Mike Vuolo & Bob Garfield: "Life Is a Flat Pizza Bagel"
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield of Lexicon Valley join to talk 23 skidoo, Massapequa, and why life, in fact, is a flat bagel. They trace the 6/7 meme from Skrilla's drill track "Doot Doot" through LaMelo Ball highlights and a middle-schooler named Maverick, and explain how a throwaway number became the meme stock of language. The conversation winds through rival "word of the year" contenders, then lands on the legal and French graveyard roots of "gist" and its Nigerian evolution into a verb meaning "to gossip." Plus, a Spiel on Trump's death-penalty bluster, Democratic senators telling troops "don't give up the ship," and why wild-man escalation keeps letting Trump win the exchange.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Monday, November 24th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:10.0 | President Trump calling for the death penalty. Wait, let's be careful and let's avoid the |
| 0:15.2 | news imperative present tense, you know, an Alabama man clinging to his life. |
| 0:21.6 | So, last week after a collection of Democratic senators and members of Congress issued a video |
| 0:26.8 | advising military personnel not to follow illegal orders, President Donald Trump went on |
| 0:32.7 | truth social and said, this is really bad and dangerous to our country. |
| 0:37.9 | I'm trying to convey the capitalization. |
| 0:39.8 | Their words cannot be allowed to stand, seditious behavior from traders, lock them up. |
| 0:45.0 | And then in another tweet, the one right after, sorry, another truth, he added, as if to |
| 0:50.2 | answer, lock them up, seditious behavior, Punishable by death. The content of the video |
| 0:59.1 | that the senators put together was a little vague, but it did end with this call. Because now, |
| 1:04.9 | more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws. Our constitution |
| 1:09.9 | and who we are as Americans. |
| 1:12.4 | Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up the ship. |
| 1:16.6 | What were they saying exactly? I assumed it was about the strikes on vessels off the coast of Venezuela, |
| 1:23.2 | which the administration calls drug ships. This seems very clearly outside permissible U.S. |
| 1:28.8 | actions, and senators of both stripes have criticized the administration for the lack of |
| 1:34.3 | convincing detail in their private briefings. My suspicion was confirmed, but then rebutted |
| 1:40.8 | when Alyssa Slotkin, the most prominently quoted senator in that video, |
| 1:44.8 | appeared on this week, this week. |
| 1:46.8 | Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders? |
| 1:51.7 | To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some |
... |
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