Stories & Poetry with Matthew McConaughey and Maria Shriver | Dreamforce 2025 | Salesforce

Please welcome molly q. Ford, maria shriver, and matthew mcconaughey.

Hey, that's us.

Hey.

Hey. How we doing? Mazzanine. Hey.

Hello and welcome to Dreamforce. Thank you so much for joining us. I've got two of my old friends sitting here. We're about to have an amazing conversation.

Yes, we are.

We were talking backstage and we said, when's the last time somebody bought a poetry book besides their books?

Couple people, not many got two hands over here. 3, 4, 5, 6.

Now they're just raising their hands.

Not many point at em stop. But anyway, the minority seven out of.

However many we have these two iconic people here. Right. And a New York Times best selling poetry books. And you said they told you poetry doesn't sell.

Right? I mean, that's. First of all. Hi, everybody. Super excited to see all these beautiful faces. Thank you for coming to listen to us and to be here with us. So thank you. Yeah. They told me, don't do a poetry book. No one will buy a poetry book. And I'm sure you said they told you the same thing he said when.

I could write it. They just said no one's going to read it.

And we both got to number one on the New York Times. So we're like, what? What?

Right? So what does that mean?

Talking about what does that mean? What do you think it means?

Well, seems to me I think it means that people want are looking for some rhyme to all the reason, you know, some soul drew all the data. Some bass to all the treble.

All right.

Some mayonnaise to go with that. Mustard? Yeah. Any other genres I can cover? Go with that jelly.

Some hip to the ha.

You look at the evidence, you look at all the. You look at the so called news, you look at the facts and they're quite confusing. And we're questioning right now what is truth? What is a fact. The facts are an underdog right now. We're redefining that. So part of poetry is not about the facts. Poetry is what's in between the lines and outside the lines. And sometimes when you seek those ideals, they don't need to make sense. They need to. The soul rhymes. The soul's not about reason. So they're aspirational and that they're places in time and space and love stories and breakups and pains and sufferings, but they're in a place where it's almost free. Poetry is really free speech. Thank you. Thank goodness.

Amen.

You know what I mean? You cannot in poetry. You can go, hey, I didn't put the facts down. You couldn't pin me down. It's not a mirage, but it's dream states. And I think people are looking. Sometimes we make more sense out of life by looking to the rhyme instead of the reason. I think people are craving some of that now.

I love it because I think I'm a big believer that every single person in here can write poetry. And I'm a believer that if you take the rules away from having. Everything has to rhyme, has to be like Shakespeare, has to be what you read in school. But if you just sit down and actually think about what's inside of you and let it rip and let it come out, you will be astonished, I think, by who comes out and what comes out and how freeing actually that is. And I think it's such a beautiful art form to actually introduce yourself to yourself. I think it's a beautiful art form to introduce yourself to your loss, to your longing, to your childhood, to your pain and to your joy. And that's certainly what it was for me, was a way to actually make sense of the life I had led and how I had grown up and what it all meant and my experience with it. And when I went out, we both also went out on tour, and people came up to me in droves and said, this is my story. They weren't the same at all, but they're the same. And so I think that that's. Cause we're all experiencing, I think, many of the same things. We're experiencing love and loss and heartbreak and kids and families and eruptions and coming back together. And if you can write about it, it helps you make sense, and it helps you connect to other people.

Such a cathartic experience.

Yeah.

Because in I Am Maria, when you're talking about motherhood, feeling too much or not enough. Right, right. And that seems so universal right now.

I think it does, 100%. I mean, I certainly started in journalism when I was told, you're too much, it's too much. Calm down. Cause women don't act like this. They don't dress like this, they don't behave, they don't cover these stories. So the too much narrative was very ingrained. I also grew up with all brothers who were like, you're too much. You're too much. And so I adopted that narrative, actually served me quite well in many ways. But I think then you're still battling, which we all have, like, am I enough? Where do I show up? How do I show up? Why do things happen to me? I might not be enough. And I think, once again, I think that's universal, and I think it happens at different ages. It shows up in different ways, and I think different decades present us with different challenges, different opportunities, and different stories. And what I loved about Matthew's book was that it covered also the decades for you. And as did mine. I went back in time to understand how I got to the place. I was in my mid-50s. I was like this. You know, I can't end up on a bathroom floor. This must have started someplace else. And so to go back to understand how I got forward. And he also wrote about your own experiences when you were a teenager and what you were trying to make sense.

