Erin and Sara Foster on Nobody Wants This, Family Repair, and Finding Work That Loves You Back
On Armchair Expert, the Foster sisters talk with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman about career rejection, the assumptions attached to their last name, and why their close relationship works even when they disagree.
Erin and Sara Foster can turn a conversation about podcast marketing into an argument about aging, then pivot into a surprisingly moving discussion about childhood. On Armchair Expert, that mix of teasing and vulnerability becomes the point: behind their businesses and Hollywood connections are two sisters still learning how to understand each other without insisting they be the same person.
Speaking with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, the hosts of The World’s First Podcast trace the long road to Nobody Wants This, explain why Favorite Daughter serves a different purpose from their podcast, and revisit the conversations that helped repair their relationship with their father, David Foster.
The thread connecting those stories is acceptance—of a career that needs to change direction, a sibling who handles things differently, and a past that cannot be undone but can be acknowledged.
Nobody Wants This Was Not an Overnight Breakthrough
For Erin, the success of Nobody Wants This followed years of writing projects that never reached an audience.
After Barely Famous, the sisters’ scripted sendup of reality television, she continued developing shows, selling ideas, and working on pilots that did not make it to air. Writing remained a viable career, but getting something across the finish line was another matter.
The feedback became familiar: people liked her dialogue and her voice, but wanted something bigger. Erin struggled with how to satisfy that request without losing what made the work hers.
By the time she was developing the deeply personal project that became Nobody Wants This, she was also getting married and thinking about motherhood. The question was no longer simply whether she could get a show made. It was how much of her life she wanted to spend chasing that outcome.
What am I chasing? You know, what is this thing I’m doing?
— Erin Foster
Favorite Daughter offered a welcome alternative. The clothing business was doing well, and Erin could invest in it without feeling that its performance defined her identity as a writer.
But a blunt conversation with her manager challenged that retreat. Beneath her frustration, she recognized something uncomfortable: she was not only tired of rejection. She was avoiding writing a story that might put her personal happiness at risk.
The Family Conversation That Freed Erin to Write
Nobody Wants This drew on parts of Erin’s relationship with her husband, Simon, and she worried about turning elements of his family life into entertainment.
She had previously written from the perspective of a single person, without the same responsibility to people whose lives overlapped with the material. Now, she feared damaging the healthiest relationship she had experienced for the sake of a creative ambition she was trying to make peace with leaving behind.
That fear made rejection feel almost convenient. If nobody bought the show, she would never have to navigate the consequences of making it.
Eventually, Simon encouraged her to speak directly with his father. Erin approached the conversation nervously, explaining the script and minimizing the likelihood that anything would happen.
His response was enthusiastic—with one memorable condition.
I just have one request. Don’t make us look poor.
— Simon’s father, as recalled by Erin Foster
The joke carried a larger reassurance. The family did not necessarily want the protection Erin and Simon had assumed they needed. They wanted to see her succeed.
Erin says that support freed her to enjoy writing the project rather than quietly undermine it.
Dax Shepard Rewound That First Kiss
Shepard brings his own perspective to the show’s reception: watching his wife, Kristen Bell, become the center of another wave of audience attention.
Even after seeing the response to Frozen and The Good Place, he says the recognition surrounding Nobody Wants This surprised him. Walking through New York together became an almost continuous series of interactions with viewers.
His own introduction to the show was more private—and very enthusiastic. Watching with a friend during a bus trip in Texas, Shepard says they screamed at the first kiss between Bell’s character and Adam Brody’s.
Then they watched it again.
That’s the best kiss I’ve ever fucking seen.
— Dax Shepard
For Erin, the appeal is not just romantic intensity. It is the possibility that intensity and emotional stability can coexist.
She wanted to depict a relationship that feels exciting without making uncertainty or manipulation the source of its appeal.
You should want to be swept off your feet with someone who’s going to still be there in the morning and not play games with you.
— Erin Foster
The conversation also moves into a possible role for Shepard. Erin describes an idea being developed in the writers’ room and asks about his interest and availability. It is a discussion about a potential collaboration, not an announcement of confirmed casting.
Privilege Was Real. So Was Rejection.
The sisters do not deny that growing up around successful entertainment figures gave them advantages.
They describe familiarity with industry rooms, access to people who could offer guidance, and the confidence that comes from having seen creative careers work out. Sara also names the financial safety net: knowing you will have food and a roof over your head creates freedom that not everyone gets.
What frustrates them is the assumption that those advantages explain every accomplishment—or guarantee a career.
