Former MSNBC Host Brian Williams to Join Netflix With Interview Podcast: ‘The Perfect Home’

Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision via AP Images

Former NBC News anchor and MSNBC host Brian Williams will be joining Netflix later this year as a podcast host for the streaming platform.

Netflix announced on Thursday that Williams would join the company as the host of We’re Back! With Brian Williams, a weekly podcast focused on full-length interviews, nearly five years after he left NBC News.

“With scientists predicting that every American will have a podcast by 2030, I thought it was time to get in the game,” Williams said in a statement. “After 40 years in the news business, where an in-depth interview gets 4 minutes of airtime at best, I just want to have interesting conversations with creative, funny, smart, talented, and consequential people — like the shows we all grew up watching and listening to. Netflix is the perfect home.”

According to the LA Times, former NBC News and MSNBC producer Jonathan Wald will serve as the executive producer of We’re Back! With Brian Williams.

Williams previously worked as an anchor on NBC Nightly News and as the host of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour. He was replaced at NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt in 2015 and was succeeded as the host of The 11th Hour by Stephanie Ruhle in 2021.

In 2024, Williams hosted Netflix rival Amazon’s election night coverage.

In his final episode of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, Williams expressed concern for the future of the country.

“My biggest worry is for my country,” he said. “The truth is, I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m an institutionalist. I believe in this place and in my love of my country, I yield to no one. But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It’s now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for.”

He continued, “Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of have decided to join the mob and become something they are not while hoping we somehow forget who they were. They’ve decided to burn it all down – with us inside. That should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman.”

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