How This Fighter Pilot Makes Life-or-Death Decisions at 500 MPH | Michelle "Mace" Curran

0:00You just need to focus on the next closest alligator to the boat. that sounds so simple it's kind of like how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time but i think it also takes urgency into consideration just focus on what you need to do to prepare for that flight that's tomorrow stop worrying about your checkride that's three weeks from now stop worrying about the next block of training just dial in and focus your time your energy everything on the next thing that's going to kill you

0:36in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

0:46I can always tell how a show's going to go. Now I'm jinxing myself by what happens in the green room before we go live. But I'm just excited to have you on and get your viewpoint on a bunch of different topics today. Yeah, I'm excited to be here, and I agree. It's nice to kick it off in the green room behind the scenes with some good conversation before we flip the button and hit record. So we did that. Yeah. The worst is like every once in a while, and this is – I hate to be like – every once in a while I'll be chatting with someone before we like go live. Yep. And like they start giving me like one-word answers, and I'm like – I start to get a little like hand-ringy where I'm like – Uh-oh.

1:27I'm going to have to pull teeth today. But I'm not worried about that with our conversation. So I wanted to start in a place, you know, and it's something I've heard you talk a little bit about. I know you've written about it, but I work with a lot of startup founders, entrepreneurs. My industry is insurance, and I work a lot of business owners in that industry specifically. And I find that a core differentiator between the businesses that seem to eventually figure things out despite conditions like in the marketplace, right, that just seemingly always get through is their ability to make decisions.

2:07And, you know, I know from both watching both Top Guns and looking at your content that in your former profession, making decisions and making those decisions rapidly was maybe paramount to the job. So I would love for you to start through this mindset of like, how are you taught becoming a pilot to make those decisions and being able to operate moving at a speed that most of us can't even imagine having your life on the line with every decision? Like, like there are real consequences to your decision-making structure. So if there's anyone who can make decisions, it's you. So I'd love to just work through your initial thought process on that.

2:45Yeah. There's so many things that go into it. And the air force does a good job of teaching you from a young age when you're in the training pipeline, how to kind of adopt this mindset of making decisions with the information that you have available, even when it's incomplete a lot of the times, which I think is the case for most of us, most of the time. And I came into Air Force pilot training with no civilian flight time. So it was drinking from a fire hose. It was intense. There was so much information being thrown at me. And there were a couple of kind of key, very like fundamental mindset things that we were taught really early on that kind of laid the groundwork.

3:23One of those is that you have to compartmentalize. And I think that can get a negative connotation around it, right? Like we should process what we go through. And there is a time and a place for that. I 100 % agree. But when you're in the thick of it, when you're flying a fighter jet, for example, at 500 miles an hour, and something goes awry, something goes not as planned, you have to do what you can with that situation and purposely focus on moving forward and the next task that you have to handle. you cannot let that thing snowball and impact your next decision and impact it cannot become a distraction and so being able to compartmentalize and focus on the task at hand was something that was just drilled into us very early because you would see students in the pilot training program who would go out and both have an equally bad flight say they messed something up the student that would go on to thrive would come back and be like, okay, what can I learn from that?

4:26What things can I pull from that that are going to make me better on my next flight? And they would go crush it the next day. The student that would eventually fail out of the program would come back and be like, I shouldn't be here. I can't believe I made that mistake. Now everyone's judging me. Clearly I'm not cut out for this. And they would just let that mentality snowball and affect their next flight where they were distracted by, oh I'm about to land last time I messed this up surely I'm going to mess it up again so there's that and then I was told a very simple phrase by an instructor very early on they were basically like this program is going to be hard you're going to feel very overwhelmed by this idea that we're going to take you from never having flown an airplane to flying a jet trainer and soloing and doing instruments and all the things in aviation the progression of skill is so rapid over the year long program it can seem like there is an absolutely impossible amount of things to learn.

5:21And people get discouraged and scared off by that. So they were like, you just need to focus on the next closest alligator to the boat. That sounds so simple. It's kind of like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? But I think it also takes urgency into consideration. And they're like, just focus on what you need to do to prepare for that flight that's tomorrow. Stop worrying about your checkride. That's three weeks from now. Stop worrying about the next block of training. Just dial in and focus your time, your energy, everything on the next thing that's going to kill you. And kill you in that circumstance means, you know, wash you out of the program.

