XPRIZE And Abundance Founder Interviews GoodTrust

Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and founder of the Abundance Community and the XPRIZEs, along with his co-host, futurist and filmmaker (and GoodTrust advisor), Taryn Southern, interviewed GoodTrust CEO and founder Rikard Steiber and co-founder Daniel Sieberg for a recent webinar on digital legacy. The consensus: we're just getting started with how our digital selves will be remembered in the future (watch a clip from the interview below).

It used to be in past generations that everything was in the last will and testament," says Diamandis. "It was on your mom's or dad's desk. It was in the safe, it was on paper. And you could go through all those papers and you'd have everything. But today, everything has gone digital."

Diamandis himself is renowned for his passion to explore the limits of human longevity and suggests that in the near future age 100 will be the new 60. He points to advancements in the past two decades that have allowed for more cost-effective sequencing of the human genome (dropping as much as 100,000-fold to below $1,000 per genome), which will in turn lead to the discovery of disease susceptibility long before symptoms are present.

"I spent a lot of my time focusing on longevity, not mortality," says Diamandis. "The immorality of mortality or the morality of immortality, or whatever you want to call it. And so it's tough (to think about death). We just don't like to look at that side of ourselves."

Steiber agrees that it's never an easy topic for people to discuss but at GoodTrust the opportunity is also to imagine celebrating life not just mourning someone's passing.

"Yes, it is probably weird for you, for most people to think about this," says Steiber. "So what we have tried to do is kind of find those moments, life moments. When you are writing your will or signing, you get a new job, you sign up for your life insurance, maybe you just get your first kid so that those are probably times when you're thinking, OK, I'm going to make sure that I have a backup so that if something happens to me, it becomes available to my friends and family."

A global challenge that's only increasing

The reality is that since there are 4.4 billion internet users in the world today all living longer than ever, we're collectively creating a digital legacy like never before that needs to be solved at scale. Doing nothing, says Steiber, is not a viable strategy even if it means you prefer to delete or shut down your accounts.

"Your digital legacy is going to get lost if you don't take action," says Steiber. "The other thing is that we all die and no one is really doing anything about these accounts. You probably started so many accounts, but when did you actually close off an account yourself? We estimate, for example, that there are over 30 million dead people on Facebook sending birthday reminders. People are on LinkedIn. You get work anniversary reminders from dead people. You get restaurant recommendations or Airbnb recommendations from dead people. This is not sustainable. We need to find a way where we can take control of not only our own legacy, but also the wants of our parents or our friends."

For now one of the primary goals for GoodTrust is to help generate an understanding of this critical issue to allow people the choice of what to do.

"A big part of the effort we have these days is generating awareness with people," says Sieberg. "If your house was on fire right now, if you think about that will and testament and all those physical possessions, the reality is you would probably run out of your house with your smartphone."

Steiber also mentioned the current GoodTrust offer to empower women all over the world as part of Women's History Month (sign up for a free GoodTrust Premium Plan with code IWD2021 at checkout, $70) and encouraged people to take action today at GoodTrust. Don't let any of the easy excuses prevent your digital legacy from adhering to your wishes.