How Creator Grace Dirig Became a Science Superstar on The King of Random

Let’s be honest. Science wasn’t everyone’s favorite subject in school. But thanks to the high-energy creator team behind The King of Random (TKOR), conversations about science and the surrounding natural world have become a lot more, well, natural. And fun.

If school failed at making science digestible, it’s ok because The King of Random is here to pick up where academics left off. By making testable predictions about our everyday world, subject matter that might have felt otherwise obtuse is now interesting.

TKOR’s educational videos often debunk common myths—or altogether confusing topics—and their exciting experiments enable fans to better understand the basics of how things work. Ever tried to master the concept of evaporation or distillation via text? Oof. But watching the group scoop up ocean water and boil it in order to make sea salt is really freaking cool. You can see why they have such a massive following.

Grace Dirig often hosts many of The King of Random’s instructional videos. Her energy is infectious and radiates in everything she does, and it shows—they have over 12.5 million YouTube subscribers and 1.8 million Facebook followers. She also hosts the official TKOR podcast, Random Theory, where she explores any and every random science theory she can think of.

In a clip called I Got STUCK to the Ceiling, the team uses caulk to glue Grace’s sneakers to the ceiling to see if she can hang upside down. She’s so authentically interested in the project you can’t help but want to better understand the principles behind adhesion and force. And to see if she falls down from the ceiling, obviously.

Grace isn’t just a personality for the show; she knows her sh*t. Science is her bread and butter. “I got a microscope for my 7th birthday,” she shares during an interview with Jellysmack. Though she’s always been drawn to observations and experiments, becoming a creator and joining a TKOR all sort of happened by chance. “[It] fell into my lap,” Dirig says. “I wanted to go into news and be a weatherwoman but King of Random slid into my DMs in a way, and they offered to bring me out to work with them.” She was just finishing up school majoring in Meteorology—the timing was perfect.

Since then she’s helped bring science to the forefront of the internet with The King of Random. Some of the group’s most successful videos involve asking simple questions and trying to solve them. In the video What Happens When You Try to FREEZE Anti Freeze?, their quest to find the answer is as messy as it is entertaining.

How Science Works For Grace 

What makes Grace the obvious choice to host the series is her true passion for the subject.

“I took everything I was learning in the classroom and [applied] it to real life. I just wanted to share my love of science with the world.” 

Creator Grace Dirig of The King of Random

It only takes a few minutes interviewing her to instantly see that learning and making is in her DNA. “Every day is a new adventure. You’re learning a new skill every single day.” She says it all with a growing smile. She loves what she gets to do.

And perhaps Grace’s biggest advantage is that she knows exactly what it feels like to be uninspired while learning merely about theories. “In school I didn’t love textbook learning,” she admits. “I wanted to experience it.” In part, it’s what makes her work so rewarding. “To give [this] opportunity to a child in a classroom that has learned in the textbook but is now watching me do a video on it, that means the world to me.”

But like all creators, there are challenging days where she needs to hit pause and head out into the real world for a fresh perspective. “I go for creative walks where I let my brain run,” she says. She makes a point to leave her phone at home.

For Grace, hitting pause isn’t to just find new ideas, though. Sometimes she needs to take an even longer break, especially if she’s faced with something a lot of creators unfortunately encounter: negative comments. “You want to show up and be bright and bubbly for [your audience] and sometimes it’s really tough when you read [hurtful] comments,” she says. “They always say don’t read the comments, but it’s also the only way to know your audience.” 

Luckily, she’s figured out how to remove herself from negativity and put her mental health first. “Take a deep breath, walk away, unplug, and just step back and breathe,” she recommends. “Go do something happy for a minute.”

So while millions of people subscribe to TKOR to see which scientific theory the group explores next, Grace knows that the true magic to being able to go bigger as a successful creator is her well-being. Whenever you need it, take that break, she recommends. “The internet will be there tomorrow.”