Modern Dating Is Broken | Paul Eastwick

January 19, 2026·1 hr 10 min·6 clips

Men evolved to be gentle parents, not dominant predators, according to evolutionary psychology.

Dominance gets pushed back on right away. Eastwick starts with evolution and argues that gentler, less aggressive men were often preferred because care around offspring mattered for survival. That changes the usual story. Instead of men winning through intimidation, the episode asks what attraction is really choosing. Online dating makes that harder. The host treats dating apps and AI as tempting tools, but also as places where people can lose the practice that teaches them what they want. You cannot outsource intuition. The host worries that systems built to predict who someone will like could leave younger daters without the hard-earned feel that comes from trying, missing, adjusting, and trying again. Eastwick keeps the answer practical. Dating works through fumbling, failed attempts, small course corrections, and the slow discovery of what you are actually into. Mistakes are part of the training. That is true before a relationship starts and after two people hit it off, because both stages require experimentation. There is no neat shortcut. The developmental point is blunt: people start learning this around thirteen, make bad choices, and slowly build a feel for themselves. AI does not replace that. Eastwick says he has not seen evidence that an artificial stand-in can make relational mistakes for you and turn them into your wisdom. The host widens the concern to Gen Z, millennials, and Gen Alpha, asking what happens when technology shapes social learning from the beginning. The answer stays grounded: relationships do not get fixed by better predictions alone. They improve when people stay in the process long enough to develop judgment.

As heard by us

A sharp look at dating, evolution, and why intuition still has to be earned.

Paul Eastwick presents dating as something learned over time rather than a fixed trait. He argues that, across evolutionary history, the men most likely to survive and be preferred were often the gentler, less aggressive ones, especially those better around children, which…

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If dating apps feel noisier than useful, this one cuts straight to why.

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