Simone Giertz Spent Two and a Half Years on a Coat Hanger

Lex Fridman asks Simone Giertz for the first cool thing she built, the moment she fell in love with making. She does not offer a polished origin myth. Early on, she says, you smash into the limits of your skills, and building actually gets less frustrating the more you know. Limitations can be fun, but only until you have a picture in your head of a certain level and then have to compromise with materials, tools, and ability. Watching other people build can look like water pouring downhill. For her it still often feels like shoving a toy car into a wall.

The pride she can name is older than Arduino. In Sweden, middle schoolers had to choose sewing or woodworking; she chose woodworking, and she still remembers bringing something home. "Oh my God, I get to show my parents this." She thinks she built her job around that feeling: make a thing, then want to show people. Back then it was a little wooden spoon. Now it is a slightly larger wooden spoon — one that is dynamic, moves, and has a mind of its own.

The first real electronics project came after a year of vocational advertising school, where she realized she did not care much for advertising and did care about building and programming. With a friend named Jonathan she made an iPhone case with retractable guitar strings: six actual strings pulled from the bottom of the phone, clipped to a belt like a seatbelt, chords held on the screen. A real guitar senses vibration against a rigid neck. Her strings would move, so she used capacitive touch, which does not care where the string sits relative to a sensor. A Bluetooth board from Punch Through Design, the San Francisco firm whose hardware she had found, sent the pluck to a first-ever iOS app that checked the chord and played the sound.

She cannot quite believe she pulled it off. It was her first hardware project and her first iPhone app; if someone pitched it as a first project now, she would say that is a lot. Fridman wants to know why she did not stop, the way many people never discover what they can do because the first thing is too hard. She barely knew how to program and knew nothing about capacitive sensors. Two things carried her: it was a school project with deadlines, and then a horizon appeared. When she realized she might actually pull it off, she felt like a bloodhound. Without that glimpse, she says, it would have been harder to stick through. The guitar still had a flaw: arm tension cannot make the strings taut, so you play saggy notes. Tighten them from the case and it becomes a really shitty guitar. She is fine with that. It was already a really shitty guitar, and also not a guitar, which is what made it cool.

Asked how her brain works, Giertz says that if she has a problem, she cannot stop thinking about it, and that the thinking is fun. She spent two and a half years designing a coat hanger. It began with a corner in her home where she could not fit a coat rack. She immediately regrets bringing it up: she plans to release it as a product, probably in a year, so the conversation treats it as a mystery. Fridman offers that it solves a fundamental problem in the human condition. She agrees, and she cannot put the problem to rest until she has.

After seven or eight years on YouTube she is trying two next avenues. One is the product business, coat hanger TBD. The other is a pilot for a show in which each episode is an everyday object and why it looks the way it does. They have written a fork episode: why did this become the eating implement of the West, why are we ruled by an iron fork, how did that happen? Every object you take for granted, she says, is something somebody made up. The world is malleable, and you can make objects work better for you. She once built a fruit bowl whose diameter can change, because she always had too little fruit or too much. Bowls do not have to stay the way they are.

Doorknobs belong in that rabbit hole, and she would happily live there. Fridman nominates push-versus-pull doors as one of the main problems of humanity: eight billion people, and every second some first-year student shoving a pull door, then playing it off. Objects also change behavior. Forks can speed you up or slow you down, take bigger bites or smaller ones. Chopsticks work because the chopping happens in the kitchen and the bowl comes to the mouth, while a plate stays on the table. Culture and human behavior, she argues, hide inside things we never question. Fridman asks why sporks are not more popular. Giertz blames Big Utensil.

Did she have imposter syndrome when she leaped into engineering on a team of engineers? Both yes and no. She tries to flip flaws into selling points. Punch Through Design was a room of engineers whose customers were not all engineers, so she pitched herself as the filter who could tell them when something would be too hard for customers to understand. Not having the skills looked like a weakness. She sold it as the job: she would represent the everyday person.

The same instinct showed up in the year of college physics she completed before dropping out. She gave herself a rule: whenever she did not understand something, she would ask a question. She kept raising her hand in an auditorium of extremely intelligent people who were mortified of seeming stupid. At the end of the year, classmates thanked her, because whenever they were too scared to ask, she had already raised her hand. She treats that as a skill, and as a way to channel imposter syndrome: lay it all out there.

