Lester Holt is chasing a deceptively simple idea in his latest project: the instant that splits a life in two. The anchor spent a decade fronting “NBC Nightly News” before handing the broadcast over in May 2025.

“Before & After with Lester Holt,” an NBC News podcast announced on August 31 and premiering September 14 under the Dateline Originals banner, is built around interviews with people whose lives were upended in an instant. Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, Adrianne Haslet and Rebecca Scofield are among the announced guests. Listeners can find it through Dateline Premium, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with subscribers getting early access. “I said when I started this new chapter, I wanted to create and exercise these new news muscles,” Holt told People, “and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Talking about the storytelling behind Season 35 in that same August 31 interview, he returned to the craft itself. “I think sometimes people forget that that’s one of the main components of what we do is not just standing in front of the camera, but it’s the writing. It’s how you tell the story,” he told People. “I’ve always believed, and I think a lot of people agree, that the Dateline producers and correspondents are really the best storytellers out there.”

Holt is presenting a one-hour “Dateline” documentary in NBC News’ 25th-anniversary coverage of 9/11. The film revisits New Yorkers whose experiences were captured by NBC News cameras on September 11, 2001, and who reflect on the attacks and how they shaped their lives.

Stepping Away From the Evening News

All of it follows a major turn in Holt’s career. In a memo to network colleagues on Monday, February 24, 2025, he told staff he would give up the anchor and managing editor job at “NBC Nightly News” at the start of that summer, after 10 years at the helm. His final broadcast came Friday, May 30, 2025, and he signed off by telling viewers: “I’ll miss our evenings together, and I’ll miss the team that brings us all together.” Tom Llamas, named his successor in March 2025, took the chair on June 2.

Llamas will also anchor special editions of “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story” from Ground Zero as part of the anniversary coverage. Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin will anchor “Today,” with Guthrie reporting from Ground Zero.

Holt, now 67, stayed with the network full time at “Dateline,” where he had been the principal anchor since 2011, and hosted the podcast “The Last Appeal” earlier this year.

The newsmagazine begins its 35th season Friday, September 25, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC, with episodes streaming the following day on Peacock. Holt said longer episodes and more in-depth investigations are in store.

NBC News did not name a successor when the memo went out. Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News, credited Holt with steering the network through a turbulent decade. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization,” Rodriguez wrote in a message to staff.

When the February 2025 announcement landed, “Nightly News” was still a weekly fixture among television’s top-rated shows, averaging around seven million viewers. The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult had twice named Holt the “most-trusted television news personality in America,” in 2018 and 2024; ABC’s David Muir took the title in the 2025 survey.

A Decade of Defining Stories

The permanent “Nightly News” job came to Holt on June 18, 2015, after longtime broadcaster Brian Williams left the show amid criticism that he had exaggerated his account of a helicopter attack in Iraq. Holt arrived at the desk with eight years of anchoring the newscast’s weekend editions behind him.

What came next was a decade of assignments that defined the era. He led the network’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s rise in politics, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and the war in Gaza. He worked far from the studio just as often, returning again and again to towns torn apart by lethal hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings.

His interviews with heads of state and leading political figures frequently set the agenda. Trump sat down with him one-on-one, as did former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with other newsmakers.

From the Police Beat to the Anchor Desk

Holt got his start in radio, working the police beat in San Francisco at 20. Television followed in 1981, when he joined WCBS-TV in New York as a reporter, and a year later he moved to Los Angeles to report for the CBS station there, then KNXT and now KCBS-TV. He returned to WCBS in 1983 and later spent 14 years anchoring the afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago.

NBC News hired him in 2000. He co-anchored “Weekend TODAY” for 12 years and became principal anchor of “Dateline” in September 2011, a job that put him at the center of the network’s true-crime and long-form storytelling. Industry honors for his work include Emmy Awards, and he received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2019.

In his note to “Nightly” and “Dateline” staffers, Holt looked back on that arc. “I could never have imagined my career path would unfold in the way it has. What an amazing ride,” he wrote.

Iran, Wildfires and a Kids’ Newscast

The work Holt took on in the stretch before the February 2025 announcement showed how far his portfolio had stretched. He co-anchored NBC’s election night coverage, went to Iran for an exclusive interview with President Masoud Pezeshkian that aired in January 2025, more than a year before the war, and anchored a “Dateline” special about the devastating 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.

He anchored “Nightly News: Kids Edition,” too, a digital newscast made to inform and educate children, which drew a Children’s and Family Emmy nomination in 2023 — a sign that his audience has never been limited to the evening-news crowd.

Viewers who followed him through hurricanes, elections and war zones will find something quieter in “Before & After with Lester Holt” — not the sweep of a national crisis, but the single moment that rewrites one person’s life. That is the kind of interview Holt has spent a career conducting in the middle of chaos, and now it is the premise of a show carrying his name.