From Symphony Stages to Flying in the Sky

Amy Stone [00:00:03]:
Nathaniel Ramsey. Welcome to the art of imperfect Adulting.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:00:06]:
Hi. Thank you for having me.

Amy Stone [00:00:08]:
I’m so happy you’re here. Are you ready for a fun chat?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:00:10]:
I am.

Amy Stone [00:00:11]:
That’s great. All right, so I begin every interview, most interviews, by asking people to share with me where they are in the world. So where are you talking to me? What part of the country are you talking to me from?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:00:21]:
I’m in Charleston, West Virginia.

Amy Stone [00:00:23]:
Charleston, West Virginia. Very nice. Very nice. All right, so before we dig into the topic of the day, I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background, just as a person, you know, what do you do outside of work? Who are the important people in your life? People you live with, your pets, your hobbies, anything. As much or as little as you want to tell us about your. Outside of your job.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:00:45]:
So outside of my job, I spend a lot of time with my kid. I have a son. He’s coming up on two years old, and my wife. So outside of time, outside of work, I spend as much time with them as I can. They’re really kind of the light of my world right now.

Amy Stone [00:00:57]:
So two is cute.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:00:59]:
Two is very cute. He’s. He’s a lot of fun right now. He’s getting to that age where he’s walking and talking. So that’s what I look forward to every day.

Amy Stone [00:01:07]:
As you sleep all the way through the night. Yep.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:01:09]:
He sleeps like 12 hours a night, so I feel very blessed in that realm.

Amy Stone [00:01:15]:
Yeah, no, that’s very good. It’s like. But then you get the interruptions. It’s like you get into a habit, a false sense of security, and something will happen, you know, the flu.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:01:23]:
Yeah, I think he just started having nightmares recently. Just little ones. They go away pretty quick. But, you know, that’s that false sense of security kind of coming back a little bit.

Amy Stone [00:01:32]:
So I would love to tell you that it gets better, but then they become teenagers, and then they’re just up at night.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:01:39]:
That’s what everybody tells me. So I’m looking forward to, hopefully, a couple more years before I get there.

Amy Stone [00:01:44]:
Oh, you’ve got some time. You’ve got some time. All right. So you have no way of knowing this because this is the first conversation we’ve had. But I actually have a cool job theme going on in my interviews today, and so that’s a lot of fun for me. But we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about career change, and we’re going to talk about your job. At one point, I think you were A musician?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:02:06]:
Yes, I was a professional violinist living in Charleston. Technically had the title of artist in residence string educator with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra.

Amy Stone [00:02:16]:
That is like, so cool.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:02:19]:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I taught in. In seven different schools at one time, just kind of traveling around and teaching 4th grade through 12th grade string instruments. So we would take students who had never touched or seen a violin or viola or cello and teach them how to. About the orchestra and how to incorporate that into their curriculum.

Amy Stone [00:02:40]:
So we have a connection. My oldest stepdaughter was a cellist, and I met her when she was 8 and she was already playing the cello. She started on violin in the little peewee, but that was before my. And I just have to say that I have a special place in my heart for anybody living through the experience of a new string instrument player. Because it is a special, special kind of torture. And you want to be this like, really, really passionate, like, you know, believe in the music and go. But it really is like living with a dying cat. And many, many years later, many, several children later, one of the kids was doing a music performance that was not strings, but there was a strings element, an elementary school strings part of the performance. And my husband and I were applauding for the very small strings players. One of the other parents was like, oh, do you have somebody playing strings? And we were like, no, but we remember. We remember.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:03:39]:
Yep, it does eventually pay off, but it’s one of those things that takes many, many years for them to get fed to.

