I spot the Tesla long before I see the strawberry-blonde ponytail of its driver. The car is a candy-apple-red Model 3 sedan that appears to have had part of its rear half deleted, so that it looks like a modish Chevy El Camino. Simone Giertz, the YouTuber behind the wheel, is meeting me under a highway overpass in northern Sonoma County so she can lead me to one of the secret workshops where, for the past year, she's been hacking away at the sharky EV to transform it into a pickup truck. Ten days ago, she posted a 31-minute YouTube video about building the “Truckla.” Eight million people have already watched it, but barely anyone has seen the mutant EV up close.
Leaning out of the Truckla's window, Giertz tells me she's been busy cleaning hay out of its bed. She gestures for me to follow her about a mile down a winding road in my 12-year-old gas guzzler. Thickets of tall trees give way to dry, grassy hills. The workshop where we're headed is a place where Burning Man artists and other tinkerers fabricate their work. As we get closer, a few cottage-sized kinetic sculptures appear in the fields alongside us, as if they'd been dropped from outer space.
When we arrive, Giertz introduces me to her main collaborator on the Truckla, Marcos Ramirez, an affable, bearded guy in a turquoise cap and overalls. It's midday-hot in the heart of wine country, and in the hangar-like workspace the two begin to rattle off everything they have left to do before the vehicle is truly finished. There's still some welding to do on the panel that divides the cabin from the truck bed, the car's interior needs to be waterproofed, and the tailgate doesn't work yet. In the beginning, Giertz (pronounced “Yetch”) intended to just graft a flatbed kit onto the front quarters of a Model 3. But she ultimately decided to preserve as many of the Tesla's svelte lines as possible—a plan that has required vastly more labor and finesse.
For the past couple of years, Giertz's primary vehicle has been a homely 1970s Comuta-Car—a golf-cart-sized electric vehicle sheathed in yellow ABS plastic—that she nicknamed Cheese Louise for its strong resemblance to a wedge of cheddar. Her new ride will no doubt draw just as many stares on the streets of San Francisco. But in contrast to the famously janky Comuta-Car, what matters most to Giertz right now is that the Truckla is functional. Elegant, even.
This, to say the least, is not the approach to design that made Giertz internet-famous. Four years ago, she jump-started her YouTube career by building a series of what she calls “shitty robots”—sloppy, hilarious, barely functioning gizmos. There's the Wake-Up Machine, an alarm clock with a rubber hand attachment that repeatedly slaps her awake; the Breakfast Machine, a robotic arm that pours cereal and milk into a bowl with comical lack of precision; and the Hair-Cutting Drone, a quadcopter with automated shears dangling from it by wire. (Giertz notes in her video about the drone that she's just moved to the US and doesn't yet have health insurance, so she opts to test the device on a bewigged mannequin. It goes badly for the mannequin.)
When she takes me for a ride in the Truckla, she tells me I'm among the first passengers to sit shotgun, and she's supremely confident behind the wheel. She beams when we stop for pizza in Geyserville and a handful of people pause to admire the parked Frankencar.
These days, at 29, Giertz is intent on making things that work. She's trying to design and ship useful products. She's in the early stages of producing a video series that she hopes will culminate in her traveling to space—and if there's anything you'd want to go off without a hitch the first time you try it, it's a trip to space. She's confronting for the first time in her life what family and friends describe as a complicated relationship with perfectionism.
“I still put a lot of time into things like editing a video and want to make it as good as it can be, but it's not the same as it was before,” she says. “I can't remember the last time I started crying because I felt like I hadn't been enough.”
For a long time, building shitty robots meant Giertz never had to face failure, even if the robots themselves failed. “One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is: Was building shitty robots in some way a method for me to minimize myself, to make myself smaller?” Giertz says. “Because that's what I notice—a lot of women being really scared to step up and be an expert.” Giertz's older videos are full of congeniality and persistent self-deprecation, which doesn't feel so charming to Giertz anymore.
“I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of male audiences didn't really come after me,” she says. “Because I wasn't puffing up my chest and saying, ‘I know what I'm doing.’ In some ways that makes me really sad.”
In order to stop undermining herself, Giertz is saying sayonara to shitty robots. She's plotting her next move, trying to navigate past her anxieties over control and failure and competence. At the same time, she's also contending with an entity that has literally taken up residence in her head—a kind of physical insult to the very idea of control and perfection. Simone Giertz has a brain tumor, and she's trying to be as creative as possible while her doctors try to destroy it.
