By now, it should be clear that Who-dom has broken well past containment. And by "Who-dom," I don't mean the Seussian variety but the taxonomy coined by Who? Weekly's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: the vast, sub-stratospheric tier of celebrity occupied by figures whose fame is intensely meaningful to some and virtually nonexistent to everyone else. Whos are defined in opposition to Thems, the indisputable celebrities known to most except those living under a rock or who willingly reject the very notion of pop culture, and unlike the days of yore, it increasingly feels like Whos rule the world, or at least your attention.
For more than a decade, first through a newsletter and then with the podcast Who? Weekly, Weber and Finger have kept reliable and amusing tabs on the ever-expanding universe of Whos and dissected the increasingly jumbled celebrity hierarchy. The podcast marked its tenth anniversary last month, an extraordinary run not just for an audio-only show still gleefully independent and resistant to pivoting to video but also for an ongoing project tracking celebrity itself, the infrastructure of which has radically transformed over that same period. And as if to put a bow on the anniversary, Weber and Finger have now written a book. I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity will come out September 26 from Crown, and it turns their ridiculously fun celebrity-tracking work into something formal: a cultural history of fame in the digital era that grapples with what happens when almost anyone can become famous -- or famousish.
Covering terrain like the rise of sponcon and the evolution of Notes-app apologies, the book bottles the podcast's underlying ideas into an overarching theory of modern celebrity. Weber and Finger spoke to Vulture about how fame has changed in the past decade, why they wrote the book, and celebrating ten years of the podcast.
What are you going for with the book that you couldn't do with the podcast?
Lindsey Weber: I keep saying this thing that's now really in my head, which is that the podcast is stupid-smart and the book is smart-stupid. It sounds like a dig, but it isn't. With the show, we're burying the vegetables in this thing where we're being funny and silly, but underneath there are a lot of ideas and experiences drawn from having worked in journalism and all that stuff. I want the book to be the opposite, where it presents as smart but you're reading it and you're like, This is silly and fun, maybe kind of stupid.
Bobby Finger: We had a lot of conversations early on about the actual layout of the book. Do we want infographics? But it's, like, no: We want people in a bookstore to open this up and say, "Dang, they wrote whole paragraphs." This isn't a coffee-table book. This isn't a gag book you put in a stocking. This is a book with specific ideas presented in chapters.
Weber: Part of why we're doing this is because we have hundreds of episodes of audio that sometimes feel lost to the ether. All that stuff is unsearchable in a way that someone could refer to in any real academic sense.
The book isn't a reference guide through all those episodes, though. It's making a specific argument. What is it?
Finger: That it's easier than ever to become famous, but the definition of fame has changed. It used to imply a monoculture, a kind of ubiquity. People say "famous" all the time, but the word has been siloed and segmented over the past 15 years. It's easier to become famous, but it means less than ever. That's really why we created the Who-Them binary in the first place. It's never been easier to become a Who, but it's never been harder to be a Them.
Like a K-shaped economy of fame.
Weber: A hundred percent. But the way you're summing it up makes being a Them feel more valuable, and a big part of what we love to talk about is the subtlety of why it might be better to be a Who. The binary isn't really a binary. They're all on the same line, and it's how you play it. Some people are better suited to Who-dom. It's actually better for them in the long run.
Who's the archetypal example?
Finger: It's an easy answer, but Rita Ora. She loses what makes her interesting if she becomes definable. The fact that she's doing so many random things is the entirety of her charm. It's unexpected, it's unpredictable. It's funny to watch people say, "Who are you talking about?" and yet she never goes away. If she became a Beyoncé-type figure, she would lose the joy of being a fan of hers.
Weber: There'd be more of an expectation that she'd have to live up to some integrity she'd have to define, and that might take away from money-making opportunities. Or just the chance to do fun stuff! Like The Masked Singer or whatever we deem to be stupid in culture.
What I'm hearing in this is that it sucks to be a Them, and people should just aspire to be Whos.
Weber: The more I do this job, the more I see the value of being a Who. Wouldn't it be fun if you could go to a bar and get free drinks and not have to worry about people taking photos of you? That's the beauty of a Who. Sometimes it's nice just for someone to say "love your work" and you can just go about your day. On the other side, things get expensive. You need hair. You need makeup. You need the money that comes with being a Them. I'm always seeing celebrities who get super-famous super-fast and thinking, Man, you may have had it good before.
