Hunter Biden on Crack Addiction, Political Divide, Ukraine, Donald Trump Jr, Laptop & Finding Love

our next guest is probably the most famous board member of a ukrainian energy company of all time his new memoir is called beautiful things in case you've been wondering where he is welcome hunter biden [Applause] well thanks for coming thank you for having me i have to tell you i um after reading this book i'm impressed that you're alive i really am it is amazing that you are alive after all the crazy things that you've been through it was a uh it was a it was a journey but thank god i made it through yeah no kidding and a lot of the things that you detail happened here in this neighborhood uh like right around here yeah it was like you were doing crack at the places that i eat yeah well i not not intentionally i wasn't stalking you no no i didn't think you were but um you know i feel like i learned a lot about crack and i know that sounds weird but you hear about it and you see it on tv shows and you know in the news every once in a while but i learned how to get i really think i could get it now thanks to your book well i hope that wasn't the message this is not a how-to manual no it's not an oh yeah well i missed it i misread the whole thing it's a please please don't manually it's a please don't yes no absolutely it's i listen if somebody reads this book and then goes i should try crack afterwards well then they oh yeah they didn't finish the book they didn't start the book they didn't finish the book but um you uh in fact like where we're situated right now the roosevelt hotel is right across the street from us this is where yeah you had would you call it a bender i was at every hotel in los angeles basically you'd hold up there everything and every out every motel every hotel until they uh until they wouldn't have a room for me the next day one of the stories was you went just down the block from us the sunset la brea and you looked for some guys who might be able to get you something yeah and um then you wound up getting it and yeah using crack with them were those guys dressed as spider-man by any chance [Applause] no well maybe i don't know some things i don't i don't recall exactly but you know it i wrote about it and i uh and in vivid detail because um you know i think the question that most addicts have a a really hard time answering and what everybody that's a non-addict wants the answer to is why mm-hmm and you know there's a simple answer and the and that's because it works at first until it doesn't and for me um it was really important to be completely honest about the entire experience but it certainly was not a how-to manual no but it is a very vivid and detailed description of what it feels like to use crack and i i mean i've not used crack but i do feel like i understand it now and i did think it was especially interesting uh when you spoke about what you wrote about the fact that what happens the first time you use it is something you chase for the rest of the time you use it it never it's never what it was that first time ever it never and that's like every drug um you know i mean to tell you the truth the most insidious drug for um uh for me and i think for many people um that deal with addiction is alcohol but crack brought me to a place that uh i'd never had been to before both in terms of the high to be completely honest but absolutely as it relates to the low it was an absolutely awful experience at the end and it was an awful experience throughout after that first time um uh all you do is live in a lot of guilt and a lot of shame yeah and also it's very difficult for i mean listen we know you you've had a hard life there's no question about it right from you know from when you were very young tragedy uh struck your family and of course you know it's easy to draw lines from this to that or whatever but there definitely is a chemical element to addiction and yeah and and these things that you went through um were horrible horrible things that you went through and but there were also some i thought very interestingly positive things like you finding a friend uh a crack addict on the street who then moved into your house and you had this i had a kind of great relationship with other than the crack yeah other than the crack right and but uh it's a that relationship i wanted to really um detail in the book because i think that so many addicts are completely dehumanized um you know rhea is her name in the book and you passed this person on the street a hundred times in this neighborhood um uh in so many different cities and she was a um a crack addict but you know she was a a mother and a daughter she was a friend she didn't um and i don't think anybody chooses that life and what i really wanted to write the book for was to humanize um people suffering from addiction but also i wrote the book and more than anything it's a love letter to the people that are loving someone that's struggling with addiction because it's so hard for them to understand why it is that their love just can't get through why it is that if they just love them more that somehow they would be able to cure them and the one thing that i found to be more powerful than the most powerful love i knew which is the love of my family was my addiction and i hope that this is provide some people with some real hope that if they're just persistent and they continue that uh when that person's ready to reach for that love uh maybe they'll be able to find their way out of that deep dark hole yeah boy was your dad persistent i mean very very persistent and i can't imagine the nightmare that that that he must have been going through yeah and then reading about your your story about when you're a little boy and how you were around all these politicians that we now know and you know they'd call you into the office and you get to go you know see these things and these are friends of your your dads and then when you talk about like lindsey graham being on television and attacking you um and that he's a somebody that you considered to be a family friend he was a friend of your father's and how strange that must be to see that happen yeah see a person do that it's really more than anything is sad um the senate that my brother and i you know we grew up in wilmington my