The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sophie Thompson CEO & Co-Founder of VirtualSpeech

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Sophie Thompson CEO & Co-Founder of VirtualSpeech Virtualspeech.com VirtualSpeech is Professional Development Training for the Modern Workplace, Join 370,000+ people and boost your career with award-winning courses on public speaking, leadership, sales, and more. Practice online or in virtual reality (VR).

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today, coming by, sitting on the virtual

couch, if you will, and visiting with some of the most brilliant minds, companies, CEOs and people in the world, none of which are me. I'm the dumb one. I just bring the smart people on to come on the guests and do the thing. We're going to be talking today about some interesting technologies that are advancing through the world right now. Chat GPT, the metaverse, we're going to talk about VR, and pretty much from the CEO of one of the best training professional development companies that's been doing this for a long time, and with over 370,000 plus people, and award-winning courses on public speaking, leadership, sales, and more.

We'll be getting into getting into that and some of this technology and how it's being used leading edge to develop people and make them smarter and empower and utilize these technologies. I knew there was something smart I could say out of that. But in the meantime, as always, we have to guilt you with the plug, shame you, or refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. We certainly send you a virtual hug if you tell them to sign up and subscribe to the show. Also, give us a five-star review on iTunes, youtube.com, fortuneschrisfast, goodreads.com, fortuneschrisfast.

The big LinkedIn newsletter, I think, grows like every day. It's crazy. I just put out the newest newsletter this morning. I'm like, seriously? More people subscribing? And then pick the big Chris Foss Show group on LinkedIn as well. Today, we have the CEO of Virtual Speech on the show. And we're going to be talking to her, Sophie Thompson, about her company and what they've been doing for quite some time. She's the co-founder and CEO of Virtual Speech, an award-winning education platform that combines e-learning and practice exercises online and in virtual reality. Virtual

Speech was recently the first VR learning platform to integrate chat GPT. So we're going to talk about that as well. She started the company in 2015 as a way to overcome her fear of public speaking using vr i like that idea since then as she's developed a catalog of 30 plus courses focused on communication interpersonal skills from public speaking to active listening leadership sexual harassment prevention and more she's helped hundreds of thousands of people across uh 130 countries to improve their skills and confidence using VR. And she's appeared on the BBC World News, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal talking about VR for learning. Welcome to the show, Sophie. How are you? Thanks very much, Chris. I'm good, thanks. How are you?

Good, good, good. I'm definitely good this morning. It's, what is it, Tuesday or something like that? And we're all still alive. We're all still here. So knock on wood. So give us a.com so people can find you on the interwebs and where to find out more about your company. Yeah. So you can find Virtual Speech at virtualspeech.com. Easy enough. And you can also find us on all social media platforms.

And if people would like to connect with me, I'm Sophie Thompson on LinkedIn working at Virtual Speech, which is one word. There you go. There you go. So give us a little bit of origin story on you. Like what made you, you know, what were some of the developments in your life, you know, how you were born and raised, that sort of thing, and what got you into this, eventually starting this company? Sure. So as people can hear from my accent I'm from the UK so I'm from a place called Birmingham which is the second biggest city in England and what growing up I was quite a well what I thought was a shy child and it's not until I look back in hindsight really now that I realized that I was more than just shy. I had quite severe social anxiety.

And I mean, when people talk about mental health and things now, I just don't think we have the language back then. It was more like, oh, Sophie's shy. And how that translated into my life was in terms of social interactions. So if my parents had family friends over, I would hide upstairs, even though I'd known these people for 15 years. I didn't apply for universities where I had to do an interview. I had panic attacks before speaking up in class. And I wouldn't even order my own food in a restaurant because of that one-to-one interaction was too much for me.

And it was when I was doing my postgraduate, my master's degree, that I realised that how much this had been holding me back in life and closing off opportunities for me. So I was doing my master's and I had a presentation coming up in three months time and I was a very studious person I really cared about my grades and this presentation was assessed so there was no getting out of it so for my undergrad for example I would bribe my friends with food so they would do the presenting and I would do the background work but I had to present in my master's and yeah three months in advance I was waking up nervous about it like panicking and I was talking to my friend who

was working in the virtual reality department at Jaguar Land Rover the car company and really it was his idea that we could use virtual reality to provide a psychologically safe place to practice a skill like public speaking because the problem is is that if you're scared of public speaking you're not going to want to practice it you're not going to give yourself those opportunities whereas in virtual reality you're in an environment which evokes a very similar emotional reaction but you're in a psychologically safe place where you're free to make mistakes without any real world consequences you can practice as often as you like and build up that momentum so that you become both confident and

