I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.
A lot of people make the mistake of setting the bar too high.
I'm a part of a new generation of drivers that will only drive electric.
My goal is to never own a gas car.
As for making video comedy, pretty much anyone can do it. When I got started, I just filmed it with my webcam and used iMovie to edit the video, which I still use.
The Every Day Calendar is 0% Internet connected, so no apps, WiFi, bluetooth or computer programs are needed to set it up. Just plug it into the wall and you're ready to go.
To me, the goal of building useless and ridiculous robots is more - I mean, in some way, it's like a personal goal because I think it's really fun, and I think having fun is super important to create things.
My top video is probably the wake up machine. And that one was the first one that started going really viral. It's an alarm clock that slaps you in the face with a rubber arm.
A lot of my self-worth is based on what I do. And if you take that away I just mope.
I see a problem and I invent some sort of solution to it.
I didn't know how to necessarily make good robots and I was scared of failing to make good robots, so I thought I might as well make bad robots to kind of alleviate the pressure of that.
I built a lot of stuff as a kid. But I was not interested in tech, I thought it wasn't really for me.
My learning process has always been very idea-oriented. I never sat down with a book being like, 'OK, now I'm going to learn about transistors.' Instead I had an idea that I really liked and learned as I was trying to figure out how to build it.
Reddit is, it's like a tiger. It's great if it's your friend, but it can also eat you alive.
In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety.
I'm starting to feel like I can actually figure out how stuff works. I can actually pick stuff apart and have a chance of fixing it.
I build a robot version of Jenna Marbles' dog, Kermit. It turned out a little bit worse than I had anticipated.
I don't want to be brain tumor girl. I don't want this to be my thing.
I think I've kind of carved out a sweet spot for myself by combining science and comedy.
The wake up machine was actually pretty painful after some time.
Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things.
I've, in so many ways, done way more than I ever expected out of life.
Burn out is such a real thing, especially when you are enjoying your job.
I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will.
I'm not an engineer. I did not study engineering in school. But I was a super ambitious student growing up.
To me, ideas are like annoying salespeople that only go away once I've built them.
I live on an old tugboat but feel that having a submarine would be the next level.
I'm kind of a challenge junkie, I think.