Out of, to look back. Has it always been. Has it been easy for you to look over your shoulder into your past? That was one of the harder things.

I never did it until this book.

I didn't either. Yeah, little green lights in this. And, boy, it was a scary proposition. And I pushed it off as long as I could. I mean, with the green lights, I was. I had a treasure chest full of journals, and I was so scared to open those up.

Yeah.

And I kept going to it, and finally I went to my wife, Camilla, and I was like, you know, when I die, you mind opening these and see if something's in there worth sharing? And she gave me the middle finger, and I'm glad she did, because she's like, you do it and get out of here. And so I had to go off, but I had to go off alone and be forced to look at that. And it was uncomfortable at first, but now to understand where I am, where we are, and where we want to go, I've realized now that you do need to look back into your past.

Because it's in there anyway. That's the other thing, I think that we all come to understand that so much of your past is driving your presentation, and so understanding where that's coming from, what are you actually really frustrated about, angry about? When I'm talking to my kids and they're erupting about something, I'm like, what are we actually talking about here? Where did you feel this? Where did you first feel this? And so much of that is operating our system in the present.

When you both talk to me, it sounds like, oh, you're journaling, but it's more artistic than that. You're doing more than that.

Really unlocking it feels very different than journaling to me. His is poems and prayers. Mine felt like kind of meditations, reflections, screaming, wrenching, painful, joyful, confused. All of that so that I have journaled, I've written news stories, I've written speeches, I've written advocacy things. But this felt very different. And it came from silence, actually, which I'm a big believer in. He wanted to be a monk, I wanted to be a nun.

I thought we still had time, but she told me there's a cutoff for nuns.

Yes, for nuns, probably not for monks, not for guys, but for women, yes, there's a cutoff.

I'm like, there is?

Yes, there is. So I was told when I went to visit a convent. Yes, I had those.

So poems and prayers. You go from playful ditties, psalms, deeper reflections. What made you want to bring that all in the collection and then have varied way of doing things.

Well, I look back and these are poems of over 36 years of writing. And I started writing mainly when I was kind of 18 and I was off when I was in Australia for a year. I had a really tough year as an exchange student and I was lost, looking, scrambling and didn't have any of my safety nets from friends to father to family to bounce an idea off of. And an 18 year old man or woman is trying to find themselves and I was really trying to find myself. So the pen and the paper became my friend. And I would write 18 page letters to myself and return them to myself. A 19 page letter returned to me from myself. Yeah, I was, it was happening, right? The Socratic dialogue was almost paralyzing me and so I just put them together and you know, I've enjoyed writing academic stuff, I love philosophy. But I was looking around at myself and I was looking at the evidence, listening to the news and I was noticing a shortage of things to believe in. I even noticed that I started to become quite cynical, not quite cynical, but I started to become cynical. And that's a disease that I swore I'd never succumb to. And it scared me because I started to objectify people a little bit, look down my nose a little bit, ah, think someone's not worthy. And that started to carry over sometimes either feeling like I wasn't worthy or carried over to me being pompous and arrogant, thinking I was so much better. And that scared me. And then thankfully it pissed me off and I said, well, look, if you're not finding it in the evidence and you're not finding the belief in yourself and others and in the world and in tomorrow and for me and God as well, if you're not finding that in the facts, go to the dreams, go to the poems and the prayer, those ideals that we can believe in. Let's bring. Let's bring the dreams back to earth. And I usually work the opposite way. I go logic first, reality first, nonfiction first. To create the fiction, to create the dream. And I flipped the script on this. I said, I'm not finding it here. So let's look higher on higher ground and see if we can maintain the steam and the steel to go. Let's fight to bring that ideal back down to real life.

I love that. Finding the humanity. I want to talk about themes, because both of you have very vulnerable themes in your book. Matthew from Faith, resilience, gratitude, and Maria, family, love and loss. So how was this sharing, this struggle, how is it helping you connect with others?

