I have spent eighteen months listening to smart people describe the agentic advertising future, and I have heard exactly one of them describe it in a way that made me stop typing.

Phylicia Koh is a general partner at Play Ventures, the Singapore gaming and consumer fund. She came on the show and told me privacy is a lie, that Anthropic is lying about ads, and that the smartest people in this industry are building an entire machine-to-machine transaction layer with a hole in the middle of it. Then she brought Donald Trump and JD Vance to a desert island. We will get to that.

Here is why this conversation matters this week and not some other week. AdCP, the agent-to-agent protocol that Brian O'Kelley and roughly a hundred other companies are standing up, is no longer a slide. It is shipping. PubMatic put buy-side agents into production in January. Agencies have run live campaigns through it. The plumbing for a world where your agent buys media from my agent is being poured right now, in public, by people who know what they are doing.

Now go look at the governance. The nonprofit that runs AdCP has four voting classes: Brands, Agencies, Publishers, Technology Providers. Ten seats each at steady state. Forty chairs around the table.

Count them again. There is no chair for the person the ad is pointed at.

That is Koh's entire thesis and she is the only person I have heard say it out loud. Her version of the future has three agents, not two. A brand agent bidding. A publisher agent selling. And a consumer agent in your pocket that holds your calendar, your inbox, your purchase history, your Pilates bookings, and refuses the garbage on your behalf. She thinks that agent is the most important unbuilt company in this industry, and she is right that nobody is building it. Enterprise agents took the majority of agent funding this year. Consumer agents are the thin end of the barbell. The reason is not mysterious. The consumer agent has no customer. Nobody in the current value chain wakes up wanting the person at the end of the funnel to have a lawyer.

I pushed her on whether this is just RTB with extra steps. She took the hit and said it is a fair analogy, then said the difference is who is in the room. That is the honest answer and it is also the whole problem, because "who is in the room" is not a technical question. It is a question about who pays. Somebody has to fund an agent whose entire job is to reduce the value of the impression, and so far the answer to who that somebody is has been nobody.

Her diagnosis of why this matters is the best line in the conversation. She has two nephews, ten and eight, who have understood since they were toddlers that advertising is the thing that blocks the video. "That's advertising's issue, where it essentially is giving people the ick."

An entire generation for whom our product is a groan.

Where I think she overreaches: privacy. Koh says our behavior proves privacy is a commodity, not a value, and points at Meta, at TikTok, at Americans fleeing to a Chinese app the week we tried to ban a Chinese app. I have made this argument myself at three in the morning. I no longer think it holds.

Behavior only reveals preference when the choice is real, and we spent twenty years making sure it was not. Revealed preference in a rigged room is not a preference. It is a verdict on the room. Her stronger formulation, and she gets there herself, is that the problem is when privacy buys you nothing. That one I will sign.

Where I flinched: she gamified prayer. Bible Chat is in her portfolio, and it is a fine business, ten million users, a Prayer Wall, streaks. I daven three times a day. I have never once wanted a login bonus for it. She said the point is habit formation, faith or fitness or money, whatever the habit is. I believe she means it. I still think there is a category of thing that gets worse the moment you attach a counter to it, and I do not think anyone in this business has done the work to figure out where that line sits.

Then I put her on a desert island and she brought the president and the vice president, not because she likes them, but because their absence triggers a search. Pure Singaporean pragmatism, zero sentiment, maximum extraction. She has a partner and two cats for the parts of life that are not logistics. I asked which of the two men gets annoying first. She answered instantly. That one you get on the show.

The strongest thing she said, and the reason Part II exists: "So when they say, you know, we're not gonna add ads, I think it's yeah, you're not gonna add ads for right now, or maybe in the next year or two."

She is talking about Anthropic. I went and checked.

Part II, for subscribers

Part I is what she said. Part II is what happens when you take it further than she got to in thirty-seven minutes.