500 episodes listed below
Patient interviews for the deeply curious.
Getting Unstuck – Cultivating Curiosity follows careful conversations with guests who bring unfamiliar subjects into human scale. Space missions, World War II memory, wolf advocacy, Holocaust education, photography, and public-school reform are treated as invitations to think more patiently.
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Getting Unstuck – Cultivating Curiosity is an interview show with a teacherly sense of patience. Jeff Eichler frames each conversation through a personal question, memory, or reading path, then lets the guest widen the subject. The result feels attentive. A discussion of asteroid deflection becomes a plainspoken lesson in physics, measurement, teamwork, and why a safe experiment mattered. A conversation with Carol Tyler turns a graphic memoir into a study of family trauma, wartime silence, grief, anxiety, and the explanations children often find only much later. The show does not rush away from difficult material. It also does not flatten it into lesson-plan certainty. Wolves, for example, are treated not only as animals but as mirrors for fear, projection, advocacy, and the stories humans inherit about danger. History is another recurring anchor. Eichler returns often to World War II, not as trivia, but as a living force that shaped parents, veterans, children, politics, and moral imagination. Episodes on the Holocaust ask how theater, dance, music, visual art, museum studies, and film can reach forms of understanding that dates and names alone may not. That reflective method carries into episodes about photography and the natural world. Tom Reed's black-and-white images open a conversation about adventure, composition, Japanese aesthetics, Ansel Adams, and the discipline of noticing before making. Education also appears as a practical concern. Costa's work in public schools brings the show toward career pathways, social-emotional learning, artificial intelligence, and the purpose of K-12 schooling. The show's subject list can look scattered at first glance. Its through-line is not a beat or category. It is a habit of staying with a question until it reveals something about how people learn, remember, fear, create, and change. The tone is warm, reflective, and grounded. Listeners who like long-form public-radio-style interviews will recognize the shape, but the show has a personal, lightly self-questioning texture of its own.
Made for: Best for listeners who like reflective interviews about history, science, art, education, nature, and family memory. It especially suits people who prefer context and story over argument or speed.
What sets it apart: The show connects wide-ranging topics through lived curiosity rather than a fixed beat. Jeff Eichler often begins from his own reading, teaching, or family history, which gives the conversations a grounded, personal frame.
Curiosity sits at the intersection of creativity, effective human interactions, problem-solving and purposeful change. Unfortunately, the pace of life — at home, work, and school — often sidetracks our natural curiosity. So, let's see the familiar from a different angle or something new as a possibility to consider.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jeff Eichler turns wide-ranging interviews into thoughtful examinations of leadership, institutional choices, and the assumptions that shape action.
Jeff Eichler approaches Getting Unstuck - Cultivating Curiosity as an attentive interviewer with a personal stake in the questions. Conversations move from public-school leadership and career education to wolf advocacy, inherited wartime trauma, and photographic craft.
A wolf stares back; Jeff Eichler asks what you brought to the encounter.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A controlled asteroid impact becomes a clear study in measurement under uncertainty.
Space exploration turns into a practical lesson in measurement and coordinated judgment as Jeff Eichler's conversation with Michelle and Carolyn follows a spacecraft's planned collision with Dimorphos.
A memoir opens into a study of wartime fear, family silence, and the behaviors they leave behind.
Unspoken family history sits at the center of this episode, as Carol Tyler traces how wartime fear, grief, and private suffering shaped her parents and the family around them.
A reflective wolf episode about fear, story, and the human meanings projected onto the animal.
Jeff Eichler opens Cultivating Curiosity by tracing a personal route into wolves, from Farley Mowat and Barry Lopez to the felony cruelty case involving Cody Roberts in Daniel, Wyoming.
A thoughtful conversation about curiosity, close attention and the discipline behind photography and writing.
Tom Reed comes across as someone who built his life around curiosity rather than a single career prize. He says money was not the motive, and that his work gave him room for adventure, experience, photography and writing.
A reflective family-history conversation about wartime memory, civic duty, and preparedness.
Getting Unstuck - Cultivating Curiosity follows Matthew Collins, from the UK, as he talks through his work interviewing sons and daughters of U.S. World War II veterans for We Sons of World War II Vets.
A candid, locally grounded case for rethinking what schools are meant to do.
School reform becomes a local leadership test in Jeff Eichler's conversation with Dr. Constantino Costa Aguilar, now in his third year as superintendent of schools in Riverbank, California.
A patient inquiry into wolves, human fear, and the beliefs people learn to carry.
Jeff Eichler's wolf conversation moves from a personal route through Never Cry Wolf and Of Wolves and Men into a broader question: why people are taught to hate an animal so closely related to the dogs beside them at home.
History, power, and memory under close examination.
Political power, tested under scrutiny.
One question, one expert, explained at 101 level.
Evidence for the next newsroom.
News judgment, pressure-tested.
Jeff Eichler interviews Christopher Schaberg about the Object Lessons book series and the value of paying attention to ordinary things, touching on uncertainty and fly-fishing as a reflective practice.
Host Jeff Eichler interviews Amarok Weiss, a senior wolf advocate, about misconceptions and hatred toward wolves.
Host Jeff Eichler interviews Dr.
Host Jeff Eichler interviews Dennis and Ali Pitoco about their experience walking the Camino de Santiago and the transformative lessons learned.
Jeff Eichler interviews Heather Lendy about how observing and deep listening shape strong writing, using her essay 'Alaskan's Deer' as an example.
A safe crash turns into a practical science story.
Jeff Eichler talks with Carol Tyler, the multi-award-winning comics artist behind Soldier’s Heart: My Campaign to Understand My World War II Veteran Father, a 362- or 363-page graphic memoir with more than 800 hand-drawn images.
Jeff Eichler opens with Barry Lopez, Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, and the Cody Roberts case in Daniel, Wyoming, before introducing Amarok Weiss as senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Host Jeff Eichler interviews Dr.
Jeff Eichler introduces a podcast episode about the overlooked naval battle at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, featuring guest Bill Whiteside, who argues that history is shaped by individual actors.
Tom Reed says Patagonia gives him a “second sunrise,” then he drops his pack and sprints for a foreground.
Jeff Eichler speaks with Matthew Collins, the BBC presenter behind "We Sons of World War II Vets," after Collins connected through Dr.
Jeff Eichler interviews Dr.
Jeff Eichler interviews former reporter Ted Check about his book on the corruption of American journalism and potential solutions.