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In early October of 2019, a young CEO by the name of Erin Valenti was on a business trip to California
The 33-year-old was to participate in a 3-day workshop and tech conference
with other businessmen and women
Her company, Tinker Ventures, had previously
endorsed “brain-machine interface” technology
that dealt with machine learning and neuroscience.
After frantically calling her parents exclaiming,
“It’s all a game, it’s a thought experiment,
we’re in the Matrix”, Valenti misses her
flight home, and is found dead a few days later,
leaving behind a very strange mystery.
What happened to Erin Valenti?
Erin Valenti grew up in Fairpoint, New York,
and was described as being smart, energetic,
and full of crazy ideas.
She was a graduate in business administration
from Georgetown University and attended classes
in Chinese language, culture, and business practices.
Erin was also an advocate against human trafficking,
and a volunteer for “Not For Sale”,
a non-profit organization that fights against
human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
Her husband, Harrison Weinstein, is a psychologist
who insisted that his wife had no history
of mental illness, hospitalization, substance
abuse, or arrests; she was completely normal.
The two eventually moved to Salt Lake City,
Utah, where Eran started up Tinker Ventures,
a web-development company that
now employs over 120 people.
The business notably recruited a remote staff
of engineers from Pakistan, and was very profitable,
according to close friends of Erin.
In 2019, Erin planned a business trip to Orange
County for a tech conference, and then to
Silicon Valley to meet with friends.
Her last post on Facebook was on September
25th, and it stated,
"Heading to San Francisco and Los Angeles soon... whose around? DM me!!"
On the week of October 1st, 2019, Erin flew
to Orange County, California
for a professional-development workshop.
Her mother, Agnes Valenti, recalled that Erin
sounded very excited about her trip during
their phone call; that she couldn’t wait
to get home and start something new.
A few days later, she flew to Silicon Valley to
visit old friends and former colleagues.
Finally, on October 7th, Erin made a series of strange phone calls to her husband, Harrison, and her mother
They described the way she spoke as being,
“out of character”.
Her words were reportedly “fast and erratic”, and that what she was saying wasn't making much sense
Notably, Erin told her mother: “It’s all
a game, it’s a thought experiment, we’re in the Matrix.”
Erin also stated that she was going to miss her flight and that the vehicle she was driving was low on gas.
Her husband and mother took turns talking 
to Erin on the phone until midnight.
After that, their calls went straight to voicemail.
They would not hear from her ever again.
Later that night, Erin missed her flight from
the Palo Alto airport to Utah.
She was reportedly last seen at Almaden Expressway
and Camden Avenue in San Jose,
wearing a white T-shirt and ripped up blue jeans.
Her case is sent to the San Jose police department,
and five days later, she is found dead in
the backseat of her rental vehicle in an Almaden
neighborhood.
There were no signs of physical assault and
no drugs in her system.
Shortly after their phone call, Valenti’s
family went to the police in search of Erin.
The family gave details about her rental vehicle,
including the Make, Model, and License Plate.
The police actually managed to speak to her
through the phone that night,
but also found her communications to be bizarre.
Weinstein called Verizon Wireless and found
out that the last place Erin’s cell phone
had signal in, was on Menlo Drive north of
the Almaden Expressway.
Her phone also pinged a few times in the streets
further up north, before shutting off.
Officers investigated both areas, as well as nearby hospitals for several hours but found nothing.
Interestingly, her rental vehicle did not
have any sort of tracking device on it.
The family also attempted to locate her phone
using apps such as “find my” but were unsuccessful.
Despite the fact that Erin was clearly in
danger, the police supposedly did not report
an official missing persons case until Thursday,
October 10th, 2019.
By the point, the family hadn’t heard from
Erin for three days.
This is due to the police believing that her
disappearance wasn’t a top priority simply
because she was an adult, and could have simply
decided to take a few days off.
Sounds crazy, but people have voluntarily
disappeared on their own accord
because of an abusive partner, home life, or such.
As noted by spokeswoman Sgt.
Melody Gray, “If you’re over 18, you have
the right.”
However, given that Erin was the CEO of a
fairly large web development company that
worked on contract (not subscriptions), and
that she was even set to receive an award
for Entrepreneurial Excellence a mere two
days later, it's highly unlikely that she
would choose to leave.
Still, when the police eventually did file
her disappearance, they described her as being
“voluntarily missing” and didn’t actively
search for Erin.
