The Dave Chang Show · The Ringer

Chinese Chicken Salad and Inappropriate Dinner Conversations With Chris Ying and David Meyer

February 5, 2026·56 min·4 clips
Dave Chang suggests a religious figure may have learned magic tricks in Egypt.
The plan falls apart quickly. Christopher Chen and Noelle Cornelia are out, so Dave pulls Christopher Ying and producer David into something looser and a little more dangerous. The food is the excuse. Dave makes a Chinese chicken salad in about 20 minutes, then starts worrying about how to describe it without making it weird. The lettuce cups are still in his head. A recent visit from Jacob Soboroff sends him back to Cafe Palisades, childhood food, and the shaky confidence of cooking without much of a map. Then Inappropriate Dinner Conversations takes over. What started as a recipe session turns into a table game about embarrassment, secrecy, and how much trouble a stray tap can cause. Accidental likes become the first fight. Dave wants a warning button before his thumb ruins his life. His social media rant is not trying to be wise. It is mostly panic, clean-up mode, and the fear of touching the wrong thing in public. Christopher answers with a cooler, darker read. He says his feed is trained well enough that the real risk is smaller than Dave thinks, then gives himself away by admitting his discover tab needs privacy. Producer David keeps feeding the machine. The questions keep narrowing into tiny moral calls: what is embarrassing, what stays hidden, when a harmless click starts to look like evidence. The salad never leaves the room. It stays on the counter as the practical reason for all the wandering, another thing Dave is adjusting while the episode changes shape around him. The game is rough, but it has a pulse. By the end, Dave is already testing the rules in his head and wondering if the bit can survive another round. There is no big finish, just cooking, needling, a five-star plea, and the feeling that the unfinished version might be the most fun one.

As heard by us

Fast chicken salad gives way to a messy, funny table game about social media, privacy, and judgment.

Dave Chang turns a short-handed recording into a loose, funny Leisure listen, starting with the pleasure of cooking without a recipe and sliding into the social risk of saying too much at dinner.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A twenty-minute Chinese chicken salad and a party game designed to make people say the wrong thing.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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