Average Joe Nerdcast | Pop Culture, Nostalgia & Critical Thinking

Thirty-five years ago, Terminator 2: Judgment Day changed action movies forever. Somehow...it still hasn't been topped. This week on the Average Joe Nerdcast, Nate is celebrating one of his all-time favorite movies. From wearing out VHS tapes recorded off USA Network, to quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger well enough to accidentally win an impersonation contest in the Army, this episode is a love lette...

Metal Gear Solid is one of the smartest video game franchises ever created. It's also one of the dumbest. And somehow...those aren't contradictory statements. This week, we're celebrating one of Nate's favorite gaming franchises of all time. From Shadow Moses to Guns of the Patriots , we're talking cyborg ninjas, vampires, bee guys, giant walking nuclear robot dinosaurs, Presidents named Snake, Pr...

Beneath the Armor | Gaming's Greatest Hero Part 5 of 5 Twenty-five years ago, a PlayStation kid got a phone call. "Dude." "You've gotta come over this weekend." "There's this game called Halo." What followed were midnight releases, Mountain Dew-fueled LAN parties, Xbox Live friendships, Forge maps held together with duct tape and dreams, SWAT matches, custom games, Noble Six trauma, teabagging, Ga...

The thread ends here. Over four episodes we've talked about propaganda, Edward Bernays, Reagan-era economics, labor, my dad, anger, fear, and what happens when communities feel left behind. Then last month, fifteen minutes from where I live, something happened that made me stop and think: "Oh...maybe this is what we've been talking about all along." This isn't really an episode about what happened...

Predator turned 39 years old this year. Which gave me an excuse to sit down and talk about one of my favorite movies of all time. It's basically me spending an 45 minutes celebrating a movie I've watched more times than I can count, talking about why it still works, why Dutch's helicopter ride hits differently as an adult, why Billy might be the smartest guy in the movie, and why Kevin Peter Hall,...

Halo fans have argued for years. Was Bungie Chief better? Or was 343 right to humanize him? After revisiting twenty-five years of Halo, I think everyone is asking the wrong question. In Part 4 of our Master Chief retrospective, we're going underneath the armor to explore the humanity that was always there. From Sam and Johnson to Cortana and Halo Infinite, this episode examines why John-117 contin...

Something happened to working-class America. Factories closed. Union jobs disappeared. Communities hollowed out. The anger that followed was real. But what if somebody showed up and handed people the wrong suspect? In Part 3 of How Did We Get Here?, Nate follows the thread through wealth inequality, union decline, deregulation, and the propaganda playbook Edward Bernays helped build nearly a centu...

If this is your first stop in the Dystopian Trilogy, welcome aboard! The journey started with: Part 1 - V for Vendetta Ideas are Bulletproof Part 2 - Equillibrium Feel Nothing Or Die Part 3 - Starship Troopers Would You Like to Know More? Three films, three different warnings, One conversation. Most people remember Starship Troopers as a dumb, glorious bug war movie. A kid from Kentucky remembers...

How does a soldier become a legend? And how does a legend become a myth? In Part 3 of our John-117 series, we’re diving into Halo 2 and Halo 3, the two games that transformed Master Chief from humanity’s greatest soldier into one of gaming’s most enduring heroes. We’ll explore the mythology of The Demon, the promise that defines Chief’s relationship with Cortana, and why two simple lines: “Sir. Fi...

My dad was a Vietnam veteran, a biker, a sci-fi nerd, and the man who taught me to question everything. He also believed in Ronald Reagan with a conviction I spent decades trying to understand. But this isn’t really an episode about Reagan. It’s an episode about my dad. About why good people can believe things we can’t talk them out of. About identity, belonging, and the stories we tell ourselves...

What if a society decided that human emotion was the problem? In 2002, Equilibrium imagined a future where love, grief, joy, art, music, and even compassion was outlawed. Citizens of Libria survive by taking Prozium, a mandatory drug designed to suppress all feeling. The result is one of the most fascinating dystopian films ever made, and one that feels more relevant today than ever. In this Check...

In Part 1 we established the thesis. The recipe was there for Frankenstein’s monster. Instead, what emerged was the best of us. Now the Human - Covenant War kicks off proper. In 2525 humanity encountered the Covenant, a vast religious empire with superior technology, overwhelming firepower, and a theological certainty that made diplomacy approximately as useful as a strongly worded letter to a hur...