5:58So I know that's kind of like slightly off topic from the question. But being taught those two things super early on, those were fundamental skills that I used years later in a combat squadron. and years after that, flying for the Thunderbirds, when a decision had to be made with limited information. It was to set aside the things that had gone wrong previously, focus on the task at hand, and then also not get overwhelmed by the things that were coming up. So it's kind of like an extreme version of living in the moment, but you're not doing that carelessly. The other piece is that there's a massive amount of preparation that goes in beforehand in a controlled environment when there really is no risk of failure.

6:45So that's walking through, you know, contingency plans. That's getting in a simulator and practicing emergencies. That's getting with your whole team and talking about, okay, what if this asset runs out of gas and has to leave early and now we don't have those missiles for this air-to-air engagement? And so this really detailed planning, looking at contingency plans, rehearsal in our brain that we call chair flying, where we're on the ground and we're running through the flight again and again, that is what allows you to make a decision with the limited information. Because in your mind, you've already been there and done that when you weren't at 500 miles an hour and you weren't at 9 G's.

7:26And so I guess that's to kind of boil that down because that was the world's longest answer. You know, it's compartmentalization. It's prioritizing. But then it's really the preparation that allows you to do that. Yeah. Do you think that ability to stay present despite obstacles is born in? Or do you think it's something that, like, the second scenario, the latter scenario that you described, the person who starts, you know, diving into judgment and, you know, their status in the program and starts, you know, coming inside themselves. Do you think that person can be trained out of that as well?

8:03Or is this just something that like intrinsically we have this ability to move past these things or we don't? I think you can definitely be trained into it. And I myself have been both of those students. I would say in pilot training, I was the one that was like, okay, this is what I have to do today. Study, focus on that. I have a very clear objective, like let's go. And I did really well in that programming. Focus or fast forward a few years later, now I'm flying an F-16. Things have gotten a lot harder, but I am now the person that's really struggling with self-doubt and imposter syndrome and the feeling like they don't belong there and all of those things.

8:41And I mean, the second one is probably two, three years later. so I am more experienced. I'm objectively a better aviator at that point. I'm older. I am more mature. And now I am that one struggling with all of those things. And maybe it was just being young and naive and like super goal-driven, like I'm sprinting towards getting this fighter jet. This is my dream. And then I realized a little bit more the nuances and how hard it actually was as I, you know, moved forward in my career. But I have been both. And I also went on that journey back from that second one where I really struggled to eventually go fly for the Thunderbirds.

9:19So I think there were peaks and valleys. And now I have a lot of perspective on it where I don't let myself get into that mentality anymore and wallow there. But I think really just being able to zoom out and realize when you're finding yourself in that situation and recognizing that your thoughts are not necessarily facts, that that perspective, I call it the 30 ,000 foot view, right? Because aviation cliches, but being able to like zoom out and be like, okay, I recognize what's happening here. Here's the external evidence of what's really going on. And I need to set my feelings of inadequacy aside and focus on the facts.

10:00Yeah. So a mentor of mine a long time ago used to say preparation breeds presence. And his whole philosophy on life was whoever can be the most present in a situation wins, right? Whoever's not, you know, ruminating over the past or projecting out into the future, right? Who can be there in the moment with the most of themselves, ultimately, you know, most often ends up winning that situation. So outside of, say, just the preparation to get to that point, did you have any personal things that you did to stay present? Any like morning routine type stuff or like like meditate or pray or mantras or like journaling, anything that you did outside of, say, what the Air Force was teaching you to kind of help keep you more present in those moments.

10:51And as you said, like catch yourself when you feel yourself going down that path. Yeah, I wouldn't say it was necessarily a morning routine, but it was more of a broader, like boundaries I created for myself. Go back to that pilot training timeframe. It is very intense and it's a year long and that is a long time to operate at max capacity, you know, 12 hours a day, just learning new things constantly. So I kind of set a rule for myself that Saturdays I would hang out with my family. I would go do fun stuff. I would maybe go for like a long run. We play with my dog. You know, it was like, okay, shut the books, put away the flashcards.

