ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Each week, a well-known guest draws a card from our Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Samin Nosrat is the force behind the hit cookbook and Netflix series "Salt Fat Acid Heat." She's famous for teaching people not just how to cook but how to have fun while doing it, but her personal life has included a lot of loss. Nosrat told Wild Card host Rachel Martin about a major shift in her perspective after her father died a few years ago.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: One, two or three.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Three.
MARTIN: Three. What truth guides your life more than any other?
NOSRAT: Oh. I mean, I think life is finite. My whole life, I've been kind of in this - if I'm good enough and work hard enough and, you know - I don't know - have high enough standards and achieve enough, then eventually, something good will happen for me. You know, then eventually - and it's - I've always been in, like, saving up mindset of - both financially and - but also almost, like, saving up good deeds to cash in for I don't know what. And then I was like, oh, wait. There's no there. There's no thing that you get to where then you're paid back, you know, or the, like...
MARTIN: Right.
NOSRAT: ...The huge welcome in to the palace and now you've earned the good life happens. Like, this is it. This is my body, my one body. This is my one life.
MARTIN: Right here.
NOSRAT: And so I've often had this kind of mentality of, like, almost a self-punishing, of, I have to just - no, no, no, no, no. Like, everyone else is going on that camping trip. Like, well, they are people who take days off but not me. Like, I have to put my head down and keep working. But it's not like those work days are incredibly, like, you know, productive. I'm often, like, so sad I'm not with my friends or something.
MARTIN: Yup.
NOSRAT: And yeah. And also, working - only working or only being hard on yourself doesn't ever really lead anywhere good. So certainly by the time my dad died, I really sort of reoriented. And maybe less than a month after my dad died, two of my best friends had a baby on the East Coast. And they had - and they invited me to the baby naming ceremony, which was a thing I normally wouldn't do. I wouldn't just, like, drop everything and buy a ticket - like, a super-expensive, last-minute ticket to go...
MARTIN: Name a baby.
NOSRAT: ...To the East Coast for this ceremony or whatever. But then I was like, wait a minute. What is life for? There was a very - a clarity of, like, oh, I don't need to say no to all these things. There's only one baby naming ceremony. You know, there's only one opportunity to go be with the people who I care about. And I think I've really sort of come into this awareness of - time is the most precious currency in our lives.
SHAPIRO: That's chef Samin Nosrat talking with NPR's Rachel Martin. For more conversations like this one, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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