• You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts: https://www.howthisworks.show/032-bumhan-yu
• Or on Youtube: https://youtu.be/O_qGqCS9i0A

During the show, we talk through a number of topics, including:

• German-speaking Bumhan comes from an academic family, with professor parents.
• Initially studying linguistics and psychology in academia, he left his psychology graduate program, worked various jobs including translation and military service in Korea, then discovered design (read: graphic design) through a trade school for executive assistants in Manhattan.
• His spatial-visual thinking style, using schematics and diagrams, led him to realize he could build a career making things. He views design as problem-solving beyond aesthetics, distinguishing between specialized "capital D" design and general "lowercase d" design.
• Bumhan's LinkedIn tagline "business of design, design of business" reflects his dual focus on design operations and organizational dynamics. At DoubleVerify, he maintains design systems, defines visual tokens, and collaborates closely with front-end engineers while focusing on systematic problem-solving approaches.
• He critiques design thinking's commodification while valuing its core principle of understanding problems before solutions, drawing inspiration from Bruce Lee's philosophy of adaptation and evolution.
• His coding skills enhance collaboration with engineers through better understanding of backend structures, while his linguistics and psychology background provides unique insights into human behavior and communication.
• Beyond design, Bumhan's also passionate about theoretical physics, particularly Carlo Rovelli's work.

Here's a photo of Bumhan's t-shirt from the episode:

Special Guest: Bumhan Yu.

Links:

• International Trauma Studies Program
• Eames design process diagram
• The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman
• Audiobook for "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli
• "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens

We start with his origins crowning in a cab in Mumbai, India, the ease in which his right shoulder dislocates after a show once upon a time with his hardcore band Lovers and Killers, the joy of Royal Farm (RoFo) fried chicken, and the brilliance of a 'hot now' Krispy Kreme donut. Skipper and Thejus also get into his two books, Brushfire and The Flywheel and The Lever where they get into some of the foundational details, including Henry Ford's creation of the 40 hour workweek, the Stanford prison experiment done by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority figures, the notion of 'it's always the system', the Ben Franklin effect, Thejus' experience creating an instructional system out of open source technologies, Donella Meadows' essay on leverage points, and Gamergate. See if you can pick out the Seth Godin namedrop.

Interesting note about Thejus' previous band — Lovers and Killers, then Caestles, and now Queen Wolf as well as a second band called Infinite Pizza. While he formally left that band about five years ago, they're still making music and he helps with production and occasionally contributes. Here's an audio family tree/playlist:

• "An Hour Left of Forever" from Lovers & Killers' 2006 album Tropic of Cancer (YouTube or Spotify)
• "William Blake" from Caestles' 2010 album A Treatise of Human Combustion (YouTube or Spotify)
• Infinite Pizza at the Windup Space in Baltimore on July 13, 2014 (YouTube)

Queen Wolf and Infinite Pizza are both on Bandcamp, if you want to indulge deeper.

After the outro music, you can hear Skipper spring on Thejus a request to read the opening bit from "Brushfire".

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Thejus Chakravarthy.

Links:

• Ford factory workers get 40-hour week on May 1, 1926
• Books by Sir Terry Pratchett
• Royal Farms best fried chicken
• Sugata Mitra's TED talk on how kids can teach themselves
• Thejus' book "Brushfire"
• The official Stanford Prison Experiment website
• Milgram experiment
• Hot Signage Now: Krispy Kreme in Times Square
• The Benjamin Franklin Effect
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows
• Seth Godin's TED talk about the subject of his book, "Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us"
• Seth Godin's book, Tribes
• Thejus' book "The Flywheel and The Lever"
• Tim Ferriss
• What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks
• Thejus' work site, hircinous.com
• Intro and outro song: "Zombie Nation" by Jose Travieso