1466 Steve Nygren + News & Clips

Episode for October 23, 2025

My conversation with Steve Nygren starts at about 45 minutes after headlines and clips

Subscribe and Watch Interviews LIVE :

Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. This show is Ad free and fully supported by listeners like you!

Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 750 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls

National bestselling author, Steve Nygren is Founder and CEO of Serenbe, the biophilic community leading the wellness real estate and agrihood movements. He started his career in hospitality, having founded the 34-restaurant group, Peasant Restaurants, serving guests from the 1970s until the mid ’90s. Concerned by trends of poor human health and a degraded environment, Steve Nygren was on a treadmill trying to effect change but going nowhere. He surrendered to hopelessness and retreated to the countryside on the edge of Atlanta to raise his family.

After seven years of retirement while walking the trails, he realized the tentacles of dysfunction could destroy his rural paradise. Rather than retreat further, he launched an effort to save his own backyard expanding the effort to the surrounding 40,000 acres that is now a living laboratory for change offering solutions and hope to communities around the world who are curious about a better future. Steve and Serenbe have been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, Dwell, and Southern Living as a new model for community development.

Start in Your Own Backyard

Visionary placemaker Steve Nygren chronicles the rise of Serenbe, a pioneering model of biophilic living outside Atlanta, and charts a path for others wishing to challenge the status quo, embrace optimism, and reinvent their communities…and themselves.

For many Americans, life is no longer working. We are increasingly sick, stressed, anxious, and unhappy. Many feel left behind by the economy, disillusioned by once-respected institutions, and helpless in the face of environmental decline. Steve Nygren argues that much of this can be traced to where—and how—we live. By rethinking and reinvesting in our own communities, we can rediscover the joy of connected, meaningful lives for ourselves and future generations.

National bestselling book, Start in Your Own Backyard provides a blueprint for developing sustainable communities where citizens of all generations can thrive, and awe is found in everyday moments, which requires understanding:

The unintended consequences of sprawl, and why clustered development supports more green space, more housing, and lower costs
Why being disconnected from nature and each other is at the root of many environmental, societal, and health-related woes
Tactics to encourage a local food-based economy (and why that matters)
How small yards, front porches, and blueberry bushes at crosswalks lead to strong, supportive neighborhoods
The benefits of aging in place, and how to nurture connections between uncaged elders and free-range kids

Whether you’re a placemaker, developer, civic leader, business owner, or parent or grandparent wishing to improve the things that complicate your life, this book is for you. It educates and inspires, demonstrates the impact of local action, and sparks hope that one person can change the world in amazing ways by starting in your own backyard. Why shouldn’t that person be you?

On YOUTUBE.com/StandUpWithPete

ON SubstackStandUpWithPete

Pete Personal FB page

Stand Up with Pete FB page

Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift

Send Pete $ Directly on Venmo