Simone Giertz is an inventor, designer, engineer, and roboticist famous for a combination of humor and brilliant creative design in the systems and products she creates. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Simone's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@simonegiertz
Simone's Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimoneGiertz
Simone's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonegiertz
YETCH Store: https://yetch.store

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:06 - Early creations
18:58 - Sh*tty Robots
33:56 - Robots and human connection
36:11 - Dating AI
39:30 - Proud parent machine
41:21 - Creative process
42:47 - Bubble wrap music box
48:09 - Education
53:43 - Difficult projects
55:13 - TED talk
1:01:29 - Brain tumor
1:10:07 - Fear of death
1:14:31 - Mass production
1:29:56 - Truckla
1:34:46 - Weapons
1:38:45 - Consciousness
1:40:49 - MMA
1:44:53 - China, Kenya, and USA
1:49:45 - Advice for young people
1:53:38 - Meaning of life

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It's a machine, it was my friend Daniel Beauchamp and I, we had this long running joke about a proud parent machine that you could give a quarter and it pats you on the shoulder and says, proud of you.

So yeah, I still have that hanging on my wall in my workshop.

I just think it's a really funny concept and also I executed the build well.

Yeah, basically it's just a motorized arm and this kind of torso of a person.

It's just laser cut plywood and it kind of has like, it looks creepy.

Because I just thought that sounded more funny than proud of you, daughter.

And also proud of you, son, just it immediately communicates that it's a parent.

It's not just like a colleague or something.

Yeah, but he added like chat GPT on top of that and fine tune it on conversations you've had with your parents and all of a sudden you have a thing that can fundamentally transform your psyche.

The following is a conversation with Simone Giertz, an inventor, designer, engineer, and roboticist famous for a combination of humor and brilliant creative design in the systems and products she creates, including as part of her new product design company called Yetch.

She has a popular YouTube channel where she has demonstrated a lot of her incredible and fun designs and inventions from quote, "'Shitty robots' to a Tesla Model 3 converted into a truck." But where she also revealed her personal journey after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Simone is a brilliant, fun, and inspiring human being.

It was truly an honor for me to get to meet her and to have this chat.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Simone Gietzsch.

What was the first cool thing you built where you fell in love with the process of making stuff?

You know, I think in the beginning of building stuff, you run into the limitations of your skills so much.

So I feel like honestly, building gets less and less frustrating, or like I love it more and more the more I know.

are fun, but it's like when you have an idea of something and you want to make it a certain level and then you just have to compromise with the materials and the tools and the skills you have.

So I can't remember first time where I felt like, wow, this was so smooth.

I feel like a lot of people I watch them build stuff and it's just like watching water pour down, you know?

And for me, it's just like trying to shove a toy car into a wall.

So you're not able to step back and marvel like at the early creations even like even like we're not even talking the Arduino stuff even before then.

I'm from Sweden and you have to choose either sewing or woodworking and I chose like woodworking in middle school And I remember the sense of pride when I got to bring something home and that thing of like, oh my God, I get to show my parents this.

And I think that is kind of the feeling that I've built my job around.

It's like the sense of pride and wanting to show people something that I made.

And back then it was like a little wooden spoon, you know, and now it's a slightly larger wooden spoon.

Wooden spoon that is dynamic and moves and has a mind of its own.

You first started doing more engineering type stuff with Arduino boards at Punch-Thru Design, which is an SF engineering firm.

What are, just from your memory there, what are some cool things you built there?

So the thing is, I went to advertising school and I just like a vocational studies a year.

And I realized there that I didn't care much for advertising, but I thought it was really fun to build stuff and programs.

So like I just completely focused on that.

And there I built my first hardware project or electronics project, which was this iPhone case with retractable guitar strings.

So basically I imagined that you could pull out guitar strings from the bottom of your iPhone, and you could pluck it to your belt and then you could hold a cord on the screen.

And I built that together with my friend Jonathan and I was like, oh, this is dope.

And I considered like, oh, should I go to school for this?

