Seated seminar with lots of laughs and a few tense and emotional moments.

Experienced: August 13, 2017
Location: Arena Cinema
Address: 1625 N Las Palmas Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028
Price: $29.99-$99.99 (tiered tickets)
Audience Size: 75 (estimate)
Runtime: 90-150 minutes (depending on tier)
More Information: The Lust Experience site, Noah Sinclair site, Instagram, Facebook

In the weeks and days leading up to the event ticket holders were asked to participate in some extracurricular preliminary lessons in The System. There was the controversial Workshop as well as some other tasks done at home and online. Things like posting to social media one thing you hope to fix about yourself or periscoping one thing you hate about yourself. These tasks were cathartic for many and a great way to realize that despite all of our appearances we have some core things in common like insecurities, issues, and disappointments in this life. It was a far cry from what I was expecting with The System thus far but Noah did imply that we wouldn’t realize the method to his madness.

The day of the event attendees were given a schedule of when to show up based on the ticket we purchased:

5pm - Winners
5:30 - Meh
6pm - Garbage People.

That corresponded to the different ticketing “packages” sold from the high end “IN IT TO FUCKING WIN IT” at $99.99, to the middle tier “I’m almost cool” at $49.99, down to “I showed up” at $29.99. Much of the Noah Sinclair and The System promotional materials had been pretty over the top, in your face, tongue in cheek, and ironic. The show itself was no different.

I was in the Meh batch of tickets and we were let in 5 at a time right at 5:30pm. The first couple of batches got to watch Noah reluctantly, almost disgustingly, sign his signature on a poster. Not once asking anyone’s name or even acknowledging them. He would just sign and wave the poster around until someone took it. After getting the signature we were told to walk into the theater.

The Winners, about 10 of them, were already seated and enjoying their drinks. Apparently the Winners got to spend some time with Noah and drink some fancy alcohol with the man but it sounds like their main interaction beyond that was to answer what they liked the most about him.

This was a small theater with a stage with three chairs on it. One was off to the left side and two were off to the right (one a red king’s chair) side by side in an interview style set up. The screen in the middle of the stage was cycling through nuggets of wisdom (aka how to manipulate people or get what you want) to live The System life. There was hip hop playing through the speakers.

The top two tiers got to watch a warm up to the main event for about 25 minutes hosted by two disciples of The System. It consisted of hypothetical situations (fire your brother, who helped found your company, on his birthday or conduct a board member meeting using only gibberish and physical movement) with random people pulled up from the audience to participate. The vibe was light hearted in nature with a lot of jokes cracked by the hosts.

At 6pm the Garbage People were let in and the show began. Holly, the host of the evening, came out and rolled right into a revealing interview with Sarah Sinclair. She came out looking like a deer in headlights and was very stilted and awkward. Much of Sarah’s responses to the interview elicited chuckles from the audience. She mentioned how she and Noah compete for their son’s affection to the point of having a scoreboard at home indicating who he loves the most at any given moment. Sarah would say something that sounded shocking and funny but follow it up with a one liner that fit The System.

The biggest reveal with Sarah was that she was set up with Noah by Horace (Noah’s father) via her yearly medical exam that turned into further testing before she was ultimately chosen to be the perfect mate for Noah. Horace apparently has many hospitals around town for unknown purposes. During Sarah’s description of how she and Noah met, Horace approached the stage and was visibly unhappy with Sarah’s reveal. It looked as if he was about to shut the interview down when Tom Barrow (scientist, revealed at the iConfidant Meet & Greet to be behind a lot of the brainwashing technology used by the OSDM) cooled him down.

Andy Jenkins (confuseddude on the forums) was recently revealed to be a product of The System in this video and, with Sarah, conducted the Workshop from a couple of weeks ago. He came out on stage and started out much in the same manner as Sarah where he appeared to be shy and not know what to say. He eventually launched into a speech singing the praises of Noah and The System. Andy meandered through seemingly random topics, once bringing two people from the audience to debate the best Batman, to prove a point. “That which I believe was defining me was actually killing me.”

His point was that we let things like pop culture define us as individuals but they’re ultimately useless. He discussed how our primal instincts are manipulated on every level from the sweet foods we eat to the likes we crave on social media. He was drawing parallels between our excesses and masturbation. Unnecessary exploitations of human emotions for unnecessary pleasure, ultimately not really living life. He finished off his diatribe with a one liner like “before.. I only knew how to masturbate but Noah Sinclair taught me to fuck!” The analogy fit perfectly and had the crowd doubled over with laughter. He then proceeded to chant “Noah Sinclair!” over and over until Holly finally took the microphone away from him.