Finger: The book opens with a chapter on Meghan Markle that gets at this. To see what she was before she became a Them and what happened after -- it's an extreme example, but it does show the horror of that level of fame. I'm sure part of her looks back and romanticizes the time when she was just a paralegal on Suits.
At the same time, there seems to be a drive among Whos that pushes towards Theminess. I'm thinking about Alix Earle, who clearly wants to keep moving up in the fame ladder, even as it does feel like a losing proposition the higher you go.
Weber: The thirstiness of a Who is something you don't really want to exert. I mean, it delights us, because it means we get to talk about you -- you're in our system and that's fun for us. But for the greater culture, you don't want them to see you sweat. That can be demeaning. But we are a striver culture. We love the American dream. So when someone achieves Them-dom, we still look back and say, "Damn, they worked so hard, they came from nothing" (or maybe they're a nepo baby and didn't come from nothing), and we say, "What a beautiful tale."
Finger: We don't go into this in the book, but so much of this industrial complex is consumption capitalism going crazy ...
Weber: We don't trace the history of capitalism in the Who? Weekly book.
Finger: In some ways, that's a little too obvious and a little too macro for what we're doing, but Alix Earle is a perfect example of that type of person. Her bread and butter is influencing. The bigger my audience from a quantitative perspective, the more money I can make from brands. If I can be seen as dating Tom Brady, even if I'm not, it's more eyes on me, and that's more money from Skims or whatever. It all connects to the money, and the aspiration for money is more of the thing than the aspiration for fame when it comes to a lot of Whos. They don't necessarily care about what the output is. It's not about their talent or art or whatever. It's about how much is in the check.
What else do you hit in the book?
Weber: One of the first chapters traces the Notes-app apology all the way back to the origins of public relations and Barnum & Bailey, to the first PR person making stuff up to convince audiences of something or another. We get into gossip columns and blind items, from Louella Parsons through the "Page Six" era. There's a chapter on sponsored content and celebrity-endorsed products, like Tyra Banks's ice cream line, Smize. Why does that make us laugh? How did we get to George Clooney doing ads for Nespresso? We have a chapter on the death of selling out. All of it ties into what we find funny on a day-to-day basis, and it's great to trace it back to the roots.
You've been doing the podcast for ten years, the newsletter a little longer than that. What's the major difference between the celebrity complex now versus when you started covering it?
Finger: Something we track through a Beyoncé anecdote is the social-media calcification of celebrity journalism. Over the past ten years, celebrities have gone from treating profiles as a necessary part of the job -- grin and bear it, hold a puppy, say the least offensive things possible -- to giving you absolutely nothing. There's a wall. To read a profile from 2015 and then one of maybe the same person ten years later ... it's a different genre of writing.
Weber: We're just grasping at straws now. The mystique is there even for people who could actually use some personality out in the world. They're too scared. The internet moves too fast. They figure they might as well put it out themselves, where there's control. So much of the PR strategy now is just, "Don't say anything, don't give anything."
But if you give nothing, you get nothing. When I worked on this piece about the new media circuit last year, I got the sense that this model was reaching an end point. I think about someone like Timothée Chalamet, who seems to give you a lot without actually giving you anything. But he is giving you something. Do you feel like we're on the precipice of some shift?
Weber: The Timothée Chalamet thing is funny, because what he actually did was hire his own team of creatives to execute a vision. He wants us to know who he is in a way that's exciting from a media standpoint, and he creates something for us to see. But it still doesn't live in a truth, right?
The context is that celebrities thought they could do it themselves. "We don't need journalists to tell us who we are; we can just say who we are." And maybe we're coming back around to realizing that they do need an intermediary. Someone who's translating what's great about them, with the risk that they might say something that's not great, but with the hope that they're working toward something and can create something beautiful that really says who they are. Or they're just hiring those people onto their own teams. But just because you're an actor or a singer doesn't mean you have this natural charisma, and a lot of times that needs to be drawn out of you by a PR person, a writer, a journalist. That's not as easy as just posting on Instagram all the time.
Finger: I have no faith that intermediaries are coming back anytime soon, especially with newspapers crumbling at the rate they are. It sucks.