competent with a skill like public speaking so we created virtual speech, the first version, as some nerdy fun. And here we are seven years later, and that has really snowballed. That's amazing. And, you know, people, you know, speaking is hard for people. I mean, and I think there's, I don't know what the psychological term is, but there's a practicing stuff in your brain and imagining it and, and going through the motions, it gives you like a pre-programming where you, you, you can do it more,

you know, like a athletic or Olympic swimmers and, and athletes will take and do that. They'll, they'll walk themselves through the event and they, they know how it goes. And that preparedness can just just make the make the whole episode uh go easier yeah i think it's like a form of visualization for them and then vr

takes that to the next level um i know that these days so what we didn't realize at the time because it wasn't a thing because vr was so new then is that there's now a thing called virtual reality exposure therapy, which is basically where people use VR as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy. So you could start off by, for example, speaking in front of just one person in VR. And then when you're comfortable with that, build yourself up to five people, 10 people, 500. Well, that's quite a gap, actually, 10 to 500. Probably do a couple more in between but basically getting comfortable with your fear and then pushing yourself in a way that feels safe before going to the next level there you go and now you've developed out to all these different

courses and aspects who's your who's your consumer base who are people who usually reach out to you that might be in the audience that can utilize your services um it's typically people who usually reach out to you that might be in the audience that can utilize your services? It's typically people who, I mean, it's for anybody at any level, but just in terms of our typical demographic, it tends to be people who are at a managerial level, who are looking to improve their managerial skills. Because I think that's where so-called soft skills your interpersonal skills really start to have an impact on your work and your team as well um so really it's just anybody who's looking to to upskill their communication skills i mean i've spoken about public speaking but we have courses on leadership communication sales pitching, active listening, sexual harassment prevention, DE&I, like there's a whole breadth of courses that really can suit everybody. And I mean, if you enroll on the

platform, you have access to all of those courses. Ah, so there's like a monthly pricing that you might pay or something along those lines? Yeah, so you can do a monthly subscription, you can buy the course as a one-off, but I mean, the most cost-efficient way is actually to do the monthly subscription. And then you even have an annual version as well. How, you know, talk to us about what your thoughts are on ChatGPT.

You guys have evidently incorporated that in some of your stuff. What do you guys do and how do you utilize that? Yeah, so we were really excited when um chat gpt kind of 3.5 as you as it were came out the end of last year because our most common feedback from customers was that they would they want the avatars to be able to have a conversation with them and before gpt the one that came out in December that just wasn't possible so when it came out we were like oh my gosh this this could be huge in terms for us but also in terms of the

learner experience and just for education in general so we've integrated it into our practice scenarios so for us it's available online and in virtual reality so if someone doesn't have a headset that doesn't matter they can just do it through through the internet and the benefit for our platform is that people can now have free-flowing conversations on absolutely any topic so for example we have scenarios where you can practice difficult conversations like a um a colleague not reaching their sales targets, for example, a disciplinary. There's debating scenarios. There's a sales pitching scenario. You can actually do a presentation about any topic and tell the software that topic and it will ask you questions based on what you've said. So it really enables that more,

even more realistic role play practice that's really targeted for the topic that people want to do. Another way actually is with job interviews as well. So now you can practice for a job interview for any company in any industry. So it's really leveled up really the training that's available that's pretty darn awesome because you know i mean it's tough when people you go into interview i remember when i was very very young this is a long time ago evidently uh uh and i would go in an interview with people and you know it was intimidating and uh sometimes you're not prepared for the questions. And certainly by practicing, you know, practice is the way to master anything. And so by being able to practice and go through different scenarios and stuff like that,

I know firing people is always hard for me. I never have enjoyed it, especially if it's some, well, I take that back. I've enjoyed it when they've deserved it. But there's been times where you have to let people go for finances or whatever the case. You're shutting down a division, and it's unfortunate. And it's hard in those cases because, you know, the person has done a good job. They've tried their best, but, you know, business is business, sadly. And so, you know, I could have used a few courses in firing people when they first started out,

when I first started out firing people. But, you know, being able to do things the right way and, of course, follow, you know, so many rules, laws and regulations now and human resources stuff where if you don't do things a certain way, you can get sued. And so you've got to be careful how you approach that. What are some of your most popular courses that you find? Our most popular is our public speaking course. I think that's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's how we started out. It's where we had a lot of attention