The tone then quickly changed as Holly brought out a special guest. It was a key player, Mike Fontaine (My Haunt Life), from last year’s The Tension Experience. He had been mostly absent this season but gave us a glimpse into his current headspace and how he was open to The System helping him after seeing the good it did with others through the recent periscope tasks. There were several audience members in tears because of his powerful, presumably unscripted, real life struggles. He spoke from the heart and it was a huge, unexpected, emotional moment for the community and this seminar.

What followed was a montage of some poignant clips from various audience periscopes ending with Neil Patrick Harris talking about how The System has helped him in his life.

Holly then said “this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. A man who needs no introduction!” Rap music blaring through the speakers and stage lights were flashing for an, ironically played out, over the top introduction as Noah Sinclair took the stage. Up until this point the show had been so tight and entertaining I had actually forgotten the reason we were all gathered together! I was genuinely excited.

Noah Sinclair delivered the goods. He came out and performed like a motivational stand up comic disappointed with us yet determined to turn us into winners. He talked about how we all looked like ugly, bald, defenseless, newborn babies, and that it was not a bad thing. His point was we didn’t yet know how to process the world as he knew it yet but there was hope for us. He would show us the way. He would show us The System.

We all had three index cards and pencils to write answers to various questions he had for us ranging from one goal you want to accomplish in a year to who are you. He would frantically bounce around the stage and seated areas grabbing people’s answers, crumbling them up, throwing them back at people, apparently not happy with the responses he was reading. He gave us a collective re-do of one question in particular he wasn’t happy with the answers to. This unexpected technique actually helped many of us come up with a better, less generic, year goal.

When buying a ticket to The System we had to write why we were a failure and he focused on some of these asking the author to come up to the stage. He brought people on stage to play out scenarios to help a few face their deficiencies and weaknesses. There was a young man who had answered that he had no failures. Noah asked him to come up and tied him up to a chair and slapped him around until he finally admitted that he was a failure.

Noah then asked about 8 people from the audience up to the stage and invited his father Horace, the creator of The System, as well. He had some questions collected from the audience and decided to ask his father these questions. At this point Noah was leaning his arm against Horace’s shoulder and it was definitely a sign of disrespect.

For some background, one of the periscope videos was 10 seconds to say what we were going to do with the information we had learned so far. Noah’s version of this was “I will destroy the person who made me this way.” There was a lot of speculation on the forums as to who this person was. We were about to find out.

Noah asked his father 3 questions from index cards written by the audience. 1) Do you believe in Anoch? 2) Are Oracles real? And 3) What do you know about the OSDM? All of these questions are direct references to top three questions someone might ask about The Tension Experience. He then told the audience members on stage to take this opportunity to learn The System from the creator himself and shooed them all backstage with Horace. We could hear Horace raising his voice to those backstage as Noah talked to the rest of us in a serious, non-seminar, tone.

Noah let us know that The System was created by Horace to find a specific type of person, one that would be self motivated, one that wanted and needed success, one that fit the mold of someone that would be useful to him. Noah implied he was tired of this and that this would turn us into monsters. Noah muttered to himself that he was going to “work the system” and stormed off the stage and left the theater. The seminar was over.

A few thoughts about this event:

• This was the tightest, most natural, and entertaining “stage show” yet that I’ve seen from Tension/Lust.
• It was jam packed with content. Just about every scripted line had a purpose and there was really no filler at all.
• The humor of the scripted and improv lines were all pitch perfect and consistent throughout the night.
• There was some weirdness that existed for ambiance (serious girl checking us in while an oddball photographer was whispering things into random people’s ears, photographer taking pictures from weird hidden spots, photographer being told who to photograph at times, Tom Barrow being around but never saying anything publicly).
• There were no actual seating designations with the tiered pricing.
• It wasn’t clear what criteria was used to choose Sarah for Noah but her ability to quell his defiant behavior is likely one of them.
• There were a couple of slow burning references or callbacks:
  1) Noah gave a tinyurl of sinclairfucks linking to one of his promo videos at a bar to some participants. It’s clear now, after Andy’s speech, what “fucks” refers to now
  2) “Work The System” is one of the main taglines used in promos (and appears on the Noah Sinclair website). It has a double meaning now that Noah is clearly against The System and wants to work it.