Amy Stone [00:03:45]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we were. I think she was on like a quarter size cello, which is just only marginally bigger than a violin. So even if you’re very good, it still doesn’t have the beautiful range and skills and all the fun things. So that’s an amazing. That though. That is an amazing job. That is an amazing job. Now we’re gonna. I like to talk to about people, about choices and changes, and you are somebody who’s gone through that. At some point you made a choice to step away from that, to actually go from what I would describe as one cool job in the symphony to another cool job. So tell us what you decided.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:04:22]:
Yeah. Well, I’d always wanted to fly. So in. Even in high school, I looked up trying to see if I could get flight lessons or something. And there was a rumor going around my hometown that if wear glasses, I wear glasses, that you were not allowed to fly. So I just kind of blindly believed it and didn’t really look too much more into it. Went to College, got a degree in violin performance and was working for the symphony and kind of attained what I would consider at the time a dream job with the symphony. I’d always wanted to do what I was doing with them, and I loved it. It was a lot of fun. Got to work with a lot of kids. Every year we put together a program of three to 500 kids and had a huge, like end of year concert with all the schools and stuff. It was, it was a lot of fun. But I always wanted to fly. And when I was in high school, I worked for a family that had a little airport, an airplane, like helping strap people into a biplane. It was a ride business, giving people tours and just really liked it a lot. Fast forward to after college. I decided to look it up finally. It took me, you know, almost 10 years to finally look it up and realize, oh, that’s not true, regarding the glasses thing, I can go fly. So I signed up for flight lessons literally the next day. Like, I’m not even kidding. It was probably 12 hours later, I called the local flight school and said, hey, I want to take flight lessons. And then just to see if it was something I could do, I went and started training under what they call part 61 and quickly discovered I really like this. I really like the structure of it. It fits me really well. And so kind of self paced my through. Self paced my way through about three months to four months and got my private pilot’s license just to kind of make sure, yeah, this is something I wanted to do. This is all pre Covid. So during that time I was also doing a little bit of research, finding out that the industry was short on pilots. There was going to be a lot of a big need for pilots. I also like teaching, so we’ll get back to that in a second. But so to kind of present it to my wife, because this is a huge business, I had a successful career. I could have just stayed in it and be like, hey, let’s go do something completely different that we know nothing about. So I had to do a lot of research and say, hey, this, this is where the industry is going. I would like to start pursuing this. And I think it could pay off in the end and it would be worth it.

Amy Stone [00:06:42]:
So, yeah, so you were. Because you were working for the symphony, which is like a salary job. You were not a freelance musician who is doing gigs.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:06:51]:
It was kind of an hourly job. It was. Didn’t have benefits. That position did at one point, but when I was there, it didn’t. It had kind of downgraded. But I was happy to be there when I was there because I helped kind of regrow the program to be a lot bigger. And they were, when I left, kind of rediscussing it. I don’t know if they’ve decided to bring that back or not since then.

Amy Stone [00:07:13]:
And then. So you were doing private flight lessons. What was the, what was the first round of the job? You were. You wanted to be a, like a private pilot for what type of planes really?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:07:26]:
Just to be paid to fly airplanes. So there’s different levels.

Amy Stone [00:07:29]:
There are different levels, yeah.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:07:31]:
So private pilot is somebody who is just licensed to fly an airplane. It can be like a Cessna or a Cirrus or something like that. So in order to be paid to do it, you have to go through, generally people go through an instrument rating that lets you fly through clouds and then a commercial rating which lets you be paid to fly an airplane. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to fly a jet. So you can do things like sightseeing tours and skydiving, things like that. And then beyond that you can go into cfi, which is certified flight instructor. Certified flight instructor, Instrument multi engine instructor and things like that. So flying airplanes with two engines, I wanted to go the instructor route. So I did some research and found some schools that advertised quickly going through the program. And this is how crazy I was looking at it. I found a school, I believe it was in Germany, that advertised you could work for them after getting your licenses, but you would have to train in Utah or Arizona, I don’t remember where, out west. And I was contemplating moving to Germany so that I could get established with them. Moving back to the US and then moving back to Germany.

Amy Stone [00:08:43]:
You were really all in. And there was.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:08:44]:
I was really all in. I was committed to doing it because I’ve always thought living abroad would be really fun. And that at that time of my life I was still heavily considering it. So it wasn’t that far outside the real possibility for me.

Amy Stone [00:08:55]:
How long ago was this?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:08:57]:
Five years ago.

