This is Motleyful Answers. I'm Alison Southwick and I'm joined as always by Robert Brokamp

Personal Finance Expert here at the Motley Fool. Hello, bro. Hello, Alison. How are you? I'm good.

This week we're joined by William Bernstein. He's the author of The Delusions of Crowds,

Why People Go Mad in Groups. Somehow, Bro's going to make it about money. All that and more on this

week's episode of Motleyful Answers. So, Alison, what's up? Well, bro, today we're going to talk about

yoga babble. It's a phrase coined by NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway. If you're not

familiar with him, he's brash, he's divisive, and he's an

entertaining guy. And Yoga Babel is no different. So Galloway defines Yoga Babel as if my yoga instructor

went into investor relations or more simply, corporate BS, particularly as outlined in a company's

purpose, mission, or vision statement. Yoga Babel is fluffy,

blurry, audacious language that offers some vague overpromise that leaves you understanding

even less about what the company actually does. So Galloway's team decided to take a qualitative

look at the level of BS, as he describes it, in companies S-1s,

an S-1 being that big old document that a company files with the SEC when they want to go public.

They then check to see how that stock performed. Their theory being that Yoga Babel was a way

to distract investors from what could perhaps be lackluster, quantitative figures

like ugly EBITDA, lousy revenue, or weak projections.

Yoga babble being a verbal misdirection of synergies, out-of-the-box thinking, new paradigms,

and changing the world.

As Galloway writes, when firms are still searching for a viable business model, the temptation

to go full yoga babble gets stronger.

Before I go into some of their examples, let me point out that this is not rigorous research.

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