Tyler Cowen, of the blog marginal revolution, seems like a truly amazing guy. He's a professor at George Mason, runs a huge blog, and has a great podcast interviewing the most famous people in the world. I've followed him for years and been to podcast recordings, religiously read the blog, follow his recommendations etc.

In addition, he regularly reports having read hundreds of books a year, covering very long and difficult nonfiction titles, as well as fiction - up to sometimes 200 or 300+ books/year When pushed on how he does it, he reveals that he gives up / skips extremely aggressively, which is fine. But still, that is an amazing amount of reading for someone as busy as he is, who also travels that much.

He also claims and posts on his blog that he regularly visits a very large number of exotic locations and samples the food. Recently for example, Jujuy, Argentina. I haven't counted, but it seems that he travels internationally at least 10+ times a year. Given ~8 hours flight on average, plus time to recover from jetlag, customs, etc. this seems like it would take up a huge amount of time. He has talked about this too, and explains that as a naturally very energetic person who doesn't consume caffeine, psychologically he doesn't really suffer variation in energy or output, so this level of activity and travel isn't hard for him.

While I believe these claims since they are consistent with his overall very high level of achievement, I'd also like to get a hedge and encourage people to share or find contradictory evidence. Therefore:

Resolution

If significant evidence comes out that Tyler's claims in either of two major areas

1) book reading

2) international travel

are substantially fake and fraudulent, then this claim resolves NO.

This sounds partially subjective, but I don't think it really is. Particularly for travel, counterexamples would be rather simple to prove - for example, pictures of him in the US from time periods when he claimed to be overseas, or other evidence that he didn't really go.

The evidence has to be fairly substantial and significant, resulting in serious and respected people starting to question his posts.

Mainly I am focusing on say the last 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, but also the future, if he continues to post that he travels & reads as much. If due to any reason he announces or stops claiming such a high level of accomplishment, that won't count as a NO. But, if it turns out that false posting is proven in the future, as well, then this can resolve NO that way.

So: YES if until end of claim no evidence has emerged. NO if at any time, significant doubts about his claimed travel or reading are public and widely believed, covering either the period from 2013-2023, or future periods where he continued making claims.

YES can happen at end of claim, June 30 2028