Giertz grew up in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Sweden, about 6 miles outside of Stockholm. For 16 years, her mother was a ghost-hunter on Swedish reality TV; Giertz calls her “the face of the paranormal community in Sweden.” Her father was a TV producer who now works in media licensing.
Giertz's mother, Caroline, describes her daughter's upbringing as comfortable but middle class—“no fancy cars, summer houses, or big boats.” She was a bracingly self-sufficient child in comparison to her two older siblings, who liked to have their parents linger at bedtime and read story after story. “Simone was not like that,” her mother says.
As she grew up, Giertz was defiantly creative. She remembers being the only girl in her elementary school class who chose woodworking over sewing. Eventually, she would exhibit a kind of media savvy that may have derived from having two parents in TV. She also became intensely driven. “I think Simone felt obliged to overachieve, from some inner urge,” her mother says. “It was a bit painful to see.”
At age 16, Giertz went off as an exchange student to Hefei, China, where she studied Mandarin (and made an appearance on a Chinese sitcom). When she returned home, her mother picked her up at the airport. “It might have been one of the most surreal days in my life,” Giertz recalls. “It took about five minutes in the car before she told me she and my dad had gotten a divorce while I was gone.”
“I just said, ‘Oh wow, that's very brave of both of you.’ And then I decided to move to Kenya,” Giertz says.
(“That's one of the very few things I feel I could have done better,” her mother says. “I was trying to apologize for that just a week or two ago.”)
After three months back in Stockholm, Giertz departed for a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi to learn Swahili—and to flee the confusion of a disintegrating home. Then, after finishing high school, she went back to China for another half year; this time in Nanhai, outside of Guangzhou.
As a kid, Giertz was obsessed with getting good grades, but she attended university for only a year before dropping out. In 2012, she took a job as an editor for Sweden's official website, putting her Chinese language skills to work by retooling the Chinese version of the site. The following year she enrolled in a vocational school, this time to study advertising. As part of that program Giertz was required to get an internship. She nabbed one building products at a San Francisco engineering firm called Punch Through Design—which changed everything.
Her first builds involved Bluetooth Arduino boards. She made an iPhone accessory that turned the smartphone's screen into a makeshift guitar fretboard, giving the user actual strings to pluck. She made a motion-triggered bike light so riders wouldn't have to remember to turn it on. “It was fucking great, because I was the only nonengineer in a team of electrical engineers,” Giertz says. “I could come up with these ideas and build them and write tutorials on them.” After her internship, without a visa that would allow her to stay in the US, she decided to move back in with her mom in Sweden and live as frugally as she could, so she could keep making stuff. She was 24 at the time.
“I had just been pushing myself so hard my entire life, always trying to do the most difficult thing,” Giertz says. “And I thought, what would happen if I just freed up a bunch of time and let myself spend time on things I was excited about?”
Giertz uploaded her first robot video to YouTube in August 2015, and it was then that she introduced the persona of the shitty robot queen. The video was unceremonious and brief; only seven seconds long, more a GIF than a short film. In it, Giertz wears a teal helmet rigged with a robotic arm and a yellow toothbrush. For a few seconds, the arm sends the brush swooshing, paste-free, across Giertz's face while she grins.
Over time the shitty robot videos grew longer and more elaborate. By the end of that year, Giertz had uploaded a dozen clips—all documenting her attempts to build and test devices that solve everyday problems in the most inelegant, brutishly futuristic way possible. One showed a servo-motor-powered contraption that uses two butcher-knife blades to chop vegetables; watching it makes me instinctively pull my fingers back from my laptop. Another offered up an Arduino hack that sent electric shocks to electrodes on Giertz's face as she responded to YouTube comments.
Most of her early videos racked up views in the high hundreds of thousands. But it was a clip uploaded in February 2016 that propelled Giertz beyond YouTube's orbit. In it, Giertz unassumingly reads on an iPad while wearing a professional-looking pinstriped blouse, her hair cascading down the side of her face as a robot arm smears bright red lipstick on and around her mouth. Giertz blinks as if irritated, but she pays no mind to the robot or the makeup. She never seems overly concerned about her appearance. The six-second lipstick robot video—a kind of YouTube anti-makeup tutorial—cemented her image as the smart, funny, self-titled shitty robot queen who couldn't be bothered with your expectations of her.
That video was viewed 1.3 million times, and at least once by Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Giertz's video hit him, as he puts it, like a ton of bricks. “There's something so subversive and yet loving about technology at the same time, right?” he says. “Here was this awesome, jocular Swedish girl building robots, and this is a fairly sophisticated thing to try to do—and yet you're repeatedly watching these bots fail.”