11:30We're going to have a day off. But then Sunday it was study day to prep for Monday. Yeah. And, you know, forcing myself to do that, even when I always felt like there was more stuff to learn and more stuff that I should be doing, I think allowed me to not burn out. Yeah. And then, you know, fast forward a decade later, it's flying for the Thunderbirds. Again, super intense schedule. We're on the road 240 days a year. You're beating your body up, pulling nine times the force of gravity multiple times a week. It is very much like being a professional athlete as far as the schedule and the demands just physically.

12:06And so this is going to sound kind of funny, but like one of the things that allowed me to de-stress and get through that was finding time to go do my own workouts. Like being beat up in the jet is hard on your body. It's not necessarily good for it. So like going for a run or even just a walk or figuring out what I could do with whatever hotel gym we were staying at and like kind of making that like a non-negotiable, even if that meant waking up super early in a new time zone to make it happen. combine that with again creating a boundary where Sunday nights you know Saturday Sunday we would do air shows Monday we would fly either back to Las Vegas where we're based out of or we would go on to our next show location Sunday nights I would have like a I don't want to talk to anyone don't invite me to dinner I don't care if there's some cool thing happening like backstage passes for a concert or whatever I'm using Uber Eats I'm getting a sushi bowl and I'm sitting in my hotel bed and I'm eating sushi.

13:07Cause when else can you sit in a bed and eat sushi? And I'm watching whatever cable TV the hotel has. And so like creating those contracts with myself, even when there are constant demands of things I should be doing to be productive, that became like my lifeline. Yeah. I think it's a wonderful point. Cause I know people struggle with this in all aspects of their life, right? High achievers, especially people that are trying to do something. And I've found myself, you know, uh, been an entrepreneur most of my life and, and like you, you get a block of time and you feel like, well, I have two hours where I don't have to be somewhere.

13:46So I need to be like creating a blog post or answering emails or putting together a sales day or whatever needs to get done. And this, it, there's almost like this sense where if, if you get burned out somehow you're losing, right? Like, like that's only, only people who aren't successful get burned out. And it's like, absolutely not. Some of the most successful people I've met work. Like I had a guy on the show a couple, a couple of weeks ago and multiple nine figure exit businesses, like just incredibly successful, wealthy dude, like by all measures, incredibly high achiever. And he's like, I work six hours a day.

14:27He's like, and the reason isn't because I don't want to work. I've found that if once I hit six hours, my production quality goes down, my focus goes down, and I'm just kind of doing stuff to do it. And he's like, I would – so he's like, what I try to do is whether it's my morning or evenings, whatever, I try to create opportunities for either space or physical activity or time with friends and family because that recharges me. So when I get back to my six-hour block, I'm hitting it 100 % and have max energy. And, like, that's not a story that's told very often is the need for the recharge or that, you know, burning yourself out is a choice.

15:11Certain scenarios it's going to happen just because of the stress and how much it takes to get to certain places. But those, I think we need to look at those more as moments, like tactically pushing to burnout and knowing that after a period of time, you're going to downshift and have the ability to do that. But man, if you just sit in that burnout zone, all of a sudden this thing you used to love becomes like not something you want to do. You start to become a little bitter, a little resentful, and none of that leads to the success you're trying to get to. Absolutely. And I don't think it should be a badge of honor, right?

15:43to be like, the hustle culture of like, no days off, we work seven days a week, like we haven't taken a vacation in five years. Great. Like, congratulations for what? Yeah. I think most of us would say like the whole point of building something and making enough money to have freedom of schedule and flexibility is so that you can go spend that time with your family or you can go travel somewhere you've always wanted to go like just working to feel like you're that high achiever that hustles it it's a zero-sum game in the end yeah yeah yeah i get that now you know i take this wherever you want to go but i can't imagine uh being a female in the military and particularly the aviation space makes it easier to get to that position.

16:35So, you know, what were some of the challenges that maybe you were faced with that, you know, particular to that, or really any other scenarios you want to hit? And, and like, how do you work through that? Like when you don't necessarily look like everyone else who is doing this thing that you want to do, or aren't traditionally, you know, the, the, the, the person that would fit this space, how did you push through that and be successful? Yeah, I actually like this question because I think people have an idea of what the answer is in their minds. And I like to speak very candidly about it and maybe give people a peek behind the curtain a little bit.

