Episode 14: What We Really Think About Brad Pitt Drinking Again
September 1, 2026
This week on Dear Vernon, Laura McKowen and Eric Johnson are back with a new episode of Dear Vernon. Brad Pitt was sober for seven years. And then he wasn't. And a lot of people had a lot of feelings about that, including several people who reached out to Laura directly, asking some version of the same question: why does this make me so angry?
Laura goes into the Esquire piece that started it all, which is actually pretty brief on the subject. Brad mentions getting overconfident a couple of times, going back to drinking, and deciding he can have a few but has to be professional about it. That's basically it. And yet somehow those few sentences sparked a conversation that clearly needed to happen.
Eric shares his honest complicated feelings about Brad Pitt as a person, and why the news made him sad more than anything else. He talks about what he hears in the way people like Bradley Cooper and Dax Shepard talk about their sobriety versus what he's always heard from Brad, and why sincerity and conviction are things you can usually sense even through a screen.
Laura shares a story about her dad and how she sees parallels between his drinking (and sobriety) habits and Brad's.
They also get into the question of moderation itself, what it actually feels like to try to set a limit of two drinks and spend the entire day negotiating with yourself about what two even means, and why that exhausting mental math is its own kind of answer.
If you've had feelings about the Brad Pitt news and couldn't quite figure out what they were about, this one is worth a listen.
Laura also wrote about this on her Substack. It's free and available to everyone. Read it here.
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