Savage and his production team reached out to Giertz soon afterward and asked if she wanted to collaborate with him. They made a helmet that shoveled popcorn into its wearer's mouth, and Giertz later helped create paywalled videos for Savage's website, Tested.com. Despite Savage's delight in her early work, Giertz was intimidated. “I had the worst impostor syndrome,” she said in a video several months later about her first work with Savage. “I'm just a hobbyist. I don't know what I'm doing.”
After Savage came calling, so did Stephen Colbert. One night in the fall of 2016, Giertz and three of her barely functioning robots, including the lipstick machine, made an appearance on The Late Show. The clip is as much a display of Giertz's wit as it is of her contraptions, and she glows under the bright lights of late-night TV. “This is perfect for a nutritious meal,” she deadpans as the live studio audience loses it over her vegetable-chopping robot. Then she convinces Colbert to get his makeup done by the lipstick bot.
One of the more telling signs of Giertz's ascent to internet stardom was that, by the end of 2016, she was turning her arguments with advertisers into video content for her channel. According to Giertz, sponsors were suddenly taking issue with her language on YouTube, young lady. On the heels of the 2016 US presidential election, she teamed up with German YouTuber Laura Kampf to build a Pussy Grabs Back machine, a rubber hand hanging from a belt that's designed to thwart any vagina-grabbing attempts with an uppercut slap delivered to the attacker's groin. Advertisers bristled.
Giertz initially bowed to the pressure, deleting five of her videos at the behest of sponsors. Later, she posted a YouTube video titled “Why My Sponsors are Leaving.” (She cursed throughout the video.)
“To me, it's crazy that it has such weight,” Giertz tells me, referring to her language. “I really understand that parents are concerned, but kids know these words. I'm waiting for the documentary of someone with the blurred-out face and the morphed voice that's like, ‘Yeah, things really started going wrong for me when I heard shit and fuck on television.’ ”
So in December 2016, Giertz launched a page on Patreon, a subscription service platform for internet content creators, and said she would let STEM toymaker GoldieBlox make kid-friendly versions of her videos. It was a very Simone solution: She would publish her work on another platform, one that let her keep “Shitty” in her brand name but also do something nice for the kids.
What's notable about Giertz's body of work is that the shitty robots, as entertaining as they may be, aren't her most popular videos. Her most-viewed YouTube video to date is the 31-minute minidoc about the making of the Truckla. Her second most popular—9.4 million views—is titled “I Locked Myself in My Bathroom for 48 Hours,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Giertz experimented with confining herself to a small space for two days as part of a DIY astronaut training program of her own design. Her third-most-watched video chronicles the last of the astronaut prep sessions and shows Giertz floating around the padded cabin of a zero-gravity airplane flight.
Bathroom captivity aside, these videos would eventually become nods to the kind of projects that Giertz really wanted to spend her time on: long-term builds, products that have an actual purpose and not merely a cheeky one. But among Giertz's most-watched videos, three others stand out. They're videos she would never have willingly set out to make. These are titled “I Have a Brain Tumor,” “Back From Brain Surgery,” and, in January 2019, “My Brain Tumor Is Back.”
In the spring of 2017, Giertz started to notice that her right eyelid was swollen. A fan on Twitter even commented on it: “What happened to your right eye? It's like a bump above the eyelid.” A year later, in April 2018, the eye started to ache. MRI scans revealed a noncancerous meningioma growing on the front of her brain. The tumor, which she nicknamed Brian, was remarkable chiefly because of its size: 4.6 centimeters across.
“Plot twist,” Giertz says in a subdued voice during a YouTube dispatch about the golf-ball-sized growth at the time. “I don't even like golf. But I like my brain a lot.” Her face crumbles on camera, and she starts to cry, faced with the reality of potentially losing sight in one eye, being paralyzed on one side of her face, or suffering a stroke. By the end of the video, Giertz is joking about eye patch designs and ponders sending the excavated tumor into space.
When I ask Giertz about the decision to go public with her diagnosis, she says she's “very external” in how she processes things. “I wanted to tell absolutely everyone. Friends, colleagues, Lyft drivers, waitresses—absolutely everyone,” she says. “Seeing how other people reacted to it became a way for me to navigate the situation when I didn't really trust my own thoughts and feelings.” Her mother echoes this: “I think that was the best thing she could do. Why should you hide something like that? Her audience likes her.” But an internet audience is not the same as a group of real-life friends, something Giertz would become more aware of as her treatment went on.
