The City That Never Sleeps, Yet Never Rests

Four conversations Budas de Ciudad didn't plan to have — and urgently needed

There are podcasts that interview experts. There are communities that pile up followers. And there are spaces that, almost without meaning to, end up working like seismographs: they detect, before anyone else, the fractures about to become earthquakes.

Budas de Ciudad began as an intimate experiment. A conversation. A microphone. The conviction that there were people in this city — this invisible city with no postal address that exists all the same — who deserved to be heard not for their title, but for what they had lived. Three seasons later, something has changed. Not the format. Not the intention. What has changed is the urgency of the questions. This quarter, four different voices — a physician rewriting the science of trauma, a lawyer who became a philosopher of territory, a strategist warning about what AI is doing to talent, and a researcher studying why we are more connected and more alone than ever — came to Budas de Ciudad with answers no one had asked them for, to questions we should all be asking.

This is what happened.

I. The nervous system doesn't lie

Dr. Eugene Lipov — Now on Spotify

The question that opened the conversation with Eugene Lipov, M.D., was uncomfortable: what if we have been treating trauma the wrong way? Listen on Spotify.

Lipov is a physician, a researcher, and the creator of DSR — Dual Sympathetic Reset — a procedure that works directly on the biology of the nervous system to treat trauma. Not the story of trauma. Trauma in the body.

In the episode we explore how trauma is not only psychological but deeply physiological — and how, in a world marked by overstimulation and chronic stress, the question isn't whether "talking about it more" helps, but whether the system first needs a reset. Listen on Spotify.

What Lipov proposes is disorienting for those of us who grew up believing inner work was, above all, work with words. His thesis is more radical: before processing, stabilize. Before narrating, regulate. The nervous system doesn't wait for emotional clarity before it overflows.

And what does this have to do with leadership? With organizations? With territory? Everything. Every leader who avoids conflict because their nervous system learned that conflict is dangerous. Every team that freezes exactly when it most needs to move. Every community that repeats patterns no one consciously chose. Trauma doesn't live in the past. It lives in the automatic response of the present.

Lipov reminded us of something high-performance culture prefers to ignore: behind every person in your organization there is a body with a history. And that body votes before the mind does.

Listen on Spotify. It's the kind of episode that stays with you.

II. The translator

Nicolás Gómez Olarte — Coming soon

Nicolás Gómez is a lawyer. Or he was. Today he lives in Dublin, works in sustainability for Primark, and carries the light weight of someone who learned not to cling to any identity for too long. But before Dublin, before Primark, before PwC, he lived and breathed eleven years in the mines of Cesar, Colombia. Eleven years that began as a temporary post. "Just while we find the environmental manager," they told him. He was under thirty. The post lasted more than a decade. And in that decade, Glencore became his laboratory: the place where he learned that sustainability isn't a department of the company — it is the condition for its survival.

The analogy he used in our conversation stuck with us: "As a multinational, I'm an elephant walking into a room full of glassware. My mere presence changes the entire dynamic of the territory. I can't say I didn't know I was going to break something."

That is the core of what Nicolás Gómez Olarte has to say. Not about European regulation. Not about sustainability reporting frameworks — although he talks about those too, with a clarity rarely found in someone who comes from the field. What Nicolás has to say is about collective consciousness. About what happens when a territory tries to plan itself with actors who hold radically different visions of the future.

"Young people want quality jobs. Older people want the territory to go back to what it was. The mayor wants more royalties. And they all live in the same place."

What they did in Cesar — the socio-business laboratories, the weeks living with communities, the slow, hard building of real consensus — isn't a pretty methodology for a CSR conference. It is the story of how a territory learns to speak to itself without anyone speaking for it. With the pandemic in between, Glencore shut down operations in Colombia. Nicolás had to let go of eleven years of work. What he built, what he loved, what had been his world. "It was dismantling what I had built," he said. And instead of staying, he chose to leave.

Today he lives in Ireland with his family. He still works in sustainability. And he runs a honey venture — Miel Abeja — born from the heart of the Arhuaco community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. He calls himself a translator: someone who takes complex requirements and turns them into operating practices people can actually use. What he doesn't say — but what comes through in every answer — is that this ability to translate cost him eleven years of living in complexity without shortcuts.

His episode is coming soon. Have a coffee before you listen.

III. What artificial intelligence is changing in talent — and we still don't understand

Lou Mayé — May

Some questions sound technical and are, in fact, deeply human. Lou Mayé works with leaders and teams to build organizations that balance technology and human development, driving a sustainable, shared future (more at loumaye.com). Author. Thought partner. Someone who has spent years in the exact space where that tension becomes unbearable. The title she chose for her episode is a real question: "What artificial intelligence is changing in talent — and we still don't understand."

And what we don't understand, according to Lou, isn't technological. It is human. We are no longer debating whether AI will replace jobs; that debate is already old. What Lou puts on the table is subtler and more urgent: what happens to a person when the system around them stops needing what they believed was their value?

What happens to intuition when the algorithm predicts better? What happens to accumulated experience when a model learns in seconds what took years? What happens to professional identity when efficiency is no longer a competitive advantage — because everyone has access to the same efficiency?

These aren't questions about the future. They are questions for this Monday. Lou has no easy answers. She has something better: honesty about where we are, and clarity about what remains when everything else changes. May. Don't miss it.

IV. We are hyperconnected — and more and more disconnected from ourselves

Adriana de los Ríos · California Institute of Integral Studies — June

The title Adriana de los Ríos chose is a diagnosis of our era: "We are hyperconnected — and more and more disconnected from ourselves."

Adriana works in the psychology and energetics of bio-spiritual awakening: the transition from fear to love, from separation to unity, from ego identity to universal consciousness. Her work lives far from the language of corporate wellness or of conventional therapy. It lives in territory that is harder to name: the space where a person realizes that the life they built doesn't match who they really are.

What Adriana studies — and lives — is what happens when a crisis is not a problem to solve. When the crisis is the process. When what is crumbling isn't your situation, but your image of yourself.

In a culture that rewards productivity over presence, speed over depth, digital connection over inner silence, Adriana represents something uncomfortable: the possibility that the greatest act of leadership isn't the next strategic decision, but the willingness to look at yourself without filters.

For those who feel something moving inside — and don't know whether to call it crisis or awakening — this episode is probably for you.

June. The season finale no one saw coming.

Why this community exists

Something is worth saying out loud at a time when everything competes for attention and the algorithm rewards speed and noise: Budas de Ciudad doesn't optimize for growth.

We have no virality strategy. We don't chase reach metrics. We don't choose guests by follower count. We choose people who have been through something real. Who have scars that teach. Who think in ways that make you a little uncomfortable — the good kind.

This community was born as a podcast, but today it is something more: an emotional network, scattered but alive. A collective of people who don't always have a name or a defined role, but who know they came for more than survival. Business leaders who lead with ethics. Young people who don't buy the idea of quick success. Women who are done staying quiet. Artists who create not to entertain, but to heal. Read how this city was born.

If you've made it this far — to the last paragraph of a text no one forced you to read — you probably already know which city you belong to.

You don't need anyone to invite you. You're already in.

🎙️ Budas de Ciudad — the Transformente podcast

Season 3 on Spotify · New episodes every month

Community at transformente.com/en/budas-de-ciudad

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Simple. Measurable. Human.

Living people, organizations and territories.