Most people who reach 40 with status, connections, and a reputation in their field do everything they can to preserve it. Udi Volkov did the exact opposite.

Even before he was an advisor, Udi was a child whose height at a young age already drew attention. He played basketball at a level that earned him a scholarship to Yeshiva University in New York. But what fascinated him wasn't the game itself. "I actually have a memory from kindergarten of watching the other children and being interested in and focusing on the relationships within the group," he recounts. "How decisions are made, what the power dynamics are, why things are done one way and not another." This curiosity about group dynamics led him to the political world: first as an advisor at the British Embassy in Israel, and then as a senior advisor to Tzipi Livni during her tenure as leader of the opposition. From there, he moved on to managing digital influence campaigns, both domestically and internationally.

About a year ago, he made a complete shift: today, he is VP Marketing at the defense-tech company Althimis, which develops training and simulation systems for unmanned vehicles such as drones and UAVs. Concurrently, he is a founding advisor at the startup Polytik.ai, a simulation platform for political strategy, and a researcher at Tel Aviv University, where he studies what he calls the "post-reality" era.

This pivot wasn't easy. Udi describes it as a blow to his ego: he came from a world where he had status and connections, and suddenly found himself in job interviews where he was told he was a "serious person" but lacked relevant experience. He recalls the story of Daniel Lubetzky, a Jewish-American businessman born in Mexico who immigrated to the United States as a teenager.

Lubetzky couldn't find work anywhere, leaving him no choice but to become an entrepreneur. "That's somewhat what happened with me," Udi says. "I realized there was no point in following the usual path. It didn't work for me in that old world, and there's no reason it would work now, so I simply started acting like an entrepreneur."

The main insight he gained from the process: there's no such thing as a true lack of experience. There's a certain universality to every human phenomenon. You just need to understand what to call something you already know, but in the language of the new domain you're entering. Even the transition between political content and security content wasn't as foreign as it sounds: "There's no such thing as a true lack of experience... you just need to understand what X is called in the new domain you've entered, when until today you were used to calling it Y." He found his current role not through a formal job search, but through conversations. He met technological partners with an initial product idea, began acting as the de facto manager of the initiative, and his current CEO is someone who, in a casual conversation, told him he needed someone for marketing.

Udi's "both-and" model is dual: politics and technology, simultaneously employed and self-employed. He admits he hasn't completely figured out how to manage it all without burning out, but two things help him. First, he doesn't judge what he does solely by bottom-line successes. "I believe we collect experiences, not just achievements," he says. "If by the end of the week there's another conversation I learned from, another idea explored, another person I met, that counts." Second, his worlds aren't truly separate: what he researches informs what he markets, and what he observes in the field informs his research.

He also has a precise framework for the difference between regular marketing and what he calls an "influence operation," from the world he knew intimately. The difference, he explains, lies in the alignment of interests between the client and the representative. "When Bank Leumi or the Likud party advertise something clearly bearing their name, there's a complete overlap between the interests of the client or product and the one representing or spokesperson," he explains. "An influence operation is one where the person speaking or representing the issue doesn't necessarily have aligned interests with the payer." According to him, artificial intelligence doesn't break this distinction but merely allows it to be produced on a much larger scale. He predicts that in a few years, the difference between a "regular" campaign and an influence operation will almost disappear, because even a regular campaign will appear to originate from a thousand different sources.

His research on "post-reality" is perhaps the sharpest angle of the conversation. Udi argues that the problem is no longer fake news. Fake news is a breakdown of agreed-upon interpretation, an old problem in human history. The new problem is that generative artificial intelligence has broken the last anchor we had: what we saw with our own eyes. "The great danger is not that we will believe a lie," he says.

"The danger is that we will stop believing anything at all." The example he gives is particularly striking: someone caught on camera committing a crime can simply claim the footage is fabricated, and then the burden of proof shifts. The system has to prove the footage is real, instead of the accused proving it's fake. According to him, there's no going back from this change, only forward: the question that interests him is how to build trust and consensus in a world where we cannot rely on our senses.

Udi is not currently looking for a specific business connection. He is looking for a platform: a podcast, a conference, an executive forum, or any organization grappling with the question of how to build trust and credibility in a world where we can no longer rely on our senses, across any field that depends on documentation: law, media, education, politics. Constructive criticism is also welcome, he says; it's part of his research.

What such a mid-life career change ultimately teaches is that it's not a crisis. It's a work project that demands learning, humility, and precise networking.