The Creator Competency Question

Liberation through Creativity

Have you ever caught yourself doing something with real fluency — noticing every detail, having opinions, feeling it in your body — and still walking around saying I don't really know anything about that? That's where this episode starts. In Liberation Through Creativity, Gabby Turner is driving home from a coffee shop at the beginning of the year, listening to Tiffani Singleton and Taryn Delanie Smith on We're Your Girls, when a Coleman Domingo quote from the 2025 Met Gala stops her in her tracks. He said: "I stand here representing so many generations of men who have liberated themselves through style." And something cracked open. This episode moves through the history and cultural significance of Black dandyism — the official lens of the 2025 Met Gala theme Superfine: Tailoring Black Style — and what it means that Black men specifically used clothing to hold power and softness simultaneously in a world that told them they weren't worthy of both. But it doesn't stay in history. It comes back to something more personal: the ways we deny ourselves entry into creative containers by deciding we're not that kind of person before we ever really try. Gabby gets into what it looks like to disclaim your own fluency — to have opinions about every fabric choice and proportion on the Met Gala carpet and still say I'm not really a fashion girlie — and what that disclaimer is actually doing. It's not humility. It's a cage. And the key is permission only you can give yourself. This one is for anyone who has ever limited their own liberation by deciding in advance where it was and wasn't allowed to live. As a Black woman and creative navigating self-expression and identity in real time, Gabby holds the both/and: freedom lives where you already are and in the places you haven't let yourself go yet. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.

Heard But Unresolved: A Cute Little Workflow

Have you ever finished a long conversation with an AI chatbot, felt completely understood, closed the app, and then woken up two days later with the exact same feeling? That's what this episode is about. In Heard But Unresolved: A Cute Little Workflow, Gabby Turner gets into something nobody is quite naming yet — the difference between feeling heard and actually processing something. After her therapist asked whether there was anything she had been bringing to Claude that should have been coming to therapy instead, Gabby started paying attention to a pattern: she had been outsourcing her emotional processing to AI like it was a workflow, and the feelings just kept coming back. This episode covers what happens when instant gratification meets human emotion, why the pressure release valve that AI provides can quietly replace real emotional work, and what changed when Gabby stopped using Claude as a confidant and started using it as a tool. Spoiler: her productivity went up, her clarity got sharper, and she finally had something to actually bring to therapy. Gabby also unpacks the shame and brain rot narrative around AI use, the 10-80-10 rule, and why even feeling the need to explain how she uses AI says something about the moment we're all living in right now. As a Black podcaster navigating digital wellness in real time, this episode is as much about self-awareness as it is about technology. Whether you're someone who journals, someone who has tried to journal, or someone who has been doing their emotional processing in an AI chat window at 1am — this one is for the big feelers, the overthinkers, and anyone who has ever thought "I did the work" when what they actually did was move the feeling somewhere more convenient. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.

The Creator Competency Question

Here are the SEO-optimized show notes for this episode: Every time a creator fumbles on a red carpet, the comments fill up with the same voice — journalists and media traditionalists reminding everyone why trained professionals should be the ones getting hired for these moments. And on the surface, it's hard to argue with. Traditional journalism is a real craft. It requires preparation, accountability, and the willingness to ask the uncomfortable question without needing the guest to like you after. But in this episode of While I've Got You, Gabby Turner sits with both sides of the journalist versus creator debate and starts pulling on a thread that changes the whole conversation. Because creators are clearly offering something too. When guests have editorial control — when they know that if something doesn't feel right it gets cut, no questions asked — they show up differently. More human, more unfiltered, more vulnerable in ways that audiences are responding to. The creator brings connection where journalism brings clarity, and depending on what you're looking for, that distinction matters. What really shifts the conversation is the third example Gabby brings up. Not a creator fumbling on a carpet — a credentialed Associated Press journalist interrupting BabyFace mid-sentence to call out for Chappell Roan. She had the training. She had the credentials. And in that moment, she didn't do the job she was hired to do. Which raises the question this episode keeps coming back to: if traditional journalism training were the guarantee, how does that moment happen? And if it's not actually about training — what is it about? Gabby also gets into who is getting the institutional co-sign in this industry and who is absorbing the consequences when things go wrong. Hannah Berner and Jake Shane were both hired to host Vanity Fair's Oscar after-party coverage. Drew Afualo — a creator who has never had a moment like the ones being used as ammunition in this debate — has never been given that room. And when Jake Shane's miss with Julia Fox dominated the conversation, his co-host Quenlin Blackwell, a Black creator who did her job, watched her entire moment get swallowed by someone else's fumble. This episode doesn't resolve the debate. It asks whether the debate is even about what we think it's about. The real question might not be training versus no training. It might be competency — and those are not the same thing. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing, hosted by Gabby Turner. New episodes monthly.