Disappointed with the police department’s
lack of effort, Erin’s family created a
Facebook page called, “Help Find Erin Valenti”.
The page garnered the attention of locals
from the Bay Area who volunteered in search.
Some families drove around while others incorporated
the use of drones.
Despite all their efforts, Erin remained missing.
That is until a few days later, when one of
the volunteers from Facebook located Erin’s
gray SUV parked at a residential street in
a quiet San Jose neighborhood,
around half a mile away from her last known location.
After looking inside, her body was found in
the backseat of the vehicle.
The coroner’s office hadn’t yet officially
identified the body, but Valenti’s family
was able to confirm that it was her.
An investigation by the San Jose police department
found no evidence of foul play, and blood
tests determined that there were no drugs
or substances in her system.
At the time, officials were not able to determine
Erin’s exact time of death nor how long
she was in her car before being found.
We now know that her vehicle was parked on that street for five days, following an extensive investigation.
This means that shortly after Erin’s phone
call with her family, she missed
her flight home, parked at a nearby neighborhood,
jumped in the backseat of her rental vehicle,
died somehow, and remained completely unnoticed
for several days.
Residents of the quiet neighborhood struggled
to rationalize what could have happened.
“It’s really strange, bizarre, foggy to
me.
Because this kind of stuff just doesn’t
usually go down in Almaden,”
“What else seems weird is that
none of us noticed.
And we’re a pretty tight neighborhood. 
So I’m pretty tripped out.”
Erin’s father, Joseph Valenti, firmly believes
that the San Jose Police Department completely
mishandled her daughter’s case and wished
that they had acted more aggressively.
It’s difficult to know exactly what happened
the week Erin went missing,
but most sources say that the police 
did not do as much as they should have.
With such a strange circumstance and so many
unanswered questions, it leaves this case
open for conspiracy theories.
Some online sleuths have accused her three-day workshop of being an L. G. A. T.,
or Large Group Awareness Training
The workshop Erin participated in was called
Create Powerful, hosted by Ontocore, and was
intended to help entrepreneurs with personal
and professional growth for their businesses.
Some have compared this to an LGAT, which
is also self-help seminars that incorporate
psychological and somewhat cult-like practices.
Both cost a large amount of money.
Both take place over several days with a group
of people involved.
And both promise to help attendees achieve
better business success.
Many have expressed fear that the techniques
used in LGATs can be very harmful, but there’s
little scientific evidence to back that up.
Others have attempted to tie this to the Overstock
scandal that happened a few months prior.
In August of 2019, then CEO of Overstock,
Patrick Byrne, resigned, after issuing a statement
where he claimed to be involved in “political
espionage”.
And Erin did use to work at Overstock and
she did have a meetup with old colleagues.
If there is a connection there, it’s honestly
outside the realm of this video and seems
to be a whole other conspiracy on its own.
Finally, an eco-terrorist group known as the
“Individualists Tending Towards the Wild”,
or simply ITS, claims to be responsible for the death of Erin, as well as another Tech CEO, Tushar Atre.
In Tushar’s case, he was kidnapped from
his home in Santa Cruz on October 1st, 2019,
and was found dead the next day.
However, this claim has not been verified and there’s no evidence to suggest their involvement.
One of the oddest aspects of this case is,
of course, her last comments before her disappearance.
She exclaimed to her mother, “It’s all
a game, it’s a thought experiment, we’re
in the Matrix.”
Even though it's quite a bizarre thing for
someone to say right before their suspicious
death, it might actually be explainable, but
more on that in a moment.
I think it’s safe to say that most people
watching this video know what the matrix is,
but just in case you don’t; the matrix is
this philosophical idea that the universe,
and everything that it’s made up of, is
a simulation.
This is most popularly depicted in the 1999
movie of the same name, where our main protagonist
Neo learns that humanity has been enslaved
by the Machines, an advanced race of artificial
intelligence, and the “life” that he was
experiencing was just information being fed
to his brain.
Neo: This... this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real?
How do you define real?
If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, taste and see,
then real is simply electrical signals 
interpreted by your brain.
Now I don’t think the people who believe
in the idea of the Matrix also believe that
robots and machines will one day overthrow humanity.
But instead, they believe that at some point, humanity became so advanced that human consciousness,
something that we currently don't completely
understand, became understood,
to the point of being replicable.
