SIMONE GIERTZ

I don't believe in prayer, I'm a pretty hardcore agnostic.

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 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.

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.

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 wanted to automate any part of my life that I could. And the over-the-top solutions are more fun than the useful ones.

I try to view my YouTube channel as a logbook of personal interests.

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.

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.

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'm kind of a challenge junkie, I think.

The way I approach my insecurities is by making sure I'm the first person laughing at myself.

A lot of people make the mistake of setting the bar too high.

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.

I build a robot version of Jenna Marbles' dog, Kermit. It turned out a little bit worse than I had anticipated.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Finding a better way is all I do.

I'm good at pitching my weaknesses as strengths.

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.

It's all men on my channel. All my comment sections are engineers at Google.