Let's switch to you guys. You just celebrated ten years of the podcast on January 8. You're very much one of the OGs -- still independent, still audio only, still grinding...
Weber: Three times a week!
Finger: We're dinosaurs.
... While everybody else has gone video, trying to partner with Netflix. Is that a deliberate approach?
Weber: You know what's funny? It's actually kind of a delightful thing that's happened. We've never taken a stand. We just haven't been asked to do the things that would push us in those directions. And I think there's something actually beautiful about that. We've always been the most midrange podcast.
Finger: We're too small for anyone to really care. No one's chomping at the bit to acquire Who? Weekly.
Weber: We're always giving you what you need, We're cheap, meaning we just do it ourselves. All these little decisions we made out of necessity in the beginning, we kept doing because we liked them. We like editing. We like producing. We've been unable, maybe to our detriment, to give those things up. We want to be doing this. And all of that led to us still being in a position to do it in this weird, independent way. People have asked us to do cool things -- we had a little Spotify show for a minute, all sorts of stuff has happened -- and we're so thankful. But ultimately the pod itself always stayed intact and got done regularly. And that's all that matters.
So you don't feel pressure to do video?
Finger: We feel pressure, but we've felt it for years. I almost think we've powered through the worst of it. There was more pressure for us to pivot a few years ago than there is right now.
Weber: We were journalists during the first video revolution. We were there for Facebook Live. I remember how tempting it felt, how we were all forced to become on-air personalities, and how badly that turned out. I'm unwilling to not learn from that. And what it really comes down to is that we're an always-on, newsy, twice-a-week podcast. (Thrice, if you include the Patreon.) The idea of integrating video production into the way we work is unthinkable.
Sounds like you're in it for the long haul. I do feel like a lot of people are treating this particular pivot to video as an exit route to cash out.
Weber: Yes. I mean, that's exactly it.
Finger: We have our one employee, Timmy, and he's fantastic. Our family is perfect at three.
How big is the show right now?
Finger: The data I check pretty religiously is where we stand on the Society & Culture page on Apple Podcasts, and we're usually the 30th- or 40th-most-popular show in that category. We're somewhere around the size of the Chrisleys' show, a few of the Bachelorette podcasts --
Weber: And a few MSNBC guys. We're in that realm sometimes too.
Finger: We're a midrange podcast that does three episodes a week. We're near Nicole Byer's podcast, Monica Lewinsky's podcast. We're above Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, which is an iconic podcast. We're literally upper middle.
But you're making a comfortable living from it.
Finger: Yeah, but that took years. We both had other jobs. That's another reason we're so committed to audio only. This is how it's been from the beginning, and once we could do it full-time, we were like, "We have this wonderful community. Let's just keep doing it like this."
Weber: The only way to make a living in this is to do it yourself. We do it the way that works for us, and that's how we survive.
Do it yourself ... or be a celebrity.
Weber: We have a whole chapter about that in the book. It's this meta thing we started noticing that has frustrated us to no end. There are good celebrity podcasts and bad celebrity podcasts, just the normal spread. The issue is that the leg up they get is severe. And it's very interesting to watch the flameouts of people who realize they actually don't want to be part of this medium.
But you do have some people sticking around. Amy Poehler just won the Golden Globe for Best Podcast.
Finger: Yeah, but that show is good. Not all of them are.
Let's say podcasting dissolves and sinks into the sea. Would you rather be a publicist, a manager, or go teach celebrity studies somewhere?
Weber: Give me a break. We're not getting hired for anything. I haven't had a job in so long, the bureaucracy alone would take me down. I'd love to be behind the scenes pulling some puppet strings. If someone wanted my advice on it all, I'd be into that.
Finger: Lindsey's a puppeteer. I'd write crime fiction centered around celebrities. A series about a podcaster who solves Hollywood murder mysteries.
Weber: You should write that now.
Finger: And you mentioned publicists -- shout out, much love. The grinding they do blows my mind. I don't have the fortitude for that.
Weber: We'd always rather be heady about it and talk about the ideas than actually do the practice. If I were put in a publicist position, I don't know what I'd do -- too much pressure. But I could wax on beautifully about the idea of publicity and the idea of fame for decades. So maybe I'd have to become an academic.
