Picture a plane gathering speed down the runway, then an engine failing at the exact moment it should lift off. Most people would spend those seconds on the last thought of their lives. Matías De Stefano, whom Aubrey Marcus introduces as a man with the gift of remembering his past lives, says his own mind went somewhere else entirely: he thought he was going to be late. That small, almost comic reflex sits at the center of a short but dense conversation about what happens when we die, how fear was built into us, and whether the fear of death can be turned into something useful. The argument is that death is not the end of the story but the point where a life actually begins, and that fear is not the enemy to be defeated but an energy that has to be taught a different job.
Marcus opens with the question most people have asked at some point, and De Stefano does not answer with doctrine. He answers with an anecdote about a near-miss at takeoff. The engine failed, he had to brace, and the thought that came was not about dying. It was about the schedule. He then turns that moment into a principle: once you have a sense of how many times you have died, the fear of this particular death loses its grip. The reflex that remains is the ordinary, human one of being late.
"Once you remember how many times you have died, the only thought that you have is like, oh, you're going to be late."
Matías De Stefano, in conversation with Aubrey Marcus on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast [0:17]
The line is delivered with a laugh, and it should be taken that way. De Stefano is not asking the listener to accept a claim about reincarnation as a settled fact. He is describing how his own relationship to death changed. The rest of the segment is built on that shift: death looked different once it stopped being a wall and became something he had already passed through many times.
De Stefano draws a sharp contrast between how modern culture frames death and how earlier cultures did. In his telling, the modern default is to define death as the end of everything. Ancient cultures, he says, treated it as the beginning of everything, and not only because of what happens afterward. The deeper point is about the living person. "When you realize that you are going to die, your life begins," he says. Awareness of mortality is what gives life its direction.
He ties this to purpose. Death, in his view, is the reason everything we do carries meaning. Without it, a person is "just trying to survive." That phrase is the hinge of his whole argument. Survival is the default mode of a nervous system that has not yet asked what its existence is for. Once the question of meaning is asked, the same life that was organized around avoiding harm starts to organize itself around doing something that matters here, in this reality, now.
"When you acknowledge death for consciousness is like, oh, now I have a purpose. Now I have a meaning. Otherwise, you are just trying to survive."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [1:05]
This is a reframing that is worth sitting with, because it does not require belief in anything beyond death. Whatever one thinks happens afterward, the practical claim is that a life lived with mortality in view tends to be a more deliberate life. De Stefano keeps returning to that, even as he moves into the more speculative territory of what comes next.
When Marcus presses on the question of what happens after the body dies, De Stefano speaks in terms of energy. He describes it as something that disperses after death, and he says the experience of that dispersal varies enormously. The variable he names is consciousness: the level of awareness a person has carried into life. He does not describe a single destination. He describes a process of tuning.
"Whatever your energy is tuning to, that's what you're going to become. So, that's why we have to be concerned about how we vibrate during life."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [1:52]
Here the segment makes its most practical move. If the state you enter after death depends on what you vibrate at while alive, then the work is not reserved for a deathbed or a spiritual retreat. It is the ordinary business of how you think, react and live, day after day. De Stefano does not elaborate on the specifics of his own past-life memories in this clip, and it is useful to keep that limit in view. What he offers is a framework: energy is continuous, its direction is shaped by attention, and attention is something you practice in daily life.
Marcus then shifts to the question of fear itself, and specifically to the energy of fear as it relates to the energy of life. De Stefano's first move is to refuse the simple version that fear is destructive. He calls it a structuring energy. It is, in his account, the force that made us survive and that pushed us into the people we are now.
"Fear is basically not a destructive energy, but a structure energy. It's basically the one that makes us survive, the one that pushed us to be who we are today."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [2:25]
He extends the claim to the body and to identity. Every cell, every organ and every aspect of the self, he says, has built this personality and this being partly because of fear. That is a sweeping statement, and it is presented without citation of any study. It is best read as his interpretive frame: fear is not an accident in human development but one of its main architects. Seen this way, the task is not to get rid of something that has no place in us. The task is to understand what it was built for.
De Stefano's key condition is awareness. Fear, he says, can only operate usefully in unconsciousness, meaning in the state where life is driven by survival and by the pressure of circumstances. When everything around you pushes you toward getting through the day, fear is a very useful energy. It tells you where the danger is and keeps you moving.
