Today I am in conversation with Olga Berg — a linguist, former U.S. government interpreter, and humanitarian coordinator — about her shift from high-stakes diplomatic interpretation to frontline crisis response during the Ukraine war, and her current AI venture.
In the first days of the Ukrainian war, Olga was part of a group that co-founded the Ukrainian Medical Consortium. The crisis work began with youth evacuation: she coordinated the evacuation of 50+ Ukrainian youth to the UK and Austria in the first days of the war; one evacuee now works for Olga. For medical aid coordination the group partnered with the Polish Institute of Emergency Medicine to register the newly founded Ukrainian Medical Consortium rapidly, leveraging the institute's established credibility. Parallel they initiated an orthopedic surgery collaboration: they paired U.S. surgeons (via Northwell Health) with Ukrainian surgeons via telemedicine and procured specialized equipment including secondhand CRM X-rays. A key focus was tactical medicine training: Olga ran the only internationally certified tactical medicine program for civilians in Ukraine for 2+ years, training thousands.
Olga shares how this all came at personal costs, the work for her resulted in severe burnout, PTSD, and her divorce. She described this phase as 20 months of sleeping four hours a day.
But what she said was so fascinating and positive despite all the despair, how people in crisis know what to do, they show knowledge, taking over responsibilities - no questions asked, and communication was clear, precise and no words waisted.
This intense experience and her earlier professional career lead her to co-found the DarcyCode, a behavioral linguistic intelligence engine designed to improve human communication precision. It works as a deterministic logic layer ("behavioral linguistic intelligence engine") that sits on top of LLMs (GPT, Claude, etc.) to interpret human behavioral speech patterns. Her start up is inspired by the Gottman 1983 study: where micro-conflict resolution in conversation predicted divorce rate with 93% accuracy — the same principle is actually applied to team survival.
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To learn more about Olga Berg and the DarcyCode, please go to her website and follow her on social media:
@olgabergny
linkedin.com/in/olga-berg-9aa44416
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This podcast is created, produced and hosted by Claudia Mahler.