17:13So, you know, to go back to when I first decided I wanted to be a pilot, I get this pilot slot, I'm in pilot training. In my mind, it didn't really stick out to me that I was one of so few women. Like I go through pilot training with a group of 25, I'm the only woman in my class. And that was pretty standard. Some classes didn't have any women in them. And I don't mind. I'm fine hanging out with the guys. They're my friends. It doesn't bother me. As I get to be more competitive in that world, and it becomes clear that I'm doing well in the program, and that I'm actually a contender to get one of the very few fighter jets that will be available to each class.

17:54Generally, classes were getting between one to three fighter aircraft available. And then everyone else is going to fly what we call heavies, like cargo aircraft, air refueling, helicopters. And to be fair, not everyone wants to be a fighter pilot, but a lot of people do. And there are always more people that want to do it than spots available. So it's very competitive. Towards the end of the program, it becomes clear that I'm a contender to be the second person in the class. Like the guy that was first was just, he just killed it. So we all knew, okay, he's, if there's one fighter jet available, it's going to him.

18:27It's between myself and one other person for that second spot. We are down to our last checkride in the program, which a checkride is like an airborne test. And those have a lot of weight towards your class ranking, which ultimately decides who gets what aircraft. I am studying with my friend who I've been in this program for a year with, and he's getting frustrated with the answers he's giving or whatever. We're like doing flashcards and he's struggling with something. And his own frustration, he says, I don't even know why I'm wasting my time. They're just going to give you a fighter to check the box.

19:03And that was like the first time anyone had said anything like that to me. And it was such like a flippant, like he surely doesn't remember saying that, but I will never forget it because it was the first time that someone like through being a woman in that environment in my face in a negative way. And I was like, I, you know, I'm, I'm young. I'm not super confident yet. I don't defend myself. I think I just like sit there in silence and then go on with studying. It would be very different now if that situation happened, of course, but I'm like, I don't know, 24, 23 years old, something like that.

19:42But that was kind of burned into my mind because I was like, okay, some people don't like this. Like it, it challenges them that I might be better than them at this thing. Whatever. Long story short, I ended up second in the class and got the fighter jet, go on to be in the F-16. And now things get a lot more intense as you move up. It's kind of like going from being the valedictorian in high school to all of a sudden being a student at Harvard. You're like, oh, I was really good. Now I'm just average and everyone here is really good. And in that squadron, my first operational squadron, it was myself and one other female pilot.

20:20At that time, about 2 % of fighter pilots were women. Now it's about four and a half percent. So it has gone up, but mind you, that's like 15 years of time. So there, fighter squadrons have a very unique culture. There's a lot of work hard, play hard. There's a lot of camaraderie that is built by kind of making fun of each other, by joking around, by a lot of traditions. And that stuff is really important because you are trusting the people with your lives and you're in a serious business. But also it traditionally being all men, it can kind of devolve towards like the locker room type culture.

20:58And like, I'm not faulting the people, like, that's just kind of how it was. I came in at a very transitional point where the culture was being pushed to kind of be like, hey, we can still have all this camaraderie, this work hard, play hard, but it doesn't really have to be at the expense of women. You know, like we, like there's so many other ways to do it without saying derogatory things towards women. And so big air force down was trying to push that into units. Of course, you have the people that are resistant to that change because they feel like the identity of a fighter pilot is trying to be forced into this like new PC kind of mold.

21:36Yeah. And I think I was kind of just a little bit at the end of the whip for that, because again, I'm, I'm young. I'm just trying to figure out how to do this really difficult new career that is overwhelming at first. Meanwhile, I feel a lot of extra responsibility because I was definitely under a spotlight. if I struggled during a mission, I felt like, say it's dogfighting, since everyone's familiar with that, thanks to Top Gun. Say I'm struggling at dogfighting. Now the reputation of female fighter pilots is that we're not good at dogfighting. I'm a sample size of one. Or, I mean, it went the other way as well.

22:14Say I'm really good at air to ground, like employing weapons, dropping bombs. They'd be like, oh, female fighter pilots are just really naturally good at this. that's a lot of responsibility to carry yeah and then the other half of that was stuff would be said like inappropriate joke would be made or whatever and if i was in the room everyone would be like oh crap they would all turn and look at me and they would wait for my reaction and i'm again i'm one of the youngest people in the squadron i'm a brand new lieutenant it should not be my responsibility to determine what's acceptable in the squadron and my reaction to that, whether I laughed along with it, whether I just sat there quietly awkward or whether I spoke up against it, that determined what was going to be acceptable, acceptable in the organization.