Well, I think when you write something vulnerable, and I think honest people can tell, and I think people have that in their own lives. And so I found a lot of connection by sharing my story, what I had been through. And I think that everybody in this audience, no doubt, has experienced heartbreak in some way, shape, or form. Everybody here has grown up in a family and tried to find their way in the family. It doesn't mean, you know, it doesn't matter that the family is mine or yours or whatever, but we're all trying to find our identity within the family. And so all of these themes, I think, are universal. So I was trying to find my way in a very public, famous family. I was experiencing heartbreak. I was trying to figure out how to heal myself, reclaim an identity separate from work, separate from a marriage, figure out who I was, what I stood for. And I think that's a very universal thing, and I think it calls people into community when you share that. And I had grown up in a family that was very steeped in politics and asked people for votes. But I always had a sense that there was a division between what they were doing and the, quote, people that they were leading. And I was always looking for a way to connect to people. And I think then you can lead by connecting. And I think that was always something that I wanted to do differently than others in my family. And I wanted to lead my own life as opposed to a life that had been preordained for me. And that was a challenge, and I think it's a challenge for anybody. Just mine might have been more public. My upbringing was more public. My downfall was more public. And I think my resurrection was really of my own making. And I think everybody can do that, and everybody's capable, and everybody probably in this room has done that in their own way, shape or form.

And Matthew, faith, resilience, gratitude. How did these values show up and what really surprised you?

I've. My faith has always been somewhat healthy. I've had times where I've had my agnostic years of my life where I was so needed and to grab onto just self reliance. No, it's my responsibility. It's what I do. Look in the mirror. You're responsible if you win. Yep. If you lose. Yep. That's on you. And I had spent a couple years in that. And I tell you what, one of the great feelings was coming out of that when I came back to faith and belief in God for me. And that's a scary re entry, you know, if you're a believer, you can come back and go, oh, am I about to have to take some penance here for walking away? Which if, you know, if you, if you believe and have faith, you usually find out that no, the, the doorknob was always, never needed. To key to the doorknob, all you had to do is grab the knob and turn it. But I came back and what I felt was my faith and the prime mover, the way maker God was going. Thank you, thank you for putting your hands on the wheel. I got too many of us out there relying on fate only. And you know, that was. I didn't conjure that idea. It was a feeling that had because I came back and I was welcomed right back to my faith. But I was also like, I felt spiritually it was going, we got to have our hands on the wheel, free will and fate, you know, so. So that's where I started to notice that self reliance and faith are not necessarily contradictory. And I don't, I don't think they are. You know, as far as gratitude, I was raised on gratitude. Baseline gratitude. You know, you came into the breakfast table in my house and you had anything less than a big smile on your face saying, good morning, Mom. She would grab us by the arm, take us back to our bed, put us back under the COVID and say, don't you come back to the kitchen till you're ready to see the roses and the vases of the dust on the table. Like, whoa, you know, you're mama, Mama, I need another pair of shoes. Look at all these holes in my shoes. You want new shoes? Introduce you to the boy with no feet. Whoa. Baseline gratitude, right? And it was demanded in us. You know, resilience, that was something I got from my mother and I noticed it stuck with me through my life. Endurance and resilience to how quickly you can deal with a problem and how quickly you can go and understand and believe this too shall pass. Let's get on. Let's try it again or try it a different way. Those were ingrained in me, and I've noticed that, you know, that I've redefined them some ways in my life. I must say, the resilience part I've learned. Like, you didn't get to have a winter, so to speak, in my house, it was always summer. You better be thankful for everything. Well, if you're thankful for everything right all the time, you're a repeat offender of all the stuff you're screwing up on, right? Because you step in the pothole and you trip and you go, get up, dust yourself off, you start running again, and you never stop to look at the pothole and go, why do I keep stepping in that damn thing? You will step in it again the next time around. Over and over and over. So I did go to my mom about 10 years ago. Mom, I said, mom, I updated this resilience thing. I've learned to stop a little bit and pause and go, why do I keep stepping in that same pile of you know what? Whereas you taught us, just get up and say that. You know what? It's part of my. Part of my wardrobe now. No, let's have a look. Why do we step in it? Back off a minute. Maybe some people pass you in the race while you're having a look at why you did that, but next time around the bend, you don't step in the same pile of you know what?

I think that's interesting because I was raised by a similar kind of a mother who didn't, you know, we don't talk about feelings. Oh, somebody just died. Let's not talk about it. Let's carry on. You know, let's go out on the boat. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. But nope, nope, we're just going to carry on. And I don't want to hear anything out of you and just keep going. And so I went into a profession and I started writing about feelings and trying to go, what do I feel? What do you feel? What does. The first book I wrote was about heaven. What are. You know, what happens when we die? What is grief? Help me understand this thing, this journey called life. Because I was raised by someone who didn't want to talk about anything. And I think many of us were right. You have parents from a different generation who are like, just be grateful, you know, you didn't live through the Depression. Just be grateful we don't talk about this. You don't talk about that. And I think we're in a different time. Parents are different, kids are different. And I think actually, at a conference like this, it's a beautiful thing to be talking about this. Cause so much is about technology and AI. And I'm a big believer that our humanity. I hope we don't lose it in the process. That we no longer have to be the smartest person in the room. Cause AI's got that covered. But how can we be the best humans that society has ever produced? What makes us. It's our feelings, our grief, our love, our longing. And that's, in a way, I think, why these books did well. Because they're speaking to a moment when people are overwhelmed and when they're told that AI is going to take everything from them or change everything for them. And people have feelings.

