Today's Wisdom - Ozempic, Netflix and SE Asian Politics

Welcome back to A Little Wiser! This Friday, we are thrilled to welcome Tim Marshall, the bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography, to the newsletter. With the world currently navigating a new era of geopolitical tension, Tim’s expertise is more vital than ever; few people can match his ability to explain how borders and landscapes dictate the destiny of nations. Today’s wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

For decades, weight loss was framed as a simple battle of willpower against the primal urge to snack on your most loved chocolate bar. But the arrival of semaglutide, known by the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has shifted the conversation from psychology to biology. At its core, Ozempic is a synthetic mimic of a naturally occurring hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1). In a healthy body, the gut releases GLP-1 after a meal to tell the pancreas to produce insulin and the brain to stop eating. However, natural GLP-1 is fragile; it breaks down in the bloodstream within minutes. Ozempic is an engineering marvel because it is structurally modified to resist this breakdown, circulating in the body for an entire week telling your body to resist eating.

The drug’s most profound effect happens in the hypothalamus, the brain’s control center. Ozempic silences the intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the next meal that plague many people with obesity. By binding to receptors in the brain, it recalibrates the body’s baseline hunger level. Simultaneously, it slows down gastric emptying, meaning food literally stays in the stomach longer. This dual-action approach, slowing the gut and silencing the brain, has produced weight loss results previously only seen with invasive bariatric surgery, with many patients losing 15% to 20% of their body weight.

However, the rapid success of Ozempic has outpaced our understanding of its long-term trade-offs. While it is a miracle for those with Type 2 diabetes and chronic obesity, the drug is not a selective burner of fat. Large-scale trials have shown that a significant portion of the weight lost can be lean muscle mass, leading to a frailer body composition if not paired with resistance training. There is also the "Ozempic rebound": because the drug manages the symptom (hunger) rather than the underlying metabolic or environmental cause, many patients find that once they stop the injections, the hunger returns with a vengeance, and the weight follows.

In Southeast Asia, power is a complex, often fragile dance of dynasties, military interests, and shifting coalitions. In Indonesia, the region’s largest democracy, President Prabowo Subianto continues to navigate the challenges of his first term. Having campaigned as a continuity candidate for the popular outgoing leader, Joko Widodo, Prabowo has effectively bridged the old guard of the military elite with the modern populist machinery. While the nation attempts to maintain breakneck economic growth, observers remain watchful of a potential drift toward the centralized authority that defined Indonesia's past.

Across the border in Thailand, the political landscape has been reshaped by the recent transition from Paetongtarn Shinawatra to Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who assumed leadership amid a snap election cycle in early 2026. This administration faces the daunting task of stabilizing a nation whose youth movement feels sidelined by a pragmatic elite pact that prioritizes the status quo over deep structural reform. Tensions are further heightened by a severe border crisis with Cambodia. Despite a ceasefire brokered in late 2025, a century-old territorial dispute near the Preah Vihear temple and the "overlapping claims area" in the Gulf of Thailand recently flared into armed skirmishes. This friction between the Thai leadership and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet has turned the frontier into a militarized flashpoint, testing the limits of regional diplomacy.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the 14th National Congress of the Communist Party is currently underway in Hanoi (January 2026). Following the death of long-time leader Nguyen Phu Trong in 2024, General Secretary To Lam has consolidated power, overseeing an aggressive "blazing furnace" anti-corruption campaign that has upended traditional party stability. Under the leadership of To Lam and President Luong Cuong, Vietnam is attempting to navigate a new era of development while balancing its relationship with both the U.S. and China. This internal transition proves that in Southeast Asia, the most significant political battles often happen behind closed doors or within the gears of the state itself, far removed from the ballot box.

For nearly a century, Hollywood was governed by the theatrical window, a sacrosanct ninety-day stretch when films belonged exclusively to cinemas. Netflix's pivot to streaming didn't just move the theater into living rooms; it introduced unprecedented surveillance capabilities that traditional studios could only dream of. The platform tracks the precise moment viewers pause, scroll, or abandon a film entirely. This mountain of data, logging billions of behavioral events per day, has fundamentally transformed the filmmaking process itself. Screenwriters now receive notes demanding immediate action within the opening scenes of a film and constant dialogue that narrates events or reinforces the plot, ensuring distracted viewers scrolling on their phones can immediately catch up when they glance back at the screen.

Yet Netflix's data-driven approach has yielded unexpected benefits for the film industry. Traditional studios have grown increasingly risk-averse, funneling hundreds of millions into safe franchises and sequels designed for massive theatrical runs. Netflix, by contrast, operates on a diversification model powered by aggressive recommendation algorithms. Freed from the pressure of opening weekend box office numbers, they can fund mid-budget dramas, niche foreign-language films, and experimental projects that Hollywood had effectively abandoned. When Alfonso Cuarón pitched Roma, a black-and-white, Spanish-language meditation on domestic life in 1970s Mexico, no traditional studio would have given it a wide release. Netflix proved that by leveraging data to connect specific stories with their ideal audiences, they could transform an intimate Mexican family drama into a global phenomenon and Oscar winner.

However, this disruption comes with a significant cultural cost. In the traditional model, a film's success was measured by its longevity and cultural footprint. People talked about movies for months as they traveled through home video releases, and cable broadcasts. In the Netflix era, content often follows a binge-and-forget cycle. A $200 million blockbuster can dominate the global conversation on a Friday and vanish beneath a wave of new releases by the following Tuesday. As the gatekeepers of Hollywood cede power to the algorithms of Silicon Valley, the film industry is becoming more democratic and diverse, but also more disposable. We have entered an age where the greatest challenge isn't finding something to watch, but finding something that lingers with us once the credits roll and the next recommendation begins auto-playing.

Below - Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who recently made a new action film for Netflix discuss the changes they have noticed.

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