ElectroBOOM

Who Is ElectroBOOM?

ElectroBOOM is Mehdi Sadaghdar — the Iranian-Canadian electrical engineer who built 5 million YouTube subscribers by inventing a format that had no real precedent in educational content: genuinely accurate electrical engineering education delivered through physical comedy that involves regularly electrocuting himself, catching sparks from short circuits, burning his fingers on hot components, and generally subjecting himself to the predictable consequences of the electrical mistakes he is in the process of explaining. Born in Iran in approximately 1980 and educated as an electrical engineer before emigrating to Canada, he launched his channel in 2012, initially producing straightforward engineering content before developing the physical comedy dimension that made his channel genuinely distinctive: the humor is not performed alongside the education, it is integrated into the education, because the shocks and sparks are the actual consequence of the electrical concepts he is demonstrating — touching a charged capacitor hurts in direct proportion to how much voltage is stored, which is both funny and a better illustration of electrical potential energy than any diagram.

What his audience — which includes both engineering students who find his content useful for understanding concepts they are formally studying and general viewers who have no engineering background but cannot stop watching a man voluntarily electrocute himself — identifies as ElectroBOOM's specific quality is the engineering authenticity: the mistakes are real engineering mistakes, the explanations are accurate to the level that engineering professionals validate, and the comedy emerges from genuine consequences rather than manufactured spectacle. He is not pretending to get shocked — he actually gets shocked, because the voltage is actually there, because the circuit actually has the energy the explanation claims it has.

Origins: Tehran to Canada, Engineering Career & the Comedy-Education Integration

Mehdi Sadaghdar studied and worked as an electrical engineer in Iran before emigrating to Canada, where he launched ElectroBOOM in 2012. His initial content was more straightforwardly technical — engineering explanations without the physical comedy element that later became his signature — and the gradual integration of self-inflicted electrical consequences into the educational content was both an aesthetic development and a discovery about what his audience responded to. The key insight was that the consequences of electrical mistakes were simultaneously funny (a grown adult yelping and dropping a component) and pedagogically precise (the yelp is directly calibrated to the circuit's actual voltage and current, which means it communicates the electrical quantity being demonstrated more viscerally than any numerical label on a diagram). His background as a practicing engineer rather than a professional science communicator meant that the errors he made on camera were real engineering errors — not scripted to look good, but actual mistakes that a competent engineer makes when working carelessly or quickly — giving the comedy a grounded quality that distinguishes it from scripted "bloopers."^[1]

Engineering Community, Misinformation Debunking & 5M Subscribers Through STEM Discovery

ElectroBOOM occupies a specific and valuable position in YouTube's electrical engineering content ecosystem: his channel functions as an authoritative debunking resource for the viral misinformation about electricity that YouTube's recommendation algorithm regularly amplifies — free energy device claims, perpetual motion machines, overunity generators, and other pseudoscientific electrical content that generates high engagement through spectacular claims. His responses to these videos, which apply genuine engineering analysis to demonstrate specifically why the claimed device cannot work as advertised, reach larger audiences than the original debunked videos in many cases because his credibility as a practicing engineer gives his corrections authority that amateur debunkers lack. His 5 million subscribers include engineering students, hobbyist electronics makers, and general viewers attracted by the comedy — a heterogeneous audience whose shared characteristic is that they continue watching after the funny moments because the engineering content rewards their attention.^[2]

Brand Deals & Engineering Education Creator Economics

ElectroBOOM's estimated brand deal rate is $15,000–$50,000 per YouTube placement, reflecting 5 million YouTube subscribers in the engineering and technically-educated adult demographic — engineers, engineering students, electronics hobbyists, and technically curious adults whose consumer behavior in electronics components, engineering tools, software, and technical education products is disproportionately high relative to entertainment audiences of equivalent size. His channel's audience quality for engineering-specific brand partnerships is exceptional: a viewer who watches electrical engineering demonstration videos is self-selecting into a commercially valuable demographic for electronics suppliers, engineering software companies, and technical education platforms. His comedy-driven discovery mechanism — general viewers find his channel through the humor and stay for the engineering — provides his sponsors ongoing access to a more general audience than purely technical educational channels reach, while the core engineering audience provides the verification credibility that makes his technical endorsements persuasive. For engineering and science creator rate benchmarks, see our influencer pricing guide and brand deal negotiation guide.

Related Creators

MinutePhysics's hand-drawn physics explanation and ElectroBOOM's live electrical engineering demonstration both demonstrate that genuine scientific accuracy — not simplified or dumbed-down accuracy, but the actual physics — translates to YouTube audiences when the communication format is precise enough to carry it. Where MinutePhysics compresses conceptual physics into 2-minute visualizations, ElectroBOOM expands engineering demonstrations into 10-20 minute comedy-integrated sessions — different duration strategies for the same goal of making real science comprehensible to non-specialists. Both channels exist because the creators actually understand the science at practitioner level, and the audiences of both channels sense this and calibrate their trust accordingly: Henry Reich's physics is accurate because he studied it, Mehdi Sadaghdar's engineering is accurate because he practiced it. 3Blue1Brown's mathematical visualization and ElectroBOOM's electrical engineering demonstration both show that STEM content's educational depth and entertainment value are not in tension when the creator's genuine expertise provides the content's natural boundaries — you cannot fake knowing why the circuit is going to spark before it sparks, and that knowledge is itself the entertainment.

Sources

1. 1 IEEE Spectrum -- ElectroBOOM: How Mehdi Sadaghdar Built the Only Electrical Engineering Channel That Requires Safety Goggles for the Presenter (2019)
2. 2 Popular Science -- The Iranian-Canadian Engineer Who Debunks Free Energy Hoaxes by Building Them and Watching Them Fail (2022)

Frequently Asked Questions

ElectroBOOM — Official Social Media & Links

All accounts below are the verified official profiles for ElectroBOOM. Follower counts are approximate and updated periodically.