And so, like humans usually do, we went for
it and succeeded.
Given how advanced our technology has evolved
in the past couple of decades, and how more
integrated AI technology has been in our everyday
lives , I wouldn’t say that creating a simulation
of our world in the next couple hundred years
isn’t entirely unlikely.
And if that's the case, who’s to say that
we’re not already in a simulation?
Elon: If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.
It would seem to follow that the odds that we're in "base reality" is one in billions.
Of course, this is all just a theory based
on a number of assumptions that make for a
fun philosophical conversation.
But such technology that can read our movements
and virtually replicate them in a simulation
is already being developed.
And as previously stated, Erin’s company,
Tinker Ventures, did endorse the advent of
brain-machine interface technology, particularly
from the company CTRL Lab, founded by Thomas
Reardon of Microsoft fame.
The company sought to create a future...
This, combined with Erin’s last words to
her family, and her mysterious death have
led some to believe that she may have stumbled
upon some grand conspiracy involving our world
being a simulation.
Unfortunately, this was all we had to work
with for the next couple of months, as no
new details about Erin’s death would be
discovered, leaving her case a mystery.
That is until February of 2020.
In February 2020, a cause of death was finally
identified for Erin Valenti.
According to the autopsy report, her death
was due to “natural causes” following
an “acute manic episode”, though it didn’t
specify what exactly killed her.
Although Erin’s husband claimed she had
no previous mental or drug-related issues,
Erin did have a thyroid condition that was
later treated with medication.
According to Business Insider, it's possible
that she could have died due to this previous
condition that she thought was already taken
care of, but that the blood samples taken
were “not satisfactory for an analysis”.
Furthermore, an investigation into some of
Erin’s last electronic communications showed
symptoms of a “manic episode” according
to the San Jose medical examiner’s office.
They eventually concluded her death was due
to an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder;
Bipolar Disorder.
Bipolar Disorder is defined as an illness
in which one experiences periods of extremely
high moods and extremely low moods.
You can think of these two periods as opposite
ends of a pole, hence the name:
"Bipolar Disorder.”
According to Dr. Po Wang, a psychiatrist from
Stanford University who specializes in Bipolar
Disorder, the condition is frequently undiagnosed
and what often follows after is a period of
depression and irritability, where suicide
attempts are common.
In Erin’s case, she could have experienced
her manic episode sometime after visiting
her friends in Silicon Valley.
This causes her to call her parents and frantically
talk about life being a thought experiment
or the matrix.
Her company was interested in that
kind of technology after all.
Following this conversation, she rushes to
the airport, experiences a wave of depression,
parks her vehicle in a San Jose neighborhood,
and dies shortly thereafter.
Even so, if Erin had committed suicide, the
method by which she did so is still unclear.
However, it's not entirely impossible.
A 2015 study conducted at the University of
California, San Francisco surveyed 242 entrepreneurs
and found that 49% of them reported having
at least one mental health condition.
When compared to a small sample of 93 non-entrepreneurs, they were noticeably more likely to report
having some type of mental health condition.
The entrepreneurs were then asked to specify
on their condition.
30% reported having Depression, 29% reported
having ADHD, 12% reported having substance
abuse, 11% reported having Bipolar Disorder,
and 27% reported having Anxiety, 26%
In comparison, 7% of the U.S. population identified
themselves as depressed, according to the
National Institute of Mental Health.
All this would seem to suggest a link between
having mental health disorders and entrepreneurship.
And this isn’t too surprising.
Take Aaron Swartz for example He was an Entrepreneur
and Internet Activist who was mostly known
as the co-founder of Reddit.
He wrote about his own struggles with depression
on his online blog, and after being arrested,
he committed suicide.
There are dozens of examples and articles
written on the subject, and perhaps Erin could
have also been affected as well.
However, because Erin’s body was found 
a few days after she had died, the autopsy
report admitted that their findings were “inconclusive”.
Furthermore, her family does not believe she
was the type of person to kill herself.
Following her death, Erin’s family started
the Erin Valenti Women in Entrepreneurship
scholarship, with the goal of raising $100,000 for aspiring female entrepreneurs at the University of Utah.
She always believed that more women should
pursue entrepreneurship, and this scholarship
was created to honor that dream.
Whatever happened to Erin Valenti will remain
a mystery, as her mother Agnes remarks:
"We may never find an answer.”
