Welcome to indoctrination, a weekly conversation series about protecting yourself from systems of control.

I'm your host, Rachel Bernstein.

Hello, everyone. Today on the show, we have Claire Hoffman.

She's the author of the memoir, Greetings from Utopia Park,

and a journalist reporting for national magazines on culture, religion, celebrity, business,

and more. She was formerly a staff reporter for The LA Times and Rolling Stone. She's a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and has an

MA in religion from the University of Chicago and an MA in journalism from Columbia University.

She serves on the boards of the Columbia School of Journalism, ProPublica, and the Brooklyn Public Library, and her new book is Sister

Sinner, The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson.

Here's Claire Hoffman now.

Thank you. Here's Claire Hoffman now. It is so good to have Claire Hoffman with me on the show today.

This is going to be such an interesting conversation. It's going to tap into a lot of

different things, a lot of different groups, but also this one in particular that I can't wait

to talk about that I remember hearing about while growing up here in Los Angeles with this

mythical creature that happened to be real,

but also there's so much mythology around her that sounds like she really knew how to cultivate,

which is fascinating to me, because we see that a lot.

And we can see that it isn't necessarily just these modern techniques, but that they've been around a while.

And they're tried and true. And so I would love for you to take a moment to introduce yourself and then we'll start chatting.

Thank you so much, Rachel. My name is Claire Hoffman and I'm a journalist and a writer. I wrote my first book about the Transcendental Meditation

movement that I grew up in, and it's kind of an investigation and also a memoir about that

experience in Iowa. And then this is my second book, which is about Amy Semple McPherson, and it traces her rise to fame and then this incredible scandal that

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