But then I thought, maybe I can get a job and I could get paid to learn about electronics.

So just based off of that 1 project, I got the job at Punch Through Design, which actually was a 1 year internship.

Can you explain what we're talking about here?

So it's a case with guitar strings attached.

These are not on the screen guitar strings?

So they're actual strings that you pull out.

So there's a mechanism that's almost like a seat belt mechanism.

And yeah, you pull them out from the bottom of your phone, and you can attach them to your belt.

There's a few different ways to decide if somebody is touching a guitar string.

What you do in a real guitar is you have the little, it's like measuring the vibration or the change.

You're measuring how the guitar is vibrating.

You can't really do that because I can't have a receiving sensor because the guitar strings are going to move in relationship to that because you don't have like a rigid neck.

And this is like, yeah, this was my first electronics project.

But what I decided was to use capacitive touch, because that is independent on if the guitar strings are moving in relationship to something or in relation to something.

So basically, there was just this little Bluetooth Arduino board that this company Punch Through Design made.

And I measured the capacitive touch, so like whenever the guitar string was measured, there was this little microcontroller that was like, oh my God, a guitar string got measured or touched, and then that sent a signal over Bluetooth to my phone and I'd built a little iPhone app that interpreted those Bluetooth signals and then checked what type of cord I was holding on the screen and then played the coherent sound.

So you're doing the multi-touch sensing there.

I honestly cannot believe that I pulled it off because I think I was, ignorance was definitely bliss because that was like, yeah, the first hardware project I'd ever built, the first iPhone app I'd ever programmed.

And now if somebody was like, hey, I want this to be my first project, I would probably be like, oh, that's a lot.

Because That's such an interesting thing for people to hear because it's your first project and a lot of people stop because of the difficulty of their first project.

They never truly discover their own genius because they stop at the first and you didn't stop.

So it'd be interesting to kind of psychoanalyze you on the couch of why you didn't stop.

You have to figure out how to, did you know how to program much or no?

I mean a little bit, but I never programmed or done any iOS apps.

Okay, so you have to figure out how to get, forget like what the app does, just get the app running and working.

And then you have to figure out how to get the sensors in like real time, the finger touching, and you have to connect how to get the capacitors touch working with the microcontrollers.

Do you know anything about the capacitor touch sensors at that time?

She's, I have an Italian grandma and I always trying to get her, we're like trying to get her to tell her recipes and every recipe starts with, it's very simple.

And then there's like 45 minutes of her explaining it.

It's like with gymnastics at the Olympics, they make it look easy.

The best people in the world always make the impossible seem easy.

I pride myself with making buildings look really hard because I feel like I'm always struggling so much.

0 gosh, I mean this is such a long time ago.

6 strings and you can touch it and then there's, wow.

I still think it's such a cool concept to have this like mobile, I'm not even a guitar player, I don't know.

I was, I mean, I got the idea because I was kind of strumming on my charge cord of my phone.

Yeah, but I've been thinking about it because I'm like, oh man, it would be really fun to go back to that project with what I know now.

But the problem with it is that when you're producing the tension in your string just with your arm, you can't make it taut enough to actually play.

Like it kind of becomes playing these like saggy strings.

So it's, you're not really getting that experience.

And I think that's why, I mean, I, yeah, I haven't really pursued it.

if there's a way to generate the tightness from the case itself.

So a device that unfolds and then with some kind of tightening mechanisms tightens.

but then it kind of becomes this like whole thing in a guitar.

Then it just becomes a really shitty guitar.

Like, which this is a really shitty guitar, but it's also

But it's cool that you have an interface between a device that's capable of incredible computational power and an actual hardware thing.

Is there something that you can psychoanalyze that made you finish that others could hear in their own struggle to do their first project like that?

Because you were in a non-engineering person, technically.

And you did a pretty cool, renegade, out there, wild, no instructions engineering project.

No, it definitely was an off-road build where It's like if you're building a Lego kit, it's very much on the road and you're following instructions.