because we were the first to market with it. And also it's in the name. So that tends to be what people come to us for primarily, but also the sales and leadership courses um the the job interview stuff is really popular with universities but not so much with consumers that we like individuals we found um but yeah universities use that in their careers departments to help their students prepare for the job interviews and their first job interviews there you go i'm looking over the some of the courses in business essential public speaking how to present over video this is really an important thing that

i've talked about ever since you know covid and remoteness and zoom meetings and everything you know a lot of leaders you know you you know i i've done my soapbox uh presentations as ceo of my corporations and you know you go in your office and you get on your virtual soapbox and deliver your blah blah blah whatever sort of bs i'm trying to sell i'm kidding it's not bs but you know there's some of my employees are like this guy again um and uh and i can't blame them, really. Sometimes I've been known to, I don't know, be a little bit bombastic. But no one who's ever listened to the show knows that.

Didn't go down. But how to present over video, one of the things I've talked about is leaders with Zoom and remote working and stuff like that, you know, it's much harder to convey energy, charisma, the message of what they want to take and do. You know, you have people sitting in their homes and sometimes they have distractions going on and, you know, trying to have their full attention, be able to deliver without that in-person thing is a much bigger challenge. And so I think it's great that, you know, there's so many complaints I hear from friends who are on Zoom meetings and like, oh God, I'm on my 12th Zoom meeting today.

I don't want to kill myself. Yeah, it's exhausting. Because as you said, because you can't convey the same amount of energy, you almost have to make up for it and be overly energetic to come across the same way as if you almost have to make up for it and be overly energetic to come across the same way as if you were there in real life yeah i just scream at people the whole time and and it terrorized them and that seems to work so don't do that folks that's a joke uh let's see uh

d e and i training in vr what is d e and i training um that's diversity equity and inclusion training okay inclusion training okay there we go we've had a number of inclusion officers on the show with their books oh great yeah so that that course focuses on um the the main character if you like in that course is a a south asian woman and it basically follows her journey throughout the day. So it's about five different environments. So say we set the scene and you're in her home and she's got a child and she's balancing really work and life. So it looks at the kind of gender roles in the workplace as well and those stereotypes and then it follows her throughout the day and you'll see different microaggressions examples of allyship and the

idea of that is really to provide a point of reflection and conversation around whether you have witnessed that whether you have been the perpetrator of that perhaps unknowingly um what you can do about that so i mean we wouldn't say that a 20 minute vr experience um is the equivalent of somebody's lived experience at all um but it's very much there to to evoke a sense of emotion and emotional connection to the character to then be able to think from that person's point of view to be more more aware in the workplace there you go i could have used some of these back in the day i probably could still use them now the elevator pitch uh leadership communication that's always good because being a leader is important i wrote a book on it uh let's see uh english for business

business storytelling you know storytelling is such such an important thing to convey ideas, to convey what you want to do for learning. I tell a story, but I can't think of one off the top of my head. But to emphasize that, but business storytelling is very good. I'm just kind of shooting through these, spitballing through a few of these. Online sales pitching. And where did I see the other one that I wanted to talk about? Sales pitching and closing.

This is something I could have used back in the day. I like that. Because, you know, going through a closing process, being able to give leading, you know, I forget what we call them, but basically test closes, you know, and, uh, being able to see, you know, flush out any objections that the, uh, consumer might have or B2B if you're selling that way. Uh, and, uh, having that as an experience that you can test through is a whole lot easier than, you know, doing it the hard way. The first few times I was almost fired as a salesman back in the day. Cause I, I sucked. And, And thankfully, one of my sales managers sat down and said, look, here's some money. Go buy The Art of Closing by Zig Ziglar and read it.

And you've got about a couple of days before he fires you, so you better make it quick there. And I did, and it saved my butt ox, as they like to say on your end of the world. I think, I don't know. Trial close. A LinkedIn user has helped me with the thing there. Thank you very much, Mr. LinkedIn user. like to say on your uh end of the world i think i don't know trial close a linkedin a linkedin user has helped me with the thing there thank you very much mr linkedin your trial close is what you do

on the thing there that's why that's why you know we do the show live so i can have people help me help my old brain remember crap oh what else haven't we touched on that uh to talk about what you guys do there um i think i would say things like with the sales course, integrating chat GPT is able to take that to the next level because now you can role play with an avatar and it can either be like a nice, friendly, easy call or they can be very difficult and they can come at you with multiple objections um based on your