Amy Stone [00:08:58]:
Okay, five years ago. All right. So I did know. I knew there were different levels of being able to fly a plane. There’s, you know, being able. The little planes. I live down in South Florida where people will have little, little planes that they’ll fly like down to Key west and stuff like that or across. And that’s a very different thing than people who are fl. Commercial jets. I had a neighbor who was a charter jet pilot, so he had clients that did that. That was a Whole thing. So I knew that there were different levels of knowing how to do it. I did also. I will say that I did. I had heard a version of that rumor about the eyesight. I never questioned it. I never questioned it and I never thought about it. I mean, I see pilots wearing glasses, so it wasn’t something I’d put a lot of thought into. But I definitely had heard a version of that rumor that you had to have.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:09:49]:
Yeah. That really just kind of implanted itself. And I just never thought anything about it. And it took me five years, you.

Amy Stone [00:09:55]:
Know, because it does. It passes the common sense test. We do want our pilots to be able to see, you know. Yeah, you do. You do. It is one of the things where I like, I put a lot of faith in them knowing what they’re doing and I value the people who train them. So my impression of flight training from the people who I’ve known who’ve done it, who’ve done, started and gone to like ride alongs and things like that, is that it is a process. It takes some time. And also it’s not a discount event. It’s not a. It can be expensive to go through and learn how to, to fly. So how, when you started this, you were thinking about going to Germany. How long did you think it would change that it would take? And how were you, were you still working? Like, how are you going to do this?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:10:43]:
Well, I looked at all kinds of different options because I already had a degree and I wasn’t really interested in getting another degree. I just wanted to start working teaching again. So I started looking at it kind of from that point of view and looked at what’s going to be the fastest way to get me from point A to point B. Yeah. So if it involved moving overseas and then coming back, luckily I found a flight school that was pretty close on the east coast that advertises really, really fast. Going through their program. I believe it was four months and two weeks to the day. I think I have to go back and check. But it was very close. Four and a half months from completing instrument through multi engine instructor at that flight school.

Amy Stone [00:11:26]:
Wow.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:11:27]:
So I was able to finish all my ratings in a very short amount of time. And so knowing that I made the decision to just stop working, I kind of left the symphony. I said, hey, spent a great time, loved it here, I’m going to pursue this. So we moved and did that. And then I sat around for like a month afterwards and ended up getting a job at a flight school and helping them out for a little while and kind of almost. It wasn’t an assistant chief position, but for all intents and purposes, it was very similar. What we did. I was called a program manager.

Amy Stone [00:12:05]:
Okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:12:06]:
So I managed like a section of the flight school and had, I believe it was 8 to 12 CFIs under me at the time there.

Amy Stone [00:12:16]:
Okay. So not only flying, but also teaching other people how to fly.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:12:20]:
Yeah.

Amy Stone [00:12:20]:
What were the parts of the training process that maybe surprised you along the way? It surprises me that you could do it that fast.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:12:31]:
You can do it that fast. You have to be dedicated and committed to it. Like, it’s. You have to just embrace the lifestyle, change from the beginning, otherwise it’s not going to work out.

Amy Stone [00:12:40]:
Okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:12:41]:
I think the biggest thing for me, I remember this distinctly, was that things in aviation are pretty black and white. So in the music industry, we have a lot of things like, do you feel a certain way? How do you interpret it? There’s a lot less of that in aviation. It’s just this or it’s this. A lot of the questions are very black and white. So for me, when I realized that, my instructor told me that, he said, look, just believe it. That’s just how it’s going to be. When he told me that, that helped me accelerate my learning and understanding because I can just go with it now. Farther along, there is some interpretation stuff when you get into the legal side of things, but we’ll save that.

Amy Stone [00:13:21]:
But generally why the planes stay up in the air and what to do in certain situations, that’s a. Do as I say and don’t question the deep meaning behind the question.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:13:31]:
Yeah, we can do a lot of. I like to call it pre thinking. So what we’re going to do now is when we go out to flight, we know exactly what we’re going to do on that flight. We’ve done the pre flight, we’ve done the preflight planning. Everything is known from the time we start the engine to the time we shut it down. There’s a legal requirement to it. There’s just an obligation kind of morally to do it, to make sure that we know what we’re doing while we’re on the plane. So when we spend all that time on the ground thinking about what’s going to happen next and how we’re going to go about this process when we get in the air, we’re not really surprised by unusual events.