23:00And I also felt like that determined what the next woman that came into that unit was going to have to deal with. So even if I was okay with something that was being said, or I didn't want to rock the boat and I was like, okay, I'm going to laugh along with that, even though it makes me uncomfortable. Then I would feel guilty later because I knew I was kind of screwing over the next woman that came to the squadron. So it's not this blatant sexism that people imagine. It's not like sabotage. It's not people trying to like sexually assault you out around every corner. It was like that. I will say in the early nineties, when combat cockpits first opened to women, to some extent, I've heard horror stories.

23:40It is a lot better now, but there are still so many nuances where you feel like you have to walk on eggshells. And I don't think a lot of the guys even realize that it's a thing and they become more aware of it. And I would never fault any of them. And I wrote about this in my book. And it was like, one of the hardest things was how do I speak candidly about what that experience was like without feeling like I'm throwing my friends under the bus? Yeah. Because these were my friends or they are my friends, but that's how it was. could you go back at them and have would like like if you went tit for tat with them would they find it coming back at them like were they looking for you were they throwing stuff at you to then see how you would respond like would you come back and you know dig them and and make things back at them or was it more like just kind of launching bombs at you to kind of keep you in your place i think it was definitely like a uh we'll give it to you you give it back to us like that's how the camaraderie is built yeah and that would happen all the time like you would i think everyone does that in their friend groups right especially guys like give each other a hard time and you're like oh yeah you don't take a personal you just do it right back but that definitely happened with like mistakes you would make flying dumb stuff you would say like all of that kind of stuff.

25:01I think where it felt like it all of a sudden went off the tracks as if was when it focused on like women in general, when it was something that wasn't just like, Oh, Mace, you really sucked at that dogfight or whatever. You totally did not shoot the guy you were supposed to. This is like, I know you're PCifying the, what they're saying to you. That is expected. And I think it's important because again, that, that builds that camaraderie, but it's different if it's some like sexualization objectification of women in general and i'm in the room and it gets really awkward really quickly that's just not necessary yeah i know it's it's it's funny you know i've always struggled with this like because yeah i played a lot of sports and different stuff and and like part of the part of the process and again i've never been involved in female sports so i don't know how females react to each other but like when you join a team you immediately start pushing on people right like can I make this joke you know like will they give it like who's gonna give it back to me who's gonna kind of and it it's almost to create a like a seemingly a little bit of a hierarchy of like who's who if I can bust your chops really bad right really give it to you good and like hit on something and you don't cower you don't get you come right back over the top of me and get me now it's like oh we're you know we're good now I you You know, I feel like, and you're like, you're constantly testing each other.

26:32And what I found is like, you know, and I had this conversation with a buddy of mine who used to play in the NFL and we were talking about locker rooms, right. And like the topic of racism came up and, you know, I was like, I've, you know, I've never really understood racism because all I always just want to win. So like, I don't give a shit if you're purple or rainbow colored, like if you can be part of this crew and help us get to where we want to go, like, I don't give a shit. I don't care who you have sex with. I don't care what you, you know, like none of it matters when you're shooting towards a goal.

27:04And I think to your point, there are, there's ribbing and, and a little bit of hazing that happens as you try to figure out, like, it's all, it's all part of trying to figure out who's going to be there with me when shit's bad. Like, if you can't take a joke, then you're not going to be there when we're down by, you know, five runs in a baseball game and we need to make a comeback, right? I can't count on you because if you can't take a joke, you can't take, you know, a negative situation over here. But I agree there's, and this was always the thing I think people miss, particularly with locker room talk, is that you figure, you also figure out who doesn't get it, right?

27:41Like the guy who makes, like, there's a different, like you can make like black, you know, black people make fun of white people, you know, you make these different little, and there's like a level where it's fun ribbing to figure out who you are. And then there's that guy who comes in and will make a joke and everyone's head will snap and you'll be like, you don't get what we're doing here. Like, yeah, that was, that's the inappropriate level. And I think, and I think some of the differences, and we just haven't figured out how to do this is in those scenarios, those guys end up getting cut out of the herd, right?