Giertz, Simone
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Giertz traces her creative identity to a childhood sense of pride in showing parents something she made in a Swedish woodworking class, and describes her entry into engineering as accidental: with no formal technical background, she built a first hardware project (an iPhone case with retractable guitar strings using capacitive touch sensing) as a class project at advertising/vocational school, and that single project got her hired as an intern at the San Francisco design firm Punch Through Design. She frames her early "shitty robots" era — nonfunctional or comically malfunctioning machines like a toothbrush-brushing helmet arm and a breakfast-serving robot that made a mess — as both an internet-honed survival tactic (self-deprecation preemptively defusing online hostility, especially as a woman in a male-dominated field having to be "smart and witty enough... but not enough to threaten") and a genuinely valuable discipline against perfectionism, since deliberately embracing failure let her ship things rather than never finishing. She's candid that this reflex has become double-edged: useful early on, but something she's now trying to deploy only strategically rather than reflexively undercutting herself as a CEO of three businesses.
She discusses her design philosophy of examining ordinary, unquestioned objects (forks, doorknobs, coat hangers, fruit bowls) as opportunities for reinvention, citing a planned TV pilot about why everyday objects look the way they do (why forks became dominant Western eating implements, why chopsticks change eating behavior by requiring food to be pre-cut in the kitchen) and her own multi-year fixation on redesigning a coat hanger and a mechanical dual-surface "Tambour" jigsaw-puzzle table. She reflects at length on human-robot emotional connection: she argues most roboticists avoid naming or gendering robots specifically to avoid the attachment she considers valuable and underused, cites her own instinctive fear of a Roomba near a ledge, and raises concerns about the manipulability of that attachment (a smart device nudging purchases) and, more provocatively, the risk of emotional/psychological harm from human-AI relationships (citing the Replica chatbot app and users self-harming), extending into speculation about "AI versions of ourselves" dating other AIs as a matchmaking mechanism.
On her health, Giertz recounts discovering — partly because her mother, visiting for a TED talk, pushed her to get a swollen eyelid checked — a golf-ball-sized brain tumor that had likely been growing since her teenage years, requiring surgery and subsequent radiation treatment for tissue that couldn't be fully removed. She describes surgery as more physically intense but more predictably linear in recovery, versus radiation's unpredictable, months-long cognitive fog (compounded by an Alzheimer's-preventive medication that she later learned, via Reddit, was also used recreationally to get high, which she found one of the scariest parts of the ordeal since it was the first time she felt her perception of reality itself affected). She reflects that the illness didn't make her reckless but reinforced how much she valued having taken care of her body beforehand, reshaped her relationship with self-discipline (redefining "being good" from pushing herself hard to listening to her body), and surfaced acute grief over not yet having had children, alongside gratitude for a fuller life than she'd expected. She notes an unusual detail: her brain fully reshaped itself back to a near-normal appearance after surgery removed a golf-ball-sized mass, surprising her doctors.
On business, Giertz describes deliberately diversifying beyond her YouTube "influencer" income (which she calls fragile — dependent on platform algorithm changes, ad regulation, and her own health/visibility) by launching a product company, Yetch, using her YouTube channel as an informal R&D and audience-testing pipeline. She discusses the sharp differences between building a one-off prototype and mass-manufacturing (cost-driven material and tooling constraints, brutal quality-control demands, learning to trust manufacturing partners despite the stakes) using her "Everyday Calendar" habit-tracking product (a capacitive-touch circuit board displayed as wall art, Kickstarter-funded and shipped roughly a year late) and a deliberately incomplete 500-piece jigsaw puzzle (missing one piece, which she keeps) as examples. She discusses keeping the Yetch brand deliberately separate from her personal YouTube identity so the products can stand alone, and the tension between cost-driven simplification (the kind of relentless "how do we get the cost down" thinking she compares to Elon Musk's approach to Optimus) versus Apple/Jony Ive-style uncompromising design-first development.
She recounts building a heavily reinforced electric pickup truck by cutting apart and modifying a Tesla Model 3 (roughly a year of planning plus a month of teardown, with an outside project manager given the safety stakes of car modification) purely to get a small electric pickup that didn't exist on the market at the time, and discusses recurring requests to sexualize or weaponize her robots, framing unwanted sexual comments as reflecting men's lack of role models for admiring women without romantic/sexual framing, and expressing more serious unease about industrial robotics' military and weapons applications after visiting a factory and encountering large industrial arms in person. On AI more broadly, she describes removing an Amazon Echo from her home over unease at being overheard, and expresses simultaneous excitement about capable AI assistants and serious concern about AI's potential to manipulate belief and behavior at scale, especially combined with algorithmic radicalization dynamics.
She closes with reflections on identity shaped by an itinerant adolescence (moving to China at 16, then Kenya as a teenager after her parents' separation, then working as an English teacher and briefly as an MMA journalist in Sweden before being ejected from a press event for asking a fighter about a violent-crime disclosure), describing herself as capable of feeling "home" almost anywhere but never fully at home anywhere as a result. Her closing advice for young people emphasizes that "enthusiasm is a much more potent fuel in life than duty" (rejecting the idea that boring/hard work is inherently more virtuous or important), the value of trying many different jobs to find the context where one's specific strengths and weaknesses fit rather than assuming a single "right" career, defining personal success independent of external metrics (subscriber counts, revenue) early enough to preserve control over one's own time, and treating public work with integrity as permanent — "tattoos on your internet self" — favoring long-term reputation over viral spikes.
Excerpts
On why she leans into self-deprecation, and its double edge:
“I definitely came from a place of building things that didn't work and kind of happily failing... but what I've realized now is there's also a defense mechanism — being self-deprecating is like always beating people to the punch... I'm still terrified to tell people how to do something even if I know, because it kind of opens you up for being shot down.”
On discovering her brain tumor and the fear it surfaced:
“The nurse looked at me in this way and was like, 'how long have you had symptoms for?' And that's when I knew that they'd found something... I was really both really grateful that I've gotten so much more out of life than I ever thought I would... but I was also really really sad that I hadn't had kids yet.”
On why enthusiasm, not duty, should guide career choices:
“Enthusiasm is a much more potent fuel in life than duty, and just because something is boring doesn't mean that it's important. I'm so much better at the things I enjoy, but school doesn't really teach us how to stay excited about something... just because this is fun doesn't mean that it's not important.”