Self-deprecation, she later realized, was also a defense. On the internet she never dared set out as an expert, because that opens you up to being shot down. Beating people to the punch kept perfectionism from stopping her: if the goal is something great, she may never start; if the goal is something that looks funny, she will. At 32 she is CEO of three businesses and no longer needs to talk herself down all the time. The move still serves her at work and in relationships. She is trying to use it only when it is beneficial, not when it is harmful.

She is the one who brings up being a woman in a male-dominated field. The line she describes is brutally thin: attractive enough that people are not offended by her appearance, unattractive enough that they do not sexualize her; smart and witty enough that they say the work is cool, and self-undercutting enough that nobody gets to say, watch this woman think she knows electronics. Fridman notes that this is one reason brilliant people at places like MIT never put their work online — too many failure modes, from boring to expert-without-humor. She will never write an autobiography. She is 32. Puberty, losing her virginity, and here we are: three chapters, a coloring book.

She has officially renounced the title Queen of Shitty Robots. She did not coin it. She posted little projects on Reddit's r/shittyrobots, people called her the queen of the subreddit, the "r/" dropped, and she happily adopted it. Early work was GIF-forward: she only built things that could be translated into a GIF. The mental exercise is whether a project is easy enough to explain in a seven-second looping video without audio. Nobody, she says, is going to care that it also has Bluetooth. Fridman wants every scientific paper to take the same test, and cites DeepMind's protein-folding GIFs: nobody reads the Nature paper.

The toothbrush helmet began as a failed career move. She wanted to make a Swedish kids' show about electronics, filmed a terrible pilot in her San Francisco bedroom, cold-emailed it, and heard nothing. She had already built the prop — a skateboard helmet with a MeArm acrylic kit on the forehead, three servos, an Arduino, a unicorn horn that poorly brushed her front teeth by trial and error — so she posted a GIF to r/shittyrobots. It got about 50,000 views. Within six months, building this stuff was her full-time job. She is glad the network never wrote back. The pilot was her in "host mode," explaining servomotors with a TV-teacher intonation. Starting in a living room let her find a voice. A year later they offered a show. She was already running and said no.

The second project, a breakfast robot that poured milk and Cheerios and fed her with a spoon, was hard because everything had to be in the right location. Maybe ten or twelve takes, shot in that same bedroom, floors sticky for weeks. There was also a soup robot and a beer-pouring robot. Feeding, Fridman notes, is one of the more intimate things you can do with a person, and a hard robotics problem even in the perfect version. Giertz's reply is the real craft of the era: making things really shitty, or failing in a spectacular way, is its own skill. The shittiest robot is the one that does not turn on, and that is not much to watch. You want a particular shape of failure.

Fridman asks whether home robots that are supposed to be friends might need to be a little shitty, because humans love the flawed. Giertz finds it endearing; it anthropomorphizes them. She never feels as connected to a Roomba as when it announces it is on a cliff. Most roboticists refuse names and genders so they will not get attached. She is of the opposite mind: there is social power in a close connection to dynamic objects, even an arm, and the field often runs away from that. Humans are sensitive and squishy with each other too, and they break hearts. From a safety-protocol view, she notes, people think about physical damage, not emotional damage.

That leads them into dating. What if everyone made an AI version of themselves and sent those versions out to date thousands of other AIs as a screening tool — conflict style, compatibility, the works? Fridman immediately invents the failure mode: your AI sleeps around, gets famous on OnlyFans, and you come home to a monster. She asks whether she would get a cut. She does not love the machines she already has. She touches her phone constantly and kind of despises it. The objects she loves are ones she built with care, not the early robots she did not fuss over. Any company that figures out how to make you love a Roomba like a pet stands to gain a lot, and also to manipulate you.

The exception among the shitty robots is the proud parent machine, built with her friend Daniel Beauchamp from a long-running joke. You put in a quarter, a motorized lamp-arm with a laser-cut plywood torso pats your shoulder, and it says "Proud of you, son" — funnier than daughter, and instantly a parent rather than a colleague. It still hangs on her workshop wall. She likes the concept and she executed the build well. Add ChatGPT fine-tuned on conversations with your parents, Fridman says, and you have something that can transform a psyche. In the shitty-robot era her process was to take an everyday problem, like not getting up, and solve it in the most ridiculous spectacular way, which is how you get an alarm clock that slaps you with a rubber hand. Now she still finds everyday problems. She tries to product-design her way out of them.

