Hunter Biden says his father is holding steady, but the treatment keeping former President Joe Biden’s cancer in check has been brutal. In an appearance on comedian Howie Mandel’s podcast “Howie Mandel Does Stuff,” the former president’s son offered an update on his father’s condition and pushed back on the idea that anything about the diagnosis has changed.
“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 of Losing His Father
Beyond the physical toll of the treatment itself, Hunter Biden said he is not prepared to lose his father. He described the emotion driving him as fear — fear of losing his dad, an outcome he acknowledged the odds make inevitable in time — and said the cancer diagnosis has made those feelings harder to manage.
Mandel, who hosts the show, asked how Hunter Biden handles watching someone he is so close to suffer while protecting his own recovery. The question steered the conversation toward the intersection of his father’s illness and his well-documented history of addiction.
Sobriety and the Risk of Relapse
Hunter Biden said anxiety and fear can become overwhelming, but that he now understands exactly what returning to substance use would mean for him.
“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 his focus stays on maintaining his sobriety one day at a time. Video of the conversation was posted to Mandel’s YouTube channel.
The Diagnosis Announced in May 2025
Joe Biden’s office announced in May 2025 that the former president had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones. The disease was assigned a Gleason score of 9, a marker of a high-grade form of the illness. At the time, his office said the cancer appeared to be hormone-sensitive, which opened up treatment options intended to manage it.
The family has spoken publicly about the toll since. Hunter Biden has previously described his father’s prostate cancer as very painful and said the spread into his bones has been hard to watch. The former president himself has shared a personal update about the radiation treatment he has undergone. Jill Biden, the former first lady, has called the fight challenging and said her husband will live with the stage 4 diagnosis permanently.
A Family That Lost Beau Biden
Cancer has already taken one member of the family. Beau Biden, Hunter’s older brother, died in May 2015 at age 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Joe Biden has returned to that loss repeatedly in public life, pointing to it as the force behind his long push for cancer research funding, including his work on the Cancer Moonshot initiative.
That history gives Hunter Biden’s remarks their weight. The man describing his father’s treatment as torture is also the man who sat through a brother’s terminal illness, and who says a single relapse would be fatal for him. The two pressures, he told Mandel, are tangled together — the dread of what is coming for his father feeding the anxiety he has to stay ahead of every day.
For now, his message was a narrow one: nothing about his father’s condition has worsened into a fresh diagnosis, the cancer is something the former president will carry for the rest of his life, and the regimen holding it back is punishing. Hunter Biden said he is managing his own side of it the only way he knows how, one day at a time.