That "nerd harder" thing is something I keep coming across in the professional world and it is something of a paradox. It comes from someone who knows you are intelligent and more knowledgeable in a given area than they are, and who wants you to solve their problem, but they are unwilling to accept that your intelligence/knowledge extends to whether or not something can or cannot be done reasonably (Reasonable here being excluding things which are technically possible, such as lifting Rhode Island into some kind of Earth orbit, but aren't really quite feasible or practical).

One guy I worked for had a bad habit of starting unicorn hunts and a lot of "this looks easy from fifty thousand feet" foolishness with the phrase, "I know you're real smart but ..." and whatever followed was more a statement of how convenient it would be if something were true, rather than if it were true, possible, and so on.

Nerd harder, nerds.