Opinion: Andrew Wilson Gets Owned By Rationalist Sex Researcher Aella On The "Whatever" Podcast

The result was a hilarious inverse of the verbal sparring matches Wilson is accustomed to on the Whatever podcast, being successfully reverse-mansplained to by a sex worker in a debate where he’s amusingly outmatched intellectually.

The Lore: Who Are Aella & Andrew Wilson?

Aella is a rationalist sex worker and data-enthusiast, who famously made a flow chart of her, how do I say this, “multi-partner sexual birthday encounter.” She’s appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, has amassed over 230,000 followers on X with her socially unconforming Twitter polls that explore uncomfortable associations between things like sexual paraphilias and aspects of someone’s identity. Aella’s claim to fame has been in her unusual branding. She’s a sex worker turned amateur sex researcher with no formal training. Though she was homeschooled her entire life by Evangelist Christians and doesn’t have a college degree, she occupies more cerebral online rationalist communities like effective altruism and LessWrong.

Despite lacking credentials as a scientist, her self-published findings, often collected from Twitter polls and published on her Substack “Knowingless,” have gained legitimacy thanks to her continuous refinement of survey methodologies. Critics argue that skepticism of Aella’s research is largely grounded in elitism and an over-emphasis of credentialism, while others argue her research fails to live up to scientific rigor, suffers from selection bias, and hasn’t been peer reviewed. While the validity of her research has been something of a contentious debate, she has amassed some of the largest sample sizes concerning surveys of sexual kinks like BDSM, with over 700,000 respondents and has recently been offered funding for her research.

Andrew Wilson, on the other hand, is a content creator and husband of Rachel Wilson, who goes by rach4patriarchy on X. I think it’s charitable to characterize him as “red pill adjacent.” He runs the debate YouTube channel The Crucible and has 78,000 followers on X. Wilson, or as he has sometimes gone by, “Big Papa Fascist,” is a recurring figure on the Whatever podcast, as he and the host seem to bond over their mutual experiences of repelling women. Wilson often appears as some kind of metaphysical demon whose virtual head ominously lurks around the panel, as he oscillates between verbally eviscerating 19 year-old sex positive Onlyfans creators and taking a big puff from one of his twelve cigarettes per hour. The smoky haze coating what I can only guess is some kind of evil Reddit lair really sets the scene for his kind of sensibilities.

Wilson is lauded by his fanbase as a based and redpilled master debater and if you’d like to study his art of verbal combat, you can purchase his debate course where you can learn the “art of verbal judo” with such tactics as “dominating the discussion” by throwing “tactical insults” at your opponent, all for the low price of $500. What a steal! But that’s not all—sometimes he makes smarmy faces, talks over his “opponents” (if that’s what you can call random college girls looking to get free exposure on a painfully long dating podcast), and laughs obnoxiously when he’s losing an argument.

The Whatever Podcast Holds Hot Women Hostage as Two Socially Maladjusted Internet Personalities Debate Scientific Terms

Now that you’re caught up on the lore of our two opponents, one of which is there for an intellectually sincere good faith conversation and the other of which desperately wants to be clipped for epic “Aella gets OWNED” viral video clips, let’s set the scene. The Whatever podcast is a tiresome podcast to sit through, and this was no exception, coming in at a criminal 7 hours and 37 minutes. This format, in an era where the human attention span has famously shortened to a mere 47 seconds, defies understanding. I do my best to avoid watching this podcast unless my curiosity concerning a particular guest gets the best of me or when something notable happens and circulates on X. 

The latter is exactly what happened when this smarmy movie villain attempted to trap Aella in all manner of sleazy debate tactics that only proved effective in revealing how arrogant and ill-informed he was. Wilson, failing to understand "how we can have science absent a control for an experiment" was put on the defensive by Aella, who pointed out his slimy tactics of asking excessive questions and then dodging questions himself. In one particular clip of this exchange, Aella cheekily asks a frazzled Wilson to explain what a correlation is, which made for a funny viral self-own. 

Wilson’s confused misunderstandings gave us such hits as “so we’re controlling for a correlate.” It pains me to report that the full context of the conversation was so much more painful than the three minute viral clip. At one point, Wilson lashes out at Aella, who deserves props for maintaining an admirable level of poise and infinite patience, by calling her a dummy, followed by a forced Joker laugh, an odd combo of arrogance, ignorance, and incivility that was promptly mocked by just about everyone on X.

The real takeaway, though, is the accidental comedic gold nestled in the sludge: the sheer inability of “normie” women on set to mask their revulsion at this Reddit-level pseudo smackdown between a sweaty debate-me-bro and a manic pixie dream rationalist out of a Zach Braff movie who distills sex into its most mechanical, unsexy processes (no shade, Aella). Then, there’s the score of e-girls in the background, fidgeting, rolling their eyes, checking for the time, until they’re finally released from this cruel social experiment that allows these two camps to intermingle. These women are not meant to be in this room. They’re supposed to be at a party in the Hamptons or something regular women do.

It takes a special kind of brain rot to sit through Wilson stroking his own ego and Aella floating around like it’s her first day on Earth for more than 7 hours, and at this point, who’s even learning anything? Someone. Please. Intervene. Release these girls from this rhetorical prison!