Duchess Meghan just debuted her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, and her lifestyle brand, As Ever, but she’s not finished. This Tuesday, the Duchess of Sussex dropped the first episode of her new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder. And while the podcast will focus on the hurdles and wins that come with being a woman entrepreneur, Meghan knows we all want to know more about her life, so of course she’s including some personal anecdotes in there too.
Ahead, all the biggest highlights from episode 1, featuring Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Meghan recalls her royal photo-call with newborn Archie.
Wolfe Herd hilariously recalls the moment Meghan and Prince Harry introduced their newborn son, Prince Archie, to the world during a public photo-call two days after his birth, in May 2019. Following in the royal footsteps of Princess Diana and Princess Kate, new mother Meghan stepped out in a white coatdress, next to husband Prince Harry, who wore a gray suit and carried their bundled-up baby son for the photographers to snap away.
“I mean, I’ll never forget the image of you after you delivered Archie, and the whole world was waiting for his debut,” Wolfe Herd says. “I was either just becoming or about to become a new mom, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, how is this woman doing this? How is this woman putting on heels and going and debuting a child in this, you know, beautiful outfit in front of the entire world?’ ”
“I could barely face a doorbell delivery for takeout food in a robe,” she adds as Meghan laughs.
“Can I be back in my cocoon?” Meghan says, seemingly recalling how she felt.
She reveals she experienced postpartum preeclampsia.
Meghan shares a surprising detail about her motherhood journey, opening up about a rare condition that both she and Wolfe Herd experienced: postpartum preeclampsia. It is “a rare condition that occurs when you have high blood pressure and excess protein in your urine soon after childbirth,” per the Mayo Clinic.
The Duchess of Sussex, who is mom to son Prince Archie, five, and daughter Princess Lilibet, three, with husband Harry, does not say after which pregnancy she developed the complications.
“It’s so rare and so scary,” Meghan says of the condition. “And you’re still trying to juggle all of these things, and the world doesn’t know what’s happening quietly. And in the quiet, you’re still trying to show up for people—mostly for your children—but those things are huge medical scares.”
“I mean, life or death, truly,” Wolfe Herd says in agreement.
She speaks about her work-life routine with young kids.
“We became moms in the pandemic, post-pandemic culture, where there is so much working from home.… I don’t leave the house to go to an office; my office is here,” Meghan says.
The duchess has previously spoken about why she chose to film her Netflix show and develop her lifestyle brand locally—so she could be available for her kids whenever they needed her. The same goes for her podcast.
“Lili still naps. She gets picked up early and she naps,” Meghan says. “She only has a half day in preschool. If she wakes up and wants to find me, she knows where to find me, even if my door is closed to the office. She’ll be sitting there on my lap during one of these meetings with a grid of all the executives.… I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t want to miss those moments. I don’t want to miss pickup if I don’t have to. I don’t want to miss drop-off.”
Meghan talks about overcoming media criticism.
Wolfe Herd recalls walking through an airport in Ireland a couple of years ago and seeing a newsstand where every single magazine and newspaper had a cover photo of Meghan. “I just had a moment where I was like, ‘Wow, this is a different beast,’ ” she says of Meghan’s spotlight.
“But it doesn’t feel different, whether it’s at that scale or not,” Meghan replies.
“But I do think there is so much to be said for your ability to exist, even in the presence of that. Like, that takes a very strong cookie,” Wolfe Herd says.
Wolfe Herd remembers having gone through a media storm caused by a legal issue when she worked at Tinder and not wanting to leave her house for fear of what people would say. “I shrunk into this shell of myself,” she says.
“We turtle,” Meghan agrees. “No matter whatever scale you’re at, there’s gonna be a point where you’re gonna take a hit, and there’s gonna be a point where you’re going to have to decide if you’re going to coward or if you’re going to conquer or if you’re going to rise above it.”
They reflect on past relationships and self-love.
Meghan sweetly nods to Wolfe Herd’s happy family, composed of cowboy husband Michael Herd and their two sons, Bobby, five, and Henry, two.
Wolfe Herd says that what she has seen through working in the dating-app world is “a bunch of hurt people hurting people,” and that is what she was used to before she met her husband. She explains that she had to do the work to be ready to accept the kind of love and happiness she has with him now. “I had to learn how to like myself over the years. When I look back on these relationships, I’m like, ‘Oh, I must have really hated myself,’ because I tolerated that, and I put up with that,” Wolfe Herd says.
“Look, I think you and I really connected on that in a huge way,” Meghan says.
Before Harry, Meghan was married to film producer Trevor Engelson from 2011 to 2014. Few details are known about their relationship. She met Harry two years after her divorce, in 2016, and the two became engaged in 2017 and married in 2018.
“You create a space with the intention—even if it morphed into something that ended up dating-aligned, the root, the origin, was still about autonomy, self-love, making sure that you could really advocate for yourself and be in a relationship or even a possibility of a relationship that’s rooted in something that’s healthy,” Meghan says.
