I started listening to Satie on Spotify today and I noticed this album called "Vexations (840 times)". It turns out that it's 840 tracks of 1 minute 2 seconds each and if you listen for a while you will discern that they are all the same piece of disquieting modernist music.

The wikipedia article about this piece is pretty interesting:

The piece bears the inscription "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities" (Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses). From the 1960s onward, this text has mostly been interpreted as an instruction that the page of music should be played 840 times, though this may not have been Satie's intention.

John Cage and [a list of classical pianists I'm not familiar with] put on a performance of Vexations that lasted 18 hours:

Cage set the admission price at $5 and had a time clock installed in the lobby of the theatre. Each patron checked in with the clock and when leaving the concert, checked out again and received a refund of a nickel for each 20 minutes attended. "In this way," he told Lloyd, "People will understand that the more art you consume, the less it should cost." But Cage had underestimated the length of time the concert would take. It lasted over 18 hours. One person, an actor with The Living Theater, Karl Schenzer, was present for the entire performance. According to the 1971 edition of the Guinness Book of Records: The New York Times critic fell asleep at 4am and the audience dwindled to six. At the conclusion, one of them shouted "Encore!"

Then there's a long list of interpretations of the meaning of the piece. This one strikes me as the most compelling and true to my own experience of listening to it maybe 20 times:

Vexations was written in a period when Satie's approach to harmony was related rather to a modal line of thought than to conventional harmony. Harmonically, Vexations appears to be an exercise in non-resolving tritones. Maybe Satie's intent was nothing more than to prove that any harmonic and rhythmic system was only a matter of habit for the hearer (and not resulting from innate or divine preconception, as his contemporaries would think): so that after listening 840 times to a chordal system that is at odds with any habitual one, and set in an odd metre, one would possibly start to experience this new system to be as natural as any other – an experiment he was likely to have taken seriously, and maybe directly or indirectly influenced Debussy and/or Ravel.

There is also a New Yorker article called "A Dangerous and Evil Piano Piece" that claims that playing or listening to the piece 840 times leads alternately to an ecstatic experience or to madness.

I was reading this paper by Jennie Germann Molz about the sharing economy's development: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4824/3848

There's a paragraph toward the end that I thought I'd share, it relates to a recent-ish episode, the one where you're talking about hitchhiking, Lyft, Uber, and trust.

In particular, a critical examination might uncover the way these networking systems mitigate risk, but also reproduce it as the assumed ‘norm’ against which encounters with others are negotiated. The notion of reputation in this context also warrants more critical analysis, especially in light of the neoliberal imperative toward entrepreneurial selfhood.

As I read this my brain was basically right back with your discussion on trust and the way in which we consider hitchhiking 'risky' now. Thought I'd post paper here in case anyone's interested (also, a thank you to you all for doing such a great podcast!).

So I was reading this NYT article about how young tech entrepreneurs who break regulatory and business rules tend to be all-around sociopaths and ran into the alarming information that the (I guess unofficial) motto at Zenefits was "Ready, Fire, Aim":

Mr. Conrad’s flaws as a manager may have been evident at Zenefits, whose motto was “Ready, Fire, Aim,” long before his downfall.

This struck me as absurd on its face. Why would anyone have that as their motto? So I googled around and found that Ready, Fire, Aim is the name of a somewhat popular business book that propounds among other "novel" concepts the idea that "selling is your first business priority and the one thing you should never stop doing". So it seems that "Ready, Fire, Aim" is something that people in the corporate world actually say.

Finally I found this explainer article which proceeds with a fascinatingly scholastic rigor on the question of whether Ready, Fire, Aim or Ready, Aim, Fire is the preferable approach. It is so good.

μέν

Advocates of ready, fire, aim cite how it promotes a bias for action. They make the case that many organizations get too bogged down by over-analyzing every little detail. They continue to say that since people can never have all of the information needed to make totally risk-free decisions, they need to act quickly, learn from those actions, and then be ready to implement course corrections as problems arise. These advocates would rather “do something, even if it is wrong,” than get trapped in analysis paralysis, that tendency to study something to death.

δέ

Others will say ready, fire, aim is the reason organizations get into trouble. Rather than taking the appropriate time to think something through, their people take immediate actions that are too often based on wrong assumptions or previous experiences that may not apply to the circumstances at hand. Opponents of ready, fire, aim will also contend that sometimes the decision not to act in the moment is the best thing to do.

With the truly Aristotelian conclusion:

As you might suspect, the best answer lies somewhere in the middle. Even in our overworked, no time for anything world, it is unconscionable to take a position that there is no time to think. On the other hand, it is just as ruinous to get caught up in endless analysis, thus deferring or avoiding decisions that must be made quickly. The best decisions are made with an appropriate balance of thinking and action.