Transcript
Ben Shapiro (0:00)
Foreign.
Dave Smith (0:06)
What's going on, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. He. He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein. How you doing today, sir?
Rob Bernstein (0:16)
I'm doing well. Had a nice calm weekend. How about you, my friend?
Dave Smith (0:20)
Same, same.
Rob Bernstein (0:21)
Nice calm weekend. Sorry. Portland.
Dave Smith (0:24)
Yeah. Okay, well, I will. I will get it. Yeah, I guess I gotta. I gotta talk about this briefly. I mentioned this on the last show we did, but that was a members only show, so not everybody saw it. By the way, if you guys don't know, we do four shows a week, not three. But the only way to get access to the fourth is to sign up over@partoftheproblem.com thank you to all the fine people who do. And then you also get to watch the shows live, ad free, uncensored. You get to be a part of the live chat. We get a whole bunch of perks that you get for signing up at various different levels. So please do if you can. Yes, unfortunately, as I had mentioned, we did. We had to cancel two weekends. We had to cancel Portland, which was supposed to be coming up next weekend, I guess, and then we had to cancel St. Louis. It was like, I'm gonna try my best here. I was a little bit more. I gave my honest thoughts on the. The members only stream. But you know, there are.
Rob Bernstein (1:20)
Hey, look, like, here's the positive thing in our personal lives, we're not pushovers.
Dave Smith (1:25)
Well, yeah, that's right. Look, there's. There's moving pieces to this too. And I know I. I heard that the club wasn't very happy with what I said or whatever. I was right. I was. I just tell them the truth. But of course, my agency. Well, my agency represents other people who also, you know what I mean? Like, my agents also have other clients that they want to work at the club. And so it's like, look, the bottom line is that it was. It was a bit funky what we got paid, which was drastically less than we should have been. The club Helium. Great club, great staff of people, really fun comedy room. Don't think the ownership handled it the right way. They. They were paying something that is really, I think, wrong to pay a comedian who sold out their weekend. And I'm. They essentially. Essentially, I was tricked into the agreement. And when confronted about this, they were like, no, that's just our deal. Even though it's not. And so, yeah, anyway, I had to cancel these two weekends. It was over a business thing. I really feel bad about. I hate ever having to cancel shows. It's Particularly just because, like, I, I'm very grateful to our fans. I really appreciate, you know, when people buy tickets and come out to a show, I appreciate that that means something. I know how, how weak the dollar is these days. I know that, like, people have to work very hard to, to make their money. I know, you know, I know what hiring a babysitter and taking a night off and doing all of it is. And so I hate, hate to ever cancel shows. It was one of those things where I had no other option. I really had no choice for, for these two weekends. And it was not anything that I did wrong or that Rob did wrong. It was on their end. And anyway, also, I just think really stupid business on their part. But I am making sure, I've told my, my agent. I'm making sure we will book dates in Portland and St. Louis this year. I will come back out for those of you guys who wanted to come see the show. And I hope the club is giving out refunds. They should be, although I'm not sure they're. They're doing the right thing these days. But I really hope everybody does get a refund who wanted to come out anyway. So that's kind of a bummer. But we got a whole bunch of other digs. We are coming all around the country this year. Comicdavesmith.com for any of those ticket links. All right. Oh, and the other thing I wanted to mention is that I did the. For any of you guys who may have missed it, I did the debate with Dinesh d' Souza the other day, which was my first debate of 2026. It was one I was really excited about and I was really happy with the way it went. So go check that out if you haven't already. It was probably, and I've had some pretty big blowouts, but it was probably up there, I think, with, in terms of like, the response from the audience, it's probably up there with my most kind of dominant ways. They, the, they put a poll up and I took 95% of it. So it was a good. I thought it was a good. It was, I just thought it was a really interesting, really important discussion, our debate. And I will say, really, I give props to Dinesh Duza because not only does he show up to do the debates, but he's also, he's agreed to come on the show, like, we're going to have him on in a few weeks and like, continue the conversation. And I do it just even when you really disagree with somebody, it's Hard to, to not respect that.
