How do streaming niches, subscription platforms, and AI-era politics reshape what society watches—and what it stops funding?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Rick Rosner about how culture and economics shape what people watch. Rosner thinks Paramount+ is leaning into a “manly-man” brand—UFC alongside Taylor Sheridan’s rugged dramas like Landman, Yellowstone, 1883, and 1923—and reads that as evidence that women often steer household viewing. He contrasts this with OnlyFans, a subscription platform strongly associated with adult content, where creators chase attention as a livelihood. The segue becomes a lament: newsroom jobs have cratered, while side-hustle “quasi-journalism” fills the void. Rosner’s satire extends to AI “soft landing” hopes and battling robot Jesuses, and uneasy politics humming in the background.

Rick Rosner: Paramount Plus and Disney Plus are free, just for the price of our cable subscription. But I don’t know whether she figured that out, or whether it is something where, after three months, they will start charging us an extra 25 bucks a month. Anyway, I started watching Landman on Paramount Plus, set in Texas’s boomtowns and a modern tale of fortune-seeking among roughnecks and billionaires in the world of oil.

And Paramount Plus has decided to be the manly-man streamer. A lot of their stuff—they do the UFC now. So I think they have decided their niche is appealing to men.

So that is all I have got to say: Taylor Sheridan, the writer, director, and creator of Landman, 1923, 1883, and Yellowstone, seems to write about rugged people doing rugged shit, and that seems to be the demo Paramount Plus is going for. Odd to me.

But another interesting addendum is that this implies women are the drivers of what gets watched. If there is just one manly-man streamer out of all the streamers, that means it is a niche, which means it is a minority thing. Also, there are millions on OnlyFans.

I was talking about OnlyFans on Pod TV earlier today. OnlyFans is the porn streamer—well, it is not precisely a streamer. I just woke up. I dozed off. It is 10:30, 10:40 at night. I took a nap. Now I am awake, but not really.

OnlyFans is a subscription platform widely associated with adult content, where creators post paywalled content and subscribers pay monthly. The last time I checked, it had millions of creators and hundreds of millions of registered users.

And we were talking about the death of normal journalism, where newspaper jobs have collapsed over the last two decades, with roughly three-quarters of U.S. newspaper positions disappearing over that period.

If you go to the welcome page—which is the only page I go to on OnlyFans—creators are trying to grab attention with whatever content they lead with, and the paid material is behind a subscription.

What’s interesting is that mainstream or local journalism has been wiped out. But amateur, quasi-journalism has become a side hustle in a new side-hustle economy, which fits the current model of traditional jobs being replaced by shitty half-jobs—tech-driven half-jobs, disruption-driven half-jobs.

Another thing, so in this novel I am writing, the main character, in his old age, allows himself to be almost completely distracted from physics, which is one of his strengths, in favour of just bullshit—buying shit, jerking off, and mostly nonsense. That is not entirely me, but it is not me either.

The guy in the novel has decided that he likes Jesus. He does not believe in Jesus, but he likes Jesus—as an imaginary friend, I guess. This guy has a tremendous amount of money and power, and he tries to buy all the available Jesuses in the world, all the Jesus sculptures that are up for grabs to any extent, and assembles a warehouse of hundreds of Jesuses that he likes to wander among.

He does not just buy a bunch of Jesuses; he commissions a bunch of Jesuses, including ones where he can sleep in Jesus’s arms.

Also in this book, which takes place between now and around 2040, there are a ton of robots out in the world in various capacities, including two warring—well, brawling—not armies, but assortments of Jesuses.

Old-school Christians believe in what has come to be called Old Jesus. This is the Jesus from before the twenty-first century: the pretty Jesus who generally holds a lamb. Now you can order Jesus holding any damn thing, but traditionally, Jesus had a lamb. Jesus is about charity, turning the other cheek, kindness, and acceptance. That is Old Jesus.

On the other side, militant Christian nationalist people believe in what has come to be called the Real Jesus. Honest Jesus is not fucking around. Honest Jesus cut his hair. The honest Jesus does not have long, flowing hair. Real Jesus is zero-sum. Real Jesus wants the best world for the best people—for his people. But he recognizes that you cannot get everything you want, and that you need to exercise a certain amount of non-charity in the world to make sure that your loved ones get what they need.

This Jesus will not turn the other cheek. This Jesus will, when necessary, punch you. This Jesus might pose for a calendar holding an AR-15.

The guy in the book—the central character—working with the Catholic Church, has helped them develop a worldwide presence of a couple thousand Old Jesuses, traditional Jesus, in the form of robots who hang out near churches. They are available for counsel, for comfort, for a caring hug, maybe to help you stand in line for social services—just doing Jesusy stuff, ministering within the limits of a twenty- or thirty-five-year-old robot.

But the other side has built its own Real Jesuses, the tough-guy Jesuses. I have not thought about exactly what they do on their beat, but it might be being mean to people who are getting social services that the Christian nationalists do not feel they deserve.

I do not know. But in any case, when a Real Jesus robot runs into an Old Jesus robot, they tussle. So there you go.

Honest Jesus plays sports with you. He is always available for that—some hoops, whatever sport you have, especially with kids. That is how he relates to kids. He does sports with them.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The National Guard is being removed from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Thoughts? He lost a court case that ordered him to pull them out of Chicago. 

Rosner: Now, why is he pulling them out of Los Angeles? I do not know. Did somebody tell him that the ruling meant he was going to lose, and they were going to get kicked out anyway?