Also, Giertz might not have anticipated how drawn out the process would become. On the day of her surgery, she chronicled her pre-op jitters, posting a 59-second video just before having her skull cut open, closing out with “I hope you're having a good day” and her signature “Byeee.” After a nine-hour surgery (“Shortest day of my life,” she says), Giertz began her recovery process.
Doctors weren't able to remove the entirety of the tumor, due to its proximity to other critical structures in her head. What remained of Brian grew, and much more quickly than anyone anticipated. Eight months after the surgery, in January 2019, Giertz announced that her brain tumor was back. She had T-shirts made with an imprint of her holey brain and began selling them in an online Teespring store. But it's clear in the video announcing the tumor's resurgence that Giertz is crestfallen.
If the campaign for 2018 was to evict Brian, Giertz says, the goal of 2019 was to burn Brian through radiation therapy. This required rounds of treatment that would sap her of energy, making it difficult for the typically healthy, yoga-practicing, meditating, mostly vegan Giertz to even get out of bed. In her non-vlogging moments, Giertz felt vulnerable and alone, despite her many fans expressing support. Her family had flown in for her surgery, and her mother returned for her radiation treatments, but at some point they all went back to Sweden. Giertz had to ask her Bay Area friends, like her main collaborator, Marcos Ramirez, for help.
Giertz's prognosis is good. But Brian has already altered her life deeply. “When you're young and reckless, you think you're never going to need people,” Giertz tells me at the wine-country workshop on that warm day in June. “But that was the first time in my life I've really, genuinely needed people.”
In a lot of ways, this required Giertz to embrace a role reversal. “She looks out for everyone on set,” says Laura Kampf, the YouTuber who collaborated with Giertz on the Pussy Grabs Back robot. “She's always worried that someone is hungry or didn't sleep enough.” I see this instinct as well. As I continue to meet with Giertz over a period of six months, she starts probing into how I'm doing and at one point says with a straight face that she's writing a magazine profile on me too.
“There've been times when I was working with people, and she's called me up and said, ‘Hey, when you weren't looking that person was kind of shitty to someone else on the crew, and I thought you should know that,’ ” Savage says. “Her values are just never not present in all the things that she's doing.”
Giertz lets me sit in on one of her many doctor's visits, provided that I agree not to record audio, take photos, or share the name of her ophthalmologist. (At one point, she texts me, “Asking for a friend: Is it really naive to let a journalist come along to a doctor's appointment?”) Most people in the waiting room are octogenarians, and the still-youthful Giertz, in her faded black jeans, blue denim jacket, and ponytail, won't sit unless everyone else has a seat.
After she is moved into an examination room, a doctor comes in and goes over Giertz's most recent scans. Her optical nerve doesn't look stressed, which is good, he says. The internal swelling has gone down, and he doesn't see evidence of persistent pressure on the nerve. The bigger concern is long-term damage, something Giertz has mentioned before. She doesn't know, and might not know for a decade, whether the tumor and subsequent radiation will have a lasting effect on her hormones and pituitary gland.
The doctor says he's going to run through some additional procedures today, to determine if Giertz's eye might offer up other subtle indicators of what her long-term recovery will look like. While the doctor and a nurse are examining the scans, Giertz turns to me and says, “Did I tell you that my brain has filled out?” as casually as if she had told me she was thinking of taking next Friday off, or that her neighbor had adopted a puppy. Recent scans show that there's been regrowth in the chunk of her brain that had been pushed aside when the giant tumor had taken up residence in her eye vault. “One side is still a little floofy,” she says. “But I was so, so happy.”
In July 2019, Giertz shared a blog post on Patreon explaining why she was no longer making shitty robot videos. Her energy had been limited since her surgery, she wrote, “so I have tried my best to only spend it on things I really want to do. And for now, that has not been shitty robots.” I ask her whether Brian helped mark this turning point for her. The answer is yes, but also no. Even before the brain tumor, Giertz says, she was starting to feel like “it was harder and harder to come up with ideas. I was always concerned that it was eventually going to be like beating a dead horse, and that the joke was going to be over and I didn't have anywhere else to go.”
Abandoning shitty robots was definitely detrimental to the success of her channel, she says, as beneficial as it may be for her well-being. Giertz has never really succumbed to the pressures of the internet content machine. She publishes her YouTube videos weeks, sometimes even months, apart from each other. A video with millions of views is sometimes followed by one with a few hundred thousand. Her Patreon dispatches are slightly more consistent but take different forms. Sometimes they're videos. Sometimes they're simply blog posts, like the one explaining why she wasn't building shitty robots anymore.
