I spent every day of third grade wearing a glittery purple cowboy hat.
— Simone Giertz
Pretty much all of my inventions come about the same way. I have an everyday problem or something that I'm too lazy to do, so I make a machine that does it for me.
I got one comment that I had a lot of double chins. I just laughed at it. I do have a double chin, so that's legit.
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.
I'm still sometimes convinced that I'm just making all of this up and I'm actually somewhere drooling in a straight jacket. This success is such a bizarre thing.
Programming is a pretty tricky thing to start learning. You need to combine it with comedy to get a wider audience.
We're kind of a guinea pig generation.
I try to view my YouTube channel as a logbook of personal interests.
Getting slapped in the face with a plastic arm to wake up is not as painful as it might look - probably more humiliating than painful really.
It's all men on my channel. All my comment sections are engineers at Google.
I made a toothbrush helmet, which was a skateboard helmet with a robot arm holding a toothbrush. The idea was that it would brush your teeth for you.
I would much rather be acknowledged for the work that I do rather than being a woman doing the type of work I do.
Take it from someone who's never managed to keep a New Year's resolution: making commitments is easy. Keeping them is what is hard.
There's an incredible amount of people that you can compare yourself with and be like, why am I not doing as well as that person? It's really hard.
I don't believe in prayer, I'm a pretty hardcore agnostic.
I don't have cancer, I just have a tumour.
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.
It'd be really neat if I wasn't a Darwin Award winner.
I love Sugru like I love duct tape. I basically just compensated for lack of building skills with Sugru.
The way I approach my insecurities is by making sure I'm the first person laughing at myself.
I'm not very into politics but I love watching shows like 'Last Week Tonight' - people come for the comedy and they stay for the interesting questions.
I really dislike soup, especially pumpkin soup.
I use humor as a way to digest anything.
I want to be an inventor in the real sense.
On my bad days, sitting down and meditating was the last thing I wanted to do.
Haircuts are never good. You always end up being unhappy.
People should be faced with losing everything a little bit more often because it really helps put a lot of things into perspective.
Somewhere along the way I realized that I enjoyed making useless things a lot more than well-finished products.
I wanted to see if I could make a living off of having fun.
I don't want to be brain tumor girl. I don't want this to be my thing.
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'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.
If I'm not around, it's not because I don't want to be, it's because I can't.
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.
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.
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 just like having creative solutions to tricky situations.
I'm good at pitching my weaknesses as strengths.
I built a lot of stuff as a kid. But I was not interested in tech, I thought it wasn't really for me.
I wanted to automate any part of my life that I could. And the over-the-top solutions are more fun than the useful ones.
If I find something is interesting, there are probably other people who find it interesting… if I'm into what I'm doing, there will be other people who are into it, too.
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.
Finding a better way is all I do.
I think people just like seeing failure.
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.
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.
I really wish this wasn't a thing. But this tumor is a thing. Even though it's not what I would have chosen for myself, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be all bad. What I keep trying to remind myself is this is one of those things that looks like a really bad thing on the outside but I know too little about life to be sure.
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.
I'm kind of a challenge junkie, I think.
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.
