Two women have earned the illustrious moniker “the people’s princess”. The first is the global icon and beloved royal family member, Diana, Princess of Wales. The other is a high school girls’ field hockey coach in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. Both were reluctantly pulled into the spotlight by their husbands’ fame. Both have rocked a Philadelphia Eagles letterman jacket. But Kylie Kelce, the 32-year-old wife of the former Eagles center Jason Kelce, is the only princess of the two to figure out how to freely divulge what she wants to the people about motherhood, relationships and media.

“If you’re gonna talk about our family, if you’re gonna talk about me, you might as well hear it from me,” Kelce declared in the inaugural episode of her podcast Not Gonna Lie (NGL), which launched this past December. Kelce’s impetus to podcast isn’t hollow: a lot of people are talking about her. Through a fortuitous blend of athleticism (Jason is one of the most celebrated offensive lineman in recent NFL history; his brother Travis Kelce has similar bragging rights as tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs) and charisma (Jason’s 2018 speech at the Super Bowl parade cemented him as a Philadelphia folk hero; Travis’s girlfriend, a little-known performer by the name of Taylor Swift, has only boosted his appeal), the Kelce boys have garnered a lot of old-fashioned goodwill from the American public.

In 2023, they competed against each other in the Super Bowl, and Kylie Kelce, 38 weeks pregnant with her third daughter, brought along her obstetrician in case she went into labor mid-game. It inspired a steady drumbeat of tabloid coverage since – about her pregnancies, her miscarriage, her mothering style and her marriage. Between Jason and Travis’s New Heights podcast, Jason’s ESPN talkshow, a Kelce documentary on Prime, a Kelce Christmas duet with Stevie Nicks, at least a dozen brand deals among them all and another Chiefs/Eagles matchup for Super Bowl 2025 (Jason retired in 2024), the Kelce ascendancy continues. Little did Kylie know that when she swiped right on Jason on Tinder in 2015, she’d end up part of an American dynasty.

Still, when NGL skyrocketed to the top of Spotify and Apple podcast charts within two weeks of its debut and temporarily knocked Joe Rogan from his throne, it caused tumult in the digital town square. That a suburban mom and wife, who has said her politics “aggressively lean” left, was able to unseat the pugnacious prince of the manosphere prompted skeptics to ask, both genuinely and crudely: “Who the fuck is Kylie Kelce?”

But NGL v Joe Rogan Experience is an ill-suited comparison, and one that Kelce herself is decidedly not interested in making. “I couldn’t care less about the charts,” she told the New York Times in a December profile, and besides, Rogan’s male listenership isn’t who she’s courting. Instead, a more interesting dynamic is unfolding in two spaces where Kelce has home-field advantage: female sports media and motherhood content. What’s more, she’s forging ahead with a tactic not common in the high-octane arena of podcasting: by being, it seems, the most normal woman in the world.

On NGL, Kelce introduces herself as a “soon-to-be mom of four” – the Kelce dynasty continues to expand – and a former field hockey player turned coach. “I have a husband that you might know about. He sort of, let’s be real, dragged me into this mess,” she says. Episodes of NGL are capped at 45 minutes to cater to an audience of moms and working women (even Mel Robbins’s clocks in at about an hour and a half). They feature segments like the self-deprecating “Places I have no business being” (Milan fashion week! A WWE event!) and “Five-ish questions” (“We’re not doing 20 questions. We’re doing five-ish questions, that’s what we have time for”). Nine episodes in, all of Kelce’s guest interviewees have been women and, more often than not, women in sports.

“She seems very real, like a real, real person,” said Sara Isenhour, 40, a stay-at-home mother of three from Tennessee. Isenhour, who particularly loves NGL’s “Fuck around and find out” segment, calls Kelce “hilarious” and thinks she “has a very real take on motherhood”.

Lee Wacker, 34, a philanthropy officer from Philadelphia, likes that Kelce is “seemingly not self-involved and is making herself open to these experiences in an accessible, everywoman sort of way.” Wacker, noting Kelce’s philanthropic work in the community, also pointed out that fans have crowned her the “people’s princess of Philadelphia”.

For the most part, Kelce’s Instagram feed doesn’t show the heavy hand of a PR team; she favors posts of the Jersey Shore, her dogs and kids, and her #mcm Jason. Bulk orders of paper towels are piled up throughout the Kelce home in the Philly suburbs, less than 10 miles from where Kelce grew up and went to college. Rarely dressed more formally than anyone you’d bump into running errands at Target, Kelce is undoubtedly one with the people. It turns out, the people love that.

After launching at No 1 on Spotify and Apple’s top podcast charts, NGL, produced by Wave Sports and Entertainment, now sits at 47 and 37 respectively, outranking Travis and Jason’s show; NGL’s YouTube page has more than 250,000 followers.

Wacker and Isenhour both say that Kelce’s championing of women in sports has kept them tuning in. “I connect most closely to the women in sports dynamic, or women interested in men’s sports, [with] these echoes of other worlds,” Wacker said. “That’s been what’s sustained my interest.” Kelce recently played host to Alex Morgan for an episode in which they talked about playing soccer during and after pregnancy, achieving equal pay for the US Women’s National Soccer Team, and the difficulty of choosing baby names. Wacker recalled her reaction to the episode: “Ding, ding, ding, that’s right on the target of what I was hoping we would see.”