Amy Stone [00:14:07]:
That is a very good thing. No, I’m all about not being surprised about things that happen on the airplane, really. So. So you’re not quite there to where you’ve got somebody who’s in school. But in elementary school you might remember they do the career day. Bring your. Bring the adults come in. Right. I gotta say, you’re a candidate for two very cool jobs. You know, musician, pilot. Those are popular choices on. Bring your. Bring your kid to.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:14:32]:
They’re kind of opposite ends of the spectrum too.

Amy Stone [00:14:34]:
They are. I love this because they are, they’re so very different. I once, one of my kids went to school and one of the parents came and they were firemen and they brought the fire truck and completely staged up every other parent that showed up that day in school. But you know, pilot is. Pilot is definitely, definitely up that up there. So you shared this, that when you were in high school you worked at a. Worked on somebody’s flight business. Like you were doing. You were doing something with like a ride along program.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:15:03]:
How.

Amy Stone [00:15:04]:
Like what’s the earliest you remember being curious about flying?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:15:07]:
Actually there’s a video way back in the day. I think I was probably four or five. We were at the beach and this is way before there were like headsets and stuff in the airplane. So you’re yelling at each other the whole time. You’re just this really old airplanes in the video, they have one of those giant camera things they put on the shoulder and you can see me in the video. And I said I’m going to be a pilot one day because I want to like, I, I guess I’ve just always known it even from amazing. Very, very little. So I think it’s kind of funny that it’s come full circle now from 4 or 5 years old to now in my 30s.

Amy Stone [00:15:39]:
I think that’s very interesting. I really do. And I. So then I have another question because music is. It was your career and you were you. In order to get to where you got in music, which I did not know before we started the interview. But you had to be dedicated and passionate about the study and the instrument. But music is like a lifetime thing. Do you still play? Do you still interact with the music community in your town?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:16:03]:
I do periodically. I’ll take a gig here and there. I don’t practice as much as I did. I will admit that I probably should, but I just don’t because I’ve completely switched careers now. But I do try to stay with it a little bit. My sister and I, she plays cello, by the way.

Amy Stone [00:16:19]:
Okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:16:19]:
We were discussing setting up a little concert thing, concert series at some point and playing like the Brahms Violoncello Trio. With the piano?

Amy Stone [00:16:28]:
Well, absolutely. Like. And I have a friend who is long retired, but she gets called out to people. Even when people are getting married, they’ll bring her up and she’s like, okay, fine, I’ll come and do that, you know? Cause it’s something she still enjoys.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:16:40]:
It’s still fun. What’s nice about it now is it’s not. I don’t have to rely on it as my own, my only source of income, so I can enjoy it a lot more.

Amy Stone [00:16:50]:
Well, there’s a life lesson in there for some things, right? Like, so you. When you started with music, do you come from a musical family? Was music a pattern in your family?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:16:58]:
Kind of. I mean, we grew up in music. It was always around us. My mom, she sang a lot. My dad played trumpet in high school, but he wasn’t playing at all by the time we were around. So.

Amy Stone [00:17:10]:
There is a thing. When you’re passionate about something, it seems like the next step is to turn it into your career or your business. And it’s not always a great thing. There’s many, many people with stories of taking something they really, really love as a hobby. And the minute it becomes their business, they lose the joy in it. And so that’s definitely something that happens because it’s different. It’s different. And flying, there was a risk of that, too. You could have gotten in there and been like, oh, I only actually like this when I do it for fun. But it turns out you like to. You like to teach it and do it. How much flying time did you do you get these days? Do you do a lot of flying?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:17:49]:
I do, yeah. It depends on kind of the weather and the days. I go through periods of high flying and sometimes not a lot of flying. I’m an assistant chief, so I’m not technically a line instructor. I have, I think, 12 instructors underneath me. I know it sounds like I should know that number, but we just changed a little bit, so. So if I have a time when I have a lot of students, then I’ll fly a bunch. I’ll be in the top three in terms of hour producing. I love flying. You can’t beat the view. It’s the best office in the world.

