Kelly grew up in Eight Mile in Michigan, the same streets Eminem rapped about.

His house was absolute chaos: a drunk stepfather, a drunk mother who once stabbed her husband and set the house on fire, and a kid who learned to survive by reading the room before anything else. By the time he got to college, he was selling drugs, racking up arrests, and lying on every job application about his two felonies. Then he went to jail.

That four months in a cell changed him forever: Kelly realized he was good at sales and started a telecom brokerage from nothing. He built it into a multimillion-dollar company even without a website.

Kelly wrote Harder Than Life. Then Happier Than Life. He built a podcast and an AI-driven cybersecurity company.

And he keeps going back into the hard stuff because he's learned feeling it is the only w ...