The trouble begins when you start to ask what your existence is for. At that point, he says, you begin to feel that fear is pushing you backwards. It is no longer aimed at a goal; it is pulling you toward the past. He compares it to ballast: a load that once kept a vessel steady and now has to be taken off the boat before it can move freely. The image appears in his phrase about energy that you need to take away from the desert, a metaphor for dead weight carried across ground that no longer needs it.
This is the piece many people miss. The usual approach to fear is to overcome it through willpower. De Stefano's argument is subtler. Fear was never a mistake. It is simply out of date once the context has changed. A survival mechanism that keeps working after the threat has been reframed becomes a kind of habit that holds you in place.
If fear has to leave, De Stefano says, it cannot simply be dismissed. You have to allow yourself, consciously, to experience what transformation feels like. He frames this as dying while alive: letting aspects of yourself end, over and over, so that something truer can take their place.
"In order to allow the fear to leave, you have to allow yourself consciously to experience how it is to transform. And that means to allow yourself to die being alive."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [3:46]
He names the familiar containers for this work: ceremony and therapy. Both, in his description, are places where people let many parts of themselves die again and again. He adds a deliberately playful note, saying that if you can do it every weekend, that is even better. The experience he describes is a moment of realization: whatever you have been trying to hold onto is not who you are. It is an ancient pattern trying to make you into someone you are not.
De Stefano is careful to say that these patterns are not bad. They are simply no longer useful once a person begins a conscious path. He suggests a way to let them go without rejecting them: honor what they did. The gesture he describes is a kind of farewell, a recognition that the old structure brought you here, and that you can now walk without it.
The most concrete part of De Stefano's practice is the smallest. He is explicit that death is not only a dramatic act of facing something dangerous. It is also the everyday work of changing things in your personality, your relationships and the way you live. Small changes, he says, are their own form of death, and they are where most of the real work happens.
He also explains why people resist those changes. Fear arrives as a warning. If you change that one small thing, it signals that you might die, because the old way has been working for you all this time. This is the mechanism of resistance in a single sentence. The body and mind read a changed habit as a threat to survival, and they respond with fear. The practice, then, is to notice that response and keep going.
The role De Stefano assigns to fear is a shift of image. Fear, he says, is like a guardian or a protector. It helps only when there is something to fight against, when you have to battle in order to become something. But once you become aware that there is nothing you need to protect yourself from, fear loses its purpose. He moves the metaphor from warrior to guardian: fear as the guardian of a temple, which is the body. That is a different job. A warrior waits for an enemy. A guardian keeps watch over something sacred.
"So fear becomes this guardian instead of the protector or the warrior. It becomes a guardian of a temple, which is the body."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [6:37]
Then comes the line that gives the segment its title. The energy does not vanish. It turns into something else. De Stefano describes it as changing from negative to positive, and he says it becomes a kind of love. His reasoning is precise: you cannot eliminate an energy, you can only transform it, and the means of transformation is perception. When you see reality differently, and when you change your view of who you are, the same energy that once protected you by bracing against threat can begin to watch over you with care.
"You cannot eliminate an energy, you can just transform it. And the only way you can transform it is through the way you perceive it."
Matías De Stefano, Aubrey Marcus Podcast [6:49]
It is worth noting what this does and does not claim. De Stefano is not promising that fear will disappear from human experience. He is saying that its function can be rewritten. A person still feels fear; what changes is whether fear is used as a warrior against a life that keeps asking to be lived, or as a guardian of the body that carries it.
The clip is short, roughly seven minutes, and it leaves several threads open. De Stefano speaks from his own experience and does not expand on the details of his past-life memories here, so the segment is best approached as a philosophy of mortality rather than a report on any one life. Its strongest contribution is the idea that death and fear can both be read as teachers. Death tells you what your life is for. Fear tells you what you have been protecting, and whether that protection is still needed.
For a reader who wants to test the ideas, the practice is modest and specific. Notice one small habit you keep because it once kept you safe. Ask whether you are still living in survival mode or whether you have started asking what your existence is for. Choose one change, no matter how tiny, and watch the fear that arrives with it. De Stefano's claim is that the fear will show you what it has been guarding. Then the work is to decide whether it still belongs on watch.
To go further, watch the full conversation between Aubrey Marcus and Matías De Stefano, where the two explore the source-code metaphor and the wider path of transformation. The shorter clip gives the core teaching; the longer episode gives the context that makes it land.
Note on sourcing: quotations are drawn from the Aubrey Marcus Podcast conversation with Matías De Stefano. Timestamps refer to the clip as published on the Aubrey Marcus channel.
