Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, said his father has received no new diagnosis and that his condition is holding steady, in a podcast 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 on “Howie Mandel Does Stuff,” the podcast hosted by comedian Howie Mandel. Mandel posted video of the conversation to his YouTube channel.
Hunter 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.”
Joe Biden’s official representatives have issued no revised medical statement since the interview’s publication, as of Oct. 13. The former president continues his prescribed course of treatment.
A Voicemail From His Father
Hunter described an emotional 2 a.m. voicemail his father left during the height of his addiction. He quoted his father saying: “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 critics, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, played the audio repeatedly, Hunter said, framing it as a father enabling his child. He said the attempt to paint his father as weak had the opposite effect on the public, with most people seeing a loving father trying to save his son from addiction.
President Donald Trump said at a 2020 presidential debate, “Your son, Hunter, is a drug addict,” according to Hunter. He said that moment allowed his father to state publicly how proud he was of his son’s recovery.
Sobriety One Day at a Time
Mandel asked him how he handles watching someone close to him suffer while protecting his own recovery. The question steered the conversation toward his father’s illness and Hunter’s well-documented addiction history.
Hunter said anxiety and fear can become overwhelming, and that he now understands 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 he is focused on sobriety one day at a time.
Hunter said this period of sobriety feels different from earlier ones. “I’ve been sober before, but I never felt that way,” he said. A seven-year stretch of sobriety ended on a 2010 flight home from Madrid, Spain, when he was upgraded to business class and sat alone in the cabin. A flight attendant came through with a drink cart, and he ordered a drink. He had also previously been sober for one year and three months.
Hunter said fear of losing his dad is the emotion driving him, and he acknowledged that the outcome is inevitable in time given the odds. He said his feelings have been harder to manage since the diagnosis. He told Mandel the two pressures are tangled together, with dread about his father feeding his daily anxiety.
The Diagnosis and the Treatment
Joe Biden’s office announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones. The announcement gave a Gleason score of 9, a marker of a high-grade form. The office said at the time that the cancer appeared hormone-sensitive and that treatment options existed to manage it.
Hunter said in August 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 the radiation treatment had worked as intended. He began the radiation treatment in fall 2025.
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.”
Beau Biden, Hunter’s older brother, died in May 2015 at age 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Joe Biden has cited 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.