All right. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on tonight show.

I have a very special guest. His name is Warren Cole Smith. So it's three names Warren Cole Smith.

Make sure you type that in when you look for this book that he just published, the title of which is faith-based fraud.

Learning from the great religious scandals of our time just published May 2021.

And Warren Cole Smith is president of Minutes.com, which is dedicated to bringing transparency,

accountability, and restored credibility to the Christian ministry world.

Before joining Ministry Watch, he held leadership positions at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and World Magazine.

Warren also hosts the weekly podcast Listening in a long-form interview program heard by tens of thousands of subscribers each week.

Before transitioning to a career in ministry 20 years ago, Warren for 15 years was in the corporate world,

including seven years as the marketing director

for a major division of Pricewaterhouse Cooper's, the global accounting and consulting firm.

So we're going to talk about this book. It's an excellent book. It gave me a lot of

insight. It was a kind of wide-angle view of a lot of the problems in modern evangelical

ministries. And some of the names people may know or not know, but he's going to talk

more about that. So Warren, Cole Smith, are you there? I am. Well, thank you. It's good to be on with you.

Awesome. Great. Well, thanks for agreeing to the interview. For people who may not have heard your background,

can you talk about how you got involved in Ministry Watch and what led you to write this book, Faith-based Front?

Yeah, well, I'll kind of go back to the very beginning, I guess you could say, and you can

fast forward me through some of this if you want. But, you know, I became interested in writing

in journalism when I was in high school and wrote from, I went to the University of Georgia, and they have a, you know, pretty good journalism program.

Usually catrated a top 25 journalism program in the country and I wrote for the school newspaper.

So I've had a long time fascination with journalism.

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