Oh NYT! Allow me to lecture you on the correct punctuation for using “like” in a sentence.

“I was going to the, like, store.” Here, you enclose the “like” with commas to indicate it is extraneous - basically a verbal comma that could easily be removed and the sentence would not suffer.

“I was like, let’s go the store.” Here, “I was like” is used in place of, “I concluded” or “I said.”

So I was like, that comma you placed in that quote, like, totally did not need to be there.