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Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
Hello.
Today we have Hunter Bidon, who is an author. He was a lawyer. He was a lobbyist. He is an artist and he's a recovery advocate. Obviously, he's the son of Joe Biden, the 46th president. And he has a book out now called Beautiful Things, detailing his heroin journey through fucking hardcore addiction.
Yeah.
And so this is a very addiction heavy episode. We try to minimize any political nature. I think this is the kind of story I love to hear about addiction. That's primarily what it is. Yes. So I hope everyone goes into it with an open mind because it's incredibly honest and vulnerable and powerful.
I agree.
Please enjoy Hunter Biden.
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Chapter 2: What themes of addiction are explored in this episode?
She's an angel.
You can stay seated. How are you, brother?
Good. I'm really, really sorry I'm late.
No, you're fine.
You're bringing sugar?
Yeah, yeah. All right.
Hey, Monica. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Luckily, we had sugar in the raw. Otherwise, I was bringing out a bag of white powder. I was like, what a start for these two. That is hilarious. Sugar in your coffee. I'm a little shocked. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to start with stereotypes. Yeah. I thought you were tougher than this. Oh, no. I'm sorry. You're right.
I got my few things. I got my nicotine a little bit. I quit smoking. When I got clean, Melissa, my wife, she convinced me to go to this guy. What's his name? The hypnotist? Yeah. I don't know his name, but I know of him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, bullshit. And I went and it worked. Yeah. And then like six months later, I don't know, it was like my first indictment or my second.
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Chapter 3: How does Hunter Biden describe his family dynamics?
And all I remember is just doing this. There's never a moment where you're like, you're under. At the very end, he comes. And it's just three sessions. And at the last session, he said, that's it. You're done. Right. And I was done.
That's pretty crazy.
How about the physical withdrawal? No, done. You didn't feel the craziness? No, no. He does it over three sessions. And like the first session, you're going to smoke half of what you smoke.
Okay, okay.
Second session, you're only going to have two cigarettes a day. And then the third, you're done. And I was done. I mean, I was smoking since I was 17. I mean, like a pack of Marlboros a day. When you were sober, probably a pack.
Yeah, and when I wasn't. Yeah. Well, when I look back, I remember my epic hangovers. And at this point, it's hard to really know because I also had smoked like three packs of Camel Whites on nights that I partied. If you're blowing lines, the cigarette never goes out. It's just one after another. And you wake up feeling horrendous. You're like, I don't know how to unravel. Was it the alcohol?
Was it the cocaine? Was it the insane amount of cigarettes?
Wasn't that the whole problem? It's one lead stall.
I think there's a combination of all.
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Chapter 4: What impact did the car accident have on Hunter's life?
But anyway, thanks, Monica. I think I maybe should have been guilty about something. I'm not joking. I'm joking.
I just mean letting people down is part of the shame.
I had guilt with my wife at the time. I had guilt with my kids who I adored and adore me. But then I cycled. Then it was like, I came back from Antigua that time. I got shingles three months later. Somebody prescribed me oxycodone. I started down that path and which led to a bottle of Smirnoff. And I was in that cycle. And then Beau got diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2014. It's a death sentence.
If I were you, carrying around I'm a piece of shit and I'm a scumbag, and my sweet brother gets this diagnosis, I would think the amount of shame it would exponentially trigger in me that I should be the one dying. Why on earth would it be him?
100%. You already have this latent survivor's guilt that exists. And this is why I opened up to the idea that I can talk about that trauma now. Because of course it had something to do with everything. And just forget about the drinking or addiction. Just in terms of my fear, you already have that latent survivor's guilt. The worst dream that I ever had in my life as a kid was my brother dying.
I remember vividly. The only nightmares that I ever remembered was that, was losing Bo. And that became true, but playing in slow motion. Like you know the end is near, coming, and it's gonna be awful. And it was awful. And I did things like I decided to join the Navy and I relapsed the day before I went into the Navy Reserves at the age of 42. Pissed hot. I get, yeah, pissed hot.
Discharged from the Navy Reserve. I now am sober. I'm going through all of the treatments with Bo and all of the things that we're trying. And you get down to the end, they're doing experimental stuff. But anyway, he passed away. It was the 30th of May, 11 years ago.
And from there on out, just everything, not because of him, regardless of that, I just as easily could have completely screwed everything up. Yeah, even if he had stayed healthy. Yeah, even if he stayed healthy. It accelerated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the biggest thing that accelerated is, immediately after Bo died, my marriage fell apart. I mean, immediately after. We attempted to do things.
