Accomplished radio and TV host Kyle Sandilands has revealed that he had a very different dream job in mind when he was a young kid.

During an appearance on The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show podcast, the shock jock admitted that family trauma drove him to aspire to be a policeman.

“I’ve never drunk alcohol. Like I might have a sip of champagne [at an event] because I always thought alcohol made my family ugly, and when everyone was drinking, the cops would always show up,” Sandilands explained.

He added, “‘Cause that’s what I wanted to be before radio, my dream was to be a policeman, because I saw them as heroes, ’cause when they would arrive at our house, I would think ‘Thank God they’re here”.

Sandilands said that he got involved in petty crime, which derailed his dream of becoming an officer.

“So I always wanted to be a cop, but then I got done for unlawful use of motor vehicle and  – they didn’t charge me for this – but I nearly got charged for impersonating a police officer ‘cause I was that obsessed and a fantasising type of kid, that I had a stolen car, I was homeless and a fake federal police ID and I was flashing it at McDonald’s to get free food. Like I was desperate,” he said.

“When you’re 16, you don’t think of ‘What are you really doing here? Is this is dangerous?’ I was just surviving. And some other kids that were homeless were bashing people at ATMs and I thought I could never do that. I could never hurt anyone for myself. So I would tell them like ‘Let’s do things this way instead. Let’s steal this bread from behind the supermarket and the milk and let’s eat that. Let’s not hurt someone just to go to McDonald’s ‘cause it just was not something I wanted to be involved in.” 

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However, Sandiland’s career took a very different path, and he landed his first job in radio at the age of 21 at 4TO Townsville. He quickly climbed through the rankings at the station and has gone on to be one of the most successful presenters in Australia.

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