Erin’s acting ambitions never developed into the career she wanted. Sara looks back at some of her own early opportunities with unusual bluntness, acknowledging that she took them for granted and sometimes failed to give the work the effort it deserved.
Their discussion distinguishes getting an opportunity from knowing what to do with it. It also leaves room for another possibility: the opportunity may be in the wrong field.
Erin Found Her Voice When She Stopped Trying to Be an Actress
Erin describes her move toward writing as gradual rather than a dramatic reinvention.
While acting felt increasingly uncomfortable, a personal blog gave her somewhere to put scenes, observations, and stories about her life. When people responded to the writing, she began to recognize a different kind of fit.
Contributions to HelloGiggles and other outlets followed, along with learning how to write scripts and eventually entering a television writers’ room.
The distinction was not simply that writing brought better opportunities. It felt more honest.
Acting wasn’t loving me back.
— Erin Foster
She contrasts the resistance she felt in acting with the momentum she found in writing: one path seemed full of red lights, while the other offered green ones.
That realization echoes advice she remembers receiving from her father after an unremarkable piano recital. Rather than insisting she follow him into music, he encouraged her to find the thing she could not leave alone.
Do the thing you would do through a broken hand.
— David Foster, as recalled by Erin Foster
In Erin’s telling, being allowed to quit was liberating. She did not need to prove her connection to her father by sharing his talent.
Repairing Their Relationship With Their Dad Required Acknowledgment
Some of the episode’s most emotional moments concern the sisters’ childhood after their parents separated.
They describe living a relatively ordinary life with their mother while seeing their father inhabit a different world—and raise other children. Their point is not that they experienced financial deprivation. It is that material comfort did not remove the hurt of feeling outside a parent’s everyday life.
They are equally clear about the present: their relationship with their father has been repaired for decades. They do not want accounts of childhood pain to erase the long, close relationship that followed.
Erin recalls her father asking what he could do to bring their relationship to “100%.” She did not need him to complete a checklist. She wanted them to move forward without minimizing what had happened.
My only like trigger is just please don’t minimize it.
— Erin Foster
Shepard responds with a story about his own father. During a drive past a former family home, his father described crying after realizing he was driving away from the life and people he loved. Shepard had not previously understood that leaving had broken his father’s heart, too.
Erin shares a smaller but similarly meaningful discovery: her father recently told her that he and her mother had once cut a trip short because they missed their young daughters.
Learning that he had wanted to come home—not merely that her mother had—changed something for her. The repair came through hearing a feeling she had never known was there.
The Nashville Trip That Changed a Familiar Sister Dynamic
Padman’s enthusiasm for the sisters’ podcast gives her enough familiarity to ask a pointed question: does Erin sometimes anticipate Sara disappointing her, then try to force a different outcome?
Erin recognizes the pattern.
She describes planning a family weekend around a work trip to Nashville. She wanted the sisters, their children, and other relatives to stay together after the event. But even before asking Sara, she was preparing for resistance.
This time, with encouragement from Simon, Erin tried something different. She shared the hotel information, removed the pressure, and booked her own stay.
Sara eventually joined—but chose accommodation that gave her the space she wanted.
The weekend worked because participation stopped being a test of whether Sara would do things Erin’s way.
We grew up in the same house, but we had totally different childhoods.
— Sara Foster
Sara connects that distinction to their broader relationship. Shared parents and shared history do not mean identical wounds, expectations, or responses. Accepting those differences, she says, has put them in a better place.
Favorite Daughter Is the Business. The Podcast Is the Connection.
The sisters draw a practical distinction between their ventures.
Favorite Daughter is a business with a financial partner, growth expectations, and a clear profit focus. Their podcast serves another role: it gives listeners sustained access to their personalities and relationship.
Rather than treating it primarily as a standalone revenue engine, they describe it as a connective layer beneath their other work.
It’s sort of like this quiet undercurrent underneath the businesses that we’re working on.
— Erin Foster
That helps explain why Padman keeps returning to the episodes featuring just the sisters. The appeal is not only their opinions or their guests. It is hearing two people challenge each other with the confidence that the relationship will survive.
By the end, Padman identifies what initially sounded like meanness as something more secure.
Oh, but it’s cuz they’re so safe.
— Monica Padman
The teasing never disappears. Neither do the disagreements. What changes is the understanding underneath them: closeness does not require constant agreement, and honesty does not have to threaten belonging.
This recap is based on Sarah and Erin Foster’s appearance on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast. For the full episode, click on the YouTube link at the top or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
