Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

Look, the Tik-Tock Saga.

It's going to end, or it's going going to end or it's going to happen or it's going to do

something in the next few days. Will Tic-Toc be sold? Will it not be anything? Will it be banned in the US? Will it be dark soon? There are so many angles to the story

So many interesting ways to tease out something that is unprecedented in the world of tech at least recently.

Alex Cantruitz pinged me to talk about it and he's a good dude to do so because

he wrote a whole book about the big tech platforms and as we get into as you'll hear in a second,

this is so so rare. A big up and coming platform that is just for weird a historical reasons being offered up on a platter for all the other powers to I don't know

Take over I quoted Alex when he was at BuzzFeed for years on this show, but as we discuss at the end Alex has gone solo

Check out his newsletter Big Technology Check out his newsletter Big Technology.

Check out his podcast Big Technology.

He had our friend M.G. Seagler on to talk about Apple recently and I was like,

could I have gotten as good an analysis of Apple out of M.G. if I had interviewed him myself?

Probably not.

Alex is great.

Subscribe to Alex's stuff. enjoy our conversation.

So I did just check for the purposes of talking to you right now, Alex Alex and as of this moment

Tik-Tok hasn't sold but for all we know it could happen

in an hour have you heard anything do you do you get a sense of that things are getting down that it's definitely got to be crunch time because the deadline is coming fast and furious right?

I'm definitely gonna look stupid by the time this thing goes live when I say this but I am amazed that it's still even talked about as being in play as something that can be bought because we know that the Chinese government is making the companies making bite dance go through a review before it sells before it can hand over the algorithm.

And the fact that like Oracle and Microsoft are still talking about or still haven't shot down the fact that

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