Nerd Nite St. Pete Returns After COVID-19 Pandemic Hiatus

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — For years, the Nerd Nite lecture series has taken place in hundreds of cities around the world, and now the global event returns to St. Petersburg after going on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nerd Nite St. Pete takes place Tuesday, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., at Cage Brewing, and will be held monthly moving forward. Advance tickets can be purchased online here.

The concept is simple: speakers, sometimes professional subject experts, often, simply average people who are enthusiastic about offbeat topics, share the things they’re most passionate about with the audience.

“We like to say that it’s like Ted Talks or it’s like the Discovery Channel, but with beer,” Gerni Oster, one of the event’s founders, told Patch. “We have three presenters talk for about 20 minutes each. All three presenters are nerds. They talk about some nerdy passion of theirs while the audience drinks a lot.”

This month’s speakers include Ricardo Williams presenting “Marvel at the Death of Cinema,” Cathy Salustri presenting “Disney Saves the Everglades (No, Really!)” and Philip Gravinese presenting “A Changing Climate is Nothing to Shell-a-brate!”

“In the past, we’ve had things like octopus stuff. We had stuff about animals who don’t have hands. How do they have sex?” Oster said. “We’ve had a guy who is an expert on clouds. That was a really popular one. We’ll have professors and experts get up there and talk about their work and then we’ll also get somebody who’s super into a video game. People get nerdy about all kinds of things.”

She first learned about Nerd Nite while living in Brooklyn. When she moved to Florida, she emailed the organizers to suggest St. Petersburg as a potential place to launch a chapter of the lecture series.

“I told him, ‘You guys should start a Nerd Nite in St. Pete. I think it’d be a great place to do it,’” Oster said. “He was like, ‘Well, our model is that you can start it there. We can give you the template and the toolkit for how to start it, but we won’t do it for you.’ And that’s how I started doing this.”

She founded Nerd Nite St. Pete with two friends, Brandi Askin and Caryn Nesmith, and launched the event at the Iberian Rooster in downtown St. Petersburg.

“They had that cool downstairs lounge area and we went on before their midnight drag night, which was awesome. Those were the good ol’ days,” she said.

They stopped hosting the event during the pandemic. They delayed restarting the event because of COVID-19 precautions. Eventually, the Iberian closed and those running the events found themselves busy with other things.

But when Oster’s sister moved to the area, she suggested relaunching Nerd Nite and she eventually agreed. Now, with the help of her sister, Emily Oster, and Dawn Hunter, the nerdy event is being revived.

“We figured, we’re just gonna do it. We feel that especially at this time it's important that we have events that bring the community together, particularly around, you know, truth and education and science and, you know, nerds,” Gerni Oster said. “We have people sharing nerdy things that people are interested in and we need to get that out in the world right now. And it’s a way of connecting all of us who believe in that stuff in a safe and supportive, open-minded space.”