"He Wrote It Down" In 1928 a man named Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda. As an instruction manual. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud took everything his uncle understood about the unconscious human mind and handed it to corporations and governments with a simple message: people don’t know what they want. But we can make them want what we need them to want. He called it public relat...

A Catholic militant who died in 1605 is currently the face of anti-corporate protest worldwide. His executioners burned him in effigy for four hundred years. Now Time Warner sells his face for $10. To the protesters. This episode asks one question: what actually happens when a symbol escapes the idea that created it? The answer involves a failed religious conspiracy, a British anarchist comic, a H...

This one’s a little different. No script. No structure. No fake sponsors or Producer Steve. Just Me sitting down on a Tuesday night with a microphone because tomorrow marks one year since I lost Ripley. My girl. My Bippy. The patron saint of the Average Joe Nerdcast. Honestly, I didn’t plan this “episode”. I just wanted to talk. So if you’ve got a few minutes, then come and sit a moment with me. F...

Everything was in place to create a monster. Kidnapped at six years old. Replaced with a dying clone so his parents never knew the truth. Experimented on as a teenager. Trained from childhood to be a weapon. The recipe was there for Frankenstein’s monster. What emerged instead was the best of us. Join Nate for Part 1 of a five part series on John-117: the Master Chief, the Demon, the Reclaimer, an...

In 1997 Mortal Kombat Annihilation took one of the greatest video game movie successes of that decade and kicked off a string of events that would culminate in the bankruptcy of the company that birthed the franchise. "Mother...you're alive." Excellent observational skills, Kitana. This episode covers the full arc. The spectacular failure of Annihilation. The 3D era of games that nearly erased the...

“My favorite character in all of fiction is a child-murdering space fascist. Your honor, I can explain.“ In this episode of Average Joe Nerdcast, Nate explores why Darth Vader may be the greatest character in all of fiction. From his origins as Anakin Skywalker, a gifted slave boy on Tatooine, to his fall as the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader’s story is one of love, fear, trauma, manipulation,...

What happens when a government counterterrorism strategy places an undefined ideological label in the same category as terrorist organizations? On May 6th, 2026, the White House released a document that does exactly that. And in this special Side Quest Sunday, we read the receipts. Buried in that document are three priority threat categories. Narcoterrorists and transnational criminal organization...

In 1992 two guys at Midway Games got passed over by Jean-Claude Van Damme and accidentally created one of the most controversial and consequential video game franchises in history. This is the full deep dive on Mortal Kombat Part 1. The origin story nobody taught you. The blood. The fatalities. The mom’s face when the spine rip happened on the Sega Genesis. The blood code that spread through playg...

“Only I can fix this.” You’ve heard that phrase before. Recently. But here’s the thing, you’ve heard it before THAT too. A lot. In this episode of History Rhymes, Nate breaks down one of the oldest and most consistently effective moves in the political playbook: create the crisis, amplify the chaos, and walk in as the only solution. Three case studies. Three different eras. One identical playbook....

Remember when life just made more sense? Riding bikes until the streetlights came on. Blockbuster on a Friday night. Dial-up internet that sounded like it was having a medical emergency. The Scholastic Book Fair as a full blown cultural event. If you grew up in the 90s and early 2000s you lived through one of the most disorienting transitions in human history: from analog to digital, from offline...

What is the Average Joe Nerdcast? Honestly it depends on the week. Could be a Halo deep dive. Could be dismantling a conspiracy theory. Could be calling out political BS regardless of who's in charge. What it always is though is REAL, unfiltered, and grounded in receipts. Hosted by Nate, your resident Average Joe. New episodes every Monday and Thursday. Welcome to The Lobby.

Everybody has a name for what’s wrong with this country right now. But what if the name doesn’t matter? What if the thing everyone is arguing about is the fever and nobody is talking about the disease? Before the escalator. Before the tweets. Before any of it, the machine was already running. The outrage media. The dark money. The algorithm. Thirty years of specific, documented, traceable decision...

On Friday May 1st 2026 the Pentagon announced deals with seven of the largest AI companies in the world - OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, SpaceX, and Reflection AI - to integrate their systems into the most classified military networks in existence. The stated goal: an AI-first fighting force. I recorded this the same day it happened. It’s dropping today, Sunday May 3rd because it could...