“Dateline”’s Lester Holt Is Ready to Show Audiences ‘More of Who I Am’ with Candid New Podcast (Exclusive)

Brenton BlanchetMon, August 31, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC

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‘Before & After with Lester Holt’Credit: NBC News -

Lester Holt is embarking on a new project

The Dateline host is launching a new podcast, Before & After, featuring conversations with guests whose lives have changed in one moment

“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,” he tells PEOPLE

Anyone who’s ever caught a glimpse of Lester Holt on Dateline, or at his former home of NBC Nightly News, should be familiar with his interview style. But with his new podcast, he’ll be pulling back the curtain with more of an off-the-cuff approach.

Before & After with Lester Holt, which premieres Sept. 14, features the veteran journalist as he explores the “moments that divide a life into before and after.” He’s joined by guests including actor Jeremy Renner and athlete Colin Kaepernick as they dissect the moments their lives changed in an instant, and what they experienced in the years to follow.

These conversations are deeply personal, which as Holt tells PEOPLE ahead of its release, allows him to “exercise new news muscles.” That also means not preparing any questions in advance.

“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,” Holt, 67, says. “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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One example of Holt’s approach was his episode with Kaepernick, the former quarterback and activist who began taking a knee to protest racial injustice and police brutality during the 2016 NFL season. Some of their discussion touches on racial injustice, and Holt speaks about his own challenges with racial identity. “Even to open up that door, that’s a lot for me,” he says. “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.”

Per a description from Dateline, the podcast — which also features episodes focused on Rebecca Scofield, Gabby Giffords and Adrianne Haslet, among others — will follow how each guest’s life was shaped by “violence, survival, loss, injustice or an unexpected turn of fate.” It’ll focus on rebuilding and finding meaning. Audiences should also expect a familiarity from Holt’s new endeavor, which marks his second podcast following The Last Appeal.

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“I think if you were a Lester Holt watcher, you would still understand, ‘Hey, that’s the guy who used to do news every night,’” he jokes. “Although I get people now saying, “How’s the retirement going?” And I’m like, “I’m not retired. [I’m at] Dateline.”

Since Holt left his post as Nightly News anchor in May 2025, he’s leaned more into his role as full-time host of Dateline. At first, Holt says, he found it “difficult” when big news dropped, but he “got past that” after the first couple of breaking stories off the clock. With Before & After, he’s reminded of why he made this move in the first place — to approach news in a new light.

“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,” he says. “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.”

Lester Holt and Jeremy Renner for ‘Before & After’Credit: NBC News

For fans of Dateline, Holt promises he and his colleagues “are still all about journalism,” regardless of the format they approach it with.

“We’re journalists in every way possible, in every manner that you would expect. And that’s still our through line of everything we do, whether it’s a podcast or whether it’s a two-hour Dateline, we want the viewers to know that above everything, we are about quality journalism,” he says. “And I think that’s something I know people crave when I was doing Nightly News. People would look to us as a standard-bearer of excellence, and that broadcast still is, and so is Dateline.”

The first episode of episode of Before & After with Lester Holt arrives Monday, Sept. 14, wherever you get your podcasts. A preview will be available on Tuesday, Sept. 1 on NBCNews.com. The 35th season of Dateline kicks off on Friday, September 25.

on People

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”