I tried to go to the site, your link took me to archived programs of Motley Fool, did my own search, and as of 10am EST, the audio was not available, so I don't know what they said--

My intitial reaction would be to guess that these people are doing that same "Bosch images came from mental illness", "El Greco was near-sighted" school of artistic interpretation--

"Bolero" is great because Ravel was a great craftsman and a knowledgeable music scholar--not some garretted, mad composer driven by trauma induced obsession--

The repeating structure of the piece was not created by Ravel.The Bolero was a popular dance form, he simply used it's circular repeating rhythmic pattern--the continuous repetition of a melody(cantus firmus) is a device that was commonly used to provide a structure for compositions through the Baroque period-- and his gifted inspiration(in addition to the creation of the melody) was to combine these two things-- Ravel, who was, in addition to being a composer, an incredible arranger(It was he who created the amazing orchestration for Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition") and this, far from being a minimalist "trance" composition, is a showcase for the art of orchestration(there are no repetitions in the voicings!)

The story is that one day Ravel heard a fruitmonger whistling a popular song, and said, "I want to write a song that the fruitmongers will whistle"(or something like that)--of course, with Bolero, he succeeded--but instead of simply dumping classical music and writing for the music hall, he did it by creating a revolutionary orchestral composition--his genius was in finding away to do it that was accessible on every level--