The project that kicked her butt hardest in the whimsical department is a giant music box. A normal music box has a spiked barrel that plays a song. Hers feeds a sheet of bubble wrap, pops programmed bubbles with little feet on a barrel, and the pops speak into a pan flute. You can program different songs. She hired an engineer, Stu, about a year and a half before the conversation. The hard parts were feeding the sheet straight so the popping feet hit the right bubbles, a rotary CNC setup for the barrel, and weeks spent on pop reliability. Two rigid tubes let air escape sideways; a squishy yoga-mat material in between pops more reliably. Different grades of wrap transfer air into neighboring bubbles instead of popping. She got to spend weeks studying bubble wrap. That, she says, is the favorite privilege of the job: going down any rabbit hole she finds interesting.

She once thought she would go into academia, applied to MIT, then pulled out. She is glad. In college she lasted a year of physics. Grades, which in Sweden started in eighth grade, had hijacked her: she could put a number on how smart she was and got obsessed. She wanted mechanical engineering because she liked machines, then chose physics because it was the hardest thing and she needed to prove she was smart. She realized she was not that smart in the way the course demanded, or at least that she loves math but not ten hours a day. She is a generalist, decent at a fair amount of things, not a specialist, and the other parts of her brain felt like they were dwindling.

Her college advice comes with a disclaimer: you should not listen to her. Go to a workplace where people do the job you think you want — a hospital, not a fantasy of being a doctor. Then split the question in two: what do you want to do, and in what context? Building at a startup, a corporation, an art gallery, movies, or YouTube are different lives. At Punch Through Design she was building for other people and not hitting all her gears. She changed the context and everything changed. She still has college FOMO. She applied to MIT around 24 to become an electrical engineer, saw an average age of 18, and could not picture a room of 18-year-olds smarter than her. She chose other experiences and would not trade them. She still walks onto a campus and aches a little.

Asked for the most fun robot to make, she says they are all painful in different ways. The pride of pulling something off when it was really difficult is satisfying. One example is a mechanical dining table that also holds jigsaw puzzles, because puzzles ate her only table. It uses a tambour mechanism — thin slats of wood with fabric on the back, like an old record-player cover — so you crank one surface aside and lift the other on cams. It was incredibly painful and she uses it almost every day, one of the few projects in daily rotation.

Fridman brings up the TED Talk shoulder rig, a Saturn-ring platform that circled her with a tiny hand slamming popcorn into her face. She barely used it beyond the talk and cannot even remember the problem it was supposed to solve. What she remembers is the joke they cut without asking. She had built a vegetable-chopping machine with two giant knives, ended on a GIF of it destroying a banana, and the punchline was that the clip is the perfect response to unwanted dick pics. It brought the house down. TED wanted the talk usable in classrooms. She had abandoned the hope of being shown in classrooms years earlier.

She calls herself crude and wholesome: she will say shit and fuck, and she tries hard to be a good person and to wield whatever power she has thoughtfully. People misread the colorful projects as being for children, which she thinks has a sprinkle of sexism — a woman doing something fun must be doing it for kids. "Fuck the children. I'm doing it for myself." Parents still write to ask her to stop cussing. She gets it, and she does not think that is what will mess up their kids. She tries to be a decent enough role model while also acknowledging that humans fuck.

Fridman starts toward a dark turn about the TED Talk. Giertz gets there first: walking off stage, she found out she had a brain tumor. Her right eyelid had been swelling; YouTube comments mentioned it, and she blamed pollen allergies and sleeping on that side. Her mother came to Vancouver for the talk, insisted on a doctor, and pushed her into an MRI at 5 p.m. on a Friday. Mid-scan they pulled her out for contrast. The nurse asked how long she had had symptoms. That is when she knew they had found something. They sent her to the ER. The tumor was the size of a golf ball and had probably been growing since she was a teenager, ten or fifteen years. She had surgery, remnants kept growing, and she went through radiation. Two years were dedicated to getting better.

She named the tumor Brian and made light-hearted videos — I have a brain tumor, my brain tumor's back — without showing much of the dark. Of course she was scared. Take any other part, she thought, but not the brain. She had been healthy: no seizures, no cognitive issues, not even headaches, just a swollen eye. In the Uber from the MRI to the ER she felt two things at once. She was grateful she had already gotten more out of life than she ever expected. She was also really sad she had not had kids yet. That was the big grief. The prospect of someone cutting open her head was terrifying. It was not as bad as she thought it would be.