I attempted to go back to rehab. I stayed in. I had a sober coach. Everybody was afraid that I was going to kill myself.
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Chapter 5: What led to the impeachment hearing related to Hunter Biden?
Not a single one. There's a text message in which the board secretary of Burisma says, it was nice meeting your dad. And I know we were at a restaurant together and he sat down and there were 10 other people at the table. He was in from Ukraine. I introduced him to my dad and that's it. Now they had an impeachment hearing over that.
And so I take responsibility for doing something that could ever cause the perception of that. Now, not to get political, but what these guys are doing now. And I hate even putting the comparison between the two because that was the standard by which we as a family had lived. And here's the point.
Chapter 6: How did Hunter Biden's laptop become a political issue?
I really don't care about rehashing that, but I'm more than willing to and welcome it. But what they did was, in 2018, there was a Ukrainian-Russian oligarch who was offering for sale my laptop. This was before a laptop repair shop guy ever existed.
He was offering it for sale, and Rudy Giuliani, along with Lev Parnas and a guy named Igor Fruman that he deputized, went to Ukraine and then to Austria eventually, or on their way to Austria, to buy this hard drive. And they never made it because Lev Parnas gets arrested. Lev Parnas, he's the one that got arrested.
He was working for Rudy, and he gets thrown to the wolves, and so he tells the whole story. In truth, Rachel Maddow made a whole documentary about it called From Russia with Lev. And Lev points out that what they did was, and what they eventually found, was a record of my addiction. And that was going to be the October surprise.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of addiction in Hunter Biden's life?
But the problem was, is that in between that time, I had sat down with Adam Entos of The New Yorker, and I had told my whole story. Nobody told me to. You went rogue for that one. 100% rogue. Yeah, yeah. But intuitively, I knew. And this was the difference between any other time that I'd gotten clean or sober, ever, which is... I get a call from this guy. He wants to talk about Ukraine.
I say, where are you from?
Chapter 8: How does Hunter Biden reflect on his relationship with his father?
He's from the New Yorker. I had an obsession as a kid with the New Yorker. Thought it was the greatest publication ever to the point where I had the cover cut out, taped up to my wall. And then I read some of his work and he's an incredible journalist. And I said, I talked to him. He just was really honest. And I told him my whole story as it related to addiction. And so I had outed myself.
I think Adam said one of the first calls that he got after he did that story was from Steve Bannon and said, you MF-er, you scooped us. And so they had it. They had the hard drive. They had the phones. They had the laptop and two phones that were stolen in Las Vegas. They had a laptop that I left in my psychologist's office in Massachusetts that was there for a year and passed around.
What a hunt for all this. Oh, yeah, exactly. And then a laptop repair shop owner who happens to be blind, literally legally blind, turns over not to anybody except surprise, surprise, my arch nemesis, Rudy Giuliani and his lawyer who cobble it together and cobble all of these sources together. And they present it to the world two weeks before the election.
And remember, what Rudy did is he went to the courthouse steps in Newcastle County, Delaware, with a laptop, which was no such thing, with Bernie Carrick, of all people, who's now, God rest his soul, dead. But he was the former police chief who was indicted for bribery and fraud. And they go to the steps and they say...
This is a record of degenerate, there are inappropriate pictures of minors, and they do exactly what is elimination rhetoric, which is an old Russian trick. Accused them literally of the worst thing. What am I supposed to say in that two weeks when the world is coming down? And so 40 NSA former security officials come out, and they say this has all the earmarks.
We're not saying that it is, but it's all the earmarks of Russian propaganda. And then Twitter... which was Twitter, suppresses a story for a 24 hour period of time, not because of the content of the story, but the content of the photographs, which were nude photographs of me, which violates their terms of service. That's the only reason is the New York Post put on their front page,
Me, with my private parts blurted out, naked, which, by the way, is against the law because of the bill Melania just passed, the Take It Down Act. But then that becomes a suppression story. And they would have won the election if anybody just had known what was in the laptop. Okay. Well, now you've had seven years. Everybody. All of you. And I include the two of you and me and everybody else.
You've had my entire digital footprint, unlike anyone that I know of in human history, available to you for a 25-year period of time. What do you find? Literally nothing other than I was a degenerate crack addict. And I was in rooms I should not have been. And I was with people and prostitutes and dancers and drug dealers smoking crack and doing other drugs and 90% of the text messages.
But you do not find anything about foreign corruption or bribery or anything like that. Finally, after two years, they come back and they offer me a plea agreement. Because I failed to pay my taxes on time in that period of time, which I had subsequently paid with penalties and interest of over $800,000 after I got sober and found out that I had not filed my taxes.
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