NGL’s arrival has coincided with a meteoric rise in national interest in women’s sports, with sports’ female fandom in general growing as well. Still, scroll through Spotify and Apple’s sports podcasts and it’s a sea of male hosts in baseball caps, baring their teeth for cover photos one can only presume were taken mid-verbal dunk. The handful of women-hosted or women-focused sports shows – and there are some! – have yet to become mainstays.

“We all grew up in a world where, if you liked sports, it was a ‘name five players’ type deal,” said Lily Shimbashi, founder of Sports.ish, a company aiming to reshape sports media to be more inclusive of female athletes and fans. One of Shimbashi’s first jobs was as an NBA broadcast associate, and she said she picked up on hostility from male fans. “I wasn’t sure, as a very young woman embarking on my career, if I wanted to be judged by men on their couches for the rest of my life,” she said.

In 2019, when Shimbashi started out, an estimated 5% of sports media was dedicated to covering women’s sports. But research suggests that surging interest could see that percentage rise to 20% in 2025, with NGL, though not explicitly a sports podcast, part of that landscape.

Along with Morgan, Kelce has brought on the Fox Sports commentator Charissa Thompson to discuss her decision to not have children, the NFL sportscaster Erin Andrews to discuss her journey to parenthood through surrogacy after cervical cancer, and the Olympic sprinter Gabby Thomas to talk about imposter syndrome as an elite athlete. (Non-sports guests have included the social media personality Drew Afualo and the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia actor Kaitlin Olson.) According to Shimbashi, these are the interviews that give a female fanbase the “connection and emotional vulnerability” they crave. They offer a path into the sports world that doesn’t require them to obsessively recite stats or pass “name five players” tests.

Kelce claims she has “no business” talking to these women – a self-effacing sentiment that I don’t necessarily agree with – and is still honing her somewhat stiff interviewing skills. But her deep familiarity with the demands sports can make on women and families and a sporting attitude towards her guests allows conversations to flow. (As NGL has progressed, so has her ease with conducting interviews.)

“A real key thing to growing the popularity and the fanbase of women’s sports is to have women’s sports just talked about in general culture and in mainstream media. And Kylie is doing that,” said Caroline Fitzgerald, the founder and CEO of Goals, a consultancy and media platform focused on the business side of women’s sports.

If Kelce isn’t talking about sports on NGL, there’s a good chance she’s talking about motherhood. At the moment, the momfluencing arena is dominated by trad wives like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, who showcases an aesthetically aspirational lifestyle of tending to her rural Utah farm while raising eight children under 12, and Nara Smith, who can make chewing gum from scratch while wearing a silk chiffon blouse. These women make motherhood look selfless, virtuous and very, very beautiful. Kelce, while also a conventionally attractive woman, has no qualms discussing the uglier, messier side of parenting.

She jokes about how mortifying it is to be driving a minivan, and how she fears her children will realize how lazy she is when it comes to Elf on the Shelf placement. In the podcast’s fifth episode, I was pleasantly surprised to hear congestion in her voice. “We’re a little under the weather in our house this week,” she announced through a cough. It’s a phrase I’ve heard mothers in my life say more times than I can count.

“There are so many opinions about the right way to parent, so many pieces of advice for young moms on sleeping, on eating, on growth development, and it’s exhausting,” Shimbashi, who is also a mother, said. “To have a woman with Kylie’s influence come in and say: ‘Hey, being a mom is hard. My house isn’t clean ever’ – and this is a woman who has access to a lot of help and has access to a lot of childcare – but she is standing here admitting: ‘My child was throwing up yesterday.’”

In general, Kelce presumes a millennial mama bear equanimity – a self-assuredness, rather than a stringent allegiance to traditional values or perceived morality to guide her parenting style. Yes, she curses in front of her kids. No, she’s not too concerned this is what’ll send them down a path of depravity. “I know a lot of people do a lot to prepare for having a child, including educational avenues,” Kelce said on a recent NGL episode. “Reading books, taking birth classes. I didn’t do any of it.” But before anyone could possibly accuse her of mom-shaming, she continued: “Good on ya. It’s not me.”

Shimbashi also noted Kelce’s position as an athlete’s spouse. Athletes’ wives and girlfriends, or Wags, “were known as elite, they wore high fashion, they were untouchable”, she said. But she finds Kelce to be “relatable as a wife”. “No marriage is perfect and [Kylie and Jason’s] certainly isn’t, but it feels very real,” she said.

“She seems so adjusted and so normal, for lack of a better word, compared to the tropes of football wives and girlfriends,” Wacker said. She doesn’t posture her “children as an accessory to a personified image of marital harmony, supporting your football player husband”.

To hear her fans say it, Kelce is the platonic ideal of a friendly neighbor. She offers a familiar camaraderie that isn’t overly intimate (she loves her boundaries), and no woman will be made to feel inadequate in her presence; she’s someone to gripe with, whose voting record you don’t necessarily need to be concerned about, who can get into it about Sunday’s game. Consistently true to who she is, who she is is normal.

Time will tell if Kelce’s normalcy will give way to monotony, or whether her growing fame will break the illusion. For now, for 45 minutes a week at least, folks are hooked.