4 takeaways from Prince Harry’s Armchair Expert podcast chat

Since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle left the Royal Family in January 2020, they have been free to explore different avenues not typically open to serving royals.

In his latest venture since the move, Harry appeared as a guest on the Armchair Expert podcast.

During the discussion with the hosts, actor Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, Harry opened up about the realities of living within the Royal Family.

Here are some of the key things that he spoke about during the interview:

Fatherhood: “It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on”

In one instance, Harry – who, with wife Meghan, has one son, Archie, and is expecting a daughter – spoke about the way in which he was raised after the death of his mother Diana when he was aged 12.

“I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically,” he said.

“It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway, so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say, ‘You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you’.”

Covertly meeting Meghan in a supermarket: “We were texting each other from the other side of the aisles”

The prince also revealed that one of the first times Meghan came to stay with him in London, the pair met in a supermarket and texted each other grocery items to try and remain as incognito as possible.

He said: “The first time Meghan and I met up for her to come and stay with me, we met up in a supermarket in London, pretending we didn’t know each other, texting each other from the other side of the aisles.

“There’s people looking at me, giving me all these weird looks, and coming up to me and saying ‘hi’. I texted her saying ‘is this the right one’, and she said ‘no you want parchment paper’, and I’m like ‘where’s the parchment paper?!’.

“I had a baseball cap on, looking down at the floor, trying to stay incognito. It’s amazing how much chewing gum you see, it’s a mess.”

Life inside the Royal Family: “A mixture between The Truman Show and being in a zoo”

During the interview, Harry said he wanted to get out of the Royal Family in his early twenties and described his life as like a “mixture between The Truman Show and being in a zoo”.

When questioned about whether he felt caged in his old life, he said: “It’s the job right? Grin and bear it. Get on with it.

“I was in my early twenties and I was thinking ‘I don’t want this job, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this. Look what it did to my mum, how am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and family when I know it’s going to happen again.”

The Las Vegas controversy: “At least I wasn’t running down the strip”

He also addressed some of the controversies that took place during his partying days, as host Shepard referenced semi-nude images that were leaked in the press of Harry in Las Vegas.

Harry said: “That was a few weeks before I went to Afghanistan,” adding, “At least I wasn’t running down the strip, stripping or naked.”

Hosts Shepard and Padman joked about a calendar they make every year featuring men with good bodies, to which Harry joked: “Why am I not September?”

People on Twitter reacted to the discussion, with many glad that Harry definitively said he’d wanted to leave the institution for some time – something that wife Meghan is often blamed for.

However, some of the prince’s usual critics took less favourably to what Harry had to say:

You can’t please everyone.