Despite How the World Sees You

The night before the 2026 Oscars, Gabby Turner was watching television and noticed something that had nothing to do with awards season — and everything to do with a pattern she has been watching her entire life. In Despite How the World Sees You, Gabby connects a storyline from the ABC drama High Potential to the cultural conversation swirling around Ryan Coogler's Sinners and arrives at something worth naming out loud: the bar does not just move for Black people. It moves retroactively. This episode opens with Ava, the biracial teenage daughter of High Potential's main character, who earns a coveted spot in a competitive fashion program — beating out sixty other candidates on merit alone. Before she can hold the win, a classmate posts online implying she only got in because she is Black. What follows is one of the more honest depictions of racial identity and parenting that network television has produced in recent memory, including a white mother who loves her daughter deeply and has the self-awareness to know that love is not always enough. Ava's story becomes the entry point for a larger conversation about what it costs to be excellent in a world that is always looking for a reason your excellence does not count. From there, Gabby turns to Sinners — the film that dominated cultural conversation heading into the 2026 Academy Awards — and the rhetoric that had already begun forming before a single award was announced. When a high-profile comment from a competing film's star began circulating online, the discourse shifted almost immediately from whether Sinners was the best film of the year to whether it would only win because someone else stumbled. Gabby traces that shift in real time, naming the specific mechanics of how a Black win gets undermined before it is even official. The through line is personal. Over a decade ago, Gabby posted a generic congratulations to classmates receiving college acceptance letters. A fellow senior — by her own description relatively unimpressive and below average — responded that he had not gotten into his dream school because of affirmative action. No evidence. No proof. Just the assumption that someone less deserving must have taken his spot. That moment, and the feeling it left behind, is exactly what she is still seeing play out on a much larger cultural stage. This is what Gabby calls the retroactive bar drop. It is not just that the standard is higher for Black people — it is that even after meeting that standard, the standard gets redefined. The greatness that was produced stops being the story. The shortcut that was supposedly taken becomes the story instead. The accomplishment gets quietly replaced by the caveat. Despite How the World Sees You closes where it began — with Ava, and with the advice she receives at the end of the episode from a Black woman who understands something about this particular weight. The words land differently after everything Gabby has unpacked, and she directs them outward: to Black listeners, to the cast and crew of Sinners, and to anyone who has ever had their win explained away before they could fully hold it. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing, hosted by Gabby Turner. New episodes monthly.

Maybe Authenticity is the Way?

Have you ever had a lunch break completely derail you in the best possible way? That's exactly what happened in Maybe Authenticity Is The Way? — the debut episode of While I've Got You. Gabby Turner sat down to eat, clicked on a podcast she had never heard, and eighteen minutes in found herself climbing into her closet to record because something had cracked open that couldn't wait. That podcast was Les Alfred's She's So Lucky, and what started as a moment of "wait, is she making my podcast?" quickly became something else entirely. A mini spiral about carbon copies and competition that revealed itself to actually be something quieter and more honest — a moment of needing to see herself more clearly. Her aunt's Kroger and Publix wisdom helped. So did scrolling through the comments and recognizing that the same need was sitting in hundreds of other women too. This episode moves through what it means to build something when you don't have a tangible product, when your vision is rooted in joy instead of struggle, and when you can see the shortcut but the shortcut isn't yours. Gabby connects Les Alfred's question about sacrificing vision for numbers to Issa Rae's observation on Emma Grede's podcast about the difference between content that makes you laugh for a second and content that stays with you for days. One is fleeting. The other is what she's building toward. The throughline lands on Tabitha Brown accepting her first Emmy and closing her speech the same way she has closed every Instagram video for years. Not as a lesson. Just as a thing Gabby noticed that settled something in her — temporarily, incompletely, and exactly right. Maybe authenticity is the way. Maybe. This episode doesn't answer that. It just lights the match. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast with Gabby Turner about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.