industry so again it's very like personalized to to your job role and what you're trying to sell um i think one of the other things that i would mention um which is around ai so not not chat gpt anymore but around ai in terms of the feedback you can get with virtual speech as well. So you can get feedback on your use of hesitation words, how many ums and ahs you've said, your eye contact, pace, volume, tone, keywords, so that you know exactly where you can improve. Because with communication skills, it's very difficult to have quantifiable data to show whether you've improved or not so with using ai feedback there we're able to quantify somebody's starting point compared to say the

second time they've used the app the fourth time and so on ah i need the ums and oz thing at one point we probably should i'm the king of ums and oz we should probably at one point we were probably thinking about renaming the show the um and Oz Show because I use them way too much. Usually when I'm stalling for whatever the hell I'm supposed to be thinking about in my old brain. It seems like the older I get, the more whatever. I don't know. See, there I'm just lost again. Anyway, there's the fun part of it.

Effective business writing, negotiating your salary. That's important for people. Empathy in the workplace. That's my biggest problem i have no empathy i'm dead inside and so uh body language business networking you know these are all kill yeah these are all kill these are all key skills that you can use to you know be able to do oh i think i've lost your audio, Chris. Oh. Oh, you're back.

There we go. Well, it's those internet things in the sky. So, you know, all these different ways that we can utilize the classes to get better at stuff and everything else. And the thing that was interesting to me, too, is colleges use some of your stuff. And let's retouch on... I think we mentioned it, but let's go in a little bit more depth on how colleges and stuff use your courses.

Yes. So there's two key ways, really. The most popular way is in careers departments. So primarily on the job interview preparation but there's also a growing number of universities who have vr labs which is basically an area where they have like a few vr headsets and different softwares on so obviously they can use the job interview stuff but they can also then practice for an upcoming presentation for example or if they're going to a networking event they can practice in the networking environment so a lot of those modules

are focused on active listening simple things like remembering someone's name like how many times have you met somebody they've said their name and then you've instantly forgotten what their name is um it happens all the time bob when i said your name a minute ago i was thinking oh my gosh it is chris isn't it and uh the other key way that colleges use it is sometimes they will use it as part of their assessment so these students will deliver a presentation in virtual reality or online but using the same software and then that gets sent to their professor who then receives a transcript of it as well, and an audio recording and a video recording of their body language too. And then they can grade it from there.

There you go. Another comment from our LinkedIn audience. Sounds like a fantastic stool or tool. What is going on with me today? We do three of these a day. Sometimes the little brain starts to fart out a bit. Sounds like a fantastic tool. Identifying filler words is a huge problem for most of us.

Now I don't feel so alone in my crisis of brainium, cranium, whatever. I don't know. There's a joke in there somewhere, people. Just fill in the blank. Do whatever you want with it. In resources, you've got your blog and different things where people can talk to you and work with you um i know uh you know the vr space has a lot of different moving parts to it right now you know in the metaverse and and what facebook did uh do you see anything coming down

the pike if uh apple comes out with some with their version of vr or ar headset or whatever you know it's kind of always surprised what they come out with yeah so i think it's a matter of um when not if they're coming out with their headsets i mean there's people who've been saying for a couple of years it's coming this christmas it's coming this christmas but apparently it is actually coming this year and i think that will be the biggest test of, to be honest, whether the mass adoption is going to happen or not. If anyone can do it, Apple can do it in terms of getting hardware in front of people. I mean, if we think of what they did with smartphones and the strong branding they have, like they create such a sense of fomo of like missing out um but if they can create that with the headsets um then i think that could be a big turning point for vr but of course we also need valuable content on there as well otherwise there's no point having a cool headset if you can't do anything on there or can't do

anything that you want to do on there yeah i mean they they are the kings of you know and they've got such a rabid fan base that will buy uh just about anything they make um and and they make good quality stuff uh you know the podcasts at one point were kind of dying off and we were seeing a reduction in them and then they came into the podcast space and just reinvigorated and really made it a thing i think i kind of owe a lot to them uh they did that with phones uh they did that with tablets um trying to think what else they've done i mean they they seem to you know when they they want to drop something you know headphones they've gone into the space of that um they really are able to put a price point that seems like uh even though it might be a little expensive it you know they'll be able to hit with price point that seems like, even though it might be a little expensive,

they'll be able to hit with it. And they've always been kind of interesting in how they function, where they kind of hold back. There's the old saying, the pioneer gets all the arrows. And so they kind of hold back, and they kind of wait for everyone to get the arrows, make all the mistakes, and kind of see the lay of the land, and then they make a decision to move in.

