Hunter Biden said his father, former President Joe Biden, is holding steady and has not received a new diagnosis, while describing the treatment keeping the former president’s cancer in check as brutal.

Hunter Biden made the comments on the podcast “Howie Mandel Does Stuff,” hosted by comedian Howie Mandel, in an episode released Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. Mandel also posted video of the conversation to his YouTube channel.

“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.

A Treatment Like Torture

“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.”

Hunter Biden said he is not prepared to lose his father, and he described fear as the emotion driving him — fear of losing his dad. He acknowledged the odds make that outcome inevitable in time. Those feelings have become harder to manage since the cancer diagnosis, he said.

Fear and Staying Sober

Mandel asked Hunter Biden how he handles watching someone so close to him suffer while protecting his own recovery. The conversation turned to the former president’s illness and to Hunter Biden’s well-documented history of addiction.

Hunter Biden said anxiety and fear can become overwhelming, and that he now understands what a return to substance use would mean for him. He said he is focused on maintaining his sobriety one day at a time.

“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 told Mandel the two pressures are tangled together, with his dread over his father feeding his daily anxiety.

The 2025 Diagnosis

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 of the illness. His office said at the time that the cancer appeared to be hormone-sensitive, which opened treatment options intended to manage it.

Hunter Biden said in August that his father’s prostate cancer was very painful and that its spread into his bones was hard to watch.

The former president said on Tuesday, Sept. 8, that his 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.”

Another Loss to Cancer

Beau Biden, Hunter Biden’s older brother, died in May 2015 at age 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Joe Biden returns to that loss repeatedly in public life and has pointed to it as the force behind his long push for cancer research funding, including his work on the Cancer Moonshot initiative.