“She's doing it exactly right,” Kampf says. “I think the brain tumor slowed her down, but it made the community around her so much stronger, and I think she's completely unattached from the pressure of uploading on a regular basis.”
Giertz acknowledges that there are plenty of creators who produce more than she does, and that she may be sacrificing views in exchange for what she calls a healthier relationship with YouTube. Basically, by not producing as many videos, YouTube's system may not be bubbling her videos to the top of watch lists as much as it would for creators who post a video every week, or even every day. “The algorithm, it's a black hole,” she says.
She won't say much else about YouTube, even as the platform faces continuing scrutiny for facilitating the spread of misinformation, toxic content, and harmful videos, and for its management (or mismanagement) of all of the above. “I think social media platforms are trying to be responsible, but there are also definitely instances where they try to make it seem like they're being responsible, and for revenue or profit they're doing another thing,” Giertz says cryptically.
In the car on the way back to San Francisco from her doctor's appointment, Giertz asks me if she can read aloud a draft of something she's been working on. She's nervous about it, she says, and later she'll corner a top newspaper executive at a media confab to try to convince him to print it. It's an open letter to YouTube creators, urging them to reconsider taking sponsor money from fossil fuel companies. Giertz won't call out the YouTubers by name, but she'll speak candidly about what she sees as hypocrisy at a systemic level. “Oil companies trying to convince us that they're green is the gaslighting effort of the century,” Giertz tweeted in November.
Every time I talk to Giertz, she's hatching plans. One day over lunch in San Francisco, she is forlorn because the shipments of her Every Day Calendar—a habit-tracking wall calendar that raised more than half-a-million dollars on Kickstarter—arrived at her workshop damaged. She plans to ship them to customers in December, and her old fear of failure has let itself in again. A few weeks later she tells me she's going to build a coffee table made of matchsticks. (When it reaches the end of its useful life, you can just light it on fire.) When I call her again in October to ask about her post-Truckla plans, Giertz head fakes and tells me about her puzzle project. She's building a solid white puzzle with one piece missing, which she wants to ship to provoke the cringey feeling creators have when something is incomplete. The puzzle box reads, “499/500 pieces included.”
All of these embody what Giertz calls exploratory building—a grown-up version of playtime. I get the sense that they're important to her, fulfilling that inner drive. I also get the sense that they're projects to fill time while she's incubating bigger ideas. Like Truckla.
Her Truckla project has been, by almost all metrics, a success. At over 10 million views, it's her most popular video to date. More important, it proved that a new formula was feasible for Giertz; that she could invest as long as a year on a project and people would respond to it all the more. Even Elon Musk, who has trailed Giertz in his efforts to launch an EV pickup truck, took note of the video. He invited her to his own “Cybertruck” unveiling in late November.
It was all so encouraging that for a while last summer, Giertz flirted with the idea of moving to Los Angeles to launch a video series about building cars, almost ditching her San Francisco workshop for a much larger space in Tinseltown. Later, she scrapped that idea as she set her sights on something even bigger. Now she's in contract negotiations with a media company—she refuses to say which one—to make a TV show in space.
Or … at least a TV show about space. Giertz alternates between saying “about” and “in” when she's talking about the show she wants to make. I point out that the preposition matters. Will she film this TV series from orbit? Or would the videos just chronicle what it might take to get there? Hopefully both, she says.
This thread of space exploration has been running through her work for years: the DIY astronaut training, the zero-gravity flight, locking herself in confined spaces for days, publicly fantasizing about blasting her brain tumor into orbit. I ask her why going to space captivates her so much. “Because it's such a worthy goal,” she says. “I started studying physics because I wanted to be an astronaut. Now I want to show a flawed human going to space.”
For the new Simone Giertz, accepting her own flaws and embracing grand, non-shitty designs are of a piece. “There are so many things that are amazing that are not perfect. And there are so many things that are perfect that are fucking boring,” she says. “Perfect is a corset. It doesn't let you breathe. It doesn't let you roll around. It's a small pen to be in.”
Space is pretty much the opposite of all that (notwithstanding all those confined capsules). For Giertz, getting there is more a matter of when than if. When I ask if she has a planned timeline for liftoff, she replies, “I mean, I have time next weekend.”
Hair and makeup by Amy Lawson and Miranda Gulyash
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