Inference and Incense

Our guest: Eric Nazarian , an accomplished Armenian-American filmmaker and the winner of The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting in 2008 for his original screenplay "Giants". Why do we overthink 'the moment' and underthink 'the aftermath' ? In this episode of Inference & Incense , we take a hard (and amused) look at the way we inflate certain choices into lif...

What if growth isn’t about trying harder? In this episode of Inference & Incense , we talk about letting go—not in the dramatic, burn-your-life-down way, but in the quieter, messier way that actually creates room to grow. We share stories from our lives as Asian immigrants and women in tech. Along the way, we unpack why letting go feels so hard (ego, fear, sunk costs, cultural conditioning), h...

What if your gut has opinions… but not all of them deserve a vote? We’ve all been told to “trust your gut,” but no one tells you what to do when your gut is traumatized, overprotective, or running on outdated data. In this episode of Inference & Incense , we explore the blurry line between intuition and survival instinct—why some gut reactions are sharp and wise, and others are just your nervo...

Our guest: Daryl Wein , an American filmmaker. His most recent movies is Something from Tiffany’s (2022). The movie hilariously proves that the quickest way to find your soulmate is a jewelry bag mix-up. If an AI makes a great movie, who do you thank—the director, the data, or the algorithm? In this episode of Inference & Incense , we get into the weird, messy middle of AI and cinema: who’s ac...

What if your biggest failure wasn’t a mistake—but a message you ignored the first few times? In this episode of Inference & Incense , we talk about failure not as collapse, but as interruption—the kind that shows up when you’ve optimized your life a little too well. We share personal stories of crashing while doing everything “right,” overfitting ambition to the wrong model, and realizing—usua...

Have you ever felt like a fraud even when you're actually crushing it? In this episode of Inference & Incense , we talk about imposter syndrome the way it actually shows up—mid-career, mid-meeting, mid-scroll on LinkedIn. We unpack why AI makes some people wildly overconfident and others quietly spiral, how comparison gets weird when everyone’s part-human, part-machine, and why feeling lik...

What if starting from zero isn’t failure—but the whole point? In this pilot episode of Inference & Incense , Lucy and Jen unpack The Fool —tarot’s card zero and the patron saint of beginners, false starts, and “I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m going anyway.” We talk about what it actually feels like to step into the unknown —whether you’re learning a new AI tool, changing careers, or flir...