Amy Stone [00:18:20]:
So that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So I actually get to talk to a lot of people about career change because it’s interesting that it’s something that a lot of people go through. It’s something that most of us are not prepared for, at least the first time it happens. Right. And I love to have These conversations. I’m curious whether or not you remember where there was, like, one particular moment when you were like, all right, this is it. I’m changing, or whether or not it was a gradual thing that.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:18:49]:
Oh, it was very much just, we’re changing because it involves moving multiple states away, completely abandoning a career that was already set up and successful, and saying, you know, we’re going to leave that behind and just do something completely different.

Amy Stone [00:19:03]:
Okay, so the first person you said told was your. It sounds like was your spouse.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:19:07]:
Yes.

Amy Stone [00:19:08]:
All right, who else did you. Who else did you tell? And what kind of feedback did you get from people when you said the words that I would never put together, I’m going to stop being a violinist and start being a pilot.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:19:18]:
Right. That’s kind of a crazy thing to say. They were all supportive. I told my friends and family, and I don’t think anybody said I was crazy. They might have behind my back, I don’t know. But they all were supportive of it. They just thought it was really cool. Yeah, because you wanted to see how it would happen.

Amy Stone [00:19:36]:
So, yeah, you picked the two. The cool things. If you had said you were going to go into, you know, house painting, they may have said something different. They might have said something different. So, yeah. So when. What kind of things were you hoping would change in your life? Like, so thinking back to the way your life was when you were working for this infinity, when you were putting together these events and working with all the children, and you were thinking, and you had decided you were deciding to change to being a pilot and a flight instructor, um, what were you thinking, Were you hoping would change in your life as a result of making this career change?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:20:11]:
Uh, really, I was looking for consistency. So as a musician, there’s the gig culture or the gig mentality, which is totally fine, but me and my friends in the musician world, we talked about how there’s feasts and famine, there’s times when you make a lot of money as musician, but then you go through a couple months where you don’t make anything as musicians. So you have to plan very strategically how you spend your money throughout the year, because there may be times when you’re not making any at all and another time is making a bunch. So I really kind of wanted to flatten that out a little bit to be consistent, because at the time, I didn’t have a kid, and one of my goals was I wanted to be able to have a kid and ensure that I could consistently provide for him if something were to go wrong. Because to me there were too many variables. So if for some reason I got sick or something like that, something were to happen and I’m relying on that gig mentality, let’s say I miss that peak. I can no longer now I’m going even longer without making money now in the symphony. It was kind of a. I want to call it like a sourly gig. That’s what I call hourly sour sal salary, if that makes sense.

Amy Stone [00:21:16]:
So yeah, I’m making a portmanteau of salary and hourly.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:21:21]:
Yeah, exactly. So I, I worked hourly at like a salary rate for a certain total number of hours. I don’t remember what it was. So I could rely on that to some extent. So I. There was some stability there. But there was like a big portion of my income that came through doing a lot of gigs and stuff. So I was just kind of looking to even that out. So that was the first thing. The other thing was at the time we had an apartment and we. This, the apartment was like a diamond in the rough. It was amazing because it was 400 bucks a month.

Amy Stone [00:21:54]:
Oh my God.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:21:55]:
Yeah, it was insane. And it was around a thousand square feet. So it was huge as far as apartments go. And it was centrally located basically downtown. We. It was amazing. So it helped us get ahead in life. So we knew that if we were to ever buy a house, we’re actually going to have to spend more on the cost of living to move out of an apartment. Just usually the other way around. So. But that was my goal. Be consistent, be able to afford my own house to provide for having a kid and then eventually have a kid. So.

Amy Stone [00:22:27]:
So that’s, I mean that’s like a really grown up analysis of your life. It really was like you were leveling up from being somebody who could fly by the seat of their pants, like very gig oriented to really pre planning for a stable, consistent life. That’s a pretty. I’m going to give younger you some props for having that foresight to think about that because I think that. I think it’s hard for a lot of people to sort of see the instability and know what’s coming with that kind of thing and how to make the jump. I think that was very, very good. So what else might have changed from your day to day life when you went from being like schedule wise and routine from the job you had, which was concert based. Right. Like enter like nights and weekends and.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:23:13]:
Yeah, nights and weekends. There’s a lot of flexibility to it. So there’s a lot of parallels between Being a musician and being a pilot. So if you have.