Absolutely.

And I think that's what poetry does. Well, it gives you a place to put your feelings on the paper. You don't have to publish them. But I hope that this moment brings us back to our humanity and helps us look at the story that's, in a way, hiding in plain sight. Which is what you bring or you bring or you bring to the table that no AI machine can ever duplicate.

Because for me, both of you, institutional to my life, right, you're storytellers. Whether you told the story through journalism and reporting or you told it through film, you're storytelling. And now this is just a new avenue for you both. So when someone tells you your poetry's not gonna sell or read, I'm like, do they know who you are? We wanna hear these stories. We trust you as a storyteller. We adore you as a storyteller. So can we ask you to read us something? Would that be possible?

Yeah.

Yup.

You wanna read something?

Come on, y'. All. We want a little poetry. I'm gonna ask you to start first. I am Maria.

Oh, okay.

Is there something you'd like to share with us?

Okay, let's see. What did I say I was going to write? Oh, here. I'm going to read this because my poems are kind of long and painful, so I'm going to.

Cathartic.

Not painful, no, both. Both, but okay. This is called Dear Life. I've been wanting to talk to you lately to tell you you are not what I planned. You may not give a damn, But I thought you should know. You're not what I expected. I thought as Long as I had my compass pointing north, all would be good. But I learned that my heart doesn't know north. My life has led me on a path written in invisible ink Longing for more from a soul I didn't know yet. So here we are. Life without a compass, without a map Only my heart guiding me forward it wonders, am I ready to be known in a deep and new way? Am I strong enough to open my heart and divulge what lies within? Life, you say that's what you're all about. Let's see how the universe responds when I pull back the curtain on my soul.

Hey. Yeah. It's one of the fun things about poetry is you can personalize seemingly inanimate things or the most animate thing. Like you wrote, a form to life.

Dear Life.

Dear Life, you're alive.

You weren't as I had planned. Yep.

Who has a life that as they planned, Right?

I mean, that's a bar. Like Dear Life. You weren't as I had planned.

No. Thank God for you. Thank God I have one. Thank God.

Absolutely. Thank you, Matthew.

Yeah, I'll read when I personalize something here as well. It's called memory. I wrote this. You know how people come up to you, or not even coming up to you, you're trying to remember something. Sometimes you're playing grab ass with your thoughts, right? And sometimes that's a good thing because you find grab. Grab ass with your thoughts. Thoughts. Trying to remember something.

Got it.

Something right.

I'm going to try that tonight. I'm playing grab ass with my thoughts. And I was like, right.

And sometimes it's good because you catch it and you go, I'm glad I stayed on it. But other times, I think we need to go. Which I. Which I told. I said this to myself one day in front of a friend, and he started laughing when I said it. And I said, I can't remember this thing. Can't remember this thing. I said, I'll forget it. I was there. And he goes, you were there? I was like, what's big. What's the big deal with memory? I was there. Why we got to remember. Why are we so obsessed with this memory thing? You were there, so it's called memory.

You had to be there.

Yeah. You were there. All right. Memory. Unlike her cousin Conscience dares She patiently waits and she always cares, Judging us not for our neural void though we may be. She's not annoyed. A graceful poet, she finds us lost and greets us with reflection. She rhymes us with reminding times so we can make the connection just and true? She's deja vu? And surprises us with chances? She flies and floats from clouds to boats and? And with our dreams she dances? Always near and never far? She's a teacher? Always right behind us? On our shoulder as we greet each day? When we take the time? She's right beside us? Memory never forgets? Even though we do.

That was spectacular.

And his poems are prayers.

Yes.

And his prayers are poems.

Absolutely. Memories. She dances.

Poems are also prayers that rhyme.

That's our time, y'. All.

That's it, y'.

All.

That was it. I know we could keep doing this for hours, but. Matthew McConaughey, Maria Shriver.

Thank you.

Poems and poetry.

I am Maria. Thank you.

It.