dad commuted every day so but we knew the senate he would take us down and we would we had a rule we could go with him at any time anywhere that we wanted to which sometimes we took a little too much of it ahead of joke but we um uh but we we saw my dad and got to become uh friends well not as kids but they were like uncles um and and you know whether republican or democrat politics has become so toxic it has um and i think that the the thing that i hope my dad is able to bring back is his genuine um desire to take some of that toxicity out again so i i i had a deep respect for senator graham and it's just sad um to see um the way in which he has decided to not just attack me but to approach politics yeah but also to the way he attacked you you wrote in the book um i do want to talk about this you know the ukraine and or ukraine and um and it became some issue it became something it gave donald trump something to grab on to he almost got well he did get impeached as a result of it but um you wrote did i make a mistake by taking a seat on the board of a ukrainian gas company no did i display a lack of judgment no would i do it again no yeah and i i meant what i said i meant what i wrote is that uh you know go to the beginning is that you know i went to yale law school um i served on at least a dozen boards before burisma i was a vice chairman of the board of amtrak i was a chairman of the board of the world food program u.s largest supporting the largest humanitarian organization in the world i had an expertise in corporate governance i was asked to serve on the board for corporate governance and i was a lawyer at boyce schiller and flexner which was how it was first approached however what i didn't take into account was the way in which they would use the perception against my dad and for that i i have uh i i wouldn't do it again for that reason yeah yeah does it make you crazy when you hear someone like donald trump jr saying that the only reason he does is because he's a biden and uh because of his last name and how just wildly comical that is i mean does it it is wildly comical is that that's putting it um uh lightly i think but but you know i really what i've learned is this is that i don't spend too much time thinking about it i do i think about it all the time yeah i'll think about it for you well maybe that's why because i have other people to think about it for me i have other people that think about it do you know donald trump jr no you've never met him no never mind okay i didn't know i don't know maybe you guys went to a school together or something like that you've never met the guy no not that i know of not that i know but yeah you see not that it's some pretty pretty rough places i've seen you on i've seen you on some interviews and uh you know talking about the laptop this became this big thing the laptop and when they ask you if that was your laptop you say you don't know which is hard to believe unless you read the book yeah and then it's kind of like i'm surprised you have shoes on yeah you know you know yeah i made it i made it today pants were the problem pants were the problem pants are always the problem really yeah yeah no you know look i really don't know and the fact of the matter is it's a red herring it is absolutely red herring but i am absolutely um i think within my my rights to question anything that comes from the uh from the desk of rudy giuliani um and so i don't know is the answer do you ever wish you'd had apple care yeah [Laughter] there's one other thing i want to ask about because it's the end of the book and um you are married now you found love and but the way you found love you have to understand that on paper this doesn't sound good okay and correct me if i have any of the details wrong you meet some strangers they say oh we have a girl you should meet yeah they give you her phone number you text her like later she's sleeping she's like leave me alone i'm asleep the next morning she texts you you guys have like lunch together or something in an hour you tell her you love her yeah she tells you she loves you yeah then she finds out you are a crack addict well i tell her i tell her yeah i mean within the hour before i told her i loved her so that she had an out i told her i said look i have a real problem um but it's amazing uh and then you marry her a week later yeah this is um yeah now if i'm your dad and you tell me this story i go oh no oh no no no no no what did your dad say when you called to tell him this you know what he he said i called him to tell him and he got on the phone with melissa and he said i'll tell you that the same thing that my mom my grandmother said to my now mother when we got remarried we say we got remarried after my my mommy's death and he said uh i thank you for giving my son the courage to love again hmm wow wow he always says the right thing doesn't it you guys yeah well this is uh i mean this is some book this is not one of those books you go all right this is a a hell of a book it's called beautiful things uh hunter biden thank you for being with us i appreciate it thank you with the wall flowers hi i'm jimmy kimmel and this is the internet i made it myself hit subscribe if you like it

Channel: Jimmy Kimmel Live

Views: 945,636

Keywords: jimmy, jimmy kimmel, jimmy kimmel live, late night, talk show, funny, comedic, comedy, clip, comedian, mean tweets, Pandemic, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Social Distancing, Quarantine, Interview, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Beautiful Things, Ukraine, New Book, Crack, Hotel, Addiction, Hollywood, Drugs, Friends, Biden’s, Politicians, Lindsey Graham, DJTJ, Laptop, Marriage, Love

Id: ia219GD0Vok

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jessflyc]

He was just on Marc Marons podcast last week if you haven’t listened.

[u/[deleted]]

Part of the problem is that Hunter Biden isn’t really a person that I would want to hear on AE. First off, as an addict myself, he just makes me uncomfortable because I don’t buy that he is clean. I also kind of didn’t think his story on WTF was all that interesting outside of the drugs/alcohol (which I largely find interesting only in my capacity as a recovering addict); he’s a privileged kid who largely denies the level of privilege he has.