The Verge reports that Joe Rogan’s exclusivity on Spotify is hurting his influence, and that his social numbers have halved. Ashley Carman reports that searches for Joe Rogan also dropped after moving to Spotify, and YouTube data have also fallen.

Not a fan of shock jocks like Rogan, Howard Stern, or Don Imus, so I am enjoying a little schadenfreude with this announcement.

Shock jocks give themselves permission to say what they want by claiming to “say what is on everyone’s mind.” This is somehow seen as liberating, or even worse for the rest of us, a right.

After dinner tonight, my nine-year-old son was complaining that he had a lot of throughs in his mind that he wanted to say but we, his parents, didn’t want him to say them. He made the point that if he said whatever was in his mind, he would get in trouble. This wasn’t fair.

I said, Just because you have something in your mind, doesn’t mean that you have to say it out loud. People could get hurt. You might not mean what’s in your head. It might be rude. He considered this and clearly thought it to be advice of dubious value.

I considered bringing up Freud, the ego, id, and superego, and all the rest of the moral ball of spaghetti. Yet it didn’t seem necessary. It’s enough to consider that speaking whatever comes to mind will hurt people, and, as a person over the age of five, you have a responsibility to other people about that.