Surgery was intense and the recovery fairly linear: almost every week a little better. Radiation was not linear at all. It drained her in unpredictable ways, and for months she felt high, unable to process reality normally. Doctors dismissed it. She was on an Alzheimer's drug used to help prevent radiation-related dementia, thirty milligrams a day; Reddit users described getting high on twenty. Finding that cause was a relief, because it was the first time her way of processing reality had felt genuinely altered. After surgery she woke up as herself, without brain injury. She was surprised how little she was willing to think critically about what doctors told her. The neurologist on call at the ER became the surgeon and her rock. Her mother wanted second opinions. Opening up to multiple right answers felt so terrifying she was not sure she could have gone through with treatment if she started questioning.

The process changed her relationship to life more than to death. She is not afraid of death, but she does ponder mortality. Terrible things stop being something that happens to other people; illness fast-tracked that loss of innocence. Going through it forced her to redefine what it means to be good. Before, being good had meant pushing hard, working, being disciplined and harsh with herself. Healing meant listening to her body, resting, staying in tune with where her health actually was. That gentleness has stuck. When you are young and healthy it is hard to know what illness feels like. Recovering, she was stoked to find senior yoga nearby, the class she could actually take. You cannot always just push harder. You have to cater to people where they are.

Being sick sucks, and she is motivated to postpone it as long as she can. She was also grateful that she had reservoirs to draw from: she had exercised, eaten well, not wrecked her body, and this was the first time that care felt critical. She had the opposite thought too — I floss every day, how do I have a brain tumor, I have been good. More than that, she was proud of how resilient the body was. After surgery there is usually a void that keeps its shape. Her brain, she says, got ambitious, flopped back, and now looks almost normal. Doctors told her they would almost not be able to tell she had had a tumor.

The Every Day Calendar started as a meditation habit. She wanted a gold-star grid that would not live in a notebook thrown in a drawer — accountability art on the wall, 365 days you tap to light up. It became a Kickstarter after her surgery, shipped a year late, and is now sold through the Yetch Store, named for the unintuitive pronunciation of Giertz. Making one of something and making 10,000, she says, are not even distant cousins. Everything takes longer than you think. As someone terrified of disappointing people, she wonders why she chose jobs where it is so easy to disappoint them at scale, after they have paid. She is stoked that she still loves the work: product development, design for manufacturing, anticipating use. Thousands of calendars are on walls around the world. People found something she made useful. That still boggles her.

Factory tooling is nothing like a 17-hour one-off. Quality control is a beast; you cannot trust anyone who says things will be okay. She has raised no capital. Everything is self-invested and in-house, which makes a 10,000-unit manufacturing defect existential. Health problems also showed how fragile an influencer model is. She is a human billboard: YouTube videos, an ad spot, talks on a stage. If she is too sick to be on camera, everything stops. Algorithms and advertising law can topple it too. She started a product business to diversify and to stay interested. YouTube becomes an R&D lab and early audience test; promising ideas move to the product company; when it is time to sell, they move back to the channel. Yetch is supported by her but separate: not merchandise, not on the homepage. She wants to be able to retire her face. She is, she says, running out of narcissism.

The store launched with a small roster while she learned the brand's tone. There is a puzzle that is officially incomplete: 499 of 500 pieces, the last one kept in a box in her workshop, and she has no idea what she will do with them yet. She likes the thought of a future pitch deck that says she sold people 5,000 incomplete puzzles. There are screwdriver rings, sawdust socks, "basket fillers." Four more ambitious products are in the pipeline, closer to the tagline: unique solutions to everyday problems. The first calendar prototype had 365 mechanical toggle switches; at that quantity the runaway cost was crazy, so they switched to capacitive touch and made the front plate a circuit board worn as art instead of hidden. She would love to sell the puzzle table and will not sell a $7,000 table. Margins are tough, and she would love to sell cheaper than she can. For some products the method is to make the most beautiful version first, then decide what to compromise.

