Bye bye binary, welcome to the poly era
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Binary thinking is black or white, on or off, good or bad – and our modern world requires a more nuanced approach. New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman joins host Krys Boyd to discuss our modern age of global multipolarity and how we can start thinking in terms of “poly.” His article is “Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?”
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| 0:00.0 | There is new research on pleasure that actually is fascinating, and the site OMGS makes it accessible to everyone. |
| 0:09.1 | OMGS shares findings from the largest ever study into women's pleasure and intimacy. |
| 0:15.1 | In partnership with researchers at Indiana University and at Yale, they asked tens of thousands of couples what they wished they |
| 0:21.5 | had discovered sooner. They found patterns in those discoveries, and all that wisdom about pleasure |
| 0:27.2 | and intimacy is organized as hundreds of short videos, animations, and how-toes on omg.com. |
| 0:34.0 | And guess what? Half of OMGS users are men. |
| 0:37.8 | Men are curious about this stuff too, scientific research-backed techniques. |
| 0:42.5 | See what they discovered today at omg yes.com. |
| 0:45.7 | That's omg yes.com. |
| 0:47.8 | The term post-Cold War feels past its prime. |
| 1:01.9 | For years after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it made |
| 1:06.7 | sense to describe our times in reference to the end of the communist threat. |
| 1:11.8 | But the things were optimistic about and the things were worried about, they feel really different today than they |
| 1:16.7 | did back in the early 90s. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. If it is time to put |
| 1:24.2 | post-cold war out to pasture, what should we call this historic moment? |
| 1:29.4 | As my guest will explain, the very fact that we're moving from a world of binary differences, |
| 1:34.0 | east or west, war or peace, even male or female as the only two gender possibilities, |
| 1:39.4 | all of that suggests we are living in what might be called the Polycene era. |
| 1:43.8 | Thomas L. Friedman is an opinion |
| 1:45.4 | columnist at the New York Times where you can read his article, Welcome to Our New Era. What do we |
| 1:50.6 | call it? Thomas, welcome to think. Great to be with you, Chris. How does the name we give to a |
| 1:57.1 | particular time influence the way we think about it and about our own existence within that time? |
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