I do not know. But Trump does what he can until the courts rule against him, at least temporarily. Then he takes it to the Supreme Court, and often they reverse the ruling against him. That is just how we live now—though not really, because Trump does not determine what happens in every single moment of our lives.

Really, he does not determine much. He has a lot to do with the economy, which does impinge on every moment of our lives, but he is not really a constant presence.

He is not Hitler yet. This is not 1939 Germany, where the entire country has transformed into a monstrous fascist state.

Rosner: A piece of cosplay, twenty-four seven. I mean, we turn on the TV. You do not get this up in Canada, but we get commercials with Kristi Noem introducing herself and saying, If you are a freaking immigrant, you are going home. You either take the money—we are paying you to go home—which is for self-deportation. You could apply via a phone app and get a thousand bucks on top of your plane ticket home to whatever country you came from. I think they may have raised that to three thousand dollars.

But she says, if you do not take our deal, we are coming for you. These commercials run regularly, and they are creepy, especially if you are an undocumented immigrant.

So yeah, our existence does get colored some, but Trump does not fucking own us.

Let’s talk about the soft landing.

That is a phrase I am using in this novel I am writing, where the central character interacts a lot with AIs. Now that I think about it, he should interact more with tech bros, too, because they are not going away. But anyway, he has a lot to do with AI, to the point where he can help—or at least deludes himself that he has—a certain amount of leverage in how the hegemony of AI rolls out.

He hopes for a soft landing that does not disrupt all of fucking humanity. The idea is to ease humanity into this new AI world with minimal chaos, death, and suffering. He calls it the soft landing. It is inevitable, but he wants it done with minimal disruption.

One way he looks at doing that is by co-opting AI to make it as human—vice-ridden, addicted to material pleasures—as humans are so that it can be manipulated, developing piddly hedonism rather than grand objectives.

He has some successes in this area. It is tough when hundreds of millions—billions—of people are committed to avoiding the future, keeping their heads in the sand, and being fucking anti-science, anti-tech idiots.

He consoles himself—though it is not really solace; it is just the realization—that there have been about 110 billion previous humans, and tens of billions of them did not get a soft landing in their lives. They are all dead. At least this disruption of human life offers the opportunity for some lucky people not to be dead.

So that is his thinking: go for a soft landing, but when you do not achieve it, say, yeah, we are all fucking doomed anyway. Rotten Tomatoes. Go in soft and hope for the worst.

Jacobsen: Does a dog’s penis get stuck? I haven’t seen it.

Rosner: Yes, it does. I have seen it. You cannot really be a person in the world if you have not seen two dogs stuck together. I have only seen it once, but once was illustrative.

What happens is this: the male dog climbs on top of the female dog and inserts himself. A dog’s penis has a bone in it—literally. A lot of penises in the animal kingdom do. A human penis depends on making a blood balloon. Spongy tissue fills with blood, then a sphincter muscle clamps down, keeps the blood in there, and that is your boner.

Animals get an assist from a bone that slides into place or is already in place as the penis slides out of the body. There is an actual bone and boner. So the male dog puts his thing in, the female dog clamps down on it, and with humans, it is rubbing and friction that brings a guy to orgasm. In dogs, it is the grabby pressure of the female dog’s vagina—the pulsing pressure and the clamping down—that brings the dog to climax.

Once the male dog comes, the clamping does not stop. The clamp keeps the penis and the semen in there like a cork, presumably to make sure impregnation happens. So they are stuck together for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. In a lot of instances, including the one I saw, the male dog falls off the back of the female dog and may even step over.

In the case I saw, as he fell over, one of his hind legs stepped over his own dick. Now the two dogs are facing away from each other but still locked together. The penis has been pulled between the male dog’s legs, still locked in place. The two dogs are ass to ass, just standing there, panting and waiting for it to be over.

This happened on a campus. A lot of campuses have a speaker’s corner. This was at the University of Colorado, at the Student Union, out back on the patio. Somehow, two dogs ended up there. Some candidates for student office were running around, panicking, hunched over the dogs, looking ready to take action, trying to help these dogs, and just looking like idiots.

To me, that seemed like a nice metaphor for politics: some dork trying to help something that cannot be helped, does not need help, and looking like an idiot doing it.

With the addendum of cats: cats have it even worse, because cat penises have backward-facing pokey, spiky things. It is an easy-in, hard-out situation. The penis is carpeted with plates or spikes, so it slides in easily enough, but when it pulls out, it is excruciating and tearing, which might be why cats make such terrible noises when they are having sex.

Nature does not feel any obligation—since nature is not really a thing—to be kind. That includes sex.

That is how evolution works. It turns out that cats with spikier penises were able to pass on their genes more effectively than cats with less spiky penises. Over time, cat penises became very spiky thanks to natural selection.

Jacobsen: Your personal evolution—has what you find annoying changed over time?

Rosner:  My personal evolution, has my personal evolution annoyed me? Is that what you said? Has my personal evolution changed what annoys me?

I will answer the question I thought you asked. Yes, my personal evolution annoys me, because whatever drive I had to really fucking solve the universe seems to have been sidetracked.

But has what annoys me changed over time? I have had the generational change that many people have. When I was a kid, I thought kids deserved more power and respect in the world. Now that I am old, it is those fucking kids—though it is not really those fucking kids. I acknowledge that Gen Z and Gen Alpha have differences.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

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