Author(s): Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki

Forthcoming

"How did a shy Polish immigrant kid-Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki-evolve into the wildly eccentric Dr Karl? The only child of Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in 1950, little Karl was wildly idiosyncratic from the get go. In the sixties, he roasted raw chickens on the tail pipe of the rally car he raced through the mountains of Wollongong. In the seventies, he entered his self-described ""drug-crazed hippie years."" After he applied to be a NASA astronaut in the 1980s and failed, he announced the launch of the first Space Shuttle on Double J instead, which also launched his media career. From there, it was stratospheric rise from radio to TV, books, newspapers, speaking, podcasts and the internet. But the only time Karl knew which direction he was going in was when he was a long-haired, dope-smoking taxi driver (and even then, he often got lost). He's made everything up as he's gone along, wandering down more than a dozen career paths, from being a TV weatherman (really) to a professional 4WD tester in the outback (really) to being a roadie for Bo Didley (really). And he's failed at nearly all of them. Karl's origin story teaches us that it's okay not have a linear path through life, and that by following our curiosities and our passions, we can bend the universe to our liking. You don't have to know all the answers, as long as you ask the right questions."