Truckla started because she wanted an electric pickup and belongs to a generation that may never own a gas vehicle. In 2018 or 2019, with few options, they took a Tesla Model 3, cut it, and made a truck. She is not a car person, so they brought in a big team and another project manager. Cars are not a place she wanted to fuck around: nothing should be unsafe for her or anyone riding with her. About a year of planning, then a month tearing the car apart. She would have accepted ugly if the function was right. It ended up looking good. Years later, with Rivian and the Ford F-150 on the market, she still stans Truckla. Those trucks are giant. She wanted a small '90s pickup. Asked for the most complex thing she has built, she names Truckla for sheer scale and impact; the bubble-wrap music box is the other candidate. They are all complicated in different ways.

Early on she cannibalized old robots for motors because the budget was tight. She has gotten better at keeping projects intact, in case a museum ever wants them. Commenters used to request a dildo on everything; she now filters every spelling on YouTube. She thinks many male followers actually admire the work and do not know how to have a woman as a role model, so they channel it into wanting to date or marry her. Weapon requests have been rare. What did rattle her was a real factory: giant industrial robot arms, the grown-up version of the toys she had been playing with, suddenly terrifying. Companies that say they will never put weapons on robots and then take military contracts sit in that same dark. Drones scare her. Humans are too good at creative ways of killing, and she is afraid of a future that uses more robots to do it.

She used to have an Amazon Echo and ripped it out because whispering from bed was enough for it to hear her. Chatbots, she thinks, are a powerful tool we are not fully ready for. The internet is a parade of using powerful things in harmful ways. She is stoked for a virtual assistant that actually solves problems, and she thinks it can get dark quickly: close connections, manipulation, ads, a centralized model that gets everyone thinking the same way. Combine radicalizing algorithms with advanced language models and you can control a worldview. We are impressionable squishy flesh bags. She does not anthropomorphize her own robots, because she built them and knows how they work. She wanted other people to see organic motion, not point A to point B. She has not been surprised by a robot. They are pretty dumb: servos moving in patterns she programmed, not much in the way of sensors.

Before robots she was a huge UFC buff, trained Muay Thai and some Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and talked her way onto a Swedish MMA site at about 20. They thought Simon was coming; they had been rude until they realized Simone was a girl. She lasted a year, then got kicked out of an Alexander Gustafsson interview at Stockholm's Grand Hotel for asking why he had chosen that moment to tell the press about time in jail for violent crimes, ahead of a Jon Jones fight. Nobody had briefed her that the topic was blacklisted. She called her mother immediately, because in the 1990s her mother had been kicked out of a Mel Gibson interview at the same hotel. She is no longer allowed to do martial arts because of the brain tumor, and she is more concerned now about what elite fighting does to people.

At 16 she moved to China as an exchange student, into a small city with almost no foreigners, no language, a constant audience staring. She went back at 19 to teach English. When people later asked if the United States was a hard cultural leap, she laughed: this was nothing, and she could pass. Coming home from that first China year, excited to be a child again, she found her parents had separated while she was gone and had not told her so they would not spoil the stay. She sat on her bed and decided to go to a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi rather than miss more school. If they had stayed together her roots might have grown back. They did not. She kept moving. The upside is she can feel at home almost anywhere. The downside is she cannot feel fully at home anywhere. Home, for her, is in people.

Advice for young people starts with a warning: very few career moments feel as good as you think they will, and you often feel you are not doing it well enough or big enough. The main fuel is enthusiasm, not duty. Just because something is boring does not mean it is important. School does not teach you how to stay excited, and she had to reprogram a guilty voice that said if it is fun it cannot be work. Try on a lot of jobs like pants. She edited for the Swedish government and tried to accept that little happened and things moved slowly, then realized she should be somewhere that treats wanting a lot to happen as a strength. Ask what your strengths and weaknesses are, then which context makes most of them strengths.

She does not think life has a grand meaning, and that does not make it meaningless. A better question is what brings substantial joy. For her it is relationships, community, passive hangouts — someone in sweatpants opening the fridge, being alone together, working a joint goal. It is easier to be proud of a team than of herself, and YouTube can be lonely. From the former Queen of Shitty Robots: do things with integrity. Treat internet choices like tattoos. Going viral is intense; she is glad she built a long-term career instead of a moment. Define success yourself, because the internet will hand you numbers. Hers is not the world's biggest channel. It is being proud of the projects and having full say in how she spends her time — including the right to wake up and not want to do this anymore, and for that to be okay.