‘Dateline’s Lester Holt Announces Major Career Update
‘Dateline’s Lester Holt Announces Major Career Update
Michelle SteinMon, August 31, 2026 at 12:17 PM UTC
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Lester Holt - Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images
Dateline‘s Lester Holt just announced a new podcast called Before & After with Lester Holt.
On Monday, August 31, the NBC journalist revealed his major career update in an exclusive interview with People. Holt’s podcast premieres on September 14 and aims to examine “moments that divide a life into before and after.”
Among his guest list are Colin Kaepernick and Jeremy Renner, whose lives changed in an instant when the former started kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games in 2016, and the latter was nearly killed in a snowplow accident in 2023. Other Before & After guests will include Gabby Giffords, Rebecca Scofield, and Adrianne Haslet.
“As a reporter, I’ve seen many people who, in the worst of circumstances, still manage to put one foot in front of the other and keep going,” Holt said. “They figure their way. So we thought, what a great idea for a podcast: Talk to people who have been in circumstances like that and learn about not only what divided their life, but how they dealt with that.”
Unlike a typical journalistic approach, Holt, 67, won’t prepare questions ahead of his podcast interviews.
“I like to let the conversation kind of free flow, which is different than what we do for a typical news piece or even a Dateline story,” he explained. “I said when I started this new chapter, I wanted to create and exercise these new news muscles, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
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Holt also said that unlike how viewers are used to seeing him on NBC Nightly News — which he left in May 2025 after 10 years — he will open up about more personal matters, including racial identity.
“Even to open up that door, that’s a lot for me,” he admitted. “That’s not the kind of thing I typically would do, but the whole idea is that this is a really informal give-and-take, and that there’s a space there that I feel I can show the audience a little bit more of who I am and my personality than I could in some other formats.”
Before & After with Lester Holt, premiering on Monday, September 14
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