This is like you have no idea if you're headed for a cliff or a dead end or you're going to get stuck.

I think it had a natural pressure to it because it was a school project.

So it did have deadlines built into it and stuff like that.

But I think also it was just so incredibly motivating when I realized that I might be able to pull it off.

Like that was I felt like a bloodhound, you know, You're just like, oh my God, I can actually make this happen.

I think if I hadn't seen that, the horizon, it would have been harder to stick through.

Were you able to see the end of the tunnel pretty early on?

So there's something to just suffering for a while.

I don't know how your brain works, but it's like if I have a problem, I can't stop thinking about it.

Like I spent 2 and a half years designing a coat hanger.

Like I get so into it, because I think it's so much fun.

Take me to this 2 year journey of the coat hanger.

It began with a corner in my home where I couldn't fit a coat rack.

The thing is I shouldn't have brought this up because I'm gonna release it as a product probably in a year.

It solves a fundamental problem in the human condition.

And I am so excited about it and I cannot, I don't, yeah, but this is, I get so

pumped about it because I see it's just this issue or like this problem that I wanna solve and I kinda can't put it to rest until I have.

I mean, speaking of cone hangers, doorknobs have always been interesting to me.

It's cool how there's things that everybody uses that somebody designed.

So, this is, I have 2 big, so basically I started on YouTube and I've been doing that for like the last 7 or 8 years.

And I've kind of been thinking of like, okay, what's next for me?

Because I want to keep on trying out new things.

And I'm kind of going into 2 different avenues.

1 is the product business that I started, Code Hingers, TBD.

Then I am working on a pilot episode of a show where each episode is about an everyday object and why they look the way that they do.

We've written a pilot episode about forks, and it's all about

So we've written a pilot episode about forks and

Why did this became the eating implement of the West?

And every everyday object that you have and that you just take for granted, somebody's just made it up.

I mean, presumably most objects are optimal, you hope.

I think is so like the world around us, and this is why I love building things is because it just opens up this idea that the world around us is so malleable, and you can make objects work for you better.

I had a fruit bowl and I was always annoyed that I had either too little or too much fruit for it.

So I made a fruit bowl where I can change the diameter of it.

It has a mechanism so you can like make it bigger or smaller.

And that's just like the thing of being like

And I think like, I want to make an episode about doorknobs.

Why are they placed the way where they are?

I think that's going to be a rabbit hole from which you will never return.

I would happily live in that rabbit hole forever.

Like if I can dig out a little niche for myself there, because I think it's like,

They're also on different sides of doors.

You never, like the push-pull situation on doors in general, like that's 1 of the main problems of humanity is figuring out the push-pull.

It's just, okay, how many, there's 8000000000 people on earth.

Every single second, there is millions of people being embarrassed by the confusion of whether to push

Right now there's somebody, some guy, first time in college, he's trying to be impressive to everybody, he pushes and he plays it off like it's cool.

That was why I think it's so interesting with forks is that forks actually affect our eating behaviors.

And they can get you to eat faster or slower, take bigger bites or smaller bites, and there

are all these ways, or like the social, I mean, the reason that chopsticks work is because they do the food chopping in the kitchen

And also you have a bowl that you bring to your mouth, whereas a plate you keep on the, like there are just all these ways in which these objects affect our behavior, opening and closing doors, and I think it's such an interesting take on culture through human behavior through these objects that we use every day

Yeah, and then there's institutions that are controlling our mind that don't want us to know the truth.

Yeah, no, it's all big utensil is behind all of it.

All right, so I mean, in those early days, did you suffer from imposter syndrome?

Like that leap to being an engineer, Was there, especially when you started working a bunch of the design on a team of engineers, was there insecurity?

I think I always try to flip my flaws into selling points.

And for that, so getting that job, I was like, you're a team of engineers, everybody working here is an engineer.

You need somebody who can be your filter and tell you when something's gonna be too hard for your customers to understand.

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Simone Giertz: Queen of Sh*tty Robots, Innovative Engineering, and Design | Lex Fridman Podcast #372