Amy Stone [00:23:21]:
Okay, let’s hear it. Let’s hear it.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:23:23]:
Yeah, if you know somebody’s thinking about making that switch very easy to do so. Well, I won’t say easy. There’s a lot of things that carry over. So pilots, they, they fly, at least in the flight instructor world, we fly kind of around the clock. There’s times when I’m flying, like last night I was out till one in the morning flying and then tonight I’ll be done by probably 7. So it varies depending on what we’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes there’s like nighttime requirements that we’re trying to get in.

Amy Stone [00:23:52]:
Okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:23:52]:
So in terms of that, that carried straight over because being musicians, the same thing, I might be playing a wedding at two in the afternoon on a Saturday and then a concert Sunday evening or something. Yeah, so that part’s pretty similar. One of my musician friends, I’m going to quote her, she said musicians in the military are one of the most disciplined industries you can get into. And I would also equate pilots into that because it’s very similar. So in terms of how they approach things, when you meet some of the really high level classical musicians, they’re very disciplined in terms of how they practice and they’re consistently showing up and that it’s just unreal when you meet some of these people, they’re very good. If you bring that same mentality to how you approach becoming a pilot, you’ll find a huge amount of success in that. Because we’re, we’re big on being on time, doing things consistently the right way every time. A pilot and a music, a classically trained musician are basically the same person. If you were to break them down to their core components, I think that.

Amy Stone [00:24:55]:
Is the most amazing connection. I would never, if you had said to me before we started this, Amy, come up with things that musicians and pilots have in common, I would have been hard pressed to come up with what they are. But I see exactly what you’re saying, that the skills that are behind it in taking responsibility for your action, hitting the timing things, I see it, I do see it, but I never would have guessed it. That’s a really, really, really good thing. All right, so we are going to get to the final questions in a little bit, but I do want to ask you to think back to the younger version of you who was 14, 16 years old, the time when you were working at the airport on the summer gig, but also beginning to develop your music skills. Looking forward, if you were able to go back and give that version of you advice about jobs and things you were choosing. What do you think you might tell yourself?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:25:55]:
That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about it.

Amy Stone [00:25:57]:
Well, because it’s not something you can actually do. So it’s. In some ways it’s a terrible question, but in other ways, it’s like, what have you learned that applies to people in an earlier state? Because it sounds from the outside. Even though you point out the similarities, it does seem like a pretty big shift between two different parts of your personality.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:26:18]:
Yeah, I think so. I think listen to people around you. I think I was doing it then, too, but also, like, telling myself to believe it. So listen to what they have to say and be consistent. Like, continue being consistent and just kind of stick with it for the long haul. I don’t think I would change the trajectory if that’s kind of part of the question.

Amy Stone [00:26:41]:
It wasn’t, but it was going to be the next thing I was going to ask you.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:26:43]:
I had a feeling.

Amy Stone [00:26:44]:
Are you happy? Yeah, right? Yeah. That’s good.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:26:47]:
Because I think it played a part in making who I am now, like, how, why I am the way that I am now, being consistent the way I am. I think I could have probably done more of it. I think we always think we can do more. There’s times when I’m like, I could have done more of this or that.

Amy Stone [00:27:05]:
Well, that’s always true. Right. If you were to go back, you could always do more. I try not to ask myself the question, just as a person, for me, am I doing the best I can do? Because we are always doing the best we can do at the time. It’s just that we don’t have the same context that we will have at other times. You know, the day you get up and you have like a splitting sinus headache that day that you get nothing done, that’s the best you could do in that situation. If you look right, if you look back at it, you’re like, oh, I didn’t do anything. It’s like, yeah, it’s not a helpful. It’s not a helpful frame. But. But you. So then you are happy that you pursued music as far as you did, had that experience, and then made the change. Do you ever feel like you. Did you ever feel any pressure, like, you’ve got to change now or the time is slipping away, that kind of thing?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:27:52]:
I think so. When I was planning on switching careers to being a pilot, I. I could sense that now is the Time to make that switch. If I’m going to make the switch, I need to do it now. But I think that’s just kind of how I’m driven as a person. Individually, I’m very five year goal oriented.

