Ray Peat's voice

[Blossom]

I think we get so accustomed to the trained voices of people in the media that when we hear an interview of an ordinary but extraordinary person like Peat and notice the difference we often assume something is wrong. When you are around the elderly you notice that the voice quality does change. His voice is comparable to others at least 10-20 years younger than his chronological age (imo). Most importantly though is the content of his speaking. Pure genius if you ask me. It may also be a bit stressful to be interviewed if you are not someone who enjoys the spotlight.

 

[LucyL]

It is especially disturbing in Peat's case because it really does sound like the symptom of a neurological disorder (like Parkinson's for instance, which can be induced) and so it is reasonable to wonder weather his nerves have been damaged by his own unusual dietary practices, with which most people on this forum are experimenting and so potentially exposing themselves (ourselves) to a similar risk.

It would be fascinating if he wound up with Parkinsons (fascinating strictly from a medial perspective of course), because of others like Herbert Shelton who suffered Parkinsons had a lifestyle pretty much counter to everything Peat advocates.

 

[aquaman]

I think he's late 70s right? My grandmother couldn't talk really when she was 78, so I think he's doing pretty well :)

He's obviously not the most confident/ outgoing / socially interested person, I think that plus age is a big thing. Often he lets people talk over him on the Q&A shows. (there's that annoying woman who always calls into the Herb doctors show and talks non-stop who bugs the hell out of me and RP never can finish a sentence when she's on!). HIs voice quality seems like a personality thing, not a health-related issue.

I always think he sounds a bit like Yoda in the way he talks.

 

[Such_Saturation]

Ray Peat has stuttered all his life, in addition to having chronic migraines and some issues at birth if I recall correctly. It doesn't help that you never hear him when he is in Mexico (the altitude makes him more fluent, he said in the video). Maybe it's the low altitude that makes him LESS fluent.

 

[Ben]

Maybe he is slightly hyperthyroid (which he recommended) and it's causing a little tension. I also think he speaks with pauses and slower because he wants to present information in an accurate, scientific way. The guy has a lot of knowledge and opinions in his mind.

 

[narouz]

Here is the name/link for Peat's discussion of contraries, which I mentioned earlier in the thread. Several poems by Blake followed, but I didn't include them, nor did I include Karen McC's long meditation/question.

Vision and Acceptance: A Survivor's Guide to Awareness
http://www.visionandacceptance.com/negation/

Peat, in response to Karen McC's question about what she calls "negation":

I think the concept is very simple in itself, but the problem is that it implies a cultural criticism that involves everything, biology, physics, politics, epistemology. Contraries, or different perspectives, can interact to eliminate error, in progressing. Negation is a human function that would stop the free advance of life and consciousness, opposing critical questioning and spontaneous understanding. The refusal to discuss a problem, and the many forms of censorship, and legal-economic systems that make whole courses of action impossible, are negations, that have their poisonous effects. Physiology reflects their poison, in all the ramifications of learned helplessness, restraint stress, the carcinogenic effects of work-school-media-religion-government.

Negation excludes or suppresses those complex processes of being,* and implants nothing but–at the most–obligation in their place. Undocumented aliens are negated simply, slaves and citizens are negated but with obligations. Religions tell people that their being is immaterial, a ghost that will be o.k. somewhere else forever, if they do their duty now. Having a false consciousness implanted by schools and television, labels and roles take the place of being. A sense of despair and impossibility is right behind the false consciousness.

Our surrounding context of language and culture is constantly distorting and misinterpreting anything which persists in moving toward a more expansive life. Knowledge, a physiological thing, is expansion, and as such is always clearing away errors; when people identify with error, they see knowledge as the deadly enemy, that must be destroyed.

Blake’s idea of the “intellectual fountain” was very different from the attitude of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (where “Will” or assertion was the fundamental reality). Blake saw it as always flowing into new territory, discovering new things, enlivening the world that’s being discovered-created. When the organism is traumatized, it hardens, and stops developing, and wants to impose its moral hardness everywhere; assertiveness is the antithesis of perceptive life, and devises ways to negate it.

In an authoritarian culture, people want you to forget who you are, so they can implant themselves without resistance. Just recognizing your own presence, to attend to them fully, is something they don’t expect; it isn’t quite like Carl Rogers’ therapeutic presence, because it’s conditional–your conscious presence is the condition. Being present and able to listen (and question and understand)* is receptive and productive, and it can even be disruptive, but it’s very different from being assertive, because it’s always hoping to open up new possibilities, rather than imposing something carried along from the past. A priest is being assertive when he says you have to take it on faith, a physics professor is being assertive when he won’t justify his assumptions–where would physics be if your assumptions had to be plausible beyond a particular culture of physics? Much of their potential imagination has been invested in thinking of ways to keep you from questioning.

Physics, in the 20th century, has taken on the Nietzchean subjectivism, claiming to quantize/digitize everything. There is no digital nature, but assertive subjectivism has effectively written quantization into the constitution of science, and into the shadow of the humanities that remains in the corporate universities. Bits of “knowledge” are sold and hoarded, and people who would show that they are something other than knowledge are treated as vandals and worse–Aaron Swartz, for example.

 

[narouz]

Maybe he is slightly hyperthyroid (which he recommended) and it's causing a little tension. I also think he speaks with pauses and slower because he wants to present information in an accurate, scientific way. The guy has a lot of knowledge and opinions in his mind.

This was the standard speculation circulated on Danny Roddy's site years ago.
As I remember, it was said that hyperthyroidism, or a self-induced hyperthyroid state, is known to cause a breathy voice.

"Stuttering" (mentioned by another poster) is not, I think,
an accurate way to describe Peat's voice quality.
I have a friend who is a speech, language, and audio pathologist,
so I have some slight knowledge about this.

 

[marikay]

I think I can speak to Ray's voice and how it sounds, since I have professional experience in voice recording. Ray's voice sounds pretty much exactly like anyone's who hasn't had professional voice training and who hasn't had their voice run through a sound mixer before broadcast. Most everybody would be very surprised how their voice sounds on the radio or on a recording. All things considered, Ray's voice sounds just fine. And the wisdom in his words is priceless.

 

[lilsticky]

he sounds normal in older interviews