Hunter Biden said his father, former President Joe Biden, is “holding steady” and that treatment is keeping his cancer in check, though the regimen is brutal. He made the comments on the podcast “Howie Mandel Does Stuff,” hosted by comedian Howie Mandel, in an episode released Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026.
“He’s okay. Every time I say something, people, I think, confuse that there’s some new diagnosis or not. There’s not,” Hunter said.
He continued: “He has stage four metastatic bone cancer, which you have to live with the rest of your life. And the treatment is just not ideal. It’s like torture.”
Fear, Anxiety and Recovery
Mandel asked Hunter how he handles watching someone close to him suffer while protecting his own recovery. The question steered the conversation toward both the former president’s illness and Hunter’s well-documented addiction history.
Hunter said the fear of losing his father drives his emotion, and he acknowledged that the odds make the outcome inevitable in time. The cancer diagnosis has made managing those feelings harder, he said. He told Mandel the two pressures are tangled together, with his dread about his father feeding his daily anxiety, and he said anxiety and fear can become overwhelming.
He said he now understands what returning to substance use would mean. “If I use, it means that I’m choosing death,” he said, adding, “I don’t have any doubt in my mind about that, that there’s no coming back for me for another relapse.” He said he keeps his focus on sobriety one day at a time.
Earlier Relapses Recounted
In a clip that circulated in June, Hunter said seven years of sobriety ended in 2010 on a flight home from a business trip in Europe, when he had been upgraded and a drink cart came to his seat.
A Voicemail Used Against Him
In the same appearance, Hunter recalled a voicemail his father left around 2 a.m. during his addiction: “Honey, I just don’t know what to do… I love you more than the world; I’ll do anything. Just tell me what to do.”
Conservative media figures including Sean Hannity repeatedly played the recording, Hunter said. He told Mandel that his father’s political opponents tried to weaponize it and that the attempts backfired. Critics framed the message as a symbol of a “weak man with the weak son” and as an example of a father enabling his child, he said.
Hunter recalled President Donald Trump saying at a 2020 presidential debate, “Your son, Hunter, is a drug addict.” The attacks instead gave his father an opening to state publicly that he was proud of his son’s recovery, Hunter said.
In a July 21, 2024, statement to The New York Times after his father ended his reelection campaign, Hunter wrote that he had “looked at my dad in awe” his entire life and that unconditional love had been “his North Star as a President and as a parent.”
The Diagnosis Timeline
Joe Biden’s office announced in May 2025 that he had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones. The office said the cancer carried a Gleason score of 9, a marker of a high-grade form, and that it appeared hormone-sensitive at the time, leaving treatment options intended to manage it.
Hunter said in an Aug. 7 BBC interview that his father’s prostate cancer was very painful and that the spread into his bones was hard to watch. The former president said on Tuesday, Sept. 8, that radiation treatment he began in fall 2025 had worked as intended. Jill Biden, the former first lady, told NBC’s “Today” on Monday, June 1: “Joe will live with cancer till the rest of his life.”
Joe Biden’s official representatives had issued no revised medical statement since the interview’s publication, as of Oct. 9.
Hunter’s older brother, Beau Biden, died in May 2015 at age 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Joe Biden has returned publicly to that loss repeatedly and has cited it as the force behind his long push for cancer research funding, including his work on the Cancer Moonshot initiative.
Hunter’s message was a narrow one: his father’s condition has not worsened into a fresh diagnosis. The former president will carry the cancer for the rest of his life, the regimen holding it back is punishing, and Hunter is managing his own side of it one day at a time.