Amy Stone [00:28:09]:
Okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:28:09]:
I realize not everybody aligns with that or agrees with it. That’s fine. But for me, it works really well because the five years of being really four years of being in college, I took a gap year. So we’ll rewind a little bit. Graduated high school, I waited a year to see if music was something I wanted to do. Then I went to college. So that was about five years. Post college was about another five years of just kind of being a professional musician. And then I switched. Now I’ve been a pilot for about five years.

Amy Stone [00:28:38]:
That is really interesting. You have a five year cycle of reinvention. You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of when I was job hunting right after I graduated from high school from college. Sorry. And they would say, where do you see. They would ask this question, where do you see yourself in five years? And I always thought it was a very strange question because I was like, well, five years ago I was in high school. I don’t have a good framework for where I will be in five years. That’s not what I said in the interview. But I’ve always, I always hope that people don’t ask that question anymore to a, you know, 22 year old kids like, I don’t know. I was 17.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:12]:
I don’t think I knew back then either. But I think it kind of naturally fell into that anyway. And it works for me.

Amy Stone [00:29:20]:
It works. It absolutely works. All right, so now I’m going to ask you three rapid fire questions which are not really related to flying or music.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:31]:
Okay.

Amy Stone [00:29:31]:
I think. What is your favorite late night snack?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:36]:
Oh, popcorn.

Amy Stone [00:29:38]:
Popcorn. All right, very good. What is the last movie you saw either in the theater or streaming at home or wherever?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:45]:
Oh, I know what it is. I’m gonna have to look it up.

Amy Stone [00:29:46]:
Okay, look it up.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:48]:
It’s called the Watchers. I remembered it. It’s on Netflix.

Amy Stone [00:29:50]:
Watchers on Netflix. All right, very good. Are you a person who still goes to the theater or do you mostly stream?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:29:55]:
I stream now. I’ve kind of started a little hobby of sort of building my own home theater.

Amy Stone [00:30:00]:
Oh, okay.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:30:01]:
So I have, I built some DIY speakers and things like that. It sounds really, really good. So my, my joke is I don’t have to go to the theater. It’s at my house.

Amy Stone [00:30:08]:
So I, I I. I sometimes I really enjoy the theater experience, and sometimes I just would rather stay at home where all my stuff is. And. And so there’s. Okay, so what is one thing that you’re afraid of that you are willing to admit on the show?

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:30:23]:
One thing that I’m afraid of? Oh, this is. I know the answer to it. That I’m not. Basically, that I’m not doing enough. We’ll kind of circle back to that.

Amy Stone [00:30:34]:
That does. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:30:36]:
I’ll tell you where it comes from. I know exactly where it comes from. So. Years and years ago, I had a dream that a friend of mine and I were just. We were playing. We were kids, but it was almost like time in the dream was passing a lot faster. And you know how in school they had stations where you could go and do different things, and it was just kind of free choice. We, in the dream, we could go play at this station, or we could go learn something at any of the other stations. We played for a little bit, and then he wanted to go start learning stuff. And at the time, who I was in the dream, I just wanted to continue playing. And as time progressed, he ended up being successful, moving on with life. And to me, that kind of equated to a nightmare. When I woke up, I realized I didn’t want to be stuck, you know, not trying to better myself, basically, is what it came out to. And just kind of becoming stagnant as a human being. So ever since then, this has probably been. I might have been 10, I had the dream. That’s been a really long time ago. I kind of promised myself that I would try to never become stagnant.

Amy Stone [00:31:36]:
So always pushing yourself to better yourself. Yeah, that sounds to me very much like an anxiety dream that, like, if I’m. I’m stuck at the station, other people are moving forward. I can’t move forward. I have this fatal flaw that I can’t move forward. And you clear are a person who is always moving forward, picking something that was a very high mark, you know, professional musician and then pilot and pilot instructor. Those are two big things. All right, that’s it. Nathaniel Ramsey, thank you so much for being a great guest today on the show.

Nathaniel Ramsey [00:32:08]:
Thank you for having me.