Okay, we are alive. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show.

I have a very special guest. His name is Paul Smith, S-M-I-T-H. It's just published a book in 2025.

Full title of the book. If you're watching this on X Rumble or Rock Finn, you will see the cover of it. And the full title of the book is

Cruel and Unusual Punishment, A Memoir of the Psychological Realities of Federal Prison.

And these are kind of current events, recent events. He was in federal prison during COVID.

And this is his first book and it's been published through the great publishing house

of Wild Blue Press, who I've had a lot of their authors, and they're almost always great

books and really great guests.

So I'm delighted to have them.

Paul Smith, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

For people who may not have heard your name story or maybe not familiar with the book,

maybe you can talk about your background, the writing of the book, the researching of the book,

and then we can start from there.

Okay. All right. So let's start with who I am. I was born in Detroit in 1964. In 1970, my parents moved, you know, my siblings and I up to a rural area in northern Michigan. So I spent, I was raised there.

So I grew up in a country setting. I have a bachelor's degree in economics and a PhD in clinical

psychology. I spent most of my adult life in the field of psychology.

I worked in various settings, a hospital setting, university at Wayne State University,

outpatient clinics, community mental health, and in 2007, I opened my own

private practice clinic. The practice began with just me and another clinician and I had a

halftime staff, administrative staff, and it grew quickly.

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