So I'm, I'm definitely interested in, in what they have to provide and if it can make more, uh, learning and everything else as well. Uh, I noticed, uh, also there's some courses you have for facility training, for helping train others, winning over clients clients communicating as a leader remote working essentials you guys ever thought about doing a course on how to pretend like you actually care when you're watching a zoom meeting for the 12th time in the day um i think probably our active listening module all right i like it i like it the actual is the the try to give a shit as you're listening to uh something that should have been an email yeah yeah and probably also the body language course how to to make it seem like you are open and receptive to what people are saying there you

go i think we have one or two people uh friends of mine too that uh did body course training body language course training and uh yeah it, yeah, it's, it's an interesting science. You know, I realized some of the things maybe I was doing was, uh, you know, like when people would talk to me, I'd be like, whatever, man. Uh, they'd be like, Hey, that's kind of rude. And I'd be like, what is it? My body language, you know, that sort of thing. And, um, so, you know, stuff like that really helps us because there's a lot of those nonverbal cues that people tune into and it helps whether you're closing, whether you're being a leader. You know, most times when I'm talking to people, their eyes kind of gloss over and they start, their head starts going like this and I'm like, oh shit, I'm screwing this up. So there you go.

What else have we touched on in how you do things? Oh, here's another important point i'll i'll just cut this in before i i let you answer that um there's no installation or programs that they need to have people can just use the browser to interact is that correct yeah that's that's correct yeah there you go uh anything else we haven't touched on about uh what you guys do um i think i would just say about the rise in the number of enterprises that are looking into or utilizing VR training. So, for example, I would say we had a big growth year in 2019 and then the pandemic hit. And within three days, we lost 60% of our revenue for that year.

So that was a low point and that was a scary moment. But actually in the mid to long term, the pandemic strangely benefited our company because at that point we only had the VR options, whereas that forced us to create a web browser version, which opened up the platform to to millions more people um and also it opened up enterprises to the scalability and the possibility of digital learning because so many of them were still so focused on on face-to-face training which

um is obviously very valuable i'm not saying that VR training will replace that but I'm saying that people have realized that there's there's more options and that sometimes e-learning is more accessible sometimes VR is the better tool because you can actually practice and actively learn and learn through experience whenever you want to so I think that helped to to open people's minds to to what's possible with digital learning there you go and this is a great way to get up to a par and and the imagery the practice of it in you know feeling like you're i'm working right now on uh doing a stand-up bit and uh for comedy and you know fortunately i've been in front of a lot of people but even then you're

it's a whole different game uh you know if you're speaking to a business audience than if you're doing stand-up and then of course you got to be prepared for hecklers that might be a good thing to do but 86 percent of your users felt more confident after using your training 5 000 plus role play conversations with chat gpt it this is the thing that really excites me is seeing how you know everyone's trying to game out and figure out what's this chat gpt going to do what jobs is going to replace but then also you know how we can utilize it for good and and making things better i've been using it for some of the stuff we do uh and it's it's fun to see what it writes and then edit it and play with it i've i've never

really gotten into too many conversations because we're still working on our trust and it's got to buy me a few drinks and dinners first um but you know it's really exciting to see where this goes 93 93 of your partners recommend your speech uh would recommend virtual speech to a colleague and 95 so practicing in in VR helped them better for real world situations. I forget what the term is, but like I say, Olympians, we've had people who have trained Olympians on the show and they go

through a whole process of just being prepared so that when they go into the moment, they just feel like they have all of that in place and they can rock and roll. Anything more you want to tease out before we go? I did just think of something and it completely went out of my head. A stat that actually isn't on the website, which I need to add, is that one of our clients that we recently worked with was studying the efficacy of it and they found that in just one 10-minute session with virtual speech that

their learners on average improved 20 percent in just one session which that shows the power of learning through experience um because those sort of metrics are unrivaled with other forms of of more traditional learning there you go another Another call-in from the LinkedIn users. I read that 93% of all communication is nonverbal, which is going to suck because most of the podcast is audio only. Have fun trying to read the body language there. But that's another reason why you should go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss' plug.

Thank you very much, Sophie, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and all the insight and all the fun. And you, you've built a great company over seven years. Congratulations. Oh, thank you very much, Chris. Give us your.com. So we want people to find you on the interwebs. Yes.

So you can find us at virtual speech.com. There you go. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com. For just Christmas, youtube.com. For just Christmas.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. It looks like the LinkedIn people know where we're at. Subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter, the big LinkedIn 130,000 group over there as well.

Thanks for being here and be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.