Erin Valenti We are in the Matrix It’s just a thought experiment

https://x.com/davidicke/status/1822902342812828036
In early October of 2019, a young CEO by the name of Aaron Valenti was on a business trip from Utah to California. The 33-year-old was to participate in a 3D 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 Aaron Valenti? Aaron 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. Aaron 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 Aaron 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 Aaron. In 2019, Aaron 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 stated, On the week of October 1st, 2018, Aaron flew to Orange County, California for a professional development workshop. Her mother, Agnes Valenti, recalled that Aaron 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, Aaron 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, Aaron told her mother, Aaron 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 her on the phone until midnight. After that, their calls went straight to voicemail. They would not hear from her ever again. Later that night, Aaron missed her flight from the Palo Alto Airport to Utah. She was reportedly last seen at Almaden Expressway and Camden Avenue in San Jose, California, wearing a white t-shirt and ripped-up blue jeans. Her case was sent to the San Jose Police Department, and five days later, she was found dead in the backseat of a rental vehicle in an Almaden neighborhood. There were no signs of physical assault, and no drugs in her system either. Shortly after their phone call, Valenti's family went to the police in search for Aaron. 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 contacted Verizon Wireless, and found out that the last place Aaron's cell phone had signal in was on Menlo Drive, north of the Almaden Expressway. Her phone also pinged a few times 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 FindMy, but were unsuccessful. Despite the fact that Aaron was clearly in danger, the police supposedly did not report an official missing person's case until Thursday, October 10th, 2019. By that point, the family hadn't heard from Aaron for three days. This is due to the police believing that her disappearance was not a top priority, simply because she was an adult, and could have just 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 rights. However, given that Aaron was the CEO of a fairly large web-developing 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 her. Disappointed with the police's lack of effort, Aaron's family created a Facebook page called Help Find Aaron Valenti. The page garnered the attention of locals from the Bay Area, who volunteered in the search. Some families drove around in pursuit of Aaron, while others incorporated the use of drones. Despite all their efforts, Aaron remained missing. That is, until a few days later, when one of the volunteers from Facebook located Aaron'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 back seat 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 Aaron'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 the street for five days, following an extensive investigation. This means that, shortly after Aaron's phone call with her family, she missed her flight home, parked at a nearby neighborhood, jumped in the back seat of a 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, and 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. Aaron's father, Joseph Valencia, 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 Aaron 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 the case open for conspiracy theories. Some online sleuths have accused her 3D workshop of being an LJT, or Large Group Awareness Training. The workshop Aaron participated in was called Create Powerful, hosted by Onsocore, and was intended to help entrepreneurs with personal and professional growth for their businesses. Some have compared this to an LJT, which are 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 success with their business. Many have expressed fear that the techniques used in LJTs can be very harmful, but there's little scientific evidence to support this claim. 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 Aaron did used 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 the ITS, claims to be responsible for the death of Aaron, 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 the group's 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, finds out 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. Is this real? What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Now, I don't think that people who believe in the idea of the Matrix also believe that machines and robots will one day overthrow humanity, but instead they believe that, at some point, human consciousness, something that we don't currently fully understand, became understood, to the point of it being replicable. And so, like humans usually do, we went for it, and succeeded. Given how much our technology has evolved in the past few decades, and how 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 or so isn't entirely unlikely. And if that's the case, then who's to say we're not already in a simulation? If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Just indistinguishable. It would seem to follow that the odds that we're in face reality is one in billions. Of course, this is all just a theory, based on a number of assumptions, and that makes for a fun, philosophical conversation. But such technology that can read our movements and replicate them in a simulation is already being developed. And as previously stated, Aaron's company, Tinker Ventures, did endorse the advent of brain-machine interface technology, particularly from the company Control Labs, founded by Thomas Riordan of Microsoft fame. The company sought to create a future in which machines are natural extensions of thoughts and movements, according to Medium. Control Labs will connect your nervous system to your technology and allow your brain to send commands through the muscles in your arm. It's so sensitive, you don't even have to move your arm or hand to make it work. The controller just gets the idea. The future of brain-machine interfaces is non-invasive. Instead of surgical implants, Control Labs uses state-of-the-art detection and machine learning to read your neurons from outside the body. The first step will be technology precisely picking up the signals from inside your body to control devices outside of it with little more than natural gestures. The next step, and we're already closer than most people realize, will be reading the intention directly from your brain. 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 as a mystery. That is, until February of 2020. In February of 2020, a cause of death was finally identified for Erin Valenti. According to the autopsy reports, 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 that 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 the blood samples taken were quote, not satisfactory for 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 that 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 that 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 unlikely. A 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. In comparison, 7% of the U.S. population have identified themselves as depressed, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. All of 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 Aaron could have been affected by this as well. However, because Aaron's body was found a few days after she died, the autopsy report admitted that their findings were inconclusive. Furthermore, her family just doesn't believe that she was the type of person to kill herself. Following her death, Aaron's family started the Aaron 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 an entrepreneurship, and this scholarship was created to honor that dream. Whatever happened to Aaron Valenti will remain a mystery. As her mother Agnes remarks, we may never find an answer.